We’ve talked about the bad leadership of PUSH Buffalo’s Senior Management Team causing the toxic work environment that exists there that led to PUSH moving very far away from their stated mission, but who are some of the people over the paid staff of the Senior Management Team who have allowed this toxic culture to thrive? Let’s take a look at PUSH board member Carl Nightingale.

 

Nightingale is a founding member and board member of PUSH Buffalo. He is a professor at the Department of Transnational Studies at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York. According to his PUSH Buffalo board bio; “Carl Nightingale teaches at UB about cities and how to make them fairer and more just for all those who live in them. He has volunteered for PUSH since the early years, running a film series and working on the Green Development Zone website, as well as on fundraising. As a board member, he would like to continue to connect PUSH with new resources for organizing and real power.” According the University at Buffalo’s Department of Africana and American Studies, Nightingale’s fields of interest are; “Race, critical race theory, and racial justice; Urban history; World history; Urban racial segregation in global perspective; Youth culture and activism; youth culture as a global phenomenon; Community organizing; African American history.” Also according to them; “Carl Nightingale’s new book “Segregation: a World History of Divided Cities.” University of Chicago Press, 2012) is the co-winner of the 2012 Jerry Bentley Prize in World History from the World History Association and the American Historical Association.

 

The book traces the spread of practices of racial segregationist in cities from their most ancient roots through the rise of racial segregation as a global phenomenon in the years from 1700 to the present. It ties together primary research on cities in Asia, Europe, Africa and the Americas with an extensive synthetic reading of the history of urban politics worldwide.

 

Prof. Nightingale curates the exhibition “Buffalo Divided and Unequal: How it Happened and What People are Doing about It,” which is available for installation in appropriate venues.”

 

“Buffalo Divided and Unequal: How it Happened and What People are Doing about it!?” We can tell you what Carl Nightingale is doing about it. He’s financially helping feed the monstrosity that is the non-profit industrial complex in Buffalo which in order to survive, parasites off of racial divisiveness in the city. We call it poverty pimping. Aside from being a college professor, Nightingale has personal wealth and he has used it to build ‘real power’ for himself by funding PUSH Buffalo initiatives since the beginning and while sitting on it’s board of directors. Think about that! This guy sits on the PUSH Buffalo board of directors, and FUNDS it. He helps to manipulate the toxic work culture at PUSH which fuels its antithetical nature of their mission, and helps to pay for it! If that isn’t a conflict of interest we don’t know what is. He who pays the piper, controls the tune or the songs being played. And, we know this particular song very well. We already told you that grants are terrible, and here is a prime reason why. Nightingale sits on the PUSH board of directors which is the de facto leadership of the organization on top of its paid staff of the Senior Management Team, while overseeing PUSH’s toxic work culture. Paying to spread the lies that PUSH has been pushing to the community and the movement!

 

Many have speculated over the years that Nightingale uses his financial power of investing in the social injustice at PUSH Buffalo to really be the leader or controller of PUSH’s board of directors. This may be one of the white guys using PUSH as a front to poverty pimp low-income people for clout and money who actually runs the PUSH show. Some have viewed Nightingale’s background as an ‘educator’ as one of his self interests in the organization. Basically in a weird way seeing the organization as some type of social justice experiment on black and brown folk. “Let’s put a couple Negros and Latinos in our Green Development Zone (GDZ) cage and see what happens!” For those who don’t know, PUSH’s GDZ is roughly a rectangular 10 block area which it owns property in on Buffalo’s West Side, where many of its community developments are. We don’t know what Mr. Nightingale’s self interest’s in running PUSH’s affairs which hurt its employees and the community are. We do know that “people know what they want where they live.” And, what PUSH has become and is offering isn’t it.