Brendan Hughes

Northern Ireland experienced three decades of violent conflict until the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. Many of perpetrators never faced justice and some of these individuals have been brought into the political system as a part of the peace deal. This past creates multiple tensions in the present and leaves significant questions about how the judicial system should approach the numerous unsolved murders. Historians and those interested in truth and reconciliation have their own desires to better understand this past.  Why did so many otherwise normal individuals become involved in mass murder? Can a greater knowledge of the individual motivation of IRA members help us better understand these kinds of conflicts in the future? All this leads to significant tensions between the desires of victims’ families for justice  and the demands of a political settlement and power sharing agreement that might fall apart if too many reformed political leaders are brought up on charges. An academic project to record oral histories with living IRA members, which were then to be locked away at the archives in Boston College until the interviewee passed away, has brought these tensions between the demands of justice and a search for historical understanding into the news. The Belfast Project for Boston College preformed the interviews with republicans for five years beginning in 2001. Last year, after details from the late Brenden Hughes interviews were published, the Police Service of Northern Ireland began court proceedings in the United States requesting access to the remaining interviews.

An appeals court in the United States will now have to decide between the demands for justice and the value of this kind of historical project, which might become impossible in the future if academics cannot find a way to deposit transcripts beyond the reach of a subpoena. The issues are further complicated, as some suggest these interview transcripts might confirm Gerry Adams’ role in some of the violent attacks and potentially could lead to criminal charges for the current President of Sinn Féin (something Adams denies). Beyond the legal implications, this could damage Adam’s political career, as he claims he was never a part of the IRA. This creates a very difficult situation for the American appeals courts, as their decision might lead to a potential political crisis in Norther Ireland. Academics and journalists will now have the opportunity to intervene in the court case and make arguments that the importance of creating this kind of historical archive outweighs the demands of justice for the unsolved crimes from the troubles. Are they right? Does our quest to better understand the past supersede the rights of all of the victims?

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"Cleaner sweeping the floor after the Wall Street crash, 1929," The Nationaal Archief in The Hague

Discussing money is generally afforded the same privacy as the balance of one’s bank account. Inviting an open conversation about the subject in public, from basic finance to complex economics, is thought to be rude and even poorer politics.

It is perhaps the most polarizing field of contemporary journalism because it has absolutely no means of circumventing readers’ class ties and can only clash with their compromised socio-economic opinions: what time readers could devote to the possible merits of ‘tax cuts’ or increased ‘government spending’ from one year to the next is usually put in the service of bolstering their own particular side of the trench.

And then there’s the fact that financial reporting was tasked with covering the ascendancy of “Reaganomics” in Western political discourse during the 1980s, and outright drafted to make sense of “globalization” (a vague catch-all for the apparent international prosperity brought about by free trade agreements but also the arrival of budgetary shortfalls, lapsed or eliminated regulatory provisions, and rising unemployment) since the 1990s.

To meet the demand, and keep pace with a burgeoning cottage industry of self-appointed financial experts, we borrowed more and more aloof language and overly-complicated concepts from the notoriously noncommittal (read: variable-rich) social science of economics that is inaccessible to most of us, even if we had the time between our first and now second jobs to look into it.

The result is a version of information that is not exactly propaganda (although media concentration does present clear conflicts of interest) but not strictly informative either. Here’s a fun example from Bloomberg News, with their editorial, “Black Friday 2011 Turns Freaky for Economists, Politicians: View” (24 November):

Black Friday 2011 is especially fraught for several reasons. First, the future is more uncertain than usual. We don’t know whether we’re emerging from the deepest recession since the Great Depression or about to plunge into a ‘double dip.’ Second, the 2012 elections are approaching and both the White House and the Senate, now in Democratic hands, are very much up for grabs. Historically, the state of the economy is the most important factor in determining the winner of the presidency.

Third, it’s not even clear what we should be hoping for in the Black Friday sales figures, when they start pouring out tomorrow. Our every instinct is to hope for brisk sales and record highs, signs of what’s charmingly called ‘consumer confidence.’ The consumer has been the engine of past prosperity, and consumption has always played a large role in America’s particular style of the pursuit of happiness. Economic recovery depends on whether the consumer has got his or her confidence back. Some fear that we are losing our taste for things — that the recession may have taught us that we don’t really need. Others, of course, applaud the same development.

It’s the perfect Rumsfeldian nightmare.

OCCUPY THE EVERYDAY

In short: we don’t talk about money. We talk around it. And when a crisis makes it impossible not to talk about, we discover that we’re not very good at it.

We easily remember “Black Tuesday” 29 October 1929, the original financial catastrophe of our time, but we recall less about the Glass-Steagall Act of 16 June 1932 and its regulatory framework for averting another crash — and we know even less about the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999, passed under President Bill Clinton (not President George W. Bush), which nullified its most powerful provisions and started the countdown to the next catastrophe.

Still, there is an emerging pool of general audience material that makes our complex international financial situation more accessible in new ways: Paul Krugman’s The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008 (2008), Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff’s This Time is Different (2009), David Harvey’s The Enigma of Capital (2010), Nouriel Roubini and Stephen Mihm’s Crisis Economics (2010), Matt Taibbi’s Griftopia (2010), and Dambisa Moyo’s How the West Was Lost (2011) — along with documentaries like Capitalism: A Love Story (2009) and Inside Job (2010).

These and similar works, by both economists and non-economists, cover a wide variety of problems and solutions (not to mention financial crimes) and can ultimately serve as the foundation for a new conversation about money while perhaps even provoking an unprecedented demand for serious and permanent financial literacy.

