A Q&A with Sharon daVanport

Most resources available for parents come from psychologists, educators, and doctors, offering parents a narrow and technical approach to autism. Sincerely, Your Autistic Child, edited by Emily Paige Ballou, Sharon daVanport, and Morénike Giwa Onaiwu, represents an authentic resource for parents written by autistic people themselves. From childhood and education to culture, gender identity, and sexuality, this anthology tackles the everyday joys and challenges of growing up while honestly addressing the emotional needs, sensitivity, and vibrancy of autistic kids, youth, and young adults.

In this blog series, our editorial intern, Evangelyn Beltran, introduces you to each of the editors to talk about the book and about how parents can avoid common mistakes and misconceptions, and make their child feel truly accepted, valued, and celebrated for who they are. Next up this Autism Acceptance Month is Sharon daVanport!

Evangelyn Beltran: Tell me about your experience founding Autistic Women & Nonbinary Network (AWN).

Sharon daVanport: AWN finds our history deeply rooted in the need to find community and shared-lived experiences.

At the time AWN entered the autism community, the narrative centered mostly around young white boys and men. In those early days, we discovered quickly that AWN was an initiative that was desperately needed.

AWN also recognized early on the importance of engaging researchers in order to address the underrepresentation of all marginalized genders within autism research. Autism studies have been historically dominated by young school-aged boys, and it became obvious to AWN’s founders how disproportionately distorted the autism diagnostic criteria is due to gender and racial bias.

It was also during those early days when parents to autistic children held the microphone, and too often they didn’t see the benefit of sharing the conversation with autistic people; and as difficult as those formative years were on our community, it was those very same experiences which encouraged us to keep moving forward with purpose.

Today, we find a much different autism community where Autistic adults are loudly and proudly holding the microphone, and the majority of parents are more cognizant of the benefits of Autistic adults being front and center while leading the conversation as the experts in our own lives.

Of course, like most organizations, there are many layers to our history as well as the many ways by which we have implemented our own needed changes in order to be equitably representative of our community members. You can read more about Autistic Women & Nonbinary Network’s history and progress over the years in Steven Kapp’s book, Autistic Community and the Neurodiversity Movement: Stories from the Frontline.  

EB: When did you first start becoming involved in disability justice?

SD: My start in disability justice evolved gradually over time and after having been in the online autism community for several years. As AWN grew, we realized the importance of building relationships with cross disability coalitions and we made deliberate choices to engage other activists and organizations within the greater disability community. There’s always power and strength when those of us with like-minded goals join forces. I guess you can say that the rest is history.

EB: What are the biggest issues regarding disability justice in your view? 

SD: The disability community is not unlike all other communities which make up society as a whole. This means that we face the same disparities that all marginalized people face. These include, to name a few: racism, xenophobia, sexism, homophobia, and oppression against all marginalized genders. More often than not, when these subjugations are inflicted upon disabled people, there’s an extra layer for which our community is forced to fight against. Internalized ableism IS a thing and it’s a constant battle for most of us who have grown up in a world that tries to tell us we are not enough.

EB: What is it like being a parent to neurodiverse children, being neurodiverse yourself?

SD: This is always one of my favorite interview questions, because being a parent continues to be the most meaningful experience of my life. It is through observing my children’s diverse expressions of individuality that I have learned to accept my whole self without exception.

In our family, we have regularly contended with an array of competing access needs. Most of these are specific to communication and sensory sensitivities. And though we are never perfect, we somehow manage to come out the other side with a determination to keep loving and appreciating one another for being faithful and true to our individual selves.

EB: What advice would you give young autistic people who are interested in advocacy and want to get started?

SD: I’d say, first and foremost, be kind to yourself; and as cliché as it may sound, never have these words been truer as it applies to self-advocacy and activism.

Understand and accept that you will make mistakes. We are an ever-evolving community, and you can expect that the strategies which worked in the disability advocacy community fifteen years ago might not work to our community’s benefit now.

Be ready and willing to accept the mistakes you’ll make from time to time. Allow yourself to be called in (or even called out) when need be. Remember that it’s not the mistakes we make that count but rather our willingness to correct and commit to do better as we learn.

Don’t try to be perfect. In fact, it’s our human imperfections that give us the ability to be empathetic and understanding to our fellow disabled advocates. The universe is wise and continues to teach us lessons. Speak out when you’re able and take a seat when necessary, but never ever forget to be kind to yourself.

 

About Sharon daVanport

Sharon daVanport lives in the Midwest by way of their home state of Texas where they spent young adulthood writing short stories, poetry and serving as co-editor of their academic newspaper. After nearly a decade in social work, Sharon founded the Autistic Women & Nonbinary Network (AWN). Appointed by their state’s board of education, Sharon served a full term on the SILC board of directors. Publications include co-authoring a paper in Sage Pub Autism Journal, a chapter in Autistic Community and the Neurodiversity Movement: Stories from the Front Line, and pieces in Welcome to the Autistic Community, and Disability Visibility Project.

A Q&A with Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

Make way for the next brilliant documentary by Raoul Peck! His four-part HBO docuseries, Exterminate All the Brutes, examines the history of Native American genocide and American slavery to reframe the overarching consequences of European colonialism. If you’ve seen his award-winning James Baldwin documentary, I Am Not Your Negro, you won’t want to miss this! It begins airing on April 7. Peck based his series on three books, two of which are from Beacon: Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States and Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Beacon Broadside editor Christian Coleman caught up with Dunbar-Ortiz to chat with her about her involvement with the production.

Christian Coleman: An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States was originally published in 2014. Is this the first time anyone has approached you about using it as source material for a film adaptation?

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz: Yes, it was the first time a filmmaker showed interest in the book. I never imagined that any filmmaker, even if they loved reading the book, would be interested in using it in a documentary. But Raoul Peck is not any ordinary filmmaker. I have long admired his work. His first documentary, from 1991, was Lumumba: Death of a Prophet, which is about the first president of the former Belgian Congo colony that won its independence in 1960 and was then assassinated with CIA involvement. But he made it a personal story, telling his own story as an Afro-Haitian. All his films are extraordinary, the dramatic one and the documentaries.

CC: How did you get news about the series and that Raoul Peck would be referencing your work in it? 

RDO: Raoul Peck called me on my cell phone! I had received an email the day before that I sort of ignored, saying that a production company in Paris was interested in using the book in a film. I was out walking to a meeting when the call came. He said, “I am Raoul Peck,” and I thought it might be a crank call and nearly cut off the call, but then he said he loved my book and was making an HBO docuseries on colonial genocide. Beacon Press had already been contacted to obtain the film rights, but I didn’t know that, and they were dealing with the film company, Velvet Film. I was truly stunned that the filmmaker I most admired in the world would read my book and want to make it a part of his film. He explained to me that he had already been working for a year with two other history texts when my book came to his attention in the Spring of 2018, one by Haitian historian Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, which was also published by Beacon Press, and the other by Swedish writer, Sven Lindqvist, “Exterminate All the Brutes:” One Man’s Odyssey into the Heart of Darkness and the Origins of European Genocide. He said he had never conceived of United States continental imperialism, only US imperialism, and of course, the thirty plus years that the United States occupied Haiti. He then asked me if I would work with him on it, with such humility in his voice, as if I might decline!

CC: Wow! How much involvement did you have in the production?

RDO: We met in New York City for three days in June 2018. An assistant had already gone through my book and brilliantly excerpted key passages. He had not begun developing the script, only the research. He asked me to be a consultant, so I was on the Velvet Film payroll for the next six months, going over the script as he wrote it. Unfortunately, the historian Trouillot died an untimely death and never was able to work on the project. Despite having a terminal illness, Sven Lindqvist did work closely with Raoul in shaping the concept, and he passed away, but they had accomplished a great deal. Throughout 2019, every step of the way, Raoul kept me informed. Then in late November, he brought me to New York to view the four hours; it wasn’t complete, as there were reenactments with an actor to be filmed and the addition of many images, but the structure and story were there, and it is truly amazing. Nothing like this documentary has ever been made. There are many documentaries that are good on European colonialism, but none ever include United States colonization of North America.

CC: On social media, you said Peck’s choice of using your book as source material was radical. Tell us why.

RDO: I think all three books are radical histories; Lindqvist documents the connection between the Holocaust and German colonialism and genocide in Africa in the late nineteenth century, and Trouillot’s book is a radical indictment of the West’s failure to acknowledge the most successful slave revolt in history, in Haiti, and thereby distorts the whole European history of colonialism and its continuing crimes. So, my book fits in very well, but I found it radical that Raoul recognized that the Indigenous Peoples of North America also experienced classic European colonialism and genocide, first by the British Empire, then by the independent United States in its one hundred years of wars against the Indigenous peoples to take the continent and import settlers to people Native land. It was certainly a risk, I thought, in that rarely is US colonial history located within the larger European colonial conquest, with the US even seen as anti-colonial in expelling the British empire.

CC: And what does your book mean to you now that it, along with the other two books the series references, is part of a visual presentation of the consequences of European settler colonialism?

RDO: It certainly feels like a validation at another level than the success of the book in reaching tens of thousands of people and being used in high school and university courses. I believe the documentary will reach another audience who may be interested to read the book. Raoul Peck is a great intellectual as well as being a great filmmaker, and his respect for literature is unusual, I think, for someone in the visual arts.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g37YqLD0BSg]

 

About Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz grew up in rural Oklahoma in a tenant farming family. She has been active in the international Indigenous movement for more than 4 decades and is known for her lifelong commitment to national and international social justice issues. Dunbar-Ortiz is the winner of the 2017 Lannan Cultural Freedom Prize, and is the author or editor of many books, including An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, a recipient of the 2015 American Book Award. She lives in San Francisco. Connect with her at reddirtsite.com or on Twitter @rdunbaro.

A Q&A with Morénike Giwa Onaiwu

Most resources available for parents come from psychologists, educators, and doctors, offering parents a narrow and technical approach to autism. Sincerely, Your Autistic Child, edited by Emily Paige Ballou, Sharon DaVanport, and Morénike Giwa Onaiwu, represents an authentic resource for parents written by autistic people themselves. From childhood and education to culture, gender identity, and sexuality, this anthology tackles the everyday joys and challenges of growing up while honestly addressing the emotional needs, sensitivity, and vibrancy of autistic kids, youth, and young adults.

In this blog series, our editorial intern, Evangelyn Beltran, introduces you to each of the editors to talk about the book and about how parents can avoid common mistakes and misconceptions, and make their child feel truly accepted, valued, and celebrated for who they are. To kick off Autism Acceptance Month, we’re starting with Morénike Giwa Onaiwu!

Evangelyn Beltran: How do your identities, being disabled and a woman of color, intersect?

Morénike Giwa Onaiwu: It’s interesting, because it kind of makes me think about certain medications. Some do not have any adverse reaction when taken together. Neither is there a positive reaction. They just coexist simultaneously but aren’t necessarily interrelated in any meaningful way. Another medication might help enhance the efficacy of another—maybe by increasing its metabolism rate or boosting its effect in some other way so they interact in a helpful way. However, when some medications are paired together, it can be dangerous and potentially even fatal. Their combination can result in very serious circumstances, and not in a helpful way. And that’s not because there’s anything inherently “bad” or “wrong” with the medications themselves individually, but together it increases the risk of a suboptimal outcome. That’s kind of how I perceive my identities; they “play” off one another in shifting ways depending upon the circumstances. I wish I could say most of the time it’s more like the second scenario, but I’d be lying.

EB: What was it like being diagnosed as an adult rather than as a child?

MGO: It’s the only way I know, so to me it’s hard to fathom what it’s like to be diagnosed when one is younger. Being that my two youngest children received their autism diagnoses as toddlers, I do have a way to directly compare the way things are for them versus the way things were for me growing up undiagnosed. I think having a better understanding of oneself can be really beneficial for a child (or anyone, but especially for a child), because when you are pondering how you might be different from others and vice versa, you have some insight into not just the “what” but also the “why” of things. You also might have the verbiage to be able to express what you need, what your preferences are, etc. and hopefully people might be accommodating of that. When you don’t have a diagnosis and can’t really articulate a “reason” that makes sense to people, they tend to be a lot less empathetic, although they shouldn’t be. I do wish to say that obtaining the diagnosis for me personally has been very empowering and has helped put much of my life, retrospectively, into context; I don’t know if that would be the case if I’d had the diagnosis younger.

EB: What was your experience as a child, trying to decipher the words, facial expressions, and tones of other kids, all while trying your best to mask?

MGO: Talk about exhausting! Everything felt like work. There’s a saying in the Black community that references how, unfortunately, we often have to overachieve and exceed minimal expectations just to obtain the consideration that more privileged groups receive merely by existing and/or meeting expectations. Essentially, it is said that we have to “work twice as hard to get half.” It sucks, but there’s truth in it. I feel that a different but similar sentiment can be applied to disability as well, at least in my case. There was never such a thing as “just” doing anything. Everything that was practically effortless for many others required a series of agonizing, stress-inducing steps for me to perform them.

For example, the act of starting to get dressed—maybe putting on a pair of socks—is a lot more complicated when you have coordination and movement differences as well as sensory differences; it might take you a lot longer to be able to select a pair that isn’t physically uncomfortable and then to put them on. The act of saying “Hi!” to a neighbor passing by—totally not simple. At what interval exactly do you meet their gaze to acknowledge them? How long do you hold the gaze? Do you stop going toward your destination to greet them or is it okay to greet them while you continue going on your way? Do you smile first before saying hi, or say hi and smile at the same time, or say hi and then smile? Do you smile with teeth or only with closed lips? How long do you hold the smile? Are you expected to add some additional words to the “Hi,” (i.e. small talk) or can you just say hi and leave without being rude? How loud or how soft should your volume be? Should you lilt your tone to indicate enthusiasm, or can you keep your tone normal? Do you also wave, and if so, when exactly? Before you smile but after you speak? After you smile, but while you speak? Is “Hello,” more appropriate than “Hi,” and do you need to include the person’s name if you know what it is (i.e. “Hi, Morgan,”) or is it okay not to? And there’s a lot that I’m leaving out when trying to navigate that “simple” greeting scenario. This is just a sampling.

