Elana Levin
What Would Rosa Parks Do?
Under a proposed amendment to H.R. 1461, the Federal Housing Finance Reform Act nonprofits that engaged in voter-registration, get-out-the-vote and grassroots lobbying in the past 12 months would be disqualified from accessing a fund to increase housing for low and extremely low income families.
(I call it the Bush's Revenge Against ACORN Act.)
More and more government funding is going to religious organizations but if Community Voices Heard wants to organize its members to take power and challenge the status quo -- that would be used to deny them affordable housing program access.
So you can serve the poor a turkey at Christmas but please don't empower them to organize and vote for policy in their interests.
Rosa Parks died yesterday. The hidden story of Rosa Parks was not one the Right would have embraced. Popular mythology had written her as an everywoman with no political affiliations whose feet were hurting and so she "unwittingly" committed civil disobedience. The truth is she was a political activist with the NAACP- a group at the time considered a radical fringe group, even called "terrorists" by some bigots. The NAACP was looking for a test case and she was the perfect subject for it because she was an upstanding citizen by their cultural norms and had great personal strength.
Parks had fought in recent years against an early history that had written away her political consciousness in an attempt to make her story a better myth, more palatable to a public wary of activists and troublemakers. To some people in power oppressed populations are quaint when they are naive. But educated expressions of discontent-- well that would be revolutionary.
Can't have any troublemakers now can we.
Elana Levin: Author Bio | Other Posts
Posted at 12:51 PM, Oct 25, 2005 in
Democracy | Media | Rosa Parks
Permalink | Email to Friend
