The American Flag - A Cultural Object

In my Religion, Political Culture, and Ideology course, we began class with a reading by Wendy Griswold, attempting to define what culture is. Culture is such a vague term – people often think they know it when they see it or experience it, but struggle to give any formal definition of it. Griswold notes that there are different types of culture in society, and that elements of culture are expressed through cultural objects – objects in society that we assign meaning to. Culture becomes culture when we (as a group) assign some meaning to the object.

Griswold also states that cultural objects can have different meanings to different groups of people. This Labor Day, I point to the American flag as a symbol that, even in my own extended family, holds many different meanings.

Growing up in a relatively conservative active military family, the American flag served as a symbol of sacrifice and freedom, of democracy and of rights. The American flag was (and is) venerated by many family members as a tangible cultural object, one that stands for the many wars that have provided our citizens freedom. It is a cultural object that must be respected, for it in many ways represents so many values of American society.

I found myself at Mass today feeling cynical about this cultural symbol. It’s true – I haven’t always been the most patriotic in the same sense as this familial veneration of the flag. Singing “America the Beautiful” in a wealthy part of South Chicago, just minutes from a center of Chicago’s cyclical poverty and violence, images of my JVC experience reappeared in my mind. Can I really hold the same meaning that my fellow family members hold of the American flag when I see cyclical poverty and institutional racism so rampant in our society?

Being a patriot means being loyal to one’s country, being willing to serve one’s country. I believe I am a patriot in a different definition of the word. I’m willing and ready to serve my country, but that means domestically – serving those who are in need, fighting inequality in our institutions, speaking up about injustice in my conversations with family and friends. I believe this is another way of being loyal to one’s country – being loyal to people in the country society forgets to acknowledge as human.

When listening to the song today, when discussing my views of society, and when seeing the American flag, I held a different meaning of this cultural object. Instead of a testament to freedom, democracy, and sacrifice, I saw a country of irony, of segregation, of inequality, and of ignorance. When singing the words, “God shed His Grace on Thee,” I felt a mix of frustration and of humility. In many ways, we are dependent on God’s grace, and could use so much more trust and patience in this fight for equality and justice.

And perhaps, I too am the “Thee” in that verse. For I need just as much grace as our country. I recognize that it has taken me many years to understand the world and our country the way I do. I need that grace now to be humble, to be compassionate, to be patient, to be open, and to stop judging other views of the United States. For it is true – there has been much sacrifice for the luxuries I enjoy.

So as I continue on through school, I know that elements of cynicism will reemerge and challenge me. But – I must continue to return to God, asking for His Grace to be shed on me, and perhaps I will be able to stop judging and continue working for social justice.

It will only be by the grace of God.

The Importance of Walking

Last Sunday was one of my last morning walks to St. Patricks, the Catholic Church I have been attending for the past year. Each Sunday morning, I wake up, get ready, and walk 45 minutes to go to Mass. It is clearly avoidable – there are buses and metro lines that go to St. Patricks as it is in the heart of downtown D.C. However, I have found something special about walking this year.

I used to take the metro and bus a lot more, especially when we were in the thick of the winter. Yet, perhaps partly out of financial necessity, and partly out of desire to see more of the city, I began walking more places.

There is something to be said about these walks. If I would have taken the metro or bus to Landlord-Tenant Court in April, I would have taken the same route and seen the same streets. Yet, instead of taking the bus down 7th/Georgia Ave, I walked down 4th Street from our home. In the process, I saw different housing developments, smiled at different people, and felt as if I knew one more piece of Washington.

Walking like this has almost become a sort of ritual for me. Despite the heat of July, I walked to Lindsy and Andrews near the Navy yard, exploring new parts of NE and Capitol Hill through the walk. I took different streets when walking back from Foggy Bottom, and from various meetings this year, and walked the neighborhoods of Shaw and Columbia Heights.

Washington is relatively small, and the portions that tourists see are only a fraction of the city. Tourists know only the Mall, the White House, and perhaps parts of downtown. By living north of Shaw, working at Bread for the City (in both NW and SE), I feel a real connection to the city of D.C. I see real people living their own life experience.

Looking past the stereotypes that emerge about the neighborhood I live in, and the many neighborhoods of our clients, walking has given me the opportunity to confirm that perhaps I feel more comfortable here, rather than in Georgetown or in a distant suburb. Perhaps it is because I’ve smiled at real residents of D.C., and felt myself truly at home.