EB: How do you think parents should prepare their children for the possibility that other kids might be mean to them because of their autism?

MGO: I think that kids need to know, but parents need to introduce the topic in a balanced way that is tailored to the way that particular child comprehends things. It does us a disservice to act like everyone is kind and that the world is some Utopia; when we learn otherwise, it will be hurtful and shocking, and we will have likely unintentionally placed ourselves potentially in harm’s way because of that naïveté. Yet we don’t need to be raised in fear either, looking for the “bogeyman” around every corner and assuming everyone will bully/mistreat/hate us because we’re different. That’s no way to live. I have taken the perspective that I need to prepare my children for ableism in the same way I’ve educated them about and prepared them for racism and sexism: that there’s nothing wrong with who and/or what you are, but some people don’t understand it, fear it, or view it negatively and that can result in mistreatment. That’s their issue, not yours, and you are not to blame for them being ignorant or bigoted. It isn’t appropriate and shouldn’t be tolerated; do not internalize it nor accept blame for being who you are.

EB: At what point in your life did you become comfortable in your identity?

MGO: Truthfully, I think, in a sense, I’m still working on that. It’s a continuous process for me! However, I feel that I have been on a constantly evolving quest to understand and accept me for me for a number of years. It’s almost like a physical journey; me gradually accepting one aspect of my identity (i.e. gender, personality characteristics, race, ethnicity, sexuality, etc.) is like me traveling over time to Point A, then eventually, over time, successfully making it to Point B and so on.

EB: In what ways have your autistic traits helped you in life?

MGO: I feel that in many ways they’ve helped me be my true and real self. I don’t have this curated, ultra-Photoshopped filter draped across my life. I am my authentic self, strengths and weaknesses. I feel that it has helped me to be more inclusive of others and has helped me to survive some ultra-painful and craptastic experiences in my life. In many ways, my autistic traits have probably saved my life.

EB: Have your identity and experiences influenced your career choices at all?

MGO: Absolutely. There’s a phrase I love from a fellow autistic colleague, Kassiane Asasumasu (the originator of the term “neurodivergent”), which describes autism as “deep love” and notes how we’re all about “going big or going home.” This resonates with me so much because we’re not “in between the lines” people. We’re on the lines or out of the lines. I personally do not have the capacity to effectively “do” an exceptional job consistently over a lengthy period of time on tasks that I dislike. It’s just not how I work. When I’m leaning into my abilities and my interests, however, I’m phenomenal and I shine. So, for me, knowing my strengths, knowing what I’m NOT good at and/or what I need support with is crucial. I could never work in a field that required certain tasks such as lengthy, extensive “networking with potential clients, or having to “people” a full day around the clock with no breaks to regroup, or with rigid time frames. I thrive in an environment where there is flexibility, where I can express some creativity in my approach to managing my responsibilities and/or solving problems, also and where I can have a level of autonomy while also knowing precisely what is expected of me by whom, when, why it is needed, and how to deliver it.

EB: What do you think should be done about the lack of representation of female and BIPOC autistic people?

MGO: I saved this question for last because it’s a downer for me, for I (and other gender and racial minorities) get asked this question quite frequently, and although it’s a sensitive topic, we try to respond earnestly with practical recommendations—all of which typically get ignored in terms of implementation. We explain the critical need to include and amplify us in a respectful, non-tokenizing manner; we suggest BIPOC women, nonbinary, and trans individuals as well as books and organizations; we seek opportunities for meaningful leadership and involvement; we empty out our hearts . . . and it’s typically in vain.

At this point, I think that “mainstream” autism—and disability, for that matter—aren’t really invested in having better representation of us, because clearly, they don’t think it’s worth the effort, time, or resources. All the inequities that already exist in society at large regarding race and gender are present within the autism community as well, and I would even propose that they’re magnified. If people struggle to comprehend that autism is not the Peter Pan of developmental disability (existing in some form of perpetual childhood) and that autistic children grow up and become teens and then adults, it’s doubtful that they will be able to see that it’s a spectrum in terms of race and gender. If they can’t/won’t see (white) autistic adults, it’s almost laughable to believe they’ll see someone like me. Nor do they want to. BIPOC Autistics and Autistic gender minorities aren’t at the table; we haven’t been invited, and I don’t know when/if we ever will be.

So, while I can humor you and myself by telling you what SHOULD be done to increase our representation, instead, I will tell you what WILL be done: my people will continue, as the great Shirley Chisholm advised, to “bring a folding chair” to that table, regardless of our lack of invitation. Because it’s our table, too, and we belong there, and we’re not going to perish waiting in vain for an invitation that may never ever come.

 

About Morénike Giwa Onaiwu

Morénike Giwa Onaiwu, MA, is a global self-advocate, educator, parent and disabled person of color in a neurodiverse, multicultural, serodifferent family. A prolific writer, public speaker, and social scientist/activist whose work focuses on meaningful community involvement, human rights, justice, and inclusion, Morénike is a Humanities Scholar at Rice University’s Center for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality and a member of several executive boards. Publications include: Knowing Why: Adult-Diagnosed Autistic People on Life and Autism, All the Weight of Our Dreams: On Living Racialized Autism, and various peer-reviewed articles. Learn more at: morenikeGO.com.

By David Freedlander

In 2018, the country watched as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez rose from unknown part-time bartender to the halls of Congress at the age of twenty-nine and became a household name for her progressive, passionate politics. In The AOC Generation: How Millennials Are Seizing Power and Rewriting the Rules of American Politics, journalist David Freedlander gives firsthand accounts detailing the final days of her campaign, which he spent beside her as she fought for every last vote. He also connects her ample political talents and ability to command the media and the public’s attention to the newfound political awakening of millennial activists. This selection from his book details the last moments of her campaign as she ran against her opponent, former US Representative Joe Crowley, and the night she made history on many fronts—including women’s history.

***

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez did something unheard of in politics: she skipped town.

While the Crowley forces were holding a big rally on a rainy Saturday, Ocasio-Cortez was thousands of miles away at the US-Mexico border to protest the Trump administration’s child separation policy.

It led to striking visuals that rocketed around social media of Ocasio-Cortez pleading with guards at the gate, but it seemed suicidal politically. It was Ocasio-Cortez’s idea, and no one tried to talk her out of it.

“As a campaign manager, yes, it is hard not to have the candidate present for the final weekend,” said Vigie Ramos Rios. “But here’s the thing: You are talking about a district that is 50 percent immigrants. And so you’re talking about a candidate who is recognizing what’s important to them and is highlighting it.

“We could see a path to victory at that point, but she also had a spotlight and if she could take that spotlight and highlight something that mattered to the people in her district, that’s what she was going to do. It wasn’t about winning. It was a movement. Victory comes in getting people to see somebody who’s willing to represent her district wholly, even if that means for her personally, it might not be a gain. She might go back to being a bartender and a waitress. She was going to take that little bit of spotlight and highlight an issue, and that was incredibly important to people in her district.”

On Election Day, the streets of the district were flooded with volunteers from both sides, but it was clear that many of the those there for Crowley were connected in some way to the Queens political machine; they were staffers for local elected officials or members of a local political club. Shawna Morlock, the hairdresser from Astoria, stood outside of a polling place in her neighborhood to urge voters to pull the lever for AOC, but she thought something was up when she got to talking with a person, a firefighter, who was there on behalf of Crowley’s campaign. He was a union guy, and as they started talking, she was surprised to hear him say good things about Donald Trump and bad things about immigrants. Later, he admitted he wasn’t a Democrat at all but was there at the polling place because his union asked him to be.

Ocasio-Cortez spent much of Election Day tweeting photos of places where she thought the Crowley forces had hung illegal signs, and then accusing the Crowley forces of taking down her signs and putting theirs up illegally. There was no evidence of it, and it wasn’t the only baseless accusation thrown out by Ocasio-Cortez during the campaign. She accused the incumbent of not having bilingual campaign literature, which was false, and of Crowley acolytes tampering with election machines, which would have been a violation of state law and for which there was also no evidence. Crowley couldn’t make one of the debates because he had a previous commitment in another part of the district, so he sent a surrogate in his place, a local city councilwoman named Annabel Palma, and Ocasio-Cortez accused him of deliberately attempting to confuse voters by sending a Latina in his stead.

Ocasio-Cortez’s mother, Bianca, joined the campaign for the final days. She became a regular campaign volunteer, joining the others who had been inspired by Ocasio-Cortez’s campaign, and allowing herself to feel the faint hope that her daughter could actually win. As they were waiting for the election results, Morlock told Bianca to just relax, saying, “She is going to be president one day, just you watch,” to which Bianca replied, “Don’t jinx it!”

As the team members finished their day on the streets, Ocasio-Cortez gathered with a few of them in a pocket park in the Bronx. At polling stations across the district, the enthusiasm for her seemed palpable, yet, still, no one believed she could win. Surely, they figured, there was a reserve army of Crowley supporters who could pull this off.

“No matter what happens, this does not stop here,” Ocasio-Cortez said to her supporters as evening fell. “I want every single one of you, to stay active, to keep pushing. Once people have been woken up, they don’t go back to sleep.”

The minute the polls closed, the Crowley forces knew the race was over. There had been massive turnout in areas good for Ocasio-Cortez and very limited turnout in Crowley’s precincts. The Crowley election night party was a new bistro on Northern Boulevard in Jackson Heights. The room didn’t have any TVs, and so the people in attendance, who were most of the city’s political class, including at least three people then planning on running for mayor in three years and hoping to pay homage to one of the most powerful people in the city, had no idea what the early returns showed: that Ocasio-Cortez had opened up a big lead on Crowley. As more votes came in, the lead only widened. Crowley staffers were in tears. Local elected officials stormed off in disgust, with one suggesting that was why primaries were a bad idea. Some, seeing which way the wind was blowing, dashed out and headed up to Ocasio-Cortez’s election night party in the Bronx. Crowley came in eventually to cheers. An amateur musician, Crowley’s band was set up in a corner of the restaurant and, with the congressman on guitar and vocals, launched into a rip-roaring rendition of “Born to Run,” dedicated to AOC.

“I may not have gotten proper credit for all the things I have done,” Crowley said afterward while sipping on a beer as the band played “Ramblin’ Man” behind him. “The people in this district know me. It was a Democratic primary at a time of low turnout. It is what it is.”

“People know me as a national figure, not a local one,” he added. “I think I always maintained my connectivity to the district. But at the end of the day it’s not about me. It’s about the people. I give my opponent, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a lot of credit. She ran a good race.”

Meanwhile, up in the Bronx, Ocasio-Cortez was in a car with her partner, Riley Roberts, and a few campaign staff were on their way to her election night party at a pool hall in the Bronx.

Naureen Akhter had made two cakes for the occasion, figuring that win or lose, the occasion called for cake. Ocasio-Cortez refused to look at the returns coming in, and so was genuinely shocked when a reporter for NY1 pulled her aside as she was declared the victor. Actor and activist Cynthia Nixon showed up to celebrate. Most media had been banned since they had not bothered to cover the race in the first place.

“I told you!” Morlock said when she saw Bianca Ocasio-Cortez standing off to the side, weeping tears of joy. “She is going to be president. I am calling it right now!”

Roberts was interviewed by People for Bernie, which livestreamed his words to the group’s Facebook account, and he said they always had talked about something like this happening but never thought it would happen so soon. The crowd began to chant, “AOC! AOC!”

Ocasio-Cortez stood up on the bar and addressed her exhausted supporters: “This room won this seat! Every person out here changed America tonight. What is very clear is that this is not the end, this is the beginning. The message we sent to the world tonight is that it is not okay to put donors before your community. The message that we sent tonight is that sometime between midnight and darkness there is still hope for this nation. You have given this country hope that when you knock on your neighbor’s door, when you come to them with love, when you come to them and tell them that no matter their stance, you are there for them, we can make change. What you have shown is that this nation is never beyond remedy, it is never beyond hope.

“Every person in this room is going to DC with me,” she added. “We have to dedicate ourselves to this fight because I can’t do it alone.”

 

About the Author 

David Freedlander is a contributor to Politico Magazine and New York Magazine, and writes for a variety of publications about politics, the arts, and New York City, including The New York Times, The Daily Beast, Slate, Rolling Stone, and Town and Country. Freedlander is an adjunct professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism where he teaches politics and political theory, and is frequently called onto CNN, MSNBC and national radio programs to discuss current events. He lives in Jackson Heights, NY. Connect with him at davidfreedlander.com and on Twitter (@freedlander).

By Emily Paige Ballou

My guess is that if you have a child or family member on the autism spectrum or have been involved with the special education system or disability services as a professional, you have most likely been taught, at some point, that the correct way of referring to people with disabilities is to use “person-first language,” or to “put the person first.”

Meanwhile, over the past couple of decades, much of the autistic community, as well as other disability pride-focused communities, have actually come to prefer “identity-first” language. We call ourselves disabled, or autistic, or Deaf, rather than “people with disabilities” or “people with autism,” for instance, because we don’t believe that our disabilities or communication differences are something that should have to be separated from our personhood, instead of treated as an intrinsic but morally-neutral aspect of our identities. We say “women,” not “people with femaleness,” and would call an adherent of a particular faith system a “Buddhist” or “Christian,” not a “person with Buddhism” or a “person with Methodism.”

Similarly, autism isn’t something we feel we should be ashamed of or be required to hold at arm’s length in order to be seen as people, just as we don’t feel people should have to rhetorically distance themselves from their gender, sexual orientation, race or ethnic identity, hair color, or faith in order to be seen as whole people deserving of respect and autonomy.