Which brings me to the current international Occupy Movement. What makes it so interesting is its loose platform and the lack of any formal centralized bureaucratic authority (even that of a ‘big tent’ political party). You don’t have to endorse or even agree with the movement to see it as basically an international confession that we have a problem.

We would do well to recall that mass calls for radical financial upheaval or reform are historically followed by hard right or left turns, as parties attempt to capture the moment and co-opt enthusiasm. Until we simplify and popularize the elements of economic order (that is to say, become more open and willing to discuss money), from domestic policies to regional agreements, we will continue to swing from one extreme to the other.

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On October 31^st the United Nations announced the birth of the seven billionth person. Many stories were published on this event, but to me the most revealing was by David Suzuki, the venerable leader of Canada’s environmental movement. As Suzuki pointed out, the human population has increased three-fold during his lifetime. Nonetheless, he refused to blame population growth for our ecological malaise. As Suzuki argues, “most environmental devastation is not directly caused by individuals or households, but by corporations driven more by profits than human needs.” According to his line of thinking, it is overconsumption by the wealthy, not the ever-increasing population, that is causing the problem.

There was a time when population size was a central concern within the environmental movement. Stanford biologist Paul R. Ehrlich’s 1968 treatise, The Population Bomb, sat alongside Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring on environmentalists’ “must read” list. Full of doom and gloom, this book linked exponential growth of the human population with ecological destruction, resource exhaustion, mass starvation, and political instability. The only solution, according to Ehrlich, was to reduce the rate of population growth to zero percent. A variety of solutions were prescribed, including tax incentives to men that voluntarily underwent sterilization, luxury taxes on children’s goods, the promotion of abortion and other forms of birth control for women, and an end to foreign aid to countries that did not put a check on their population growth. The Population Bomb sold millions of copies, Ehrlich became a media darling, and the goal of reducing the global population became standard within the American environmental movement.

As Roy Beck and Leo Kolankiewicz have pointed out, support for population control among the environmental movement’s leadership in the United States “was paralleled, and bolstered, by widespread agreement among influential researchers and scholars in the natural sciences throughout the 1960s and 1970s.” By the 1990s, however, this support had subsided. Beck and Kolankiewicz note many reasons for this drop, chief among them being the fact that it proved to be politically incorrect to critique immigration, the main source of the United States’ population increase in the years following 1972.

The population control movement failed to gain significant traction within Canada’s environmental movement. It had advocates within mainstream groups such as Pollution Probe, but rarely made its way into their action campaigns or policy work. This was largely left to Zero Population Growth Canada, which peaked in 1971 with eight chapters and a membership of 500. Given Canada’s relatively low population density and birth rate the members of this group were given short shrift by elected officials. As Ontario premier John Robarts wrote to one of its members in May 1970, “Where overpopulation may become a problem on a world basis some time in the future, it is certainly not the case in Canada nor here in Ontario.”

It is worth noting that while Suzuki dismissed the advocates of population control as rich white conservatives, the chief benefactors of Zero Population Growth Canada were George and Barbara Cadbury. It is true that the Cadburys were wealthy, but they were hardly conservative. Important players within the International Planned Parenthood Federation, the couple left England for Canada when George decided to work for David Lewis’ Co-operative Commonwealth Federation government in Saskatchewan. George later served as president of the New Democratic Party of Ontario.

According to a survey released in July by the Association for Canadian Studies in Montreal, 54 percent of Canadians felt that the current population was “the right number of people,” while 33 percent felt it was “not big enough.” Those advocating a larger population include Robert Kaplan, the former Solicitor General of Canada, who wrote an opinion piece in the Globe and Mail calling for a Canadian population of 100 million – roughly triple its current size. Advocates of population control, meanwhile, have been assigned to the fringes of the internet, where a variety of organizations continue to operate. The dominant paradigm from forty years ago now appears to have been assigned to the dustbins of history.

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However, just how the War of 1812 should be commemorated, and what this war actually meant to Canadian history, is being actively contended in the pages of the Globe and Mail.  According to the Department of Canadian Heritage, the War of 1812 was a pivotal event that ultimately shaped the nation that became Canada.  Many point to the “happy aftermath” of the war: the 200 years of peace with the United States, as well as the Rush-Bagot agreement of 1817 that limited military activities on the Great Lakes.  Others argue that the war “was among the dumbest ever fought,” and charge the Harper Government with attempting to use the bicentennial as “contemporary nationalistic propaganda.”  Alan Taylor’s recent book, The Civil War of 1812, also muddies the waters concerning why the war was fought and who was fighting it.  Taylor argues that “national” identities and borders were fluid, and the war shouldn’t be seen as simply an American invasion repelled by the British military and Canadian militia.

While the argument rages about how and why the War of 1812 should be commemorated, there remains a serious silence in the national dialogue concerning the role of the First Nations allies in the war.  As detailed in Carl Benn’s The Iroquois in the War of 1812, “the War of 1812 was a critical event in Iroquois history.” The Iroquois allies were pivotal to British victories in major battles such as Queenston Heights, Beaver Dams, the blockade of Fort George and Crysler’s Farm.  Benn concludes that the outcome of the war, the successful defence of British territory, “could not have been achieved without aboriginal support of the king’s cause.”  Taylor reiterates this point stating by “intimidating American troops, the warriors had done more to foil the invaders than had the Canadian militia, but a postwar myth glorified the militia and degraded the Indians.”  Like they had during the American Revolution, warriors from the Six Nations allied themselves to the British cause.

