Monday's Musings: New Name, New Look But Same Old Neighborhood, Same Old Politics

I am not one much for looking down on new initiatives that aim to help others. In fact, it is usually quite the opposite, especially when it comes to education initiatives (one of my areas of academic interest). On Sunday, Kathleen McGrory wrote about the changes to Edison Senior High School in Miami in her article “Miami Edison Senior High Gets New Name, New Look.” A little background as to why these changes are so important and worthy of attention. Edison Senior High (aka Haiti High) is a school in one of Miami’s most economically disadvantaged areas, Liberty City, is predominately Haitian (the area is generally called Little Haiti), has made headlines for its deplorable performance on state exams (the FCAT—a grade of F in 7 of its 8 last performances) and tensions between students and staff recently culminated (or rather degraded into) in a riot.

McGrory reports that the new initiatives are aimed at adding that spark, providing that incentive, to get students to take education seriously. To use her words, “the challenge [is to] take one of the state’s lowest-performing schools and transform it into a place the county’s best students are clamoring to attend.” She is right to call such an ambitious goal a challenge. It is herculean task for even the most ambitious of us all. I applaud Miami-Dade County Public School officials for embarking upon such an arduous journey; they are surely to be commended.

One of the key changes to the school that may prove to be its more attractive and efficacious features, to students and teachers alike, is the internal restructuring of the curriculum, broadly defined. More specifically, Edison will now be structured like a university with four colleges within it where students get to choose the college that best fits the academic and extracurricular activities. I believe that this is important because it at once empowers students through their ability to choose and also matching teachers with students actually interested in the material being taught. The former should not be taken lightly; having control over one’s life, in this case, one aspect of one’s life, is empowering. The latter deserves equal credit as having engaged teachers with equally engaged teachers is something special.

However, as the old adage goes, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Again, I am not arguing against the program; I am simply being and arguing for others to be cautious of accepting such new initiatives blindly for in our zeal for progressive and promising projects, we can become shortsighted. The reason I go along this cautionary road specifically in the case of Edison and its changes is best explained using a car metaphor (bare with me). The oil is the lifeblood of the car; without it, you are not going far. The dirtier the oil, the worse the car runs until it finally breaks down. So far so good. Well, to me, the kids are the oil. The school, the car—literally and figuratively the engine of social (im)mobility. If the students only interacted with the school things would run smoothly (or at least smoother than they do now). The problem is that the oil—these students—must first run through the muck, the dirt, the filth that is the remains of Liberty City, a part of Miami that is poor, hostage to criminal activity, and still recovering from race riots of generations past. It goes without saying that this areas is also as political disenfranchised as it is economically. I am not making an argument against the individuals who attend Edison or live in this area. What I am saying in connecting the students, school, and community has been posited by many immigration and race scholars like Harvard Sociologist Mary Waters and Princeton Sociologist Alejandro Portes: the immediate location of these immigrant and native communities matter with respect to the students’ well-being and how they come to formulate their identities and their connection (or lack thereof) to schooling and mainstream routes to upward mobility.

Portes with his colleague Min Zhou argue that segmented assimilation occurs when immigrants are blocked from upward mobility by different barriers, whether they be political, language, social, cultural, or any combination of the above. In response to such barriers, subsequent generations of immigrants (the second generation) begin to identify with different subcultures—in the case of the Haitian population in Miami, poor, inner-city blacks who have experienced the effects of both interpersonal and structural racism. This is where I find such an initiative as an amazing step forward but one with the possibility to do more harm than good because it places all its resources in the school to the neglect of the community. The problem is that is that if this program does not succeed with amazing results, then cultural arguments will be everyone’s rationale for why things didn’t work: these people, the individuals and their cultural patterns at writ large, are somehow defective. The comment box for the article already presents itself as evidence for such a prediction. However, such attacks against the group would never take factors like the deleterious effects of residential segregation, the cumulative disadvantages of living in concentrated poverty, the racial politics of Miami with respect to its Cuban, Haitian, Black, and White citizenry, and the like into consideration.

