June 29, 2019. The treatment of refugees at home and abroad: A Greensboro, NC example.
Greensboro, NC, a medium sized Southern city, has long been a resettlement destination for refugees only now being matched by the Charlotte metropolitan area. The election of Trump has severely curtailed the numbers of newcomers arriving at the Piedmont Triad International Airport which in turn has affected the region's refugee resettlement system already weakened by a scandal in 2010 that caused Lutheran Family Services to hastily depart. Without a steady influx of newcomers, local resettlement agencies cannot justify staff. Cutbacks are inevitable. In May 2018, a fire swept through an apartment at the notorious Summit-Cone complex, killing all five children of the Mugabo family. I had documented years ago our efforts to get refugee families moved out from there. The owner was well known to all agencies and organizations that operate in Greensboro.
Unlike past confrontations with the owner that that faded from public memory despite good News Record coverage, the horror of the 2018 fire could not ignored by Greensboro’s elected officials. The agencies, organizations and offices that make up the local refugee resettlement system were quick to distance themselves from responsibility, a rather remarkable success for them given the widely aired complaints and concerns voiced by families who lived at the complex. The forced relocation of families after the fire did not result in questions about how they were being treated, nor was there much interest in addressing the special needs of families undergoing repeated trauma. Some families are known to have moved back to the complex.
But the story won't go away, even as system defenders have proposed various excuses, for examples, that the Summit-Cone families were no longer clients under the contractual care of the agencies that placed them there, that they voluntarily chose to live at a known slum, that agencies no longer placed clients there after hearing of complaints from the families, and finally, that the families were "free agents" who could have moved anytime if they didn't like the conditions. And in a town that has long supported refugee resettlement through direct assistance from its large churches, it is remarkable how tepid the few comments have been from church leaders. Refugee service providers have sought for years to elevate their profession. The director of one agency's main office located in Durham was one such vocal proponent. But the excuses voiced by Greensboro's agencies reflect a culture of defensiveness and ineptitude that harken back to the time when Lutheran Family Services fell apart. Since the fire, only one individual, the former director of a resettlement agency office, has broken ranks, distraught that she and her organization could have done more to have prevented the tragedy.
Since the fire a slew of conferences, meetings and summits have taken place, hosted by housing and health experts, that reflect a comprehensive approach to community health and deploy a raft of terms like "intersectionality", "social determinants of health", "unconscious bias", "poverty", "redlining" and historic and persistent racism. This language replaces the neoliberal idea of individual agency embodied in the policy of increased "access" to services as the solution to persistent poverty and inequality. Having provided "access", healthcare providers have been left wondering why chronic disease rates continued to climb. It is revealing that today's leaders now realize that without a car ride or food to eat, increased access to services is meaningless to most poor, which include many refugee families. Yet none of this "design thinking" is applied to the Summit-Cone fire or the practices of the local refugee resettlement system as if refugees settled in our region were protected by a magic bubble. Protectionism and paternalism persists. I'm tempted to say it's an old school, plantation mentality that defends itself and extols the generosity, goodness and sacrifices of its practitioners. Refugees exist in the minds of these magic bubble conjurers in the same way African Americans in a pre-Civil Rights era South existed for some liberal whites, that is, as the occasional means to demonstrate their own moral goodness through a few words here and there that publicly proclaim where they stand. More than one year after the fire and deep into the Trump presidency, one writes, "As immigrant advocates, we have to start talking about racism, race and white supremacy". I suppose what this writer means is that it is time for refugee resettlement defenders to stop regarding newcomers as the grateful recipients of their gifts, services and good intentions and instead start thinking about the civil rights and legal protections they are entitled to.
In the meantime, I don't believe much help can be expected from supposed allies who are just getting started on Poverty 101 and who believe Black Lives Matter does not extend to the many black Sudanese and Congolese families who were placed at Summit-Cone. In their wish to "respect" the traditions and values of refugees' homelands, they think and act as if Greensboro was some kind of overseas Peace Corps site. Just how far behind is their thinking? In World War 2, minorities in America decided to participate in the war effort, going to work at the factories that produced the goods and weapons to defeat the Axis powers and serving in an openly segregated, racist US military. Their purpose was to achieve Double Victory, the end of fascism and authoritarianism abroad and the end of racism at home. Thus they put two big ideas together to make a worldview that has long gone out of favor with the rise of Trump. But unless you believe in civil rights protections and legal entitlements here in the US and human rights beyond our borders, you wind up with the absurd, morally and politically empty views spoken by a prominent academic and system defender. According to this expert, recently arrived, highly traumatized, vulnerable families who lack money, social connections or cultural understanding of American life are able to make fully informed choices about where they live in Greensboro. They have "free will" and agency to do as they please, just as (I think this neoliberal must agree) the families of native born residents here in Greensboro who had to lie and fail drug tests in order to qualify for slum housing for themselves and their children. For this expert, nonprofit agencies that serve either refugees or homeless provide "access" into the system for their clients. Having placed them into hell, their responsibility is done.
