Mayor-elect Emanuel announces Chicago Public Schools leadership team

Chicago 2011 

Mayor-Elect Rahm Emanuel

Posted 7 minutes ago on Apr. 18th 2011

CPS Senior Leadership

Jean-Claude Brizard, Chief Executive Officer

Jean-Claude Brizard is Superintendent of Schools for the Rochester City School District. Under his leadership, the district's graduation rate increased and student scores in English Language Arts and Math improved. Prior to his time in Rochester, Brizard worked for 21 years as an educator and administrator with the New York City school system. As a New York City Regional Superintendent, Brizard supervised more than 100 K-12 schools serving over 100,000 students. Prior to holding that position, Brizard served as Executive Director for Secondary Schools, Region 8 Instructional Superintendent, and as a high school principal. He began his career in education as a high school physics teacher and junior high school science teacher. Brizard is a commercial pilot and a native of Haiti. He holds a Master’s Degree in School Administration & Supervision from The City College of New York, a Master’s Degree in Science Education from Queens College, and a Bachelor’s Degree in Chemistry from Queens College.

Dr. Noemi Donoso, Chief Education Officer

Dr. Noemi Donoso is Director of Denver Public Schools’ Office of School Reform and Innovation. Previously, Dr. Donoso was Chief Academic Officer for the high-performing Camino Nuevo Charter Academy network. Dr. Donoso served as the founding principal of Camino Nuevo's first middle school. Previously, Dr. Donoso served as the turn-around principal of two K-8 charter schools in MacArthur Park, Los Angeles and East Harlem, New York. Prior to becoming a principal, Dr. Donoso taught high school English and Advanced Placement History for eight years at Foshay Learning South Los Angeles. Approximately 70% of her students went on to become the first in their family to attend four-year universities. Dr. Donoso holds a Ph.D. in Education Policy and Planning from the University of Southern California, a Master's from Rutgers University and a Bachelor's from Mount St. Mary's College.

Tim Cawley, Chief Operating Officer

Tim Cawley is is currently Managing Director for Finance and Administration at the Academy for Urban School Leadership (AUSL). Cawley joined AUSL after a 30-year business career, holding senior management positions at Fortune 500 companies. Cawley has served as Senior Vice President of Global Logistics and Fulfillment for Motorola’s Integrated Supply Chain, President of SBC/Ameritech Interational, and Chief Executive Officer for RevellMonogram. He began his career with Procter & Gamble, the world’s largest consumer packaged-goods company.

Diana Ferguson, Chief Financial Officer

Diana Ferguson is currently the Chief Financial Officer of Chicago Public Schools. Before becoming CFO, she served as Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of The Folgers Coffee Company, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of Merisant Worldwide, Inc. and Chief Financial Officer of Sara Lee Foodservice, a division of Sara Lee. Ferguson holds a B.A. from Yale University and a Master's degree from Northwestern University.

Andrea Sáenz, Chief of Staff

Andrea Sáenz currently serves as Special Assistant to the Assistant Secretary of Vocational and Adult Education in the United States Department of Education (USED). Previously, Sáenz was executive director for the Hispanic Alliance for Career Enhancement, where she collaborated with Fortune 500 employers, universities and Chicago Public Schools to increase Latinos’ access to professional and management careers. Prior to holding that position, she was a fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Fels Government Research Service, where she worked on data-driven performance management for Philadelphia public schools and the Philadelphia Workforce Development Corporation. Sáenz began her career in non-profit leadership at Congreso de Latinos Unidos, where she led an initiative to open the first bilingual one-stop career center in Pennsylvania. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Latin American studies from Scripps College and a Master’s degree in government administration from the University of Pennsylvania.

Becky Carroll, Chief Communications Officer

Becky Carroll has directed communications policy for the City’s Housing and Planning and Development Departments and the Mayor’s Press Office. She managed the communications and community outreach strategy for the launch of Mayor’s Daley’s Five-Year Affordable Housing plan and served on the Cabrini Green/Near North Side Redevelopment Plan Task Force. In 2007, Carroll joined President Obama’s campaign as National Director of Women for Obama, where she implemented a national outreach strategy to engage women voters. She spent the last two years in the private sector as Vice President of Communications and Community Affairs for the Chicago Fire Soccer Club. She is a graduate of the Chicago Public School system. Carroll holds a Bachelor's in Communications and Political Science from Loyola University.

