Study Finds More than a Third of Oakland's Fast Food Workers Cannot Afford Food and I Wonder Why do we Care At All

I'm a bit confused about something from my friends on the left. Yes, once again I am having to take stock of the nature of this so-called friendship for what me and mine are getting out of it. It's not just my anarchism but also just plain, good sense that any relationship be constantly assessed and re-assessed for its ... qualities. Yes, I almost wrote "utility" instead of qualities, but this might have been misconstrued ideologically by these same friends I'm questioning.

A study by the Restaurant Opportunites Center United reveals that more than one-third of the fast-food workers in the city of Oakland, CA, cannot afford food because of the poverty wages they must subsist on. Food insecurity is the polite way of saying that people are going hungry, they may be starving, they are certainly snowballing a host of health issues for which the state will simply let them die.

So the results of this study, though not surprising, should be an urgent concern. I just don't understand why the left is concerned.

Just the other day, I heard Russell Brand, whom I have more in common with ideologically and would never kick out of my bed, utter the line that many use as a justification for immigration [read: immigration from Latin America]. Brand noted without any irony that without allowing these men and women to cross the border, our food costs would escalate.

Brand is not the only person making this argument. I think the argument is at least as old as I am because I have heard it all my life

And it is a sorry argument that says something to me about those on the left willing to use it.

Because if you look at the argument that without immigration [from Latin America! They do not expect Germans to come here and do agricultural work] our food costs will go up, what it is saying is we need these immigrants [from Latin America] to work at below-subsistence wages and without any labor or health protections. This is what the argument is saying.

So it should strike us radicals a bit odd that fast-food workers wages are a concern because they cannot live on them, but the wages of immigrant labor is not a concern because we need cheap food..

It should also strike us that when we speak about immigration from Latin America we are talking about indigenous people who were already at the economic bottoms of these Euro finance-centered economies, like the Mexican economy, which is run and headed by wealthy white Mexicans, while thankfully many of the indigenous are not trying to assimilate into this culture but have rebelled in Chiapas as an example to us all.

I'll say the same thing about agriculture that I've already said about the fast-food or any industry: if a business cannot exist without giving a living wage to its workers that business has no right to exist, period. To say otherwise is to accept the argument of the antebellum slave owner, who was probably correct that he could not be competitive in the marketplace - particularly selling textiles to Great Britain at low cost - if he had to pay wages to his plantation workers [another immigrated workforce].

Granted, private ownership of businesses is antithetical to community interests. Read that again. The labor fight of our times should be no different than the labor fight of a hundred years ago: that workers collectively own and self-manage the factories they work in. This should be the standard.

But the system we have is the system we have for today. So the bar should be reasonably placed that if you must pay your workers wages on which they cannot live and must beg, plea, borrow, or steal to make ends meet your business license should be nullified and you, the business owner, sentenced to long hours of community service.

So already, with the plantation example in mind it's clear I am calling less these friendships but more an entire economic system into question. It is fundamentally no different than the antebellum South in its labor relations.  And it is indistinguishable from a system that seems on the one hand to create vast wealth [for the plantation owners] and fathomless poverty. This system cannot be improved with a few reforms or some regulations, any more than forcing farm owners to provide bathrooms and water to poorly paid farm workers is an improvement. It is not. Just so, if poorly paid, hungry fast-food workers is intolerable then so too is our reliance on cheap food from cheap farm workers [from Latin America]. This should spark a revolution in how we feed ourselves, how we organize our lives, our towns, our cities, our strip malls: if we are to have any of these things at all.

On Negro Maid Servants and the White Settlers They Serve

In James Baldwin's brilliant book-length film study, Devil Finds Work [1976], he uses the tool of his prose as always to dismantle our most cherished mechanical sins. In one startling part, he discusses the role of a maid servant in DW Griffith's classically racist "The Birth of a Nation" [1915] from the early, early days of the movie industry, and he observes how this same character emerges unchanged 50 years or so later in a "liberal" movie, Stanley Kramer's "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?" [1967]

Baldwin's problem - and ours, to be clear - with this character is that she is nothing but an appendage of the white family she toils for, and that generations of struggle have not improved this. She is a matronly House Slave, who only seems to feel and see what the whites who hold her leash feel and see. She is without familial concerns, only the concerns of the white settlers who command her; she seems to come to us with no connections of her own. Baldwin seems to cringe when the manifestation of this strange character in "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?" is the one who takes Sydney Pointer's character to task for stepping outside of his place for his intentions with the white daughter and coming in disrupting the white family.

I think about this phenomenon when I think about Africans rushing to join every cause, immerse themselves into any religion, and of course take on any political issue that white-settler culture dishes to them, as long as they do not speak of Africa.

With Africa, there is a tacit understanding among too many of us New Negroes, post-racialists, African-Americans [sic] that anything associated with Africa - and our ignorance already prepares us that nothing exists in Africa before European slavers and colonization arrived - is sullied and as embarrassing as ebonics.

This is not only why we run from Africana but also run into the arms of anything emanating out of Europe, ground zero for some monstrous crimes. This is also why we as a people wholeheartedly turn our treasures, our children, over to the monsters who started this, in order for those children to be be civilized and made whole.

I'm recalling the Black male character in "Follow Me Home," [1996] a beautiful independent movie produced by the Bratt Brothers of San Francisco. The Black male character is immersed in Buddhism. Or, the Black female character in "La Mission," [2009] another brilliant independent movie, also by the Bratt Brothers, who seems to be practicing another South Asian faith rather than an African one, even a New World African one.

I cite these two movies because they are created, like Kramer's 1967 classic, by liberals - our so-called "friends"! In truth, they are reinforcing that same tacit understanding that Africa is backward, primitive, and only brought into the light of civilization by white slave traders and venture capitalists.