It is from this experience of walking that I came to know the city. I hope that I will continue to do the same as I move onto my next few years in Chicago.

The Audacity to See Our Society as "Raceless"

Even as a sociologist, I began the Jesuit Volunteer Corps believing that we had moved to a raceless society – one in which we all have the same opportunities, and one in which we have moved passed any sort of prejudice. And when confronting with statistics of the overwhelming numbers of minorities who are poor in America’s urban centers, I had the audacity to simply label this as economic inequality and forget that race could or should be incorporated into the analysis.

Could I fully blame myself? Yes and no. Coming from a predominately white area where I myself was a minority, it was easy to dismiss the fact that racism exists; after all, I am not white, and look at me – I have successfully used my talents and middle class-instilled work ethic and social compass to not only “succeed,” but actually obtain almost everything I had ever asked for – with slim to in some cases no adversity.

Coming to Washington has slowly eroded the fantasy I held to be true. Even as quickly as getting off the plane at National Airport, I noticed that the people in business attire are most generally white, and the people in service jobs are indefinitely black. But, sure I thought, this is tied to economic inequality, and it is not racial inequality, for that doesn’t exist.

I work in NW Washington in an office that is in a predominately and historically African American neighborhood. I live just north of our office and walk to work each day. Our location also lends itself to other Latino/Hispanic clients, and I notice the rare white client who walks into Bread for legal assistance. But still, through this, everything must be tied to economic inequality only, for we are now a raceless society.

Nevermind that in my attempts to pretend that we are raceless, I still watched (to my horror) that I had my own prejudices that surfaced. We can blame a list of relevant factors and sources of this prejudice, but the fact is that I held prejudices that I didn’t even know were there. Working at Bread for the City has challenged me daily, and has helped destroy the prejudices and replace them with relationships with real people.

Even heading to Southeast Washington, across the Anacostia, where the deepest poverty perpetuates itself overtly, I still continued to believe that all our problems are tied to economic inequality. I remember my first visit to our Anacostia location. The blatant absence of any sort of commercial establishments (minus the plentiful liquor and corner stores) coupled with the hopelessness in the tone of the buildings and the fact that only African Americans were present should have been a clear signal that we cannot continue to see a raceless society. Even travelling back across the river, commenting on the contrast to the luxury condo buildings and the omnipresent cupola of the United States Capitol, I failed to see what should have been so clear.

After many more conversations, more visits to SE, more daily walks through my neighborhood, a sociological observation at Landlord-Tenant Court, media coverage, and inner reflections, I believe I had my grand epiphany in early June. For what should have been obvious in my courses at Gonzaga now finally made sense. There is a reason in modern sociological theory that race, gender, and class are tied together, and not viewed only independently of one another.

In the context of race, it now clear to me that the term “racism” applies to institutions in society. Institutions are racist because they give power to the views of the majority at the expense (and disadvantage) of the minority. The power reinforces the majority while condemning the minority. The very foundations of who we are as Americans is dependent on this system of power. The majority power has used African Americans in an exploitative manner since their original days in this country. Freed from slavery, they began their new lives without any of the wealth many others had been able to accumulate through prosperity, inheritance, and the advantages of being white in a racist society. Naturally, African Americans stayed in poverty and entered a life of a new slavery – this time as sharecroppers. And finally, when escaping this new type of slavery, African Americans headed towards the city where they faced new types of racism and segregation. When wealthier Americans fled cities for the suburbs in the 50s, African Americans were left without sufficient wealth and thus found themselves in the center of decay and fleeting capital. Even when having sufficient wealth to move to the suburbs, African Americans faced racist policies written into law, preventing them from actually achieving the American Dream.

Today – the result is so easy to see that it’s abhorrent to think that it wasn’t clear on my first visit to our SE office, when such an image was so blatant. Lack of capital resulted in neighborhood decay. Dependency grew. Poverty concentrated deeper and deeper, due to policies in housing and in prejudice of individual Americans. Lack of jobs in the urban centers, the coming of drugs, the fall of the American family, terrible schools, lack of tax base to provide services, hopelessness and mental illnesses, conditions of squalor, deep segregation, and perhaps a forgotten symptom – the apathy and lack of concern by the dominant power and society, has led to the state we are in today.

I can no longer believe that we have moved to a raceless society.