Greensboro, NC, a medium sized Southern city, has long been a resettlement destination for refugees only now being matched by the Charlotte metropolitan area. The election of Trump has severely curtailed the numbers of newcomers arriving at the Piedmont Triad International Airport which in turn has affected the region's refugee resettlement system already weakened by a scandal in 2010 that caused Lutheran Family Services to hastily depart. Without a steady influx of newcomers, local resettlement agencies cannot justify staff. Cutbacks are inevitable. In May 2018, a fire swept through an apartment at the notorious Summit-Cone complex, killing all five children of the Mugabo family. I had documented years ago our efforts to get refugee families moved out from there. The owner was well known to all agencies and organizations that operate in Greensboro.
Unlike past confrontations with the owner that that faded from public memory despite good News Record coverage, the horror of the 2018 fire could not ignored by Greensboro’s elected officials. The agencies, organizations and offices that make up the local refugee resettlement system were quick to distance themselves from responsibility, a rather remarkable success for them given the widely aired complaints and concerns voiced by families who lived at the complex. The forced relocation of families after the fire did not result in questions about how they were being treated, nor was there much interest in addressing the special needs of families undergoing repeated trauma. Some families are known to have moved back to the complex.
But the story won't go away, even as system defenders have proposed various excuses, for examples, that the Summit-Cone families were no longer clients under the contractual care of the agencies that placed them there, that they voluntarily chose to live at a known slum, that agencies no longer placed clients there after hearing of complaints from the families, and finally, that the families were "free agents" who could have moved anytime if they didn't like the conditions. And in a town that has long supported refugee resettlement through direct assistance from its large churches, it is remarkable how tepid the few comments have been from church leaders. Refugee service providers have sought for years to elevate their profession. The director of one agency's main office located in Durham was one such vocal proponent. But the excuses voiced by Greensboro's agencies reflect a culture of defensiveness and ineptitude that harken back to the time when Lutheran Family Services fell apart. Since the fire, only one individual, the former director of a resettlement agency office, has broken ranks, distraught that she and her organization could have done more to have prevented the tragedy.
Since the fire a slew of conferences, meetings and summits have taken place, hosted by housing and health experts, that reflect a comprehensive approach to community health and deploy a raft of terms like "intersectionality", "social determinants of health", "unconscious bias", "poverty", "redlining" and historic and persistent racism. This language replaces the neoliberal idea of individual agency embodied in the policy of increased "access" to services as the solution to persistent poverty and inequality. Having provided "access", healthcare providers have been left wondering why chronic disease rates continued to climb. It is revealing that today's leaders now realize that without a car ride or food to eat, increased access to services is meaningless to most poor, which include many refugee families. Yet none of this "design thinking" is applied to the Summit-Cone fire or the practices of the local refugee resettlement system as if refugees settled in our region were protected by a magic bubble. Protectionism and paternalism persists. I'm tempted to say it's an old school, plantation mentality that defends itself and extols the generosity, goodness and sacrifices of its practitioners. Refugees exist in the minds of these magic bubble conjurers in the same way African Americans in a pre-Civil Rights era South existed for some liberal whites, that is, as the occasional means to demonstrate their own moral goodness through a few words here and there that publicly proclaim where they stand. More than one year after the fire and deep into the Trump presidency, one writes, "As immigrant advocates, we have to start talking about racism, race and white supremacy". I suppose what this writer means is that it is time for refugee resettlement defenders to stop regarding newcomers as the grateful recipients of their gifts, services and good intentions and instead start thinking about the civil rights and legal protections they are entitled to.
In the meantime, I don't believe much help can be expected from supposed allies who are just getting started on Poverty 101 and who believe Black Lives Matter does not extend to the many black Sudanese and Congolese families who were placed at Summit-Cone. In their wish to "respect" the traditions and values of refugees' homelands, they think and act as if Greensboro was some kind of overseas Peace Corps site. Just how far behind is their thinking? In World War 2, minorities in America decided to participate in the war effort, going to work at the factories that produced the goods and weapons to defeat the Axis powers and serving in an openly segregated, racist US military. Their purpose was to achieve Double Victory, the end of fascism and authoritarianism abroad and the end of racism at home. Thus they put two big ideas together to make a worldview that has long gone out of favor with the rise of Trump. But unless you believe in civil rights protections and legal entitlements here in the US and human rights beyond our borders, you wind up with the absurd, morally and politically empty views spoken by a prominent academic and system defender. According to this expert, recently arrived, highly traumatized, vulnerable families who lack money, social connections or cultural understanding of American life are able to make fully informed choices about where they live in Greensboro. They have "free will" and agency to do as they please, just as (I think this neoliberal must agree) the families of native born residents here in Greensboro who had to lie and fail drug tests in order to qualify for slum housing for themselves and their children. For this expert, nonprofit agencies that serve either refugees or homeless provide "access" into the system for their clients. Having placed them into hell, their responsibility is done.