Patrick Rocks, General Counsel

Patrick Rocks is the current general counsel to the Chicago Public Schools. Previously, Rocks was First Assistant Corporation Counsel for the City of Chicago's Department of Law. Rocks earned a Bachelor's at Loyola University and graduated from John Marshall Law School.

Alicia Winckler, Chief Human Capital Officer

Alicia Winckler is the current Chief Human Capital Officer of the Chicago Public Schools. Previously, she served as a senior human resource manager for several major corporations, including Sears Holdings, Inc. and Sears, Roebuck and Co. She holds a Bachelor's degree from the University of South Dakota and a Master's from the University of Colorado at Denver.

Office of the Mayor

Elizabeth Swanson, Deputy Chief of Staff for Education

Elizabeth Swanson is the Executive Director of The Pritzker Traubert Family Foundation, which invests in people and programs that enrich the life experiences of Chicago’s children. Prior to joining the Foundation, Swanson led the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) Office of Management and Budget under CEO Arne Duncan. Swanson has also served as director of the CPS Office of Extended Learning Opportunities. Swanson has devoted her career to youth development and education reform, working for both local and federal government, as well as a number of non-profit organizations. She holds a Bachelor's from Amherst College and Master's in Public Policy from the University of Chicago. Swanson's two school-aged children attend CPS schools.

Board of Education

David Vitale – Board of Education President

David Vitale served as Chief Administrative Officer of Chicago Public Schools under CEO Arne Duncan. Before joining CPS, Vitale was Chief Executive Officer of the Chicago Board of Trade and Vice Chairman and Director of Bank One Corporation. Vitale currently serves as Chairman of the Academy for Urban School Leadership, a nonprofit teacher residency program, and as Executive Chair of Urban Partnership Bank. Vitale's daughter is a CPS student. He holds a Bachelor's from Harvard University and an MBA from the University of Chicago.

Jesse Ruiz – Board of Education Vice-President

Jesse Ruiz is Chairman of the Illinois State Board of Education and a partner at the law firm of Drinker Biddle & Reath. Ruiz served as a Commissioner on the Chicago Public Schools Desegregation Monitoring Commission. He is chief legal counsel to the Illinois Legislative Latino Caucus and the Illinois Legislative Latino Caucus Foundation. In early 2011, Ruiz was appointed to the U.S. Department of Education’s Equity and Excellence Commission, which will examine the impact of school finance on educational opportunity.

Henry Bienen – Board Member

Henry Bienen served as President of Northwestern University from 1995 to 2009. Under his leadership, Northwestern grew its research output, academic standing, and facilities. Previously, Bienen served as Dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. Beinen has been a consultant to the U.S. Department of State. He received his Master's and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and his Bachelor's from Cornell University.

Dr. Mahalia Hines – Board Member

Dr. Mahalia Hines served as a principal in Chicago Public Schools for 17 years. Prior to that, she was a teacher in Chicago Public Schools for over 14 years. Dr. Hines works closely with the Common Ground Foundation, which empowers youth in urban neighborhoods, and continues to share her knowledge and experience as a mentor to new principals. She earned her doctorate in Curriculum and Instruction from the University of Illinois, where she focused on how to prepare teachers for urban education. She also holds a Master's degree from Northeastern University and a Bachelor's degree from Central State University.

Penny Pritzker – Board Member

Penny Pritzker is a businesswoman and education advocate. She chairs the Chicago Public Education Fund which raises venture capital for high-impact investments in Chicago Public Schools. She also co-directs the Pritzker Traubert Family Foundation which supports programs for Chicago children in the areas of education, health and fitness, and arts and culture. Pritzker is Chairman of the Board of TransUnion, Chairman/CEO of Pritzker Realty Group as well as chair and co-founder of Vi (formerly Classic Residence by Hyatt), The Parking Spot and Artemis Real Estate Partners. She holds JD and MBA degrees from Stanford University and a Bachelor's degree in Economics from Harvard University.

