By Howard Bryant

We wouldn’t have Colin Kaepernick without Jackie Robinson. Long before Kaepernick bore the backlash of taking a knee, most of the public in Robinson’s time wanted him to “shut up and play,” too. The field, an escape haven for many white sports fans, was no place for Black athletes to speak out for their civil rights. Robinson was one of the master builders of the Heritage, the legacy of the politically-engaged Black athlete. Kaepernick stands as one of its most visible inheritors. In honor of Robinson’s hundredth birthday, let’s take a closer at this complex figure in these passages from Howard Bryant’s The Heritage: Black Athletes, a Divided America, and the Politics of Patriotism.

***

For black men, sports was not as promising an employment opportunity as it appeared. Their bodies were valuable, but beyond playing, chances to coach, evaluate personnel, or run or own teams were as remote as they were in the non-sports world. And as for the Heritage, Jackie Robinson had created the template of the black political athlete, but it was still a game, and employees were still just ballplayers, with plenty of visibility but not nearly enough security (the million-dollar, guaranteed contract was a decade and a half away), so the tolerance for speaking out about social issues was low. Even during the obvious inequality of the Jim Crow era, the white mainstream was still confounded by the black demand for equality. Some whites admired Robinson. Many more simply admired his playing, and most of the public had forgotten he had done the government the solid of testifying against Paul Robeson and wanted him to shut up about politics and the constant demands of black people (“What do they want now?”). This prompted resentment from whites and wariness from the black establishment: pull back; don’t rock the boat, lest we risk everything being taken away.

By 1964, Robinson had already been retired nearly a decade. Two years earlier, he had been enshrined in the Baseball Hall of Fame. He was a living legend. Robinson’s face was heading for the immortality of an American stamp, with streets and schools, scholarships and highways, to be named after him.

Yet to the young people who were emerging as the activists of the era, Jackie Robinson was a fossil, too old, too establishment to reach anyone under the age of forty. He was their parents’ age, and no self-respecting radical listened to his parents. In retirement, though, Robinson was more radical than he’d been as a player, all of which burnished the future legend, but at that time, Robinson was seen as an out-of-step old man. He was a Nixon supporter during the 1960 presidential election and remained a moderate Republican for the rest of his life. Younger blacks thought the times had passed him by, even as Robinson traveled to the Deep South to stand with the civil rights movement, marching side by side with Martin Luther King Jr., registering people to vote, showing his face. Robinson also never quite lived down his role in the House of Un-American Activities Committee’s takedown of Paul Robeson, an infamous moment Malcolm X never let him forget in their public war of words. By today’s mild standards of dissent, Robinson sounds like Malcolm X, but at the time, Malcolm X referred to Jackie Robinson, who carried America on his shoulders until it broke him, as an Uncle Tom. Robinson already knew what America’s African American youth thought of him, and Malcolm was unrelenting in his criticism of Jackie’s moderation: “They see me in a suit and tie and they look at my white hair and they’re too young to remember what I did, or they don’t care. I began to talk and some shouted ‘Oreo.’ You know, the cookie that’s black outside and white underneath.”

***

While Robinson’s influence may not have made an imprint on younger activists, it couldn’t be denied that it solidified the Heritage for years to come.

***

The Robinson influence on the baseball traditions of the Heritage led to a tightly knit network of African American players that would span generations, both leagues, and the entire country. “We had to take care of each other,” former Major League Baseball manager and retired player Dusty Baker said. “There weren’t that many of us. You knew the game didn’t always want you. You had to pass on what you knew, like, prepare the ones that were coming. That was your responsibility.”

The spirit of activism defined sports in the 1960s. In 1964, NBA players—the league of Russell and Chamberlain, Jerry West and Elgin Baylor—nearly boycotted the All-Star Game over the pension policy. In 1965, after being treated with racial hostility in New Orleans, black AFL players boycotted the game. In 1966, Major League Baseball players hired labor negotiator Marvin Miller and built the most powerful union in the history of professional sports, a model for athletes coming to understand their rising power in the workforce. The 1968 Olympics were seismic and could have been more so if the athletes had decided to push further and not gone to Mexico City. In 1969, Curt Flood took the first step toward defying baseball at the Supreme Court when he refused to be traded from St. Louis to Philadelphia, challenging the reserve clause, baseball rules that teams owned players for life. Along with artists in the fast-growing music industry, black athletes were the most visible black professionals in the world. The public wanted them to be grateful for their talent, but athletes didn’t just have talent; they had power. If the best prospect for black America was not going to be education but the lottery ticket of sports, body over brain, then the most physically gifted African Americans were bound to interrupt America’s fun and games when the times demanded their political participation. This was the Heritage. It was the special inheritance of the black athlete. It belonged to them now, even if it was a burden the next several generations of athletes did not always seem to want.

For all the gauzy tributes and reflections of the 1960s, there was no mistaking a central fact: the Heritage and all of its political strains, from the conservative push of moderate integration to radical wings of the movement, were never welcome by the suits who signed the checks or the executives who picked the talent. Jim Brown told his biographer Dave Zirin that he considered Paul Robeson his “number-one guy, a great man . . . who was doing it, fighting, for decades before anyone knew Dr. King.” Robinson was a Republican, an integrationist, but never shied from asserting his rights.

About the Author 

Howard Bryant is a senior writer for ESPN.com and ESPN the Magazine and has served as the sports correspondent for NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday since 2006. He is the author of The Last Hero: A Life of Henry Aaron; Juicing the Game: Drugs, Power, and the Fight for the Soul of Major League Baseball; Shut Out: A Story of Race and Baseball in Boston; and the three-book Legends sports series for middle-grade readers. A two-time Casey Award winner (2003, 2011) for best baseball book of the year, Bryant was also a 2003 finalist for the Society for American Baseball Research Seymour Medal. In 2016, he was a finalist for the National Magazine Award and received the 2016 Salute to Excellence Award from the National Association of Black Journalists. He lives in Northampton, Massachusetts. Follow him on Twitter at @hbryant42 and visit his website.

By Kay Whitlock

A fireball begins to rise, and the world's first atomic mushroom cloud begins to form, nine seconds after Trinity detonated on July 16, 1945. Photo credit: US Department of Defense.

Dear Folks,

We have been getting all this atomic bomb dope today and yesterday. I don’t know what to think. If only a third of this dope is factual it revolutionizes the whole world; necessitating a complete new set of ideas . . . If this is a fact the war is over, I am coming home, but the whole idea scares me. I guess the first thought that flashes thru anyone’s mind is what is going to happen in the future when two nations go to war with this equipment . . .
—from a letter written by my partner’s father, then a young naval officer serving aboard a minesweeper in the Pacific

I am often drawn to historical battlefields and sites by a sense that the memories, the ghosts, the landscape will somehow reveal more than I have yet learned through book-and-documentary-related study. And by the inchoate sense that I may even be changed by it, that in mysterious ways, my justice vision will be moved toward greater wholeness. In solitary reflection in places where something terrible happened, I listen to the land, to winds, to the rustle of leaves. I cull histories, photographs, poetry, and survivor accounts to try to conjure in my imagination the people and the place and the moment. And sometimes something close to that happens, a quiet ripple in time and perception that somehow shifts how I see and experience everything. When I lived in southern Colorado, long before a national historic site was created, I periodically drove out east to Sand Creek, where a long-ago cavalry massacre of Cheyenne and Arapaho peoples—mostly women, children, and elderly people—took place. There, I sat alone for hours and in silence on land unmarked by buildings or pathways. For whatever reason, Shiloh still disquiets me in a way many other historic battlegrounds do not.

Perhaps Trinity Site, part of a vast, desert landscape, with blue mountains off in the distance, had metamorphosed into that, an elegiac lamentation murmured by earth and sky.

First-hand witnesses to the Trinity test use vivid words to describe what they felt, heard, and saw as this new force, capable of annihilation on a global scale, was released: “breathtaking,” “awe,” “grandeur,” “fantastic.” They reported that the flash of light came first. Then, as Val Fitch, an enlisted man with the Army’s Special Engineer Detachment noted, “It took the blast wave about 30 seconds. There was the initial loud report, the sharp gust of wind, and then the long period of reverberation as the sound waves echoed off the nearby mountains and came back to us.”

The expanding fireball and shockwave of the Trinity explosion, seen .025 seconds after detonation on July 16, 1945. Photo credit: US Department of Defense.

I imagined the memory of that sound would yet be echoing; that the ground would still tremble, at least in my heart. But the ghosts had fled. We were greeted on arrival by imposing banks of port-a-potties and a few scattered tables where friendly local people behind gas grills offered hot dogs and hamburgers for purchase.

From there, it was a quarter-mile’s walk to Ground Zero, marked by a stone obelisk erected long after the test, and surrounded by a tall chain link fence. Along the pathway, cheerful people at a mobile souvenir stand sold commemorative mushroom cloud t-shirts, pins, and other ephemera. The clicking of Geiger counters on display tables confirmed the still-radioactive nature of trinitite, a greenish, glasslike substance of fused sand and other particles created by the intense heat and force of the first atomic blast.

If Trinity Site is a shrine, trinitite is its sacred relic. Collectors have acquired a lot of the stuff—allegedly before its taking was banned in 1952—and we saw scattered bits of it on the ground, though most has been buried. While visitors are assured that no health risk is posed by its presence, signs warn that taking trinitite is theft of government property. But we saw teenagers scrounging for some in the dirt. On the way out, just the other side of Stallion Gate, we encountered many weekend vendors hawking chunks of trinitite for sale out of their cars and trucks.

A series of large Manhattan Project-related photographs is displayed along a northern segment of the Ground Zero fence. Save for the photo of the Trinity Site Polo Team, these are iconic images of the bomb and the buildup to the test, long familiar in bomb lore. There are no photographs of the devastation to the peoples and landscapes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Courtesy buses took us a short distance out to the McDonald ranch house—the Army seized the house from a local family under protest in 1942 and never returned it—where final assembly of the active plutonium core for “the gadget” took place before the completed bomb was transported to the test tower. Because there are so few “things” to actually see at the site, people flocked to an empty room to take selfies under a single lightbulb dangling on a cord from the ceiling with a sign marking the space as “Plutonium Assembly Room.”

Of the few hundred people we saw at Trinity Site, more than a few were Japanese Americans and visitors from Japan. There were also many young men, predominantly white, who had served in Iraq or Afghanistan and were accompanied by buddies, wives, and girlfriends. They made jokes about The Bomb, but the laughter that greeted them was short-lived and uncomfortable, a series of staccato barks. Some people, not many, brought their kids who seemed bored. Others, like us, were in their sixties and older; many of these men wore hats or other indicators of their status as veterans of earlier wars and eras. Mostly, there was silence, which did not seem so much reverent or contemplative as baffled: What the hell?

Trinity Site. Photo credit: Kay Whitlock

Whatever anyone was looking for, I doubt that they found it.

All this is to say: Trinity Site is a monument of erasure. A memorial offering only the assertion that something awesome took place here, and that Americans did it. And by “erasure,” I don’t mean what many people consider the emptiness of a desert landscape. I grew up on a shortgrass prairie. It has always been the arroyos, the deserts, the tablelands and plateaus, the spare places where movement always seems to happen only at the corner of vision that most stir my soul.

No, this void is intentional. Crafted entirely by humans, it is something akin to a hidden entombment. Buried somewhere deep beneath the assertion of magnificent accomplishment is something no one is supposed to notice.

Part III: Sacrifice

But Mr. F was wrong yesterday when he said that this country is so old it did not matter what we Anglos do here. What we do anywhere matters, but especially here. It matters very much. Mesas and mountains, rivers and trees, winds and rain are as sensitive to the actions and thoughts of humans as we are to their forces. They take into themselves what we give off, and give it out again.
—Edith Warner, journal entry, June 24, 1933, In the Shadow of Los Alamos

At an unmarked place along the roadside on the way to Los Alamos, at the edge of lands belonging to the San Ildefonso Pueblo, stand the remains of a small adobe tearoom/café run by Edith Warner and her friend and companion Tilano, a pueblo elder. Once open to the public, the government permitted the teahouse to remain open during the intense Manhattan Project years solely for the purpose of providing refreshments and brief respite to Robert Oppenheimer, the theoretical physicist who led the A-bomb development effort, Niels Bohr, and other atomic scientists and their wives.

One overcast and rain-swept morning, my partner and I drove to Los Alamos. On our way,

following the careful directions provided by a friend, and without encroaching upon San Ildefonso lands, we stopped near a small turnout and walked back to look at the remnants of small buildings where Warner lived and worked. Peggy Pond Church, who knew Warner and Tilano, notes that the lives of tearoom visitors were all heavily-surveilled, filled with tension, and circumscribed by stringent restrictions and security measures. Accordingly, she writes, “there were many people at Los Alamos who felt that only their evenings at Edith Warner’s kept them human.”

Warner’s story deserves to be encountered on its own terms, especially in her own writings and journals, most of which were published after her death. Although she did not know any details until after the Trinity test, she almost certainly sensed and feared a terrible weapon in the making. Yet she did not hate the scientists. Nor did she justify their work, nor did she comfort herself by simplifying in her mind the magnitude or violence of what was being created. Instead, rooted in the love of earth, water, and sky, and recognizing the ultimate importance of respectful, compassionate, evolving relationship—to people and all beings as well as to the earth—she saw more deeply, and with clearer vision, what this all meant. Hers was not an activist vision, but nonetheless it quietly subverts supremacist notions by refusing to see human beings as somehow separate from or in dominant relation to nature. Rooted in Indigenous understandings, it  recognizes well-being can only result from just, respectful, and non-destructive relationship in many intersecting realms.

This is where—along the road, near a crumbling adobe teahouse, in that particular New Mexico landscape that includes the San Ildefonso Pueblo, and in the writings of Warner—I finally caught a sentient glimpse of larger in relation to Trinity. A powerfully sensate inkling of wholeness, or at least something closer to it, that goes far beyond daylight recognition. And that’s when I began to recognize the luminescence of Trinity for what it really is: part of a murder-suicide pact on a global scale. I didn’t agree to this pact—though new generations of cheerleaders cling to the dream of the technological fix—and neither did most of you.

The luminescence of Trinity touches everything; it has since the first test, and it continues to touch lives and ecologies, mostly in ways that are harmful, not immediately visible, forgotten, and ignored. And it violates every possible, sane understanding of “right relationship.” The same is true for all structural forms of violence.

For the most part, political perceptions and discourse are so fragmented, so hopelessly rent, not only in the mainstream, but along the liberal/progressive/left spectrum. I know that transformative change is fought for, and begins to arrive, in bits and pieces; in fits and starts. But our animating analyses and visions should never be piecemeal.

Mainstream political and economic conversation depend on disassociation as an organizing principle of dialogue, policy, platform. There is a civic habit, deeply engrained, of never addressing wholeness and the kinship of human and other sentient beings. It could be done. Not by ignoring the constituent parts of structural violence—white supremacy, economic violence, gender violence, ecological devastation, genocide, mass extinction—but by addressing them specifically and with regard to the dynamic relationships among them. Yet many of us say that is impossible because “it’s too overwhelming,” or “we’ll lose focus.” Often: “we’ll lose our funding.”

But what is the cost of voluntarily spinning endlessly in the lethal centrifuge of cosmetic change and fatalism created by accepting existing terms of debate? It’s time to establish new ones; to work as hard to shift consciousness as we do policy. Groundbreaking efforts by abolitionists and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to shift both consciousness and priorities already provide some heartening models for thinking differently. Others will emerge. The alternative is to let fear, rage, and failure of imagination triumph.

Structural violence is not “inevitable,” nor is it “necessary.” Its varied forms constitute a series of interrelated murder-suicide pacts organized by dominant power hierarchies around the rhetoric and practices of supremacy, survival, and security. These pacts are then invested with a quasi-holy status. But it is a shabby holiness, and phony, manufactured at the bipartisan crossroads of greed and an unquenchable thirst for domination.

Eventually, these pacts will take us all down—peoples, other sentient beings, cultures, ecologies, smaller caring economies—but some have long been going down first and hardest, in alignment with the dictates of racial capitalism which require never-ending blood sacrifice. The geographer and abolitionist Ruth Wilson Gilmore has defined racism as “state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.” And this group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death is not only raced but classed, gendered, and overtly or covertly eugenic to the end.

Better to name and publicly withdraw consent to these unwritten pacts. Better to expose and discard the consecration of nightmare. Better to go larger. 

Read part 1 of “The Luminescence of Trinity: Consecrating Nightmare at the Center of a Sacred Word.”

About the Author 

Kay Whitlock is a writer and activist who has been involved with racial, gender, queer, and economic justice movements since 1968. Her political vision is unapologetically abolitionist. She is coauthor of Considering Hate: Violence, Goodness, and Justice in American Culture and Politics with Michael Bronski, the award-winning Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States with Joey L. Mogul and Andrea J. Ritchie, and cofounder and contributing editor for the weekly Criminal Injustice series at CriticalMassProgress.com. She lives in Missoula, Montana. Follow her on Twitter at @KayJWhitlock.

By Kay Whitlock

Trinity test explosion at 25 seconds in. Photo credit: US Department of Defense.

She died    a famous woman    denying
her wounds
denying
her wounds    came    from the same source as her power

—from the poem “Power,” by Adrienne Rich,
occasioned by reflection on Marie Curie, who conducted pioneering research into radioactivity and the isolation of radium

In the autumn of 2017, my partner and I joined a long car caravan winding slowly across White Sands Missile Range. Organized semiannually by the Alamogordo, New Mexico Chamber of Commerce, the trek set out from an empty lot adjacent to the local high school’s athletic fields. Journey’s end, Trinity Site, is where the first atomic bomb—scientists and officials working on the device called it “the gadget”—exploded at 5:29 a.m. on 16 June 1945. It is open to the public only two days each year, the first Saturdays in April and October. 

That I finally made the trip still surprises me, though I have long been an avid student of the history of The Bomb and its human, ecological, political, and cultural impacts. I’d always intended to visit Trinity Site at some vague moment in the future. But it’s the kind of destination that self-generates a continuous avalanche of even better reasons for not going. For decades, each time I contemplated the journey, I just as quickly abandoned the idea.

That may have something to do with the engraved metal dog tag I wore on a chain around my neck many years ago. Along with other grade school children in my home town, my sister and I were physically tagged as potential nuclear war casualties. These tags, stamped with our names, addresses, and phone numbers, also bore a P for Protestant, C for Catholic, or J for Jewish. My mother wrote our blood types on the back in nail polish. In this way, The Authorities could identify young dazed, scorched, irradiated survivors of nuclear blasts or our sad little corpses—assuming that the IDs and human detritus were not completely vaporized.

The school district and my parents thought the dog tags, evoking those identifying military war casualties, were a good Civil Defense measure in the post-Atomic, Cold War era. I don’t recall whether they were mandatory, but the purpose was clear. We ducked under desks, covering our heads with our arms, during school safety drills (today’s version is school lockdowns). No one I knew could afford a real fallout shelter, but along with countless other mothers all over America, my mom amassed canned goods, bottles of Coca-Cola, and flashlight batteries in the basement. As the catechism of the nuclear age might have it, these were “outward and visible signs of an inward and spiritual terror.”

While cleaning the house following my mother’s death many years later, I found a dozen cans of Dinty Moore beef stew still stashed away. They either bulged or, through explosive rites of transubstantiation, had already burst into puddles of gelatinous, purple goo covering the shelves.

I often wonder: beyond the usual reductive political and religious pronouncements, what is there to say about the character of a society that seeks its own life and light through the ability to control, dominate, devastate, destroy? About a society that claims this life and light by framing such power as exceptional, inevitable, moral, and sacrosanct?

These questions stalk all of my work about structural violence, sometimes obliquely. This violence—ranging from policing and prisons to genocide to gender violence to laying waste entire ecosystems—can’t ever be effectively addressed as a series of separate, single “issues.”

I am speaking here of routine forms of massive violence, enabled and carried out legally and often with significant popular support, by respectable people in public and private institutions. These are structural components of everyday normalcy. Nothing exists in isolation; race, economics, gender, disability, culture, and ecological disruptions are always dynamically interrelated, always shaping one another and the larger social reality. But when public opinion begins to raise some uncomfortable questions, it is almost always within the narrow confines of mild tsk-tsking presented as, “Well, the basic intention is right, and it started out OK. They’ve just gone a little too far.” That mindset ushers us into the delusional task of measurement: how much routine violence is too massive, and how much is just right.

This is deranged territory, where any deal cut, however understandably, only reifies the foundations of structural violence by yielding to its terms of debate. Accordingly, I have abandoned the search for reasonable answers to any of my questions. Now I look more for clues, trail markers, symbols, and fragments that hint at something much . . .  well, larger.

That’s probably why I finally showed up at Trinity Site, in search of larger.

Part I:  Rites, Ritual, and Celebration

“Gotta light?”
The Woodsman, Part 8, Twin Peaks: The Return

By larger, I mean: my usual interpretations are no longer sufficient for comprehending, much less responding to, the titanic reach and intricate influence of structural violence. That is to say, the violence of coercion, conquest, colonization, exploitation, limitless extraction, poverty, privatizing what must be collectively held in order to sure collective well-being, the expansion of the carceral state, and endless war. The quest for larger bolsters my willingness to engage complexity; to simultaneously, and without apology, engage mind, heart, and spirit—without feeling obliged to be polite about it.

With regard to the lethal legacies of Trinity, it matters that acculturation to the atomic age was never focused on doom and gloom. It was also, in part, heady and humorous; thrilling and suspenseful; filled with celebrity endorsement. Earlier expressions of concern and protests from scientists who’d worked on developing the atom bomb—and then argued against its deployment—had been squashed. In the aftermath of bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, any number of philosophers, scholars, physicians, scientists, and artists cried out against the inhumanity and warned of future dangers. But politics and popular culture framed such concerns as unpatriotic and rendered them largely invisible. Endless Civil Defense public service announcements on radio and television broadcast a whiff of upbeat determination and normalcy along with alarming, mostly useless, dollops of information (“When you see the flash, cover your eyes!”). Popular culture was replete with songs filled with braggadocio and defiance, neon signs, menu items, and knick-knacks related to the Atomic Bomb. Post-World War II tests in the Pacific and in the Nevada desert—the US alone conducted at least 1054 of them between 1945 and 1992—came with false assurances that there would be no lasting danger to those in the area or downwind of the tests. The problem of nuclear waste disposal would only emerge as a public concern further down the road—and, in the Trump years, become a small feature in a much larger (and fraudulent) politics of austerity. The atmosphere in those days was replete with a grotesque blend of existential anxiety tempered by American atomic triumphalism. We embarked on a never-ending journey into the Twilight Zone, most of it fed by a steady drumbeat of Red Scare propaganda.

Public doubts emerged, along with some laudable Ban the Bomb activism in Europe and the US, but the optimism of supremacist vision won, as it usually does. After all, who wants to believe the worst? It’s so depressing. Better to file the jagged edges off reality. Problems, actual and potential, are brushed away by pretending that, through the intervention of “experts,” every terrible thing is manageable and survivable, at least for those who (by the raced/classed/gendered calculus of worthiness) really matter. But that’s the simple part. The more exhilarating challenge is to make the crusade holy; to create images, rites, rituals, spectacles, and ceremonies intended to bind the dominant segments of a nation together, across generations, through the twinned rubrics of survival and supremacy.

Throughout the country from the late 1940s into the early 1960s, buttressed by a whitewashed storyline about the 1962 “Cuban missile crisis,” civic officials and families were drafted into a series of absurd, often short-lived, survival schemes. A member of my extended family told me that as a young mother living outside of New York City, she was instructed to send her two young sons to school draped in white sheets, with a hole in the center cut out for their heads. These coverings would, she was told, help deflect the heat of a nuclear blast as children walked to and from home. To her credit, this young mother, the very antithesis of a political radical, responded to school authorities with a blistering refusal.

It was the perfect American metaphor. Send (primarily) white kids to school dressed in white sheets for safety’s sake.

So my avoidance of Trinity Site is, I hope, understandable. Yet I have often experienced synchronicity, the idea of meaningful coincidences, and in the end, this was the deciding factor. Something in the material world coincides with a person’s state of mind, conscious or unconscious, in some personally significant way. You know how it goes: you’ve been thinking of someone you haven’t seen or talked to for years and, quite unexpectedly, that person calls you or writes or news about them suddenly appears. Or you’ve been avoiding thinking about Trinity site this year because it’s too twisted a destination, and blam. I generally regard synchronicity as a nudge—sometimes a painful kick in the ass—to pay attention to something I’m not seeing clearly enough.

Blam began early in 2017 with a deluge of images and popular culture depictions of Trinity and its legacies. Especially the brilliant and unnerving Part 8 of Twin Peaks: The Return, with its evocation of the test—a power source unleashing forces of unimaginable evil—set against the musical backdrop of  Krzysztof Penderecki ‘s Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima.