The new name—Edison EduPlex—new look—paint job, planting trees, the works—and new “structure”—transforming the internal running of the school to mimic a university with four colleges within it—addresses structural problems of the school. However, by effectively placing the school in the spotlight and key component of the reform efforts to the detriment of a more critical assessment of the antithetical role the community can play when attempting to create initiatives of this kind, we may find ourselves with the same problem once the attraction of the newness wears off. Is this a recipe for change or one of another cycling of resources with mixed and inconclusive results?

France's Urban Utopia

For those that don’t really follow urban spatial arrangements the same way I do, you might not know that metropolitan Europe has an entirely different spatial pattern than metropolitan America. In the United States, most suburban development occurred as a result of middle-class exodus from central cities. The general pattern in Europe is almost exactly the opposite; the poor live in the ‘burbs, while the central city typically houses the bourgeois class. Paris, for example, is like the anti-Detroit: Imagine Bloomfield Hills as a sprawling slum, and downtown Detroit as home to Michigan’s most wealthy.

In Europe, like America, poverty tends to be isolated from areas of employment, role models of behavior, social services, and other rudimentary, daily needs. This social and physical isolation may change in Paris in the next few years, however. Nicolas Sarkozy, President of France, has recently employed the services of an international team of urban planners and architects in the hopes of fundamentally changing metropolitan Paris. There are plenty of ideas being thrown around, most captured in this excellent New York Times piece. The most genius idea being discussed, however, involves a metropolitan transit system connecting the city of Paris to its poor suburbs.

I recently wrote about the failures of the American public transit system, far too often focusing on levels of density than on the needs of poor folks without access to other means of transportation. I mean, this whole idea that our transportation system needs to be environmentally sound is great, but we can’t forget why we have public transportation: to transport the public. More importantly, a focus on alleviating density ignores the great social need for sound transit in isolated urban and suburban communities with already low levels of traffic. Our transit system should respond to the needs of our most marginalized citizens.

The plan in Paris takes both of these considerations into account. With one carefully planned transit system, Paris’s poor suburbs could become “greener” and less isolated:

Isolated neighborhoods, which now have little green space, would be intimately woven into the city’s fabric. And the parks would link to a vast new greenbelt defining the city’s edge.

In a phrase, this is urban policy at its finest. Sarkozy and his architects are cognizant of the social, ecological and environmental concerns of metropolitan Paris—and they’re actually going to respond to these needs. Novel idea, I know. If Sarkozy is able to implement his plan, it will be the most ambitious reinvention of an urban metropolis in our generation—an innovative plan that may serve as a model for re-envisioning urban America.

Goombay is Dead

No more triangle banners hanging from the lampposts or baskets lining the ground in colors that capture the life and vitality of Bahamas, Jamaica, Haiti, and the other West Indian countries.

No more bands playing the rhythmic tunes from the islands that force us all to move our feet, shake our hips, swing our arms.

No more spicy curry goat that makes you run for water. No more watermelons or mangoes that make you forget your table manners. No more conch fritters that make you want to drive to Key West to start a little conch farm of your own. No more fresh crabs caught earlier that day, cooked in front of your face, and ate soon thereafter.

Here Ye. Here Ye. After 32 years, Coconut Grove’s Goombay Festival is Dead.

