What’s interesting is that all four were exposed by the
unusually-sleepy local press: the city manager and sheriff by the weekly Chronicle,
Dukes and Cobb by the American-Statesman. This public
housecleaning occurred in the context of the continued gentrification of the
only major city in the country that has consistently lost black population, our
own version of ethnic-cleansing-on-the-Colorado, a process that now includes
black public officials. What follows will not be a defense of
any of these officeholders. Each committed sins: In the case of Marc Ott for
example he was guilty, as his detractors often said, of spending as much time
working on extending his tenure as he did running the city. Striking
nonetheless is that the Chronicle treated the City Manager well for seven
of his eight years in office and only began attacking him after he suggested
that SXSW’s owners—which also means the Chronicle—needed to start
paying for the extraordinary municipal expenses incurred every spring staging
the world-renowned privately-owned festival. Chronicle publisher
Nick Barbaro wrote a cryptic yet threatening piece about Ott, the refrain of
which was, literally, “Is he gone yet?” without ever specifying exactly what Marc Ott did to justify the change in editorial sentiment. A few weeks
later the Chronicle’s news side accused him of creating a hostile
atmosphere for women in government, a counterintuitive charge in the Texas
capital city where a majority of the City Council is female, as well as the
county’s chief elected official, half the county commissioners and most of the
school board—half of the legislative delegation—not to mention the out-going
and incoming district attorneys, a majority of district judges, the fire chief,
the new sheriff, the new (if interim) city manager and both the editors of
the Chronicle and American-Statesman themselves.
If women in River City are second-class citizens it’s a pretty good gig,
apparently. What Ott did do was to corrupt the system so that
complaints of discrimination both in government and just as importantly in
the private sector were not heard. For that he needed to go but we ought to be
clear why he went. It may be hard to understand that in the cases of each of
these four powerful black people outing the offending official may have been a
good thing—but the overall dynamic is just another distortion in racial equity
along the banks of the mighty Colorado, in the Live Music Capital of the World, in which the press is oh-so
complicit.
Assistant District Attorney Gary Cobb had election to the big
office wrapped up until the American-Statesman published the
financially-salacious details of a messy divorce, said to have been leaked by
his ex. Cobb would have been a disaster for the minority community as D.A. but
that doesn’t mean he was treated fairly. Again, we’re glad he’s gone but uneasy
about how he went. Gary Cobb showed, as noted by the Chronicle itself,
an unhealthy preference for guilty verdicts over justice. He came to power as a
New Age Uncle Tom, like a couple of the black judges, and ended up as an
old-style victim of The Man, the kind of biblical justice most Negroes can get
behind, actually, it’s just odd that what goes around only seems to come back
around for black folk. The best analogy is white policing—something we’re no
strangers to in this bucolic River City—a heavy hand is used and the people arrested are almost always minorities even though we are the minority of
the population. That
doesn't mean we don’t break the rules, it means whites do too but they’re
not being busted. Guess what? So too in the press.
State Rep. Dukes did nothing different in the Texas House of
Representatives than anyone else—in other words using her public staff for
private tasks. According to two former member of the Travis County delegation in
a position to know. In fact said one of her former colleagues, compared to the
practices of her fellow legislators, Dukes wasn't even a particularly offensive
offender. Her error was to do what she did openly and in front of a white
assistant who didn’t like seeing a powerful black woman living, shall we say,
expansively. Dukes’ real crime may be breaking an unwritten rule for blacks in
power, that you cannot do as white people do. Instead a black leader must
remain above suspicion a la Barack and Michelle. Once the
Texas Rangers entered the picture Representative Dukes was toast because if the
Rangers begin looking at any state legislator’s accounts there
will likely be trouble. The issue here is that a black was chosen for scrutiny,
just as with police stops. Driving-while-black has a lawmaking counterpart, a kind of legislating-while-black. Since those first stories, the American-Statesman has waged a relentless
anti-anything-Dawnna campaign overseen by white editors worried about poor ad
sales, the kind of reporting we don’t read about Caucasians in power. Be
that as it may.
Of the four black officials who took a fall, perhaps the only one who was guiltless was Sheriff Hamilton, taken down by the Chronicle for cooperating with federal immigration authorities before it was mandated in the Trump world. No one has accused Hamilton of ulterior motives, he simply believed in what he was doing (“Greg’s thing,” said a friend of his, also a high-ranking law enforcement type, “was cooperation among police agencies.” A more pertinent complaint against Sheriff Hamilton might have been custodial deaths in the jail he ran. It doesn't seem to matter who is sheriff, people tend to die in Travis County's cells.) In the end cooperation with the feds cost him his job—he knew the risks and accepted the consequences, although he was known to have held Chronicle Editor Louis Black responsible for the attacks on his office. During the most recent round of election-year candidate interviews the Travis County Democratic Party didn’t even invite Hamilton to compete for his own job, which may say more about the party than the lawman who served it. These African-American officeholders have all taken pretty hard falls—Rep. Dukes is still falling but has the farthest to go and may land at the Texas Department of Criminal Justice in Huntsville. If there’s any good news at all it’s that there aren’t many black people in power left in Austin! It’s almost a clean sweep. Through the process of elimination, literally, the press will have to start attacking white leaders if reporters want to continue to display investigative chops. The idea here in this piece will be to offer a few suggestions of unethical public officials with whom to begin the new hunt, in the context of the latest and biggest example of racial disenfranchisement in town: who’s behind the ethnic cleansing this time and why? Citizens of River City should be ashamed of ourselves and of white leadership. And why several leading public figures, in and out of government, a group that includes the mayor, the county judge, a state senator and university president all need to take those white sheets off their heads.
2
Mayor Steve Adler is a D.C.-born lawyer whose climb to power in
Austin, after the University of Texas Law School, included working as principal
aide to State Senator Eliot Shapleigh of El Paso, “Saint Eliot” as he was
sometimes called. Shapleigh was such a good lawmaker, so principled and
far-sighted that, as one of his Hispanic former colleagues recently mentioned,
Sen. Shapleigh’s positions on the issues related to Latinos “were often better
than Latino lawmakers’.” That doesn’t necessarily mean that Shapleigh’s
goodwill rubbed off on Steve Adler: As an executive assistant in the Texas Capitol, whether the big guy or big girl is Jesus of Nazareth or the original Princess
of Legislative Evil, the job is pretty much the same. Running interference,
counting votes, courting contributors, gathering intelligence and doing all the
other things that the senator or representative him- or herself doesn’t want or
have time to do. More recently Adler has been a development lawyer in our fair
city, a profession that led to considerable wealth working condemnations and
foreclosures in this arch-typical hot real estate market especially, one hears,
although details remain murky, in and around the Domain. The guy is loaded and so is his wife, also from real estate.
Steve Adler has been in office two years now in a tenure that
has been marked by a studied lack of critical interest by the press. We have a
multimillionaire developer as mayor of a city in the throes of rampant
development but the mayor’s business ties are never discussed in print. In the
case of the daily Statesman, still shedding jobs as the newspaper
attempts to make a profitable transition to the digital age, editor Debbie
Hiott cannot afford to anger business interests which means the mayor and his
erstwhile business partners. In this context at the Statesman practically
“all real estate deals are good deals,” a neighborhood association leader moaned recently. Complicating matters is that the newspapers owners, the Cox
family, are major landholders and benefit from a rising real estate market. Meanwhile over at
the weekly Chronicle ownership of South by Southwest has led
to so many conflicts of interest in reporting and in editorial direction—on
almost a weekly basis—that kissing the mayor’s ass has developed into an art
form: a recent column by Louis Black described Mayor Adler’s “genius” which
like publisher Nick Barbaro’s description of Marc Ott’s perfidy was lacking
only in details. What this all translates into is no scrutiny in the Wild West
that constitutes our recent business/governmenttech nexus, a kind of sweetheart
relationship for Adler and other whites in power that Donald Trump couldn’t
wish for in D.C., because in Austin it includes coddling by the press. For
instance: the mayor’s recent push for a $720 million bond issue to fix roads
and traffic was never subjected to the basic due diligence of comparing Adler’s
private interests (that 66-page financial disclosure form would have been a
good jumping-off point, although the apartment in New York and the condo in
Cabo San Lucas can safely be left out) or those of his business partner or
former clients, or those of his wife, also a developer, with
what was being proposed. Was the bond package a fix-all for present
transportation ills or a guide to future development? Whose ox was being gored, in other words, which is invariably true of big public expenditures. Instead the bond projects
were evaluated only on their alleged merits, at face value—a kind of taking for
granted of good intentions that minority officeholders do not often enjoy. The
good news, if you’re looking for bad news, is that the mayor is so omnipresent
in the city's affairs that he leaves a lot of tracks.