Two friends, also visited by thoughts and shadows of Trinity, introduced me to unexpected books I’d never heard of, more books, poetry, and two mesmerizing (and moderately steamy) seasons of a critically acclaimed fictional TV series set in Los Alamos, New Mexico, where a critical mass of scientists gathered under the expansive umbrella of The Manhattan Project to create The Bomb.

Around this time, the news was stalked by specters of things nuclear, the progeny of Trinity. Fukushima radiation and the Tokyo 2020 Olympics. The appalling reality that Donald Trump was in charge of US nuclear policy. The staggering power of today’s nuclear weapons. Uranium mining, with its deep connection to environmental racism. The possibility, later confirmed, of plutonium thefts. The geopolitics of nuclear energy and weaponry. Grandiose nuclear contamination containment schemes. Nuclear power’s seductive, false promises.

How much synchronicity does it take to make a dent in my personal stockpile of avoidance? A sledgehammer’s worth, apparently. But finally, over a long weekend in early October, my partner and I found our way first to 109 East Palace in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where Manhattan Project scientists and workers reported for duty, then to Los Alamos, and finally to Trinity Site. All celebrations of a relentless “can do!” stampede of technological know-how and American triumphalism.

Contrary to popular assertion, dropping the bomb was not necessary to defeat Japan in World War II. But once the atomic bomb was created, the compulsion to use it was all but inevitable. While at this writing, the US is still the only nation to have deployed nuclear weapons against another nation, American nuclear fear is focused on the terror that somebody else might do to “us” what “we” already did to “them.”

The American solution to the problem of truth is to organize around a false and contradictory but compelling binary: the US is omnipotent and superior, even while the US is also an unjustly persecuted victim under constant assault by hostile forces who “hate us for our freedoms.” The only way to successfully manage both ends of the binary is with overwhelming force. Dominate. Devastate. Demolish. Destroy.

Stay tuned for part 2 of “The Luminescence of Trinity: Consecrating Nightmare at the Center of a Sacred World.”

About the Author 

Kay Whitlock is a writer and activist who has been involved with racial, gender, queer, and economic justice movements since 1968. Her political vision is unapologetically abolitionist. She is coauthor of Considering Hate: Violence, Goodness, and Justice in American Culture and Politics with Michael Bronski, the award-winning Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States with Joey L. Mogul and Andrea J. Ritchie, and cofounder and contributing editor for the weekly Criminal Injustice series at CriticalMassProgress.com. She lives in Missoula, Montana. Follow her on Twitter at @KayJWhitlock.

By Dina Gilio-Whitaker

Nathan Phillips (right) marching in the Indigenous Peoples March in Washington, DC, 2017. This is where the incident with the Covington Catholic school boys would take place on January 18, 2019. Photo credit: Mike Maguire.

The incident with the Covington Catholic school boys has been an astonishing exhibition of not only an intensely polarized country, but a dizzying conglomeration of issues. There were countless mixed messages contained in the assortment of video clips of Nathan Phillips and Nick Sandmann who appeared to be in a standoff. As an American Indian journalist and academic trained to analyze information from all possible angles and come to some kind of understanding of the evidence, I agree that much of the reactionary rhetoric and hateful response to the Covington students was misguided and outright wrong. The students did not deserve death threats.

But I think there are bigger questions to ask that get to the root of why there is so much outrage that is apparently so easily triggered. Who is outraged, and what are they outraged about? What are the different interpretive narratives circulating, and are they raising legitimate concerns, despite the “unfairness” the students have been handed?

I think different people will approach those questions in different ways. From an American Indian perspective, I can say that the confluence of factors of the incident are stunningly complex, and arguably, not understood by the vast majority of people who viewed the various videos. Nick Sandmann’s statement is incapable of capturing the complexity of the situation, just as Nathan Phillips’ cannot tell a larger story. It’s not a matter of the boy’s actions simply being misunderstood and mischaracterized. Nor is it about Phillips inciting a confrontation.

Factoring in the Black Hebrew Israelites, American Indians entering the scene singing the American Indian Movement song (a song of resistance, victory, and healing), and the fact that an all-boys, predominantly white Catholic high school group who were present to protest woman’s rights over their bodies, and you have a toxic brew of ingredients backed by hundreds of years of injustice at the hands of white men fueling the conflagration, and providing a much larger context.

The MAGA hats and shirts were the visual cue that brought all those things into focus in a way that made anything but a confrontation impossible. And the adult chaperones allowed it all to happen.  

Even if we accept that Sandmann was not being overtly disrespectful (which I don’t), and was, as he claimed, trying to defuse the situation (copy-catting Phillips’s original claims), there was still obvious disrespect in the crowd. There was mocking (tomahawk chops and fake Indian singing and dancing); there was cultural appropriation (a faux Maori haka); there was the fact that Phillips was surrounded by the boys in a way that can easily be interpreted as threatening.  

And there was the statement, “it’s not rape if you enjoy it.”  

The question also needs to be asked: would Sandmann’s stare-down in the face of a singing elder have been tolerated had the elder been, say, a white priest? I think we all know the answer to that question. How in the world could an elderly man playing a drum and singing have been construed by him as threatening, as he implies in his statement?

And the comment about “lands being stolen, that’s the way the world works,” that gets at the very root of the problem.

This incident is exemplary of not just racism, but of systemic colonialism bent on Indigenous extermination. For American Indians, unlike any other demographic in the US, while racism is part of a genocidal system, it is not the defining characteristic of it—elimination is. The elimination of Indigenous peoples has always been about obtaining our lands and replacing us. That is the unspoken, invisible context framing what’s really going on here.

This history is the irreducible core element of this conflict. There is no getting around it, and any analysis that sidesteps it just contributes to the whitewashing of history and upholds the settler colonial system that American Indians like Nathan Phillips are still fighting. The boys’ actions—however convoluted—the lack of action on the part of the chaperones, and even the vile, hateful words of the Black Hebrew Israelites are all part of a larger reality that is not being acknowledged by the majority of the media and other commentators.

The entire incident is a classic display of settler privilege and fragility. Only in a society that systematically and simultaneously denies and justifies its genocidal foundation can an elderly Native man singing and playing a drum surrounded by hundreds of frenzied white males dressed in attire that to American Indians represents the colonial wrecking ball be construed as menacing.

It is the replaying of a centuries-old narrative. Native people standing their ground, peacefully or not, are a threat to the white settler population and are, therefore, assailable. The assault is always justifiable, and accountability is absent. White Catholic school boys—like their interloping pioneer ancestors before them—are thus painted as the innocent victims while Nathan Phillips is the degraded Native—the savage, a liar, always suspect, undeserving of a legitimate perspective, let alone an apology.

Until the US accounts for its history at every level of society, this scenario will play out relentlessly, in endless configurations.

About the Author 

Dina Gilio-Whitaker (Colville Confederated Tribes) is a lecturer of American Indian Studies at California State University San Marcos, and a consultant and educator in environmental justice policy planning. Her research interests focus on Indigenous nationalism, self-determination, environmental justice, and education. She also works within the field of critical sports studies, examining the intersections of indigeneity and the sport of surfing. She is co-author with Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz of Beacon Press’s “All the Real Indians Died Off” and 20 Other Myths About Native Americans, and her forthcoming book, As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice from Colonization to Standing Rock, is scheduled for release by Beacon Press in April 2019. Follow her on Twitter at @DinaGWhit and visit her website.

By Deborah L. Plummer

My husband, Mike, is an engineer—a full-blooded engineer. Not only is it his career choice, but he also lives and thinks like an engineer. Often when we go out with my friends, the occasion is loosely planned and somewhat spontaneous. A phone call made that day inquiring about the evening’s plans usually gets things started. Mike’s friends (fellow engineers), on the other hand, plan events literally months in advance—even if we are just meeting for dinner. Time, place, and confirmed reservations are emailed in a precise manner.

One Saturday, we met his friends Julie and Steve (both engineers) for dinner. Mike and I arrived at approximately 7:25 p.m. The 7:30 reservation was in Julie and Steve’s name, and the hostess informed us that they had not yet arrived. Knowing their habitual promptness, we decided to go to the table. I began to get nervous after fifteen minutes, since this is equivalent to waiting over an hour for someone in non-engineer land. My husband pulled out his printed email with the confirmed date and place. “Yep,” he said. “We are in the right place. Besides, the reservation is in their name, remember?” We asked the waitress again if anyone else was waiting for a couple. “No,” she assured us. “Your friends are not here.” After a half hour, I was convinced that something was dreadfully wrong. I checked our voicemail. No message. No missed phone call or text. We inquired again with the waitress, who checked with the hostess; she impatiently came back to tell us, “We checked. Your friends are not here.” As she was walking away, I turned to watch her—only to notice the back of Julie’s blond head and the shoulders of Steve, her husband, seated next to her. Not surprisingly, they were being told the same story. Apparently, the restaurant hostess assumed we could not be friends.

If we cannot even imagine individuals being friends across races in social settings, how can we envision and create a racially diverse and united America? Our natural preference for sorting people into categories of people who look like us, sound like us, and share our same values and beliefs leads us to remain socially segregated.

Now when I am the first to arrive at a restaurant to meet friends who are white, I openly let the restaurant know that I am waiting for some friends . . . and that they are white. Hostesses and maître d’s always appear a bit taken aback. It might be that they feel my mention of race is unnecessary, or perhaps they are surprised that I have named the elephant and they are grateful. As my husband frequently says, “Assumptions make asses out of you and me.”

Nobody likes feeling like an ass, so it is time to examine our assumptions about others who are racially different from us. The time for talking about the elephant in our societal living room is long overdue. I am not talking about ugly, evil, racist remarks that most people abhor. I am talking about those thoughts in our heads that would cause us to be a bit embarrassed if people were reading our minds. Like believing that blacks are lazy and Hispanics are dumb. Or wondering what country Asians are really from when they tell you they are American. Or wondering how authentically Native is that professed Native American and how did they come to know they were Native American? Did they use Ancestry.com? Although annoying to those who represent the identity, this kind of thinking is common and interrupts building the capacity to be able to have a meaningful conversation with an acquaintance of a different race without having what we will later explore as an amygdala hijack.

From kindergarten through third grade, I attended a racially mixed school. From first through third grades I was friends with Kitty, who was white. Our friendship started because I loved her blue rhinestone-trimmed eyeglasses. I was also friends with Maria, who was Filipino. Our friendship was based on the fact that I coveted the windbreaker jackets she possessed in several different colors. I was friends with Carlos, who was Puerto Rican. Our friendship was based on my pure attraction to a cute boy who was also quite popular with everyone in the class.

By seventh grade my formerly racially mixed school had become predominantly black, as the inner-city neighborhood surrounding St. Thomas Aquinas Elementary School in Cleveland, Ohio, became subject to white flight, the large-scale migration of middle-class whites from racially mixed urban cities to the suburbs. My best friends, Gayle, Zoe, and Debbie, were black. Judy, one of the few remaining white kids, sometimes hung around with us. We would often take the bus from the East Side to downtown Cleveland, where we could walk around and window-shop, peering at the trendy, pricey outfits on the mannequins and talking about our dreams of one day being able to buy clothes like that. We each had about fifty cents for lunch, which in the 1960s meant you could get a full meal at McDonald’s, consisting of a hamburger, a shake, and fries. Going to McDonald’s for lunch was a special part of these Saturday outings, but on one particular day, Judy said there was a better place we could go for lunch. She suggested the cozy corner diner where she and her mom ate when they shopped downtown. On our trips without Judy, we had passed that diner often, always peering in the window and assuming we could never afford to eat there. Judy assured us that the food wouldn’t cost us much more than McDonald’s and would be even better, a claim I found hard to believe. Thinking that the worst thing that could happen would be that we would have to share an order of fries, we agreed to go.

Debbie, Gayle, and Zoe quickly claimed five empty stools along the counter, and motioned for Judy and me to hurry up and sit down before other patrons claimed the seats. The waitress was a tall white woman with a hairstyle like the actress Lucille Ball, who held special fascination for me because she was married to Desi Arnaz, a Cuban who often butchered the English language like my immigrant Spanish-speaking parents. I assumed that because she looked like Lucy she would be friendly, but her expression was one of annoyance. Still standing at the entry with Judy, I started to giggle, thinking about how quickly my friends had gotten themselves into trouble, as there was barely a minute between when Gayle, Zoe, and Debbie sat down and Judy and I entered the diner. While I assumed that my friends must have done something unimaginable to cause Lucy-look-alike to be so upset, Judy had quickly assessed the situation and knew what the argument was about between the waitress and three black teens. They were being asked to leave.

Judy loudly announced, making sure the others in the diner could hear her, “If my friends are not allowed to eat here, then I won’t either. We are taking our business elsewhere.”

She dramatically motioned for us to leave. We were all stunned that what we’d witnessed on television happening to black people in the South was actually happening to us—good Catholic school girls, dressed appropriately and with enough money to pay for lunch, albeit maybe without French fries.

What I learned from the diner experience was that there were individuals who happened to be white who were racist and there were individuals who were white that you could call friends. White friends like Judy would challenge those racist structures and support you in the struggle for equality. I haven’t seen Judy since those school days and have no idea whether as an adult her views remain the same, yet throughout my adult years I frequently recall her advocacy against racist practices on behalf of her friends of a different race.

As a seventh grader hanging around Gayle, Zoe, and Debbie, attending what became a predominantly black school and living in a black neighborhood, I didn’t fully experience racism. I heard many stories of my parents’ experiences with racism and knew the impact of racism witnessed by their lowered expectations for financial prosperity despite their hard work and their limited career mobility despite their talent. As a young person, hanging around with Judy forced me to think about how the world treated us differently because of our race and how we developed differently as a result. This developmental process involves cognitive, emotional, and behavioral components and continues throughout all our life stages. As an adult, after an exchange with my close friend Yvonne, I became intensely curious as to why so many of my black friends, who were raised in similar circumstances and had the same values as I, did not have friends across racial lines, and why for so many of my white friends I was their only friend of color.

My curiosity persisted and I began examining friendships across racial lines as a major component of my research agenda. Over the course of my three-plus decades as a clinical psychologist, as an academic whose research has explored cross-racial relationships of all kinds, and in my more recent work as a chief diversity and inclusion officer, I have seen that one of the most effective ways to bring about the change in understanding our need to improve race relations is by forming friendships across racial groups. Yet a racial divide exists in cross-racial friendships, most notably between blacks and whites.

Positing cross-racial friendship as an answer to our deep racial divide may seem naive and even ignorant to those more directly affected by the divide, and miseducated to those who have studied history. It is a rosy answer that comes with hard, coarse thorns. Not every cross-racial friendship has the capacity to move the mountains of racism, but all give witness to the goal of racial equity. Advancing race relations in the broader society cannot be achieved just by changes to our national conversation, for sometimes that conversation feels like a shouting match, with neither side listening, rather than a true dialogue. Black Lives Matter conversations are met with All Lives Matter and Blue Lives Matter rebuttals. Racially charged deaths of black men and police officers ignite animated yet stagnant conversations about race. Political rhetoric about what constitutes a racist remark and what makes someone a racist or a bigot doesn’t change the narrative on race. Americans don’t need more conversations about race. Americans need more friends of different races with whom to engage in conversation about social change and bridging the racial divide.

About the Author 

Deborah L. Plummer, PhD, is a practicing psychologist, university professor, chief diversity officer, and speaker on topics central to racial equality, inclusion, and mutual respect. She currently serves as vice chancellor and chief diversity officer at UMass Medical School and UMass Memorial Health Care, and she has written for Diversity Executive and the Boston Globe Magazine. Her books include Handbook of Diversity Management, Racing Across the Lines: Changing Race Relations Through Friendships, and Some of My Friends Are. . .: The Daunting Challenges and Untapped Benefits of Cross-Racial Friendships. Follow her on Twitter at @DebbiePlummer and visit her website.

By Lisa Page

Photo credit: Allan Warren

As a kid, I heard that Carol Channing was Black (the word back then was negro). She was one of many celebrities rumored to pass, in Hollywood—a list that included Angie Dickenson, Dinah Shore, and others. These women had large brown eyes, full lips, and bleached blond hair. Looking white—being light-skinned—allowed many Americans to cross the color line into the mainstream, back in a time when that meant serious opportunity. But rumors are rumors.

Then Channing dropped a bomb and published a book where she admitted she had been passing since she was sixteen years old.

According to her 2002 memoir, Just Lucky I Guess: A Memoir of Sorts, Channing learned of her Black ancestry in 1937. She was on her way to Bennington College, to major in drama and dance, when her mother told her the story.

“I’m only telling you this because the Darwinian law shows that you could easily have a Black baby,” Channing said, quoting her mother. Her father, George Channing, was born in Augusta, Georgia, and his original name was Stucker. Census records from 1890 listed him as ‘colored.’ In a CNN interview with Larry King, Channing said those records were destroyed in a fire and couldn’t be verified. His mother moved him to Rhode Island for a better life.

George Channing became a newspaper editor and Christian Scientist, based in San Francisco who, in photographs, looks white. From all indications, his story rivals Anatole Broyard’s, who famously passed for white at the New York Times for many years. George Channing died in 1957, twenty years after his daughter learned he was Black.

“He wasn’t Black,” Channing exclaimed. “He was this color!” She pinched her own cheeks. Jet Magazine described him as a light-skinned man who used two different accents: one for the white world and a different one, at home, where he sang gospel music to his daughter.  

When the story broke, Channing was in her eighties. Had she revealed the story earlier, she would never have had the career she had. No Black woman would have been cast as Lorelei Lee in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes in the 1940s, let alone the role of Dolly Levi in Hello, Dolly! She wouldn’t have worn those Bob Mackie dresses on the Great White Way or been the subject of Al Hirschfeld cartoons, or made all those guest appearances on Password and I’ve Got A Secret and What’s My Line. Black celebrities, back then, were marginalized, at best.

But then, weirdly, Channing walked the story back.

“My mother and father had many disagreements,” she told talk show host Wendy Williams in 2010. Her mother may have decided “she would get even” with her father, by inventing the story. I remember how I annoyed I was by this news. It was as if Channing chickened out.

“You look light-skinned,” Williams responded.  “You have a thicker lip.” Williams went on to call her Soul Sister Number One.

“I don’t know if it’s true, but I hope it’s true,” said Channing. “I can sing and dance better than any white woman anywhere.”

The real passing story, here, is her father’s. Yet Channing is important. She’s the show business metaphor for racial ambiguity. Channing could “sing and dance better than any white woman anywhere” at a time when most of America thought she was white. She’s about our national obsession with the one drop rule.

Americans like stories like hers, because racial and ethnic passing is ubiquitous inside a culture known for self-invention.

But being Black is about more than biology, one drop rule be damned. Being Black is not just about singing and dancing, and shucking and jiving. Being Black goes beyond complexion—it’s a cultural thing. Think of Elizabeth Warren’s recent Indian ancestry revelation, for context. Her DNA backed up her story. But her cultural upbringing was never Native American. Without the culture, it’s just data. 

“My grandfather was Nordic German and my grandmother was in the dark,” Channing told Larry King. “I got the greatest genes in show business.” She was always good with the punch line. I admire her for that.

About the Author 

Lisa Page is co-editor of We Wear the Mask: 15 True Stories of Passing in America. She teaches at George Washington University where she directs creative writing and is interim director of Africana Studies.

By Lori L. Tharps

This blog post appeared originally on My American MeltingPot.

I’m not mad. Not mad at all that executive producer, Peter Saji, covered the same ground regarding colorism and family dynamics in a twenty-two-minute Black-ish episode that I covered in my 200-page heavily researched 2016 book, Same Family, Different Colors: Confronting Colorism in America’s Diverse Families.

I’m not upset that the basic premise of last week’s show, that originally aired on Tuesday January 15, literally could have been scripted from the pages of my book, where I collected the lived experiences of people who lived in families where folks were the same race, but different colors. On Black-ish, Diane, the youngest daughter in the fictional Johnson household, is rendered nearly invisible in her class picture because of poor lighting on her dark(er) complected skin. This is the inciting incident to a volatile family reckoning about colorism in the Johnson family and in the wider world. Lines are drawn between the lighter-hued family members (Bo and Junior) and the more melanin-rich (Andre and Ruby).

Colorism 101

In fact, when I sat down to watch the episode, I was ready with my pencil and pen to take note of all the things the show’s creators missed or overlooked when trying to make a sitcom episode about colorism. I mean, how could they cover all the things in twenty-two minutes? But they kind of did. They covered everything from the fictitious Willie Lynch letter, to the very real facts about lighter-skinned Black people receiving shorter prison sentences than their darker-hued brothers and sisters.

They also interrogated the idea of light-skin privilege, instead of just presenting it as fact that light skin Black people lead “easier lives and don’t have to deal with discrimination.” Light-skinned Black people suffer from colorism too, but it looks different than the way darker complected Black people experience it. In my book, I talk about things like light-skin isolation and how lighter-skinned Black people often have to “defend” their Blackness. I wrote an entire chapter about this, but Bo and Junior pretty much summed up what it feels like being “not Black enough” in their moving monologues on the show.

Colorism Doesn’t Discriminate

Which brings me to my next point. I just knew that in a twenty-two-minute Black-ish episode about colorism, Saji and his crew weren’t going to have time to explain that colorism is a global phenomenom, and not just a “Black thing.” In Same Family, Different Colors, I spend equal time discussing colorism in the Asian American, Latino and Mixed Race communities as I do talking about colorism in the African American community, because colorism doesn’t discriminate. I wanted that to be very clear. Obviously, Saji feels the same way, because even with only twenty-two minutes to work with, he managed to insert a Schoolhouse Rock!-inspired cartoon break that explained global colorism in all of its insidious glory.

By the time the episode was almost over, I stopped “taking notes” and sat back to simply enjoy the show. And I’m glad I did, because the ending was truly satisfying. Even though there was no neat and easy resolution to the family strife, and a solution to global colorism wasn’t discovered, the final message delivered in a voice over by family patriarch, Andre, put a smile on my face. He said,

“Colorism is our secret shame, and the pain it causes keeps growing because we rarely talk about it. But as I looked at my multicolored black family, I realized that because we talked about it, our wounds could finally start to heal as we learn to love ourselves out in the open. Because nothing gets better in the shadows.”

Colorism Out of the Shadows

Basically, Dre took the words right out of my mouth . . . or rather, right out of my book. But I’m not mad. Not mad at all. I’m happy that colorism is getting talked about out in the open and out of the shadows, so as a community, as a culture and as individuals, we can all begin to heal.

About the Author 

Lori L. Tharps is an associate professor of journalism at Temple University and the coauthor of Hair Story: Untangling the Roots of Black Hair in America, Kinky Gazpacho: Life, Love & Spain, and Same Family, Different Colors: Confronting Colorism in America’s Diverse Families. Her writing has also appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, and Glamour and Essence magazines. She lives in Philadelphia with her family. Follow her on Twitter at @LoriTharps and visit her website.

A Q&A with Stephen Puleo

Wreckage from the Boston Molasses Flood, 1919

Don’t giggle and or give that look of disbelief, because this really happened. On this day, 2.3 million gallons of molasses—you read that correctly, the sweet stuff—flooded the streets in Boston’s North End in 1919, killing twenty-one people and injuring about 150. You’d think it would be water, but no, it was a fifteen-foot tide of brown treacle from an exploded steel tank that tore through the neighborhood. One hundred years later, we’re looking back at this surreal and tragic accident from Boston’s past. What better place to look than the authoritative book on the topic, Stephen Puleo’s Dark Tide: The Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919. Our blog editor Christian Coleman caught up with Puleo to ask him about the anniversary edition of the book and what the hundredth anniversary of the disaster means to him.

Christian Coleman: Is Dark Tide still the only adult book ever written about the Great Boston Molasses Flood?  

Stephen Puleo: I’m proud to say that Dark Tide is still the only adult non-fiction book about the Great Boston Molasses Flood. The book has been out for fifteen years and is still the definitive account of the flood—and I hope always will be.

CC: Did you come across any information or findings that took you by surprise when you were researching the flood? 

SP: I was surprised by a couple of things. First, the flood received extensive coverage in all seven Boston newspapers of the day. It was on the front pages for a whole week, knocking off the front-page topics, like the impending Prohibition amendment and the Versailles peace talks to end WWI. Plus, there were many pages of coverage inside. Second, I was surprised, but pleased, that virtually every major subject America was dealing with in the early twentieth century—World War I and munitions, anarchists, immigration, and the relationship between the public and Big Business—quite literally touched this story in some way. All those themes weave their way through Dark Tide, because they all literally come into play as part of the story itself.

CC: You’ve toured across the country with the book. What are some of your favorite experiences from talking to audiences about this surreal and tragic part of Boston’s history? 

