Judge A. Leon Higginbotham

Yale Law School | "The Dream with Its Back against the Wall"--A Speech by A. Leon Higginbotham

Source: www.law.yale.edu

>News & Events>News Archive>July - December 2001>"The Dream with Its Back against the Wall"--A Speech by A. Leon Higginbotham

A Leon Higginbotham, a legal giant and hero. His speech at Yale is a classic and demonstrates the power of educational access,remembrance, legal scholarship, and a fierce and unyielding commitment to justice. To me, I will always consider him to be the 10th justice on the Supreme Court.

Had an opportunity to meet him.

Eating Crow at a Dinner for Wall St.

A great post by NYT business columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin. Even though, it is focused on the Wall Street titans of the "downtown's," their actions have resulted in an unprecedented financial and foreclosure crisis that has directly resulted in the financial mess in cities like Cleveland and many others.


BUSINESS | January 06, 2009
DealBook Column: Eating Crow at a Dinner for Wall St.
By ANDREW ROSS SORKIN
Many heavy hitters on Wall Street, even those who did not get burned badly, should be glad that 2008 is history.

Council of Development Finance Agencies Briefing to Obama Transition

Below is a link to the Council of Development Finance Agencies press release discussing their recent briefing to the Obama Transition Team on economic development finance agencies. Actually, this membership organization is located in downtown Cleveland.

http://www.cdfa.net/cdfa/cdfaweb.nsf/fbaad5956b2928b086256efa005c5f78/2a103ea6fbeec10d86257523006c1673/$FILE/CDFA%20Legislative%20Release%2012-18%20revised.pdf

Putting the Inner City First-Making the Case For an Inner City Policy

Below is a link to a September 2008 presentation by Michael Porter, professor of business at Harvard Business School and President/CEO of the Initiative for a Competitive Inner City.
Interesting and provocative presentation. Others have referred to inner cities as places of emerging markets; markets that are underutilized, undervalued, but possess tremendous asset markers for reinvestment and community wealth potential. In other blog posts, I'll explain why.

http://www.icic.org/site/pp.aspx?c=fnJNKPNhFiG&b=3416281

Initiative for a Competitive Inner City Forum-Focus on Inner City Economies

Spotlight: The Inner City Policy Unit

Inner City Economies: Distinct in Analysis, Distinct for Federal Policy

The Summit’s opening session set the framework for the overall event. Dr. Michael E. Porter, ICIC’s CEO and Founder, set the agenda by arguing that inner city economies, while closely linked to the growth and vitality of the regions and metropolitan areas that they belong to, merit distinct and targeted analysis and policy making to account for their unique assets and challenges. Bruce Katz, Director of the Metropolitan Policy program at the Brookings Institution then outlined the “Blueprint for American Prosperity,” advocating that the health of the US economy hinges on the economic strength of America’s metropolitan areas, the areas in which two-thirds of the US population lives and three-quarters of the US’s gross domestic product is created.

Both presenters situated the discussion within the context of the federal policies and programs most critical to America’s urban areas.

Dr. Michael Porter

Dr. Porter began by reminding the audience about the troubling and complicated macroeconomic situation in US financial markets. He also reminded the audience of the importance of the presidential election; the election of 2008 was the first national election since 1952 without an incumbent, and represented a real opportunity to make inroads and move beyond the failed narratives of both parties. Porter explained that ICIC and Brookings have formed a partnership with the very specific goal of having a concrete, actionable, deeply thought-out federal policy agenda for inner cities ready to present to the new administration in the spring.

Porter asked the audience to consider why the US actually needs to have a federal policy that focuses on inner cities. Even in times when the national economy does well, there are chronic deficits in inner city performance. The 100 largest inner cities as of 2000 consisted of 0.1% of US land area; 8% of US population; 19% of US poverty; and 32% of US Minority poverty. Obviously, poverty is more prevalent in inner cities. It is not, however, intractable. Porter posited that the US needs not only a national economic policy, but an economic policy focused on regions and metropolitan areas.

The national economy is a collection of regional economies, Porter reminded the audience. Many of the advantages and strengths and weaknesses that affect economic growth are actually contained and controlled at the metropolitan level. Metropolitan or regional growth helps inner cities. If metropolitan areas are healthy, that health makes an impact on the economically distressed census tracks contiguous within the urban area. The inner city does better in a rapidly growing metropolitan area, but a gap remains; metropolitan growth accounts for only about 30% of inner city growth.