As with most powerful people where Mayor Adler takes a meeting
is a good guide to how important the person or persons sitting opposite him and
the issues are. Mayor Adler chooses his City Hall
offices for conversation, for instance, often when dealing with the press. From
that point of departure there’s a kind of hierarchy of outside venues, ranging
from the casual Java Hut, down the block, to drinks at the W hotel, to dinner—also at the W, at the
restaurant Trace—and even an occasional meeting in Adler’s apartment upstairs
at the W (he's said to have two apartments in the hotel), one of which was
attended by, as his staff noted in the mayor's datebook’s margin, Austin's
major downtown landholders. To be a fly on the wall! Race and ethnicity, our subject here,
actually kick in first in Adler’s City Hall office, not at the Java Hut or on the
Eastside, or upstairs at the W, and in this instance the mayor’s own ethnicity
is at play. Early in his tenure he met at City Hall with representatives of the
Israeli government, selling State of Israel bonds. This is a revealing
encounter since the bonds are not considered a particularly competitive
substitute for their American counterpart: the Middle Eastern version can be
purchased only from a representative of Tel Aviv, at an interest rate set by
the State of Israel, and can only be sold back to Tel Aviv. (The University of
Texas endowment held a few million dollars worth a couple of years ago, but
sold them, and the State Comptroller holds $65 million today, seen as much as a
vote of confidence in our ally as an investment.) But Adler is Jewish and he
was presumably showing solidarity when he listened to the Israeli pitch which
means that his own ethnicity or cultural background should be fair game if
those of black leaders is. And it is here, in this meeting of two fault lines,
money and race—money and identity—that the mayor is most
vulnerable, not in regards his relationship with his own community but
regarding his relationship with ours. He’s selling niggers out.
For example: The once-proposed and since-abandoned OneTwoEast housing tower, on the east side of Interstate 35 between 11th and 12th streets, spitting distance from the Capitol. This project alone was described by the (now lone) remaining powerful black person in city government, Council Member Ora Houston, as the gateway to East Austin. The project would have determined the future of gentrification in the city, Ms. Houston warned as part of her opposition to the plan, but in the press the project did not receive one-tenth the attention that The Grove on Shoal Creek in a white neighborhood did last year—or the development dispute-du-jour, Austin Oaks, also in a white neighborhood, just received. Large, imposing, and a complete game-changer in terms of what had been built in this black neighborhood up until that point, just across the interstate from the Capitol, also sitting just across the interstate from the soon-to-be-developed now-cant Brackenridge Hospital site. Mayor Adler was pro this particular growth, the OneTwoEast deal and the mayor spoke openly and in support of OneTwoEast’s developer. But if you look at that developer, Haythem Dawlett, let’s ask a question: Is that the same Haythem Dawlett who was convicted of drug-trafficking in Massachussetts back in the day? Not that there’s anything wrong with that of course, this is Austin—we try not to be judgmental. Still, contrast Mr. Dawlett's background and narrative with development projects in white neighborhoods where the mayor, City Council and city bureaucracy parse every comma and discuss the developer’s bonafides and you understand why blacks feel like second-class citizens. White neighborhoods get the greenbelts and set-asides and we get ex-traffickers and arrest records? Another question, not to be picky: Was the same Haythem Dawlett whom the mayor spoke up for, as the guy to lead off this major redevelopment of the Eastside—was that the same Haythem Dawlett who was convicted for solicitation of murder of a witness in his drug trial? But hey, what’s a little solicitation among neighbors? In Austin we do it all the time. The conviction was overturned by an appellate court after all, not because the guy didn’t try to get the witness whacked, as the federal appeals judges noted wryly in their opinion, but because he was charged and tried under the wrong statute, in other words a technicality. The point here is that this revelation is not the result of an awesome display of investigative journalism on my part but by entering the developer’s name into Google search and hitting the button, something that neither the daily nor the weekly has apparently done. How do you miss something like that? You don’t look in the first place—just as both the Chronicle and Statesman missed gentrification in the city, until redevelopment of minority neighborhoods had achieved a momentum of its own. There are in-depth updates in both newspapers every time someone proposes pouring a slab in a white neighborhood—but it’s laissez-faire and let-niggers-beware amid an atmosphere of questionable political connections, on the Eastside. Frankly Representative Dukes' use of her aide for babysitting is the least of our problems.
Actually it says everything that needs to be said about the
Texas capital that one of the most concerned voices about how the city has
developed was the recently-departed police chief, Art Acevedo. He noted in an
interview a couple of years ago that, yes, young blacks have left their homes
in traditional minority East Austin, driven away by high rents, lack of a
homestead exemption and even his own police force’s overzealous efforts. But
Acevedo noted that, while East Austin is no longer African-American, on Friday
nights and Saturdays the hood becomes heavily-black once again as young bloods
return from their new homes in the suburbs (which are now the relocation
centers of preference for those forced out of the central city) to visit
elderly parents and grandparents who have refused to leave. What the police chief
didn’t say: that process is also repeated on Sunday mornings as blacks in other
parts of the city and surrounding communities return to East Austin to go to
church. While individual African-American homeowners have left for blacker land, a dozen or so African American churches that once served a thriving East Austin community still linger as minority
anchors in this part of the city. As the churches go, so goes the community. And
there, once again, it seems Mayor Adler has been busy working to make way for
development.
Gaylon Clark is lead pastor of Greater Mount Zion Baptist
Church, one of the principal African-American congregations. “Mayor Adler has
reached out to me on a few occasions. While running for office, he visited the
church, stayed the entire worship experience, then came into my office and
inquired about me and the church,” Rev. Clark wrote in a recent email. “His
desire to know me and hear my story spoke volumes. No one seeking political
office had ever honored me in this way. After winning the election, The Mayor
invited me to his office for a personal conversation regarding my thoughts
about East Austin and the economic and quality-of-life disparities in our city.
I am not a preacher who is constantly looking for political solutions to solve
moral and relational deficits in the community. I had very little to share with
him from a political perspective. I did however share my concern about the
quality of education in [Austin Independent School District], the need for
expanded mentorship programs for African-American youth, and the continued
inability of Austin to keep and attract African-Americans. I'm sure I was
not thinking large enough for what he had in mind. His economic vision for
Austin is huge and much more informed than mine. As he shared some of his
dreams for our city, it was clear why he was the Mayor.” If you’re thinking that
Steve Adler the former developer's lawyer may have had other reasons for
reaching out to black pastors than merely sharing his vision, you may be right.
Rev. Clark continued: “He and his wife came to our church in September of this
[2016] year. No agenda. He came just to visit. I told him about our November 6
entrance service into our new campus and invited him to join us. Can you
believe he was there? I couldn't. He had just visited five or six weeks
earlier.”
You can believe in the innocent interest of the mayor, as does
Rev. Clark, who is not political. But you would also have to believe that
Greater Mount Zion’s move from its prime East Austin location on Pennsylvania
Avenue is unrelated to the serendipity of the mayor’s sudden appearance at the
church doors and that it’s a mere coincidence the old church property was sold,
during the same period of the mayor’s vision, to a subsidiary of Eureka
Multi-Family, a major developer which already owns several properties on
Pennsylvania Avenue and is thick in the gentrification mix. Rev. Clark will not
comment further because, as he notes, the church’s move was not entirely
popular with his congregation. You can believe in the mayor’s big vision—or you
can just as easily believe that Mayor Adler took advantage of a black Baptist
minister, a man who by his own admission is not politically-attuned, and in the
course of meetings and discussions of East Austin’s future—the church moved out
of the neighborhood. On the possible conflict of interest front, by the way,
mayor’s spokesman Jason Stanford said in response to a question that neither
the mayor nor his wife "has ever heard" of Eureka Multifamily, even
though KUT public radio has reported at length on the company’s local buying
spree, and Eureka executives have been quoted in the local business press.