This reality has been on my mind for the past three years. And being back in Miami during the week leading up to Goombay and right after this year’s National Spelling Bee where Goombay was a word in one of the final rounds brought this thought to the fore. If you look in the dictionary, Goombay is a form of Bahamian music and a drum used to create it. Some link it to Calypso. For us in the Grove, Goombay is a two-day festival the first weekend in June held to commemorate the unique ties between the Grove and the islands of the Bahamas: the Junkanoos dancing in the street; the conch salad, fried conch, stewed conch sold along the sidewalk; Bahamian music reverberating on the ear drums; arts and crafts of the islands; the conch salad, fried conch, stewed conch. Literally, you walk, eat, drink, dance and listen for two days straight. To put it in perspective, imagine Carnival or Mardis Gras on a more local level but with all the fanfare, tourists, and craziness that ensues. For a look, look at the streets in action when the Junkanoos come by. I am sad to report, however, that the Goombay many of us grew up with, the Goombay some of us couldn’t wait for, the Goombay all of us got ‘all fixed up for,’ is dead.

A little background is necessary though to better understand this social autopsy. First, I am from Coconut Grove, a small community in Miami. The Grove, as it is more commonly known, is split. More honestly, the Grove is segregated (this is made evident even in the Wikipedia post where Black Grove is omitted). There is, for lack of a better way of saying it, White Grove where the homes are big, cars are fancy, and yards are sprawling, and then there is Black Grove (or West Grove) where, well, the houses are not so big, cars are fancy but in a different (read as ethic) way, and yards are a bit more crowded with stuff that doesn’t fit in the homes. Put it like this, once you cross McDonald St, a street that runs north to south between Grand Avenue and US1, you’re in a different world.

This “natural” split existed since the first black settlers came over from the Caribbean, specifically the Bahamas. When these settlers arrived, they were forced to live in Black Grove while they slaved away in White Grove, serving as maids, butlers, yard workers, and any other menial job that their more affluent counter did not fashion themselves doing. This story was the same for the few African Americans who came soon thereafter and the families of current residents here today. These settlers and their African American peers endured Miami’s tumultuous racial periods and now are as much a part of the community and city as any other ethnic group (though there is still troubles to be sure). So, enough with the history lesson. Why the post? Well, because the ceremony held to honor such a beautiful and rich history has been desecrated to the point of no return and should no longer be held for it sullies the legacy of the settlers and mocks the current inhabitants in every since of the word.

Goombay is now held in the heart or rather, one may argue, the centerpiece of White Grove: Peacock Park. Goombay’s current location is unsettling and has many residents upset. Goombay is no longer held within the boundaries of where the original Bahamian and Black celebrated their cultural heritage, where they, to put it simply, lived in the truest since of the word. Some argue that this is a step in the right direction, bridging racial divides. This is simply not the case because in all the Goombays I attended (and those of individuals my mother’s age), there were people from all races and nationalities (yes, it even had people from Canada make a flight just for the food and music). All this happened while the festival was held in our backyard without corporate sponsors and the like, not a place where we were not wanted then and get followed when we go there now.

What is worse, a festival that was once free and open to ALL now has a price for admittance. This is the ultimate slap to the face. Once barred, relegated to “the other side of the tracks” to live, we must now traverse those tracks, pay an entrance fee to celebrate what we started in the first place. Goombay is dead.

The first thing I wanted to do is point the finger. Should we blame the planning committee, those who simply let Goombay decay into what it “is” today? No? Then definitely those who live in Black Grove, those who simply sat by, threw up their hands, and just went with the flow. I really wanted to place blame on someone, some individual or specific body of people. But then I thought back to my second semester in graduate school. I specifically thought about the books which focused on the neighborhood. I specifically thought of Columbia University sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh’s Off the Books which chronicles the daily economic as well as social happenings of Marquis Park (based on a Chicago neighborhood) and, more specifically, Northwestern sociologist Mary Pattillo’s Black on the Block which details the different phases of black gentrification. These books came to mind because one lasting question that nags me to this day is, what power do certain individuals have in voicing the concerns of the community. In Off the Books, taking it from this angle, the people were not able to break the boundaries of their social isolation and had no real say in the governing of their territory. Even Pattillo’s middle(wo)men, middle class African Americans in professional positions, were only permitted to quibble about the details of the residential plans with no influence on any major decision.