Rod Sierra – Board Member

Rod Sierra is Chief Marketing Officer of Johnson Publishing Company, which publishes Ebony and Jet magazines. Sierra has worked as a deputy press secretary to Mayor Daley and as Integrys Energy Group's Vice President for Public Affairs. Sierra is the parent of three CPS students.

Andrea Zopp – Board Member

Andrea Zopp is president and CEO of the Chicago Urban League. She has been general counsel for several major corporations, including Sears Holdings Corporation and Exelon. Zopp also served as First Assistant State's Attorney for Cook County. Zopp has been a CPS parent since 1997. Four of her children have graduated from CPS schools. From 2002 to 2004, Zopp served on the Local School Council of Henry R. Clissold Elementary. She holds both a Bachelor's and a JD from Harvard University.

April 15, 2011: Markey: In GOP Budget, Medicare Becomes Medicare-LESS

Republican budget scheme would terminate Medicare for almost 5 million in MA, would increase out-of-pocket costs for seniors Washington, D.C. – Congressman Edward J. Mary (D-Mass.), a senior member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee and Dean of the Massachusetts Congressional delegation, today voted against H.Con.Res. 34, the Republican Resolution on the Budget for Fiscal Year 2012. According to analysis this week from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the GOP budget plan would more than double the typical senior’s out-of-pocket health care spending in 2022, compared to what their costs would be under traditional Medicare – increasing their out-of-pocket costs by more than $6,000. Additionally, under the GOP budget, everyone currently under age 55 would not receive Medicare but would be enrolled in the GOP voucher system. In Massachusetts, that would be almost five million people. “The Republican budget is so cruel, if you kicked it in the heart, you’d break your toe,” said Rep. Markey. “The Republican budget is a disaster for seniors and impoverished Americans who rely on Medicare and Medicaid. It cuts off help for Grandma and Grandpa to pay for the life-saving medications they need. Republicans are trying to turn Medicare into Medicare-LESS – they couldn’t care LESS about Grandma. G.O.P. used to stand for Grand Old Party – now it stands for Get Old People. “Deficit reduction must be a priority as we continue to rebuild our economy, but it makes no sense to continue tax breaks for the wealthy and subsidies for oil companies while eviscerating the programs that millions of our seniors and the neediest Americans depend on.” The following are additional examples of how Massachusetts would be negatively impacted by the Republican budget scheme: Pell Grants: The GOP budget would cut the maximum award from $5,500 by 45%. This would affect 136,880 eligible Massachusetts students, and 10,949 eligible in the 7th District. Transportation Cuts:  The GOP budget is estimated to cut $219.9 million for Massachusetts, costing 7,648 jobs in the state. Social Security: There are an estimated 1.2 million Social Security beneficiaries in Massachusetts. The GOP budget estimates $10 billion in cuts to Social Security over 10 years, negatively affecting recipients with the possibility of increased backlogs and longer delays in receiving benefits. Additionally, the GOP plan also raises prescription drug costs for millions of seniors – getting rid of the health reform law’s provisions providing a 50 percent discount for brand-name drugs for seniors in the ‘donut hole’ and completely closing the ‘donut hole’ by 2020. The GOP plan also raises costs for seniors by getting rid of the new free preventive care benefit under Medicare, which went into effect in January of this year. The Economic Policy Institute estimates that the Republican budget’s Medicaid cuts would cause the loss of 2.1 million jobs over the next five years, most of them in the private sector.

2011 NASCAR Sprint Cup Aarons 499 at Talladega 3-wide Photo Finish - Ties closest finish ever!

It was an awesome finish with all 4 Hendrick divers in the top right places..