These characters seek awakening anywhere and everywhere but where they came from: the Christian church is, of course, a given among North American Africans. According to a Pew study, over 40% of Africans in North America identify with some form of Baptist church. Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism are in the single digits or much less. What is fascinating about this Pew study is nowhere is the acknowledgement that Africans had their own indigenous religions, which were denied New World chattel slaves; the study finds no irony that these people had been forced to adopt Christianity, and does not note why most North American Africans gravitated to the Baptist denomination over others [no white hierarchy to exclude Black membership and the Baptists took on the abolition cause early].

If Baldwin were alive, he might continue the non-evolution of the maid servant with this Pew study of a people from nowhere with no history heading into whiteness on the same leash.

But this phenomenon boils over into other areas, like activism. Like the maid servant characters discussed by Baldwin, we Africans in North America are guilty of joining anyone else's campaign but our own. Let me be clearer about this: because, our oppressions are connected, and we should be working as co-conspirators with each other to understand the complex affects of capitalism on all our communities and wage revolution to upturn it, but except when a Ferguson or BART shooting occurs and makes the headlines, the issue of the condition of Africans in North America is not an issue at all for whites.

The left - I'd argue as witnessed by its movies - does not really know and lacks a comfort in tackling the social and economic contexts of Africans in North America.

We rush to their causes even though often within these other critical movements, we as Africans in the diaspora face the same marginalization that we do in employment, housing, wages. Leftist activists treat us like their pets, like we are an appendage, and when we step out of their roles for us, they pull back on the yoke.

This isn't a pleasant thing to say. I'm supposed to only attack FOX News and the rightwing, not my "friends." But with precious few exceptions, precious few radical whites who "get it" and have marched right out of these organizations, this must be stated as the nature of our so-called friends.

If you do not believe me, look at any of the cottage industry organizations on the left and identify where their mission statement acknowledges the crimes done historically to Africans in North America and how these crimes are still in full effect.

They would respond that this is not part of their mission, and I would say "Exactly." Because just as fundamental as the human rights violations against indigenous nations of this hemisphere is the state of the Africans. Both, not surprisingly, are almost totally ignored. The reset switch for these friends do not correct the crimes of white-settler institutions on these populations, the assumption being that this really is a white country, and we others are merely making guest appearances.

Baldwin's point was pretty clear in drawing that link between an old film and a new one. The only advancement is technicolor. So many of us still in vain situate ourselves as having come from nowhere running to a white settler population which doesn't want to deal with us except as the farm animals working on their narrow agenda. Their lip service and false concern will not win us progress; only a revolution will do that. Their program will bring us 60 more years of maid servants cooing for their masters.

All Equality is not Equal

This is not my last or first word on the topic of gay marriage. Many years ago when this was just becoming THE issue in the LGBT community, AIDS activism was splintering, and marriage seemed to be THE stage-managed solution, I penned an editorial in the San Francisco Chronicle expressing my non-support of gay marriage. I said it demanded conformity that queers were not about; and that it was predictably spearheaded by privileged white gay men and lesbians, who had a real stake in this fight that fast-food or domestic workers, mostly of color, did not. What did marriage between two poor Black fast-food workers without health care mean? What cache did it offer them towards a better life? Nothing!

The morning the editorial appeared, many of my teacher colleagues would not speak to me until one approached me and challenged: "what did you mean by this?"

What I mean is that I do not confuse at all economic and social equality, nor do I think they can be separate things. You cannot have one without the other, and I am just old enough to throw back in your face anyone that says one can be a "step" to the other. You might as well tell me to wait my turn and know my place.

Gay marriage is social development without economic development: it is like building schools for communities whose parents have no jobs It is like donating a library for a community whose children have no shoes.

It is, in short, a very typical Western tactic. The West's empires will assuage restless colonials with garbage but never, never economic development because this risks making the colonial a competitor.

What is social development for people who have little and lessening economic viability in a white supremacist capitalist system but an empty promise?

The opposite is just as true but more revealing: what is having economic wealth and yet be marginalized socially?

This is the dilemma the white lesbians and gays found themselves in as they continued to reach the pinnacles of their professions but forced by laws to be in the closet.

Meanwhile, racial minorities continued to menace this wretched Western Experiment founded by hate groups, like the Pilgrims, on the corpses of Native Americans. Racial minorities continue on the trajectory being a refuse population. And yet, THE program offered by the LGBT hierarchy - Lambda Legal, Human Rights Campaign, the ACLU - is solely and uniquely marriage.

These whites are like the 17th century bourgeoisie who grew wealthy as Commoners (from the trade in Africans!) but as Commoners had zero standing in the Royal Courts of France and Great Britain, which held on to feudal ritual. These bourgeoisie only gained social status to match their economic status by waging revolution; they did to some kings and courtiers what we find so abhorrent in the Middle East: heads had to be dismembered from some bodies. Then with Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity in their mouths, they expanded the trade in human cargo, depopulated generations of brain trust from the African continent, enriched themselves, and told us it was the Age of Enlightenment.

Their progeny today don't give a goddamn in hell for the social and economic condition of Black and Brown peoples: they do care to what extent we support their agenda. We are still their human cargo, so they keep assuaging us with broken lies and broken treaties that tomorrow will be as bright for us as today must be made for them.

What do I mean by this? I mean that the only equality that has any meaning  is jointly economic and social as one. The only way to attain this FOR EVERYBODY is a Revolution. Didn't our European counterparts already prove that time and time again? Appealing to the moral conscience of a people who have no conscience is a waste of time. So while I'm indifferent to anyone's marriage, I am not fooled that this move by the US Supreme Court today is a step for progress while me and mine keep getting dragged back into another century.