Spokesman Stanford continued, the mayor “doesn’t think” he or his wife has ever
done business with the company. “Neither he nor Diane,” Jason Stanford wrote,
“have [sic] ever heard of that entity and they don’t think they’ve ever had any
relationship with it.” That sounds completely believable.
It could be worse. Literally. Today if you go to the website of
Huston Tillotson University the historically black college, in the heart of the
city, you’ll see grinning pictures of Mayor Adler in cap and gown. Lately he’s
been showing an interest in Huston-Tillotson as well, which has a 25-acre
downtown campus that is a developer’s wet dream. The new Huston-Tillotson
president has refused to answer inquiries about the state of the college's finances but
she’s probably not the main danger to selling out, said someone who knows her
and knows the institution, “It’s the board [of trustees] you have to worry
about,” and the possibility that tens of millions of dollars will be dangled in
front of the school, just as big money packages are being offered to black
churches to pull up roots and go. Most historically-black universities in the
country are in financial trouble. President Trump has just threatened to cut
federal funding. (University of Texas Prof. Richard Reddick, who grew up on the
Eastside and who brings graduate students to Huston-Tillotson every semester,
predicted that the departure of the black school would be the death of the
African-American community in Texas' capital city.) You can’t
underestimate the role of higher education in this dynamic. Historically the
institution of institutional racism in Austin has been none other than the
University of Texas. While private colleges on the East Coast like Harvard and
Columbia are only now coming to terms with their histories of slave ownership
or profiting from the slave trade, UT—which was born too late to generate
revenue from that particular business endeavor—has exploited minorities by
taking their land. The entire eastern section of the Austin campus was seized
in the 1960s in the name of urban renewal, which blacks called “urban removal,”
and that appears to be happening again—on a much larger scale and actually
underlies Mayor Adler’s grand vision. Keep in mind that UT’s master plan calls
for all growth to be directed east. Going south is not possible because of the
Capitol complex, and going north or west would mean taking property from
affluent whites which simply isn’t going to happen. Even direct eastward expansion
is limited by a long strained but still-holding agreement between the
university and Blackland Community Development Corporation, victim of the
university’s older land grabs but which has fought successfully in recent
decades to maintain a shaky status quo with the university. That does however
leave southeast from UT's campus, where OneTwoEast was planned.
To
cut to the chase the greatest gentrification is about to occur, on a scale that
will likely wipe out most traces of black home ownership on the traditional
Eastside—in coordination with the University of Texas’s “Innovation Zone”
emerging from the new Dell School of Medicine. The starting point is the
renovation of the old Brackenridge Hospital where generations of black babies
were born and is now partly managed by the university. What has happened
piecemeal up until now, a parcel at a time, is about to become a machine of
ethnic cleansing, pushing out colored peoples to make room for doctors,
residents, students, researchers and biotech entrepreneurs who, like the
faculty and student body of the medical school, indeed like the University of
Texas itself, will be predominantly white and Asian. The city in the person of Mayor
Adler is pushing this vision, the county health district is on board and
providing the legal means, and UT is directing. The mayor knows, the council
knows or should know—Travis County Judge Eckhardt knows. The county
commissioners should know or are merely unconcerned, and UT’s administration as
always is up to its armpits in plotting. The plans are far-advanced and
may be too late to stop, but in this wave of exploitation unlike what has
happened in the past, the hope is that some high-ranking whites are going to
take a fall too.
Blacks still lose more battles than we win in River City but the
beauty of being African-American in this town, not to brag or anything, is that we usually
take a few white people with us. Happily, there’s already a list of who needs
to go this time.
3
The latest wave of gentrification will emerge from the Central Health
District, originally approved by voters as an aid to indigent healthcare but
which has taken a decided swing toward big business. “Gentrification Zone” is a
good name for the likely outcome. This kind of redevelopment is not an original
idea on the part of Mayor Adler, Judge Eckhardt, UT President Greg Fenves or
the Chamber of Commerce, a model has already been established in Boston, in San
Francisco, and as the Times recently reported, in New York.
“They’re not building all those bike lanes for us,” a black former elected
official mentioned recently of the proposed East Austin “improvements,” that
signal displacement. For present purposes it’s the San Francisco example that
provides the best analogy here.
Dean S. Clairborne “Clay” Johnston of the new Dell Medical
School is a University of California San Francisco transplant where he was in
charge of UCSF’s business relationships, “translational medicine”it's called, the
euphemism for the business of healthcare, the big-dollar commercialization of
medical discoveries and medical devices. During Dr. Johnston’s tenure in San
Francisco, UC created its Mission Bay campus, made possible by gentrification
of two of San Francisco’s remaining minority communities, in Mission Bay and Hunter’s Point, to form a complex of mixed-use medical research, healthcare and
healthcare entrepreneurship exactly like what’s planned here. In Austin the
14-acre Brackenridge Hospital tract is now officially up for grabs as a number
of development companies (most prominently Catellus, part of Texas Pacific
Group, a big S.F. player that now features Dell Computer’s former CEO Kevin
Rollins as a senior advisor) vie for the nod to establish our own
Mission-Bay-by-the-Colorado. That’s business, part of Austin’s effort to
attract high-tech, allegedly-clean industries like medical research. Fair
enough. But keep in mind that Big Pharma is now more profitable than Big Oil
and local business interests and politicians want a piece of this action. Fair
enough again. The problem is that the “Innovation Zone” envisions the new
researchers and academics living in the environment where they work, as in
S.F.’s Mission Bay, and unless there’ll be housing built on the Capitol
grounds, or tents at UT’s football stadium, that will eventually mean
bulldozing in East Austin. Hence, the bicycle lanes. That is why Eureka is
snapping up property east of the interstate. That was also the market the
now-discredited OneTwoEast was directed at, in its filings with the city,
formerly-black real estate for people working in the white Innovation Zone.
What happened in East Austin in the past, one hipster-homebuyer at a time, will
become a chain reaction when there’s suddenly a medical research/business
complex next door. The principal institutional heavy here as in the past is the
University of Texas, and its primary facilitator, State Senator Kirk “The Deal”
Watson. Watson, first.
In a discussion a few months ago one of the American-Statesman editors, while explaining the decision to look into Representative Dukes’ affairs, said there was some unease in the editorial offices about singling out a black public official for this kind of scrutiny when there were so many highly-visible white suspects in the mix. “Have we looked at Kirk Watson’s filings?” was the rhetorical question the Statesman staffer asked, because of Watson’s history of opportunism. Sen. Watson always has irons in the fire: recently, again in the healthcare sphere, he has shown concern about mental health and the possibility of closing the old State Hospital, a move that would incidentally open up the huge mental health campus for redevelopment next to Central Market. For the record former Mayor-cum-Senator Watson and incumbent Mayor Adler both refused to be interviewed for what follows, as has Travis County Judge Eckhardt, UT Chancellor Bill McRaven, Chronicle Publisher Nick Barbaro—who first agreed and then backed out. Also refusing to speak on the record were Dell Medical School Dean Johnston, U.S. Rep. Lloyd Doggett and practically everyone else with a pulse who’s involved. But that doesn’t mean it’s not possible to read the writing on the wall at City Hall and at the Travis County Courthouse, or the graffiti at UT. When a project is large enough, as is true of Mayor Adler’s “big vision”—to quote Reverend Clark—it’s hard to hide. And in the case of Kirk Watson, at least the senator has been consistent: he always follows the money. Often he leads the way.