But my aim here is not to argue for or against either identity-first or person-first language. I feel that many other autistic and disabled advocates have amply addressed that particular topic, and there is very little new ground that I could tread there.

Rather, I’d like to challenge a phenomenon that tends to occur in nearly any online conversation between autistic people and mostly non-autistic parents about that language debate. I don’t, in fact, think I’ve been involved in a single one, in over ten years of involvement in autistic advocacy now, in which someone didn’t make this contribution to the conversation:

“I asked my child what he wanted to be called, and he said ‘my name.’”

Now, I think I know what the intent of this anecdote is. I think you want to tell this story to honor your child’s full and unique humanity and relationship to you.

Unfortunately, the effect, probably inadvertent, can be to disparage the importance of disability communities having terminology preferences, of being able to know that we share a common language and identity with other autistic people (or people with other disabilities), as well as to further entrench harmful stereotypes of autistic people as being lost “in our own little worlds” or irreparably disconnected from other people.

But here’s the truth: Autistic people are connected to each other. We’re connected by shared experiences of the world—similar sensory experiences, similar challenges growing up, shared experiences of mistreatment, ostracism, and loneliness, of feeling like we are always speaking a foreign language even in our own native tongues. We’re connected by time spent doing activism together, advocating for both ourselves and each other, and of course, simply by being friends and enjoying each other’s company.

Many autistic people are partnered or married to each other. Some of us are autistic parents to autistic children. Some of us belong to intergenerational families of autistic people.

And like almost any other group of people who have been marginalized for some facet of shared identity, we have a diverse set of opinions about the terminology we use to talk about ourselves that has shifted and evolved over time for various reasons.

As Lydia X. Z. Brown wrote in their essay “Dear Well-Meaning Strangers,” “Autistic is not a swear word. It is a beautiful word, a name for an identity that represents an entire group of people who are diverse in their personalities, characters, abilities, and deficits. Autism is not homogeneous. Autistics are not homogeneous. But we are everywhere.”

If my friend Jane is going to be in my city and wants me to come out to get coffee or dinner with her, then she will just use my name to e-mail me and say “Hey, want to hang out this week?” But if we are going to have an in-depth conversation over coffee about the kinds of issues and challenges we share because of our neurology, or that we share with a whole community of similarly disabled people, then the word “autistic” is going to be very helpful to our ability to do that.

When we ask you to understand the reasons autistic people choose the identifying language we do, no one is asking you not to call your child by their name in any context in which that would be the normal and obvious thing to do. That is not what this is about.

It’s about the right of autistic people to have access to the language with which to talk about our experiences, to share an identity as a community, and to have words with which to advocate effectively for our needs.

Whether your child comes to identify as autistic, as a person with autism, or wishes to keep that information private or not identify with the autistic community at all, is up to them.

But your child deserves access to information about what our communities believe and why, disabled adults in their lives, and exposure to open and nonjudgmental discussion about autism and disability, in order to make these decisions for themselves.

Our anthology, Sincerely, Your Autistic Child, includes contributions from authors who identify as both autistic and as people with autism. Some of us feel very passionately in favor of one or the other, and others less strongly, or identify more closely with the broader community of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities.

But all of those preferences are informed by our personal histories, our sense of ourselves in the world, the communities of disabled people we’ve been a part of and the work of autistic and disabled elders and activists we’ve looked up to.

There’s nothing shameful about being autistic. Nothing about knowing and understanding our linguistic history detracts from your child’s individuality or personhood. And there’s nothing trivial or strange about having discussions about autistic identity.

 

About the Author 

Emily Paige Ballou is an old Millennial from the Midwest who currently lives and works in NYC, where she primarily stage manages off-Broadway new plays and new musicals, including works such as the Hello Girls with Prospect Theater Company, Nikola Tesla Drops the Beat at the Adirondack Theatre Festival, and Rose with Nora’s Playhouse. She graduated from the University of Georgia, where she was also a member of the Demosthenian Literary Society. Previous publications include pieces in the Thinking Person’s Guide to Autism, The Real Experts: Readings for Parents of Autistic Children, NeuroQueer, Barking Sycamores, and Fuckit: A Zine.

Where would we be without the leadership of extraordinary women who chose to challenge the societal status quo? This year’s theme for International Women’s Day was Choose to Challenge. As Women’s History Month draws to a close, we’re highlighting books from our catalog to celebrate the inspiring women who saw the need for change, and took action for equality!

Judith Heumann’s lifelong battle to achieve respect, acceptance, and inclusion in society built up to the demand for protections for disabled peoples’ rights. Clara Park challenged the medical establishment to advocate for the support and education of autistic children and their parents. With her book Launching While Female, Susanne Althoff has exposed the gender gap faced by women and nonbinary entrepreneurs—especially those of color—to chart a road map for a more inclusive and economically successful future for us all. And Black women have innovated the digital space with their use of social media language and movement-building hashtags to spread the word of Black feminist theory and raise awareness of ongoing oppression. 

These stories are just the tip of the iceberg of what we have to offer. Scroll down to check out a selection of titles from our catalog. And you can click here for more!

 

Being Heumann: An Unrepentant Memoir of a Disability Rights Activist

Some people say that what I did changed the world. But really, I simply refused to accept what I was told about who I could be. And I was willing to make a fuss about it. I must say right up front, though, that it wasn’t actually an “I,” it was a “we.” For any story of changing the world is always the story of many. Many ideas, many arguments; many discussions; many late-night, punchy, falling-apart-laughing brainstorms; many believers; many friendships; many failures; many times of almost giving up; and many, many, many people. This is my story, yes, but I was one in a multitude, and I hope I will do justice to the many heroes, those who are alive and those no longer among us.
—Judith Heumann with Kristen Joiner

 

A Black Women’s History of the United States

To write a history about the United States from the perspective of Black women is to chart a course where the incredible, the fantastic, and the triumphant meet, mix, and mingle, often simultaneously, with hardship, and terror. Although it largely defies uniformity, African American women’s history is marked by the ways that we have marched forward, against all odds, to effect sustained change, individually, locally, and nationally.
—Daina Ramey Berry and Kali Nicole Gross

 

Here She Is: The Complicated Reign of the Beauty Pageant in America

Beauty pageants trace the arc of American feminism. Pageants may appear to be an unexpected instrument for this, due to feminist critiques of them. In reality, the history of pageants mirrors the many monumental changes related to a woman’s place in society, while still showing how far we have to go in our expectations of and for women and girls.
—Hilary Levey Friedman

 

Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong—and the New Research That’s Rewriting the Story

Today, hidden among the barrage of questionable research on sex differences, we have a radically new way of thinking about women’s minds, bodies, and their role in evolutionary history. Fresh theories on sex difference, for example, suggest that the small gaps that have been found between the brains of women and men are statistical anomalies caused by the fact that we are all unique. Decades of rigorous testing of girls and boys confirm that there are few psychological differences between the sexes, and that the differences seen are heavily shaped by culture, not biology. Research into our evolutionary past shows that sexual division of labor and male domination are not biologically hardwired into human society, as some have claimed, but that we were once an egalitarian species. Even the age-old myth about women being less promiscuous than men is being overturned.
—Angela Saini

 

Intelligent Love: The Story of Clara Park, Her Autistic Daughter, and the Myth of the Refrigerator Mother

Clara [Park] was called “an intellectual mother.” [Her daughter] Jessy was categorized as “autistic.” For a long time, both labels made them suffer deeply and restricted what they could become. But in their remarkable journey together, Clara and Jessy broke through the straitjackets of those labels, learning from each other and eventually helping each other to construct a life on their own terms. Exemplifying different ways of combining intelligence and love, Clara and Jessy also helped transform our understanding of what mothers and autistic people can do.”
—Marga Vicedo

 

Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color

It is not only the experiences of women of color with racial profiling and police violence that must be invisible no more but also our long-standing resistance. This book is ultimately a celebration of the roles that Indigenous women, Black women, and women of color have played in movements to resist racial profiling and police violence against communities of color, and in challenging antiviolence movements’ investment in criminal legal systems to demand safety on our terms.
—Andrea J. Ritchie

 

Launching While Female: Smashing the System That Holds Women Entrepreneurs Back

[Women] own fewer companies than men, and those businesses have access to significantly less start-up capital, make significantly less revenue, and employ far fewer people. An entrepreneurial gender gap exists, and it leaves us with fewer jobs, a weaker economy, and less innovation. Building a start-up world that’s open and inclusive would benefit us all.
—Susanne Althoff

 

Radicalizing Her: Why Women Choose Violence

Radicalizing Her is rooted in the perspective of the female fighters who demand to be seen as political actors. While much has been rightly made of the surge of women in electoral politics, this text reclaims women’s place in another form of political life: on the battlefield and in the streets. the erasure of the female fighter from narratives on gender and power is not only dangerous but also antifeminist.
—Nimmi Gowrinathan

 

Reclaiming Our Space: How Black Feminists Are Changing the World from the Tweets to the Streets

Black feminist women are being heard in ways they have never been heard before. Social media networks provide platforms for conversations that we have long been having in our hair salons and our churches, by our watercoolers and in our breakrooms, and in our housing project courtyards and systematically segregated classrooms . . . . We have to look at how, over the last decade, Black women have harnessed their ingenuity and their magic and have taken to digital platforms to advance the fight toward liberation while honoring the ways in which Black Feminism has been the guiding theoretical framework for our collective progress.
—Feminista Jones

 

The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls

Words like “feminism” and “resistance” are being drained of their meaning when we offer them up as band-aids that offer temporary relief to women and girls against the vagaries of patriarchy. I have had enough of giving women and girls ways simply to survive rather than tools to fight back. The danger and fear that should emanate from feminism and resistance must not be stamped out. Feminism should terrify the patriarchy. It should put patriarchy on notice that we demand nothing short of its destruction. We need fewer road maps toward a peace treaty with patriarchy and more manifestos on how to destroy it. The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls is my manifesto.
—Mona Eltahawy

 

Women and Other Monsters: Building a New Mythology

I’ve had a long-standing interest in female heroes, the women who have broken through gendered notions of who is allowed to embody valor and strength, and I was beginning to suspect that monsters, perhaps ironically, could offer a whole new approach to heroism for people (like me) who are often tripped up by feminine ideals . . . . We’re still struggling to create or consume stories about valorous women, unless they also display the “feminine” virtue.
—Jess Zimmerman

 

Women Warriors: An Unexpected History

The disappearance of women warriors is part of our larger tendency to write history as “his story.” The tendency is explicit in the world of military history. As military historian David Hay points out, “The assumption that war is something essentially male—be it the apotheosis of masculinity or the incarnation of patriarchy—has banned the study of the female combatant to academic purgatory.” But women’s contributions in science, literature, politics, and economics are also routinely minimized, dismissed, or forgotten. Look at almost any subject and you’ll discover another example, whether it’s classicist Alice Kober’s critical role in the decipherment of Linear B or the existence of all-female volunteer fire brigades in the early twentieth century. In the case of women warriors, the tendency to erase women’s roles in history is complicated by the contested question of whether women should fight.
—Pamela D. Toler

By Christian Coleman

It’s another fest of firsts for Octavia E. Butler! The multi-award-winning author and MacArthur fellow is having a moment, or rather a series of rolling moments that’s been gaining speed over the last few years, and we hope it keeps going!

One of the goals Butler wrote about in her journal was to become a New York Times best-selling author. In September 2020, fourteen years after her death, she finally became one for the first time.

Octavia E. Butler, who died in 2006, is a NYT Bestselling author. This was one of her life goals. Thank you all for making it happen! pic.twitter.com/0QNRfcQQ21

— Merrilee Heifetz (@MerrileeHeifetz) September 2, 2020

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

Her bestseller status owes itself to Parable of the Sower, the first in her Parable duology in which America dives off the dystopian deep end in a way that rings too true for the last four years. Butler explained in her Democracy Now! interview, her final television appearance, that she wrote the duology as a cautionary tale. Readers have been turning to it as a prophetic reflection of our society during one of our peak turbulent times on record, and it’s alerting them to the genius and wonder of her other fiction.

Where to start if you’re fresh off the rush of the Parable novels? Critic and reporter Stephen Kearse charted a reading guide of Butler’s entire output for the New York Times, beginning with her time-travel classic, Kindred. Because of its crossover appeal and “controlled and precise” depiction of American slavery, Kearse recommends it for readers who swear that they’re not fans of science fiction. They will be once they read it.

NPR’s Throughline produced an hour-long feature about her career, “How Octavia Butler’s Sci-Fi Dystopia Became a Constant in a Man’s Evolution.” It features commentary from her former editor Dan Simon; writers Nnedi Okorafor, Ayana Jamieson, and adrienne maree brown; and readings from her books. The first part covers Kindred. About her intentions in writing it and her innovative approach to the time travel trope, she’s quoted as saying:

“I wrote Kindred to make people, I hoped, feel history as opposed to merely knowing facts of history. It seemed important to me to get . . . the awareness of what it might have been like to be a slave, to feel it on your own skin, so to speak. And to understand the lack of control of your own fate that a slave suffers.”

In his extensive New Yorker piece, “How Butler Reimagines Sex and Survival,” Julian Lucas singles out Kindred as the novel that kicked off the neo-slave narrative as a genre. Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Water Dancer are its direct descendants. Lucas goes on to remark that Kindred’s “enduring power lies in how it forces [protagonist] Dana not simply to experience slavery but also to accept it as a condition of her own existence.” And in a time when Black women are being lauded for saving the country from itself, its “premise feels newly mordant.”

The Library of America enshrined Kindred’s literary legacy in the first ever volume of Butler’s collected work, released this January. Edited by writer Nisi Shawl and scholar Gerry Canavan, the LOA’s Butler volume includes her other stand-alone novel, Fledging, as well as her short stories and selected essays. She joins Ursula K. Le Guin, Philip K. Dick, and Ray Bradbury as science-fiction writers whose work has been recognized for its cultural significance to American letters. In signature Butler fashion, she’s the first Black science fiction author to have a full volume of their work added to the canon. Always a first. Always a trailblazer.