SP: I have a huge list of great experiences, and it’s hard to pick just a few. I guess I’m just constantly amazed at the way this story has captured the imagination of readers. They embrace the story, the characters, the event itself. I’ve spoken to so many different groups about different aspects of the story: engineers about the tank’s construction; teachers about the big-history aspects of the flood; lawyers and judges about the massive court case that followed; book clubs that have made Dark Tide their choice; and community organizations (twenty-three cities and towns have selected Dark Tide as their community-wide read). Students across the country—from middle school to grad school—have contacted me for projects, papers, and presentations about the flood. I’ve run into people reading Dark Tide on the beach, on the subway, and on airplanes. I’m honored and humbled every time it happens.

CC: Many attendees at your author appearances ask if Dark Tide will be made into a movie. Which would you prefer: a Ken Burns-style documentary or full-length feature film?

SP: Full-length film, definitely. The History Channel and others have done the documentaries. This story is dramatic and compelling enough, with sympathetic real-life characters, and even a real-life villain, to warrant something bigger. The book has been optioned, so we’ll see. I’m keeping my fingers crossed.

CC: Dark Tide was originally published in 2003. What does the hundredth anniversary of the disaster and the special edition of the book mean to you? 

SP: I’m thrilled that fifteen years after publication, Dark Tide continues to resonate. I still get scores of emails from readers, many requests for presentations, and a variety of press inquiries about the book and the story. People from around the country see it in bookstores of all sizes. Also, many people have told me that they hadn’t read nonfiction for years before they picked up Dark Tide, and they loved the book. That means the most to me—that people decided to take a chance on history and were glad they did.

About Stephen Puleo 

Stephen Puleo is an author, historian, teacher, public speaker, and communications professional. He has written six narrative nonfiction books and has a seventh on the way. His published works include A City So Grand, The Boston Italians, and Dark Tide. A former award-winning newspaper reporter and contributor of articles and book reviews to publications and organizations that include American History magazine, Politico, the Boston Globe, and the Bill of Rights Institute.,Puleo has taught history at Suffolk University in Boston, and also has developed and taught numerous writing workshops for high school and college students, as well as for adults who aspire to be writers. Follow him on Twitter at @spuleoauthor and visit his website.

In these times when readers are responding to our books “more than ever,” when our authors—including Cornel West, Anita Hill, Robin DiAngelo, Charlene Carruthers, Howard Bryant, and Christopher Emdin—are appearing in the media, their ideas going viral on social media, their voices being heard on so many platforms, we thought it might be good to take a break to focus on some of the staff who work hard to find, shape, edit, produce, and promote those works. Our blog series “Beacon Behind the Books” introduces to you a member of our staff and gives you a behind-the-scenes look, department by department, at what goes on at our office.

To kick off 2019, we introduce you to our associate marketing manager, Emily Powers!  

What drew you to publishing, Emily? How did you find your way to Beacon?

I’ve always wanted to work in book publishing once I realized it was a possible career. I interned at a few different publishers in college and loved it. I knew it was a super competitive field, and someone at my college’s career office even told me it was too competitive for me and that I shouldn’t really bother trying to break in, but I knew what I wanted to do, so I worked really really hard to make it happen. My first job was at Cornell University Press in the acquisitions department, which was great, but I really enjoyed the marketing aspects of my job the most and wanted to move back to Boston, so that’s how I ended up here! My official title is associate marketing manager and I do lots of different things: academic marketing, conferences, advertising, creating promotional materials like postcards or bookmarks, drafting marketing plans, and managing our internship program.

What are some of the challenges of being an associate marketing manager? What do you find most rewarding?

Creating relationships with our authors is probably the most rewarding part of my job. I work on academic and library marketing, which means I get to go to conferences where authors might be giving keynote addresses or doing book signings. Watching a room full of people get super excited about an author’s story or message never gets old. I also know they’ve worked so hard to get their book to the publication stage, so I try to honor that by always trying to do my best work on their behalf. Sometimes, it is a bit challenging to try to stay on top of everything that’s happening in the world and online. Twitter never sleeps, and we do need to see where the conversations are going in order to promote our books successfully. But I think I’ve figured out sort of a middle ground where I don’t refresh Twitter every five minutes but still manage to stay updated about the most relevant things.

What is one book on our list that has influenced your thinking on a particular issue?

White Fragility. It’s definitely one of the most important books I’ve read in the last decade, and I’ve told pretty much everyone I know to read it.

How much of what you learned in college have you found vital to your work?

Lots! I was a double Communications and English major at Le Moyne College, a small liberal arts school (GO DOLPHINS!), and took some really intensive writing and grammar classes, which are vital to every part of my job, whether it’s drafting a tweet or editing the marketing copy for a book. I also took SO many literature courses, which have been really helpful in my life generally, but definitely great for working in the literary world (so I know what people are talking about when they talk about the Chekhov’s gun concept, or having a room of one’s own, or what it means to be a total braggadocio and where name that came from). Being an English major is also very helpful for watching Jeopardy!

What upcoming projects are you excited about?

I’m SO excited about Mona Eltahawy’s book called The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls. It’s a bold and uncompromising feminist manifesto that shows women and girls how to harness their power through what she calls the “seven necessary sins” that women and girls are not supposed to do or be: angry, ambitious, profane, violent, attention-seeking, lustful, and powerful. For a lot of my life, I grew up thinking that constant politeness and trying to please everyone and being pleasant all the time was nonnegotiable as a woman. I no longer feel that way at ALL and I think it’s been a really important shift in my life. So, I’m thrilled to get to work on this book and spread the message to other women and girls who may have grown up believing similar things.

In an alternate universe, what career would you have?

A dog trainer or a greeting card creator! I would also LOVE to be a chef/recipe developer but I’m still working on my knife skills. Luckily, all these things are pretty fun just to do as hobbies on the side, too.

What’s the next queued song on your music player?

Right now, I’m listening to lots of Maggie Rogers, Lizzo, and Amos Lee. Also, the Hamilton soundtrack. Still.

Hobbies outside of work?

Anything trivia or Jeopardy related, dogs, trying new ways to cook things, collecting greeting cards, memorizing lyrics to Broadway songs, board games, trying any drink with mezcal, and learning about highland cattle, otters, and the stories of powerful women.

Favorite podcasts?

For laughing: How Did this Get Made (comedians review terrible movies)

For learning: Freakonomics (explores the hidden side of everything with episodes like “Should America be Run by Trader Joe’s?” or a personal favorite “How to Win Games and Beat People”)

For learning AND laughing: Call Your Girlfriend (two long distance feminist BFFs discuss politics, pop culture, and everything in between)

Name three non-office items on your desk and their significance to you. 

I curate the things on my desk VERY seriously! I have lots of dog pictures and photos of the people I love most in the world, and favorite quotes and best greeting cards I’ve received, and an action figure of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. I also always have a big calendar, which is very important because I have monthly calendar ceremonies with friends in the office on the first day of the month where we all flip our calendars to the next month (we never ever look at what’s coming up next, so the design is always a surprise). It sounds kind of small when I write it out, but it’s one of the little rituals I love most in the office. 

About Emily Powers 

Emily Powers joined Beacon in 2016 after three years at Cornell University Press. Previously, she worked as an intern at the UN Refugee Agency and Harvard Common Press. She is a graduate of Le Moyne College. Follow her on Twitter at @emilykpowers.

The protean meme of never-ending remixes: The Distracted Boyfriend

They are today’s indisputable shrine to our cuddly overlord, the cat. Meow! You embed them in your text messages, your tweets, your Facebook posts, your Instagram stories. A shorthand for our daily feels, they’re also unifying symbols and rallying cries for a common cause. We’re talking about internet memes. They’re everywhere, on- and offline. And they’re shaping and reflecting our pop culture and politics in real time.

In her book Memes to Movements: How the World’s Most Viral Media Is Changing Social Protest and Power, technologist, writer, and artist An Xiao Mina defines them as “a piece of online media that is shared and remixed over time within a community.” How do they work? How do they get shared and remixed? Mina goes on further to say:

Think of a funny picture of a cat being held up by its front legs, so it stretches out and looks quite long. (This is a real meme called Longcat, who is indeed long.) Now imagine if someone else does the same thing with their cat. And someone else does too. And they share it with each other, and then someone else stitches them all together in Photoshop to create a team of three long cats. This is meme culture. Memes can be silly they can be harmless, they can be destructive, they can be extremely serious, and they can be all these things at the same time. A meme is an invitation: “You can do this too.” And in both Ferguson and Hong Kong, during the inauguration and during the Women’s March, memes spread across borders and territories to involve much larger groups of people acting in solidarity than might previously have been possible.

The term “meme” comes from Richard Dawkins, who coined the term in his 1976 book, The Selfish Gene. A meme is a unit of culture that’s spread like biological genes. A human cultural practice, such as “tying one’s hair in a ponytail versus tying it in intricate braids, wearing watches versus wearing extensive bangles, or holding racist views,” is passed down again and again, from generation to generation. Internet memes are the digital variety.

For better and for worse, memes can be anything we want them to be. There are several kinds we can make, share, and remix to our heart’s content. How do we know which one we’re using? Here’s Mina’s breakdown of each type from her book, with an example. You’ve probably seen all, if not most of them.

Image Memes and Image Macros

When someone shares a picture of a llama photoshopped onto a car, they are sharing an image meme. Many internet platforms encourage photo embeds, because human beings are visual creatures, and so image memes tend to do particularly well. Image memes can have text on them, and in those cases they’re called image macro memes. The popular meme format in the West, of creating an image and adding text above and below it to make a statement, is a good example of an image macro.

Text Memes 

They are, technologically, the easiest to create, and they’re most familiar in the Western context as hashtag memes, like #BlackLivesMatter and #MakeAmericaGreatAgain. 

Video Memes

Video memes are the most technologically and creatively demanding to create, but often also the most virally popular. Length doesn’t matter so much—some video memes can be quite long, while others can last just a second or two. 

via GIPHY

GIF memes can be considered a subgenre of video memes. GIFs operate effectively under lower bandwidth conditions and, through repetition, often reinforce a message or make a humorous statement.

Physical Memes

The pussyhat started offline and became a physical meme through online sharing. Woman with pussyhat at the Women’s March on Washington, 2018

[To evade censorship, activists in China critiqued their government with grass mud horse pictures online.] When the grass mud horse leapt from the screen and into phone stickers and plush toys, it went from a purely digital meme to a physical one. Not all these toys were actual grass mud horses; indeed, many people just repurposed existing plush dolls of llamas to make a statement. Regardless, the ability to remix or make a physical object to produce a memetic statement is quite common. Thanks to smartphone cameras, anything done in the physical world can quickly enter the digital world, and thanks to rapid production cycles, anything made popular on the internet can quickly become a physical product disseminated through online stores.

Performative Memes

Remember when the planking meme was a thing? And then it wasn’t? That was a flash in the pan!

In 2011, the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei posted a photo of himself jumping naked while holding a grass mud horse to cover his crotch. When he did, he was participating in a performative meme, using his body to generate a version of the meme circulating on the Chinese web at the time. The joke was once again a pun, this time with an even more explicit political message: “The grass mud horse covers the center”—caonima dang zhongyang (草泥马挡中央)—sounds a lot like “fuck your mother, Central Party Committee.” This performative meme took aim at one of the most powerful institutions in China, and it asked citizens to embody their political stance through performance.

Selfie Memes 

Selfie meme from Mike Dugan’s Twitter account @MikeDuganDC, showing his participation in #TakeAKnee.

Selfie memes are a common subgenre of performative memes that deserve special mention. When people post photos of themselves cuddling a grass mud horse, they are posting selfie memes. Thanks to the advent of both front-facing cameras on smartphones and social networks like Instagram and WeChat that encourage photo sharing, selfies have swept the digital world. As with “Coca-Cola” and “taxi,” “selfie” is a word that rarely requires translation in other languages.

By Linda McQuaig and Neil Brooks

It would be one of the boldest moves in progressive taxation we’d see in the twenty-first century. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez suggested raising the tax rate on the wealthy to seventy percent. The proceeds would back the goals of the Green New Deal Ocasio-Cortez and other Democrats have proposed. Garnering praise and skepticism, her radical tax plan has brought our attention back to how our country has and has not taxed the One Percent. In their book Billionaires’ Ball: Gluttony and Hubris in an Age of Epic Inequality, Linda McQuaig and Neil Brooks explain how billionaires and Wall Street earned a bad reputation and fierce criticism, and why the rest of the country is eager for them, as Ocasio-Cortez put it, “to pay their fair share in taxes.”

***

After years of basking in the glow of a flattering limelight, by the fall of 2011 the very rich were experiencing something new and altogether jarring: the glare of a harsh spotlight trained directly on them. The temptation to bark orders like: “Dim that light, or else!” was natural enough, but perhaps unwise. After all, those shining the spotlight were not their employees and were swarming in large numbers through the streets of lower Manhattan, behaving like the sort of unruly mob one finds in faraway places where the ways of the free world are insufficiently appreciated.

All of a sudden, right here in America, being wondrously, fulsomely, voluptuously rich was no longer a badge of honor, something to announce gleefully to the world by squealing the tires of one’s Lamborghini at pedestrians who were in the way. Wall Street—the nexus of ambition, brains, greed, glamour, the very g-spot of the American Dream—was no longer something to be glorified, but rather occupied.

Where would it end? Could the trappings of wealth become a source of embarrassment? Could the day come when a yacht became like a fur coat—one of life’s small pleasures ruined by the prospect that wearing it (or docking it) might attract a crowd of protestors? Imagine a protestor so mean-spirited that she would object to the sight of a banker lounging on a pleasure craft massively larger than the house she had once owned but that now belonged to . . . a bank.

Of course, it could be worse. Luckily for the bankers, the occupiers were a little fuzzy in their targeting, going broadly after the top 1 percent, apparently unaware that the real red meat was much higher up the food chain—the top .01 percent, the top .001 percent, or all the way up to the dizzying heights occupied (in this case appropriately so) by billionaires.

Anyway, help was on the way. Already, the lobbying industry was swinging into action. By late November 2011, one of the leading Washington lobby firms—Clark, Lytle, Geduldig & Cranford—had prepared a memo for the American Bankers Association (leaked to the press by some mean-spirited soul), which laid out a media strategy for countering the Occupy Wall Street juggernaut.

The lobbyists insisted that the answer lay in a carefully prepared counter-campaign aimed at slinging mud at the motives of the occupiers: “If we can show they have the same cynical motivation as a political opponent, it will undermine their credibility in a profound way.” (It’s tough to imagine what cynical motivation might lead people to live in water-soaked tents for weeks on end.)

The danger was that the anti–Wall Street message, if unchallenged, could turn the big Wall Street banks into fodder for the Democratic political machine—and worse. As the memo noted: “The bigger concern should be that Republicans will no longer defend Wall Street companies—and might start running against them too.”

The lobbyists even raised the prospect of the Tea Party crowd joining in some kind of a Right-Left populist free-for-all of bank-bashing: “The combination has the potential to be explosive later in the year when media reports cover the next round of bonuses and contrast it with stories of millions of Americans making do with less this holiday season.” (It’s gratifying to see that, even when they’re plotting the destruction of a democratic movement, lobbyists now use inclusive language about the “holiday season.”)

All this looming victimization was no doubt baffling to members of the financial elite, who still had trouble grasping the notion that they were somehow supposed to feel culpable for the 2008 financial crash.

That bewilderment had been evident as early as January 2009, only months after the crash, at the elite gathering in the Swiss town of Davos, where bankers, business leaders, political shakers, and other big thinkers come together every year to celebrate the globalized world of liberated financial markets, shrunken government, and reinvigorated capitalism. Of course, some bewilderment was inevitable in Davos that year, with even questions popping up about why markets had done such a poor job of policing themselves. The headline on a dispatch that appeared on the website Slate captured the mood: “Davos Man, Confused.” Written by journalist Daniel Gross, the piece explained that, despite the confusion, there was a broad consensus at Davos that “[s]uccess is the work of Great Men and Women, while failure can be pinned on the system.” Or, as another journalist, Julian Glover noted in the UK’s Guardian: “The shock is real, the grief has hardly begun, but no one in Davos seems to think [this] means they should be less important or less rich.”

That would have involved a change of mindset, which was not what these economic overlords seemed inclined toward. After all, a key concept behind the economic order of the past few decades has been the central importance of individual talent—and the need to nurture it with abundant financial rewards. That way, so the idea goes, the brilliant in our midst would be lured to the top jobs that run the world. Ensuring the active participation of these giants among us was clearly understood to be worth a lot, and pay scales were adjusted accordingly, going through the roof at the upper end. Just because the global economy was now in a free fall hardly seemed like grounds to beat up the very people who’d played key roles in designing it.

So, in Manhattan, then-CEO of Merrill Lynch John Thain apparently saw no irony as he explained why he’d felt it necessary to pay $4 billion in executive bonuses to keep the “best” people on staff—right after those same overachievers had steered the company to a staggering net loss of $27 billion and, in the process, helped trigger the global economic meltdown. The decision of the Wall Street crowd to collectively pay themselves a record $140 billion in 2009—outstripping even their 2007 record—may have seemed odd under the circumstances, but then no one ever accused Wall Street bankers of being unduly modest, unassuming, or prone to self-doubt.