If you look at a recent Watson campaign finance report he raked in $53, 000 and had about a million-and-a-half on hand. Take a calculator along with you to the Texas Ethics Commission to do the math because unlike Rep. Dukes’ accounts you won’t read Watson’s figures in the daily newspaper. His money is almost totally saturated, the trans-fat of the body politic: 95.5% from contributions over $1000, in other words special interests: trial lawyers, road builders, beer and wine distributors, healthcare companies, real estate interests and even tycoon Elon Musk. Watson gets a regular $5000 check from the Austin Police Association which we’ll come back to later, and also a regular $10,000 contribution from an organization called “Friends of UT” run by William “Dollar Bill” Cunningham, former University of Texas System Chancellor (and present business UT professor, holding the Free Enterprise Chair at the McCombs School of Business) who pushes anything that leads to further industry ties for the great university. Watson has also received big donations from UT regents themselves even though he’s involved in Senate oversight of the university. The Dell Medical School is his baby legislatively and he’s still being paid for that successful delivery, so to speak. Historically, Senator Watson has had a far greater sleaze factor than Dukes: he was tied a few years ago to one of the major figures in the Pedernales Electric Co-op scandal, he was later dinged publicly over failure to disclose business connections, and most recently Watson’s law firm was hired to do work for the Travis County Central Health District with whom the senator closely works on the Gentrification Zone. Hello! One of the accusations against Dukes is co-mingling of campaign funds, money from an African-American festival she founded and her own private accounts, but someone involved in the investigation noted that Dukes patterned her financial practices in office after those of the head of the legislative delegation, Sen. Watson. If he were black or Hispanic the Statesman or Chronicle would have taken him down with glee years ago, certainly Watson’s business ties would have gotten a good going over, but like the mayor he’s well-connected, powerful and linked to the city’s white liberal elites.
Watson himself is not particularly liberal but he does for liberals in Austin what the niceties of local liberal Democratic politics don’t allow them to do for themselves, openly screwing minorities being one thing. And that’s even without considering his time as mayor when the most recent growth-at-any-expense mantra took over City Hall and gentrification first began to wreak havoc on the Eastside. Kirk Watson helped that process along as leader of the Chamber of Commerce and as mayor at the turn of the century. He conceived “Smart Growth,” the compromise between environmentalists and the Chamber that limited suburban building over a critical watershed in favor of dense development in the city’s core. Next time you’re sitting in traffic downtown or on Interstate 35 take a moment and look around and thank Mayor Watson for his vision, which was big like Mayor Adler’s is today. The local press is unmoved: instead of an expose of the most compromised figure in local public life we get Dawnna Dukes using her aide to pick up her kid. Certainly, race has nothing to do with it.
Now Sen. Watson has recycled his previous idea and produced a
homologue, “Smart Healthcare,” in the form of the Innovation Zone: a mix of the
medical school, Big Pharma (shorthand for the major pharmaceutical companies
like Merck, Pfizer, Roche, Teva, Novartis and GlaxoSmithKline), the Travis County healthcare
district and medical for-profit start-ups. To that end the board of Central
Health has been loaded to push redevelopment and business interests not
indigent healthcare for which the district was founded by Watson’s predecessor,
Sen. Gonzalo Barrientos. The most prominent of the loaded appointments by
county commissioners was, two years ago, a professor from UT’s LBJ School of
Public Affairs named Sherri Greenberg.
Professor Greenberg has a resume to die for. She‘s a former
director of the City of Austin’s finance department, she’s on the city’s
housing board and is a past five-term member of the Texas House of
Representatives. Somewhere in there is a master’s degree from the London School
of Economics. She’s a Democrat with impeccable Party credentials: and despite many
other demands on her time she applied for the board of managers of Central
Health and was accepted over potential minority representatives. What county
commissioners say now, however, is that Greenberg failed to disclose that she
had authored a 129-page paper entitled “Austin Anchors & the Innovation
Zone: Building Collaborative Capacity” in which she, aided by her LBJ School
students, argued in favor of using Central Health for private business
development on the Eastside, the kind of business interests that Dean Johnston could tell you
about. This study written by Professor Greenberg and her students notes UT’s
own history of taking land in East Austin, the famous Blackland case for
example (property expropriation also led to construction of both the LBJ School
and LBJ Presidential Library, although Greenberg’s report doesn’t mention that)
and she proposes how to do it all again this time, noting the need for 800
apartments for UT-affiliated endeavors in East Austin. Buried on page Page 87
of the document is the worrisome proposal: "Central Health, Seton
Healthcare Family, the University of Texas Dell Medical School, and
other partners have the opportunity to leverage assets to promote the
local private sector." This is, by the way, exactly what the health
district says it’s not doing. Questioned recently at a Central Health
meeting about her failure to disclose her interest in this narrative—something
that has nothing to do with indigent care—Greenberg literally fled the building
rather than answer. The professor is actually the central figure in this particular plot to seize the homestead of the black peeps in the World Capital of Live Music. She ties the university to the health district and to the
city. If you look again at Mayor Adler’s calendars the single most
frequent meeting with His Honor, every two weeks almost like clockwork, is
Sherri Greenberg. They usually get together, the calendar entries note, for drinks
at the W where the mayor has his condos. Greenberg and Adler might have met
when both were working at the Capitol, except their tenures didn't seem to
overlap, and when you see the frequency of their get-togethers today—the mayor
calls Greenberg his “senior advisor”—your first assumption may be that they’re
fucking. This is Austin, we try not to be judgmental, whose business is it, if
after having a few, they slip upstairs to wrinkle the silk sheets? That is so not our business. Greenberg is
a smart, attractive woman, you wouldn’t kick her out of bed for ethnic
cleansing—actually, they are fucking. They’re fucking black
people. The mayor is the biggest public proponent of the Gentrification Zone in
elected office. Greenberg is now in position to execute the idea, and getting a
handle on the truth about exactly what’s happening becomes harder every
day.
At a recent Central Health meeting, while the board of managers was in a closed session discussing the hiring of a new executive director, at the prompting of Professor Greenberg a staffer came out to the lobby to tell a reporter, “I can’t allow you” to speak to the members of the board, showing a compete cluelessness about the Texas Open Meetings Act but clearly indicating Central Health’s views on transparency. Despite the repeated requests by suspicious community activists, county commissioners have declined to order an outside audit of the health district books. Judge Eckhardt, Travis County's chief elected official, has refused to release her email regarding the district either—she’s demanding payment to search her files, even though the Public Information Act allows her to waive costs for records of interest to the public. Professor Greenberg whose special area of expertise at the LBJ School is open government has appealed to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton to keep hidden any of her substantive email on the board. You can’t tell who else at Central Health may have a conflict of interest because board members are not required to file personal financial disclosure forms with the county, although we do know that the lead figure in the developing land deal involving Brackenridge Hospital, which is owned by the district, is Clarke Heidrick, a partner of silk-stocking law firm Graves, Dougherty. Heidrick was serving as chairman of the board of the Chamber of Commerce that is pushing for the Innovation Zone at the same time he was voting on the Central Health board to raise taxes to pay for it. “I don’t think that my unpaid volunteer service to any of these organizations is or was a conflict of interest in that their missions are not in conflict with each other and I got no economic benefit from any of them,” Heidrick wrote in response to a question about his business ties. But the goals are at odds in this instance, as will be pointed out, and personal financial gain is not the only measure of conflict of interest. Meanwhile UT remains unstoppable. The most recent appointment to the Central Health board was yet another LBJ School professor who actually has her office across the hall from Sherri Greenberg on campus. Assistant Prof. Abigail Aiken is a Brit, a well-educated Northern Irish physician who has studied women’s health in Texas. She was a joint appointment by the city and county. On paper she looks great but what she really is—is another vote for UT. The problem is Aiken’s vulnerability to pressure, and that is the personal gain kind of conflict of interest that Clarke Heidrick mentions. At the LBJ School, Dr. Aiken is a tenure-track professor who hasn’t yet had her tenure vote, which means that the likelihood she will make any decision that angers the university employing her and her husband, who teaches at the UT McCombs School of Business, is nil. And she’s coming from a position of white privilege in a segregated environment—not Northern Ireland, either, but UT. The LBJ School can be viewed as the center of institutional racism on the campus that holds the same distinction in this city. Rather than being a source of knowledge or tolerance the LBJ School is in the running for the most segregated public institution in Austin—beating out even the Dell School of Medicine, whose diversity profile includes eighty percent white faculty and seventy percent white students in a state that is majority-minority.
