Looking Back to Nov. 6: Walking The Akron, OH Rust Belt Walk In Ward 4

GOTV IN AKRON:

Walking the Rust-Belt Walk in Ward 4

 Jean Riesman

A fuzzy shot of our staging location

GOTV is not the Akron Fox network affiliate that was flickering above the bar at the New Era Restaurant, where the Serbian dumplings have the specific gravity of uranium and the apple strudel the lightness of the Red Bull Stratos: it's the acronym for "get out the vote," the relentless strategies (including door-knocking, voter registration, early voting turn out and buses full of church goers voting on Souls-to-the-Polls Sunday) that helped secure Ohio for Obama last Tuesday. The dumplings and strudel fortified us for the campaign's last pavement-pounding weekend – as did the Fox channel's back-to-back political ads, a low-budget stream of local, state, and national Republican consciousness.

Crystal, Jean and Pat Laying Out Turf for the Big Push

Our job was to knock on carefully-selected doors in West Akron up to six times before the polls closed on Tuesday night and thereby, if necessary, to badger our targeted Obama voters into exercising their franchise. While Ohio early voting had begun October 2, Republican Secretary of State Jon Husted continued to do everything in his litigious power to limit hours and access, especially in Democratic-leaning districts: that is, in dense urban lower-income communities of color such as West Akron. His tactics backfired. Lines at the Akron Board of Elections were up to four hours long during the last stretch of early voting, and prospective voters were equally undeterred at precinct polling locations on Election Day.

At our Ward 4 outpost, ordinarily the combined space of the Just 'N Café and the Bizness Lab, we were superintended by a formidable local African-American woman who could re-focus chattering volunteers with a hard look from her chair behind the central-command computer. Hustled out to cover the next piece of turf, we worked our soggy printouts in the windy drizzle, drilling down to the last sporadic voters who might need a final nudge. Behind many doors were the voices – "already voted!" – of the already-voted or stern parents promising to turn their young'uns out to do their civic duty; behind others, TVs on and nobody answering; and others, either nobody home yet or nobody home, in vacant single-family houses or empty apartments with Obama materials dangling from a previous pass.

Akron used to be the Rubber City, running on the tire factories of Goodyear, Firestone and other manufacturing giants. The New Era had refreshed decades of General Tire workers getting off their shifts across the street. Plant closures hit the city hard. Downtown seems to be patching up its post-industrial distress, but in many parts of Ward 4, tired houses and weary residents reflect long-term unemployment, foreclosure, and the hard work of just getting by. The ravages of 1960s-era urban renewal also are etched in the abrupt dead ends of West Akron's streets, where we kept discovering that our next house number was on the other walled-off side of the interstate highway system.

Other than a scattering of lawn-signs and bumperstickers, there was not much evidence of the Romney/Ryan campaign. A handful of operatives made mischief: Obama/Biden lawn-signs had been regularly disappearing, as did – on election eve – the oblong placards we had just hung on doorknobs and storm-door latches, imprinted with the proper address of the right polling location for those particular voters.

To no avail: with over 74% turnout Ward 4 went 88% for the president on November 6, Ohio closed the deal, and Romney conceded before midnight in a form of early voting – with his feet, out of the battleground states and out of his misbegotten place in American political history.

RUBBLE TO RUBBLE: The Last Demolition of Beit Arabiya

by Jean Riesman

Beit Arabiya is already down. Returned, again, to rubble. Rebuilt this summer for the fifth time since 1998. Re-dedicated July 16, 2012; demolished, November 1, 2012. Gone. No, not gone. The rubble will stay this time. Right where it landed. Or right where it is now, after anything retrievable has been retrieved. The rubble will be the place. The rubble will imply the house. All six of the houses that have stood on that spot. Each one the home of Salim and Arabiya Shawamreh and their seven children. "Beit Arabiya," in Arabic, for "Arabiya's house." It sounds the same in Hebrew.

In the rubble is the work. Pouring the foundation. Wrestling the jacks into position to hold up the beams for the pouring of the flat cement roof, and then wrestling them down. Passing the concrete blocks from the truck to the site, hand over hand, the buckets of cement, the rocks, the floor tiles. Stacking the concrete blocks into walls, sandwiched by mortar. Plastering over the concrete blocks. Painting over the plaster. The rubble holds all that kinetic energy. It embodies that painstakingly-gathered attention, task by shared task.