Away from the rarified air of Davos and Manhattan, doubts were beginning to appear. Some less-gifted types were now clamoring for change, even suggesting that cutting executive pay might induce the hypertalented to seek more socially useful employment in areas like teaching or health care. But a letter to the New York Times clarified the danger of this approach, making a compelling case for maintaining extravagant pay, even huge executive bonuses: “Without them, Wall Streeters will all look for other jobs. Do we really want these greedy, incompetent clowns building our houses, teaching our children or driving our cabs?”

~~~

As a result of the dramatic increase in the concentration of income and wealth at the top during the last few decades, the United States has become an extremely unequal society.

Before going any farther, we should point out that we are not against all inequality. On the contrary, some reasonable degree of inequality is not only acceptable and inevitable but even desirable because it allows for different rewards for different levels of individual effort and contribution. But what exists today in the United States—and to a lesser extent in Britain and Canada—is a level of inequality that is extreme compared to the rest of the advanced, industrialized world. Indeed, the level of inequality in the United States today is actually more considerably extreme than what exists in many developing countries, including India, Cambodia, and Nigeria, and even in many Middle Eastern countries, such as Egypt and Tunisia, where excessive inequality is widely believed to have played a role in sparking the Arab spring uprisings of 2009–2010.

Over the past three decades, virtually all the growth in American incomes has gone to the top 10 percent, with particularly large gains going to the top 1 percent and spectacularly large gains going to the top .01 percent. Between 1980 and 2008, the incomes of the bottom 90 percent of the population grew by a meager 1 percent, or an average of just $303. Meanwhile, over those same years, the incomes of the top .01 percent of Americans grew by 403 percent, or an average of a massive $21.9 million. The richest 300,000 Americans now enjoy almost as much income as the bottom 150 million. These high rollers make up an enormously rich and powerful class that can best be described as a plutocracy—not unlike the plutocracy of financial interests that dominated America back in the 1920s, when the opulence of the wealthy and their disproportionate influence over the political process was particularly blatant.

America’s return to plutocracy is all the more notable because, between the periods of extreme inequality of the 1920s and the extreme inequality of today, something very significant happened. During the intervening years—particularly the early postwar period, from the end of World War II until 1980—the United States achieved, as did many other industrialized nations, a degree of equality and egalitarian distribution of income rarely seen in any period of Western history. Certainly, it is striking to compare the fate of ordinary Americans in recent decades with the fate of ordinary Americans in the early decades after World War II. As mentioned in the last paragraph, the incomes of the bottom 90 percent of Americans grew by only 1 percent in the past three decades. But, in the 1950–1980 period, the bottom 90 percent did dramatically better, experiencing income growth of 75 percent, or an average of $13,222. Since the 1980s, however, the revival of plutocracy has had sweeping effects, profoundly changing the nature of American society and the lives of Americans. Yet, even as this remarkable transformation took place, the issue of inequality and its negative consequences largely disappeared from public debate—until the Occupy Wall Street movement boldly pushed the subject back into the limelight in the fall of 2011.

About the Authors 

Linda McQuaig has developed a reputation for taking on the establishment. Author of seven Canadian best sellers and winner of a National Newspaper Award, she has been a national reporter for the Globe and Mail, a senior writer for Maclean's magazine, and a political columnist for the Toronto Star. Follow her on Twitter at @LindaMcQuaig and visit her website.

Author of three books, Neil Brooks is director of the Graduate Program in Taxation at Osgoode Hall Law School in Toronto. He has participated in building projects relating to income tax in Lithuania (through the Harvard Institute for International Development), Vietnam (Swedish International Development Agency), Japan (Asian Development Bank), China (AUSAid), and Mongolia (AUSAid).

You’ll notice a major recurring theme in the top read blog posts from the Broadside in 2018. Should it be any surprise? This year, readers were more than ready to come to terms with our country’s complex notions around racial identity and, most of all, white fragility. And we have Robin DiAngelo’s book White Fragility to thank! Dina Gilio-Whitaker extended the conversation of white fragility to address how settler colonialism manifests as settler privilege and settler fragility today. Her series on settler privilege went viral. Whatever the topic, we at Beacon Press can always turn to our authors for the critical lens we need to understand today’s most pressing social issues. Take a look at our other highlights of the Broadside.

Here’s looking to another year of insightful blog posts! And Happy New Year!

Lisa Page’s “Passing or Transracial?: Authority, Race, and Sex in the Rachel Dolezal Documentary”

“But there is more to this story than a white woman passing for black. This story is full of secrets and scandal tied to Dolezal’s complicated childhood . . . . This is a story that should’ve made the news, not just the sensationalistic story of a woman passing for black. It speaks to our short attention span and our flat-out disinterest in anything complicated. It also speaks to the complications of authority, race, and sex.”

Robin DiAngelo’s “Examining White Identity Is the Antidote to White Fragility”

“I am white and am addressing a common white dynamic. I am mainly writing to a white audience; when I use the terms us and we, I am referring to the white collective. This usage may be jarring to white readers because we are so rarely asked to think about ourselves or fellow whites in racial terms. But rather than retreat in the face of that discomfort, we can practice building our stamina for the critical examination of white identity—a necessary antidote to white fragility.”

Ayla Zuraw-Friedland’s “45 Telltale Signs Your College Roommate Has White Fragility”

“White fragility comes in many shapes and sizes, but all are toxic. Much of [Robin DiAngelo’s] advice is geared toward recognizing and treating these symptoms in the workplace, so I’ve taken the liberty of imagining some ways in which they might manifest in your dorm room. I imagine these as possibilities, because they are, in part, taken from my own experience of being the roommate with white fragility and saying some cringeworthy things that revealed what DiAngelo refers to as ‘racial stupidity.’”

Dina Gilio-Whitaker’s “Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack of Settler Privilege”

“All of today’s settlers and immigrants are in one way or another beneficiaries of genocide and land theft, even if they are simultaneously themselves victims of other forms of discrimination (with the possible exception of migratory Indigenous peoples of “Meso-America”). I realize this may be difficult for people of color to hear. But this is what it means to center settler colonialism as a framework for understanding the foundation of the US beyond an analysis of race, since the origins of the US are rooted in foreign invasion, not racism.”

Dina Gilio-Whitaker’s “Settler Fragility: Why Settler Privilege Is So Hard to Talk About”

“Like white fragility, settler fragility is the inability to talk about unearned privilege—in this case, the privilege of living on lands that were taken in the name of democracy through profound violence and injustice. Like white privilege, white supremacy is also at the root of settler fragility. The difference is that foreign invasion, dispossession of Indigenous lands, and genocide were based on (white) European religious and cultural supremacy as encoded in the doctrine of discovery, not racial supremacy.”

Mary Frances Berry and Josh Gottheimer’s “The Story Behind Obama’s Keynote Address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention”

“Barack Obama began working on his speech in early July . . . Without missing a beat, Obama turned to his aides and delivered a clear message: he would write this speech. According to Gibbs, ‘He wanted to write this speech . . . in a way that was personal.” Axelrod later commented, ‘Almost immediately he said to me, ‘I know what I want to do. I want to talk about my story as part of the American story.’” (Posted originally in July 2016)

“Martin Luther King, Jr.’s ‘A Christmas Sermon on Peace’ Still Prophetic 50 Years Later”

“If we are to have peace on earth, our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Our loyalties must transcend our race, our tribe, our class, and our nation; and this means we must develop a world perspective. No individual can live alone; no nation can live alone, and as long as we try, the more we are going to have war in this world.” (Posted originally in December 2017)

Danielle Ofri’s “Dr. Lisa Schwartz, We Will Miss You”

“But it was my supreme good fortune to have Lisa Schwartz at the helm as I struggled to find my way on the 16-North medical ward. Lisa defined for me what it was to be a doctor at Bellevue—committed, brilliant, easy-going, and of course, endowed with a suitably dry sense of humor . . . . She not only taught us students the ins and outs of medicine; she taught us how to be a doctor—in the fullest sense of the word. They say you never forget your ‘first,’ and Lisa Schwartz was my first. We’ll miss you!”

With a book on the New York Times bestsellers list, it’s been an amazing year for Beacon. Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility has been on the list for twenty-four weeks in a row! This may be a record for us. It just goes to show you how the need for Robin’s critical analysis of whiteness and white supremacy isn’t fading any time soon. But White Fragility wasn’t our only bestseller this year. We’ve got such classics as Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning and Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred as well as recent books, like Jeanne Theoharis’s A More Beautiful and Terrible History and Charlene A. Carruthers’s Unapologetic, keeping Robin’s book company in this roundup. Check out all our bestsellers!

For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood . . . and the Rest of Y’all Too: Reality Pedagogy and Urban Education
Christopher Emdin

“Filled with exceptional intellectual sophistication and necessary wisdom for the future of education.”
—Imani Perry, author of Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry 

The Heritage: Black Athletes, a Divided America, and the Politics of Patriotism
Howard Bryant

“It may make people uncomfortable, but I’m pleased that Howard Bryant has chosen to tell the story of our heritage.”
—Henry Aaron, Major League Baseball Hall of Famer

An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

“A must-read for anyone interested in the truth behind this nation’s founding.” 
—Veronica E. Velarde Tiller, PhD, Jicarilla Apache author, historian, and publisher of Tiller’s Guide to Indian Country

Jesus and the Disinherited
Howard Thurman

“[Jesus and the Disinherited] is the centerpiece of the Black prophet-mystic’s lifelong attempt to bring the harrowing beauty of the African-American experience into deep engagement with what he called ‘the religion of Jesus.’”
—Vincent Harding, from the Foreword

Kindred
Octavia E. Butler

“Octavia Butler is a writer who will be with us for a long, long time, and Kindred is that rare magical artifact . . . the novel one returns to, again and again.”
—Harlan Ellison 

Man’s Search for Meaning
Viktor E. Frankl

“An enduring work of survival literature.”
—New York Times 

The Miracle of Mindfulness: An Introduction to the Practice of Meditation
Thich Nhat Hanh

“Thich Nhat Hanh writes with the voice of the Buddha.”
—Sogyal Rinpoche 

A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History
Jeanne Theoharis

“An important book that sheds new light on our recent past and yields a fresh understanding of our tumultuous present.”
—Bryan Stevenson, author of Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption 

Notes of a Native Son
James Baldwin

“A straight-from-the-shoulder writer, writing about the troubled problems of this troubled earth with an illuminating intensity.”
—Langston Hughes

Race Matters, 25th Anniversary Edition
Cornel West

“Cornel West is one of the most authentic, brilliant, prophetic, and healing voices in America today. We ignore his truth in Race Matters at our personal and national peril.”
—Marian Wright Edelman 

The Third Reconstruction: How a Moral Movement Is Overcoming the Politics of Division and Fear
The Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II with Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove

“A remarkable story about a great justice movement, led by an American prophet. Everyone interested in justice should read this book.”
—James H. Cone, Charles Augustus Briggs Distinguished Professor of Systematic Theology, Union Theological Seminary 

Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements
Charlene A. Carruthers

“She offers us a guide to getting free with incisive prose, years of grassroots organizing experience, and a deeply intersectional lens.”
—Janet Mock, author of Redefining Realness and Surpassing Certainty 

What Doctors Feel: How Emotions Affect the Practice of Medicine
Danielle Ofri

“A fascinating journey into the heart and mind of a physician struggling to do the best for her patients while navigating an imperfect health care system.”
—Boston Globe 

Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?
Martin Luther King, Jr.

“In this book—his last grand expression of his vision—he put forward his most prophetic challenge to powers that be and his most progressive program for the wretched of the earth.”
—Cornel West

White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism
Robin DiAngelo

“The value in White Fragility lies in its methodical, irrefutable exposure of racism in thought and action, and its call for humility and vigilance.”
—The New Yorker 

Why I Wake Early
Mary Oliver

“The gift of Oliver’s poetry is that she communicates the beauty she finds in the world and makes it unforgettable”
—Miami Herald 

With an introduction by Bettye Collier-Thomas

Langston Hughes. Photo credit: Delano/Library of Congress

“One Christmas Eve” was published in Opportunity in December 1933. The editor noted, “Langston Hughes, just returned from a lengthy stay in Russia, turns his hand to the short story and shows a growing mastery of that medium.” Prior to going to the Soviet Union in 1932, Hughes, at the insistence of the noted educator Mary McLeod Bethune, travelled throughout the South reading to mainly black audiences. Listening to the stories of black Southerners, and personally experiencing segregation and discrimination at every turn, Hughes became inspired to write this story.

In 1930, the majority of African American women were employed as domestics. In many small Southern towns, such as the one described here by Hughes, educated and uneducated African American women and men had few economic opportunities. As late as 1990, the majority of black women, many without formal education, were employed mostly in service positions and agriculture. Teaching and preaching were the primary professional employments open to educated blacks. Arcie, the central character of this story, personifies the plight of some black servants and of many African American women who worked to support their families as domestics. A single woman with a young child, Arcie works long hours for meager wages, which barely support her basic needs. Yet, with all her problems, she yearns to provide her child with a “normal” Christmas.

Hughes demonstrates Arcie’s efforts to make Christmas a happy occasion for Joe, her four-year-old son, and employs the Christmas theme to illustrate the vast economic gap between whites and blacks, and the lack of concern evidenced by some whites about the lives of their servants. Hughes examines the meaning of Santa Claus for black children, especially boys.

Hughes’s Santa Claus does not see Joe simply as a child who, like all children, idolizes Santa and believes in his goodness. For Santa Claus, Joe is just a Negro, a reviled figure to be made fun of, an animal without humanity, and a beast of burden to be used. Like all children who gravitate toward Santa Claus, Joe sees no reason why he should not enter the lobby of a segregated movie theatre where Santa is dispensing gifts and good cheer.

Because of the particular vulnerability of black males to lynching and other racial attacks, Hughes used black boys to demonstrate the problem black parents faced in trying to provide a “normal” childhood for their children, while at the same time educating them about what it meant to be black in America. The dilemma that African American parents, particularly Southern blacks, confronted each December was how to celebrate and embrace America’s definition of Christmas and Santa Claus, and at the same time protect their children from the dangers posed by racism, inherent in every aspect of United States culture—even Christmas.

—Bettye Collier-Thomas, from A Treasury of African-American Christmas Stories

***

Standing over the hot stove cooking supper, the colored maid, Arcie, was very tired. Between meals today, she had cleaned the whole house for the white family she worked for, getting ready for Christmas tomorrow. Now her back ached and her head felt faint from sheer fatigue. Well, she would be off in a little while, if only the Missus and her children would come on home to dinner. They were out shopping for more things for the tree which stood all ready, tinsel-hung and lovely in the living room, waiting for its candles to be lighted.

Arcie wished she could afford a tree for Joe. He’d never had one yet, and it’s nice to have such things when you’re little. Joe was five, going on six. Arcie, looking at the roast in the white folks’ oven, wondered how much she could afford to spend tonight on toys for Joe. She only got seven dollars a week, and four of that went for her room and the landlady’s daily looking after Joe while Arcie was at work.

“Lord, it’s more’n a notion raisin’ a child,” she thought.

She looked at the clock on the kitchen table. After seven. What made white folks so inconsiderate, she wondered. Why didn’t they come on home here to supper? They knew she wanted to get off before all the stores closed. She wouldn’t have time to buy Joe nothin’ if they didn’t hurry. And her landlady probably wanting to go out and shop, too, and not be bothered with little Joe.

“Doggone it!” Arcie said to herself. “If I just had my money, I might leave the supper on the stove for ’em. I just got to get to the stores fo’ they close.” But she hadn’t been paid for the week yet. The Missus had promised to pay her Christmas Eve, a day or so ahead of time.

Arcie heard a door slam and talking and laughter in the front of the house. She went in and saw the Missus and her kids shaking snow off their coats.

“Umm-m! It’s swell for Christmas Eve,” one of the kids said to Arcie. “It’s snowin’ like the deuce, and mother came near driving through a stop light. Can’t hardly see for the snow. It’s swell!”

“Supper’s ready,” Arcie said. She was thinking how her shoes weren’t very good for walking in snow.

It seemed like the white folks took as long as they could to eat that evening. While Arcie was washing dishes, the Missus came out with her money.

“Arcie,” the Missus said, “I’m so sorry, but would you mind if I just gave you five dollars tonight? The children have made me run short of change, buying presents and all.”

“I’d like to have seven,” Arcie said. “I needs it.”

“Well, I just haven’t got seven,” the Missus said. “I didn’t know you’d want all your money before the end of the week, anyhow. I just haven’t got it to spare.”

Arcie took five. Coming out of the hot kitchen, she wrapped up as well as she could and hurried by the house where she roomed to get little Joe. At least he could look at the Christmas trees in the windows downtown.

The landlady, a big light yellow woman, was in a bad humor. She said to Arcie, “I thought you was comin’ home early and get this child. I guess you know I want to go out, too, once in a while.”

Arcie didn’t say anything, for if she had, she knew the landlady would probably throw it up to her that she wasn’t getting paid to look after a child both night and day.

“Come on, Joe,” Arcie said to her son, “Let’s us go in the street.”

“I hears they got a Santa Claus down town,” Joe said, wriggling into his worn little coat. “I want to see him.”

“Don’t know ’bout that,” his mother said, “But hurry up and get your rubbers on. Stores’ll be closed directly.”

It was six or eight blocks downtown. They trudged along through the falling snow, both of them a little cold. But the snow was pretty!

The main street was hung with bright red and blue lights. In front of the City Hall there was a Christmas tree—but it didn’t have no presents on it, only lights. In the store windows there were lots of toys—for sale.

Joe kept on saying, “Mama, I want. . . .”

But mama kept walking ahead. It was nearly ten, when the stores were due to close, and Arcie wanted to get Joe some cheap gloves and something to keep him warm, as well as a toy or two. She thought she might come across a rummage sale where they had children’s clothes. And in the ten-cent store, she could get some toys.

“O-oo! Lookee. . . . ,” little Joe kept saying, and pointing at things in the windows. How warm and pretty the lights were, and the shops, and the electric signs through the snow.

It took Arcie more than a dollar to get Joe’s mittens and things he needed. In the A&P Arcie bought a big box of hard candies for 49 cents. And then she guided Joe through the crowd on the street until they came to the dime store. Near the ten-cent store they passed a moving picture theatre. Joe said he wanted to go in and see the movies.

Arcie said, “Ump-un! No, child. This ain’t Baltimore where they have shows for colored, too. In these here small towns, they don’t let colored folks in. We can’t go in there.”

“Oh,” said little Joe.

In the ten-cent store, there was an awful crowd. Arcie told Joe to stand outside and wait for her. Keeping hold of him in the crowded store would be a job. Besides she didn’t want him to see what toys she was buying. They were to be a surprise from Santa Claus tomorrow.

Little Joe stood outside the ten-cent store in the light, and the snow, and people passing. Gee, Christmas was pretty. All tinsel and stars and cotton. And Santa Claus a-coming from somewhere, dropping things in stockings. And all the people in the streets were carrying things, and the kids looked happy.

But Joe soon got tired of just standing and thinking and waiting in front of the ten-cent store. There were so many things to look at in the other windows. He moved along up the block a little, and then a little more, walking and looking. In fact, he moved until he came to the picture show.

In the lobby of the moving picture show, behind the plate glass doors, it was all warm and glowing and awful pretty. Joe stood looking in, and as he looked his eyes began to make out, in there blazing beneath holly and colored streamers and the electric stars of the lobby, a marvelous Christmas tree. A group of children and grownups, white, of course, were standing around a big man in red beside the tree. Or was it a man? Little Joe’s eyes opened wide. No, it was not a man at all. It was Santa Claus!

Little Joe pushed open one of the glass doors and ran into the lobby of the white moving picture show. Little Joe went right through the crowd and up to where he could get a good look at Santa Claus. And Santa Claus was giving away gifts, little presents for children, little boxes of animal crackers and stick-candy canes. And behind him on the tree was a big sign, (which little Joe didn’t know how to read). It said, to those who understood, Merry Christmas from Santa Claus to our young patrons. Around the lobby, other signs said, When you come out of the show stop with your children and see our Santa Claus. And another announced, Gem Theatre makes its customers happy—see our Santa.

And there was Santa Claus in a red suit and a white beard all sprinkled with tinsel snow. Around him were rattles and drums and rocking horses which he was not giving away. But the signs on them said (could little Joe have read) that they would be presented from the stage on Christmas Day to the holders of lucky numbers. Tonight, Santa Claus was only giving away candy, and stick-candy canes, and animal crackers to the kids.

Joe would have liked terribly to have a stick-candy cane. He came a little closer to Santa Claus. He was right in the front of the crowd. And then Santa Claus saw Joe.

Why is it that lots of white people always grin when they see a Negro child? Santa Claus grinned. Everybody else grinned, too, looking at little black Joe—who had no business in the lobby of a white theatre. Then Santa Claus stooped down and slyly picked up one of his lucky number rattles, a great big loud tin-pan rattle like they use in cabarets. And he shook it fiercely right at Joe. That was funny. The white people laughed, kids and all. But little Joe didn’t laugh. He was scared. To the shaking of the big rattle, he turned and fled out of the warm lobby of the theatre, out into the street where the snow was and the people. Frightened by laughter, he had begun to cry. He went looking for his mama. In his heart he never thought Santa Claus shook great rattles at children like that—and then laughed.

In the crowd on the street he went the wrong way. He couldn’t find the ten-cent store or his mother. There were too many people, all white people, moving like white shadows in the snow, a world of white people.

It seemed to Joe an awfully long time till he suddenly saw Arcie, dark and worried-looking, cut across the side-walk through the passing crowd and grab him. Although her arms were full of packages, she still managed with one free hand to shake him until his teeth rattled.

“Why didn’t you stand there where I left you?” Arcie demanded loudly. “Tired as I am, I got to run all over the streets in the night lookin’ for you. I’m a great mind to wear you out.”

When little Joe got his breath back, on the way home, he told his mama he had been in the moving picture show.

“But Santa Claus didn’t give me nothin’,” Joe said tearfully. “He made a big noise at me and I runned out.”

“Serves you right,” said Arcie, trudging through the snow. “You had no business in there. I told you to stay where I left you.”

“But I seed Santa Claus in there,” little Joe said, “so I went in.”

“Huh! That wasn’t no Santa Claus,” Arcie explained. “If it was, he wouldn’t a-treated you like that. That’s a theatre for white folks— I told you once—and he’s just a old white man.”

“Oh. . . . ,” said little Joe.

About Bettye Collier-Thomas 

Bettye Collier-Thomas is professor of American history at Temple University. Her scholarship includes American social and cultural history, African American women’s history, religion, civil rights, and electoral politics. Dr. Collier-Thomas is the author of numerous award-winning books. Her most recent, Jesus, Jobs, and Justice: African American Women and Religion, was reviewed and cited in the New York Times as an Editor’s Choice, won a National Women’s Political Caucus’s EMMA award for excellence in elevating the civil discourse on issues affecting women, and received awards from the Organization of American Historians and the Association of Black Women Historians. Her previous award-winning books include Sisters in the Struggle: African American Women in the Civil Rights–Black Power Movement (as coeditor) and Daughters of Thunder: Black Women Preachers and Their Sermons. She has received multiple fellowships and grants from the Lilly Endowment, Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Humanities Center, and Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

By Mary Frances Berry

Two years ago, we didn’t want to talk about it. But it’s happened again in North Carolina. We’re talking about electoral fraud. This time around, veteran political operative Leslie Dowless McCrae is facing allegations of illegally collecting absentee ballots from voters. Electoral fraud takes other forms, including vote buying. And it doesn’t just happen in North Carolina. Democrats and Republicans alike participate in these illegal practices. More importantly, none of this is breaking news. Historian and activist Mary Frances Berry had already written about the effects of electoral fraud and what should be done about it in Five Dollars and a Pork Chop Sandwich: Vote Buying and the Corruption of Democracy. Let’s take a gander at this passage from her book . . . and pay attention.

***

What [former director of Louisiana’s Vote Fraud Division] Greg Malveaux told me about electoral fraud in Louisiana was disturbing. He explained how campaign operatives paid the poor small amounts of money for their votes while making policy contrary to their needs. He talked about the family fiefdoms that perpetuated their power illegally. He described how election officials cavalierly accepted payments to let buyers view the ballots to make sure the bought stayed bought. He related how poor voters didn’t mind saying they got paid small amounts of money and treats for their votes, perhaps a pork chop sandwich and a cold drink.

Greg had been a deputy sheriff for twelve years in Orleans Parish. He was not naïve. But he soon realized that his new job of punishing election fraud was very complicated. The manipulation and vote buying seemed accepted by the public as just a routine part of the process. Politics is a game and parties do whatever it takes to win.

Malveaux focused on his job as an enforcer of the fraud law. But after thorough investigations he found he couldn’t get help from local officials. Elected local prosecutors and judges recoiled from the very idea of prosecuting the people who voted for them. Party principle and solidarity also play a role. Elected officials have important connections and relationships with each other and the candidates for other offices. Jobs, contracts, and other matters of patronage are at risk. Put simply, judges and other officials aren’t eager to upset the system, because they benefit from it.

Greg had some successes but it was hard, often demoralizing, work. His boss, Suzanne Haik Terrell, had campaigned on an “end the fraud” platform. Ending fraud is certainly great rhetoric and a good campaign slogan. Greg believed Terrell wanted him to succeed, hoping success would propel her to higher office. Success seemed to mean convicting a few low-level brokers and haulers and not the donors or candidates themselves. Basically, the law was hard to enforce because hardly anyone who could enforce it wanted it to be enforced.