The LBJ School’s racial
breakdown of faculty recently released in response to an open records request
is 58 Caucasians (a figure that includes Professors Aiken and Greenberg), 2
blacks, 2 Hispanics, 1 Asian and 1 Native American. And the LBJ School itself has
already exercised a malevolent effect on the lives of blacks in the city, not
limited to the land taken by UT. Bill Spelman, another professor at LBJ, was a
longtime City Council member who spent his most recent tenure at City Hall,
including a spell last year as a public safety consultant, attempting to
convince anyone who would listen that there’s no evidence of racial profiling
in our police force—something that no one with any sense believes any longer, not even
many of the troops on the street. Both Dr. Aiken and her husband also have
biotech business ties, which means conflict of interest. It's listed on her financial disclosure form with the city,
which means she will now be in a position to vote to promote the same kind of
business in the Gentrification Zone. The city’s vetting of conflict of interest
allowed her merely to submit a statement by yet another LBJ School professor
who wrote that Prof. Aiken’s business ties do not present a problem for her
role on the Central Health board. Well that settles that. Like the
appointments of Professors Aiken and Greenberg there are other dynamics
pointing to a bad outcome for minoritie,s yet again. The university could
already be buying land on the Eastside through third parties which is what was
done in the past, using “Good Negro” community members to front land purchases
in East Austin (the going rate for betrayal is said to have been 4% of the
purchase price) and no one might ever know. For the record, the Chancellor’s
Office says that is not happening: “Any land purchase would be
approved by the Board of Regents in an open meeting,” said Jenny
LaCoste-Caputo, UT System spokesperson, “so there have been no secret land
purchases.” But for UT the beauty this time around is that President Fenves,
Chancellor William McRaven et al don’t really have to get their hands dirty. A
little economic push at the start, to get the Innovation Zone going, and it’ll
spread east as market forces take control. If that fails, eminent domain has
also been used here before to get the university what it wants.
For minorities the prospects get progressively worse. Admiral McRaven’s
administration has announced the opening of a library or “biological bank” of
tissue samples and DNA of patients from all UT’s medical centers but has
declined to say how the rights of patients will be protected. He's not hunting Bin Laden anymore, there are rules. DNA is like gold
in today’s medicine, but unlike real gold—that is valuable even in small
quantities—healthcare data must be voluminous to be of any value. Most
healthcare databases in the country, said Dr. Paldeep Atwal, a Mayo Clinic
genomics expert who was recently called in by the Dell School to consult, are
of northern European ancestry whites, and now everyone’s goal is collection of
minority data. “Basically,” Dr. Atwal wrote in an email, “a [biological]
library allows you to have a well-defined set of patient samples to test for
specific things, be it genetic changes or biomarkers to guide disease. With
that you can make a test/treatment which can of course be commercialized.” In
fairness to UT, Dr. Atwal said that no modern medical school can be credible without
a strong genetics presence, but that’s not synonymous with Big Pharma, he said.
“Data needs to be shared not commercialized,” he wrote.
But ask Dean Johnston, who is off a different opinion. His job at UCSF in
“translational medicine” included recruiting black children from Oakland to
participate in experiments in white San Francisco. As part of the business of medicine.
Oprah’s new movie (The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks)
is a true story about a black woman whose cancer cells were stolen by Johns
Hopkins University back in the day, the famous HeLa strain, and cloned, in the first cloning of human cells, and sold
over the years for study worldwide. The second most famous case along the same
lines involves Dean Johnston’s own University of California where the
California Supreme Court ruled in a case involving UCLA that a patient whose
cells are taken and exploited commercially has no legal remedy. The Dell School
is gearing up for the same kind of industry ties in Austin and both Dean
Johnston and his right-hand woman—the Dell School’s leader of "partnerships,"
Mini Kahlon, who was with Johnston at UC San Francisco and became his first
hire in Austin—are being paid three-quarters of a million dollars each. Money
like that has very little to do with education or indigent care, it’s a big business salary. Dr. Kahlon is now on the board of the Austin Chamber of Commerce which is hardly a traditional affiliation for medical school faculty. The
Dell med school has already created a think tank for start-ups, the new Texas
Health Catalyst Advisory Panel that advertises, “Life Sciences leaders with
expertise ranging from product development and venture capital to regulatory
issues and patent law.” What that has to do with indigent patient care or
medical education you’re free to speculate.
Practically-speaking, all the issues in the Gentrification Zone,
from DNA to eminent domain, can be boiled down to the same dynamic, a lack of
transparency. What’s really going on? Public officials are hiding their true
aims although everything points to the School of Medicine: Clay Johnston’s
business ties are not a felicitous coincidence in his choice to lead Dell,
it’s why he was picked in the first place. Both UT and the
county have for instance fought to withhold details of an agreement that
established a UT clinic at Huston-Tillotson and whether, for instance, that
includes data or tissue or DNA collection from patients. Meanwhile the first
major Big Pharma company to show an interest in the Innovation Zone is the
pharmaceutical giant Merck, which just announced plans to include a “metadata
collection” operation here. This is in some sense the beauty of Austin, a
particular kind of white liberal mindset: what Republicans do in the rest of
the state is create conflicts of interest, or have ethical lapses, but in River
City these are “collaborations” that, inevitably, magically, have transformed
into an Innovation Zone. Where else could a healthcare district specifically
created to provide indigent care suddenly become home to entrepreneurial
start-ups and the 100-billion-dollar Merck & Co.’s metadata collection hub?
On the border of a fragile minority neighborhood that the mayor claims to want
to protect he’s advocating the construction of a major medical research complex
featuring an industry, pharmaceuticals, that in recent years has beat out
defense and energy as the single most predatory and least ethical business
model in the world. Hello! It’s one thing for African-Americans to have to say, “They
stole our neighborhood,” it’ll be another thing entirely if, at some point down
the road, we have to say, “They stole our data.” The city’s role is paramount.
Interestingly, Mayor Adler’s name appeared on the original incorporation papers
filed with the Texas Secretary of State for the Innovation Zone but the city’s
official participation has since been struck from the paperwork. Despite
impediments to transparency, however, there has been major disclosure
that is valuable.
Last year a book was published by a former UT geography
instructor, Eliot Tretter, Shadows of a City: The Environment, Racism
and the Knowledge Economy in Austin, detailing past university land
grabs—which apparently happen in cycles, every few decades. Tretter reports
that the methods preferred by UT, secret land-buying, and collaboration with
local government, that is happening now in the Gentrification Zone, were first
employed decades ago. Historically the book describes UT’s land acquisition in
the context of the modern American public university’s efforts at growth—to
establish a greater scientific profile in order to draw in federal research
dollars—a bigger-is-better way of conducting the business of higher education that started at
the University of California in the ‘50s, followed by a more recent drift
towards private industry support of university labs, also popularized by UC.
This is exactly the business plan for the Innovation Zone. Prof. Tretter said
in an email that University of Texas Press “passed” on his manuscript, not
surprisingly, so it was published by the University of Georgia Press
instead. Tretter’s book points out that typically UT has acted in concert
with the City of Austin to dispossess minorities. (“Basically we came up with
the proposition that the university’s expansion to the east was feasible,”
Austin city manager Bill Williams is quoted telling the press in 1966, explaining
a prior land expropriation, “and could be tied into an Urban Renewal program.”)
This time urban renewal or “urban revitalization” has been replaced by urban
“innovation,” starting with a research complex that can dispossess minorities
through “economic drift,” like fallout from a nuclear explosion.
Tretter spends a few pages depicting the white liberal tribe that populates our bucolic River City, and its customs, which is always entertaining to hear, as he describes the rich vein of hypocrisy among the city’s Democratic elites. There’s a great scene that could be played to dramatic effect as well, perhaps in a flashback, in the filming of The Gentrification Zone, although probably no one would believe it. It takes place during Kirk Watson’s tenure as mayor and involves Latinos not blacks. The activist group PODER, which had environmental concerns of its own, including the dumping of toxic waste on the Spanish Eastside, was headed to a meeting at City Hall and opened the wrong door, literally—only to find city staff deep in the process of carving up East Austin for redevelopment. Of course no one in Watson's administration had bothered to mention anything to the people living in those neighborhoods, and Susana Almanza, a PODER leader explained to Tretter: “As a matter of fact we stepped into it by accident because we were supposed to be at City Hall for a meeting and we kind of went into the wrong room and saw a big map about the Desirable Development Zones. The map showed moving everything east in Austin. We were like, ‘What’s going on with this?’ We were very much against the whole Smart Growth movement because the Smart Growth movement was, to us, really the change in language when they came in with revitalization . . . When they revitalized that meant getting rid of us, making new communities, and we were not going to be in those communities.” Ditto the Innovation Zone.
