This is not at all a scientific survey but my guess is that the number of destitute African-American men is growing. No women, or not many, and not to buttress City Hall’s denial that there is a problem, some of these brothers look like they could be small town folks, from Bastrop or even Milam County, somewhere rural. They're walking the big city sidewalk by circumstance not desire unless there is a part of old black East Austin that continued to resist, until recently, the onslaught of white Hipsters. Black people from an older era you might call them, when Afro-Texans had one foot in town and another in the country. A way of life that may have suddenly come to an end with the arrival of COVID-19 but was already disappearing due to gentrification. Anyway, seeing the homeless, it’s a hard decision to know who to give money to actually. Most of these brothers appear equally needy and are, more or less, the age group of 40 to 65 and black male, a description that includes me. So, like, a white homeless guy asked me for money a couple of days ago. And my answer was no.
The guy was kind of a jerk really, he got insistent, cracker privlidge, standing in front of my perch, you know how white people can be. He said that everyone he had asked that day for money lied and said they didn’t have any when clearly they did. He said my denial was a lie too which it was. He said that you can tell who has money and who doesn’t, he kind of got into a poor white revolutionary dialectic after that, which was kind of cool actually although he was not. This guy looked like a country boy too, btw, who had fucked up everything he touched in his entire life but it was always somebody else’s fault.
With an attitude too, not to be judgmental on my part. This white boy was maybe from some small-town East Texas pisspot, like the brothers on the sidewalk maybe were too. But the brothers were noble in their demeanor while he was not. Maybe people in pandemic are blowing west, like during the Dust Bowel, onward to Cali like the Great Depression or some historic shit like that?
There must be a migration going on because it’s always different guys blowing by, at least on Lavaca Street, here in this bucolic River City. They're mostly black and my age group which is doubly concerning, you know? So, like, regarding charity, my feeling as an African American is that if my budget allows five dollars that day as a direct donation to the poor, or the dispossessed, it’s not going to a white guy from Butt Fucking Texas, B.F.T., the five dollars is going to the black guy or black girl from B.F.T. Call that racist if you will. Because the white guying me a liar was born to privilege, you might say, no matter how hard his life may have been since then. White women are my second least likely awardees after white guys, to be honest although she gets extra points for being a woman because it's harder to be a woman, especially homeless. Most of my giving is to people of color, men as well as women. That's my revolutionary dialectic, actually. But the white homeless guy had a point too. Times have changed. So, like, feeling guilty about what he said, even if he suffered from white privilege—a few days later—just after sitting down on my perch, actually—well, a homeless brother came by, across the street, carrying all his shit, all his worldly goods, or whatever, on a pack on his back. Me running after him and calling out, “Do you need help?” like he was on fire? Which was not cool. And he was startled and turned around and said sure, yeah, and he got $6, all ones and gave me a smile.
During the next ten minutes there were like seven or eight more brothers, coming from the direction of the church, and two stragglers, a white lady and a white guy, but the vast majority black men of a certain age. Which was not a good sign, frankly, from my point of view. And it’s the last of these brothers who will be called to your attention now. He was on my side of the sidewalk and moving south towards the river. To set the scene. He looked literally like death incarnate, worn-out and in a non-sustainable state, actually. Like, all you would have to do is close his eyes and he’d be gone. But he was still trucking along, with his shit, moving at a pretty good pace, actually, they all are, like they’re on their way somewhere important, just came to the university for the food. And he smiled and he said hello to me. Whatever’s going on, however hard times are, you have to have reverence for human spirit.
But there also need to be consequences, you feel me, not for the guys on the street but for the people who put them there.
Someone needs to take responsibility for what has happened and is happening to African-Americans in this city during the pandemic. My favorite candidate is Spencer Cronk and he’s the city manager, actually. Mr. Cronk's pigeons need to come home to roost, you feel me?
He came from Minneapolis, a city recently much in the news and in a bad way, that has a strong-mayor system of government, unlike our own that has a strong city manager. To set the scene again. And since arriving on the scene here in the Live Music Capital of the World, Mr. Cronk has struggled to establish better outcomes for minorities, especially regarding the police and use of violence against the black and brown communities. More recently in the fight against COVID his efforts towards equity have also fallen short and the result is worse healthcare outcomes for black people—especially Latinos, in this enlightened capital city of the Lone Star State. Spencer Cronk has been at City Hall for two years now, which is long enough to own what happens here.
Yet according to the City Attorney’s office, in that time the city manager has not received a performance evaluation. So, like, it’s interesting that of the two most problematic public officials for black people in Austin, Texas, the two guys most responsible for minority disenfranchisement in River City, although there's competition for that honor—best in minority endangerment, you could call it. Are the police chief and his boss, the city manager. Neither has had a performance evaluation in two years, according to Anne Morgan, the City Attorney. There's nothing on paper in other words. But it’s likely that, just in the last few weeks, the city manager has actually killed more people of color through inaction and through incompetence, than Police Chief Brian Manley’s troops have shot, actually, in ten years. This is not a new issue by any means. According to the Times, 60% of the victims of Minneapolis police shootings, in the last ten years, a period that includes Spencer Cronk’s three-year tenure in Minneapolis as City Coordinator—as Minneapolis’ chief administrative officer, in other words. 60% were black victims in a municipality that is only 20% black.
Unless he was deaf and blind Mr. Cronk was aware of bad practices during his time in the Midwest, both the police force’s reputation and the deadly reality. Indeed in an interview at the time of his hiring in Minneapolis, in 2014, describing his duties as city coordinator in Minneapolis, he said, speaking of the city fathers, “They were intentional about that word ‘coordinator’ because they really wanted to allow somebody to work with the different city department heads — police, health, civil rights—to coordinate their efforts.” Police, health and civil rights, those are the three areas he has been least successful in Austin too
In health care, to continue, regarding the coming of the virus, Spencer Cronk had time that other leaders did not. He saw what was happening on the coasts of the United States at the beginning of the pandemic and did nothing to prepare for an eventuality that he was supposed to know would affect minorities most. Our health is already worse than whites' in this city and nationwide. He's been here two years, in a big, rich, increasingly wired (not weird) metropolis, where the minority population has not received equitable treatment in the past, including health care, schools and infrastructure. To say nothing of the courts and the pigs.
Yet warnings about the lack of COVID testing in poor and minority neighborhoods are unheeded. Warnings that data on differential effects of the pandemic on the poor and minorities in Austin were not tracked or the results were buried. Warnings about especially worse outcomes in black and Latino communities were not provided to the public until relatively recently, after dozens of deaths and thousands of cases. In other words the city manager has a record, whether his performance has been evaluated by the mayor and City Council or not. Spencer Cronk knew in Minneapolis what was really happening with police, just as he knows what's really happening here in public health. And what are the chances he's going to make any more of a difference in Austin than he did in Minneapolis?
He is used to seeing minorities in a dependent and disadvantaged position, in other words. Whether from police actions, land use rewrites or even in the realm of health care. And he does nothing. He is a white male, this would be my sociological argument, as seen thru a psychosocial lens, who was brought up in circumstances of white male privilege and who lacks empathy for those unlike himself. He also lacks the cognitive ability to serve the poor. Every time those gentleman pass my perch, on Lavaca Street. Reaching in my pocket for a few bills, my anger turns on Mr. Cronk and what he has not done and is not doing.