Beit Arabya Demolished November 2012

It contains all the rubble that came before it, all the terror of those previous demolitions, all the policy behind that terror – in Anata, in the West Bank, in East Jerusalem.

The rubble is local. It joins the rubble in the next field, and the rubble cleared from the previous demolition. Some of which had gone into the reconstruction, especially through the genius of Riad, the Palestinian stone-mason who engineered a series of retaining walls and garden walls and low walls around wounded pomegranate trees recovering in new dirt.

The rubble is global. It bears the fingerprints of the all Palestinians, Israelis, and international volunteers who – gathered together by the Israeli Committee Against Housing Demolition (ICAHD) – re-assembled it, time after time. It bears the marks of the American-made bulldozers that, six times over, turned it back into rubble. It bears the collective entropy of an international community's failure to hold Israel accountable for the violent cyclical alchemy of rubble to rubble.

On Rubble

Our friend, Jean Riesman is back from her 2nd summer working in Israel with the Israeli Committee Against Housing Demolition (ICAHD).  The following is her account of the experience.

On Rubble

July 31, 2012

Rubble has become such a common feature of the West Bank landscape that it may seem almost geological. But it is not the output of a natural process over geologic time; it has an unnatural history. The shattered concrete, twisted rebar, mangled utility lines and shredded water tanks wherever the Israeli military has demolished a house are the wretched artifacts of human geography, the industrial waste of the occupation. Last year set new records for rubble production, with over 600 Palestinian structures razed and more than 1000 people displaced between the Green Line and the Jordan River, and 2012 is on track to exceed those numbers. If there is an analogy in nature, demolition orders are the state flower of the stateless, and the Israel's bulldozers are the lawnmowers. Rubble is what's left after the bulldozers are gone.

Some rubble doesn't stay rubble. As a serial act of resistance against the Israeli occupation, the Israeli Committee AgainstHousing Demolition (ICAHD) has rebuilt almost 200 homes in the West Bank since 1997. Every summer, ICAHD recruits international volunteers to work with a Palestinian construction crew on the original site and raise a new house from scratch in two weeks. Last July, I helped rebuild a home bulldozed in 2005, whose former residents – by 2011, including 10 children – since had been living under a tree and then in a neighbor's basement. While we were on the job, we stayed nearby at Beit Arabiya, or the House of Arabiya, now ICAHD's "peace center" (and temporary lodgings for the summer volunteers) but originally the home of Salim and Arabiya Shawamreh and their children. They had survived four previous demolitions and four previous reconstructions.

Six months later, both buildings – the one that we rebuilt and the one where we slept – again were added to Palestine's gross domestic product of rubble.

Uma Omar

Rubble is not merely the residual byproduct of Israeli policy but its objective: systematic Palestinian displacement through ruthless physical destruction and psychological intimidation. That the two structures were targeted together on a cold, wet January night was no coincidence. They jointly stood as acts of civil disobedience against a regime that methodically manufactures rubble. More than the landscape is scarred. When Arabiya's house was demolished for the first time, she did not speak for a month, and still struggles for her equanimity; her youngest son ran into the desert, found later that night asleep under a rock but never to recover fully. Like many others, the family whose home we rebuilt last summer was reluctant to build again and run the risk of a yet another demolition. So ICAHD, its Palestinian construction crew, and its international volunteers returned to the task of reclaiming Beit Arabiya for the fifth time since its foundation first was laid in 1994.

Riyad At Work

Rubble at close range is discrete, local, utilitarian, intimate. Beit Arabiya had red desert rock and pale delicately-veined cut marble, the gray matter of crumbled cement and crushed concrete blocks, hunks of rebar and rusted networks of chain-link fence, fragments of floor tile and remnants of PVC pipe, laminated wooden drawers gone trapezoidal and shards of a lavender plastic laundry basket, sparkling broken glass and a kid's red-streaked marble, countless plastic soda bottles and flapping plastic bags. We were instructed to set aside the clean rock, marble, and tile (no clusters of cement still attached) for Riyad, the Palestinian mason. The rest we gathered by hand or hoe, often passed in buckets in a human chain to the pile downhill growing by the ton. It was heavy, but it was not passive. Rubble made me its apprentice, demanding that I learn how to assess its density and whether I could carry it alone, how to walk on rubble carrying rubble without losing my center of gravity, how to dump rubble without the wind slapping the lighter bits of trash back in my face. Rubble worked me hard, and after a few days I could dump a bucket high rather than low, even climb on the pile and toss my debris a little higher, overhand.