It has occurred to no one in the local power structure, not County Judge Eckhardt, who is just as crude and corrupt as any of the white guys who came before her, nor the mayor or university president—not the board of the health
district either—that secure housing plays a big role in healthcare outcomes.
What the health district or medical school are providing in terms of clinic
visits for the poor and minorities will be more than offset by the stresses
caused by losing one’s home. It’s almost as if the health district itself is a
disease attacking the poor. At City Hall the preferred press release is that if
there is wrongdoing at Central Health, Sen. Watson is the villain and Mayor
Adler’s sole fault is failing to confront him. But The Gentrification
Zone like The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is the
kind of major motion picture that can easily feature two bad guys, Steve Adler
in the close-ups and Kirk Watson as a shadow in the background.
A fine supporting cast is already on hand from the courthouse.
Directing and screenwriting? This is a Forty Acres production.
4
After the police shooting of a mentally-disturbed black teenager, the officer was fired. He filed a Civil Service appeal although Chief Acevedo
noted at the time that his disciplinary decisions had been upheld in the past
and he had no fears in this pig's case. As part of the appeal the officer’s
lawyers called Mayor Adler to testify, a smart legal move but also a great
opportunity for black people to get some answers under oath from City Hall
about African-American fears that inappropriate use of force has not been
exclusively attributable to dumb or racist cops, but is also policy downtown.
As the hearing approached something surprising happened. City Attorney Anne
Morgan cut a deal with the killer and paid him $35,000 go-away money. The
outcome of the settlement was that it kept Mayor Adler out of the witness
chair. Then Ms. Morgan appealed to the Attorney General to keep the full
details of the settlement secret.
A county commissioner recently defended Steve Adler, in general terms, saying he’s not the opportunist he appears to be, citing for example the mayor’s stand against the Trump executive orders on Muslims entering the country. But a review of the mayor’s email offers a less morally-motivated take—and is also instructive about his attitude toward minorities in the healthcare context. After the Trump executive order the mayor’s staff discussed reaching out by letter to Texas’s less extreme U.S. Senator, John Cornyn, but the focus was business not human rights. Adler’s media guru Jason Stanford wrote to the mayor and another city official in the loop about an early draft of the message to Sen. Cornyn: “The letter does not specifically mention objections and concerns raised by major employers such as Facebook & Google, by UT-Austin and by SXSW. This letter right now is a laudable statement of goals but does not say that the executive order threatens our economic well-being, which was the news value of doing the letter.” Adler replied: “Can we add the thought Jason raises… But note, Jason, we may not do any media or press on this letter. The main goal is to hope that Cornyn uses us and acts as a moderating force.” Stanford again: “Then we all need to agree on that or at least get on the same page. This is a great media opportunity to recast this [executive order] as uniquely anti-Austin. If we are privately attempting to ask to collaborate on the implementation of this EO, then that's something we should probably never write down in a public document.” Adler again: “Hell no to collaboration! I want to know, though, if Cornyn wants some cover to moderate the development of the laws and rules that will post date the horrible, and we’ll never work on, EO.” Stanford: “Then let's clearly state this without being jerks. Value the relationship [with Cornyn] but state the opinion clearly. And, if I may, citing the examples of SXSW, Google & UT creates a common interest. Of course he cares about these things too.” This is a pretty jaded pair, not to belabor the obvious. Jason Stanford particularly comes across as a douche but at least he’s an honest one, laying out the real calculus at City Hall. So, too, in indigent healthcare—it’s all about business.
Central Health’s Clarke Heidrick, for example, the Chamber of Commerce guy, has been on the
board since the health district was created in 2004 and at the time of his last
reappointment, a handful of local physicians wanted his position. County
commissioners nonetheless chose Heidrick to serve again and Judge Eckhardt has
since explained that he was kept on the board because of his expertise in
women’s health. The guy is a corporate lawyer. You could pick any woman at
random off the street and she will know more about women's health than Heidrick
does. He’s there to do the Chamber’s bidding. Distortions like
these become a race issue because gentrification is, as slavery was, an
economic crime, it’s not about skin color, it’s about money—and is the kind of
wrongdoing that local government is gearing up to commit today in Austin, the World Capital of Live Music. Yet it is
precisely blacks’ own history of poor outcomes, to use the language of medicine, in this Southern city that might be
leveraged now to achieve a little justice.
Recently the mayor created a “racism task force” that has begun
to show some signs of independence. The task force has already drawn obvious
connections between city government and what has happened to blacks here, in
terms of zoning for example. But suppose that effort is taken to its logical
conclusion and a reconciliation commission, of the kind favored after apartheid
in South Africa, examines exactly how the bad outcomes have
emerged. How single-member city council districts were delayed for so long, for instance, as
well as the delay of a homestead exemption that would have protected home
ownership on the Eastside long, long ago—and how exactly gentrification began
to take shape. Let’s name names and get testimony from those who were making
these decisions, especially the “gentlemen” of the Gentleman’s Agreement who
reviewed minority candidates for City Council seats to select blacks and
Latinos they knew would not rock the municipal boat. Ms. Morgan, the city
attorney, recently refused to release the names of any of these gentlemen but
the persistent rumor is that this group of city fathers—and some mothers,
presumably—often included the mayor, whoever that mayor was, which leads us
back to Kirk Watson. Other powerful pols who are likely candidates include
former mayors Lee Leffingwell and Wil Wynn, and U.S. Rep. Lloyd Doggett who was
state senator at one time too. In the case of the mayors the City of Austin has
destroyed Watson’s financial disclosure records form his time in office, so
it’s impossible to see who was giving him money, and the city attorney has
already asked for and received permission from Attorney General Paxton to
withhold old email from Leffingwell’s tenure, which might have elucidated why
His Honor seemed so content with dubious police shootings. Watson and
Leffingwell by the way were the fathers of the Innovation Zone—they set up the
study group that led to the concept of a medicaal research complex in East
Austin. It all gets pretty incestuous from that point on, you can’t separate the
players without a crowbar: Leffingwell later endorsed Adler’s mayoral campaign
and in return Steve Adler has helped retire Leffingwell’s old campaign debt.
Part of that deal appears to be obfuscating Leffingwell’s history in office as
well.
And then there’s “The Lloyd,” pronounced like “the Lord,” Lloyd Doggett, our Congressman and the white liberal who white liberals aspire to be. For the African-American community he has been mostly conspicuous by his absence. Congressman Doggett has never publicly questioned the behavior of the police, or called on the Justice Department to study local police shootings, nor has he called upon the Office of Civil Rights to look at the inordinate discipline of black children in local schools, perhaps because the teachers’ union that supports him has been opposed to greater scrutiny.
He could even have called upon the
significant resources of the federal government’s various community outreach
agencies to look at housing patterns in Austin and at gentrification, but that
might have led to scrutiny of Doggett’s own land holdings, which are major, and
who his renters are. Lloyd Doggett’s contributions and tenure
in office—he is reportedly one of the wealthiest members of Congress, which we
condemn for Republicans but not Democrats—he goes unexamined year after year because
he’s a good liberal, and white, in a city where that combination is unchallenged. Now he's expected to find federal funding for the Innovation
Zone without the least concern for what that will mean. The public university that
has been the largest recipient of federal healthcare research dollars in the
country for the past few years is Dean Johnston’s alma mater, UC San Francisco,
whose Congressional representative is Nancy Pelosi. Under the Trump
administration that funding is likely to change, with more money going to Red
State schools like UT and the University of Tennessee. Even though Austin is a
Democratic town, Doggett may already have his hand out in Donald Trump's D.C.