John “Smoke” Johnson, grand-father of the poet Pauline Johnson, was one of these Six Nations warriors.  He left the Grand River at 21 years old to join Isaac Brock.  Johnson fought at Queenston Heights, Lundy’s Lane and Stoney Creek.  He also claimed to have set the fire that burned Buffalo in December 1813.  The iconic photograph taken in 1886 shows ninety-three year old John “Smoke” Johnson (right) with two other Six Nations veterans of the War of 1812, Jacob Warner (left) and John Tutlee (centre).

While Canadians today view the War of 1812 as a victory for Canada, and two hundred years of peace with the Americans, there was far less of a “happy aftermath” for Britain’s Six Nations allies.  During the war the Six Nations found themselves fighting against their Iroquois kin at battles like Chippawa.  Following the war, despite promises from the Indian Department not to interfere with their affairs, the Six Nations of the Grand River found their territory increasingly threatened by white squatters, and their finances mismanaged by white officials.  In the 1840s the Six Nations of the Grand River were forced to abandon the majority of their territory and were moved into a small reserve along the Grand River.  The two hundred years that followed the War of 1812 was not a time of peace and prosperity for the Six Nations, but marked the end of their independence as allies of Britain, and decline in their sovereignty and territory.

While the Canadian government treats the War of 1812 as a defining moment in Canadian history that led to the creation of the nation of Canada, for the Six Nations of the Grand River the war has very different meaning.  The Woodland Cultural Centre in Brantford is planning an exhibit to raise awareness about the role of the Six Nations Confederacy in the War of 1812.  With all the attention that is being focused in Canada on the bicentennial of the war, hopefully some people will take the time to look beyond the militaristic and nationalistic propaganda to learn more about the important role that Britain’s allies, the Six Nations and other First Nations, played in repelling the American invasion.

In Part II of “A Town Called Asbestos”, Dr. Jessica Van Horssen continues her survey of the history of asbestos in Quebec by examining the first asbestos industry boom between 1914 and 1939. The outbreak of war in Europe and the advent of aerial bombing in urban areas created a new market for the inflammable mineral. In the years after the war, asbestos found its way into a number of industrial products as both a flame retardant and as insulation. This growth in demand led to an expansion of mining activities and the establishment of large, multi-national asbestos mining corporations.

Viewers should also visit the website for Asbestos, QC: The Graphic Novel to further explore Dr. Van Horssen’s work on this topic.

Visit the full EHTV website at: http://niche-canada.org/ehtv

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Faced with humanitarian crises, outbreaks of civil war, and working in some of the world’s most unstable places, United Nations peacekeeping missions are taxed to their limit. This month, historian Donald Hempson traces the evolution of United Nations peacekeeping over more than six decades to highlight the challenges associated with an ever more robust approach to international peacekeeping and conflict resolution. The limitations of the current model force supporters of UN peacekeeping operations to confront the hard questions of whether or not the United Nations is equipped for missions that now entail more peace implementation and enforcement than peacekeeping, especially in an environment of evermore diminishing resources and international will for prolonged and complex peacekeeping initiatives.

• This article includes a podcast, images, and maps  •

Avoiding the Scourge of War: The Challenges of United Nations Peacekeeping

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“Let the atrocious images haunt us. Even if they are only tokens, and cannot possibly encompass most of the reality to which they refer, they still perform a vital function. The images say: This is what human beings are capable of doing—may volunteer to do, enthusiastically, self- righteously. Don’t forget.” – Susan Sontag

This week marks the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. What struck me during the past few days leading up to the anniversary, was the overwhelming amount of historical images of 9/11 that are recirculating around social media websites, print media, news articles, and blogs.[1] With cultural media we are constantly re-imaging and re-imagining the past.

These images are for the most part used to commemorate the events and the tragic loss of life endured that day. Are photographs of 9/11 vestiges that force us to come to terms with the violence and trauma endured as a society? Although photographs are more than just ‘evidence’ of past events, they often speak to us despite their captions and accompanying text. Photographs are also a language on their own that we are versed in as consumers of media. For me, images of 9/11 prompt memory of that day and invoke feelings of fear and loss.

The photographs I speak of clutter our collective memory and are depictions of the scarred landscapes and cityscapes of 9/11. They display smoking, crumbling buildings and damaged emergency response vehicles. We see the troubled faces of witnesses, victims, firefighters, police, families and countless others standing near crash sites, helplessly. We contemplate the Falling Man and the impossible decision he (and hundreds of others) made to jump. Thousands upon thousands of tattered papers and documents appear littering the streets of New York, possibly reminding us that we are not safe no matter where we work or play. For me, some of most horrific photographs capture the act as it was about to occur, the airliner about to make contact with the tower. But how do traumatic images like these impact collective memory of 9/11, and what are the politics surrounding their recirculation, particularly as images of a traumatic event? What does this mean for us as a society? Do they still shock us? Should they? Critics who are against the circulation of photographs depicting violence, war, and tragedy, cite our fascination as a society with morbid images, and rightfully so.

In Regarding the Pain of Others (2004), scholar and cultural critic Susan Sontag remarked on the audience’s experience of gazing at images of trauma and violence:

Something becomes real—to those who are elsewhere, following it as “news”—by being photographed. But a catastrophe that is experienced will often seem eerily like its representation. The attack on the World Trade Center on September 11 2001, was described as “unreal,” “surreal,” “like a movie,” in many of the first accounts of those who escaped from the towers or watched from nearby. (After four decades of big-budget Hollywood disaster films, “It felt like a movie” seems to have displaced the way survivors of a catastrophe used to express the short-term unassimilability of what they had gone through: “It felt like a dream.”)