All trailblazing paths begin somewhere, and Butler’s began in her hometown of Los Angeles. The Los Angeles Times mapped out her literary landscape and the old haunts where she wrote in their interactive feature for us to explore.

Her path opened the way for today’s newest generation of writers, like N. K. Jemisin, Tochi Onyebuchi, Nnedi Okorafor, and adrienne maree brown. In particular, brown centers much of her work on Butler’s. On Democracy Now!, she talked about Butler’s impact as a deeply feminist writer on her:

“I think one of the things that was so powerful to me when I first picked up Octavia is that she wrote these strong Black feminine characters, these protagonists, who now you might look back and see the nonbinary, see the queerness, see other things in them, but at the time, she was writing these characters, and it was like, ‘Oh, there’s young Black women, and they’re leading.’”

The National Women’s Hall of Fame took notice of Butler’s feminist influence too. This October, they will induct her in the class of 2021, and in an announcement noted that “the issues she addresses in her Afrofuturistic, feminist novels have become more obviously relevant.” Here’s what else they had to say about her:

“Her life and works have been highly influential in science fiction, the literary world and popular culture, especially for people of color and marginalized communities. Scholars note that Butler’s choice to write from the point of view of characters in these communities expanded the science fiction genre to reflect the experiences of disenfranchised people.”

Her fellow inductees include poet Joy Harjo, NASA mathematician Katherine Johnson, and former First Lady, Michelle Obama.

On the anniversary of her passing this year, Symphony Space hosted an evening of readings and conversation to celebrate her fiction. Such literary superstars as N. K. Jemisin, Walter Mosley, and our very own Imani Perry were part of the extraordinary roster that read selections from her work. It’s so heartening to see other writers and fans outside of science fiction fandom hopping on the Butler bandwagon.

Just like Earthseed, the godless religion Butler invented for her Parable novels, her name has been taking root among the stars and worlds far from our planet. In 2018, the International Astronomical Union named a mountain on Charon Butler Mons to honor her. The year after, Asteroid 7052 Octaviabutler, discovered by American astronomer Eleanor Helin at Palomar Conservatory in 1988, was named in her memory. And this year, on March 5, NASA named the Mars 2020 Perseverance rover landing site after her. She would have loved this.

There’s another Mars connection here. Butler started writing science fiction because she went into competition with Devil Girl from Mars, the kind of campy, post-war B movie that ghettoizes science fiction for its adolescent traits, like laser guns—pew pew pew!—and sexy yet dangerous women from outer space. “I could write something better than that,” she thought to herself as a precocious twelve year old after watching it. If NASA had this in mind when naming the landing site, hats off to them for the nod!

By stars, we’re not just referring to astronomical objects. Last December, Dolly Parton gave the best shout-out to Kindred in the New York Times. And soon, stars of the small screen will bring the characters of the novel to life. FX Networks ordered a pilot for the TV adaptation of it. Yes, please! A screen adaptation of Butler’s work was long overdue.

There’s only one thing missing in all the great news: Octavia E. Butler herself. It’s a shame she’s not here for this. We wish she were here to see how much she and her visions of the future mean for so many people.

About the Author 

Christian Coleman is the associate digital marketing manager at Beacon Press and editor of Beacon Broadside. Before joining Beacon, he worked in writing, copy editing, and marketing positions at Sustainable Silicon Valley and Trikone. He graduated from Boston College and the Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers’ Workshop. Follow him on Twitter at @coleman_II.

By Yaba Blay

The ripple effects from the truth bomb of Oprah Winfrey’s interview with Meghan Markle and Prince Harry will take a while to settle. During their two-hour talk, the royal couple revealed the royal family’s concern with how dark the skin of their child, Archie, would be when he was born. Also, Archie will not be granted a title or protection. Put two and two together, and the reason is clear. Racism is a hell of drug, isn’t it? Not even Markle’s perceived proximity to whiteness, granted to her as a biracial woman, can protect her son. We may live in the woke times of the twenty-first century, but the royal family’s concern is a fear is as old as the slave trade their ancestors took part in. As Yaba Blay writes in One Drop: Shifting the Lens on Race, it’s a historical fear, steeped in colonialism, over preserving the purity of whiteness and the superiority ascribed to it.

***

The US Census reveals much about the country’s perspective on race. It counts people according to how the nation defines people, and historically, those people counted as Black have been those people with any known Black ancestry. Blacks are defined by the one-drop rule. No other racial or ethnic group is defined in this way, nor does any other nation rely upon this formula; the one-drop rule is definitively Black and characteristically American. It should make sense then that the origins of the rule are directly linked to the history of Black people in the United States, and as such, our discussion of the one-drop rule begins during the period of colonial enslavement.

Within the context of colonial enslavement, Blackness—prototypical and phenotypical African features such as dark skin, a broad nose, tightly coiled hair—were the undeniable markers of inferiority. These features served to immediately communicate one’s position within the social power structure, and in the context of enslavement, whether one was free or enslaved.

If you were White, you were free; if you were Black, you were enslaved. Simple.

However, this seemingly simple social order soon became complicated by the rampant increase in amalgamation—the mixing of the races. The lines between White and Black, free and enslaved, became more and more blurred. Even though the mixing was extensive and extremely common, from the beginning it was always discouraged. For example, in 1630, only eleven years after the first enslaved Africans arrived in Virginia, “colonist Hugh Davis was sentenced to be soundly whipped ‘before an assembly of negroes and others for abusing himself to the dishonor of God and shame of Christianity by defiling his body in lying with a negro.’” Any White person, male or female, suspected of interracial sexual contact was publicly punished.

Racial mixing posed a number of potential problems. At a time when Blacks far outnumbered Whites, Whites were afraid of losing control over the enslaved population. But what really lay beneath their physical fears were their psychological ones. In order to maintain White supremacy, Whiteness had to remain “pure.” White anxieties about racial mixture were rooted in eugenics and scientific racism, both supposing that the White race was the superior race, that physical and mental traits were tied to heredity, and that racial mixing thus not only lowered human quality but further threatened the survival of the White race. Within this framework, Blackness was considered a contaminant, one poisonous enough to taint and further cripple an entire gene pool. The one-drop rule would be critical not only in the defense of the White race but in the concentration of White power.

Given the shamelessly disproportionate amount of power and privilege assigned to Whiteness, the lines between who counted as White and who did not had to be unquestionably clear. Maintaining a firm color line would require the institution of what would later be called “anti-miscegenation laws”—laws that defined marriage (and sometimes sex) between the races as criminal. Because Blacks were already enslaved, in reality these laws reflected an attempt to police the behavior of Whites:

In many of the colonies . . . interracial marriage was formally prohibited; those who engaged in interracial fornication paid a double fine; those who intermarried were banished; those who performed marriages for mixed couples were punished; Whites who engaged in interracial marriages were enslaved; offspring of such marriages followed the slave status of the mother if the mother were Black and were enslaved anyway if the mother were White.

The idea that children born to enslaved mothers would take the status of the mother reflected a significant break with traditional English common law that held that children take the status of the father. However, as we will continue to see, laws changed frequently to maintain White supremacy. Essentially, if a White man were to impregnate a Black woman, the law took him off the hook; he did not have to support or even claim that child. At best, if the mother of the child was his property, he gained not a child but additional property and another source of labor and income. Thus, the law inadvertently sanctioned the sexual abuse of enslaved women. In fact, on some plantations, a select number of enslaved women were reserved specifically for breeding with White men since Mixed-race “slaves” brought higher prices at the market. Defining White-descended children born to enslaved Black women as “slaves” suited the need to control the population, increasing the number of exploited laborers while limiting the number of free Blacks. By limiting who had access to privilege, particularly that of freedom, Whites were able to further concentrate White power.

The punishment for White women who had consensual sex with Black men was much more severe than the penalties given to White men who raped Black women. The responsibility of maintaining the purity of the White race lay in the hands (and wombs) of its women, the literal bearers of the next generation. White women who had children by Black men were not only disgraces to their race but to their nation. Many were banished from the colony; many others were themselves enslaved. Conveniently, traditional English common law was upheld in these cases, and Black-descended children born to White women took the status of their Black fathers. In both cases, racially mixed persons would be assigned to the status of the lower group, thus the term “hypodescent”—“hypo” meaning under, defective, or inadequate. A White mother could give birth to a Black child, but a Black mother could never give birth to a White one.

Obviously, White/Black sexual liaisons continued, and the Mixed-race population grew rapidly. The general term used during the antebellum period to describe people of mixed racial heritage was “Mulatto.” Taken from the Portuguese and Spanish term mulato meaning “young mule,” the term reflects not only the disdain with which the referents were held but the way in which race was conceptualized at the time. As we know, a mule is the offspring of a horse and a donkey—a hybrid of two different animals—and as hybrids, they are sterile. To refer to children born of interracial sexual relationships as “Mulattos” pointed to the conviction that Whites and Blacks were two distinct beings and the related belief that if they were to mix, their offspring would be sterile and thus useless. True, we know that those of mixed racial heritage were not at all sterile; but this process of naming reflected a projected value system more so than an actual truth. Again, what lay beneath their physical fears were their psychological ones.

What would happen if one’s social status—free or enslaved—were no longer obvious based on physical appearance? What exactly were “Mulattos”? If there were only two racial categories, White and Black, which one did they belong to? By one colonial observation, Virginia was “swarming with Mulattos,” a situation that likely forced the state to quickly put laws into place to address the “problems” it posed. Virginia was the first state to outline a formulaic definition of race in its ban against interracial marriage. In 1705, it defined a “Negro” as the child, the grandchild, or great-grandchild of a “Negro” or anyone who was at a least one-eighth “Negro.” By this definition, “Mulattos” were Black. Other states soon followed. At different times up until the twentieth century, Indiana, Maryland, Missouri, Nebraska, North Carolina, North Dakota, and South Carolina all relied on a one-eighth rule, while Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Texas defined anyone with “any blood of the African race in their veins” as Black. While legally many Mixed-race individuals were considered White in many states at various points of time, socially most Whites regarded anyone with any Black ancestry as Black. The message was clear: No matter how White you may appear, if there is but one drop of Black blood in your lineage, you will be considered Black and treated accordingly.

 

About the Author 

Dr. Yaba Blay is a scholar-activist and cultural creative whose work centers the lived experiences of Black women and girls. She has launched viral campaigns including #PrettyPeriod and #ProfessionalBlackGirl and has appeared on CNN, BET, MSNBC, and NPR. Dr. Blay’s work has been featured in the New York Times, Ebony, Essence, and The Root. A thought leader on Black racial identity, colorism, and beauty politics, she is a globally sought-after speaker and consultant. Connect with her online at yabablay.com.

By Jeanne Theoharis and Brandy Colbert

What you learned about Rosa Parks in school was a myth. Much of what is known and taught about her is incomplete, distorted, and just plain wrong. Because Rosa Parks was active for sixty years, in the North as well as the South, her story provides a broader and more accurate view of the Black freedom struggle across the twentieth century. Jeanne Theoharis and Brandy Colbert show young people how the national fable of Parks and the civil rights movement—celebrated in schools during Black History Month—has warped what we know about Parks and stripped away the power and substance of the movement. Their young-adult adaptation Theoharis’s The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks illustrates how the movement radically sought to expose and eradicate racism in jobs, housing, schools, and public services, as well as police brutality and the over-incarceration of Black people—and how Rosa Parks was a key player throughout.

If you haven’t already read either version—and you should!—here are twelve things you didn’t know about Rosa Parks.

***

One: Raised by her mother and grandparents to be proud, Parks’s determination began as a young person. When a white boy pushed her, she pushed back. His mother threatened to kill her, but Parks stood her ground, saying she did not want to be pushed. Another time, she confronted a white bully bothering her and her brother, holding up a brick and daring him to hit her. He went away.

Two: Her husband Raymond was “the first real activist I ever met.” When she married him, Raymond was working to free the nine Scottsboro boys, and she joined these efforts. Raymond’s political outlook was crucial to her political development and their partnership sustained her political work over many decades.

Three: She was a lifelong believer in self-defense and kept a gun in the house, including during the boycott, because of the daily terror of white violence.

Four: She had been thrown off the bus a decade earlier by this same bus driver for refusing to pay in the front and go around to board in the back—and had various run-ins with other bus drivers because she refused to re-board after paying. Parks knew well the cost of bus resistance. A neighbor at Cleveland Courts had been killed. Fifteen-year-old Claudette Colvin was arrested in March 1955 for her refusal to move had been manhandled, and Parks had spearheaded efforts to raise money for the case.

Five: She had been working with the NAACP for more than a decade, doing the dangerous work of trying to document white brutality and legal malfeasance against Black people. She had grown so discouraged with the lack of change that she told fellow activists at a Highlander Folk School workshop she attended the summer before her bus stand that there would never be change in Montgomery because people wouldn’t stick together, and white resistance was too fierce.

Six: Parks had no belief that her arrest would galvanize a mass movement. She had been “pushed as far as she could be pushed.” She did not know if she would get off the bus alive” but still found her arrest “annoying” as it seemed, at the time, a distraction from the NAACP youth workshop she was planning for the weekend.

Seven: Parks’s arrest had grave consequences for her family. She and her husband both lost their jobs. Even as she made appearances across the country, Parks and her family were at times nearly destitute. Her mother would stay on the phone for hours just to keep the line busy so death threats could not be called in. The Parks’s economic and health troubles lasted for a decade after her arrest. 

Eight: Parks spent more than half of her life in the North, in Detroit—and lived for most of her time in Detroit in “the heart of the ghetto” (just a mile from the epicenter of the 1967 Detroit riot). She continued to organize and protest racial inequality in the North, “The promised land that wasn’t” she called it.