Uploaded by MT89Motorsport2 on Apr 17, 2011

The race itself might have looked different, but the finish was awesome again. Three wide for the win, and in the end the win was decided by 0.002 seconds, which is a tie with the closest NASCAR finish ever

That's what it means to be a Democrat

The president laid out a vision of optimism and equal opportunity that made Paul Ryan and the GOP look small

BY JOAN WALSH

AP/J. Scott Applewhite

Paul Ryan

I'm glad I waited for President Obama's heralded budget speechWednesday before criticizing it (such a novel idea); there was much to praise in it and little to challenge. The best news: Obama laid out the kind of sweeping "story" of American democracy, and the bold vision of how we grow together, that I thought was too much to ask for even yesterday. He even talked about the scariest fact of American inequality: The dangerous hold the top 1 percent of Americans has on wealth, income and (he didn't say this) politics. He pushed back on the cruel GOP deficit plan, made his toughest case yet for tax hikes on the richest, and stayed away from the worst ideas floated by his own deficit commission. The devil will be in the deficit-cutting details, and frankly, there weren't a whole lot of them in the speech. But the president came out fighting with firmness, and with a rhetoric of social justice and equality, that I haven't seen enough of these last two years.

Obama acknowledged our American history as "rugged individualists, a self-reliant people with a healthy skepticism of too much government." But he quickly identified "another thread running throughout our history":

A belief that we are all connected; and that there are some things we can only do together, as a nation. We believe, in the words of our first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, that through government, we should do together what we cannot do as well for ourselves. And so we’ve built a strong military to keep us secure, and public schools and universities to educate our citizens. We’ve laid down railroads and highways to facilitate travel and commerce. We’ve supported the work of scientists and researchers whose discoveries have saved lives, unleashed repeated technological revolutions, and led to countless new jobs and entire industries. Each of us has benefited from these investments, and we are a more prosperous country as a result.

 Part of this American belief that we are all connected also expresses itself in a conviction that each one of us deserves some basic measure of security. We recognize that no matter how responsibly we live our lives, hard times or bad luck, a crippling illness or a layoff, may strike any one of us. "There but for the grace of God go I," we say to ourselves, and so we contribute to programs like Medicare and Social Security, which guarantee us health care and a measure of basic income after a lifetime of hard work; unemployment insurance, which protects us against unexpected job loss; and Medicaid, which provides care for millions of seniors in nursing homes, poor children, and those with disabilities. We are a better country because of these commitments. I’ll go further – we would not be a great country without those commitments.

So far, so good. It got even better when Obama took direct aim at Paul Ryan's cruel and ludicrous budget plan. He laid out its many cuts, and concluded:

These are the kind of cuts that tell us we can’t afford the America we believe in. And they paint a vision of our future that’s deeply pessimistic. It’s a vision that says if our roads crumble and our bridges collapse, we can’t afford to fix them. If there are bright young Americans who have the drive and the will but not the money to go to college, we can’t afford to send them. Go to China and you’ll see businesses opening research labs and solar facilities. South Korean children are outpacing our kids in math and science. Brazil is investing billions in new infrastructure and can run half their cars not on high-priced gasoline, but biofuels. And yet, we are presented with a vision that says the United States of America – the greatest nation on Earth – can’t afford any of this.

Then he attacked the Gilded Age social inequality and tax cuts that have helped create our troubles:

Think about it. In the last decade, the average income of the bottom 90% of all working Americans actually declined. The top 1% saw their income rise by an average of more than a quarter of a million dollars each. And that’s who needs to pay less taxes? They want to give people like me a two hundred thousand dollar tax cut that’s paid for by asking thirty three seniors to each pay six thousand dollars more in health costs? That’s not right, and it’s not going to happen as long as I’m President.

Indulge me here, because this is how Democrats should be talking, and rarely do:

 The America I know is generous and compassionate; a land of opportunity and optimism. We take responsibility for ourselves and each other; for the country we want and the future we share. We are the nation that built a railroad across a continent and brought light to communities shrouded in darkness. We sent a generation to college on the GI bill and saved millions of seniors from poverty with Social Security and Medicare. We have led the world in scientific research and technological breakthroughs that have transformed millions of lives.

 This is who we are. This is the America I know. We don’t have to choose between a future of spiraling debt and one where we forfeit investments in our people and our country. To meet our fiscal challenge, we will need to make reforms. We will all need to make sacrifices. But we do not have to sacrifice the America we believe in. And as long as I’m President, we won’t.