Perhaps then, for witnesses it was surreal and for consumers of media, 9/11 became a horrifying truth. Photographs of  9/11 serve as painful reminders of that day, almost storing our memories for us. The infamous image of the Falling Man is a telling example of the politics of visual representation. When it was initially printed, critics described the image as disturbing, commenting on the act of taking the photograph: “if it’s disturbing to look at these pictures over your morning cornflakes, it’s traumatic to take them, and witness the terrible events of September 11th.” Richard Drew, who photographed the Falling Man maintains that it was just part of his job as a journalist.

It’s part of the history that I have been able to photograph in my lifetime for the AP [Associated Press], whether it be a car wreck, or a fashion show, or this thing. I just have to place in that file drawer where you say “I have covered major stuff”, and this will go in that major file drawer.”

Others like Mark D. Thompson viewed the Falling Man as a powerful and necessary testament to the existential crisis following 9/11. According to Sontag, epic photographs such as that of the Falling Man, become “the ultra familiar, ultra-celebrated image[s] – of agony, of ruin” and they are “an unavoidable feature of our camera-mediated knowledge of war.” As a society that consumes media at a fast rate, have wee seen too much? Have these images lost their impact? Are we too distant from 9/11 as an audience? Ten years have gone by, and for most of us who didn’t experience 9/11 firs hard, we can only know it, feel it, and see it through the media and representation.

The Falling Man was reproduced on page seven of The New Tork Times on September 12, 2001, and was not reprinted in the Times until six years later due to controversy and outcry from readership. Speculations as to the identity of the Falling Man began almost immediately after the photo was printed and controversy arose after many claimed his identity. There is even a documentary about the history of the photograph called 9/11: The Falling Man (2006). It seems that there is a struggle between the intent of the photograph as an object of art and visual representation and the context of how it will be viewed and understood by the public.

Fast forward ten years later, do they hold the same meaning in 2011? Do they horrify us? Or are they part of a much larger collection of images of war and trauma that we’ve been inundated with since 2001? While flipping through Life 100s Photographs that Changed the World a few weeks ago, I stumbled upon the image of the Falling Man alongside other photographs of tragedy and war. It haunts me no matter what context I am viewing it from.

The September 11 Memorial Museum has created a free smart phone application called Explore 9/11, which allows users to view historical photographs of 9/11 in place while listening to witness testimonies. Remarkably, Explore 9/11 also allows users to submit and share their own media through the Museum’s Make History website. This kind of participatory practice transforms private and corporate photography into sites of memory for the viewing public. I think people will ignore their cornflakes for a few moments to take the time to view these images, I know I did.

In a recent article about Explore 9/11, one reader commented: “After reading this article, I got up from the sofa, went to another room to fetch my iPhone 4, and downloaded Explore 9/11. This is the kind of intelligent interest in the tragedy we need to see more of.” Another reader remarked: ” I think that something could have been done all those inocent people who died and dont have anything to do with politics or other stuff like countries fighting eachother like little kids…. Remember 9/11.”

On the other hand, someone else wrote: “The year 2001 should not be repeated.” I think to myself after reading this comment “you are entirely right,” but does looking at photographs repeat the event? Can we chose to not look? Deciding not to look does not mean we decide to forget. At the same time, viewing does not equate memorializing 9/11.  We need to have a little more faith in the viewing public while maintaining the utmost respect for witnesses, victims and families. Let the photographs haunt us, as they should.

How have these images impacted you as an audience? Please leave a comment as I would love to hear your interpretations.

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Peter Trimming and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence.

By Patricia Daley.

[This article has already been posted on Pambazuka.org, OpenDemocracy.net and shared through the H-Urban email list. It was licenced on Pambazuka under Creative Commons, so we are reposting the full article here]

I spent my teenage years on the Pembury Estate in Hackney – one of the locations of last week’s riots in London. For the last 20 years, I have been an Oxford University don. I left home and Hackney in 1976. I have continued to visit friends and family in the borough. More recently, my visits have increased as I assist in the care of my elderly mother who still lives in the area.

I have listened and read members of the elite pontificating about the causes of the riots in London; most of which I find quite disturbing. The prime minister’s use of the term ‘fight back’ gives recognition to the divide in the society between Them and Us. He seems to be advocating civil war, between the morally good and the ‘bad’ – ‘the scum’ – while failing to recognise the deep schism in the society. The litany of contributory factors – whether they be unemployment, poor schooling, public spending cuts, racial profiling in stop and search, institutional racism, single mothers and poor parenting (I will say more about this later) – require radical thinking about the nature of our society and current economic policy, which our politicians do not appear equipped to handle.

I came to England just before my 12th birthday to join my divorced mother who wanted to reunite with the two children whom she had left in Jamaica. To say she and I did not get on is an understatement. This is partly because, at 12, I was already a fully formed, independent-thinking person whom she could not bend to her will. She wielded the rod uncompromisingly. Those who talk of the return of corporal punishment have no idea how brutalising it can be. My brothers and I did not report her to the authorities, even though we knew we could, because we were aware of the terrible situation of children in care. My aim was to get out as soon as I could and stay out. I am telling you this because the narrative of my rise to donship can be partly explained by my relenting desire to escape from the belt, broom – whatever came to hand – and from the poverty that I believe underpinned my mother’s abuse. However, it would not have occurred without the support of school teachers, the existence of a public library, friends and their family, and the state in the form of the Inner London Education Authority (ILEA) (disbanded in the 1980s by Margaret Thatcher).