Nine: In 1964, she volunteered for the long-shot campaign of John Conyers for a new congressional seat and helped secure his victory in the crowded primary by convincing Martin Luther King to come to Detroit on Conyers behalf. One of the first things Conyers did when he was elected was hire Rosa Parks to work in his Detroit office, where she worked until 1988. This was the first time in over twenty years of political work that she held a paid political position. Conyers’ office received all sorts of hate calls and letters for hiring Parks.

Ten: Her personal hero was Malcolm X.

Eleven: Parks worked alongside the Black Power movement, particularly around issues such as reparations, Black history, anti-police brutality, freedom for Black political prisoners, independent Black political power, economic justice, and an end to the war in Vietnam. She attended the Black Political Convention in Gary, IN, and the Black Power conference in Philadelphia, PA. She journeyed to Lowndes County, AL, to support the movement there, spoke at the Poor People’s Campaign, helped organize support committees on behalf of Black political prisoners, such as the Wilmington 10 and Imari Obadele of the RNA, and paid a visit of support to the Black Panther school in Oakland, CA.

Twelve: She was an internationalist. An early opponent of the war in Vietnam in the early 1960s, she was a member of WILPF and supporter of Winter Soldier hearings in Detroit and the Jeannette Rankin Brigade protest in DC. In the 1980s, she protested apartheid and US complicity, joining a picket outside the South African embassy and opposed US policy in Central America. Eight days after 9/11, she joined other activists in a letter, calling for justice and saying this means working with the international community and no retaliation or war.

 

About the Authors 

Jeanne Theoharis is Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College of City University of New York and the author or coauthor of numerous books and articles on the civil rights and Black Power movements and the contemporary politics of race in the US. Her books include The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks (winner of a 2014 NAACP Image Award) and A More Beautiful and Terrible History (winner of the 2018 Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize for Nonfiction). Connect with her on Twitter (@JeanneTheoharis).

Brandy Colbert is the award-winning author of several books for children and teens, including The Only Black Girls in Town, The Voting Booth, and the Stonewall Book Award winner Little & Lion. She is the cowriter of Misty Copeland’s Life in Motion young readers’ edition. Her books have been chosen as Junior Library Guild selections and have appeared on many best-of lists, including the American Library Association’s Best Fiction for Young Adults. She is on faculty at Hamline University’s MFA program in writing for children and lives in Los Angeles.

By Helene Atwan

When Beacon was founded, in the mid-1850s, two burning issues of the day were abolition and women’s suffrage. Here, as we transition from Black History into Women’s History Month, I’m feeling so proud of our lasting tradition of publishing biographies that celebrate Black lives and women’s stories, and often both.

Decades ago, about the time I came to Beacon, we published Marian Wright Edelman’s memoir of her mentors (and it was among the press’s best-selling books of the time), and more recently we have published biographies of Black women who have made an indelible contribution to our history, including, of course, the NAACP Image Award–winning The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks by Jeanne Theoharis (also a best-selling book for Beacon, and just last month we published the YA adaptation of that book, coauthored by Jeanne and celebrated writer Brandy Colbert). These books put Mrs. Parks not just at the front of the bus but at the front of a movement that she very much helped to plan and lead. They correct the false image of an unwitting heroine who needed a rest and restore Parks to her actual role as an intentional and lifelong activist for civil rights.

The work of Black women as leaders in activism goes far deeper in our history, as recent films about Harriet Tubman and Madame C. J. Walker attest. But these women need no fictionalizing. In Keisha Blain’s powerful Until I Am Free, we will have a new book that tells the story of Fannie Lou Hamer, the youngest of twenty children, the granddaughter of enslaved people, a woman who worked as a sharecropper before dedicating herself to activism; and just out is a biography of Dorothy Pitman Hughes, With Her Fist Raised, Laura Lovett’s groundbreaking account of this pivotal figure in Black feminism and community organizing. The powerful work and witness of these women is baked into American culture and deserves to be better known. Like so many of the important books recently written by Black women activists, a good number of those published by Beacon, these stories correct the white supremacist version of history we’ve been fed for centuries.

We’ve also published in just the last half decade several important biographies of extremely influential Black women in the arts who are not as well-known as they deserve to be: Gayle Wald’s Shout, Sister, Shout!, the story of the life and times of Sister Rosetta Tharpe, often acknowledged to be the first gospel superstar, a book that led me to discover Sister Rosetta’s unique music, much as Ian Zack’s Odetta, an intimate portrait of a woman who was known as “The Voice of the Civil Rights Movement,” led me to hours of riveting listening. Angela Jackson’s acclaimed biography of poet Gwendolyn Brooks, A Surprised Queenhood in the New Black Sun, introduces us to one of the great American literary icons of the twentieth century, a protégé of Langston Hughes and a mentor to a generation of poets, including our own Sonia Sanchez. I hadn’t read enough of Brooks’s work or understood her role, her very real importance in our culture, until Jackson’s book. And until Imani Perry’s multiple award-winning biography of playwright and essayist Lorraine Hansberry, Looking for Lorraine, I mostly knew only A Raisin in the Sun and failed to appreciate the ways Hansberry used her prominence to challenge President Kennedy and his brother, the attorney general, to take bolder stances on civil rights, for example, or in supporting African anticolonial leaders and confronting the more subtle racism of the new generation of white writers. These books will help reshape our understanding of the lasting influence of Black women in the arts.

Just a few months ago, Beacon’s associate publisher and editorial director, Gayatri Patnaik, was awarded BIO’s prestigious 2020 Editorial Excellence Award. Most of the books I’ve mentioned above were acquired and edited by Gayatri; she deserves our gratitude.

Finally, on a personal note, I feel deeply honored, over the course of my career, to have had the opportunity to work with Black women whose influence on me has been profound. In the days before I came to Beacon, I was lucky enough to get to know Jamaica Kincaid, Edwidge Danticat, and Charlayne Hunter-Gault, among other brilliant Black women. Since I became director here, now over twenty-five years ago, I’ve been fortunate to have had the chance to meet and interact with some of the writers mentioned here, along with some whose work I personally edited and whose friendship I count as one of the great joys of my life. So thank you to Amy Alexander, Elaine Brown, Dominique Christina, Carol Fulp, Lani Guinier, Anita Hill, Gayl Jones, Deborah Plummer, and Sonia Sanchez.  

 

About the Author 

Helene Atwan has been the director of Beacon Press since 1995.

By Julian Bond

I entered the archive at the University of Virginia unsure what I might find. Looking through the Julian Bond Papers, over 130 boxes of materials, I was asked to find his lectures for the class he taught on the Southern Civil Rights Movement. With the aid of several research librarians, I eventually found those lectures, which Jeanne Theoharis and Pam Horowitz edited into the book, Julian Bond’s Time to Teach: A History of the Southern Civil Rights Movement. One unexpected surprise, and one that we could not fit into the book, was his lesson on the music of the movement. He ended his classes with this lecture, perhaps as a way to celebrate, but also as a way to inspire and to move his students to go out and change the world.

Music served many purposes for the movement. There was great resolve activists gained from singing together. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote:

“I have stood in a meeting with hundreds of youngsters and joined in while they sang ‘Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me ‘Round.’ It is not just a song; it is a resolve. A few minutes later, I have seen those same youngsters refuse to turn around from the onrush of a police dog, refuse to turn around before a pugnacious Bull Connor in command of men armed with power hoses. These songs bind us together, help us march together.”

Here we see that music can give a group of activists courage and a sense of togetherness to move forward into action. Music can take people from the realm of ideas into the realm of action. In this realm of action, those resisting are able to transform spaces of oppression into spaces of resistance. Movement singing was largely based on congregational singing, which is not rehearsed but learned in the moment, and is flexible and can respond instantly to the needs of an assembled group. A song-leader raises a song, receives a response from the congregation, and, in turn, the song leader responds. This style was a natural fit for the work being done by civil rights activists. Fannie Lou Hamer provides a clear example of this congregational style here, in her singing of Woke up this Morning. You can here the way the room responds and the dynamic give and take of a group speaking to each other.

Local people in the civil rights movement created a space in their struggles, using music to gain confidence, power, and a voice. In this process, they transformed the space around them; turning churches into spaces to organize; claiming jails as spaces for political speeches; and making armed police and vigilantes back down in realization that they could not control a movement that was showing their unity and power, all through song. In this lecture from Julian Bond, we get a lesson in how this happened through a variety of songs.

You can listen to the entire album, from which Julian played selections for his class, by following this link for purchase of the album or individual songs. We have linked the songs in this article to video and audio freely available online.

—Erik Wallenberg

***

Movement Music
by Julian Bond

We are going to listen today to several Freedom Songs, all of them taken from a three-record set “Voices of the Civil Rights Movement: Black American Freedom Songs 1960–1966”—all of them should blow your mind. The set was compiled by Dr. Bernice Johnson Reagon, Director of the Smithsonian’s Program in Black American Culture. You will hear her voice on some of these songs and will remember her from the movement in Albany, Georgia. She is best known as the Founder and Director of the singing group Sweet Honey in the Rock. In the liner notes, she says the “music culture of the civil rights movement was shaped by its central participants: black, Southern, and steeped in oral tradition.”

These songs tell stories. They are protest songs and songs of rebellion. They issue challenges to the white opposition. They tie the movement’s experiences—a march, a boycott, a clash with white authority—to the tradition of the black church, and take from the tradition of black church songs, substituting words and names to create new songs, applying old songs with Biblical messages to the current movement.

For example, the lines “Paul and Silas bound in jail, had no money for to go their bail” could easily refer to Biblical figures, or to jailed protestors in Albany, Birmingham, or Selma. The song “Let My People Go” might mean the children of Israel held in bondage; it might also mean jailed protestors anywhere in the early 1960s South.

SNCC Field Secretary Charles Sherrod described in a field report how the music helped the movement when he wrote about the Albany Movement’s first mass meeting in November 1961:

“The church was packed before eight o’clock. People were everywhere, in the aisles, sitting and standing in the choir stands, hanging over the railing of the balcony, sitting in trees outside the window . . . When the last speaker among the students, Bertha Gober, had finished, there was nothing left to say. Tears filled the eyes of hard, grown men who had seen with their own eyes merciless atrocities committed . . . And when we rose to sing ‘We Shall Overcome’ nobody could imagine what kept the church on four corners . . . I threw my head back and sang with my whole body.”

There are many songs on these three records, and many other collections—on records and in songbooks—of movement music. Some of these songs should be familiar to you; others will be brand new. When they are familiar, you should feel free to lose your inhibitions and sing along, following the song’s leader. I have selected a few, loosely divided into two categories—first, songs created by movement songwriters for movement ensembles to express a feeling or sentiment or to sum up a movement, and then more traditional songs from church tradition that have been altered and adapted to become Freedom Songs.

Bernice Reagan explained that process:

“Charlie Jones looked at me and said ‘Bernice, sing a song,’ and I started ‘Over My Head, I see Trouble in the Air.’ By the time I got to where ‘trouble’ should be, I didn’t see any trouble, so I put ‘Freedom’ in there. That was the first time I had an awareness that these songs were mine and I could use them for what I wanted.”

These songs serve many purposes. They help to rally community spirit. They help the community to say things in song they might not dare to say in conversation. Most of them are congregational, sung by everyone at the mass meeting. When everyone sings, everyone shares in the emotion, and everyone shares in the spirit expressed in the song. There were many movement ensembles or groups. Many communities had a favorite choir, drawn from a church, or a choir made up from several church choirs that moved from church to church as the sites of mass meetings moved.

Each community also had song leaders. Each leader brought something different to each song. On occasion, a member of the ensemble or choir—or of the congregation or audience—can supersede the leader, suggesting a line, introducing the chorus, even beginning a new song. Typically, the leader serves both musical and organizational roles. He or she establishes which song is to be sung, and the rest join in. The leader must select the right song for the right moment and must infuse the group with the spirit to sing. The typical song follows a pattern imported from Africa, adapted to field or work songs during slavery and peonage, and existing today in church and popular music, and in the cadences of black and white ministers—call and response.

Thus, in the spiritual, “the leader asks, “Have you got good religion?” and the congregation answers, “Certainly Lord.”

Leader: “Have you got good religion?”

Audience: “Certainly, Lord.”

Leader: “Have you got good religion?”

Audience: “Certainly, Lord.”

Leader: “Have you got good religion?”

Audience: “Certainly, Lord. Certainly, certainly, certainly, Lord.”

With the change of a few words, this spiritual becomes a Freedom Song.

Leader: “Do you want your freedom?”

Audience: “Certainly, Lord.”

 

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIGOpJTd5mg]

 

The next songs are traditional songs from the standard hymnal and church repertoire that have been altered to become Freedom Songs, this one from the height of the Birmingham movement in 1963. It is based on the parable of the lost sheep.

The singers are Carleton Reese and the Alabama Christian Movement Choir, and the song is a traditional gospel song with new words. As you listen, you’ll hear the leader, Carleton Reese, open with the call, “Oh Lord, I’m running,” and the choir will respond, “Lord I’m running, trying to make a hundred.” Later they will exchange places and the choir will issue the call, “35, 40, 45, 50,” and Reese will respond, “Won’t do, won’t do.” Then he’ll take over and he will issue the call “Let me tell you 91, 92,” and the choir will respond “Won’t do, won’t do.”

 

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DANNl779ewg]

 

Next is a song sung and recorded at a mass meeting in Greenwood, Mississippi, in the fall of 1961. Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer leads what began as a traditional Christmas song, “Go Tell it on the Mountain,” which announces the birth of Christ.