The extraordinary effort it took for Malveaux to win his biggest case attests to the difficulty. To penetrate the Martin-Champagne-Thibodeaux network in St. Martinville, he had to overcome intimidation and deliberate undermining by fellow staff members. He did have the helping hand of a few courageous ordinary citizens. He also found an occasional reporter willing to stand up to his or her editors in pursuit of the story. But only when he was able to persuade federal officials to respond did he have some measure of success.

The research his experience inspired shows that electoral fraud, consisting mainly of vote buying and abuse of absentee ballots, does indeed exist in state and local elections. Such fraud is routine in some locales. Family dynasties that perpetuate their own power seem tempted to buy votes with money or influence as a rite of passage. The Martin-Champagne-Thibodeauxes in Louisiana, the Shulers in Florida, the Daleys in Chicago, and others are examples. At the national level we have also seen the good and bad effects of politics as the family business. The role Jeb Bush played in the manipulation of the Florida election in 2000 for his brother George is one recent example of such influence. While in the twenty-first century working to end voter suppression through identification laws and other mechanisms is necessary and a priority, the influence of often hidden or just plain ignored fraud harms the same group of vulnerable citizens. In fact, the very existence of their democratic participation tempts abuse of the election process.

Yet the inclination, no matter how small, to blame the most vulnerable citizens for fraud is misdirected. The prosecution of poor people who get a few dollars for their votes is like making an arrest for selling single cigarettes. In 1904, Indiana tried punishing voter fraud by giving rewards to buyers who would persuade someone to sell them a vote. They soon recognized that all they did was to entrap the needy along with the greedy.

Any outrage over fraud should be reserved for the candidates who buy their votes, neglect the issues that concern the poor, and studiously refuse to implement policies that could help them. Good examples of the latter include the refusal to adequately fund the schools their children attend, fund the medical facilities they utilize, or promote more racially equitable policing.

Candidates who engage in electoral fraud should suffer prosecution, even though it’s challenging. Looking for legal ways to give citizens practical incentives to vote may be a way to reduce the attractiveness of vote selling, while increasing turnout. But incentives must be combined with appealing issues and candidates, and organizing needs to assist the marginalized to achieve beneficial policy objectives. Otherwise the increased election totals will serve only to validate the system.

Taking care of voters and potential voters in poor and working-class neighborhoods such as those manipulated by Nashville’s Little Evil and Good Jelly, and Chicago’s mayors and aldermen, motivates turnout and loyalty to candidates. Street money or walk-around money, designed to increase turnout among people who see no reason to vote, also acts as a short-term jobs program for the unemployed or low-wage workers needing additional income. There are stipends for putting up yard signs, distributing literature, and circulating petitions. There are payments for hauling voters back and forth to the polls. There are expenses for feeding election judges and other officials and campaign workers. There are also media buys for ethnic and black radio stations and ad consultants. Campaign operatives and the community dependent on the short-term jobs hope for competitive primaries and run-off elections to increase the money flow. Turnout may increase, but whether it is increased legally or though illegal vote buying, the same structural problems of unemployment and inequity remain in the targeted communities once the election is done.

Federal enforcement would be the most certain way to provide more effective oversight, the adjudication of violations, and control of the relationship between money and politics in state and local elections. But unless there are federal candidates on the same ballot, or a federal discrimination issue is raised as in Pam Thibodeaux’s case, this is the most unlikely approach. Unlikely, because under the Constitution, the framers deliberately did not include control of state and local elections among the powers delegated to the national government. Therefore, the power is left to the states. The only way to change this responsibility is to adopt a constitutional amendment. The amendment would need to make voting and election protection a federal responsibility instead of a primary responsibility of the states. In 2001, stirred by investigations of irregularities in the 2000 presidential election in Florida, including from the US Civil Rights Commission, Illinois congressman Jesse Jackson Jr. introduced such a Right to Vote Amendment in the Congress. The bill, reintroduced in successive Congresses, would place voting under the direct control of Congress, which would have the power to administer standards and enforce election protection in both state and federal elections. Since Jackson’s resignation from Congress, Wisconsin Democratic congressman Mark Pocan and Minnesota Democratic congressman Keith Ellison have pushed the amendment. It has not yet made it out of committee.

About the Author 

Mary Frances Berry is the Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought and professor of History and Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the former chairwoman of the US Commission on Civil Rights, a Distinguished Fellow of the American Society for Legal History, the author of twelve books, and the recipient of thirty-five honorary degrees. Dr. Berry has appeared on Real Time with Bill Maher, The Daily Show, Tavis Smiley, PBS NewsHour, CBS Evening News, Al Jazeera America News, and various MSNBC and CNN shows. She is the author of History Teaches Us to Resist: How Progressive Movements Have Succeeded in Challenging Times. Follow her on Twitter at @DrMFBerry and visit her website.

Are you ready for the holiday season and on the hunt for gifts to inspire someone in your life? Our holiday sale is back! Save 30% on everything at beacon.org through December 31 using code HOLIDAY30.

This year, Beacon Press is also donating 10% of our web sales in December to Unitarian Universalist Assocation Disaster Relief Fund to the help the communities in California recover from the wildfires.

Here are our holiday picks for the year. Drum roll, please:

White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism
Robin DiAngelo

“An indispensable volume for understanding one of the most important (and yet rarely appreciated) barriers to achieving racial justice.”
—Tim Wise, author of White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son 

A New York Times Best Seller! 

The Heritage: Black Athletes, a Divided America, and the Politics of Patriotism
Howard Bryant

“This is the book for explaining our times, whether you give a damn about sports or not.”
—Dave Zinn, sports editor, The Nation, and author of Jim Brown: Last Man Standing 

A Library Journal Best Book of 2018, a Boston Globe Best of 2018 pick, and longlisted for the PEN America Literary Award in literary sports writing! 

Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry
Imani Perry

“I didn’t know how hungry I was for this intimate portrait until now.”
—Jacqueline Woodson, National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature and National Book Award Winner for Brown Girl Dreaming

Longlisted for the PEN America Literary Award in biography! 

The Trials of Nina McCall: Sex, Surveillance, and the Decades-Long Government Plan to Imprison “Promiscuous” Women
Scott W. Stern

“In our own era, when harassment is a great national topic, this book could not be more timely.”
—Mary Pipher, author of Reviving Ophelia and Women Rowing North

A Boston Globe Best of 2018 pick! 

When I Spoke in Tongues: A Story of Faith and Its Loss
Jessica Wilbanks

“Jessica Wilbanks’s memoir of faith’s loss and her efforts to comprehend its significance is no less than an illuminating exploration of how to live meaningfully.”
—Claire Messud, author of The Burning Girl  

Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements
Charlene A. Carruthers

“Charlene gives us not just a manual but a prayer, an intention, a critical path forward, and a deep analysis on where we’ve been.”
—Patrisse Khan Cullors, coauthor of When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir  

The Miracle of Mindfulness: An Introduction to the Practice of Meditation
Thich Nhat Hanh

“Thich Nhat Hanh’s ideas for peace, if applied, would build a monument to ecumenism, to world brotherhood, to humanity.”
—Martin Luther King Jr.

How to Be Less Stupid About Race: On Racism, White Supremacy, and the Racial Divide
Crystal M. Fleming

“This book will leave you thinking, offended, and transformed.”
—Nina Turner, former Ohio state senator

New and Selected Poems, Volume One
Mary Oliver

“Her special gift is to connect us with our sources in the natural world, its beauties and terrors and mysteries and consolations.”
—Stanley Kunitz

Man’s Search for Meaning
Viktor E. Frankl

“One of the great books of our time.”—Harold S. Kushner, author of When Bad Things Happen to Good People  

Kindred
Octavia E. Butler

“In Kindred, Octavia Butler creates a road for the impossible and a balm for the unbearable.”
—Walter Mosley 

An African American and Latinx History of the United States
Paul Ortiz

“An African American and Latinx History of the United States is a gift.”
—Ibram X. Kendi, National Book Award–winning author of Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America 

The End of Animal Farming: How Scientists, Entrepreneurs, and Activists Are Building an Animal-Free Food System
Jacy Reese

“Places the issue of factory farming in the context of human progress and presents compelling arguments on how we should deal with it today.”
—Steven Pinker, Johnstone Professor of Psychology, Harvard University, and author of The Better Angels of Our Nature and Enlightenment Now  

Notes of a Native Son
James Baldwin

“He named for me the things you feel but couldn’t utter . . . articulated for the first time to white America what it meant to be American and a black American at the same time.”
—Henry Louis Gates Jr.

A Treasury of African-American Christmas Stories
Ed. Bettye Collier-Thomas

“A Treasury of African American Christmas Stories gives us all the gift of engaging our hearts and minds in the true stories of Christmas.”
—Nikki Giovanni

If you’re tracking down a specific kind of book, poke around in our categories. For those concerned about the lives of immigrants and the policies that affect them, browse our titles in Immigration Reform. For those eager to see what’s really at stake with regard to reproductive justice and abortion laws, look at our titles in Women’s Lives. And for those looking to up their game on discussing issues of race and systemic oppression, check out our books in Race and Ethnicity in America. You can always browse our website to see all the others and search our whole catalog!

Oh, and our staff members are here to help you out, too! Check out what some of them are recommending. They’re also suggesting their favorite things to gift for the holidays.

“Anyone who knows me even a little bit knows that I am obsessed with all things animal (particularly dogs, but cows and goats and pretty much everything else too). Mousy Cats and Sheepish Coyotes dives deep into the science behind animal personalities and John Shivik’s own experiences as a pet-owner and wildlife expert. It also has one of the best first lines I’ve ever read: ‘My cat, for all practical purposes, is an asshole.’

Another thing I’m loving this season is all kinds of lights! I hate the constant darkness of winter and this is my new sun lamp at my desk that I use every single morning. I also recently got an alarm clock that mimics the sunrise, so instead of being jolted awake in the pitch dark, you wake up gradually with light. It’s AMAZING.”
—Emily Powers, associate marketing manager

“My favorite Beacon book is The Art of Misdiagnosis, which I recommend to anyone who has used the gifts of art, creativity, and storytelling to process complicated family and personal situations. My favorite ‘thing(s)’ to gift at the holidays are prints, cards, totes, and all sorts from local artisan fairs. I recently fell in love with the work of talented local artist Amanda Williams Galvin (a.k.a REVEL REVEL) and purchased many of her New England–themed delights to send to friends near and far. And, ’tis the season to treat oneself too, right? I bought this delightful Somerville, MA, print as a gift to me.”
—Marcy Barnes, production director

“With the recent uptick in discussion about immigrant detention centers, Margaret Regan’s Detained and Deported is a crucial read for anyone who wants to dig deeper into our country’s history of separating and incarcerating migrant families. The stories and statistics are heart-wrenching, but they really helped me get a better understanding of this issue when it took over US headlines back in September. On a lighter note, this is Tyra, the design department’s pet crocodile. I’m not sure what brand she is, but she’s one of those toys that starts out small and grows in a bowl of water. A great holiday gift for anyone in your life who may need some companionship this winter.”
—Louis Roe, designer 

By Danielle Ofri

There’s nothing quite like the sucker-punch feeling of turning the page of the newspaper with your morning coffee and suddenly seeing an obituary of someone you know. But that’s what happened last week when I turned page A27 to see a photo and obituary for Dr. Lisa Schwartz, who died at the age of fifty-five of cancer.

When I was a medical student and did my very first rotation on the medical wards of Bellevue Hospital, Lisa was my resident. To say that I was green would be an understatement. Every medical student is green when they start on the wards, but I had stepped away from the traditional path for four years in a lab, so the coursework of the first two years of medical school was hardly a flickering shadow in my hippocampus.

But it was my supreme good fortune to have Lisa Schwartz at the helm as I struggled to find my way on the 16-North medical ward. Lisa defined for me what it was to be a doctor at Bellevue—committed, brilliant, easy-going, and of course, endowed with a suitably dry sense of humor. Back in those days, we wrote our progress notes on paper, which in Bellevue was bright pink for some inexplicable reason. I still have a perfect image of her impeccable admission notes, which set the standard for how to think about a patient’s illness and capture all the clinical nuances. No matter how busy a night we had, the next morning every new patient had a neatly printed and intensely thorough Senior Resident Admitting Note. It has remained my standard to this day.

When I wrote my first book about becoming a doctor, the very first chapter took place on that ward in that month. I had been confused about how to work with a patient who seemed only to want to jabber on about all the nonmedical trivialities of the day. But Lisa relayed to me how she once stayed up late with a patient singing songs with him, because that was what he connected with and what brought him comfort. “So it was okay just to spend time with your patients,” I later wrote. “It was okay to do things besides record your patients’ vital signs. My resident said so!”

Because your resident said so. At Bellevue, what your resident said was as good as gold. Whether it was about how to aspirate ascites fluid from the abdomen of a cirrhotic patient, how to diagnose Wegener's granulomatosis, how to wrangle a CT scan from an obdurate radiologist, how to handle a hallucinating patient who spoke only Igbo, how to interpret an EKG when you couldn’t get a stable baseline, how to run a code, or where to get a cheese Danish once the coffee shop closed—your resident was the authoritative voice. Lisa skillfully guided all of us newbies as we struggled to find our footing. She loved to teach and always exuded joy about being with patients.

It was no surprise to anyone who knew Lisa that she went on to do groundbreaking and creative work that has benefited so many patients. She wasn’t afraid to question how and why we make diagnoses and helped expose the harms from overdiagnosis. She wasn’t shy about challenging the FDA on how to make labelling of medications more understandable to patients. She relentlessly questioned so many assumptions in medicine that most doctors take for granted.

Lisa came back to Bellevue two years ago to give a Grand Rounds lecture. None of us had any idea that she had already been sick for five years by then. But she gave an inspiring lecture on how we can improve medicine on a grand scale, and what that means on an individual level for patients. Many of the younger doctors in the audience hadn’t known her before, but we communally swelled with pride that she had cut her chops on our home turf.

It’s devastating to lose someone who has been an inspiration both globally and personally. I will always remember the comfort she gave me during one particularly upsetting situation in that first month of doctoring. But most importantly, she not only taught us students the ins and outs of medicine; she taught us how to be a doctor—in the fullest sense of the word. They say you never forget your “first,” and Lisa Schwartz was my first. We’ll miss you!

About the Author 

Danielle Ofri, MD, PhD is an associate professor of medicine at New York University School of Medicine and has cared for patients at New York's Bellevue Hospital for more than two decades. She is the author of Singular Intimacies: Becoming a Doctor at Bellevue, Incidental Findings: Lessons from My Patients in the Art of Medicine, and Medicine in Translation: Journeys with My Patients. Dr. Ofri is a regular contributor to the New York Times' Well blog as well as the Times' "Science Times" section and the New England Journal of Medicine. Her writings have appeared in Best American Essays and Best American Science Writing. She is the editor in chief of the Bellevue Literary Review. Dr. Ofri lives in New York City with her husband, three children, and their loyal lab mutt. Follow her on Twitter at @danielleofri. Check out her website and Facebook fan page.

This year’s Human Rights Day marks the seventieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights—the perfect day to reflect on the US’s treatment of the immigrant community. And let me tell you: It’s going to be a stark reckoning. Just look at some of this year’s headlines. Many migrant families are still separated. Border patrol agents fired tear gas at migrant families at the US-Mexico border to disperse them. This is inhumane treatment. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights proclaims the “inalienable rights which everyone is inherently entitled to as a human being—regardless of race, color, religion, sex, language, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status.” That’s not what we’re seeing. Where are the inalienable rights for this community?

Outraged by the headlines, many took to Twitter and posted, “This is not America.” But if you check your history, you’ll find that, yes, this is and has been America. That’s why we’ve put together this reading list. To put a mirror up to our country’s history of anti-immigrant sentiment. And it’s our hope that these books from our catalog always remind us never to lose sight of anyone’s humanity, regardless of their national or social origin.

Considering Hate: Violence, Goodness, and Justice in American Culture and Politics
By Kay Whitlock and Michael Bronski

Our society’s reliance on the framework of hate to explain hate crimes and violence is wrongheaded, misleading, and harmful. It’s led to intensified government-based policing, increased surveillance, and harsher punishments that have never worked and don’t work now. Longtime activists and political theorists Kay Whitlock and Michael Bronski wrote Considering Hate so we can radically reimagine the meaning and structures of justice within a new framework of community wholeness, collective responsibility, and civic goodness.

Detained and Deported: Stories of Immigrant Families Under Fire
By Margaret Regan

The stories in Margaret Regan’s Detained and Deported are just as harrowing and heart-wrenching as the headlines we’ve been reading this year. Increasingly draconian detention centers and deportation policies have broadened police powers while enriching a private prison industry whose profits feed on human suffering. The worst of it is how families are separated, again and again. Regan also documents the rise of resistance, profiling activists and young immigrant Dreamers who are fighting for the rights of the undocumented.

How Does It Feel to Be Unwanted?: Stories of Resistance and Resilience from Mexicans Living in the United States
By Eileen Truax

Journalist Eileen Truax knew that the election of Donald Trump didn’t signify the beginning of hardship of Mexican immigrants, but the continuation of a decades-long assault. She also knew that resistance to this assault had been building, and it was time for the countless stories of strength, perseverance, and activism to be shared. Through the thirteen stories in How Does It Feel to Be Unwanted?, Truax connects us with the Mexican population already living and participating in their communities as well as those who still seek asylum.

How to Love a Country
By Richard Blanco

This new collection from renowned inaugural poet Richard Blanco explores immigration, gun violence, racism, LGBTQ issues, and more in these accessible and emotive verses. Unifying the wide variety of subject matter in these poems is one fundamental and overwhelming question: How to love this country? Blanco seeks the answers by digging deep into the marrow of our nation with poems that interrogate our past and present, grieve our injustices, and note our flaws yet remember to celebrate our ideals and cling to our hopes.

Hunting Season: Immigration and Murder in an All-American Town
By Mirta Ojito

Ten years ago, thirty-seven-year-old undocumented Ecuadorean immigrant Marcelo Lucero was attacked and murdered by a group of teenagers in the Long Island village of Patchogue. An unassuming worker at a dry cleaner’s, Lucero became yet another victim of anti-immigration fever and a symbol of everything that was wrong with our broken immigration system. Journalist Mirta Ojito crafted an unflinching portrait of this case in Hunting Season.

“They Take Our Jobs!”: And 20 Other Myths About Immigration
By Aviva Chomsky

“We need to protect our borders to prevent criminals and terrorists from entering the country.” Does this sound familiar? Three years into our current administration, we’re still hearing egregious myths and misinformed claims about immigrants and immigration that promote aggressive anti-immigrant policies. This calls for Aviva Chomsky’s revised and updated myth-busting book “They Take Our Jobs!” And 20 Other Myths About Immigration. Crucial for our politically fraught times, this expanded edition contains fresh material addressing what’s been happening in immigration policy for the last ten years. It also helps us understand the underlying assumptions behind the myths.

Water Tossing Boulders: How a Family of Chinese Immigrants Led the First Fight to Desegregate Schools in the Jim Crow South
By Adrienne Berard

We can look as far back as the 1920s to see how our country excluded immigrants from the right to an equal education. The Lums were a Chinese American family whose daughters were barred from attending middle school in Rosedale, Mississippi, because they were considered to be “colored.” The school was for whites. The Lum family fought for the right to educate Chinese Americans in the white schools of the Jim Crow South in what would become the first US Supreme Court case to challenge the constitutionality of racial segregation in Southern public schools.

When I Walk Through That Door, I Am
By Jimmy Santiago Baca

Poet-activist Jimmy Santiago Baca makes the immigration crisis painfully personal in this new interpretation of the Epic Poem. In these verses, he imagines the experiences of Sophia, an El Salvadorian mother searching for a better life. Her journey takes us through the obstacles and tragedies of immigration, family separation, ICE raids on the Southern border, and her husband’s murder. When I Walk Through That Door, I Am is a call for our attention, for our compassion, for our energy in pursuit of democracy and of justice.

In these times when readers are responding to our books “more than ever,” when our authors—including Cornel West, Anita Hill, Robin DiAngelo, Charlene Carruthers, Howard Bryant, and Christopher Emdin—are appearing in the media, their ideas going viral on social media, their voices being heard on so many platforms, we thought it might be good to take a break to focus on some of the staff who work hard to find, shape, edit, produce, and promote those works. Our blog series “Beacon Behind the Books” introduces to you a member of our staff and gives you a behind-the-scenes look, department by department, at what goes on at our office.

For the month of December and to close 2018, we introduce you to our business operations assistant, Claire Desroches!  

What drew you to publishing, Claire? How did you find your way to Beacon?

I studied English and Religious Studies in college but didn’t know what I wanted for my career. I fell into hospitality management for several years after graduating. I loved working for the boutique hotel I managed but was ready for a change. Despite my best efforts to avoid any and all math courses in school, I realized while working that I enjoyed and wanted to expand on the accounting and business administration skills I had acquired. Working in the business department for Beacon Press felt tailor-made to my interests.

What other departments does your department collaborate with? And how?

A lot of my responsibilities sit at the intersections of the business, production, and sales departments, but one of the things I love about being at Beacon is that it’s a small, collaborative team. As a person who is new to publishing, it’s great to be exposed to every department. I’m trying to soak up as much as I can.

What helps you focus when you’re at work?

I can’t operate without my daily to-do list. The last thing I do every day at work is write out my list for the next day. It’s how I get back on track after a distraction, and it helps me prioritize my time.

What’s your advice to someone interested in entering the publishing field?

Do it! It took me a while to land here, and I’ve only been here for a short while, but working for Beacon has been very rewarding.

Favorite podcast?

I have so many favorite podcasts. I like everything from Gimlet Media, namely Heayweight and Reply All. Personal Best by CBC is guaranteed to brighten your day. Swindled is a great podcast about white collar crime. My Brother, My Brother and Me is perfect if you, like me, enjoy laughing uncontrollably in public.

Best vacation destination?

My favorite place to go is my parents’ house on Lake Arrowhead in Waterboro, Maine. Maine is so beautiful, and we spend as much time up there together in the summer as we can. It also helps that I get to stay for free.

Favorite thing about Boston?

The Boston Public Library. I worked in Copley Square since I was in college, and I miss being so close to it every day. I am working on finding a new favorite place in the Seaport!

About Claire Desroches 

Claire Desroches joined Beacon Press in 2018 after several years of managing a small boutique hotel. She graduated from Northeastern University, where she earned a dual major in English and Religious Studies.

By The Reverend Dr. Liz Theoharis

The New Testament documents a moral movement of the poor and rejected. It portrays the survival struggles of the marginalized, the solidarity and mutuality among different communities, and the critique of a social, political, and economic system that oppresses the vast majority of people. Given his leadership in that movement, it is not surprising that the main theme of many of Jesus’s teachings and his ministry in general is bringing good news to the poor and marginalized, standing up for righteousness, and ending all forms of discrimination and oppression. Nor is it surprising that Jesus was recognized by Rome as a threat to the status quo and crucified, the punishment reserved for revolutionaries and those deemed insurrectionists.

Jim Wallis, an evangelical leader and the founder of Sojourners magazine, has written that one in every four stories in the Bible is about poverty, making it far and away the most common theme. Certainly, stories about poverty are much more numerous and prominent than those that pertain to issues such as marriage or sexuality or prayer in schools. At the very beginning of his ministry, in Luke 4, Jesus reads from the scroll of the prophet Isaiah and announces that he has come to fulfill the mission laid out in it—to proclaim release to the captives and bring good news to those who have been made poor by systems of oppression. In passages such as Matthew 25, Jesus reminds us that what we do to the least of these, we do unto him. The Apostle Paul, following his revelation of Jesus, started a collection for the poor of Jerusalem.

Jesus’s teachings and actions around poverty, wealth, and power create a picture of him as a leader of a social, political, economic, and spiritual movement calling for a world without poverty, want, or oppression. The Sermon on the Mount, the parables, and his other lessons show him to be a “New Moses”: a liberator and freedom fighter who brings instruction about how to treat the poor, the stranger, the widow, and the marginalized. Jesus was a teacher too. Contemporary and historical stories, prophetic instruction, and moral guidance were central to his revolutionary work. His was a ministry in which he educated while he organized, taught as he fought, walked as he talked, learned as he led. He admonished his followers and other movement leaders to morally resist the authorities as they built an order of justice and equality in the here and now. The purpose of his education and leadership-development practices was to reveal the lies enshrined in the status quo and to wake people up to the possibility of another way—what he named the Kingdom or empire of God.

