December 2000/
January 2001

Views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily of the AFSC.

From the editor's desk

Photo © John C. Boeckeler, Bread & Puppet Museum, T. 122, Glover, VT

This photograph from the Bread & Puppet theater attic speaks to us of the pale horses and ghost riders of white privilege that haunt this nation. It has been on our mind as we assembled this year-end issue of Peacework. Even as we try to lay the 1900s to rest and embark in earnest on 2001, there is still no escape from W.E. DuBois' text: "The problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color line, the relation of the darker to the lighter races in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea." Are we doomed by our failure to address the problem to carry it with us into the 21st?

As he has so often, Martin Luther King starts us off. Reviewer Arnie Alpert reminds us that by the time of his death, Dr. King was challenging the establishment as he linked the cause of racial equality to its necessary context of peace and economic justice. He had become--and remains--a dangerous man.

Manning Marable takes us to prison, these days populated, overwhelmingly, by people of color. We hear voices, of people who have been inside and of walkers bearing witness to their plight. James Liebman and his colleagues, after two decades of sober study commissioned by a Congressional committee, describe a system of state killing that has "made more mistakes than we would tolerate in far less important activities." And Michael Ross, writing to us from Connecticut's death row, offers a simple way to show our opposition.

Two of our AFSC colleagues describe gun violence and police bias. The targets--disproportionately people of color. The system of skewed justice, say Andrea Smith and Angela Davis in ColorLines, is universal and doubly devastating for women of color. Teresa Williams, participant in a pilgrimage retracing the footsteps of slavery, thinks about how this unfinished business of our past pervades global realities today.

Thus we come to the most recent iteration of the march to a global economy--the Free Trade Area of the Americas, which will be discussed next April at a conference in Quebec. Joanne Comerford talks about organizing to confront it in the context of a vision of justice. L.A. Kauffman's conversation with a black activist sheds light on opportunities to enlarge and inform that organizing and that vision of justice to "unite the two major issues--corporate globalization and criminal injustice." The wrangling and self-serving bargaining at The Hague conference on global warming only reconfirms the economic and racial imperialism of great nations, starting with our own.

So there's work to be done. Two lives offer excellent examples of how to begin. One, Illinois' poet laureate Gwendolyn Brooks, dead this month at 83, sang of what she saw from her window on Chicago's south side. She broadened and deepened her palette as she listened to the next generation of activist poets, and nurtured the voices of her community, its children and its prisoners. The other, a woman from the American south, chronicles for us the consequences of a simple act of principle.

Lest we think the songs no longer needed, the testing no longer necessary, Derrick Jackson at once challenges the odd notion of substituting standardized tests for better schools, and challenges us to examine how much we really know about our history.

Thought you could get away without yet another take on the election, didn't you? Not a chance. Boston city councilor Chuck Turner has come up with what might serve as an inaugural address for activists. Attorney Susan Guberman-Garcia reports on the NAACP hearings on the denial of voting rights to people of color in Florida. Shepherd Bliss suggests that we not only enjoy the tragi-comedy now unfolding, but take advantage of the civics lessons to turn things around. Perhaps one day we will be able to lay the specter of those haunting horses and pale riders to rest.

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