 

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SmNBVL4CRM]

 

The next song, “This Little Light of Mine,” was recorded at a mass meeting in Selma in October 1963. The group is the Selma Youth Choir. The leader is fifteen-year-old Betty Mae Fikes—here, Betty Mae Fikes talks decades later about the role of signing in preparing for going to jail—who is one of the movement’s strongest singers. Fikes is going to use the names of local figures and people and places in these songs to make them relevant to a Selma audience. She will mention Governor Wallace, Alabama’s governor; Jim Clark, the Dallas County Sheriff; Judge Loomis, who has been a movement opponent; Mayor Heinz, Selma’s Mayor; Hudson and Farish High Schools, the segregated black and white schools in Selma; Mr. Anderson and Miss Moore, popular teachers at the black high school, Hudson High; and Pres’s Place and the Thirsty Bar, segregated after-school student hangouts in Selma.

 

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Au0AFyB-m_8]

 

“If You Miss Me from the Back of the Bus” is a song written for the movement during the Freedom Rides. Here, Betty Fikes changes the usual words to fit the specificities of the Selma movement:

“If you miss me from the back of the bus,

and you can’t find me nowhere,

come on up to the front of the bus,

I’ll be sitting up there.”

She inserts local names—George Wallace, Jim Clark, and others—to make points not easily made otherwise. Listen carefully and you will hear her say:

“If you miss Jim Clark,

and you can’t find him nowhere.

Come on over to the graveyard,

He’ll be lying over there.”

Here is the Selma Youth Choir and fifteen-year-old Betty Mae Fikes.

 

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ODLwix8DGM]

 

Next is a song whose title should be familiar to all of you. It is “I’m Gonna Sit at the Welcome Table”—this was the name of the course reader Julian assigned for his class—and is sung by Hollis Watkins. He is at a rally for striking coal miners in West Virginia and he takes this 1930s labor song, which had been transferred into a 1960s Civil Rights or Freedom Song, and makes it a union song again.

 

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4EeE6ccU40]

 

Last is the movement anthem, “We Shall Overcome.” George Stoney has produced a marvelous documentary on this song, tracing its development from an old church song “I’ll Overcome Someday.” In 1945, members of the Food and Tobacco Workers Union in Charleston, South Carolina, adopted it for use during a strike and brought it with them to Highlander Folk School. Zilphia Horton used it at union meetings all over the South and taught it to Pete Seeger. Seeger and Horton added verses appropriate to labor, peace, and integration movements.

In 1959, Guy Carawan was hired as Highlander’s Music Director. He sang it at SNCC’s organizational meeting on Easter Weekend, 1960. That was the first time I and other students had heard it. It quickly became the movement’s anthem. I saw Israeli and Palestinian women holding hands and singing it; it was sung as the Berlin Wall came down; I heard it sung in Tiananmen Square. In March [2006] in the great immigrant rights marches, it was sung in Jackson, Mississippi in Spanish. This version was recorded in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, at a mass meeting in 1964. Mrs. Hamer is the lead singer.

 

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZrpmwWG2fC4]

 

Read part one of “Movement Music: The Final Lecture from Julian Bond’s Class on the Southern Civil Rights Movement.”

 

About the Authors 

Horace Julian Bond (1940-2015) was a leader in the civil rights movement, a politician, professor, writer, and activist. A founding member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, he went on to serve as president of the Southern Poverty Law Center from 1971 to 1979. He served ten years in the Georgia House and six terms in the Georgia Senate. From 1998 to 2010, Bond was the board chairman of the NAACP. He taught at several universities, including the University of Virginia, where he spent twenty years as a professor in the history department. He is the author of A Time To Speak, A Time To Act.

Erik Wallenberg is a PhD Candidate in History at CUNY Graduate Center where he studies environmental history and the Black freedom struggle. He researches and writes on the artistic expressions, the music and the theater, of social movements.

Black history isn’t just about the history-makers and big social movements. They begin as everyday people whose day-to-day experiences, inner Black life, and Black joy—this especially!—are just as much a part of Black history. Without daily life and joy, the picture narrows solely on struggle and trauma, and comes off as incomplete. We need it all.

With this in mind, and February being the month it is, we are also sharing selections from our titles—veterans of the shelf, new, and soon-to-be new—that offer a richness of Black life you won’t find in encyclopedias or reference texts. And remember: Blackness is not a monolith.

***

 

Gladys Bentley

African American female performers took to stages in cramped bars and grand halls alike, scenes awash in cigarette smoke, thinned gin, and explicit sexual entanglements. In cabarets, Black women engaged the personal in the blues to talk about issues such as domestic violence and incarceration but also to give voice to the erotic. Songs like Ma Rainey’s “Black Eye Blues” told the tale of Miss Nancy, whose man beat her, cheated on her, and took all of her money. It also told of her efforts to fight back by warning, “You low down alligator, just watch me/Sooner or later gonna catch you with your britches down.” Gertrude “Ma” Rainey’s performances also brazenly flouted heterosexual norms. With songs such as her 1928 hit “Prove It on Me Blues,” she crooned, “I went out last night with a crowd of my friends/ They must’ve been women, ’cause I don’t like no men/Wear my clothes just like a fan/Talk to the gals just like any old man/’Cause they say I do it, ain’t nobody caught me/Sure got to prove it on me.” The lyrics and performances exploded respectable concepts of how to be Black women and men in the world, and it opened up a space for a variety of sexual identities to emerge.

Black lesbians like Gladys Bentley donned tuxedos and played before raucous crowds eager to drink in Bentley and bathtub gin by the mouthfuls. Headlining clubs such as the Clam House, in top hat and coattails, Gladys in particular had a commanding presence that made her a top-selling artist in Jazz Age Harlem. As renowned poet Langston Hughes described: “Miss Bentley was an amazing exhibition of musical energy—a large, dark, masculine lady, whose feet pounded the floor while her fingers pounded the keyboard—a perfect piece of African sculpture, animated by her own rhythm.” Hughes beautifully captured the essence of Gladys, who made no secret of her intimate relationships with women.
—Daina Ramey Berry and Kali Nicole Gross, A Black Women’s History of the United States

 

Being a Black punk rocker is about maintaining a feat of punk rock inception. You are a punk among punks, a subversion of rules that themselves are subversions of yet other rules. At the same time, Black people and aestheticized irreverence are a more intuitive fit than is popularly acknowledged. I would be hard pressed to think of anything more definitional to Blackness than being subject to the chafing of oppressive norms.
—G’Ra Asim, Boyz n the Void: a mixtape to my brother (forthcoming in May 2021)

 

Our music, our dance, and our visual arts were considered natural gifts, not craft or a complicated rethinking of the possibilities of sound and the body, and I fell for it. It took me years to undo this horrible stereotyped construct. I’d seen Carmen de Lavallade in Amahl and the Night Visitors, and I knew I would never be capable of doing what she did—I wasn’t white enough. I’d see Katherine Dunham in old black-and-white movies, loved her solos, but I was ashamed of the ensemble pieces that drew from Haitian and Cuban influence. Too colored. Too sensual. Any Black person could shake that butt. So, after many years of this psychic and psychological trauma, the Black Arts Movement, as championed by Amiri Baraka and Larry Neal in the anthology Black Fire, gave me a new context; I was re-made.

Not only were our so-called “natchel” talents art, but they were a gift to the world, a craft, and I believe that after realizing that, something was freed in me that has changed my life dramatically. I don’t even have a slave name. Paulette was afraid of her body, it could not fit, move lyrically, or get her knee to her nose in a chorus line. But when I went to the first Black Power Convention in Newark, New Jersey, in 1967, I saw authentic African, jazz, and modern dance in Black bodies of all shapes, colors, and skills, and I said with my whole being, “That’s what I want to do. I want to do that.” Surprisingly, the dancers invited the audience to join in, and my body knew joy in my heart. Since that time (which is before I started writing), I have searched out, studied, and worked professionally with an amazing collection of African American, African, Cuban, Brazilian, and Haitian groups. I threw myself into the world of jazz, tap, and modern dance as interpreted by Black sensibility. Those experiences, I swear to you, are among the most treasured moments of my life.
—Ntozake Shange, Dance We Do: A Poet Explores Black Dance

 

The historical figures I idolized, Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X chief among them, embodied an idealized sense of strong black manhood, but they were straight. The love poems I absorbed in dog-eared black poetry anthologies were clearly written from a heterosexual point of view. This burning curiosity about other boys, I figured, would pass. Maybe it was because Daddy wasn’t around to help me through this phase. Maybe this longing to be affectionate and sexual with other boys was all about missing him. Whatever it was, I didn’t know what to do with it, and I told myself that the feelings would all fade away. The dashikis and clumsy Afrocentric rhetoric would disguise the desire, distract me from it, or maybe erase it altogether.
—Rashod Ollison, Soul Serenade: Rhythm, Blues & Coming of Age Through Vinyl

 

Her soaring vocals and preternatural ability to inhabit the characters she sang about left her predominantly white audiences spellbound and a little more open to the notion that someone could be both wonderfully American and proudly Black at the same time.

Odetta, in fact, gave them cause to celebrate Blackness. “She is more than an eloquent Negro voice,” one reviewer would note in the 1960s. “She is the eloquent voice of the Negro.” As Blacks demanded freedom at Southern lunch counters, at voter registrar offices, and on frontline protest marches before seething sheriffs’ deputies, many Northern whites were looking to embrace the nation’s better angels. The young woman with the trailblazing Afro, who sang about prisoners and chain gangs and talked about the Black history not being taught to schoolchildren, helped rouse a political consciousness among a searching and surging youth generation.

For a brief but seminal period, Odetta was a star, selling out concerts in the US and around the world, appearing on TV and in films. Our cultural memory can be short-lived, but at the height of her fame, Odetta’s singing and magnetic stage presence exerted such a force over her acolytes that sometimes their knees went weak, they fainted in front of her, or they tried to steal her food in the hope that it contained some kind of magic elixir.
—Ian Zack, Odetta: A Life in Music and Protest

 

Racially, I identify as Mixed because my father’s African American, my mother’s European American, and they both have Indigenous ancestry. Culturally, I identify as African American, because whereas the African American community is more of an open community that will claim me in being Mixed, the White community will never accept me as being White. So I wouldn’t even think of it. Never. Most people assume I’m Latino. Caribbean. They rarely think that I’m African American. I’ve been mistaken for Middle Eastern. Every once in a while people think I’m Black and Asian. In Cuba, they would call me Chino but they thought I was Cuban. Same thing in Brazil. Until I open my mouth, they just think I’m Brazilian. A lot of places are like that. But when I went to Tanzania, folks were breaking my heart thinking I was straight-up Italian. When I was in Ethiopia, I got ‘Are you half-caste?’ All the time. A couple times in Jamaica, I even got ‘White man.’ And that hurts. So, it depends on how people’s eyes perceive. You can feel like you’re Black as night on the inside but still be perceived as Other on the outside.
—Joshua Bee Alafia, Brooklyn, NY, in Yaba Blay’s One Drop: Shifting the Lens on Race

 

My father’s father was White, and his mother was dark. My father’s father owned the sawmill. He never claimed my father as his son, but he did see to it that they were taken care of. My father never laid on us about no ‘yella’ or no light skin or no White or no passing or none of it. He told us we were Negroes. He would tell us about how the White people took advantage of his mother and how we needed to respect her. He said, ‘You see Mama? You see her color? If you disown that, you disown her.’ So, I never gave passing a thought. But my Uncle Felix passed. My father’s brother. He left Florida and went to Ohio because he wanted to pass. Uncle Felix worked for the railroad, and I remember he would come in the dark of night just to make sure we were OK. He’d always give us a little something, but he could never stay. They woulda killed him. When we left Apalachicola for New Jersey, Uncle Felix got our train tickets. We had to sit way in the back by the engine, me and my sister. Can you imagine? Coming all the way up through the South like that? But Uncle Felix worked for it, so we knew not to say, ‘Hi, Uncle Felix.’ We ain’t so much as look at him. But one way or the other he saw to it that we had food and something to drink. He saw to it that we could come up North to be with our parents. But once we got up North, we never saw Uncle Felix again.

When I was in Florida, I went to public school. They treated me so bad my mother took me out and put me in the Catholic school. At that time, Colored people would say, ‘Black is honest,’ and ‘Yella is dishonest,’ and so they was hard on me. They used ‘yella’ a lot. They didn’t trust me, but they knew better than to mess with me, because I’d fight them.
—Angelina Griggs (born in 1908), Fayetteville, GA, in Yaba Blay’s One Drop: Shifting the Lens on Race

 

In my experience, it’s been my hair that’s been more of an issue than my skin color. People totally change the way they treat me when my hair is different. When I wear my hair straight, people don’t look twice. I look normal, and I guess I’m safe. If my hair is straight, people think I’m Indian. Then it’s like this whole other situation with a whole other set of stereotypes. But if my hair is curly, it’s more risky. Then people are like, ‘Is she Black? She can’t be Black. Is she Jamaican? Oh, she has some mix of something. But she’s definitely got some Black.’ People always do that. But then people who understand Ethiopian features do call me out and say I’m Ethiopian. Most people are just very Black or White. ‘You’re Black. Period. You’re not White.’ And I hate to say it but it’s true—there’s some privilege in my hair. I’ve heard ‘You have good hair’ all my life. And I never really understood, like ‘What do you mean? I know a lot of people who have my hair.’ Especially when I was in Philly at temple, a lot of women were like, ‘You’re so lucky.’ Why does that make me lucky? Just because my hair is curly? I didn’t really get it because I think it’s all beautiful. Straight, curly, natural, permed.
—Sosena Solomon, Brooklyn, NY, in Yaba Blay’s One Drop: Shifting the Lens on Race

 

I couldn’t help but think that somehow I had scammed them into believing I was worthy enough to model for them, that they’d find out that I was fatter than my photos showed, and that they’d toss me off the set as soon as I walked through the door. I was a small-time model from Detroit without an agent. I mean, I had modeled in Paris and LA, but those were smaller gigs that I had set up myself. Oh, and I had modeled for Adidas Originals, too, but I could barely fit into their stuff. New York was intimidating. They’d expect me to be on the entire time. What if my IBS acted up and ruined the whole shoot? What if I died on the way there and they’d be like, “Ugh, I knew her fat ass would so die on the way here. Such a typical fattie.” And worse, what if I couldn’t fit into any of their wardrobe?