That's the president I voted for.

On the meat of the president's plan to cut the deficit: He deserves credit for rejecting Medicare vouchers, for turning aside specific talk about Social Security (even though it has nothing to do with the federal deficit, the privatizers and Obama's friends on his deficit commission wanted it thrown on the table in a grand bargain that can only be bad news for Democrats and working people; Obama seemed not to be willing to do that); for promising that reforms and innovations already part of the Affordable Care Act will bring down the costs of Medicare and Medicaid; and for saying we need bigger defense cuts than so far proposed.

(Small point: I liked the way Obama trashed Ryan without mentioning him -- you don't fight down -- but I wish he'd been a tiny bit more confrontational on exactly what Ryan's "Medicare vouchers" would do; if seniors could afford insurance at all, which is debatable, they'd certainly be at the mercy of privatized "death panels" refusing care over its costs. I say that because I'm sure some GOP prevaricator will bring back the "death panel" lie now that Obama has committed to curbing costs in Medicare. I hope I'm wrong.)

My quibbles? I'm still concerned that Obama has agreed to freeze the 12 percent of the budget that goes to "discretionary spending." And I'm assuming that freeze includes the cuts made this week. I don't like his promise of $3 in spending cuts for every dollar raised in revenue via tax hikes. In a statement, AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka praised the speech but added: "President Obama does not yet have the balance right between spending cuts and new revenue." I also never like it when Obama undermines himself by saying things like:

I don’t expect the details in any final agreement to look exactly like the approach I laid out today. I’m eager to hear other ideas from all ends of the political spectrum.

I know, I know, he thinks it makes him sound reasonable to independents; I worry he sounds weak to Republicans. If Obama thinks the plan he laid out is as far to the left as Ryan's plan is to the right, and that the answer is to meet in the glorious middle, we're all in trouble.

But for today, I'll take him at his word. After the speech, pundits called it the opening salvo of the Obama 2012 reelection campaign, as though there was something wrong with that. If these are the founding principles of the president's 2012 campaign, Democrats and the country will be better off than we've been in a while.

Black by Choice

Melissa Harris-Perry

April 15, 2010   |    This article appeared in the May 3, 2010 edition of The Nation.

President Obama created a bit of a stir in early April when he completed his Census form. In response to the question about racial identity the president indicated he was "Black, African American or Negro." Despite having been born of a white mother and raised in part by white grandparents, Obama chose to identify himself solely as black even though the Census allows people to check multiple answers for racial identity.

This choice disappointed some who have fought to ensure that multiracial people have the right to indicate their complex racial heritage. It confused some who were surprised by his choice not to officially recognize his white heritage. It led to an odd flurry of obvious political stories confirming that Obama was, indeed, the first African-American president.

When Obama marked his Census form, he offered another lesson in what has been an intensive if unintentional seminar on the social construction of race. In just a few years, decades of multiple racial formations have been projected onto him at hyperspeed; it's a bit like watching those nature films that show the growth of an apple tree from a seed in just thirty seconds. When Hillary Clinton held a significant lead among black voters, media outlets regularly questioned if Obama was "black enough" to earn African-American electoral support. When the Rev. Jeremiah Wright dominated the news cycle, the question shifted to whether Obama was "too black" to garner white votes. By the final months of the campaign, Obama's opponents charged that he was a noncitizen, a Muslim and a terrorist. In less than two years a single body had been subjected to definitions ranging from insufficiently black, to far too black, to somehow foreign and frightening.

But Obama did more than disrupt standard definitions of blackness; he created a definitional crisis for whiteness. Imagine for a moment that a young American falls into a Rip Van Winkle sleep in 1960. He awakens suddenly in 2008 and learns that we are in the midst of a historic presidential election between a white and a black candidate. He learns that one candidate is a Democrat, a Harvard Law School graduate, a lecturer at the conservative University of Chicago Law School. He also discovers that this candidate is married to his first wife, and they have two children who attend an exclusive private school. His running mate is an Irish Catholic. The other candidate is a Republican. He was an average student who made his mark in the military. This candidate has been married twice, and his running mate is a woman whose teenage daughter is pregnant out of wedlock.