This revolutionary Jesus and the instruction left for his followers, as summarized by the books of the New Testament, follow the prophetic teachings of the Hebrew scriptures. The revolutionary teaching of the early Jesus movement is found not only in the sermons and parables, but also in the lives and community practices of Jesus’s followers. The many references to material poverty and simplicity, especially that of Jesus and the disciples, have an important relationship to the lived experience of the poor, who made up the base of that movement during the Roman empire. The asceticism of the Jesus movement followers, given the economic and debt practices of the empire, can be seen as both a necessary response to the reality of their poverty and resistance to the established order. Rather than romanticizing a simple life, one should read passages such as “Do not worry about your life, what you will eat” (Matthew 6, Luke 12) as comfort for people who are facing serious chronic financial difficulty. These passages tell the poor and rejected that they matter to God, that they can lead a powerful movement even if they own nothing themselves, and that by seeking God’s justice together they can build a world without want. In that context, it is possible to interpret Jesus’s instructions on how to be disciples—going out with no staff or money or bread, asking for meals to be provided—as a necessity of their economic situation, rather than as a voluntary decision to be poor. In this way, Jesus’s teachings can be seen as a declaration of justice over charity and the conviction that poor and oppressed people are agents of change who do not have to wait for religious leaders or those with more resources to fix society’s problems. Having heroes and leaders from the ranks of the poor and among those who have been rejected and marginalized for who they are is important for any moral movement. Jesus’s own poverty and homelessness (beginning with his humble birth) and Paul’s emphasis on his own personal struggles show that the early church was made up of people who did not have much and required a commitment to prosperity through community survival rather than individual accumulation and greed.

In Jesus’s time, like our own, the leisure of the wealthy and powerful was held in high esteem. The common sense of those societies said that to work was to be low, dirty, and marginalized. But the people of the Jesus movement, drawing on a tradition stretching back to the Hebrew prophets, challenged that common sense and instead emphasized the value and dignity of labor. They announced that God’s desire is for people to benefit from the fruits of their labor. The examples of Jesus, James, Paul, and other leaders of the Jesus movement working for a living—as carpenters, tent-makers, and fishers—affirm the dignity and worth of people who have to work in order to survive. It affirms that the intention in the Kingdom of God is to have community flourishing and prosperity for all, from the bottom up. Living wages are an important theme throughout the Bible for this very reason.

In addition to the reality of poverty and oppression among the leaders of the early Jesus movement, there are examples throughout the New Testament of communal practices of economic redistribution, antipoverty measures, and support for a social, spiritual, economic, and political movement opposed to Rome. Paul’s concept of the collection is a central example. He suggested that the best way to spread the Jesus movement throughout the Roman world, to Jews and Greeks, was through this act of solidarity in which the poor of many diverse nations could support the lives and actions of the poor in Jerusalem (rather than the imperial center in Rome). This ancient act of solidarity and protest against the Roman empire is also a survival strategy of sharing resources. It makes it possible for poor people not just to feed, house, and clothe themselves, but also to develop a movement with other poor people who want to build a different world. Today, we do not hear much mention of the collection for the poor. When we do hear about it, it is in reference to Christian giving (to the church and through charity). The collection, however, is not about giving to the church, nor is it a big Christian charity program (like the Salvation Army). It is about forging relationships of mutuality among diverse poor people to meet their needs. The collection for the poor is an example of the kind of practice called for in Acts 2:44–47 (New Revised Standard Version): “All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need.” In Paul’s epistles, we hear that the resolution to disputes about who could be counted as part of the Christian community is participation in the collection for the poor; that one can demonstrate allegiance to the Jesus movement by offering material resources in support of its mission. And through these practices of the poor, a community where everyone prospers is possible.

There are other economic practices present throughout the New Testament that emphasize justice over charity and abundant life for all over riches for a very few. References to exodus, Deuteronomy, Leviticus, Jeremiah, Hosea, Isaiah, and other Hebrew scriptures emphasize the ideas of liberation, forgiveness of debts, and economic justice. While the early Christians could have chosen any parts of the Old Testament for their New Testament references, the texts related to the elimination of poverty, the exodus from slavery, and the critique of the domination of power and empire resonated most closely with the lived experience of the early Christians. Freedom and liberation and the end of bondage and debt are mentioned throughout the New Testament. Indeed, the New Testament reappropriates liberatory themes from Hebrew scriptures, and this reappropriation is focused on poverty, love, and justice issues in particular.

Although we do not know extensively about the communities that documented the stories of Jesus, we know that they were communities of poor people and prophetic leaders who stood up for justice and peace. We know that they developed communal practices to survive, to spread their movement, and to challenge the theology, ideology, and practices of the empire. The Gospel of John was written by an ostracized and oppressed community. Mark was written by a community of followers from shortly after the destruction of the Temple, facing escalating imperial taxes and debts. Paul points out to the Galatians that they welcomed him, shared what they had with him, and healed him when he first arrived, rather than killing him as an outsider. It’s important to see how all of these Jesus followers and communities, especially those from the bottom of society, created communal strategies for sharing and living cooperatively. Several of the New Testament stories, from the feeding of the five thousand to the messages of many of the parables to the community of goods in Acts 2 and 4, fit into this type of collective survival through mutual support and organization.

The New Testament contains numerous critiques of the disparity between the rich and the poor, and the way that systemic greed gets in the way of loving and honoring God and the neighbor. The other side of these critiques is the call to move from hierarchy to mutuality. Some of the passages that are most explicit include the teaching that one cannot worship God and Mammon, James’s condemnation of the oppression of the poor by the rich (especially using the courts), and the parable of the rich young man who is told by Jesus that to have eternal life he must give what he has to the poor.

Many New Testament books explicitly critique the wealthy. This includes passages such as “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God” (Matthew 19); “The first shall be last, and the last first” (Mark 10); “Command [those who are rich] to do good, to be rich in good deeds” (1 Timothy 6); the story of the rich man and Lazarus (Luke 16); and the critique of slavery and the selling of bodies and souls like commodities on the market (Revelation 18). In addition to the more implicit discussions of poverty throughout the gospels and the rest of the New Testament, the existence of these more explicit critiques of wealth make it harder to dismiss the other themes and concepts mentioned above as merely allegorical. These critiques show that poverty is a main concern of the New Testament and that it is a Christian duty to end poverty.

The Greek word for “Kingdom of God” or “empire of God,” basilea, has much to do with the economic order that Jesus advocated. Few would disagree that the Kingdom of God is central to the teachings of Jesus and the New Testament. However, many understand this kingdom as otherworldly and immaterial. But if we look at both the prevalence of the concept and the specific references to it in the New Testament, we can see that God’s kingdom is a real, material order, with a moral agenda different from and opposed to the reigning order of the day. The basilea is particularly present in the parables that describe how the reign of God functions differently from the Roman empire: in God’s kingdom, there is no poverty or fear, and mutuality exists among all. Throughout the New Testament, Jesus’s parables and stories paint a picture of a reign in which the poor and marginalized are lifted up and their needs are met, rather than being despised or ignored by those in control. There are many references to basilea—particularly where this kingdom is associated with the poor and marginalized, children, and other vulnerable people. From these passages and others, we can see that the Kingdom of God is not ruled by force and coercion; that on earth, God’s followers are asked to model a community of mutuality and solidarity; that the poor and oppressed are held up and cared for in the Kingdom of God and that there is no room for oppressors and oppression.

The New Testament is one of the few forms of mass media that has anything good to say about poor and marginalized people. Centuries of interpretation have attempted to spiritualize or minimize this good news for the poor, hiding the reality that the Bible is a book by, about, and for poor and marginalized people. It not only says that God blesses and loves the poor, but also that the poor are God’s agents and leaders in rejecting and dismantling kingdoms built upon oppression and inequality. In the place of the old injustice they build the Kingdom of God, a kingdom without poverty. It is the vision of society the early Christians sought to create on earth, and that we who follow Jesus today are commanded to strive for as well.

About the Author 

The Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis is founder and codirector of the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights, and Social Justice and coordinator of the Poverty Initiative at Union Theological Seminary. An ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church, Theoharis is a popular speaker, teacher, and activist, and has published numerous books and articles including Always With Us?: What Jesus Really Said About the Poor. She is also the coauthor of Revive Us Again: Vision and Action in Moral Organizing. Follow her on Twitter at @liztheo and visit her website.

By Mary Frances Berry

Today, on National Day of Mourning, many gathered at Washington National Cathedral—and in front of their flatscreens—to attend the state funeral of former President George H. W. Bush. As important as it is to honor his legacy, it’s equally important to point out that his presidency didn’t benefit everyone. (After all, we’re seeing a replay of threats to our civil liberties play out during our current administration.) Historian and activist Mary Frances Berry does so in History Teaches Us to Resist: How Progressive Movements Have Succeeded in Challenging Times. This passage highlights some of the regressive policies his administration enforced, and more significantly, the resistance movements that took them on full force.

***

Protest movements began to shift tactics in the late 1980s. Unlike earlier movements, which had identifiable leaders who demanded specific policy changes, political protests increasingly relied on creative expression to influence the public and public policy. Using storytelling, graffiti, alternative music, street theater, puppetry, and new media technologies, protests sought to change popular culture and mobilize support for progressive change. The medium became the message, as Marshall McLuhan had recommended decades earlier. Now there was rap music, zap actions by the Guerrilla Girls, and Critical Mass, which brings hundreds of people together for bicycle riding in the streets, and which San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown was finally forced to accept. Disruption remained the aim of these gatherings; however, it would be misleading to draw sharp distinctions between protest styles of the 1960s and 1990s. The “Don’t Buy Krugerrands” campaign and the movement against sweatshop apparel all disrupted business as usual and helped persuade politicians to respond favorably.

Protesters against George H. W. Bush’s policies used some cultural forms, but they mainly used the “inside/outside” strategy typical of other movements. These included lobbying and marches, statements from public figures, and ads. At the start, Bush experienced what happens to every president-elect: at least one objection to a cabinet appointment. Bush’s choice of Louis Sullivan, president of Morehouse Medical School in Atlanta, who would be the only black cabinet member as secretary of Health and Human Services drew the ire of antiabortion advocates. They cited remarks he made in a news interview indicating his support for a woman’s right to choose abortion. Bush, avoiding questions about the protests, canceled a news conference at which he had been expected to name additional cabinet choices. Sullivan said he supported the right to choose but without the use of federal funds to no avail. Bush deflected the protests by having Sullivan say he agreed with Bush’s policies and would accept only people “knowledgeable” on abortion issues and recommended by antiabortion groups as his key subordinates. When Bush followed through on appointments, the issue mostly died and Sullivan was confirmed.

AIDS activists used street theater and other tactics in their protests. ACT UP had held its first action on Wall Street during the Reagan administration, in March 1987, to protest the profiteering of pharmaceutical companies such as Burroughs Wellcome, manufacturer of AZT, the first drug approved to fight AIDS. In April 1989, ACT UP members went to Burroughs Wellcome’s headquarters and chained themselves to office furniture to protest the high cost of AZT. On September 14, 1989, ACT UP members chained themselves to the VIP balcony at the New York Stock Exchange, closing trading. Four days later, Burroughs Wellcome reduced the price of AZT by 20 percent, effective immediately, reducing the price to wholesale distributors from $1.50 to $1.20 per capsule. Secretary Sullivan said he was pleased and that the price cut, combined with recent findings that lower dosages could be effective, would reduce the cost of AZT treatment. Peter Staley, an ACT UP activist, said the 20 percent reduction was too little, only a “step in the right direction, but a very small step.”

Protests on the AIDS crisis continued throughout Bush’s four years and during his reelection campaign as so many people died from the disease. Thousands of AIDS activists, organized by ACT UP, stretched a red ribbon around the White House after a debate between presidential candidates Bush, Bill Clinton, and independent Ross Perot in October 1992. The ribbon was in support of AIDS sufferers. Protesters liked Clinton’s proposal for an AIDS czar and even Perot’s call for speedier drug approval, but dismissed Bush’s talk as only being about his supporting more research.

From April 15 to June 4, 1989, there were also successful protests, mainly on the West Coast and in Washington and New York, as part of the international backlash against China in response to its suppression of the popular national democracy movement. The Chinese government used the military to kill many demonstrators and clear out Tiananmen Square, where they had been protesting. Bay Area congressional representatives quickly sought recourse for Chinese students. Bush issued an executive order to give permanent residence to protesters and those at risk of repression. The Chinese Student Protection Act of 1992 established permanent residence for Chinese nationals, targeted toward students. Chinese students who were in the United States during the time of the protests participated in TV interviews, demonstrations, and rallies, and were featured in newspaper articles. Chinese nationals were eligible to apply for permanent residency, even with expired passports. Over the years, the act granted green cards to an estimated fifty-four thousand Chinese nationals.

Unlike the Chinese student protests, Bush’s perpetuation of a no-entry policy toward Haitian refugees did not result in policy improvements. I first met Bush after I went to Rome during the last years of the Reagan administration, along with a small group organized by Jesse Jackson. It was part of our protest against Haitian refugee detention and deportation. We met with Pope John Paul II to discuss what the church might do to help the refugees incarcerated in Florida until they could be returned to Haiti, since they were mostly Catholic. The Catholic bishops responded by trying to alleviate the material deficiencies of their detention. When we returned, we met with then vice president Bush to give the briefing Americans are expected to do when they meet with foreign leaders on matters of US policy and to ask the government to relent. We found him affable, sounding very agreeable but stuck on the policy of returning the Haitians immediately or incarcerating them until they could be returned.

Bush’s engagement in the almost seven-months-long (August 1990 to February 1991) Persian Gulf War stimulated some protests. In October 1990, antiwar protesters across the country demanded an end to the deployment of US military in the war, proposing instead a diplomatic solution. Protesters, in these first coordinated protests, objected to sending two hundred thousand troops to the Persian Gulf as protection for Saudi Arabia’s oil after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. In New York City, a large crowd, variously estimated at four to fifteen thousand people, gathered at Columbus Circle and marched to Times Square, chanting, “Hell no, we won’t go; we won’t fight for Texaco!” In Washington, DC, picketing of the White House and a sit-down on Pennsylvania Avenue closed the streets for two hours. Protests also took place in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, and other cities.

Activism against Bush’s return of Haitian refugees continued throughout his administration and accelerated after a coup in Haiti on September 30, 1991. The military ousted Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the island nation’s first democratically elected president. Aristide came to the United States, and an increased fl ow of refugees left on creaky boats for the United States. US policy became a demand for negotiations to bring him back to power, despite qualms among some US officials concerning his militant leftist politics. “It’s an election year, and people don’t want poor black folks coming here,” said Democratic congressman Charles Rangel in a televised interview. “If these people came from a country that had oil or if they had some wealth, there would be adjustments made.”

The House and its committees took several actions during 1992 to protest the Bush administration’s policy of returning Haitian refugees. But none of those measures became law. In September 1992, TransAfrica, the NAACP, and other groups organized a protest at the White House. Coretta King, tennis champion Arthur Ashe, and others joined us in marching and getting arrested along with ninety or so others. Arthur was physically very weak from illness, and this was the last time he could come with us to demonstrate on human rights issues. He was hospitalized soon thereafter and died of complications from AIDS, which he contracted from a blood transfusion, on February 6, 1993. The policy of no entry to Haitian refugees was inherited and retained continuously by presidential administrations, except for a brief period after one of the hurricanes.

For civil rights advocates, domestic civil rights challenges in addition to AIDS sparked resistance. An insider strategic lobbying strategy was crucial, but targeted grassroots activism made a difference at key points in successful legislative campaigns. Bush vetoed the family and medical leave bills twice, even though women’s groups took the lead on mobilizing bipartisan support in Congress. The terrain remained particularly difficult on race issues. Just as blacks who undermined civil rights were appointed in the Reagan years, they continued to spring up all over the Bush administration, in Congress, and at the Supreme Court with the confirmation of Clarence Thomas as an associate justice. The Reaganite color-blind society theatrics had taught that black or female appointees were just as likely as the white men they served to spout anti–civil rights rhetoric and take retrograde actions accordingly.

But at first an “era of good feelings” prevailed, based on Bush’s history and the hope that he would be “kinder and gentler” than Reagan. He and his appointees were generally more low key than the Reagan group. Attorney General Richard Thornburgh, a former Pennsylvania governor, and low-profile John Dunne, assistant attorney general for civil rights, went along as the White House denounced “racial quotas” repeatedly and deliberately invoked this catchphrase to imply unfairness to whites in favor of unqualified blacks in employment. The administration’s goal was to undermine the passage of a new job discrimination bill, which was urgently needed. In the states, the Steel Belt rusted as a recession and unemployment grew, with black unemployment twice as high as that of whites. Reagan’s deficit and tax cuts exacerbated class and racial tensions. Klansman David Duke ran a nearly successful race for governor of Louisiana against Edwin Edwards, who would later uphold the state’s tradition of governors being jailed for corruption. Duke’s popularity with voters in and out of the Pelican State underscored the visibility of white supremacy in American politics.

Bush’s soothing calls for a “kinder and gentler America,” with a “thousand points of light,” perversely brought more victims of injustice seeking justice. Individuals filed more complaints of discrimination against employers, police officers, rental agents, schools, and real estate brokers than they had since the beginning of the Reagan administration. In 1990, the Department of Justice received 9,800 civil rights complaints, well over the 7,500 received in 1986.

***

During the years of the Bush administration, activists’ legislative responses to Supreme Court cases were effective, well targeted, and well timed. The AIDS protesters, under the mantle of ACT UP, used guerrilla tactics and gained a reduction in price of AZT and accelerated an FDA drug-safety review. The Civil Rights Act protests did not become a movement, and the technical nature of the decisions inhibited understanding. The Thomas embarrassment, combined with protests over his opposition to the Family and Medical Leave Act, as well as attacks from leaders such as Vernon Jordan and criticism from the media, eroded Bush’s popularity and helped lead to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1991. The course of events and the Supreme Court opinions imply that the massive prochoice marches influenced the court not to overturn Roe v. Wade.

Bush lost the 1992 election to Clinton because he seemed bored at times, and there didn’t seem to be a rationale, beyond experience, for his reelection. Additionally, his violation of his promise to not raise taxes turned off some in the Republican base. Bush also seemed not to have a policy to deal with the ongoing economic recession, while Clinton’s deployment of the slogan coined by James Carville, “It’s the economy, stupid,” was successful. Ross Perot’s candidacy also contributed to Bush’s defeat. Perot took almost 20 percent of the popular vote, making Clinton a minority president.

About the Author 

Mary Frances Berry is the Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought and professor of History and Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the former chairwoman of the US Commission on Civil Rights, a Distinguished Fellow of the American Society for Legal History, the author of twelve books, and the recipient of thirty-five honorary degrees. Dr. Berry has appeared on Real Time with Bill Maher, The Daily Show, Tavis Smiley, PBS NewsHour, CBS Evening News, Al Jazeera America News, and various MSNBC and CNN shows. She is the author of History Teaches Us to Resist: How Progressive Movements Have Succeeded in Challenging Times. Follow her on Twitter at @DrMFBerry and visit her website.

By Linda Schlossberg

Like many white Americans, I read To Kill a Mockingbird in junior high and loved it. Published in 1960, Harper Lee’s Pulitzer-Prize winning novel is told from the point of view of young Scout, whose father, the lawyer Atticus Finch, defends a black man falsely accused of rape. Scout’s innocent and appealing voice is an accessible vehicle for discussing race relations, and the novel has become a staple of school curricula. Gregory Peck won the Academy Award for his portrayal of Atticus in the 1962 film. The novel’s previously unpublished and controversial sequel, Go Set A Watchman, hit bestseller lists a few years ago. And Aaron Sorkin’s highly-anticipated Broadway adaptation, produced by Scott Rudin and starring Jeff Daniels, is certain to sell out. It’s no wonder that Mockingbird, published almost sixty years ago, emerged the winner of PBS’s The Great American Read television series, where viewers could vote, American Idol style, for their favorite novel.

But there’s a reason Mockingbird is assigned to thirteen-year-olds. The moral message of the novel is a simplistic one: Racism is bad. Very, very bad.  Also, bad people are racists. Good people, the reader is assured, are not racists.

The novel tells us very clearly which side we’re on. As readers, we are aligned with Scout and by extension Atticus, who embodies rational, educated “racial tolerance,” in sharp contrast to the novel’s depiction of an angry, ignorant, racist mob. Everything in the reading experience of the novel—our easy alliance with Scout, our comfortable sense of right and wrong—confirms a white reader’s sense of herself as open-minded, tolerant, woke. “If I lived in 1930s Alabama, I would never do that,” the white reader thinks. “I am one of the good white people.”

The results of the The Great American Read series is certain to put Mockingbird back on bestseller lists across the nation, where it will sit in uneasy proximity to sociologist Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism. White Fragility—currently holding the #5 spot on the New York Times paperback nonfiction bestseller list—is not directed at the angry, ignorant mob. It is directed instead at white, educated PBS-watching liberals. 

DiAngelo (herself white) argues that progressive white Americans, confident in their stated ideals of racial tolerance and equality, can’t bear to acknowledge the material, social, and emotional benefits they derive from living in a culture based on systemic racism. To protect themselves from that painful truth, they expend enormous energy performing their tolerance. As she writes, “I believe that white progressives cause the most daily damage to people of color. I define a white progressive as any white person who thinks he or she is not racist, or is less racist, or in the ‘choir,’ or already ‘gets it.’ White progressives can be the most difficult for people of color because, to the degree that we think we have arrived, we will put our energy into making sure that others see us as having arrived.” People of color are left to negotiate and dance around the fragile egos of progressive whites, who must always be protected from the divisive charge of racism and of protecting racial inequality.

Which brings us back to Mockingbird. White people are brought up to see their lives reflected in dominant cultural narratives and to see their stories of internal struggle and moral awakening—like the journey undergone by Scout—as universal and timeless. To suggest otherwise—to point out that racism is a daily lived reality for many people and not just part of a lesson plan—is to suggest that white people’s experiences are not universal, but specific. Worse, it implies that in loving a novel like Mockingbird, the reader herself is racist—an unbearable accusation. The book, like so many stories of white heroism, must be defended at all costs.

Somehow, being named “racist” has, for white people, become less tolerable, more of an affront, than the practice of racism itself.

A culture is made up of the stories it tells itself about itself. The selection of Mockingbird as “America’s best-loved novel” reminds us that as a nation we have a long way to go in telling the story of American racism and American whiteness.

About the Author 

Linda Schlossberg serves as Assistant Director of the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at Harvard University, where she teaches courses in literature and creative writing. She is the author of the novel Life in Miniature and the co-editor of Passing: Identity and Interpretation in Sexuality, Race, and Religion, and her work has appeared in a variety of publications, including McSweeney’s, Conduit, and Post Road. Schlossberg was the recipient of the 2016 Emerging Writer Fellowship from the Writer's Center and is currently completing a feminist dystopian novel.

By Philip Warburg

This article appeared originally in WBUR’s Cognoscenti.

Faced with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s latest report, some environmental leaders are all too ready to toss a lifeline to aging, uneconomic nuclear power plants. The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), long venerated as America’s most rigorous nuclear watchdog group, joined this chorus in early November.

The UCS report, “The Nuclear Dilemma,” proposes that we single out “safe” but financially ailing nuclear plants and subsidize their operations, so that they might remain open—thus avoiding additional carbon emissions from coal or natural gas plants that might replace them. America gets about 20 percent of its electricity from nuclear power, but only 17 of the 99 reactors that generate this power are unprofitable, according to UCS. Those reactors account for just 3 percent of overall US power generation, though UCS says the share of unprofitable nuclear plants could grow in future years if the price of natural gas drops or the costs of maintaining older nuclear facilities rise.

What do we gain by breathing some extra life into these plants? Proponents say “zero-carbon emissions.” That's if we choose to ignore the emissions associated with mining and processing uranium, building nuclear power stations, managing nuclear waste, and—on those rare but horrific occasions—dealing with the consequences of a major nuclear disaster.

Bailing out old, financially shaky nuclear plants is a short-sighted response to a huge challenge that requires much bigger, much more transformative thinking. Instead, we ought to invest big in our leading zero-carbon alternatives—solar and wind—which offer far cheaper electricity and, unlike nuclear, have life-cycle costs that have steadily dropped over the past several years.

Setting aside the questionable economics of boosting the bottom lines of unprofitable power plants, how would we determine if a nuclear plant is “safe”?

