by MARK GABRISH
CONLAN
Copyright © 2011 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s
Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
If there’s one
thing Jamala Rogers “gets,” it’s that the various progressive struggles — of
African-Americans, Latinos, Asians, Pacific Islanders and Native people for
civil rights, of women for equality and Queers for equality and protection
under the law — are linked. It came through in the way she got the job as
political columnist for the St. Louis American, an African-American weekly, in 1994: she confronted the paper’s
publisher, Donald “Doc” Suggs, and demanded to know why he had only one woman
columnist, and all she wrote about was religion. Suggs saw her point that his
paper needed a woman writing about politics, and gave her the column she writes
to this day.
Rogers’ sense
that all struggles for equality and freedom are linked comes across in her new
book, The Best of “The Way I See It” and Other Political Writings,
1989-2010. (“The Way I See It” is the name
of her St. Louis American column;
since 2006 she’s also contributed to the BlackCommunicator.com Web site. The
very first The Way I See It column
reprinted in her book is one from June 1998 called “Human Rights Are Gay
Rights,” which directly took on the religious and secular leaders in the
African-American community who oppose Queer rights. “The African-American
community has definitely absorbed anti-Gay messages from the mainstream that
feeds into the very similar forms of discrimination we experience daily,” she
wrote with her usual bluntness. “That should sensitize us not to victimize
others. This isn’t always so.”
The outspoken
columnist and activist (she’s the chair of the Organization for Black Struggle
and the Coalition Against Police Crimes and Repression, and co-chair of the
Freedom Road Socialist Organization) came to San Diego November 15 to speak at
the World Beat Center in Balboa Park. Co-sponsored by the World Beat Center and
Activist San Diego, Rogers’ speech took place against a nationwide campaign of
police repression against the Occupy movement, in which campers protesting the
increasingly unequal distribution of wealth and income in the U.S. were rousted
by police using suspiciously similar tactics in various cities.
Rogers’ origin
story of how she became an activist reminded her audience that the repression against
Occupy was nothing new. “I was in 1968 in Kansas City, after the assassination
of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.,” she recalled. “There were rebellions all over
the country” — itself a revealing choice of words, since the mainstream media
then and now called them “riots.” “In my community, six people were killed and
the drugstore at which I worked was leveled,” Rogers said. “The National Guard
was called in. My mother said, ‘Don’t go down there. Stay at home.’ So I went
down there.”
When she did,
Rogers recalled, “the first thing that hit me was the smell of tear gas. But
the most important sight was a U.S. tank coming down the street. It was a clear
message that you could be killed if you got out of line.”
Rogers said the
1968 riot in Kansas City was one of the two most important events that have
shaped her life. The other, she said, was Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and the
blatantly racist ways authorities handled both the evacuation of New Orleans
and the cleanup and rebuilding afterwards. “I had a sort of post-traumatic
stress disorder just watching it on TV,” she said. “I went to the Gulf four
summers in a row and saw no changes in the [poor, mostly Black] Lower Ninth
Ward and a lot of things in the
[upscale, mostly white] French Quarter. So I wrote a column calling the Bush
administration’s attitude towards Katrina genocide.”
She didn’t just
mean that as a metaphor. According to Rogers, “people were shot in the back by
the police as they tried to get away from Katrina, and one person was burned in
a car.” She said that, like the Rodney King beating in Los Angeles in 1991 and
the 1992 acquittals of the four police officers who beat him, which sparked the
1992 L.A. riots, the activities of the police in New Orleans and its suburbs
showed how differently white and Black people see the police.
“White people
see the police as really serving and protecting,” she said, “but in lower-class
communities and communities of color, the role of the police is occupation and
repression.” Indeed, one peculiar sort of hope she holds out regarding the
Occupy movement is that its white participants, too, are getting to see the
police behaving badly. The rousts, the arrests, the meaningless and arbitrary
rules, the destruction of property and physical attacks by police on Occupy
protesters are the same things “we get on a daily basis in our communities,”
Rogers said.
One story Rogers
covered was about an African-American professor who did a study of how the St.
Louis police functioned in communities of color. “”The study was so
controversial, no American journal would publish it. It had to be published in
Great Britain. We felt he should do a presentation to Black mothers who thought
their children were doing something wrong because they were getting in trouble
with the police. The police in St. Louis had a model of stopping people that
had nothing to do with ‘probable cause’
[the Constitutional standard]. They would stop students going to school with
backpacks. The police would rip open the backpacks, saying they were looking for
drugs. If this happens twice a week, sooner or later the kid is gong to
bad-mouth the police, or they’re going to be late for class and have a bad
attitude in school. White mothers don’t have to deal with this. Black sons are
programmed from the fourth grade to be part of the criminal-industrial
complex.”
Rogers also
exposed scandals relating to racism in the St. Louis Fire Department, which she
encountered soon after she settled there in 1972 and which is still going on.
“When I first came to St. Louis I was told by a Black firefighter who said the
firehouses were so segregated, the white firefighters didn’t want their
silverware washed with the Black firefighters’ silverware. That was in 1972,
and in 2007 a Black person was beaten for going into a firehouse to use the
phone.”
One of the
columns from her book she read at the November 15 event (“Where’s the Fire?,”
page 101) was about Sherman George, the first African-American fire chief in
St. Louis’s history, and how he was denied the control over promotions his
white predecessors had had. Eventually the white mayor, Francis Slay — a former
corporate lawyer who was re-elected by wide margins in 2005 and 2009 — fired
Chief George for “insubordination.” Slay has been in the news more recently for
taking a tough line against the Occupy movement in his city.
Rogers says her
writing and activism are about “the ways people live in a community, and the
privileges and racism that keeps people from not only being equal but realizing
our full potential as human beings. Our schools are now under the control of
the state, and there’s little to offer the kids. I can remember shedding tears
when Barack Obama was elected president and I worked in his campaign, but those
of us on the Left know that there are limits to what any elected official can do. We have to raise up our
voices and talk, and that’s one of the things Occupy Wall Street is doing.” One
of the things we have to talk about, Rogers said, is how “there’s almost a
parallel government, and definitely a parallel military force,” that protects
America’s rich and powerful.
Asked how to
reach white people and give them an understanding of the African-American
struggle, Rogers said, “You have to really inform people with statistics and
numbers from sources they think are legitimate. In the 1970’s and 1980’s we all
heard about the ‘welfare queens’ and not about the welfare corporations get. …
Some of it is fighting people with information. The rest is taking people into
the community. People who have relationships with people of color learn about
it.” She noted that Washington University in St. Louis actually warns their
students, “Don’t go north of Del Mar” — i.e., don’t go into St. Louis’s Black
community — “and the kids don’t, except for a few who want to see the whole
city.”
Rogers closed
her prepared remarks with a short bit of advice on how to build a better,
healthier and more effective movement for progressive social change. “First, do
no harm to the movement and the organization,” she said. “Second, do what you
say you’re going to do. We have to deal with homophobia, genderphobia and
racism.”