Having done most of my primary schooling in Jamaica, I was already aware of the value of education. My fervently religious mother thought that education stops people from being god-fearing, and though she would not have had us misbehave in school, she did not encourage us to aspire. We moved onto the Pembury Estate just before my 13th birthday; prior to that we lived in one room in a shared house in Dalston. We spent a year in a two-bedroom, third-floor flat in one of the 1930s blocks. The estate’s residents were primarily white working class. Often someone would daub ‘nigger’ or ‘NF’ on the stairwell and we would have to sidestep dog shit to get to our front door. I was thrilled when we moved into a newly built three-bedroom house on the edge of the estate. Finally, I had a room of my own, though there was only space for a bed and a dressing table. I often wondered about the architects who designed such spaces and their views on the humanity of the people who would live in them. Homework was done on my bed or in the public library. Hackney library on Mare Street was a sanctuary and haven for me. I read voraciously. In my early teens, I was a fan of Russia’s literary giants.

My school was the local girls’ secondary modern. I knew it was second rate because the grammar school up the road had better facilities and the majority of teachers expected us to become secretaries (I hated typing) or, at most, bank clerks. Those were the days when headteachers were so remote that I can’t remember ever saying a word to mine, except for ‘thank you’ at prize-giving. Staff turnover was high and there was bad behaviour in the school but, because my year group was streamed, I managed to avoid most of that except in the playground. What kept my aspirations going was the support from three teachers; all stayed at the school for a short time. My French teacher, who was fresh out of teachers’ college, recognised my flair for languages, while my geography supply teacher noticed my interest in the wider world. My Australian music teacher loved opera and kept me in the choir out of charity – my voice was not great. However, I got the opportunity to go the opera, ballet and musicals in central London. My trips out of Hackney were dependent on these organised activities. For a year or two, we travelled on the 22 bus every Sunday to our black church at World’s End in Chelsea, but we could not afford to break the journey. I would spend the time familiarising myself with London landmarks from the top deck of a double-decker bus.

Virtually all my extra-curricular activities were funded by the ILEA, because my mother, despite working full-time, had no money for treats. We were on free school meals and school uniforms had to be worn until you grew out of them, even if the polyester fabric was shiny from ironing. Among my friends, I was the last one in a mini skirt and the last one out of one. Thanks to the support of the education authority and to some teachers, who dipped into their pockets to pay the parental contribution, I was able to visit France twice. The local youth club also provided trips outside of the area – a memorable one was to watch the Drifters perform on Top of the Pops. Having come from Jamaica, I already knew that there was a world out there – one in which black people are successful. Immigrant children tend to be enterprising and their self-esteem does not buckle under the psychological pressure that comes with racism.

I left my secondary modern after O levels because I knew it did not have the capacity to enable me to pass my A levels, and enrolled at a local technical college. My mother’s hostility to me studying was even greater then. I survived because of the small grant (I suppose the equivalent of today’s Educational Maintenance Allowance) I got from ILEA to pay my bus fare and a Saturday job. My friends and their families were immensely supportive of me, especially after I enrolled on a degree course at Middlesex polytechnic, and left home for good. The polytechnic’s welfare officer petitioned the ILEA to allow me to be assessed for a grant, independent of my mother’s contribution. My mother had refused to support me with evidence of parental income. Luckily, there were jobs. I worked weekends and evenings in department stores in Brent Cross, during the summer holidays as a play scheme assistant for council-run play schemes in Southall, Ealing, Islington and Northolt and, at Christmas, delivering the mail in Hampstead and Plumstead. I got to know London really well!

It was at university that I first encountered people from wealthy backgrounds. I made friends with some of them – lasting friendships in one or two cases. I did not feel second rate, because I was confident of my academic abilities. After that I took advantage of every opportunity that existed to gain qualifications, aiming always for financial independence. Looking back at my experience, without the assistance of the welfare state, without the confidence in my ability which I had gained in Jamaica, I would not be here. I am not rich, and I am not immune from racism in my job or in my suburban street, but I have the resources to escape on a regular basis to a sanctuary – a place where, if people are sneering at me, I am 100 per cent sure that it is not because of my skin colour, where, as Martin Luther King states, ‘I am judged on the basis of my character rather than the colour of my skin’. The young black people in Hackney often have no escape routes and, more importantly, are more British than me – they have no memory of other places and ways of being.

So, it pains me when members of the privileged elite dismiss these young people’s claim that the lack of employment and youth club facilities are contributing to disaffection among them. I know I would have been at the edge of despair if I was trapped in Hackney at that time. The last time my brother and I were there to see my mother he looked at the youth hanging out on Clarence Road and said ‘I am glad I am not growing up around here now’.

Certainly, at one level there appears to be more money in Hackney. The borough is undergoing gentrification. Mare Street looks better than I have ever seen it. London’s intelligentsia visit the Hackney Empire frequently for West End-quality shows. There are farmers markets, loft-style apartments in converted factories and churches, and streets of Victorian terraces gated against traffic and ‘others’. My younger brother, who lives locally, told me a year ago that Hackney is even more socially divided now, with rich whites – ‘the wine bar crowd’, he calls them – and poor, predominantly black, on the estates. When I was growing up the social divide was less stark. The first person who defended me against racism was the father of one of my white friends on the estate, who had an altercation with a local shoe store manager, whom he believed had discriminated against me when his daughter and I responded to an advert for Saturday girls. The black population itself is now quite diverse – with Somalis, Nigerians, Congolese and so on – different cultures and tensions. I can attest that the living conditions of those in private rented housing are often much worse than what my mother experienced in the 1960s.