How do we determine priorities for what really needs to be done? How should we change skills training as it impacts distressed communities? How do we change and improve in other policy buckets? Healthy regional economies are necessary but not sufficient. Federal policies can and should strengthen the inherent competitive advantages of the inner city: strategic location; underutilized workforce; unmet demand; and linkage to regional growth clusters

Four policy areas are of clear and unambiguous impact on inner cities and their economies: workforce training, infrastructure, capital access, and cluster development.

Wages are lower in inner cities than in the rest of the US for all demographic groups. For each 1% growth in central city job creation, there is a 0.9% decline in central city poverty. Between 1998 and 2006, the 100 largest inner cities added 10,000 jobs while their regions added over 6 million. Inner city growth in business formation also lags in the region. Workers with a high school degree or less have seen their wages essentially stagnate since the 1970s; most of the gains have gone to workers with higher education. Workforce training has a huge impact on the wages of workers without a college degree. Within the next 20 years, 40 percent of the US workforce will be African-American and Hispanic, yet only about 13 percent of Hispanics and 18 percent of African-Americans have a bachelor's degree. There are huge racial and ethnic disparities in education, Porter said, which affects not just an individual ability to compete, but the country's ability to compete.

Porter then moved on to discuss inner city infrastructure investments. Transportation and logistics used to be the most concentrated cluster in inner cities in America, but have dropped to the ninth-ranked cluster. The inner city has lost position in clusters that used to be really critical clusters for inner city locations. Inner city infrastructure has also improved more slowly than rural infrastructure. Porter suggested that the US should base its investments on economic impact rather than politics.

He also recommended that the federal government look at inner city infrastructure investments as not just isolated to the inner city. Instead, they affect the efficiency of the overall region's infrastructure.

In terms of capital flow, Porter reiterated the need for business investment in inner cities. Many of the capital projects and federal capital programs that relate to inner cities are not focused on business; they tend to be heavily focused on real estate. Although real estate can affect business success, the US needs a policy more focused on funds that invest in business.

Porter also suggested that federal policy must be leveraged to benefit multiple clusters. The largest inner city clusters are in local health, local commercial services, and local hospitality. Anchor clusters are in construction, transportation and knowledge creation and education; and there is emerging strength in inner cities in entertainment, hospitality, and tourism.

The question that remains is how to craft federal programs and incentives that will encourage regions to focus their attention on these clusters. Porter ended by encouraging investments to revitalize and improve some of these clusters. The opportunity is now, he said, and the need is great to understand what inner city policies look like.

Can Cities Save the Planet? Article from Slate

Can Cities Save the Planet?Scientists are skeptical. Planners are hopeful. The Dutch are pragmatic.

By Witold RybczynskiPosted Wednesday, Dec. 17, 2008, at 6:58 AM ET

Winning With WaterAccording to Timothy Beatley, an urban-planning professor at the University of Virginia and the author of Green Urbanism, the per-capita carbon dioxide emissions of American cities are almost twice as high as those of their European counterparts. Hardly surprising, since European cities are denser and more compact, homes are smaller, and people rely to a far greater extent on mass transit. So if Americans are to significantly reduce their carbon footprint, we will have to do a lot more than switch to reusable shopping bags and recycle our soda cans. But as a recent conference on "urban design after the age of oil" at the University of Pennsylvania (where I teach) demonstrated, there is something of a disconnect between the global-warming problem and the available solutions.

The problem is easily stated. In 1950, the global emission of carbon dioxide was 6 billion tons a year. Thanks to population growth, urbanization, the expansion of wealth, and massive industrialization around the world, by 2008 this has increased fivefold to 30 billion tons a year. Assuming that nothing is done to reduce emissions, by 2058, they will be 60 billion tons a year. Thus, to reduce global warming, whose effects are already beginning to be felt, it will be necessary to take drastic measures just to stay at the present level, never mind actually making real progress. For example, to reduce the number of coal-fired generating plants, nuclear capacity in the United States will have to be doubled. To reduce car emissions, either Americans will have to drive half as many miles per year or cars will have to be twice as efficient. Buildings will have to use 25 percent less electricity.

The Penn conference featured many speakers proposing changes, large and small, as to how buildings and cities should be designed. The scientists were hard-nosed and slightly scary. Planning consultants were authoritative and self-assured—as planning consultants tend to be. They described new carbon-neutral cities, with wind farms and solar arrays, green roofs and urban farms, far-ranging mass transit, and large-scale water recycling. The Power Point images were mesmerizing. Most of the projects appear to be in the Gulf states. In the present economy, most are, I suspect, on hold.