The team and I emailed back and forth about what I could and couldn’t wear due to being a covered Muslimah. Then we got into sizing. The agency gave me the stylist’s Instagram, so I could see who’d I be working with. The head stylist was that typical tan, privileged, and thin white girl with even whiter teeth and soft brown tresses with honey blonde highlights. She’s possibly never seen cellulite in her life. She’d probably vomit seeing mine. I’d been on a set before, and I’d have to be naked during fittings and outfit changes. I knew the drill. Beads of sweat rolled down my neck as I anticipated the judgment.

I sent in my size and measurements. She replied: “Great. Do me a favor and just bring in some of your fave outfits.”
—Leah Vernon, Unashamed: Musings of a Fat, Black Muslim

By Julian Bond

I entered the archive at the University of Virginia unsure what I might find. Looking through the Julian Bond Papers, over 130 boxes of materials, I was asked to find his lectures for the class he taught on the Southern Civil Rights Movement. With the aid of several research librarians, I eventually found those lectures, which Jeanne Theoharis and Pam Horowitz edited into the book, Julian Bond’s Time to Teach: A History of the Southern Civil Rights Movement. One unexpected surprise, and one that we could not fit into the book, was his lesson on the music on the movement. He ended his classes with this lecture, perhaps as a way to celebrate, but also as a way to inspire and to move his students to go out and change the world.

Music served many purposes for the movement. There was great resolve activists gained from singing together. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote:

“I have stood in a meeting with hundreds of youngsters and joined in while they sang ‘Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me ‘Round.’ It is not just a song; it is a resolve. A few minutes later, I have seen those same youngsters refuse to turn around from the onrush of a police dog, refuse to turn around before a pugnacious Bull Connor in command of men armed with power hoses. These songs bind us together, help us march together.”

Here we see that music can give a group of activists courage and a sense of togetherness to move forward into action. Music can take people from the realm of ideas into the realm of action. In this realm of action, those resisting are able to transform spaces of oppression into spaces of resistance. Movement singing was largely based on congregational singing, which is not rehearsed but learned in the moment, and is flexible and can respond instantly to the needs of an assembled group. A song-leader raises a song, receives a response from the congregation, and, in turn, the song leader responds. This style was a natural fit for the work being done by civil rights activists. Fannie Lou Hamer provides a clear example of this congregational style here, in her singing of Woke up this Morning. You can here the way the room responds and the dynamic give and take of a group speaking to each other.

Local people in the civil rights movement created a space in their struggles, using music to gain confidence, power, and a voice. In this process, they transformed the space around them; turning churches into spaces to organize; claiming jails as spaces for political speeches; and making armed police and vigilantes back down in realization that they could not control a movement that was showing their unity and power, all through song. In this lecture from Julian Bond, we get a lesson in how this happened through a variety of songs.

You can listen to the entire album, from which Julian played selections for his class, by following this link for purchase of the album or individual songs. We have linked the songs in this article to video and audio freely available online.

—Erik Wallenberg

***

Movement Music
by Julian Bond

We are going to listen today to several Freedom Songs, all of them taken from a three-record set “Voices of the Civil Rights Movement: Black American Freedom Songs 1960–1966”—all of them should blow your mind. The set was compiled by Dr. Bernice Johnson Reagon, Director of the Smithsonian’s Program in Black American Culture. You will hear her voice on some of these songs and will remember her from the movement in Albany, Georgia. She is best known as the Founder and Director of the singing group Sweet Honey in the Rock. In the liner notes, she says the “music culture of the civil rights movement was shaped by its central participants: black, Southern, and steeped in oral tradition.”

These songs tell stories. They are protest songs and songs of rebellion. They issue challenges to the white opposition. They tie the movement’s experiences—a march, a boycott, a clash with white authority—to the tradition of the black church, and take from the tradition of black church songs, substituting words and names to create new songs, applying old songs with Biblical messages to the current movement.

For example, the lines “Paul and Silas bound in jail, had no money for to go their bail” could easily refer to Biblical figures, or to jailed protestors in Albany, Birmingham, or Selma. The song “Let My People Go” might mean the children of Israel held in bondage; it might also mean jailed protestors anywhere in the early 1960s South.

SNCC Field Secretary Charles Sherrod described in a field report how the music helped the movement when he wrote about the Albany Movement’s first mass meeting in November 1961:

“The church was packed before eight o’clock. People were everywhere, in the aisles, sitting and standing in the choir stands, hanging over the railing of the balcony, sitting in trees outside the window . . . When the last speaker among the students, Bertha Gober, had finished, there was nothing left to say. Tears filled the eyes of hard, grown men who had seen with their own eyes merciless atrocities committed . . . And when we rose to sing ‘We Shall Overcome’ nobody could imagine what kept the church on four corners . . . I threw my head back and sang with my whole body.”

There are many songs on these three records, and many other collections—on records and in songbooks—of movement music. Some of these songs should be familiar to you; others will be brand new. When they are familiar, you should feel free to lose your inhibitions and sing along, following the song’s leader. I have selected a few, loosely divided into two categories—first, songs created by movement songwriters for movement ensembles to express a feeling or sentiment or to sum up a movement, and then more traditional songs from church tradition that have been altered and adapted to become Freedom Songs.

Bernice Reagan explained that process:

“Charlie Jones looked at me and said ‘Bernice, sing a song,’ and I started ‘Over My Head, I see Trouble in the Air.’ By the time I got to where ‘trouble’ should be, I didn’t see any trouble, so I put ‘Freedom’ in there. That was the first time I had an awareness that these songs were mine and I could use them for what I wanted.”

These songs serve many purposes. They help to rally community spirit. They help the community to say things in song they might not dare to say in conversation. Most of them are congregational, sung by everyone at the mass meeting. When everyone sings, everyone shares in the emotion, and everyone shares in the spirit expressed in the song. There were many movement ensembles or groups. Many communities had a favorite choir, drawn from a church, or a choir made up from several church choirs that moved from church to church as the sites of mass meetings moved.

Each community also had song leaders. Each leader brought something different to each song. On occasion, a member of the ensemble or choir—or of the congregation or audience—can supersede the leader, suggesting a line, introducing the chorus, even beginning a new song. Typically, the leader serves both musical and organizational roles. He or she establishes which song is to be sung, and the rest join in. The leader must select the right song for the right moment and must infuse the group with the spirit to sing. The typical song follows a pattern imported from Africa, adapted to field or work songs during slavery and peonage, and existing today in church and popular music, and in the cadences of black and white ministers—call and response.

Thus, in the spiritual, “the leader asks, “Have you got good religion?” and the congregation answers, “Certainly Lord.”

Leader: “Have you got good religion?”

Audience: “Certainly, Lord.”

Leader: “Have you got good religion?”

Audience: “Certainly, Lord.”

Leader: “Have you got good religion?”

Audience: “Certainly, Lord. Certainly, certainly, certainly, Lord.”

With the change of a few words, this spiritual becomes a Freedom Song.

Leader: “Do you want your freedom?”

Audience: “Certainly, Lord.”

 

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIGOpJTd5mg]

 

The first three songs are sung by one of the movement’s premier ensembles, the SNCC Freedom Singers.

First is a song “Dog, Dog,” written in Parchman Penitentiary in 1961 by Freedom Riders James Bevel and Bernard Lafayette. It reflects the early 1960s optimism of the movement that racial barriers would be broken down and blacks and whites would one day be together. It owes its inspiration to the rhythm and blues music of the period.

James Bevel explained how it was written.

“I lived next door to a man and he had a lot of children and so did my dad but we weren’t allowed to play together because they were white. But we had two dogs. He had a dog and we had a dog. And our dogs would always play together, so we wrote this song . . .”

This is SNCC’s Freedom Singers—Rutha Harris, Bernice Reagan, Bertha Gober, Chico and Charles Neblett—each of them a SNCC Field Secretary with experience working in the field. Cordell Reagan, who came to Albany in 1961 with Charles Sherrod, is the lead singer.

 

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQ6FmG1w5ek]

 

The next song was also written in jail, this time by Bertha Gober and Janie Culbreath, both students at Albany State College arrested for trying to integrate the bus station. This song is based on the spiritual “Oh Mary, Oh Martha.” By substituting some words, they have changed it into a Freedom Song. The song is “Oh Pritchett, Oh Kelley;” Pritchett is the Albany Chief of Police and Kelley is the Mayor. This song follows the call and response pattern:

Leader: “Oh Pritchett.”

Response: “Oh, Kelley.”

Leader: “Oh, Pritchett.”

Response: “Open them cells.”

The Freedom Singers are singing; Bertha Gober sings the lead.

 

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fITVcMSNJgI]

 

Like many others, this next song borrows from the popular culture, in this case, rhythm and blues music. This song was written by James Orange, an SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Conference) organizer. It is called “Governor Wallace” and is aimed at the segregationist governor of Alabama.

The Freedom Singers sing; Charles Neblett is the lead singer.

 

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QCSbAvECQ8]

 

 

Stay tuned for part two of “Movement Music: The Final Lecture from Julian Bond’s Class on the Southern Civil Rights Movement.”

 

About the Author 

Horace Julian Bond (1940-2015) was a leader in the civil rights movement, a politician, professor, writer, and activist. A founding member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, he went on to serve as president of the Southern Poverty Law Center from 1971 to 1979. He served ten years in the Georgia House and six terms in the Georgia Senate. From 1998 to 2010, Bond was the board chairman of the NAACP. He taught at several universities, including the University of Virginia, where he spent twenty years as a professor in the history department. He is the author of A Time To Speak, A Time To Act.

By Daniel S. Lucks

The ease with which Donald Trump took over Ronald Reagan’s Republican Party is one of the most significant political developments of the Trump era. For many Americans, this is surprising because the Gipper was a sunny and avuncular figure, and his projection of America as a “shining city on a hill” is the antithesis of the Trump’s polarizing dystopian view of “American carnage.” 

In The Reagans, journalist and documentary filmmaker Matt Tyrnauer’s four-part Showtime docuseries, challenges the narrative of Reagan as an American icon by revealing a dark side to Ronald and Nancy Reagan’s glamorous veneer. According to Tyrnauer, Reagan’s triumph marked an inflection point where America took the wrong turn and prioritized greed and selfishness, demonized government, eviscerated labor unions, and destroyed the social compact that created widespread middle-class prosperity in the post-war era. Though the now ex-President Trump is never mentioned in the nearly four hours of archival footage and commentary from a variety of historians, journalists, and a gallery of Reagan-era luminaries, Tyrnauer implies that Reagan’s political rise from Hollywood B actor to President of the United States laid the groundwork for the former reality star Donald Trump’s capture of the Presidency.

The Reagans is organized chronologically as well as thematically. The first episode narrates Reagan’s political odyssey from youthful allegiant of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal liberalism to his transformation to staunch conservative and corporate pitchman for General Electric. Tyrnauer’s treatment of Reagan’s role as an FBI informant in Hollywood, where he enforced the Hollywood blacklist as President of the Screen Actors Guild, will be news to many viewers.   Reagan’s background in Hollywood was pivotal in his facility in crafting an image of himself as an American hero based on a mythical America that never existed.

The second episode focuses on Reagan’s political rise from B Actor to Governor of California and explores his deft use of racially-coded dog whistles like “law and order,” “states’ rights,” and “welfare queens,” in appealing to white middle-class voters anxious over the racial and cultural dislocations of the 1960s. The final two episodes are a searing indictment of Reagan’s presidency. The third focuses on his quest to dismantle government programs for the needy while increasing the power of the wealthy through his tax cuts, ushering in our current Second Gilded Age. The final episode details some of the troubling episodes of Reagan’s final years, like the Iran-Contra scandal and his callous disregard of the AIDS epidemic. Most interestingly, Tyrnauer interviews Ronald Reagan, Jr., who believed his father exhibited symptoms of dementia during his Presidency. A main thesis of The Reagans is the central and indispensable role of the First Lady Nancy Reagan, an avid cultivator of the wealthy and powerful, and her reliance on an astrologer to determine Reagan’s schedule.

While much of the docuseries covers familiar ground, Part II, “The Right Turn,” traces Reagan’s early political career, backed by a powerful consortium of California millionaires, which is not as well known to the American public. Tyrnauer provides a great service by exposing the extent to which racism factored into Reagan’s political rise to Governor of California, and then the Presidency. As far back as the mid-1960s, Reagan aggressively appealed to white working-class Democrats by stoking their anxieties over the pace of the civil rights movement, which reached a crescendo after the explosive 1965 Watts riots. Capitalizing on fears that the ghetto and mayhem would spread to their communities, Reagan announced his bid for Governor in January 1966, claiming he wanted to protect Californians from the city streets that are “jungles” after dark, and crisscrossed the state excoriating California’s Fair Housing Act as an infringement on property rights. In 1976, Reagan campaigned for the Presidency, repeating the fanciful tale of a Cadillac-driving welfare queen chiseling off the hard work of white taxpayers. While Reagan never resorted to the overt racism of a George Wallace, his racially-coded dog whistles on “law and order,” “states’ rights,” and “welfare queens” resonated with white Americans.

The Reagans is a compelling, revisionist examination of the defining figure of the modern conservative movement who has been treated far too well by history. Tyrnauer succeeds in puncturing the myth of Reagan that a network of conservative activists and intellectuals fashioned in the years following Reagan’s exit from the political stage, and in apotheosizing Reagan as an American icon deserving of a coveted space on Mount Rushmore. The docuseries is a good companion to Reconsidering Reagan: Racism, Republicans and the Road to Trump, finalist for the 2021 Prose Award, in which I, too, indict Reagan and the conservative movement’s racist politics and policies and argue that Reagan’s white supremacist policies laid the groundwork for Trump. Both demonstrate Reagan’s genius in packaging his racism in a façade of fatherly love. 