I do my research on Africa and, there, the proliferation of charismatic Pentecostal churches seems to follow the decline of the economy and the implementation of austerity measures in the form of structural adjustment. In Hackney, and in Tottenham, the proliferation of these churches promoting prosperity Christianity is also evident. Ministers are taking the wages of poor people and telling them that they should aspire to own Mercedes-Benzes. Materialism has become a religious ethic. Scholars, especially on the left, claim that this can only be expected in a hyper consumer and individualistic society, where your self-esteem depends on what you wear. I agree, but I would argue that physical appearance has deep social and historical roots in a black community that had been subjected to the racism of slavery and colonialism – whose bodies were commoditised and belonged to another. Poor African-Caribbean communities have always defined their self-worth in terms of appearance, cleanliness and material possessions. We are famed for our fastidiousness – a trait immigrants of the 1950s thought was missing in their working-class neighbours – and our respect for adornment, what the youth term ‘bling’. Members of my extended family are always exhorting me to ‘dress good’, because my English academic style does not generate admiration. There are deep sociological reasons for this phenomenon. My take is that dispossession, alienation and marginalisation play a role in this, but my wealthy Oxford neighbours in their luxury cars and designer clothes do not suffer from any of this, so we have to give consideration to the culture of profligate consumption that is promoted in the media by corporations and on which the basis of our 21st century economy rests.

Along with consumerism, looting is the norm in our societies, whether it is presented as legal, in the form of tax avoidance by the wealthy, speculation by bankers, bailouts of banks using public money, privatisation of public-owned services at bargain prices, fiddling of expenses by our democratic representatives or hacking into victims’ phones to make a profit. We welcome Russian oligarchs to make clean their money on our shores. There are numerous reasons for the people looting in London last week. While I condemn the loss of life and livelihoods, for some perpetrators the heavy handedness of the state’s retribution will be disproportionate to the severity of the crime. How can we teach our children to respect human lives, property and their communities, if those with power do not set an example? The disparities in the application of the law will only reinforce the alienation and disaffection that affect large swathes of our society. The hollowness in the mantra ‘we are all in it together’ is exposed for all to see.

In a television debate, the historian, David Starkey, blames the riots on whites becoming black by adopting black culture, thus implying that black culture is dysfunctional. Many commentators have attacked the racism of much of his retort. But look at it another way, in the 19th and 20th century, white working-class people and criminals were exported to the colonies, and in that way were able to retain their ‘whiteness’. There is a whole body of academic research on the social construction of ‘whiteness’ and its links with empire and the de-humanisation of non-Western people. Today, working-class white people have nowhere to go, so their poverty and alienation have become even more pronounced. They are dismissed from mainstream society as ‘scum’ and ‘chavs’, in effect, to the white elite, they have become as de-humanised as black people.

Let me now turn to parenting. Many commentators on the riots, including black people, have pointed to lack of discipline in the home and schools. There have always been problem kids in the East End; one cinematic depiction was in the ‘To Sir with Love’ movie with Sidney Pottier as the leading actor. Black parents, especially the older generation, are some of the strictest I know. Unfortunately, harsh discipline often leads to rebellion. I was lucky the support existed then to channel my rebellion productively. I cannot comment on the parenting skills of teenage mothers. But I know, as an ‘older mother’ trying to bring up a child on my own, at the same time as working full-time and even with the financial support of his father, it was immensely difficult. What I knew was that I did not want to be like my mother and I had to consciously hold back whenever I felt myself about to repeat aspects of the behaviour in which I was socialised. I am educated sufficiently to know that the abused often end up as abusers.

All parents are beginners, and the guidebooks are not that helpful either. The rich contract out parenting to nannies and boarding schools. The poor single parent has become even more atomised. Sales of council houses, amid high property prices, have meant that grandparents no longer live in the vicinity and young mums have no guidance, apart from social workers, who may appear to be judging them negatively. At least I had just about enough resources to pay for childcare: nursery, after school club, holiday play schemes and clothing (not designer), and to buy enough food when my child reached his teens and would eat a week’s shopping in three days. I wonder how many of the teen looters had a gnawing hunger due to insufficient food. Recently, on a trip to Hackney, one of my mother’s neighbours, who works in the care industry, asked me how much was a 2lb bag of flour in Aldi in Oxford. I could not say, even though I had switched my basic shopping to Aldi. She proceeded to compare the price in Netto and in the Co-op around the corner. Incidents like these remind me how far removed I am from the social reality of poverty in contemporary Britain. Can we therefore be surprised when we hear about looters raiding Lidl?

The issue of the absence of community keeps coming up in the media reports. I can only agree. Among the black community in London, there is no political community as such, no alternative to the church, which, despite the materialist bent of some of them, have managed to provide a sanctuary and a space for youth to express themselves. However, not all people are inclined to turn to religion. For me, I found camaraderie in the black political movements of the 1970s that provided a space in which I could find explanations about my condition and those of other black people within the society and elsewhere. My family were not immune from police racial profiling under ‘sus’ laws. We remain grateful to my mother for challenging the attempt to criminalise my younger brother. It is appalling that, some 30 plus years later, young black men are still subjected to similar levels of racial profiling.