Now ask our recently awakened American to guess which candidate is white and which is black. Remember, his understanding of race and politics was frozen in 1960, when a significant number of blacks still identified themselves as Republican, an Ivy League education was a marker of whiteness and military service a common career path for young black men. Remember that he would expect marriage stability among whites and sexual immorality to mark black life. It's entirely possible that our Rip would guess that Obama was the white candidate and McCain the black one.

By displaying all these tropes of traditional whiteness, Obama's candidacy disrupted the very idea of whiteness. Suddenly whiteness was no longer about educational achievement, family stability or the command of spoken English. One might argue that the folksy interventions of Sarah Palin were a desperate attempt to reclaim and redefine whiteness as a gun-toting ordinariness that eschews traditional and elite markers of achievement.

Obama's whiteness in this sense is frightening and strange for those invested in believing that racial categories are stable, meaningful and essential. Those who yearn for a postracial America hoped Obama had transcended blackness, but the real threat he poses to the American racial order is that he disrupts whiteness, because whiteness has been the identity that defines citizenship, access to privilege and the power to define national history.

In 1998 Toni Morrison wrote that Bill Clinton was the first "black president" because he "displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald's-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas." Ten years later the man who truly became America's first black president displayed few of these tropes. Instead he was a scholarly, worldly, health food-eating man from Hawaii. In this sense, Obama was the white candidate in 2008, and a substantial portion of white voters preferred Obama's version of whiteness to that of McCain and Palin.

Which brings us back to Obama's Census choice. Despite his legitimate claims on whiteness, he chose to call himself black. As historian Nell Painter documents in her new book The History of White People, white identity was a heavily policed and protected border for most of American history. A person born to an African parent and a white parent could be legally enslaved in America until 1865. From 1877 until 1965 that person would have been subject to segregation in public accommodations, schools, housing and employment. In 1896 the Supreme Court established the doctrine of separate but equal in the case of Homer Plessy, a New Orleans Creole of color whose ancestry was only a small fraction African. President Obama's Census self-identification was a moment of solidarity with these black people and a recognition that the legal and historical realities of race are definitive, that he would have been subject to all the same legal restrictions had he been born at another time. So in April, Obama did as he has done repeatedly in his adult life: he embraced blackness, with all its disprivilege, tumultuous history and disquieting symbolism. He did not deny his white parentage, but he acknowledged that in America, for those who also have African heritage, having a white parent has never meant becoming white.

Melissa Harris-Perry

Are We All Black Americans Now?

Melissa Harris-Perry

In the months following September 11, my colleague Cornel West offered this insight: national political elites used the devastating attacks to promote the “niggerization of the American people.” West understood that long before 9/11, African-Americans were intimately familiar with terrorism. Through the Jim Crow century, they were routinely and randomly brutalized and murdered by well-organized groups of whites acting beyond the confines of the official state but with the tacit consent of their society. Under the shadow of lynching, black Americans learned what it meant to feel, as West describes, “unsafe, unprotected, subject to random violence, and hated for who they are.” After 9/11 far too many Americans, unaccustomed to this sense of collective intimidation, felt helpless to halt an unjustified war or the erosion of civil liberties. Thus, whether or not they were black, Americans were “niggerized” by the attacks.

Author

 

Melissa Harris-Perry

Melissa Harris-Perry, an associate professor of politics and African-American studies at Princeton University, is...

We Can't Win the Fight if We Can't Tell the Story (Barack Obama, Conservatives and the American Right)

Whatever one thinks of the foreign and domestic policy outcomes of the past two years, it is clear that the Obama administration has stumbled in its ability to tell a compelling story.

Melissa Harris-Perry

 41 comments

The Great Wells of Manning Marable(Education, Racism and Discrimination)

Manning Marable did more than encourage us. He made a way for us.