The UCS recommends that we rely upon the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s five-tier performance matrix, and offer financial support only to plants that have earned the NRC’s highest rating. In 2002, the Davis Besse Nuclear Power Station in Ottawa County, Ohio, enjoyed that rating, but in March of that year, its reactor vessel—which contains the nuclear reactor coolant and shrouded reactor core—was found to be a fraction of an inch away from a potentially catastrophic rupture. Years of undetected corrosion had worn a football-sized hole in the vessel wall.

If the vessel had ruptured, the plant’s backup water pump (which was known to be impaired) would not have been able to re-flood the reactor vessel, an essential step in stabilizing the reactor core. In a recent interview, UCS scientist Dave Lochbaum, a seasoned reactor engineer, told me he remembers telling residents near Davis Besse: “You can stop buying lottery tickets. Your luck has been used up.”

Hundreds of thousands of people in Central Europe and Japan didn’t fare so well in the nuclear safety lottery.

Following the Chernobyl disaster in 1986, some 350,000 people were evacuated from parts of Ukraine and Belarus, and to this day 1,000 square miles of territory remain off-bounds to human habitation. In Japan, some 100,000 people had still not returned home five years after the March 2011 meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi plant. Utterly different circumstances precipitated these two nuclear disasters, as well as the earlier meltdown at Three Mile Island, but all three proved the statistician’s axiom that rare events do happen.

And then there’s the question of security at nuclear plants.

Shortly after the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, word got out that unnamed nuclear plants were on al-Qaida’s list of potential terror targets. This was particularly alarming to people living near the Pilgrim power station in Plymouth, Massachusetts, situated on the flight path of the hijacked planes departing from Logan Airport.

Suicide air attacks were one concern post-9/11; saboteurs carrying rocket-propelled grenades and other portable weapons were another. To help plant operators prepare for potential threats, the NRC increased the frequency of “force-on-force” mock confrontations with plant infiltrators. It also required plant personnel to be trained in the use of portable pumps, generators and other devices that could fill in for safety equipment knocked out by sabotage.

Yet, at Pilgrim, this added training didn’t engender lasting vigilance.

Diane Turco, executive director of the volunteer watchdog group Cape Downwinders, brought attention to gaping holes in Pilgrim’s plant security when she and another activist visited the plant unannounced in 2014. She explained to me how they walked by an empty guardhouse, down the plant’s interior roadway, and into the access control building, where they observed employees punching in their security codes. No one stopped them, questioned them or searched for weapons. In 2012, a member of the same group, Paul Rifkin, circled Pilgrim in a friend’s helicopter and took detailed aerial photos of the plant.  He encountered no response from plant security, the FAA or the U.S. armed forces.

To be sure, Pilgrim is not on the NRC’s list of star performers. Burdened by a backlog of operational problems, it will be shutting down next spring. That said, the security deficits plaguing this plant are, to some degree, a warning about the broader vulnerability of nuclear plants.

We need to cut carbon emissions drastically if we are to have any hope of avoiding the very worst of climate change. Were there no better low-carbon electricity choices, groups like UCS might be on the right track in calling for a bailout of financially strapped nuclear plants. But we do have safer, more economically viable options.

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory projects that renewable energy, combined with a more flexible electric system, would be “more than adequate to supply 80 percent of total US electricity generation in 2050, while meeting demand on an hourly basis in every region of the country.” Keeping our least-profitable nuclear plants online is a distraction from meeting—or exceeding—this goal.

About the Author 

Philip Warburg is a lawyer and writer who lives in Newton. He is the author of Harvest the Wind and Harness the Sun, both published by Beacon Press. Follow him on Twitter at @pwarburg.

A Q&A with Jacy Reese

“You know what tastes better than a scrawny, industrial slab of turkey on your plate? Field Roast, Tofurky, and Gardein! But don’t take my word for it. Get chomping, hoomans!” *wink, wink*

Animal farming as we know it may go the way of the dinosaurs by 2100. That’s what Sentience Institute cofounder Jacy Reese forecasts in his new book The End of Animal Farming: How Scientists, Entrepreneurs, and Activists Are Building an Animal-Free Food System. With the developments of innovative food technologies such as cultured meats and plant-based protein, we can put slaughterhouses and industry farming out to pasture so that our clucking, oinking, and mooing friends can graze peacefully in wide-open pastures. But what does this mean for Thanksgiving, America’s most food-centric holiday? What options will we have as our food tradition evolves? And will they be just as tasty? Jacy has the answers to our questions.

Beacon Press: What are some of the major issues that consumers should be concerned about when it comes to factory farming, especially as it pertains to poultry farms?

Jacy Reese: First is the scale and ubiquity of suffering on factory farms. Over 100 billion animals are in the food system, and over 90% live on factory farms. That figure is over 99% in the US, based on USDA farm size data and the EPA’s definition of a Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation. The animals on these farms are confined in dreadfully tight spaces; even on a cage-free egg farm, there is usually less than a square foot of space per bird. Chickens and turkeys grow so much meat so quickly that they often topple under their own weight and die from heart attacks or organ failure. Many have their beaks tips cut off without anesthetic. They are usually bled out while still conscious, and some make it all the way into scalding hot defeathering water before dying.

Second are the wide range of human health and environmental harms. 80% of US antibiotics are fed to farmed animals, leading to so-called “superbugs.” Animal agriculture is responsible for 14% to 20% of greenhouse gas emissions, more than the entire transportation sector. Factory farms pollute local land, water, and air, leading to increased rates of asthma and cancer, not to mention the stench and other nuisances that drive down local property values. The health and safety of workers is especially at risk, and these local workforces and communities are disproportionately people of color and undocumented immigrants.

Finally, all animal farming is just incredibly inefficient, wasting taxpayer and consumer dollars as well as natural resources. It takes around ten calories of plant-based food to produce one calorie of animal-based food. Animals aren’t meat machines; they have hair, skin, brains, and metabolic functions that all require large amounts of energy. One entrepreneur I interviewed for my new book, Alex Lorestani at Geltor, said he was motivated to address animal agriculture because, as a scientist, he felt “technical outrage” (as opposed to “moral outrage”) at the fact that humans still use animals this way. In his words, factory farming is “the dumbest way to make the things that we need and love,” given we can make meat, dairy, and eggs without animals.

BP: In your book you write about a future where meat is no longer the centerpiece of the American diet. What changes do you see coming for holidays like Thanksgiving that focus so predominantly around food, in a food culture that still relies so heavily on animal products?

JR: The biggest reason for optimism about the end of animal farming is that it doesn't have to be the end of meat. We can have a turkey on the table. In fact, we can have any animal product and the food culture that goes along with it, without raising and killing animals. This can either be done with plants—blend together the right proteins and fats to get the same taste, look, and texture of a holiday roast—or with cells—scientists are now able to take a small sample of cells from an animal and grow meat directly, in a big cultivator that looks like one of the tanks at a beer brewery. This process cuts out the middleman, cuts out the inefficiency, and provides consumers with “clean meat,” named in an homage to “clean energy” for the ethical and food safety benefits.

Of course, adopting a new technology isn’t that simple. So, a lot of the book goes into the technical research being done, the regulation of these products by governments, and the psychology and sociology of consumer acceptance. But the prognosis is optimistic; I think we’re on track to end animal farming by 2100.

BP: What are some companies currently working in the area of plant-based meat substitutes that consumers can turn to this holiday for alternatives to turkey, butter, milk, and any other staples they might want to substitute?

JR: Usually what consumers want most during the holiday season is a big protein-and-fat-rich meat product in the center of the table, like turkey or ham. Fortunately, there are several holiday roasts available today. My favorites are Field Roast, Tofurky, and Gardein. I think at least one of those can be found in most US supermarkets if they aren’t already sold out. If you’re feeling more adventurous in the kitchen, consider looking up “vegan roast recipe” on Google. Most versions are nut-based or wheat-based, but they do require you to follow the recipe pretty closely to get the taste and texture right.

For side dishes, I would also steer people towards Google for recipes. The most important rule here is that making vegan food takes more than just cutting out the animal products. If you take cow’s milk out of a recipe, remember to add a plant-based milk or butter product, ideally high in fat content. If you take out egg, remember that different plant-based products can fill the same culinary niche: flax or chia seeds are best for precise baking, but in more casual applications, you can use fruits like bananas or avocados. Finally, if you want scrambled eggs for your holiday breakfast, rejoice with the latest plant-based product to wow vegans and omnivores alike: Just Egg.

About Jacy Reese 

Jacy Reese is the research director and cofounder of Sentience Institute, a nonprofit think tank researching the most effective strategies for expanding humanity’s moral circle. He previously served as board chair and a researcher at Animal Charity Evaluators. Reese’s writing has appeared in Vox, Salon, and the Huffington Post, and he has presented his research to academic and nonprofit audiences in fifteen countries. Follow him on Twitter at @jacyreese and visit his website.

By Gayatri Patnaik

University Press Week runs each year in November and was first established in 1978 by President Jimmy Carter to recognize “the impact, both here and abroad, of American university presses on culture and scholarship.” This year’s theme is #TurnItUP, which celebrates the dedication of University Presses to amplify knowledge. As a member of the Association of University Presses, Beacon Press is proud to participate in this year’s blog tour. In our contribution, we look at how our ReVisioning American History series challenges how so many of us have been taught to think about US history by offering a variety of US history books written from the perspectives of marginalized and underrepresented communities.

***

A little over ten years ago, I found myself mulling over what kind of history books Beacon Press could successfully publish. With the incredible history titles published every year by both university and trade presses, what could Beacon do to distinguish our list in this competitive space? Certainly, the books would need to reflect Beacon’s progressive vision of social justice and also the inherently “cross-over” nature of our list. Cross-over in two senses—both in terms of the intellectually grounded but accessible writing, as well as our ability to find multiple audiences—trade, academic, and activist—for our titles.  

Professors at history conferences had been sharing with me that students weren’t reading longer history books, and so I was already thinking of books around 300 pages (which are short considering the length of some history titles.) Then, during a one day “editorial retreat” with colleagues, the idea for this cross-over series—ReVisioning American History—was born. The goal is that each title tells US history from the vantage point of an underrepresented community, and that the series fundamentally challenges how so many of us have been taught to think about US history.

The first title in the series, A Queer History of the United States, was published in 2011 by veteran LGBT activist and scholar Michael Bronski. A Disability History of the United States by prominent disability historian Kim Nielsen was next in 2012. Radical activist and scholar Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s An Indigenous History of the United States was published in 2014, won the 2015 American Book Award and has sold over 100,000 copies. In 2018, historian and activist Paul Ortiz’s An African American and Latino History of the United States was published to a strong reception in both trade and academic markets.   

In fall 2019 we are excited to publish A Black Women’s History of the United States by distinguished historians Daina R. Berry and Kali Gross. Other forthcoming titles include A Black Power History of the United States by former Harvard University W. E. B. Du Bois Institute Fellow Rhonda Y. Williams; A Mexican History of the United States by journalist historian Lorena Oropeza; and An Asian American History of the United States by award-winning historian Catherine Choy.

Soon after publishing the initial books in this series, we began receiving feedback from middle and high school teachers searching for material to help make their US history curriculum more inclusive. When the FAIR Education Act was passed in California in 2011—a state law that requires the inclusion of LGBT people and people with disabilities in textbooks and social studies curricula—our books were used as blueprints for developing lesson plans. Authors in the series began receiving invites from high school educators and public-school curriculum developers.

In response to the growing demand from school teachers, Joanna Green, a senior editor who edited a couple of the titles in the series, began working with educators and young adult authors to adapt books in the series for middle-grade and young-adult readers, as well as for professional teacher development. A Queer History of the United States for Young People will be published in June 2019, coinciding with the fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall uprising, and An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States for Young People will be published in July 2019 ahead of the academic year. The potential impact of these YA editions could be wide reaching. As one teacher commented, “having accessible editions of these texts impacts not only the way I teach today, but the way I teach for decades to come.”

The influence of the young readers series will reach beyond the classroom. We see these books going into the home as parents gift them to their children. They will give families a way to talk about complex issues and concepts around topics like race, gender, sexuality, and colonialism. Young people will learn their own and their families’ histories. Or they will learn about other communities they are not a part of, giving them resources early on to think about their contributions to systemic injustice and actions they can take toward dismantling it.

Here’s what our authors have to say about the importance of telling these histories:

“When I began writing the book, it struck me that the more research I did, that while this project was well-intentioned, it was rather unnecessary. That in fact gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender people, African-American people, Latino people, women have always been in American history. So the very process of separating people out in order to put them back in seemed to me to be shortsighted. So the purpose of the book as I began writing it became clearer and clearer--it was simply to identify and find the LGBT people that are in American history already. The more I did this, what I discovered was that there were so many people, so many events, people's lives, people's personalities were so intertwined with what we think of as American history that there was no separation at all.”
—Michael Bronski

“Disability Studies courses enable students to better deal with the vagaries of life. All of us either are or know people who live with disability. Knowing that disability is not tragedy, and that disability is simply part of the human experience, enables all of us to better savor the human experience.”
—Kim E. Nielsen

“I think it’s a very important time to have a Native voice really making clear what’s going to happen, but also the means of survival. One thing Native people have really been about for the last 500 years is surviving an onslaught of continual genocide, warfare, suppression, near extinction of languages, of cultures, of sacred items. Survival is an active word. It’s not just passively surviving. That takes an enormous amount of resistance and cultural continuity, and that has allowed for the survival. Everyone’s going to have to learn how to survive because we’re already to the point that there’s going to be dire consequences even if we very quickly did a whole lot of things to slow it down. Things are already happening. In a way, everyone on earth has become the Indian from these five centuries of destruction of the earth through industrial, corporate profits to get more and more things out of the earth and devastate it. I think Native people have a lot to teach, and people will start listening.”
—Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

***

Head on over to these other university press blogs to read their contributions: Harvard University Press, University of Nebraska Press, University of Alabama Press, Rutgers University Press, Kansas University Press, University of Georgia Press, and Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Visit the AUP website for a list of contributions from the rest of the week.

By Dina Gilio-Whitaker

From “Our colonial history from the discovery of America to the close of the revolution,” 1915. French trading with Native Americans.

Robin DiAngelo’s brilliant 2018 manifesto on white fragility was a much-needed truth bomb at a time when it’s more clear than ever that we are light years away from the “post-racial state.” Perhaps most important about the book was its clarity that racism is systemic and structural, that no white people are immune from it, and that their fragility about it is based on a belief that they are being judged as bad people (the good-bad binary). In this second part of a two-part series (see part one here), I take on the similar but very different concept we in Indian country call settler privilege and its companion, settler fragility.

Settler fragility stems from settler privilege, which is similar to white privilege in that it is systemic, structural, and based on white supremacy, making it difficult to identify. Only in some ways, settler privilege is far more covert and cunning. The reason is because of the ubiquitous ways the US is normalized; that is, the US settler state is the “water we swim in.” US citizens of all races and ethnic groups have been indoctrinated their entire lives with messages designed to foster a sense of national pride and belonging in the making of what has been called an “imagined community,” which always occurs on Indigenous lands. Their citizenship and their very identity are taken for granted without critical consciousness about the US’s contradictory foundational structures and narratives. 

Settler colonialism is said to be a structure, not an historic event, whose endgame is always the elimination of the Natives in order to acquire their land, which it does in countless seen and unseen ways. These techniques are woven throughout the US’s national discourse at all levels of society. Manifest Destiny—that is, the US’s divinely sanctioned inevitability—is like a computer program always operating unnoticeably in the background. In this program, genocide and land dispossession are continually both justified and denied.

Like white fragility, settler fragility is the inability to talk about unearned privilege—in this case, the privilege of living on lands that were taken in the name of democracy through profound violence and injustice. Like white privilege, white supremacy is also at the root of settler fragility. The difference is that foreign invasion, dispossession of Indigenous lands, and genocide were based on (white) European religious and cultural supremacy as encoded in the doctrine of discovery, not racial supremacy. And, unlike for other people of color who have made significant legal gains in the US legal system, the nearly two-centuries-old doctrine of discovery is at the foundation of the legal system that still paternalistically determines Native lives and lands.

Settler privilege thus simultaneously implicates and is beyond racism, which is one reason why, paradoxically, even non-Native people of color can experience a type of privilege and fragility. Fragility stems from the need to distance oneself from complicity in settler colonialism, in what some scholars have called “settler moves to innocence.” The good-bad binary is part of this distancing impulse, because like racism, nobody wants to be associated with genocide and injustice, especially in a country that touts its democracy and equality, and especially for people who have been oppressed by it in other ways. But compared to white privilege, this is what makes settler privilege so much more beguiling and difficult: it cuts to the core of American identity in all its iterations, subtly calling into question the legitimacy of the US and the sense of belonging on the land.

Here are some of the ways settler fragility can be seen in all ranges of the political spectrum. On the liberal end we see:

1. “I love Indians and Indian culture. I believe I have Native ancestry somewhere in my family tree” (I have been oppressed, too, even though I’m white).
2. “Even though the Indians didn’t deserve what we did to them, the damage is done and there is nothing we can do to right the wrongs that have been done to them” (We should all move on and forget the past, and Indians should get beyond their victimization).
3. “We are all one people now” (The settler state and all its attendant privileges must prevail).
4. “I am a person of color and am subject to racism, so I don’t have settler privilege” (I have no reason to be accountable to settler colonialism since I am oppressed, too).  
5. “Since I am poor and don’t own any land, I don’t have settler privilege.”

In the middle we see:

1. “Neither I or my ancestors killed anyone to be here” (my people are not to blame).
2. “We can’t apply the standards of today to the behavior of our (European) ancestors” (evasion of accountability).
3. “Most Native American people have white ancestry” (that means they are complicit in settler colonialism, too; if everyone is to blame, then no one is to blame).

On the right end of the spectrum:

1. “Indians were all killing each other anyway when Europeans got here” (they were uncivilized savages anyway).
2. “I’m a ‘native’ American because I was born here” (American Indian history is irrelevant, and the settler state prevails).

It’s important to emphasize that like white privilege, settler privilege is systemic, so just denying that one doesn’t possess it doesn’t mean one isn’t complicit in it. This is about deeply questioning all the assumptions we have been raised with in a society built on imperialism, private property (which includes slavery), and capitalism. Even for Native people who don’t live in their ancestral homelands, the questions need to be asked: who are the original people of the place where I live, and what are my responsibilities to them?

Here’s how some of these ideas apply in my own life, which are vexing and uneven but do not relieve me from accountability. I am of mixed European and Native ancestry. A phenomenon I have been exposed to throughout my life is the minimization of my Nativeness by others in order to emphasize my Europeanness (“you’re not a real Indian”). However, my non-Native ancestry does not cancel out the ways my Indigenous ancestors were victimized by the genocidal policies of the US, nor has it shielded me from inheriting the negative impacts of that history.  

At the same time, I was born and raised outside my Native community due to the policies of forced assimilation my mother and her ancestors were subjected to; I live in the Native American diaspora. This means that as long as I don’t live in my ancestral lands, even though I am Native, I am still a guest in someone else’s homelands (currently the lands of the Acjachemen Nation in Southern California). Based on the way I look I have a degree of skin privilege, so I rarely experience overt racism. On the other hand, as a mixed-blood Native person, due to colonial processes of erasure and prevailing stereotypes, I cannot be seen by dominant society for who I am as an “authentic” member of my group.

This is extremely complex terrain, and there are many shades of grey depending on a person’s own ancestral origins. But the most important point is that this is a structural, societal issue to which we each have an individual relationship. The central question is: what is our relationship to place, and what processes have granted and/or denied us privilege in it? To unsettle settler privilege, we need to accept that we have responsibilities not only to the land we live upon, but to the Native community of that place in order to be good relatives, accomplices, and tenants.

About the Author 

Dina Gilio-Whitaker (Colville Confederated Tribes) is a lecturer of American Indian Studies at California State University San Marcos, and a consultant and educator in environmental justice policy planning. Her research interests focus on Indigenous nationalism, self-determination, environmental justice, and education. She also works within the field of critical sports studies, examining the intersections of indigeneity and the sport of surfing. She is co-author with Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz of Beacon Press’s “All the Real Indians Died Off” and 20 Other Myths About Native Americans, and her forthcoming book, As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice from Colonization to Standing Rock, is scheduled for release by Beacon Press in April 2019. Follow her on Twitter at @DinaGWhit and visit her website.

By Mirta Ojito

“Wall of Hope”: 2010 Vigil for Marcelo Lucero. Photo credit: longislandwins

Where are we, socially, as a country, ten years to the day after the murder of undocumented Ecuadorian immigrant Marcelo Lucero? Sadly, in the exact same place. The environment of angst toward the growing presence of immigrants in 2008 Patchogue, New York, where Lucero lived, looks too much like today’s administration that continues to spout hate-laced rhetoric and policies toward the immigrant community. Except this time, it’s cranked up to fever pitch. Look at the migrant families being separated at the southern border. Listen to the comments about “caravans.” This is reminiscent of the hotbed of hate that led to Lucero’s murder. Mirta Ojito wrote about it in Hunting Season: Immigration and Murder in an All-American Town. So, in honor of Lucero’s memory, we’re sharing an excerpt of it. Because we still have so much to learn about the war on immigration.

***

On November 8, 2008, having had a few beers and an early dinner, Marcelo Lucero, an undocumented Ecuadorian immigrant, took a late-night stroll with his childhood friend Angel Loja near the train tracks in Patchogue, a seaside village of twelve thousand people in Suffolk County, New York, a county that only three years earlier had been touted by Forbes magazine as one of the safest and wealthiest in the United States. It is also one of the most segregated counties.

Before the mild moonlit night was over, Lucero was stabbed and killed by a gaggle of teenagers from neighboring towns, who had gone out hunting for “beaners,” the slur that, as some of them later told police, they used for Latinos. Earlier that night, they had harassed and beaten another Hispanic man—a naturalized US citizen from Colombia named Héctor Sierra. The teenagers also confessed to attacking Hispanics at least once a week.

Lucero was not the first immigrant killed by an enraged mob in the United States, and he most certainly will not be the last. At least two other immigrants were killed in the Northeast in 2008, but Lucero’s case is especially poignant because he was killed by a high school star athlete in an all-American town where people of mostly Italian and Irish descent proudly display US flags on the Fourth of July and every year attend a Christmas parade on Main Street. If it happened here, it can happen anywhere.

Patchogue, in central Long Island, is only about sixty miles from Manhattan—far enough to escape the city’s noise, dirt, and angst, but close enough to feel splashes of its excitement, pluck, and glamour. Lucero, who probably didn’t know about the Forbes ranking of the village as an idyllic place to live and raise children, had come from Ecuador to Patchogue in 1993 on the heels of others from his hometown who for thirty years now have been slowly and quietly making their way to this pocket of lush land named by the Indians who once inhabited it.

In Ecuador, too, Lucero had lived in a small village called Gualaceo. The town has lost so many of its people to Patchogue that those who remain call it Little Patchogue, a way to honor the dollars flowing there from Long Island. Month by month, remittances from New York have helped Gualaceños prosper despite a profound and long-lasting national economic crisis that forced the government to toss its national currency and adopt the US dollar more than a decade ago.

The day before he was killed, Lucero, thirty-seven, had been talking about going home. Over the years he had sent his family about $100,000—money earned working low-paying jobs—to buy land and build a three-story house he planned to share with his mother, his sister, and his nephew. He was eager to join them. The sister, Rosario, had asked him to be a father figure for her son. It’s time to go, Lucero told his younger brother, Joselo, who also lived in Patchogue.

“He was tired,” Joselo recalled. “He had done enough.”

Lucero was planning to leave before Christmas, an early present for their ailing mother. I’ll take you to the airport, Joselo promised. He never got the chance.