The lack of community is presented by some commentators as one explanation for the rise of gang culture. Gangs are not a new social phenomenon in the East End. However, the prevalence of black youth in gangs and their confinement to limited geographical spaces, postcodes or ‘endz’ is worrying, but not unusual if you look across the globe, in El Salvador, Brazil, Mexico, the Dominican Republic and Jamaica, for example. The tragedy of the economic crises of the last 30 years has been manifested by the descending of alienated youth into gangs. At a conference in Oxford last year, Professor Colin Clarke, Dr Rivke Jaffe and Yonique Campbell presented a terrifying picture of the future of societies where the state had abandoned the people to the hands of the gang ‘dons’. Gang violence is probably the main cause of the death of young black men in London. Too many parents have lost their sons and daughters. It is a phenomenon that black people should be organising to halt. To do so we cannot just rely on the law; we have to examine why the youth see gang lifestyle as the only choice and seek solutions that involve wider sections of the community.

And so to role models – the lack of a father figure keeps cropping up. It is shocking that such a high percentage of black children are growing up in households with no fathers – because the women must be struggling to cope on their own, especially due to the atomisation of household units. Despite being a fairly independently minded person, I do think it is important that boys have men in their lives. However, it depends on the man and the nature of the masculinity he portrays. Many women leave men because of violence, whether it be physical, psychological or material (failure to contribute financially to household well-being). The role models that black men have are predominantly of an aggressive masculinity – but I would hazard a guess that the proportion that subscribes to this conceptualisation of manhood is relatively small – yet influential, because it is this cohort that gets media space and is presented as hegemonic. Children need their fathers and the women need their men.

In the book ‘African Sexualities’, the editor Sylvia Tamale challenges the ways in which sexuality and loving relationships among Africans have been studied historically, represented as dysfunctional and perverse, and have become medicalised through attempts to control African reproduction and HIV/AIDs interventions. The exoticisation of African sexualities left little room for the complex and diverse ways in which they are expressed in reality – something which black people will have to address. There are numerous issues concerning the relationship between black men and women in Britain that beg further thought. Black women are faced, on a daily basis, with idealised and racialised visions of beauty to which they can never aspire. Even an LSE academic has used pseudo-research to try to depict black women as unattractive. Unfortunately, today, we do not have the 1970s black power movement to remind the men how beautiful the women are.

And professional role models – I find this a strange phenomenon. I knew from my experience in Jamaica that, despite what some teachers and the media in the UK said, I was capable of going into any profession with the right schooling. However, it was my confidence in my abilities and encouragement from those three teachers that helped me to achieve academic success. On my last visit to an East End school I saw similar aspirations in the young people, but the school playground looked like a prison.

Young black people’s career choices are often constrained by the visibility of other black people achieving in particular profession. We want to be hip hop stars, lawyers and doctors because in this society, those are the professions where we see successful black people. I became an academic geographer out of expediency in my teens, but I value the insight the subject has given me into the wider world. Yet I am always disturbed by the paucity of black geographers at professional conferences, especially in the UK. Bonnie Greer is reported in The Voice newspaper as saying that opportunities have so declined for black people in this country that they may have to play the ‘race card’ to progress. This is a sad indictment of the state of affairs, and suggests that we have entered a period of regression. Some of my white friends say they can see Britain regressing to the social conditions of the 19th century and that would not be good for black people – even if one has a fondness for costume drama.

Looking back at my time in Hackney, I don’t think I would have succeeded if I did not have the solid grounding in Jamaica, the few school teachers who encouraged me by helping to broaden my horizons and, most of all, the availability of free public goods: state housing, library resources, youth clubs and education. For today’s youth, virtually all of these resources have declined or disappeared.

Neoliberal economists often talk about the need of governments to create an enabling environment for capital to grow at the same time as advocating cuts in social welfare, but what about governments creating an enabling environment for people, whilst curbing the worst excesses of capitalists. Getting the home, work, social and physical (environment) space right so that people can flourish – that is the challenge of the 21st century. If we don’t heed the message of the August riots, we are in for a bleak future.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

* Dr Patricia Daley is a university lecturer in human geography and fellow of Jesus College, Oxford. She is also chair of Fahamu Trust – the publisher of the online social justice newsletter, Pambazuka News.
* Please send comments to editor[at]pambazuka[dot]org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

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The Hunter family has struggled for years to bring Charlie home. Earlier this year the Hunter family, the National Residential Schools Society, Keewaytinook Okimakanak, Nishnawbe Aski Nation, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and the Toronto Star began a campaign to raise money to bring Charlie to Peawanuck.

Two weeks after a story about Charlie appeared in the Toronto Star enough funds were raised to repatriate Charlie’s body.  These articles which contributed to funds being gathered for return can be seen here and here.  The efforts of the bring Charlie home campaign came to fruition on Friday August 19th, 2011 when over 100 mourners gathered in Peawanuck to see Charlie laid to rest in his home community. News coverage documenting Charlie’s return home can be seen here and here.

The repatriation of Charlie is a unique story, but the details leading up to Charlie returning home are surprisingly common place. Many children who passed away at residential school were buried at the school they were attending.  Additionally, a countless number of children disappeared while at residential school. Missing and incomplete records make it difficult to estimate how many children died or disappeared during their time at residential school.  Similarly, mass and unmarked graves which are found at a number of residential school cemeteries make it impossible to identify the remains of students buried while at school.

The repatriation of Charlie highlights the ongoing struggle of all Canadians – First Nation, Métis, Inuit, and non-indigenous people – to deal with the legacy of the Canadian residential school system.  Charlie is one of the very few residential schools students who have been returned home.

So far, the Canadian government and organizations which ran the residential schools have put little effort into assisting families in their efforts to locate burial sites, missing children, and unmarked graves.  The government sanctioned Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC) supports the Missing Children and Unmarked Grave Working Group’s Recommendations and has a file on missing children. However, the TRC has stated that given their limited mandate and the overwhelming number of missing children the TRC is not going to be able to say how many children died in the schools, or where they are all buried.  It is probable that we may never know the names or numbers of all those lost as a result of the residential school system.