A word that came up frequently was holistic, the implication being that we shouldn't change one thing until we know how it affects everything else. But that is not the way cities develop. The technologies that improved urban life in the past—gas lighting, pressurized water, electricity, streetcars, elevators—were developed separately, each according to its own technological schedule. This autonomy accounted, in large part, for the success of the industrial age. The other implication of holistic is that, by taking everything into account, we can control the future. But technologies have always had unintended consequences. Streetcars, for example, which replaced horse-drawn omnibuses and were not only faster but considerably cleaner, also encouraged suburban growth, enabled commercial strips to develop along rights of way, and created amusement parks (Coney Island in New York, Natatorium Park in Spokane, Wash.) as end-of-line destinations. One would expect green technologies to similarly produce unforeseen side effects.

Another thing strikes me about green urbanism. Even assuming that anything at all gets built in the coming economic depression—during the Great Depression of the 1930s, building construction virtually halted—creating new cities and reconfiguring old ones will take many decades. We don't have that much time. On the other hand, Americans' rapid change in driving habits during the gas-price run-up of summer 2008 suggests that people can quickly alter the ways they behave: driving less, walking more, turning down the thermostat, turning off the lights. Yes, we should eventually change the way we build and plan cities, but it might be more effective in the short run to change the way we live in them.

Most of the planners at the Penn conference emphasized technological fixes, but if the point of no return has already been passed in global warming, as some of the scientists at the conference suggested, protective measures are at least as important, not least against the anticipated rise in sea levels. In that regard, I note an interesting news item from the Netherlands. The Dutch Parliament has asked a commission on coastal development to examine the idea of building a massive man-made island in the North Sea. The 31-mile-long island will provide 274,000 acres for housing and farming. Not coincidentally, the so-called Tulip Island (named because of its shape) will also act as a storm-surge barrier. The Dutch, who have managed water in their low-lying country for centuries, are the canaries in the coal mine as far as rising sea levels are concerned. Other coastal cities—and most large cities are on the water—should take note.

Politics of Indignation Book Review

Pedagogy of Indignation

reviewed by Peter Lucas — 2006

Title: Pedagogy of Indignation
Author(s): Paulo Freire
Publisher: Paradigm Publishers, Boulder
ISBN: 1594510512, Pages: 129, Year: 2004
Search for book at Amazon.com

In the last years of his life, the Brazilian educator and philosopher Paulo Freire was a prolific writer. He wrote books, published letters, and several of his extended conversations were transcribed into “talking books.” Although Freire will always be known for his early works such as Pedagogy of the Oppressed, published in 1970, his later work also deserves attention (Freire, 1970). Many people, myself included, actually prefer his later work because Freire’s writing was more poetic, more sensitive to gender, and more expansive.

When Teachers College Record asked me to review Freire’s Pedagogy of Indignation, I was filled with both a sense of wonder and loss knowing that this was Freire’s final book. While there may still be more Freire books in the future once all of his collected papers and interviews are translated, this title will undoubtedly become an important study for the simple but profound reason that these chapters were his final thoughts before he died on May 2, 1997. Freire was without a doubt one of the most important educational philosophers since John Dewey and as was the case with other great international writers who have recently passed on, such as Edward Said, Susan Sontag, or Jacques Derrida, we’re curious as to what he was thinking about in his final days.

I also wanted to write about Freire as a means of exploring the connection between Freire and peace education/human rights. Freire’s insistence that education must lead to critical consciousness and social transformation has inspired an international movement for transformational education. Freire’s themes of critical literacy, the analysis of power and systemic oppression, desocialization of regressive social values, advocacy and research, and self-education/self mobilization have supported the most progressive forms of human rights and peace.

As a professor of peace education and human rights, I’ve always used Freire’s books to help build the theoretical scaffolding for my students. My favorite book to use is We Make the Road By Walking, Freire’s thoughtful fireside chat with Myles Horton about their respective lives as grassroots adult educators (Horton and Freire, 1995). The students are just as impressed with Horton’s literacy projects in the American South as with Freire’s international career. Two ideas from this book seem to resonate for first time readers, Freire’s conviction that all education is political and Horton’s radical call that one has to “bootleg” progressive education.