This rubble's story was not over. With the rock we retrieved, Riyad crafted retaining walls, some in double rows for new rose bushes, and low rings around replanted pomegranate trees. With rescued marble and tile he laid out walkways and stairways, level on the level. He turned marble slabs the long way for a kind of vertical paneling on one of the building's outside walls. A genius of geometry, he built deliberately, each element considered in its essential dimensions, assembled into a thing of cumulative beauty. The stones that the bulldozer rejected, in the rubble of Beit Arabiya, were sculpted into the rising home.

Updates and New Thoughts on Disturbed Places

Updates

In case you missed it, there was an update on the African migrant situation in Israel in Monday's NY Times. Jean Riesman will be back with her own analysis, either from Israel, or when she returns after July 19.


The Peekskill Public Housing Petition is almost to 100 signers.  Read Margaret Rubick's post and sign on!

Disturbed Places

Me, Installing Straw Bales

In early spring I picked up my Uncle John to bring him to our construction sites.  He wanted to see the houses even though it was hard for him to get around very easily, straw bales and earth plaster was everywhere.  After that we had a little tour of the neighborhood.  

One way to think of a vacant lot is as a disturbed place.  Our land had been, a long, long time ago, pristine forest, or even farther back, buried under a glacier.  While the word glaciation is one of my favorites to say and think about, I'm not sure it's a helpful way to think about the vast resource of unoccupied urban land that has become available since the Great Recession. 

What is now vacant, like much of Hickory St. where we are building, had been occupied by structures at one time.  When I took my uncle for the tour I asked him to point out some landmarks. He could see homes where I saw vast reaches of mowed grass.  We started at our end, the corner of North Maple and Hickory. 

"I think Aunt Marie lived here, Mama's sister." 

"And then they moved up the hill.  Go that way,"  he pointed toward the railroad track.  As we climbed we came to the corner of Silver St. and Hickory.  

"Yeah" (imagine a very gruff voice, and soft) "See, Aunt Myrtle and Uncle Joe lived here," (one of her cherry trees still stands).  And Mama lived here.  I was born here".  He points to a lot near the western corner.  Grandma and her two sisters lived close for years. 

As I contemplate the meaning of being back in Akron, "coming home", I'm very aware how deep my family roots go here.  The Chapmans moved here from Columbus, Ohio at the turn of the 20th century.  The three sisters married and had many children.  There has been a Chapman descendant on or near Hickory St. for over 100 years.  The large trees along the Towpath Trail that borders our neighborhood grew up with my uncle.  The neighborhood he knew, one that was an affordable and welcoming point of arrival for Great Migration settlers is now being marketed as an "arts district".  The lively memory of Black migration -- jazz clubs, juke joints, full churches and overflowing schools  -- being used to create a neighborhood that won't be affordable or necessarily welcoming.  We will resist such efforts, since that is the ultimate disturbance, a gentrification that means a future group of people like my great aunts, uncles and grandparents would have no place live and claim as their own.

Too Black For Israel

Guest Writer Jean Riesman

Today marks the beginning of an experiment for me with Urban Ecology.  I'm pleased to announce guest writers every Friday throughout the summer. Except for this week.  Jean Riesman, friend, co-conspirator in many ventures and cogent observer of the Palestinian crisis has agreed to write about a growing crisis in Israel -- racialized violence against African immigrants.  She is making the first of what I hope are frequent visits to the virtual page of Urban Ecology. 





Too Black for Israel
Jean Riesman
There it is – no code words, no euphemisms, but out in the cleansing desert sun of ethnic decontamination: African immigrants are too black and too not-Jewish for Israel. Declaring that all African migrants "without exception" should be expelled before the "[i]nfiltrators, along with the Palestinians,…bring a quick end to the Zionist dream," Israeli Interior Minister Eli Yishai put the race card down on the unvarnished table: "Most of those people arriving here are Muslims who think the country doesn't belong to us, the white man."

"Infiltrator" has become the standard term for African refugees and asylum-seekers, as if they were a threat to both demographic purity and national security, the underground plume of a hidden contaminant or the conspiratorial advance guard of a territorial invasion. To contain infiltration requires strategic engineering, a way to intercept the ominous flow. In Israel, the containment system under construction includes a 150-mile-long fence along the Egyptian border, a detention center for up to 11,000 detainees, a new plan for mass deportations and tent cities, a law that jails not only uncredentialed immigrants but also anyone aiding them, and explicit appeals to racism in the preservation of Israel as a white ethnographic state.