The efforts of the Hunter family to bring Charlie home were covered by CBC, CTV, and various print media outlets.  The return of Charlie Hunter to Peawanuck has the potential to raise awareness of the impact of residential schools and inspire reconciliation and respectful repatriation.  But, only time will tell if that potential will be effectively harnessed or ignored by the Canadian public and government.

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Used with the permission of Toronto Public Library

Toronto city councillor Doug Ford, brother of city mayor Rob Ford, recently ignited public controversy over potential cuts to the city’s public library services when he claimed not to know much about author Margaret Atwood, who had spoken out against possible cuts to services and closures of library branches. Councillor Ford’s insistence that Atwood “get democratically elected” so that she could have a say in deciding library funding policy in the city was ludicrous, particularly given the Toronto Public Library’s history.

Much of the financial backing that spurred the construction of public libraries in Toronto, and Ontario more generally, in the early twentieth century came from retired American industrial steel magnate Andrew Carnegie’s philanthropy, more specifically his fund dedicated to public libraries. Though public libraries had been slowly gaining in support throughout the late nineteenth century, it was Carnegie’s funds that provided a valuable boost to public library growth. Carnegie’s grants helped build 125 libraries in Canada, 111 of which were in Ontario. In Toronto alone, libraries such as Yorkville (1907); Queen and Lisgar (1909); the Central Reference Library (1909); Riverdale (1910); Wychwood (1916); High Park (1916) and Beaches (1916) were built using Carnegie grants. Three more—Western Branch/Annette Street (1909), Weston (1914), and Mimico (1914)—would be absorbed into the Toronto Public Library system when the city merged with nearby communities.

Carnegie’s grants did not come without strings, however. Proposals had to meet three conditions: a suitable site had to be found and approved, ten percent of the grant value had to be guaranteed by the municipality for annual operating costs and, most importantly, the library had to be free to its citizens. Not everyone cheered Carnegie’s benevolence. Nationalists opposed the American influence that Carnegie represented. Labour activists accused Carnegie, whose steel fortunes had been built in an industry marked by labour strife such as the disastrous strike at a Carnegie-owned Homestead Steel Works in Homestead, Pennsylvania in 1892 where 11 strikers were killed and 145 wounded, of using money earned from the exploitation of workers to fund his charity. In Toronto, the Council of Allied Printing Trades and the Toronto District Labour Council both officially opposed the city taking any Carnegie Grant, with some even calling it “blood money”.

Ultimately, Carnegie won over Toronto city council, and even some opponents, with a popular call to the cause of self-help and hard work. Libraries, he argued, provided the ‘means by which those who desire to improve may do so.” Carnegie’s praise of the self-educated man, using the library as a means of bettering his lot in life was echoed by Toronto Chief Librarian George Locke in 1930:

“There is a large, and what ought to be an influential, division of education known as the public library, an educational institution with no entrance requirements, no fees, no instructors and no examinations. It has books and trained persons whose duty it is to help people to help themselves.”

Lorne Bruce, who has written extensively about public libraries in Ontario, argues that it was Carnegie’s grants which provided a needed boost to the nascent public library movement and often forced many communities to adopt free public library models in order to receive funds. After receiving the funds, however, many public library administrators, both professional and elected, shaped community libraries to suit local needs and demands such as open access to collections, multipurpose space, outreach services and specialized collections such as children’s departments.

In spite of Carnegie’s conservative views of economic forces and capital being the product of hard work and thrift, without the funds he provided, Ontario’s public libraries might not have grown as quickly as they did. Local control of libraries, provided in Carnegie’s grant requirements, remained a countervailing force against libraries becoming beholden to private interests throughout the years of Carnegie’s influence and beyond.

What does all this have to do with the Ford brothers and their dismissal of public concern with public libraries? Recent media coverage of a marathon session of city council held for public hearings into possible budget cuts, particularly to libraries, highlights citizens’ connection to libraries as vital spaces both for self-improvement and pleasure. Particularly striking however, was a moment at 2 a.m. of the proceedings, when 14 year old Anika Tabovaradan had her turn at the microphone. Tabovaradan spoke about using her local branch for research and studying and how crucial it was for her schooling.

“I’m no taxpayer,” she said, gasping for air, “but when I get to use the computers in the library and do my homework, I’ll be able to get a good job someday … and when the day comes to pay taxes, I’ll be glad that you supported people paying the extra taxes to keep the system going.”

Her testimony reveals the pervasive and continuing power of the image of the public library not just as a space for the arts, but as a space for self-improvement and shaping future citizens, in this case defined as tax payers. Cutting accessibility to these resources, then, is not simply a case of needing to know who Margaret Atwood is, or why she should matter, but rather how we view social mobility, progress and the public good. If Margaret Atwood and the many citizens who testified at city council can’t convince the Fords of the importance of free public libraries, maybe the ideas and spirit of another “unelected” figure, one of the most successful businessmen of his period, can.

Further Reading:

Lorne D. Bruce, Free Books for All: The Public Library Movement in Ontario, 1850-1930 (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 1994).

Margaret Penman, A Century of Service: Toronto Public Library, 1883-1983 (Toronto: Toronto Public Library, 1983).

Siobhan Stevenson, “The Political Economy of Andre Carnegie’s Library Philanthropy, with a Reflection on its Relevance to the Philanthropic Work of Bill Gates,” Library and Information History, Vol. 26, No. 4 (December,2010), 237-257.

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