“The Lloyd” illustrates that at the root of the problem of race are two
intertwined dynamics: coziness among whites in power, including the press, and
a lack of transparency. It's not rocket science or even close. Most harmful to
the interests of minorities—something that goes hand in hand with the skewed
press—is the lack of openness in government. And for that, one person is mostly
responsible: longtime Travis County Attorney David Escamilla. He's been in the
Travis County Courthouse oh-so long.
Escamilla has no problem sending blacks and Latinos and the poor to jail, on a daily basis, as misdeamenor prosecutor for the last 15 years, but he remains deferential to the powerful and influential. In other words he's afraid, which is not a good character trait in a prosecutor. Statesman editor Debbie Hiott said something similar once in an interview—that whenever the newspaper questions Austin’s liberal credentials she gets a shitstorm. Mark Ott, ditto: At a conference a few years ago at Huston-Tillotson, seated next to Rep. Dukes, the then-city manager mentioned that when he discovered that City Hall long cheated the Eastside of infrastructure investment, sewers and streetlights for example—until white people started to move into the neighborhood—and he mentioned that fact to liberal whites, white smiles at the new, black city manager began to fade. You feel me? For his part Ott decided to just drink the Kool-Aid and enjoy himself while he was here. He lasted until he questioned the $2 million reverse-bribe from the city to the Chronicle—not sending the bill for police overtime at SXSW—in exchange for good press for the mayor. David Escamilla is the one responsible for keeping everything under wraps. It’s notable that the county attorney, like other local officials who are so opposed to the Republican administration of the state, has no problem appealing to Attorney General Paxton (whom County Judge Eckhardt calls “crazy”) because the county knows the Gen. Paxton has no interest in enforcing disclosure.
There’s a passage in Tretter's book describing a past land grab, which allowed UT to grow into the area of the campus just west of the Interstate and which ought to send a chill through local public officials: “ . . . approximately one thousand people were displaced, mostly African Americans, and countless businesses, many African American-owned, were forced to close. While many people received relocation funds, the money was insufficient for people to buy a new home. The result was that even more African Americans settled in east Austin because it was the only place they could afford to live, and these communities became much more isolated and increasingly disadvantaged.” The descendants of those very displaced persons are the people whom the mayor, county judge, state senator and university president are now pursuing. You’re struck reading Tretter’s account that many of the neighborhoods in East Austin were formerly white (Robertson Hill was once populated by white working class Swedes, for example, and presumably by the Mexicans and the Comanches before that) but in the '20s when the city officially segregated, whites moved west and blacks were transported east. Land is always changing hands—not just here—but whites chose to leave the Eastside in support of segregation, while blacks have been pushed to live there and are now being pushed out. It’s all pretty depressing and has led to soul-searching among blacks ourselves. Indeed, one of the recurring themes among African-Americans intellectuals here is that outcomes have been so bad in part because—as a black academic recently explained—in this town there’s been “no critical event,” like a civil disturbance, a race riot in other words, as has happened at one time or another in most major American cities, something to remind white people what real consequences are. Yet another theory is that such a critical event recently happened. The date was Nov. 6, 2015, and on that evening State District Judge Julie Kocurek, who represents the Ku Klux Klan and the Austin Police Association in the Travis County courthouse, the critical event happened when Judge Kocurek arrived at her Tarrytown home and was met by a loaded pistol. A black finger is said to have been on the trigger.
So, like, that night Her Honor learned a lesson that others, in the
context of the Gentrification Zone, may also need to learn—but it doesn’t have
to be the same kind of gun-barrel instruction. Targets need to be selected,
yes, bullseyes drawn, but the consequences can just as well be political as
traumatic, intellectual as physical, social rather than blood-stained. We don’t
have to “burn this bitch down,” so to speak, no need to throw Molotov
cocktails—that, by the way, don’t even need to be lit if the
bottle is completely filled with gasoline and there’s an airtight seal with the
cap. When they break they blow up just like with a fuse, or so it is said. We don’t have to take to the streets and overturn police cars that can
weigh more than 3,000 pounds and require as many as ten people to flip
effectively. We don’t have to write “Black Power” on the side of the Travis County courthouse
or on the white walls of the Governor’s Mansion, just a few yards east of the
courts—or disrupt a Regents meeting, located on the second floor of the new University
of Texas System offices a couple of short blocks from of the Governor’s
Mansion, you can't miss it. We don’t have to shout down Mayor Adler or call him a “lyin’ ho”
or a “lyin’ white bitch” the next time he comes to the Eastside to bullshit us
or to explain his Big Vision, which doesn’t include us or Mexicans. Nor do we have to
somehow get upstairs at the W and crash his crib, partaking from his liquor
cabinet or smoking His Honor's herb. It’s his home and
someone’s home should be sacred, their castle and all that, which would be the whole point here. Peaceful protest
can be more powerful than gunfire and has the added benefit that you
don’t go to jail.
In the case of the Gentrification Zone we're lucky that a preliminary list of targets is already available, evidence from the perps’ own mouths, the list ordered not necessarily by complicity but including those guilty both of acts of omission and commission. It’s a baker’s dozen—crackers not cookies—and unlike Mark Ott, Sheriff Hamilton, Assistant District Attorney Cobb or Rep. Dukes everybody is refreshingly whitebread, with only a few exceptions like the county attorney. The point of drawing up a list, and checking it twice, is that if blacks continue to turn the other cheek—as Rev. Clark might advise, relying on the Good Book for guidance—whites’ll just slap that one too. Which is what has already happened here, in the schools and at the university. Now it’s healthcare, to be followed by another round of land expropriation. Instead of Jesus’ teachings there’s a better lesson to take to heart, from Malcolm X: “By any means necessary.” A recent visit to the home of a principal race offender shows how confrontation might best be achieved in the white liberal mecca, the Live Music Capital of the World, starting with the institution that most threatens black lives in our fair city, the University of Texas.
Dr. Gregory Fenves lives at 3714 Meredith Street in West Austin—Tarrytown, actually, the very bosom of White West Austin power and privilege. To set the scene. If you’re coming from the Eastside you take Enfield Road a couple of blocks past Exposition and turn right on Roadrunner which runs into Meredith. Left on Meredith and the Fenves home is a few blocks down on your right. A nice neighborhood, for a couple of million dollars you too can find a fixer-upper. Taking a few trips to Meredith Street to catch somebody at home offered a chance to scout out the ‘hood. Tarrytown is a pretty dodgy locale for the visiting black male even today, kind of the white equivalent of a Chicago housing project in years past—except this is a pricey ghetto and includes many of the people who commit race crimes in our fair city, all living in this same comfortable zip code. Judge Kocurek met her fate in a driveway here. Prof. Greenberg and her husband are said to live in the neighborhood, too. Riding my bike to Greg Fenves’ house there were people out jogging and walking dogs—kids playing—folks working in their yards, all of the Caucasian persuasion, not that there's anything wrong with that.
He shook hands with me. You have to give him that. “What’s your name,” he asked warily, after he accepted my hand, looking relieved that it wasn’t the Jehovah’s Witnesses. “And who do you work for?” The Fenves home had an alarm company sign on the grass and “no soliciting” above the doorbell. On some level, both admonishments spoke to me personally but after riding all the way there, twice, my feeling was fuck it. Especially since the second time The Man himself answered on the first ring. Before even pushing the bell it was clear how this little visit was going to play out. There was an apprehensive look on Dr. Fenves’ face as he opened the door, not exactly welcoming, you feel me? He could have come to the door wearing only women’s panties and it wouldn’t have made any difference to an open-minded black male like me, but in fact he was wearing a burnt orange polo shirt with a little white Longhorn logo over the left breast. How loyal to the Longhorn Nation is that? He didn’t get enough of that shit Monday through Friday at work, in the University President's Office, he wore his gang colors at home on the weekends too? Fuck me. Oh well, but this is Austin—we try not to be judgmental. Especially those of us in the black community where our mantra is each to his or her own thing. No matter how bizarre that white people in this town are, the World Capital of Live Music and all.