~~~

The killing did not surprise experts who track hate crimes and who knew that attacks against Hispanic immigrants had increased 40 percent between 2003 and 2007. According to the FBI, in 2008, crimes against Hispanics represented 64 percent of all ethnically motivated attacks.

In the two years that followed Lucero’s death, hate crime reports in Suffolk County increased 30 percent, a ratio closely aligned with national trends. It is unclear whether more attacks have taken place or if more victims, emboldened by the Lucero case, have come forward with their own tales of abuse.

Lucero’s murder, as well as the growing number of attacks against other immigrants, illustrates the angst that grips the country regarding immigration, raising delicate and serious questions that most people would prefer to ignore. What makes us Americans? What binds us together as a nation? How do we protect what we know, what we own? How can young men still in high school feel so protective of their turf and so angry toward newcomers that they can commit the ultimate act of violence, taking a life that, to them, was worthless because it was foreign?

~~~

Lucero’s death has left a mark on Patchogue, and placed the village in the eye of the political storm that immigration has become. On the night of November 8, 2008, a Saturday, everyone went to sleep in a town that was almost totally anonymous and awoke the next morning to find satellite trucks in their front yards. Mayor of Patchogue Paul Pontieri found out about the attack as he sipped coffee and read the Sunday paper in his backyard. Diana Berthold, a local artist, heard the story on TV. In desperation, and out of habit, she began to quilt. Jean Kaleda, a local librarian, was coming back from a short vacation when a friend told her about it; her stomach lurched at the news.

Film and television crews descended on the town. A half-hour documentary was promptly filmed and released, PBS taped a show, and a local theater group staged a well-received play about the murder. In addition, college students wrote essays about Lucero and hate crimes to win scholarship money. Later a separate scholarship fund was established by the Lucero family to help seniors from the local high school—the same school where the attackers had been students—pay for college. (At the end of 2012, four students had received scholarships ranging from $250 to $500.) A group of about twenty women worked for more than a year on a three-part quilt that has been used in a local anti-hate campaign. Soccer tournaments that include Latino teams have become yearly events spearheaded by Eddington, the former legislator, and a group of Ecuadorians, under the banner of the Lucero Foundation, has met regularly to discuss issues that affect their community. (At a meeting in November 2011, the discussion wavered between two issues: whether to give toys or candy to children at a Christmas gathering, and how to react to a man who disrupted a town parade because Latinos had been included.)

But beyond the headlines, sound bites, and community meetings, and after the satellite trucks left, what remains is daily life in this seemingly sleepy and charming village. It is here, in the mundane details of personal stories and relationships, where my book dwells. This two-way process of assimilation and adaptation—a drama unfolding every day, in every small and not-so-small town across the United States—is how stereotypes are shaped and cemented, opinions are molded, and political decisions are made. When the process works well, as it usually does, America is at its best: welcoming and gracious, showering newcomers with handouts and opportunities like no other country on earth. When it doesn’t, as has been increasingly the case, America is at its worst: parochial, protective, and dismissive of the other. (Arizona and Alabama, with their punitive anti-immigration laws, are relevant examples.)

In Patchogue, Marcelo Lucero thought he had found a home, albeit a temporary one, but to the town he was always a stranger, a foreigner, an invisible other. Pontieri is still upset when he recalls that a few days after Lucero’s death a local Hispanic man approached him to talk about his fears. Pontieri asked him where he lived. Over there, the man said, pointing to a small, white, wood-framed home two doors from the house where Pontieri grew up, the house he visits every day to check on his mother. “How is it that I never saw him?” Pontieri asked me rhetorically. “He’s been living here for years and I never saw him before, and I know everybody in this town.” Four years later, wanting to meet that man, I asked Pontieri what his name was. He had forgotten—or never learned it.

Of course, Pontieri does not know everybody in his village. He didn’t know Lucero either, just like most people in Patchogue. Only in death did they learn his name. Only in death were they forced to see him.

About the Author 

Mirta Ojito, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, has worked for the Miami Herald, El Nuevo Herald, and the New York Times, where she covered immigration for the Metro desk. She is the author of Finding Mañana: A Memoir of a Cuban Exodus and Hunting Season: Immigration and Murder in an All-American Town. Follow her on Twitter at @MirtaOjito.

By Dina Gilio-Whitaker

Samoset comes "boldly" into Plymouth settlement. Woodcut designed by A.R. Waud and engraved by J.P. Davis (1876).

November is Native American Heritage Month, when we as American Indian people get to have the mic for a little while. So, I’d like to take my turn at the virtual mic to talk about settler privilege, something you likely have never thought of, or have never even heard of. What you have undoubtedly heard of, however, is white privilege.

Peggy McIntosh first popularized the concept of white privilege in her now-classic 1989 essay “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.” The impact of her essay was due at least in part to its clarity and readability; it broke down into a list of easy to understand ideas why white people have unearned advantages in society based on their skin color. Not that it was necessarily easy for white people to accept that they are in fact “more equal” than others, but the essay opened up a conversation that has gained serious traction in our social discourse, especially now when racism is on full, unobstructed display in this Trumpian moment.    

White privilege centers the concept of race, describing racism as systemic and hierarchical, often in binary terms of black and white, which has its limitations for other people of color. Racism is certainly not limited to African Americans; American Indian people have for centuries been targeted in countless ways that are fundamentally genocidal in nature. The single, irreducible element of the racism American Indians have been subject to is the acquisition of our lands, and this is what makes racism against American Indians different than all other forms of racism and discrimination. This is the core of a system we call settler colonialism.

People who do not have ancestral connections to Native communities are all either settlers or immigrants. People with ambiguous “Native ancestry,” like Elizabeth Warren, are so disconnected from whatever Native roots they may have had that they can no longer be considered Native. Settlers are people whose ancestors who came to acquire recently dispossessed Indian lands, such as recipients of the homesteads of the nineteenth century and earlier land speculators. Immigrants are people who came later to cash in on the benefits of American citizenship that didn’t necessarily include land (but might have if they came with enough money to invest in American land).  Most are settlers (also “colonizers”) or immigrants by choice, with the exception of Blacks who are descended from slaves who were settled here without their consent.

All of today’s settlers and immigrants are in one way or another beneficiaries of genocide and land theft, even if they are simultaneously themselves victims of other forms of discrimination (with the possible exception of migratory Indigenous peoples of “Meso-America”). I realize this may be difficult for people of color to hear. But this is what it means to center settler colonialism as a framework for understanding the foundation of the US beyond an analysis of race, since the origins of the US are rooted in foreign invasion, not racism.   

To this end, I would like to propose an invisible knapsack with colonialism as its starting point for recognizing how everybody not of American Indian heritage benefits from unearned settler privilege (or complicity). You have some degree of unearned settler privilege or complicity in settler colonialism if any of these statements apply to you:

1. I can live anywhere in the US without being disturbed that people of my race or ethnic group were not systematically killed or displaced so that I could live there.
2. I don’t have to worry that images, symbols, or names of people of my ethnicity will be used as sports mascots, Halloween costumes, or marketing logos, and that I will be told that when they are that I am being honored, even when I say I don’t feel honored.
3. I am not burdened that people not of my ethnicity will appropriate the spirituality and religion specific to my community and justify it with arguments that everybody has a constitutional right to practice whatever religion they choose.
4. I am not concerned about my group’s history being accurately represented in my children’s education, or represented at all.
5. I don’t have to worry that I will be perceived as an authentic member of my ethnic group based on a sufficient amount of “blood,” as verified by a government-issued document.
6. I can see myself and my ethnic group represented in a wide variety of media and popular culture that aren’t predominantly stereotypes.
7. I am usually represented in statistical findings in studies and reports.
8. I am never confronted with comments that express surprise that my group is still existent.
9. I am never confronted with comments that imply that my group deserved to be wiped out because they were all killing each other already anyway before being invaded by outsiders.
10. I don’t have to hear references about my group described as a “plight.”
11. I never have to defend against the desecration or digging up of burials of my ancestors for capitalist development.
12. I can be assured that the American legal system will defend my ability to practice my religion in its original setting, and respect that it is based on a different set of assumptions about the world than other religions.
13. I am not subject to a legal system that is based on a concept of cultural and religious inferiority of my group.
14. I don’t see myself spoken of as a “savage” or other derisive term in any of the US’s founding documents.
15. I never have to worry that my legal existence or that of my group can be terminated at any time by the US government without my consent.
16. I have no ancestors who were considered “wards of the state” even though they committed no crime.
17. I have no ancestors that were hunted for bounties paid for by any governmental agency.

Discussions about unearned racial privilege often results in defensiveness by people who don’t believe they are being fairly portrayed, and have evolved into what Robin DiAngelo has famously called white fragility. In part two of this series, I will discuss settler fragility and what it looks like in popular American discourse.

About the Author 

Dina Gilio-Whitaker (Colville Confederated Tribes) is an award-winning journalist and columnist at Indian Country Today Media Network. A writer and researcher in Indigenous studies, she is currently a research associate and associate scholar at the Center for World Indigenous Studies. She lives in San Clemente, CA. She is the co-author (with Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz) of “All the Real Indians Died Off” And 20 Other Myths About Native Americans and is the author of the forthcoming As Long As Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice from Colonization to Standing Rock. Follow her on Twitter at @DinaGWhit and visit her website.

By Jacy Reese

Few buzzwords are more important in food marketing than “natural.” It’s been applied to everything from Cheetos to Minute Maid with high fructose corn syrup. Yet despite its meaninglessness, fifty-nine percent of shoppers say they regularly check for the label.

When it comes to meat, the situation is pretty crappy—in one experiment, 100 percent of ground beef samples tested positive for fecal bacteria. Virtually all meat today comes from animals who have been artificially bred for decades to grow in extremely unnatural ways. Chickens grow more than four times as large today as they did in the 1950s on the same diet. Over ninety-nine percent of US farmed animals and over ninety percent globally are raised on factory farms where they are tightly confined with other animals, leading to misery and disease.

I say all of this because the state of the food system is dire. We have a desperate need for solutions to halt the urgent catastrophe of animal and human suffering. This is why scientists and chefs have been working on so-called clean meat, real animal meat made without animal slaughter.

The process is fairly simple. Scientists take a sample of cells from a living animal, such as with the feather of a chicken. The cells are mixed with nutrients, sugar, and growth factors, which makes the cells grow into muscle, fat, and connective tissue—the constituents of meat.

This is actually the same process that happens inside of an animal’s body, just without the hair, feathers, hooves, nervous system, immune system, and other caloric needs of sentient animals. Scientists can also produce acellular products like milk and egg whites using microorganisms, the same process that has been used for decades to make other products like insulin for diabetics.

Obviously, this process can seem quite unnatural. But how does it really stack up against meat from animal farming?

A lot depends on exactly how we define the term. This isn’t an easy task, but the most common use of the term is something like, “the way things would be without human intervention.” However, virtually nothing we eat today is natural by this definition. Have you ever seen bananas before human intervention? They have more seeds than flesh, and they don’t taste very good at all. We took nature’s block of marble and sculpted it into exactly what humans desired: nutrients, color, tiny seeds, and lots of sugar.

If we look at cultured meat, the process itself is actually entirely natural—it’s just growing meat the same way it’s been grown inside animals. Of course, this technology changes the environment in which this happens, from in vivo (in a living organism) to ex vivo.

But it’s clear that something being natural doesn’t necessarily mean it’s good. Philosophers have even coined a term for this common logical fallacy, the appeal to nature. Plenty of bad things are natural, like murder and malaria. Plenty of good things are unnatural like plumbing and modern medicine.

But what matters for consumer adoption is simply the perception, not rational analysis. When people think of naturalness, they aren’t just thinking of a black-and-white question of human intervention. People often want natural food simply because marketers have shone a light on the term, and more rationally, consumers are also trying to approximate what really does matter about food: food safety, sustainability, animal welfare, and food tradition.

Naturalness can be a decent approximation for food safety when used as a precautionary principle. If we think of the spectrum of naturalness as ranging from “safely consumed for all human history” to “invented in 2018,” then it’s probably true that older foods are less likely to have food safety issues, simply due to their track record.

Cultured meat lacks this track record, but when it comes to direct estimates of the ethical and health issues—conventional meat is in a distant second place.

Cultured meat simply bypasses the foodborne illness that inevitably comes with animal agriculture. There’s no fecal contamination, because there’s no digestive system. Around eighty percent of US antibiotics are fed to farmed animals, which is a huge risk factor for superbugs—but there’s no need for the mass distribution of antibiotics in animal feed if there are no animals in the process.

In terms of sustainability, animals are woefully inefficient. For every ten calories of plant-based food fed to a farmed animal, we get around one calorie of animal-based food. For every ten grams of plant-based protein, we get around two grams of animal-based protein. This is because of extraneous processes, like digestion, that are completely irrelevant for cultured meat.

When we use sentient beings as mere property—as raw materials and labor to produce meat, dairy, and eggs—we inevitably see cruelty, because animal welfare will never perfectly align with animal efficiency.

Naturalness is also closely tied to people’s sense of food tradition. In Texas where I grew up, barbecue and meat-centric cooking were a crucial part of celebrations like birthdays and graduations. But this isn’t something we need to give up with cultured meat; we can still have our turkey for Thanksgiving. People eat meat in spite of how it’s produced, not because of it.

There’s good news for consumers eventually recognizing cultured meat as natural in all the ways that matter. Unlike with other food technologies like GMOs, public discussion of cultured meat has been centered on the ethical problems it will solve rather than the profits it will generate. And surveys have found that when people are told the details of growing meat without animals, as well as the argument that basically all human foods are unnatural, consumers are significantly more interested in trying it.

It would be tragic, if in 2050, we had climate catastrophe, superbugs, and mass animal cruelty because consumers were a little weirded out by a new food technology. Fortunately, the moral demand for cultured meat seems poised to overtake the initial hesitation.

About the Author 

Jacy Reese is the research director and cofounder of Sentience Institute, a nonprofit think tank researching the most effective strategies for expanding humanity’s moral circle. He previously served as board chair and a researcher at Animal Charity Evaluators. Reese’s writing has appeared in Vox, Salon, and the Huffington Post, and he has presented his research to academic and nonprofit audiences in fifteen countries. Follow him on Twitter at @jacyreese and visit his website.

In these times when readers are responding to our books “more than ever,” when our authors—including Cornel West, Anita Hill, Robin DiAngelo, Charlene Carruthers, Howard Bryant, and Christopher Emdin—are appearing in the media, their ideas going viral on social media, their voices being heard on so many platforms, we thought it might be good to take a break to focus on some of the staff who work hard to find, shape, edit, produce, and promote those works. Our blog series “Beacon Behind the Books” introduces to you a member of our staff and gives you a behind-the-scenes look, department by department, at what goes on at our office.

For the month of November, meet our creative director, Carol Chu!  

What drew you to publishing, Carol? How did you find your way to Beacon?

I had a roundabout path to where I am now. I went to a STEM magnet high school and worked at the Army Research Lab in the microphotonics department and figured I would be an engineer. I entered college as an engineering major and minored in art. The whole while, I wrote articles as a student reporter. In high school I was the news editor of our school paper and in college I was a staff reporter for the campus paper. The Asian American Student Union published a newspaper, and the editor-in-chief contacted me for help. I wrote a few pieces and became the editor-in-chief for the next two years. Halfway through my junior year, I switched majors and I graduated with a BA in journalism and a minor in art and worked in a newsroom of a paper and as a writer for a magazine—and found that I was good at layout and composition and went to grad school for design. My thesis was on propaganda in children’s books. The rest is more predictable after getting my masters. I did the NYC thing: working fulltime at studios while freelancing and dog walking and coat checking and barbacking. With my boss’s blessing—because he had illustrated and designed three dozen children’s books—I convinced Random House they needed me and needed to create a position for me, and that was my first job in publishing proper. Fast forward eighteen years, my friend Bob Kosturko let me know of an opportunity at Beacon, and I leapt for it.

What are some of the challenges of being a creative director? What do you find most rewarding?

A seasoned art director once told me, “When a book does well, it’s the story. When it doesn’t, it’s the cover.” That basically sums up how cover design exists to support the story and the words, and yet . . . and yet, it can hold it back. As Beacon’s creative director, I feel a responsibility to deliver designs which are distinct as well as of-the-times and in line with the overall market. The challenge is being as culturally and visually fluent as possible as a designer, to have this sixth sense of what a book buyer sees as they look at your book and create exactly that on as small of a budget as possible and under specific deadlines. I work with an amazing designer, Louis Roe, and the design talks and brainstorming and image sharing from our virtual and real travel is exactly what’s needed to keep creating designs for dozens of books without getting burned out.

What helps you focus when you’re at work?

I always have my earbuds in and I’m usually playing a personal playlist on Spotify. Recently, my partner got me fancy-pants airpods, which are amazing because you can move around with no cord keeping you back. BUT, people don’t see that you have something in your ears sometimes, and I think a few times I’ve not heard someone talking to me while I’m at the cutting table or the copier.

What are you reading right now?

I’m reading Independent People by Halldór Laxness. It was recommended to me when I was in Iceland this summer. I’m about three-quarters of the way through; I started it late this summer and I think the cooler weather actually has me turning to it more now and I’m going to finish it this weekend.

What’s something you’ve read which made you pause recently?

I just read an article in the New York Times which quoted Carl Sagan. It was, “A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic . . . It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years.”

Hobbies outside of work?

I refinish mid-century furniture and resell it to a few dealers and collectors. It’s relaxing to sand and stain, nail and reupholster. I also quilt. I actually started quilting in NYC when I’d ask for swatches of the most expensive bolts of fabric at ABC Home. I realized I had a pile of precious textiles and decided to sew a crazy quilt.

About Carol Chu 

Prior to joining Beacon, Carol Chu was Creative Director at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and has designed and art directed a variety of books for a variety of readers. She has a Master’s in design from the Pratt Institute and has a BA in Journalism. She’s illustrated three books, authored two, and translated one. She’s partial to well-kerned lettering and enjoys a good glyph. Her favorite color is PMS 032c.

Ntozake Shange, Reid Lecture, Women Issues Luncheon, Women's Center, November 1978. Photo credit: Barnard College

As so many cultural leaders note in the tribute obituaries we’ve linked to below, Ntozake Shange was a completely original, breathtaking artist. From the time she embraced the name gifted to her by Ndikko and Nomusa Zaba, a name which meant “she who comes with her own things/who walks like a lion,” Ntozake Shange launched headlong into her program to electrify dance, poetry, and theatre. Even when her own movement became limited, she kept her focus and worked whenever she could. We were working with her on a book to be called Dance We Do: A Poet Looks at African American Dance. She was filled with ideas and ambitions, more choreographers and dancers she wanted to interview and include, some art we should commission to go in the book, some photos she would be sending. And the writing was, as she describes herself at one point, ebullient. Both Maya Fernandez and I had spoken with Zake last week; Maya was completing work on the new edition of her wonderful book If I Can Cook You Know God Can, and I wanted to check in on those photos, to begin work on the cover of the new book. All of us at Beacon were shocked and far more than saddened. But I know we all feel lucky to have shared a little bit of time with Zake, on her much too brief visit to our small planet.
—Helene Atwan, Director 

“Working with Ntozake was a privilege. I am so thankful to for the opportunity to experience her light and greatness. Like many Black women, her words held such power in my understanding of what it means to exist in this world. I am forever grateful for her. Rest easy, Ms. Shange.”
—Maya Fernandez, Editorial Assistant 

“Zake was a woman of extravagance and flourish, and she left quickly without suffering. It’s a huge loss for the world. I don’t think there’s a day on the planet when there’s not a young woman who discovers herself through the words of my sister.”
—Ifa Bayeza, Shange’s sister, quoted in Star Tribune 

“For those of us who arrived at her words, whether as young girls or fully grown women, we found an altar erected in tribute to our stories, our traumas, and our particular way of being in the world. . . . If there is comfort to be had in her passing, it’s in knowing that she left this world having done what she intended to do: she empowered generations of girls and women—and hopefully, many more to come—with the voice to ‘sing a black girl’s song; to bring her out, to know herself.’

Thank you, Ntozake.”
—Maiysha Kai, The Glow Up on The Root  

“In her work, Ms. Shange was a champion of black women and girls, and in her trailblazing, she expanded the sense of what was possible for other black female artists.”
—Laura Collins-Hughes, Washington Post 

“I see her work as just so vivid and sensual and powerful and empowering not only for women but for all people. And I think that she’s a national treasure. . . . all of her work basically has been about uplifting us. And I think that it’s the time that we revisit her work again.”
—Tony Medina, professor of creative writing at Howard University, interviewed on NPR Morning Edition

By Alexandra Minna Stern

Residents of Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh, gathered together during the past few days to mourn the loss of those shot at Tree of Life. Photo credit: Mark Dixon

It’s been widely reported that Robert Bowers, the man who gunned down eleven congregants at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh on October 27, 2018, was active on the platform Gab. Although it went offline after the massacre, Gab has consolidated itself as the Wild West alternative to Twitter, where anything goes. Its message boards are awash in a constraint stream of obscene, demeaning, and dehumanizing memes and messages about Jews, women, people of color, and LGBTQ people. 

The acronyms and shorthand on Gab, like ZOG—Zionist Occupation Government—or “cucks”—describing emasculated men and mainstream conservatives—are deciphered with a wink and a nod by white nationalists. And the participation of Bowers, whose handle was “OneDingo,” in the vitriol of Gab was typical—just another day in the life of this “free speech” platform. 

It is important to recognize the role of Gab in inciting violence. However, it represents the most gruesome tip of a much larger anti-Semitic iceberg. 

Indeed, the memes and messages swirling around Gab have meaning for white nationalists, because they tap into both a much longer history of anti-Semitism in the West and, importantly, into core ideas and narratives of twenty-first-century refashioned white nationalism. 

Over the past twenty years, white nationalists have produced a body of faux-scholarly literature, calibrating stories of the evils of Zionism and the inordinate cultural influence of Jews for twenty-first-century America. This alt-right literati, some of whom hold PhDs, knows that constructing a persuasive narrative requires accessible prose, argumentation, consistent framing. 

Foremost among these white nationalist authors is Kevin MacDonald, a retired psychology professor who runs the blog The Occidental Observer and wrote a trilogy of books that explore what he calls “Jewish in-group preference.” According to him, Jews’ high intelligence has resulted in their successful manipulation of resources and capital to control Western societies. His most well-known monograph, The Culture of Critique, is the age-old conspiracy theory of Jewish dominance masked in an academic façade.¹

From the alt-right perspective, Jews are the primary motor behind interracial unions and partnerships, the entrenchment of feminism, and the growing acceptance of LGBTQ communities. Most dramatically, Jews are solely responsible for America’s unfolding demographic transition. 

White nationalists pinpoint the origins of this Jewish takeover back to 1965, proposing that Jews single-handedly engineered the Hart-Celler Act, an immigration law that replaced racial quotas with family reunification. As MacDonald has written, “The organized Jewish community was the most important force in enacting the 1965 law which changed the ethnic balance of the country.”²

Put simply, American Jews have caused “white genocide.” From the alt-right perspective, their actions are leading directly to the extinction of the white race as the clock ticks towards 2050, when, according to census projections, this country will have racial plurality, not a white majority.

There are two aspects of these arguments that are particularly dangerous. One, provocatively, repackages Zionist conspiracy as man-made—or Jew-made—genocide. As Greg Johnson said in a podcast with David Duke a few weeks ago promoting his new book, The White Nationalist Manifesto, this genocide is not an accident: “It is intentional.” Second, the Holocaust is demoted from one of the most tragic global events to a minor incident. Both MacDonald and Johnson, for example, spell the word with a lower case h. MacDonald recommends, for instance, that the holocaust be “stepped over,” because it is not pertinent to whites today and serves as a distraction.³

Providing strategies for this disavowal, Johnson, in his book New Right Versus Old Right, describes the Holocaust as an unavoidable topic, a big interruption in history’s march forward that must be tackled in some form, namely, by underplaying its importance to the contemporary moment.⁴ Johnson does not engage in Holocaust denial, but instead wants to mold history to enable white nationalist consciousness: “because mere historical facts—no matter what they are—should never deter us.”⁵

In our post-truth era, their arguments about the Holocaust is gaining more currency. As the memories of World War II fade, as the last regenerations pass on, it is more important than ever to remember that genocide was defined by the United Nations in 1948 in direct response to Nazi atrocities, to provide parameters so that would never happen again. It is the most perverse and perilous of ironies that the alt-right have seized the term as a cri de coeur for white victimhood.

The Tree of Life temple, which works with Pittsburgh’s Jewish Refugee and Immigrant Services and was performing a bris for the child of a lesbian couple on the morning of the massacre, is the white nationalist’s worst nightmare. It represents how American Judaism propels forward white dispossession at a breakneck speed. 

It is imperative to deconstruct alt-right narratives of history, which provide the underlying meaning for bigoted and hateful memes like the plethora of bearded orthodox Jewish men with craggy notes, hunkered over and enfeebled, that proliferate cartoonishly on Gab and other forums. In the white nationalist mindset, Jews are the biggest obstacle to making American great again. 

Notes 

1. Kevin MacDonald, The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements (Westport: Praeger, 1998), Kindle edition.
2. Ibid.
3. See preface authored by Kevin MacDonald in Greg Johnson, New Right Versus Old Right (San Francisco: Counter-Currents Publishing, 2013), Kindle edition.
4. MacDonald preface, New Right Versus Old Right.
5. Ibid.

About the Author 

Alexandra Minna Stern is the author of the award-winning Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America (2d. ed., 2015) and Telling Genes: The Story of Genetic Counseling in America (2012). In addition to dozens of scholarly essays, she regularly contributes to the popular media through opinion pieces, blog posts, and interviews. She leads the Sterilization and Social Justice Lab at the University of Michigan whose work on eugenic sterilization in California has been featured in The Atlantic, The New York Times, and NPR, and many other media venues. Stern is Professor of American Culture, History, Women's Studies, and Obstetrics & Gynecology at the University of Michigan. Her forthcoming book from Beacon Press, Proud Boys and the White Ethnostate: How the Alt-Right Is Warping the American Imagination, will be released in July 2019. 

A Q&A with Dominique Christina

Illustration of Dr. J. Marion Sims with “Anarcha,” from the series “A History of Medicine in Pictures,” by Robert Thom, 1961. Courtesy of the Pearson Museum, with permission from the Southern Illinois University School of Medicine.

Enslaved Black women suffered and endured the painful medical experimentations of Dr. J. Marion Sims, commonly known as the father of modern gynecology. They were ultimately relegated to the footnotes of his life and medical history. Not any longer. Award-winning poet and artist Dominique Christina gives voice to one of Dr. Sims’s victims in her poetry collection Anarcha Speaks: A History in Poems. Selected as a National Poetry Series winner by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Tyehimba Jess, Anarcha Speaks reimagines the life of a woman facing the brutalities of medical racism, the legacy of which we still see playing out today. Our blog editor Christian Coleman caught up with Christina to chat with her about her collection.

Christian Coleman: Tell us a little bit about your background. How did you get into poetry and poetry slams?

Dominique Christina: Those are two very different answers. I started writing when I was a senior in undergrad. I whimsically elected to take a creative writing course solely because the man who taught the course was a professor I would see on campus walking around in tye-dyed shirts and Birkenstock sandals with uncommercial hair. He was profane and funny, and I thought I would enjoy being in a classroom with him. What I did not know was that his course would change the trajectory of my life. He refused to let me hide in the writing which I fully intended to do. He insisted on authenticity and transparency and confession, and I found myself, for the first time really, having permission to say things I thought I would die with.

Slam was different. I didn’t want to participate in it at all. But I was pressured by individuals I knew well who were competing in Slam. They knew I was a writer and were frustrated by my reticence to read anything out loud. I gave in. I subsequently won a lot of national competitions. The rest is kind of history. 

CC: What was your reaction when you found out Anarcha Speaks was selected by Tyehimba Jess as a National Poetry Series winner?

DC: I wept. Hard. And in total transparency, I scarcely remembered entering the competition. I do that. I force myself to submit work to various competitions once a year and then I forget about it. I don’t want to ever get complacent, but I also do not want to focus too much on receiving accolades. That’s not why I write. Still. It is an incredibly high honor. One I am doubled over in gratitude for. 

CC: What was the inspiration for telling Anarcha’s story in poems?

DC: Oh, she needed a reckoning. She deserved one, really. She, like so many others, cry out from the grave. I chose to listen. I found Anarcha by accident. In looking for the etymology of the word “anarchy,” her name appeared with an asterisk by it. When I searched her, the results led me to a conversation about J. Marion Sims, the doctor who experimented on her. I was not content to let Anarcha exist as mere footnote—a means to discuss the doctor. That wouldn’t do. She deserves to stand in the center and announce herself. 

CC: What kind of research went into writing this collection?

DC: I had to exhume her. Using the census bureau’s records facilitated a good amount of insight. And drilling down into the history available to me about the doctor’s work on enslaved women between 1845-1849 was also very useful and important. Finding Anarcha’s humanity amidst Sims’ clinically distant reporting was key. There are a number of important books on medical experimentation during chattel slavery. Many of them were also useful in providing me with a breadcrumb trail to follow to better understand the time and the realities of individuals who lived during that time. 

CC: How did you decide to write poems from the perspectives of both Anarcha and Dr. J. Marion Sims, and what was it like getting into their head spaces?

I didn’t want to include the doctor at all actually. That wasn’t my original intent. However, my mother, a professor of African American Studies, suggested that I allow for a more even-handed exchange between Anarcha and Dr. Sims. The juxtaposition between the two, in my opinion, amplifies Anarcha’s experience and reveals who J. Marion Sims really was—not a conquering hero but an opportunistic exploitation artist. 

CC: Your bio on your website says that your work is greatly influenced by your family’s legacy in the Civil Rights Movement and by the idea that words make worlds. How is Anarcha Speaks influenced by these two? And tell us a little about what you mean by words make worlds.

DC: My family participated in the social experiment of desegregation in Little Rock, Arkansas. They are change agents and way-makers. They also are people who have done seismic things and bled for it, but they choose not to bleed out loud. My creative side always seems to require exposing the blood and the bruising. It is no small way, part and parcel of growing up in a family that worked hard to not reveal those things. I am compelled to illuminate that which my family of origin tucked away. I’m sure there’s some psychology to that.

And in terms of the idea that words make worlds, it means simply that language is a culture keeper and a culture creator. It reveals the individual and the group or groups to which they belong. Language can be a noose or a tourniquet. The language we employ to describe ourselves, our world, our people is therefore critical to the reality we acquiesce to. I am interested in closing the wounds, not widening them, so my language has to line up with that intent. And I hope it does. 

CC: And lastly, what’s your take on New York City removing the statue of J. Marion Sims from Central Park in April this year? Many Black women activists were successful in leading the long campaign to have it removed.

DC: Simple. About damn time. Dr. Sims does not deserve to be lionized. The women he tortured, however, do.

About Dominique Christina 

Dominique Christina was a classroom teacher at the secondary and post-secondary level for ten years. She was the National Poetry Champion in 2011 and Women of the World Slam Champion in 2012 and 2014. She is the author of The Bones, The Breaking, The Balm; They Are All Me; and This Is Woman’s Work. She has been a featured speaker at hundreds of colleges and universities nationally and internationally. Follow her on Twitter at @nyarloka and visit her website.

By Mary Collins

We Won’t Be Erased—Rally for Trans Rights, Washington, DC, October 22, 2018. Photo credit: Ted Eytan

I have a transgender son, Donald Collins.

Let’s start by erasing the D and make that onald Collins just to show how distorted this sentence becomes with that one edit, with that one irrational erasure.

Let us now move on and erase onald and only use Collins, because the Trump administration wants to define gender solely on the basis of genitalia at birth.

Male or female.

Penis or vagina.

By using only Collins, just the surname, I get rid of any gender identifying markers, but there’s no room for no gender designation under this proposed new ruling, so I guess I better get rid of Collins as well.

Which is to say, if our society allows this sort of complete erasure of my trans son—a vibrant, honest, intelligent, hard-working individual who was born biologically female but identifies as male—then we’re no better than the Saudi suspects that allegedly chopped up the journalist Jamal Khashoggi and tried to erase any evidence of their brutal crime.

According to other allegations around Khashoggi’s murder, they edited videotape. They wiped up blood and repainted walls. They even had one of the men complicit in the murder put on Khashoggi’s clothes and exit the Turkish consulate to make it look like Khashoggi had indeed come and gone unharmed.

Only the ruse was so lousy, they erased that from the tapes as well.

The irony: the Saudis hoped to quiet a soft-spoken critic of Prince Mohammed bin Salman who occasionally published columns in the Washington Post, but their botched murder has instead led to renewed focus on everything the country has its hands in, from Yemen to oil.

The Trump administration’s office of Health and Human Services, which concocted the memo about essentially erasing “transgender” as an identity for about 1.4 million Americans, should learn from the Saudis’ misstep.

HHS, you’re upset by the modest gains our transgender citizens have made in the last five years? Well, try to negate that and you will feel the righteous wrath of millions of citizens who will push for way more, not less, who will suddenly care way more deeply about something they only had a glancing interest in. You will raise armies with your misstep. 

If the administration tries to edit transgender citizens out of the national landscape, who will be next? There’s a long tradition in America of editing groups out of public spaces in particular.

No Irish Need Apply.

Whites Only Fountain.

No Jews Allowed.

No such thing as transgender individuals.

Well, I am the proud parent of a transgender son, so erase that line out of the national conversation.

About the Author 

Mary Collins is the co-author, with her son Donald Collins, of At the Broken Places: A Mother and Trans Son Pick Up the Pieces.