Many of my students are studying to become peace educators in the third sector, and these days, most NGOs have educational projects. In order to experience these non-official spaces where transformative education happens, I take my students to Brazil every summer to study the everyday practice of human rights in the favela communities in Rio. It’s not a surprise that workers inside the NGOs in Rio relate to Freire much more than teachers in the schools. In fact, many of the human rights educators we meet were once school teachers who eventually left the formal school system in order to practice more progressive educational ideas in the informal system.

Pedagogy of Indignation opens with the long-time champion of Freire’s theories, Donaldo Macedo, lamenting the exclusion of Freire from mainstream teacher training programs. Macedo, a professor at the University of Massachusetts at Boston, vents his own frustration about the exclusion of Freire at elite schools such as Harvard. On one hand, I find Macedo’s shaming of certain professors by name a bit distasteful, but this is not the first time Macedo has named people for their inconsistent and partial understanding of Freire’s project (Freire, 1998). On the other hand, I share Macedo’s fury as I look around at my closest colleagues in the academy, and I am shocked at the absence of ethics behind the facade of progressive education.

In his last book, Freire wanted to recover the politics of anger. Comprised of what Freire calls “pedagogical letters,” his final handwritten essays were a means of reflecting on the world in order to denounce and call attention to injustice and systematic oppression. For Freire, this critical “reading the world” should be the educator’s ontological vocation. There is nothing neutral about our presence in the world, according to Freire, and before we can begin to change the world, we have to name it, critically understand it, and develop an ethical relationship with the world. This need for testimony is the first part of Freire’s universal ethics.

In Pedagogy of Indignation, Freire’s “just ire” focuses on themes that one would expect such as poverty and the struggle for literacy, globalization and power, democracy and the ethics of the market. Freire also introduces and amplifies a few new issues such as agrarian reform in Brazil, the tension between parental control and permissiveness, Freire’s personal battle with tobacco addiction, and the five hundredth anniversary of the “discovery of America.”

In the middle of the book, there is a small letter about the shocking murder of Galdino Jesus Do Santos, a Native Pataxo Brazilian who was set on fire while sleeping in Brasilia. The fact that his body was burned by a group of teenage boys as a cruel prank perplexed Freire to no end. His response was to reflect and denounce the violence inflicted on those who are perceived to be “lesser shadows” in the world - the poor, the beggars, Blacks, women, rural workers, factory workers, and Indians (p. 46). Freire likened this “tragic transgression of ethics” to the abuse of animals and to the endless ecological violence in Brazil. Many of Freire’s generative themes are distilled in these three pages: violence, dehumanization, the holistic connection between one tragedy and a larger culture of violence, and the need for tolerance and education to change this kind of world. I read this letter several times, and I’ll most likely return to it again and again for its clarity, indignation, and the fact that these were the final words that Freire wrote just before he died.

Reading the world and denouncing violence for Freire was but only one part of the critical dialectic needed for social change. Freire’s letters stress resistance, struggle, hope, and the dream of utopia. Every Freire book revolves around the notion of praxis, the merger of critical reflection and action. “Denouncing and announcing, when part of the process of critically reading the world, give birth to the dream for which one fights” (p. 18). Before Freire talks about this dream, it’s important to recognize the importance of reflecting and giving testimony:

What I mean to say is this: To the extent that we become capable of transforming our world, of naming our own surroundings, of apprehending, of making sense of things, of deciding, of choosing, of valuing, and finally, of ethicizing the world, our mobility within it and through history necessarily comes to involve dreams toward whose realization we struggle (p. 7).

For long-time students of Freire this quote is a variation on a theme from any number of books. But everyday, people are reading Freire for the first time, young students are discovering him, and seasoned educators still re-read Freire to retool their transformative capacities. I chose this sentence because of the two italicized words - ethicizing and dreams. It’s here that we can feel Freire’s influence on the human rights and peace education movement.

Unlike the majority of teacher training programs, which still espouse that schooling is somehow neutral, peace education is necessarily value-based. For me, the main values that are needed while ethicizing the world are the normative standards of human rights. One senses that had Freire lived a few years more, he would have written more directly about the human rights movement. But his theories about critically reading and reflecting on the world, denouncing violence in all of its various manifestations, and choosing a value system in order to guide the change process, are right in line with comprehensive peace education.

