-James Baldwin, “My Dungeon Shook,” The Fire Next Time
In “Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation,” the Uncle James warns the younger James, “you can only be destroyed” if you believe “that you really are” what others tell you are.
“Trust your experience. Know whence you came.”
I remember being terrified of bullies. My arm, squeezed too tightly by another elementary classmate, or the proverbial foot on the toe, obligated me to stand still, to feel the grip and to recognize the sudden palpitations in my chest and the diminishing availability of air. I had to listen and not act - in even self-defense. These fellow children frightened me. I felt small, and I was. I felt weak, vulnerable, unprotected, and I was. The overbearing and stifling seemed inhuman, dishonest and unnatural. I thought I was in danger those moments, but I was not.
In Palmyra, Pennsylvania, the collective experience of 400 foreign student workers’ encounter with the dishonest and unnatural, and they walked off their jobs on August 17, 2011; I am sure they have never felt freer!
The Hershey factory at Palmyra “packs Hershey’s chocolates,” and according to The New York Times, the students from “China, Nigeria, Romania and Ukraine” thought they enlisted in a summer “cultural exchange” program where they expected “to practice their English, make some money and learn what life is like in the United States.” Once the students reported to the factory, they became “underpaid” laborers.
I agree with the NYT writer Julia Preston. I think they did learn what life is like in the United States, the home of the Imperial bully!
Ordered to lift heavy boxes and pack “Reese’s candies, Kit-Kats and Almond Joys on a fast-moving production line,” the students discovered “deductions for fees associated with the program” and rent, writes Preston, barely left them enough earnings to recover the cost of obtaining visas.
As part of the preparation to teach in Ethiopia from 2002 to 2003, I attended the two-week, USAID pre-country workshops. I overheard a few younger teachers selected for this program bragged about going to Africa to “make money” and live in “awesome” pads.
In a country like Ethiopia (in 2002), one birr is roughly equivalent to eight dollars. An Ethiopian student pays roughly 150 birr for an average 15 dollar book. In a country like Ethiopia, one birr is hard to come by for millions of Ethiopians. I do not know if these young adult citizens of the U.S.A. secured those “awesome pads.” I do know that those who, along with me, worked in Ethiopia, earned $800 U.S. dollars a month, that is, 6,333 birr per month and this allowed many Americans to purchase as little as possible, except for gold jewelry, to do without hiring help, (or, if forced to, to hire an Ethiopian woman to clean house, wash clothes, and cook for minimum wages), and to give away (in terms of money) nothing! These young Americans returned to the States a little richer than when they left. (And teachers labored at teaching and the curriculum developers labored at developing curriculums).
In the U.S., some would call these young Americans ingenious, bright!
The 400 foreign students dared to question the sincerity (bless them; they learned quickly!) of the U.S-based corporation Hershey’s Chocolates.
The walkout at the Hershey plant is “the first time that foreign students have engaged in a strike to protest their employment,” but it is not the first time the State Department has received complaints from students participating in this program.
According to the New York Times report, a spokesperson for the State Department, John Fleming, is aware of the problem and is “investigating” it. Rick Anaya, Chief Executive of the Council for Educational Travel, U.S.A (State Department), claims he is not receiving “any cooperation” from the protesters.
“‘We are trying to work with these kids. All of this negativity is hurting an excellent program. We would go out of our way to help them, but it seems like someone is stirring them up out there.’”
Hmm…a second-year medical student from Istanbul, Harika Duygu Ozer, “invested $3,500” to participate in the program. Another young woman from China, Zhao Huijiao, invested “more than $6,000.” Standing for the duration of an eight-hour shift was common, but someone put them up to stirring trouble for the Hershey Company! “‘It is the worst thing for your fingers and hands and your back,’ says Ms Ozer, ‘You are standing at an angle.’”
“‘The tipping point was when we found out about the rent,’” says Godwin Efobi, a 26-year-old, third-year medical student from Nigeria. Their neighbors pay less in rent, and the deductions from their paychecks leave them with “less than $200 a week.”
But someone is stirring them up! All this negativity is damaging to the image of the program! (I think this line of thinking has been overheard many times here in the U.S.A.!).
Hershey, the towering Hershey Company near Hershey, PA., “the American chocolate capital,” is looking around, pointing the finger elsewhere. Who, us? We do not “directly operate the Palmyra packing plant,” says their spokesperson, Kirk Saville. See Exel, the managers. And Exel, well, says a spokesperson, the students come through “a staffing agency” that provides “‘temporary employees…we don’t have a lot of influence over some of those issues that they’ve raised.’”
Let us see…does this response remind Americans of those once very bad bullies of the defunct Soviet Union? Or is this similar to a response from the current world bullies, according to the U.S. State Department - those Iranians or Koreans? Or maybe things like this used to happen with the hooded villains when segregation and exploitation were in change down there in the South?
Cultural exchange program! No! Get the job done, we’ll barely pay you, and “you’ll take it and you’ll like it” because, Bogart-style, we have a foot on the toe! This is America!
Bullies grow up addicted to the skillful generation of power by inducing fear among the masses. THE Bully itself stirred up the students! The empowerment of the increasingly unrestrained collective of the “corporate person” is the U.S. government’s doing. One hand feeds another! Every worker need not apply to play on the transnational corporations’ playground, but introduce a human worker to the corporate assembly line and the corporate planners guarantee a transformation into mechanical entities, cranking out everything from Tomahawk missiles, drones, and oil rigs to genetically modified, pharmaceutical drugs, and yes, chocolates. This is America! The Empire of the heartless!
But this is the good news - the students said, enough and committed themselves to action! Are the students in danger now? Yes! But they are free - a state of being human many Americans believe they are experiencing but may never really experience! This is the irony of living free in the U.S.!
Hershey ducks and runs for cover while the State Department rises to defend the roughshod operation of one of the corporations it kowtows to in the first place. But note - it does so only if this corporate-roughshod operation is in danger of being exposed to the American public.
These menacing “kids” are the problem. Uncooperative! A threat to business as usual! Negative P.R. is an issue everyone at the top recognizes, not the human beings whose labor rights’ and human rights have been violated!
Nonetheless, the foreign students at the Hershey factory recognized they had rights, labor and human rights that no bully could take from them! Instead of beginning work at 3 p.m. on July 17, 2011, the students “walked into the plant and presented a petition with several hundred signatures to a management representative.”
I am sure they could feel palpitations in their throats and even envisioned myriad unsettling responses from the Hershey Company or law enforcement as holders of J-1 visas. But they marched, as students and workers, as people, outside the plants, and any and everyone could hear their chants in English, Chinese, Nigerian, Romanian, and Ukrainian: “‘we are the mighty, mighty students!’”
We are human beings! We know whence we came!
In the land of the bullies, among the bullies, it is only honest and natural to feel frightened, as I discovered many years ago in my late teens. Pick your battles, my grandmothers used to say, because here in the U.S., to be Black is to be either defeated or proactive. Pick your battles and she meant, they will surely pick you, and you will never know your true worth, who you are, or where you come from, if you do not and never act.
BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member, Lenore Jean Daniels, PhD, has a Doctorate in Modern American Literature/Cultural Theory. Click here to contact Dr. Daniels.