Melissa Harris-Perry

In recent months, I have been reminded of Professor West’s analysis because one way to read our current moment is as a blackening of America. The social, economic and political conditions that have long defined African-American life have descended onto a broader population, and it has been instructive to watch how the nation has responded.

Initially, conservatives argued that Tea Party activists had every right to be disgusted with national leadership and to demand swift economic intervention to combat the near 10 percent unemployment rate. Since the mid-1970s, except for a brief dip between 1998 and 2002, unemployment among African-Americans has routinely exceeded 10 percent, yet African-Americans were rarely encouraged to blame systems or organize collectively. Instead blacks were stereotyped as lazy and undeserving. This characterization has been an effective ideological tool for politicians intent on limiting social programs, cutting welfare, ignoring cities, slashing job training and neglecting housing.

Within months, the Tea Party shifted its focus to the deficit. As it did, policy debates about the poor and unemployed came to mirror decades of discourse about black Americans. Extensions of unemployment insurance were decried as “creeping socialism.” Echoing theories of dependency leveled against African-Americans for decades, one conservative blogger suggested that extending unemployment benefits would create “a permanent entitlement and would perpetuate unemployment.” Perhaps, in this moment, Americans understood how dangerously corrosive the characterization of the poor as “idle” is for black people.

This past November the TSA introduced screening procedures that many Americans—liberals and conservatives alike—deemed intrusive, random and demeaning. But for decades urban police forces have regularly employed race-based traffic stops and pedestrian stop-and-frisks in African-American communities. These policing practices have done little to make neighborhoods safer, but they have contributed to massive incarceration rates for black men. Justifying their racially punitive behavior as a reasonable response to potential crime, police forces have acted largely with the consent of white Americans, some of whom later decried the TSA’s new procedures. Perhaps, for a moment, they felt the stinging humiliation that routinely accompanies black life.

Few events more clearly demonstrated the blackening of America than the standoff in Wisconsin. Like the nineteenth-century leaders of Southern states who stripped black citizens of voting rights, public accommodation and civic associations, Wisconsin’s Republican majority dismantled the hard-won basic rights of Wisconsin workers. Like those Confederate leaders, the Wisconsin GOP used intimidation, threats and even the police against demonstrators and rival officials. As the saga unfolded, many Wisconsin citizens felt stunned that their once-secure rights might be eliminated. For a moment, perhaps, they glimpsed the experience of black men and women who watched the shadow of Jim Crow blot out the promises of emancipation.

The 1880s were also the decade when efforts to create corporate personhood were initiated by wealthy railroad barons. In a 2010 article, James and Tomilea Allison (psych professor at Indiana University and former mayor of Bloomington, respectively) traced how these corporate interests misrepresented past cases so that the Supreme Court eventually relied on nonexistent precedent to twist Fourteenth Amendment protections intended for newly freed slaves to instead offer shelter for profiteering corporations. More than a century later, these arguments were crucial to the Citizens United decision, which putatively endowed extraordinarily wealthy corporations with an “equal” right to electoral influence but in practice gave them breathtakingly unequal representation. Perhaps, as they are reduced to a fraction of a citizen, other Americans now catch a glimpse of what it means to be codified as only three-fifths of a person.

Today corporate greed, conservative ideology, manufactured right-wing populism and progressive complicity are making more and more Americans into, as Professor West might characterize them, “niggers.” Rather than try to escape the pain of experiencing some small familiarity with blackness, Americans could choose to learn from generations of African-Americans who resisted dehumanizing processes of domination and inequality. During the 2008 election Obama’s detractors tried to smear him by suggesting that “Hussein” was a terrorist’s moniker. As a demonstration of solidarity, thousands of Americans informally declared that they too would be known by the middle name Hussein. It was purely symbolic, but it rested on a belief in the power to change meaning by embracing rather than eschewing that which is labeled subordinate, alien, dangerous and shameful. By embracing our collective blackness, perhaps we can find the fortitude and creativity necessary to face the continuing erosion of our national social safety net in the face of a persistent economic crisis.

Melissa Harris-Perry

March 30, 2011   |    This article appeared in the April 18, 2011 edition of The Nation.