As a sociologist, I am partly ashamed to say that it has taken me this long to recognize the strong impact of race and power in the United States. But perhaps – it sheds light to the packaging of our middle class values – it is easy for us to believe we are in a raceless society when we live lives of privilege, wealth accumulation, affluent neighborhoods, and higher quality schools. Even when we come from families who are in the lower middle class, we still can look to the working class, working poor, and underclass as people below us who we continue working to avoid becoming. Our values become reinforced in the successes we experience, and we continue believing the American dream is equal, just, and gives equal opportunity to all. Others must not be taking advantage of the opportunity.

Our values are reinforced when we hear the word diversity. We cringe because it has been a buzz word and we become upset that someone might be an equal candidate (or more upsetting, worse than us) and we will lose our opportunity because the policy is favoring the African American over us. It is a power struggle and we are afraid we will lose. We know that the other has been oppressed, but we tell him that it was in the past. We tell her that it is not our fault. We rebuke the other for trying to give us guilt for the sins of the past. After all, if you only work as hard as I, you too will be at the same place. For you see, we are a raceless society now, a society of equal opportunity. Nevermind the 300 years of advantage I have over you. That is over now. What is important is that we both work hard, and let’s be honest, I have worked harder than you. I deserve it more.

And so, this is how we continue to perpetuate the great myth in our society that we live in a raceless society, a society that now is colorblind, a society that sees everyone as equals, a society that judges by merit and skills, not by skin color and economic class.

For a long time, I believed this great American myth. But, alas, after this year in Washington, the lie has become exposed. I can longer believe that we live in a raceless society.

Yet – I am not left alienated, hopeless, and powerlessness. No – the revelation is like a bittersweet taste. The bitterness floods my mind, heart, and soul, tempting me to turn to hopelessness. But, the taste of hope is sweet, and some enters me and convinces me that there is still hope. We can still fight for policy that combats a racist society. We can still confront the prejudices we don’t even know we have, just as I have this year. We can still work together to break down this great American myth and work for our brothers and sisters who are disadvantaged at our experience.

We can do it together, and we will. For now that the myth has been revealed as a fallacy in both our society and in our hearts, we can move towards establishing what we know is just.

Questions and Faithfulness

Yesterday, in a meeting at the Department of Human Services, we discussed policy implementation and ideas for making the Homelessness Prevention and Rapid Re-Housing Program (HPRP) more effective and efficient. While it was interesting to sit through a meeting with city officials, and other non-profit providers from the city, my mind was racing with a collection of questions about the work we do here at Bread and across the City Government and NGO world:

How can you meet the level of need in the District of Columbia?

There is so much institutional racism that I never saw before this year. How can we help educate others and come up with solutions that begin to tackle this racism?

Is case management the answer? Why do some of us need case management while others do not?

How do we give people incentives to work? Incentives to stop relying on public assistance and move towards self sufficiency? Is self sufficiency only a concept for middle and upper classes?

Are we imposing our own ideas of success on others? Is that a good thing or a bad thing?

Can we make a program like HPRP actually help people reach their goals and become truly independent?

Does Social Work help? What does that help look like? Is Social Work helping us or is it helping the clients?

Why are so many people “disabled” in the District of Columbia? Are they all disabled? What helps some people work despite their pain and yet makes others want to stop working? How do people with their disabilities?

How do we show our wealthier members of society that these people aren’t just lazy, but that they are dependent because we’ve made them dependent?

How do we add job training and improve our education system so we don’t have so many people without any skills or work history?

How do we help people realize the skills gifts they’ve been given and encourage them to make some impact with those?

How can we meet the level of deep seated need for our poorest members of society?

Questions such as these and more spun through my head as I walked out of the meeting at DHS. Sitting in the meeting, I began to feel thoughts of hopelessness – can we really make an impact when the need is so great?

When I was in college, I realized that there is a state of American Hopelessness that persists in our society. In college, this was viewed towards the lens of middle and upperclass suburban adults who for whatever reason have become hyper-individualistic. And in some ways, I felt elements of hopelessness after I walked out of the meeting with DHS – with a need so great and such limited resources, is it truly possible to make an impact on others, to make some sort of positive social change?

I think this is another hopelessness that is occurring though. It is the hopelessness in many of the clients served by these programs. It is hopelessness that leads these clients to become dependent, to feel as if they cannot improve their lives and thus are trapped in their current situation. They are trapped because of both their hopelessness, and because of the structures of society that keep them trapped and hopeless. It is a cycle that is, for many of our clients, impossible to escape.