In Pedagogy of Indignation, Freire writes about one of the most dynamic social movements in the world, the Landless Movement in Brazil, otherwise popularly known as the MST (Movimento Sem Terra). For Freire, the MST reflects the vitality of popular mobilization, where people who dream take political action and begin to generate real change. Having visited a couple of MST camps with my students, and having talked at length with MST educators, I found that their adult education programs and schooling for children are rooted in Freirian pedagogy of problematizing local generative themes in order to merge reflection and action into an ethical system of transformative education for life.

The themes of denouncing, reflection, and announcing woven throughout Pedagogy of Indignation directly correlate to the fundamental tenets of the international human rights movement. Someone has to denounce the widespread inequality inherent to land ownership, use the normative standards of human rights as a means of ethical reflection, and announce a response through social action in order to change oppressive conditions. That, in essence, is the same strategy as the human rights movement.

But Freire was an educator at heart. His teachings also bespoke of comprehensive peace education. In the peace education movement, strategies for peace are often conceptualized as “negative peace” and “positive peace.” Negative peace refers to the practices to stop violence in its various forms. Most human rights work is carried out in the classic tradition of negative peace. Positive peace is more pedagogical, future-oriented, and transformational. How can we create the social conditions in the future to establish a culture of peace? That is the fundamental question for peace education.

Positive peace relies on education initiatives and Freire’s vision and dreams have influenced human rights and peace educators around the world. I should clarify that peace education serves as a larger conceptual umbrella for human rights education. Basically, there are three models of human rights education, those programs that serve to raise awareness of human rights situations and values such as most school-based initiatives; human rights training for specific professions such as human rights education for police or journalists; and transformative human rights education which seeks to effect lasting social change. It is this last model that combines Freire’s themes and links human rights education to comprehensive peace education.

Positive peace education draws on the normative human rights standards as the underlying values needed to support a culture of peace. Human rights function as conceptual frameworks for peace education in the sense that the normative standards are a core set of ethicizing ideas which emphasize the process of understanding the value of these rights and the inter-relationship between all human rights standards in a holistic way. In the long run, this process perspective is more important than any specific generative themes inherent to, for example, agrarian reform in Brazil, because of the many potential human rights themes one has to negotiate in everyday life. This sense of struggle to attain one’s dreams is ingrained in Freirian pedagogy, and it is why human rights and peace workers are so passionate about Freire’s role in their praxis.

In Pedagogy of Indignation, Freire contrasts the “dark cloud” of fatalism with hope, and his anger with love. Fatalism in the human rights and peace movement (not to mention education) is a constant refrain. Dreams, envisioning change, and struggling for liberation are Freire’s strategies for refusing to submit to the pessimistic mind set which endlessly reproduces itself. Freire writes that: “Tomorrow is neither a necessary repetition of today, as the dominant would like it to be, nor something predetermined. Tomorrow is a possibility we need to work out, and, above all, one we must fight to build” (p. 75).

A constant refrain in Freire’s final thoughts was that as difficult as change is, there’s always possibility for transformation. Freire ends his book with two stunning essays on education, dreams, hope, and utopia. Denouncing for Freire announces a better world. Freire is writing in the spirit of human rights here when he reiterates that announcing is not possible without denouncing. The possibility of reinventing the world dovetails with the ultimate goals of transformative positive peace education. This matrix of hope for Freire is about being in the existential world, experiencing life with all the senses, achieving critical consciousness - not just of the problems of the world but also about the self’s presence in the world - realizing that historical

conditions always construct the self in space and time, intervening in the name of ethical standards, and striving for the utopia of a just world.

In his final book, Freire laments the tragic transgressions of ethics in the world. There is no shortage of transgressions. And as much as we denounce and respond to violence, we must also look to the future. In his lifetime, Freire played a major role in providing the theoretical scaffolding for the human rights and peace education movement. The struggle continues. Recovering an ethical relationship involves education and the resolve that one is capable of transforming the world. Freire never lost sight of that vision. At the end of his life, he reflexively wrote: “While a presence in history and in the world and filled with hope, I fight for the dream, for the utopia, for the hope itself, in a critical pedagogical perspective. And that is not a vain struggle” (p. 102).

References

Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Continuum Publishing Company.

Freire, P. (1998). Pedagogy of freedom: Ethics, democracy, and civic courage. Forward by Dolaldo Macedo. New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.

Horton, M., and Freire, P. (1991). We make the road by walking: Conversations on education and social change. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Cite This Article as: Teachers College Record Volume 108 Number 1, 2006, p. 17-22
http://www.tcrecord.org ID Number: 11884, Date Accessed: 1/2/2009 4:07:00 PM