To put it a different way, the parallel I saw is not in argument for neither book focused primarily on racial/ethnic history of segregation and place by looking at a cultural festival, but they both spoke to issues of community-level social capital that was simply novel to me. Berkeley sociologist Sandra Susan Smith advocates for one form of community level social capital aimed at skill development initiatives for those in the low wage labor market to combat the dysfunctional manner in which Black low wage workers attempt to find work in her excellent book Lone Pursuit. I took this as a lens to look through as I thought about what has happened to Goombay and also the “who to blame” game going on in my mind.

Princeton sociologist Alejandro Portes, in his 1998 review article of the scholars who employed social capital at the individual level in the last decade, defines social capital as “the ability to secure benefits by virtue of membership in social networks or other social structures.” However, looking at benefits alone leaves out everyday, round-the-way resources made available to individuals and collectivities. There is a dearth of political clout and capital in Black Grove. Taking a step back, I was able to see the ways in which city officials enacted their draconian rulings about the use of the streets, specifically Grand Avenue, without paying due attention to the people. City officials, who only show concern for this side of the tracks when they are up for re-election, paved the way, literally and figuratively, for public events like Goombay in Black Grove to die while other larger events like Calle Ocho (a yearly festival to celebrate Cuban heritage) to expand. I mention Calle Ocho not to say “Hey, look at Cubans having all the fun and how well they are treated.” If anything, it speaks to the political and social base differences between the two ethnic groups. Again, political clout and social capital. I just find the relocation of Goombay and the “pruning” that preceded relocation disrespectful.

Looking at the ways in which individuals within a community are (un)able to express themselves hit home when thinking how the one event held by the community was uprooted and unashamedly planted in someone else’s garden, where now those whose original green thumbs helped it to grow and flourish now must pay to go see their pride and joy.

I am saddened that dear old Goombay is dead.

Our New Corporate Neighbor: Costco Comes to East Harlem

In Black on the Block, Northwestern sociologist Mary Pattillo analyzes black middle-class gentrification on Chicago’s South Side. In a strikingly poignant discussion of class-segmented public space, Pattillo describes the neighborhoods two main supermarkets: the Hyde Park Co-op and One Stop Foods. The two supermarkets are segregated by class; black middle-class newcomers are the only customers at the Hyde Park Co-op, while their working class counterparts are the only customers at One Stop Foods.

While the details may be different, this particular discussion points to common trend in cities across the country. Typically, a new Whole Foods in a depressed urban neighborhood signals encroaching gentrification. This development often precipitates the displacement of local corner stores or other cheap, bulk-food alternatives. Yuppie gentrifiers would rather shop organic at a Whole Foods than frugally at a Wal-Mart or Costco.

Gentrification in Harlem has dramatically impacted the community in the last five years. So when Costco announced plans to open a store on East River Avenue at 116th Street, many community members welcomed it as a positive development. Yet a baffling, elitist, and deplorable corporate policy has tempered initial optimism: Costco will not accept food stamps.

Say what you want about big-box development—the exploitation of workers, the displacement of locally owned business—but a Costco brings jobs and cheap food to Harlem. Yet when 30,000 East Harlem residents receive food stamps, Costco’s denial of their business is an emphatic dismissal of their very existence. Costco can exploit the physical space of the neighborhood, use residential streets to make midnight to 5 AM deliveries daily, but willfully accepts the increasing economic marginalization of the majority of East Harlem’s residents.

Costco responded with flippant arrogance that they simply couldn’t afford the technology needed to accept food stamps. Apparently they are unaware that the state provides all of the necessary equipment, free of charge.

The New York Times quoted Viveca Diaz, an East Harlem resident, on the situation. With striking clarity, Diaz astutely noted, “They were saying at one point they don’t have the technology. Very interesting. The corner bodega takes food stamps, and Costco doesn’t?” Well, Ms. Diaz, the former establishment cares about the needs of the community, and the latter…not so much.