I would be a hypocrite, though, if I didn’t remember the words of Fr. Greg Boyle, when he quotes Mother Teresa. I will never forget, when asked how he is able to persevere through so much failure, his response: The key is to not measure in success, but in faithfulness.

Yes, Fr. Greg and Mother Teresa, you are right. It is true that we must measure in how faithful we are to our work, and how faithful we are to God. For this faithfulness will sustain us when we feel as if we are hopeless, as if the need is too great, and as if we are stuck not making any positive social change.

So then, remembering this thought, I take comfort in knowing that I have stayed faithful to my clients and to my work this year. It is my hope that as I continue to work here this next month, and head off to school after, that I will continue to see myself as a faithful servant. For me, as a task-minded, goal-oriented person, interacting with a system looking for quantifiable answers, it is sometimes hard not to get discouraged. But… when I change my perspective and look through the lens of faithfulness, suddenly success isn’t so hard to find.

A Home Visit with Eli and Rebecca

Rebecca, Eli, and I went on an adventure to Client X’s house last night. Client X is one of Bread for the City’s legal clients, and Client X lives in the Northeast section of the city. As we drove from our Southeast office across the Anacostia and back into Northeast, the area looked familiar. My roommate Jordan and I had biked to that very intersection during one of our biking expeditions a few weeks prior and had commented on the presence of stores, chain stores, etc… in an area we might not have expected them.

Perhaps one block from this area, an area whose façade looks like chain stores and development is the house of client X. From the outside façade of the client’s building, life looked normal and average – nothing out of the ordinary. As Eli opened the door of the apartment building, I was transported into another world – trash was the first thing I saw in the hallways of the building… cigarette butts lined the floors… We arrived at the top of the stairs to meet Client X, who told Eli to walk around back to meet. We walked back into the sunshine, around the building, and up a flight of stairs.

This morning I was fishing for a word to describe walking up those back stairs. I think eerie describes the way I felt walking into a home that had large holes in the walls… that was dark and messy. The doors had violent images of death and corpses graffitied on them. We stepped through a large pile of garbage as we walked in – that garbage could have been the home to rats and bed bugs for all I know. We handed Client X a bag of food, chatted for a second, and said goodbye.

This is the aspect of poverty I don’t have to see at Bread for the Cit. The image of Client X’s house is imprinted in my mind as a sign of mental illness, the effects of drugs and prostitution, lack of opportunity, hopelessness… the effects of the poverty cycle that is present in our society.

The funny part is that I was more struck here than I was in Zambia. Zambia, an African nation, a nation full of the images of absolute world poverty. Walking along the dirt streets of Zambezi, glances at homes with thatch roofs and no running water, with children wearing second or third hand clothing from America, with the people staring at the white outsiders. That is an image of poverty too, an image of some of the world’s most absolute poverty.

I think as Americans, with our media coverage, we’ve been conditioned to know that to be Africa. That is the African poverty we expect when we travel there. It is no surprise to us when we see it. Though it tugs at our hearts and we grapple with the site of the poverty, it is exactly what we expected to see.

I live in Washington, DC. The capital of the United States of America, the “richest country in the world.” I live in the same city as the U.S. Capitol building, the White House, the Smithsonian Institution Museums, the Memorials, and the National Monument. But I also live in a city where Client X lives perhaps worse than the people of Zambia. Client X’s home is just hidden by the brick exterior. Bricks are hard and sturdy. Bricks don’t reveal what is inside.

To borrow a phrase from Norman Maclean and adapt it to my own experience, I am haunted by the image of Client X’s house. I have not lost hope, however. Instead, my experience with Client X makes clear my vocation to act with justice, to love tenderly, to serve one another, and to walk humbly with God.

Clybourne Park

Since coming to the District of Columbia, I have been fascinated with this idea of gentrification. How can we let development occur without raising property values so high that tenants are displaced? How do we help rejuvenate neighborhoods in the District without forcing tenants to move or without changing the character of the neighborhood?

