Tuesday, September 29, 2020

The world-building of Ms. Comey's granddaughter

 Yesterday, I read a very interesting book review by Petal Samuel in Public Books, one of my favorite sites for reviews of academic books. Professor Samuel is a brilliant scholar in the Department of African, African American and Diaspora Studies at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. She reviewed two books that explore speculative fiction and fugitive science. Her discussion of one of the books -- Sami Schalk’s Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction -- particularly resonated with some recent, local events:

[In Phyllis Alesia Perry’s Stigmata, a novel Schalk analyzes], Perry’s black woman protagonist, Lizzie, is misdiagnosed, institutionalized, and inappropriately medicated because she shares her consciousness with her ancestors. Mental instability is attributed to those who resist white supremacist order and deployed as a way to discredit marginalized perspectives. Put simply, Schalk writes, “race and gender are important factors in who gets labeled mentally disabled and how a person is treated as a result of such a label.”

On Saturday, my partner and I were talking with a neighbor, when I heard someone nearby sobbing. It was the granddaughter of Ms. Melissa Comey [sp?], who had owned the house and Comey Hair Salon near 10th and C Streets, SE. Ms. Comey's granddaughter was reliving her life at that house and the loss of the Comey family home, the dispersal of her family members and community, which were, in her words, "all gone." The sobbing woman's grandmother had sold the house several years ago and her family was forced to leave, but her granddaughter had not abandoned her connections with the neighborhood that gentrification had forced her to leave. She explained that sometimes she forgets that she isn't living anymore in that time or this place. She shared stories with us about playing hopscotch on the sidewalk and parts of the life she lived here. Then she turned the corner and disappeared. To me, her arrival was a gift or maybe a very important message from the past about a different potential future.

A few minutes later, some people involved with helping the homeless approached us to ask where they could find Ms. Comey's granddaughter. They had their own perspective on the situation. They could only see Ms. Comey's granddaughter's sharing of "her consciousness with her ancestors" as mental illness. They wanted to arrange a quick intervention by mental health professionals. They deployed mental illness, in a way Schalk described: "as a way to discredit marginalized perspectives" like hers. 

Whatever mental illness she suffered, Ms. Melissa Comey's granddaughter also showed what Samuel called, "modes of black innovation, creativity, and improvisation in the face of ongoing social, economic, and intellectual oppression" and white supremacist order. She was able to envision and live within another world in which she or her family and neighbors still lived at 10th and C Streets, SE, a world in which she still had a home that her neighbors recognized, a world in which she was not classified as "homeless" and as "mentally ill." Ms. Comey's granddaughter and the many people like her, including the authors of speculative fiction that Samuel discuses, demonstrate "the capacity of black speculation and experimentation to generate world-building visions that are inclusive and sustainable for multiply marginalized black subjects." How many worlds and futures exist or are emerging around us? Are we hearing them or silencing them? Could we step into these worlds we are invited to view and take off into another future?


Friday, March 20, 2020

The Shared Inequalities of DC and Puerto Rico

Back in 2011, I visited Brazil, which was so wonderful and interesting. In a blog post at that time, I looked at its notoriously high Gini index (a conventional measure of income inequality) and compared it with the Gini index of DC and Puerto Rico. According to the Census, “The Gini index varies from 0 to 1, with a 0 indicating perfect equality, where there is a proportional distribution of income. A Gini index of 1 indicates perfect inequality, where one household has all the income.” According to the latest data in 2011 (2009 Census data), DC and Puerto Rico have long had the highest Gini indexes of the entire United States and had similar levels to Brazil.
Last weekend, I visited Puerto Rico, which was so wonderful and interesting. Today I decided to revisit my comparison:

1960
1979
1989
1999
2004
2006
2009
2015
2016
2018
DC Gini

.450
.492
.549

.532

Puerto Rico Gini





Brazil Gini

[.61]

.513
.537

(I need to fix this table. The years go from 1960 to 2018.) As before, DC and Puerto Rico share exactly the same Gini index, which was .532 (2009 data) and most recently is .542 (2016 data), and which is now above Brazil’s Gini index. You can see that these numbers are very high in the World Bank’s listing of Gini indexes for countries worldwide here. Of course, there are issues with comparing countries, states, and cities, as well as the problems with using measures of income inequality in place of other kinds of inequality. Leaving those aside, what could explain these similar Gini indexes?

Back in 2011, I hypothesized that these high levels of inequality may be due to the fact that both DC and Puerto Rico lack representation in Congress and lack democratic control over parts of their governments. Furthermore, in 1995-2001, DC was subject to Financial Control Board (see its 1995 law here). During this time, there was a large jump in DC’s Gini index from .492 to .549. In 2016, Puerto Rico is now subject to its own financial control board (see its 2016 law here) and may experience similar increases in inequality.

In 1989, when Brazil had reached its highest Gini coefficient level, the Brazilian people freely elected their first president after decades of military dictatorship. After 1989, Brazil’s Gini coefficient declined significantly through the reduction of poverty. According to a 2017 IMF working paper, Brazil’s “Inequality reduction was achieved thanks to a decade-long period of economic growth and deliberate income and social inclusion policies, such as minimum wage increases and targeted social programs.” Could lack of full democratic representation have an impact on inequality?