Most of the estimated pool of 62,000 exiles – many in flight from Sudan and Eritrea, paralleling the political crises in the Horn of Africa – have been smuggled across the Sinai from Egypt and then grudgingly given temporary status but, since 2010, no work permits at the Israeli border. They are bused into the country on a one-way ticket and literally dropped off into a marginal existence, often in Tel Aviv. Since the influx accelerated in 2007, about 25,000 have clustered in the lower-income neighborhoods on the city's south side, crammed into apartments where canny landlords have raised the rent on this per-capita boom in vulnerable tenants. Local Israeli Jewish residents have accused them of making their own lives intolerable, due to allegedly relentless physical and sexual assaults, robberies, and public drug and alcohol use.

The caption states: "The aftermath of a Molotov attack on a refugee's kindergarten in south Tel Aviv on April 27, 2012.  Four apartments and a kindergarten were hit with Molotov cocktails during a coordinated night attack."

Such exaggerated and ill-substantiated claims of an African crime spree in Tel Aviv have prompted a recent spike in racialized violence – firebombings and riots as well as physical attacks on both Africans and their anti-racist advocates. In April, after several Eritrean men were suspected of (and later charged with) rape in a nearby parking garage, Molotov cocktails were heaved into a local kindergarten yard, and later an apartment complex. In early May, a major daily newspaper – quoting anonymous police sources – reported that "youth gangs" of African youths rove the city's beaches in search of unattended wallets and bags. In mid-May, Israel's police chief strode through south Tel Aviv's neighborhoods and blamed African migrants for a crime "surge" there, while unnamed officials maintained that 40 percent of criminal activity in greater Tel Aviv was committed by illegal immigrants. In neither case was corroborating data presented – nor when Interior Minister Yishai alleged that rapes by African men were under-reported by Israeli women who were afraid of the "stigma" of purported AIDS exposure.

Then, completing the diseased and hyper-sexualized caricature of the black male African destroying the country from within, Netanyahu issued his warning that "Israel could be overrun by African infiltrators:"

[The] phenomenon of illegal infiltrators from Africa is extremely serious and threatens Israel's social fabric and national security… [I]f we don't stop the problem, 60,000 infiltrators are liable to become 600,000 and cause the negation of the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state.

Two days later, on May 22, an anti-migrant march of 1000 Jewish Israeli residents of south Tel Aviv deteriorated into a rampage, in which windows of African-owned cars and storefronts of African-owned businesses were smashed, the stores themselves looted. Black bystanders were chased and beaten (including an Ethiopian Jew to whom apologies immediately were issued after his religious allegiance was established). Anti-racist counter-demonstrators have had their placards shredded and had to be separated by police from an incensed crowd.

These physical attacks have been accompanied by vitriolic verbal assaults on the Africans themselves as well as on the anti-racist activists and refugee-advocacy organizations rallying to the migrants' support. A member of the Israeli parliament (the Knesset), from a centrist party entrenched in Netanyahu's governing coalition, asserted at the May 22 demonstration that "the Sudanese are a cancer on our body." Israeli leftists who objected to the new law that went into effect on June 3 have been labeled as "traitors." Another Knesset member – although prominent in last summer's housing protests – proposed that the human-rights activists themselves should be rounded up and sent to the massive detention camp in the Sinai desert (deliberately designed without air-conditioning).

This proposition is not as rhetorical as it may seem. Africans not considered legitimate refugees now face up to three years in prison, their advocates up to five years. Since Sunday, Netanyahu has ordered the swift deportation of Africans seen as economic opportunists. Exceptions will be made for Sudanese, Eritreans, and Somalians, who will not be returned en masse to the brutal conditions that drove their exile – instead transported out of Israel communities and into tent camps. Israeli Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein told a court last week that it is now safe to repatriate South Sudanese, despite ongoing cross-border flare-ups with Sudan.

Once the Africans are back on the Nubian side of the fence, the Palestinians are fully encircled by the West Bank separation barrier, and the human-rights activists are sweating in their cells, the dark demographic plume so threatening to Israeli identity and security apparently will be contained. And Israel's pretense of being an open democratic state will be that much more revealed.