These questions and more have been on the forefront of my questions since coming to D.C. To deepen my understanding of gentrification, I recently attended the play, Clybourne Park, at the Woolly Mammoth Theatre, here in D.C. Gaining its inspiration from the play, A Raisin in the Sand, the play explored heavy concepts of race in the United States. The first began in 1959, in a beautiful bungalow, with a white family moving out of their Chicago neighborhood. Their neighbors were furious to find out that an African American family was moving into the neighborhood; their fear, based out of racism, fueled the belief that their community would deteriorate as soon, more African American families would move into the neighborhood. In an emotionally charged act, I felt the real experience of both Caucasian and African American families struggling with the realities of both individual prejudice and institutional racism.

The first act closes and the second act opens; the home is the same bungalow, but it is no longer beautiful. The wood panelling is gone. The floor has patches of discolored hardwood floor which has been replaced. The light fixtures are gone. The home is in decrepit shape. Now, the tables are turned. The neighborhood is predominately African American and a Caucasian family wants to move into the home. Living in the city is suddenly glamorous again and this young Caucasian family wants to start their own family in this home. The price are low, and they see an opportunity to demolish the home and build their dream home. The act is equally, if not more, emotionally charged, with both African American and Caucasian Americans powerfully expressing their ties to the neighborhood and their economic interests.

In the end, there is no answer to the gentrification. Repeated in each act is the statement, "Change happens. Some change is good. Too much change is not." It is true - change does happen. It is the reality of life, it is the reality of neighborhoods. It is what happened to the District of Columbia, and what continues to happen as new families move in and out of the District, as wealth allows development to happen... in some ways it cannot be stopped.

But in other ways - I think about the African American families in the play who are displaced and who watch their neighborhood change due to the economic interests of the wealthy re-emerging into the city. It is the same picture we are observing here in the District of Columbia. The juxtaposition of the Caucasian family leaving in 1959 while a new one returns in 2009 is a powerful statement to the continued effects of past racism and current inequality.

The play continues to stretch my mind and ask, how can positive development happen? I suppose in many ways, I too am like the Caucasian family of 2009, wanting to move back into the glamorous city, wanting to capture the "good deal."

Gentrification is a topic I am continually interested in. I have no answers from the play. But I will continue to search for answers on how we can make development and tenant preservation both priorities in our cities today.

The Inequalities of Landlord Tenant Court

Last Friday, Eli and I decided to go to Landlord Tenant Court to see our Bread attorneys in action and to help if there was anything the attorneys needed assistance on. As I sat in the court waiting during roll call, and throughout the day, I was struck by many images of inequality that became immediately apparent. It has been a few days now and yet, I have continued to reflect on these images...



I noticed that the courtroom was full, mainly of African Americans. Yes, it's true - D.C. is still a African American dominated city, so perhaps that is what one would expect. Yet, I saw few men and women of other races; those who were white appeared immediately to be attorneys. As it turned out during roll call, most of the white people either worked as landlord attorney's or were Bread for the City attorneys defending the tenants. I am not usually one to point to racism as ever present in American society, but it seemed clear at that moment that white people in the District tend to own their homes, leaving many (but not all) African Americans as tenants. Here in the nation's capital... even here race continues to separate us into different categories.



Most landlords have attorneys to be present for them at the actual L/T proceeding. Thus landlords are able to continue with their business while the attorneys represent them. And, when listening closely, it became clear that most landlords were represented by just a few attorneys while the majority of tenants stood there without any sort of protection or knowledge of their rights. There were a handful of tenants represented by attorneys - mostly Bread for the City attorneys.

While the landlords have attorneys present for them in the court, tenants do not, and thus, must come to their court date, unsure of what is going to happen. Their fate looks like it is heading towards eviction. The judge tells them during roll call that they might have to stay as long as 5 pm to ensure their case gets heard. I'm guessing most of the low-income tenants I observed at Landlord Tenant court are on hourly jobs, not salaried, and face loss of wages for the day as well, further depleting them of resources needed for their families.

These were my initial observations into the disparity at L/T court. A light shining, though, offsets at least some of the inequities. DC Law students in court are able to jump in and help some tenants each day. The Landlord Tenant resource center gives information to tenants each morning and helps tenants fill out paperwork. The Attorney of the Day project helps provide representation to tenants who are income eligible. And of course, there are great attorneys like Rebecca, Vytas, Skip, Julia, and Jenny, who protect the rights of tenants through their direct client representation and advocacy efforts.

I guess I see inequality each and every day at Bread for the City. I didn't expect it to be this easy to spot at Landlord Tenant Court. But at least I an count on attorneys like ours here to help ensure some tenants have fair access to justice.