My concern at that moment was to keep an eye on his hands. The
security company sign in the yard meant nothing. The home of the President of
the University of Texas would have two, probably three panic
buttons—considering the size of the house and taking into account Fenves'
importance a high official of the State of Texas, that was my guess, having done this kind of
work for a while, talking to white people in power who don't want to talk. There was
probably one button in the bedroom, one in the kitchen and perhaps one beside
the front door where Dr. Fenves was now standing. The alarms would sound at the pig pen on campus and at the local pig pen downtown and the local pigs would be there first. Unless there was a S.O. deputy or a Highway Patrol passing bu on MoPac. Right and wrong also played a role in my mental calculus that afternoon: the
African-American’s noble and ethical spirit is never far below the surface,
even in potentially-disagreeable interactions with The Man. In an unscheduled
interview at someone’s house you can’t push it—you just don’t have that right.
The whole purpose of my Tarrytown trip was a discussion about respecting
people’s homes, even if Dr. Fenves didn’t understand that. If this
motherfucker’s demeanor changed from annoyed to pissed off, my bike was a skip and jump away in the front yard, waiting to whisk me away. In the meantime
since it was probably going to be a brief interview it was best to go straight
for his solar plexus.
“I only have one question. Why are you trying to gentrify East
Austin?”
“We’re not going to do that,” Dr. Fenves said, still standing in
his doorway. It was a Saturday night, six p.m., and clearly he wasn’t going to
invite me in for a libation. That’s cool, a lot of wealthy whites have not had
a proper upbringing, we understand that on the African-American side of town.
It's an education thing.
In this conversation President Fenves was actually at a
disadvantage compared, for example, to Mayor Adler or Dean Johnston. Both the
mayor and the medical school dean have big I-won’t-come-in-your-mouth smiles and considerable charisma to call on. Dr. Fenves is a scientist by training, a
chemist by trade, which limits his charm resources, and his is the pale face of
institutional racism in the city today: it’s an interesting face
nonetheless. Saw him last year at a UT Regents meeting and he looked
completely different—older, tired, or under strain, and his face was puffy. The agenda that day included right-to-carry on campus, Chancellor
McRaven was busy explaining to the Regents that the new polymers in a modern
handgun won’t trigger a metal detector, and the President of UT Austin looked
like that particular discussion, although related to chemistry, his field, was
not why he got into higher education. At his home in our Saturday get-together
by contrast he looked relaxed, healthy and in good spirits, with the obvious
exception of my visit. For me this was the scary Dr. Fenves. Mayor Adler
and Dean Johnston are the public faces of the Gentrification Zone, doing all
the press and talking all the bullshit—Prof. Greenberg is busy working out the
mechanics, in her role as “senior advisor.” Butt Greg Fenves is the intellect behind
what’s happening. He's a smart guy. Steve Adler is a smart guy too, that's what
he tells people, but it's a different kind of smart. Fenves is another
University of California transplant, by the way—Berkeley this time—and to a guy
like him who sees an opportunity to put a big medical research deal together
for his institution, black people are just a detail to be dealt with. “We’re
not doing an Innovation Zone,” he said, still standing there in his doorway in
Tarrytown, a really nice crib by the way, drive by and check it out. Bring some
brothers along so that President Fenves’ll get an idea what it’s like to see
his neighborhood overrun by the wrong people.
“We’re not doing a Mission Bay,” he insisted, “we’ve brought in Merck, that’s all.” He added, beginning to close the door on me, “You’ll have to go through my office. Thank you.” Would that be the same office that refused an interview last year? Oh okay, good to know. Of course he was lying but you don’t rise to the top ranks of the University of Texas by telling the truth. It’s a different skill set entirely. He should be held to it, though, it came straight from the horse’s mouth: UT is not interested in the Innovation Zone, an assertion that, we will one day find out, probably sooner rather than later, is bullshit. He said it nonetheless.
And he even added a more revealing
comment. “We’ve brought in Merck.” No one mentioned Big Pharma until he did.
Score one for the Black African Militia, a forced error on the part of The Man,
although there are plenty of white chicks involved in promoting the
Gentrification Zone too, like Judge Eckhardt and Professor Greenberg. Everyone
is acting like Merck just showed up, the company heard about Austin’s great reputation,
bars on Sixth Street, Barton Springs, the Silicon Prairie, and all that. The
company was recruited by UT. In Dean Johnston’s calendars,
also released in response to an open records request, he was already meeting
with Merck last year. That’s what Dean Johnston was brought here for, big
business, not to educate young doctors.
Anyway, that evening Dr. Fenves had already cast a critical look
on where black people live and now we’ve done the same for him, seen him at
home in his Longhorns get-up. That evening at his house Dr. Fenves
realized—this was his take-home lesson. We know where he
lives.
5
Thomas Hollywood Henderson, former Pro Bowl Dallas Cowboy, and
San Francisco 49er, and former assistant to Gov. Ann Richards, tells a few good
stories from his sixty-odd years. He's an Austin guy, born and raised.
Recently, sitting in the anteroom outside City Council chambers,
waiting to address the Board of Adjustment on the subject of a property-line
dispute, he told a good one about being stopped by a couple of Bubba-like white
police officers as he was speeding along the roads of East Texas, back in the day, coming home
from Huntsville where he'd talked to a state prison crowd at Governor Richard’s
request. Hollywood said he was speeding like a motherfucker, guilty as sin, going
so fast that by the time the county pigs and state troopers stopped him they
already had their guns drawn and immediately jacked his hefty ass up over the
hood of the car while they patted him down. To set the scene.
So, like, one of the cops, let’s say one of the state troopers—because
they know how to read—this puerco had Hollywood's driver’s license and was mouthing out the
name. The situation was tense: It was night time, this is the environment during a police stop when many black men have died especially in the wilds of East Texas, “Escape from East Texas” you
could call this screenplay because the prudent Negro doesn’t want to be on
the road between Dallas and the Louisiana state line after dark. At any moment
Henderson could have been shot reaching for a weapon he didn’t have or clubbed
to the ground because a sheriff’s deputy “feared for his life.”
To set the scene the trooper has his flashlight in one hand.
He’s shinning it on the license and then in Henderson’s face. Next, one of the
pigs puts two and two together.
“Are you—” says one.
“You wouldn’t be—” says another.
And then they’re all crowding around. Cowboys fans, looks like.
“Hollywood!”
They got his autograph and sent him on his way. That was his
account, with certain editorial commentary on my part. The point here is
that sometimes there is justice for the black man in Texas, and black woman, even if not in Austin, Liberal Mecca and World Capital of Live Music and all that. We may—like Hollywood Henderson himself,
standing beside a Farm to Market Road in Peckerwood County—we may get the recognition
and respect we deserve. The second anecdote that Hollywood recounted was more to the
present point. He had received a letter, he was saying—still sitting there
waiting for his turn in City Council chambers. He got a letter from the University of Texas, he said, which is not his alma mater. He went to Oklahoma to play college ball.
Thomas Henderson was born in East Austin and is still a property
owner there, together with his brother. So, like, in the letter UT asked Hollywood if he
would “donate” the East Austin house where he grew up to the university? Repeating UT’s request, Henderson paused for dramatic effect. He is one
of the former NFL players who is party to a lawsuit about traumatic brain
injuries and the league’s lame reaction to same. Having said that, Hollywood doesn’t appear to have lost any steps from hits he’s given or taken. Despite
the long lines of cocaine, and the women—the rough play and the road trips—or
perhaps because of them, this is a brother who has led an extraordinarily
fortunate life, including winning the lottery twice, in addition to
a Super Bowl ring. But being asked to donate his mother’s home to the
University of Texas took this Negro’s breath away.
“How much money does UT have?” he asked rhetorically,
fixing his interviewer with an amazed stare.
$43,000,000,000.
That’s forty-three billion dollars, actually: the current size
of the university endowment and other holdings, give or take a few hundred
million. UT has forty-three billion dollars and, we now know, no shame.
You've got to be kidding about Dukes. She hardly bothered to show up for work for at least two sessions, plus a special or two. Her constituents finally and rightly got fed up with their absentee representative and her sense of entitlement.
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
ReplyDeleteMr. Lomax,
ReplyDeleteCan you please contact me about a topic that you have written about and are an expert on. My email is wcarsten@gmail.com. I looked for your email address online, but I couldn't find anything, which is why I'm submitting this request as a comment.
Thanks,
Carsten Andresen