Tyrnauer’s docuseries and Lucks Reconsidering Reagan are visceral reminders that Reagan was a media-savvy celebrity like Trump who deployed racism and convinced millions of middle-class whites to vote against their self-interest. Moving forward, it’s imperative that the conservative movement expunge the scourge of Trumpism, but they also need to reckon with the dark side of Reagan’s legacy. 

 

About the Author 

Daniel S. Lucks holds a PhD in American history from the University of California, Berkeley and is the author of Selma to Saigon: The Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War and Reconsidering Reagan: Racism, Republicans, and the Road to Trump. He is a graduate of the University of California Hastings College of the Law and lives in Los Angeles.

By Jonathan Rosenblum

This article appeared originally in The Nation.

Last year’s dreadful miasma of Covid, recession, police violence, and coup attempt obscured some remarkable advances by local and national left-wing movements. Florida voters, while rejecting the Biden/Harris ticket, overwhelmingly approved a $15 minimum wage. Arizona and Oregon approved tax increases on the wealthy to fund public education. Colorado passed paid family leave. Portland, Me., voters approved rent control. All six representatives in historically swing districts who supported Medicare for All won reelection. Ninety-two of the 93 House Democrats—including all four in swing districts—who ran in November as Green New Deal sponsors won reelection. At least 20 candidates endorsed by Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) won office. In a year of historic uprisings against police brutality and economic inequality, support for socialism rose, especially among younger people.

These developments were not welcomed by establishment Democrats, who sought to blame their own poor showings in congressional races on the progressive movement. “‘Defund the police’ is killing our party, and we’ve got to stop it,” declared House majority whip Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.) a week after the election. “Don’t say socialism ever again,” Representative Abigail Spanberger (D-Va.) said, as votes were still being tallied in early November. While fending off Trump’s attempted coup from the right, Joe Biden and leading Democrats spent a considerable amount of energy before and after the election attacking socialized medicine, the Green New Deal, and the movement to defund bloated police budgets.

That blowback represents a broad effort by leading Democrats, nationally and locally, to steer political discourse away from more radical demands and foist on the citizenry their vision of “a return to normal”—a kinder, gentler neoliberal Gilded Age without the daily White House tweet tantrums.

As 2021 gets underway, ground zero for this sharpening struggle will be in Seattle, where an alliance of establishment Democrats, real estate interests, and Trump backers is coming together to try to recall socialist City Council member Kshama Sawant, who initially won office in 2013, and was reelected in 2015 and 2019. The recall advocates intend to fire a warning shot to socialists and radicals everywhere. The recall campaign has already raised a quarter of a million dollars, and is ramping up efforts to qualify for the ballot sometime in the spring or summer.

In the last year, Sawant and her Socialist Alternative organization won a three-year battle to tax Amazon—headquartered in Seattle—and other big businesses to fund emergency Covid relief, affordable housing construction, and local Green New Deal projects. And in the midst of nationwide street protests following the Minneapolis police murder of George Floyd, Sawant led organizing to win a first-in-the-nation ban on police use of tear gas, pepper spray, rubber bullets, and other so-called “crowd control” weapons. (Full disclosure: I’ve known and worked with Sawant since 2013 on issue and electoral campaigns, and currently work in her City Council office as a community organizer.)

These victories met a swift response from the political establishment. Democratic Mayor Jenny Durkan—elected in 2017 with help from a record $350,000 donation from Amazon—aligned with the Trump Justice Department in challenging Sawant’s weapons ban legislation in court.

The mayor also demanded that the City Council investigate and consider expelling Sawant from office for her leadership in the Tax Amazon campaign and her participation in Black Lives Matter protests. The council demurred, but Durkan’s bill of charges got picked up by pro-business forces and converted into a recall petition against Sawant.

The petition is now before the Washington state Supreme Court, which is expected to green-light it in the coming weeks. That will trigger a six-month period for recall advocates to collect 10,700 signatures from Sawant’s central Seattle district—one-quarter of the number of voters in the 2019 election—in order to qualify the recall for the ballot.

The petition levels four charges at Sawant, only one of which needs to be approved by the court for the recall to proceed. Two of the charges are aimed at the Black Lives Matter movement in addition to the council member: They charge that Sawant misused her City Council position to invite hundreds of protesters (with masks on) into City Hall for a people’s assembly at the height of the Justice for George Floyd protests, and that she revealed the mayor’s confidential home address by speaking at a protest outside the mayor’s mansion that had been organized by DSA and the families of police violence victims. A third charge claims Sawant illegally used City resources to campaign for the Amazon tax. The fourth charge alleges that Sawant broke City hiring rules when she involved Socialist Alternative in making hiring decisions.

Washington state’s recall law is powerful protection for a political ruling class seeking to weed out radical threats. Over the years state courts have exercised wide discretion in gatekeeping recall petitions. Lawyers on both sides of the Sawant recall fight say they expect the Supreme Court to approve at least one of the charges, and yet last fall the same court tossed out a petition against Mayor Durkan for overseeing the repeated, brutal police violence of last summer against hundreds of Black Lives Matter protesters.

To approve a recall effort, state courts merely have to conclude that recall petition charges, if true, would constitute malfeasance or a violation of an official’s oath of office. But the court is expressly barred from considering “the truth of the charges.” So, for instance, even though Sawant has stated she had no idea where the mayor lived, her mere participation in the protest outside the mansion is being used as the basis for one of the charges. Additionally, in today’s Citizens United world, independent committees can pour unlimited funds into supporting the recall effort.

~~~

Sawant is one of dozens of socialists who have been elected to office in recent years, but removing her would represent an especially valuable trophy for the business elite. She has never melded into the culture of closed-door political dealmaking, instead focusing on building movements outside City Hall to define, shape, and advance legislative demands. After upsetting a four-term City Council incumbent in 2013, Sawant and allied forces pushed through $15-an-hour minimum wage legislation in the spring of 2014, making Seattle the first major city to achieve the iconic base wage.

Hoping that 2013 was a fluke, big business spent hundreds of thousands in 2015 to defeat Sawant, an immigrant and a rank-and-file teachers union member. But they fell short as renters, students, and union members turned out in huge numbers, mobilized by hundreds of volunteer door-knockers. Following the 2015 election, Sawant led successful campaigns to cap rental move-in fees, bar rent increases at substandard apartments, and win tens of millions of dollars for affordable housing and social services. Sawant and the movement also won signature organizing battles outside City Hall, organizing tenants to beat back rent increases in public and private housing, and supporting workers organizing into unions and fighting for contracts.

The legislative fights, especially, put the Democratic political establishment on its back heels. Sawant and Socialist Alternative routinely mobilized hundreds of activists—students, low-wage workers, people experiencing homelessness, union members, young people of color, among others—to pack City Hall chambers. Organizing out of her City Council office, Sawant hosted town hall meetings, led marches demanding city action, and sponsored petitions and mass letter-writing campaigns to elected officials. Sawant legislative initiatives that began with scant support among other council members—like blocking construction of a new militarized police station in 2016—ended up getting adopted by City Council after these sustained public demonstrations.

In 2017, the local Chamber of Commerce was determined to push back against the influence of socialist politics, and it recruited Jenny Durkan to run for mayor. A former US prosecutor and close confidante to pro-business Democratic powerhouses like former governor Chris Gregoire, Durkan was trusted by the board of trade to bring political order to City Hall. At its most basic level, Durkan’s candidacy was a bid by business and the political establishment to convince liberal Seattle voters to abandon Sawant’s left-wing activism and return to a more centrist political discourse that they could control.

Boosted by nearly $900,000 in mostly corporate-dependent expenditures, including Amazon’s record donation, Durkan handily beat a crowded candidate field to win the mayor’s office. The following year, in 2018, Sawant and housing activists pushed through a modest tax on Amazon and other top corporations, but, with Durkan’s encouragement, the local Chamber of Commerce launched a scorched-earth political counterattack that reversed the tax within weeks.

Later the same year, Mayor Durkan negotiated and pushed for City Council approval of a new police contract that rolled back key police accountability measures. Two dozen civil and immigrant rights groups protested, but got steamrolled by the combined forces of the new mayor, local labor council leaders, the police, and businesses. On the council, only Sawant voted no, with the eight other members—all Democrats—approving the contract.

For Durkan and her political base, the police contract experience stimulated hope that they could defeat Sawant and the popular movement. The local chamber president, Marilyn Strickland, declared that 2019 would be “a change election” in Seattle. She vowed to replace local officeholders with pro-business candidates, starting with unseating Sawant. The anti-Sawant coalition drew in conservative building trades union leaders and others who could claim to be past supporters of the socialist put off by her recent tactics. To fund the anti-Sawant campaign, Strickland’s group led the effort to amass $4.1 million in corporate cash for the City Council elections—including a staggering $1.45 million from Amazon—swamping council races that previously saw candidates win with one-20th that amount of money.

The gambit backfired, however, as Sawant’s campaign—with support from other candidates and progressive union forces—successfully turned the 2019 election into a referendum on Amazon and corporate power. Five of the seven business-aligned office seekers went down in defeat.

In early 2020, Sawant, her Socialist Alternative organization, and renter groups seized the election momentum to win a first-in-the-nation ban on winter evictions, and to launch a renewed Tax Amazon demand.

The arrival of the pandemic shifted the terrain for the reemergent tax movement by making grassroots political tactics like door-knocking and tabling initially off-limits. Yet the economic crisis for working people underscored the dire need to fund services, and rampant profiteering by Amazon and other big businesses made it hard for most pro-business politicians to defend continued corporate tax immunity.

Notably, also, the Black Lives Matter uprising bolstered the tax fight. Street protesters and local clergy drew the connection between police violence and the brutal gentrification and economic displacement that have shrunk Seattle’s core Black community by three-quarters in recent decades. “If Black Lives Matter, then affordable housing for Black families in the Central District should matter,” the Rev. Carey Anderson, senior pastor at Seattle’s First African Methodist Episcopal Church, told media at a pro-Amazon-Tax press conference organized with Sawant and other faith leaders.

Sawant and Tax Amazon volunteers collected more than 30,000 signatures—many from the street protests—threatening to put the tax measure on the ballot if the City Council failed to act. The Tax Amazon call became a prominent demand at Black Lives Matter protests.

Mayor Durkan openly fought the Amazon Tax, at one point derisively telling a TV reporter, “Yeah, that never is going to happen, and I think it’s irresponsible for anyone to say that that’s even possible.”

But in July—two weeks after winning the police weapons ban legislation—Sawant and the movement proved the mayor wrong, as the City Council adopted a tax on big business that was more than four times the size of the repealed 2018 measure. A late amendment introduced by Sawant dedicates a portion of the tax every year to building affordable housing in the historically Black Central District, a significant tangible victory for the Black Lives Matter movement.

“Victories like these are why the ruling class wants a do-over, not only of my [2019] reelection, but also of all these victories for the working class and oppressed communities,” Sawant said.

~~~

As for Durkan, the mayor’s fortunes tumbled in the wake of the Tax Amazon win and the summer’s Black Lives Matter street protests. Joining with millions around the country, tens of thousands of Seattle community members turned out to protest racist police violence, including eight killings by Seattle police on Mayor Durkan’s watch. Durkan initially issued public declarations of solidarity with the movement, but then staunchly defended multiple brutal police crackdowns on protesters.

Faith and community members assailed the mayor’s defense of police violence. Key organizations, including the local United Food and Commercial Workers Union, called for her resignation. The Seattle Human Rights Commission, along with the LGBTQ Commission, called on her to quit. Activists launched a recall petition against Durkan (which was quickly dismissed by the state Supreme Court). Politically tattered, Durkan announced in December that she would not stand for reelection in 2021, clearing the path for making the recall against Sawant the marquee political contest this year.

The big corporate cash has yet to make an appearance against Sawant—independent expenditure mega-donations typically show up just before ballots drop. For now, the recall’s early donors reveal the contours of the emerging battle. They include billionaire property developer Martin Selig, a major Trump donor, along with senior executives from Goodman Real Estate, a huge apartment and commercial landlord with $2.5 billion in properties in the US and Canada; Broadmark Realty Capital; National Health Investors, a Tennessee-based real estate investment trust with control in 242 nursing homes and senior living centers around the US; Meridian Capital, a global investment banking firm based in Seattle; Merrill Lynch, and Noble House Hotels, a North American hotel and restaurant chain that in 2018 picked a huge fight with Seattle Unitehere members, whom Sawant actively supported. Notably, many of these executives, aside from Selig, have routinely donated to Democratic candidates like Joe Biden, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Collecting the required signatures might be a challenge for a grassroots campaign, but it’s hardly impossible for a recall effort with limitless cash to spend on mailings and advertising, backed by the local Sinclair-owned TV station, right-wing talk radio, and a Seattle Times editorial board that rarely misses an opportunity to attack the socialist. Once the recall campaign turns in signatures and they are verified, election officials would schedule the recall 45 to 90 days out.

Recall forces doubtless will continue to hammer away on their allegations that Sawant broke the law. They also are likely to try to split progressives in Sawant’s left-leaning district, by enlisting community leaders with liberal bona fides who will argue that Sawant is too confrontational and polarizing, and that the city needs elected officials who play “Seattle nice.”

Sawant and her supporters readily admit they don’t plan to bend to that culture.

“She doesn’t say, ‘Oh, well, you know, we have to all get along,’” said Kathy Yasi, a child care provider and vice president of SEIU 925. “Well, I don’t really want her to get along. I want her to say, ‘What the hell is happening? Why is this this way?’ And I can count on her to do that.”

This past summer, as Black Lives Matter protests took off across the country, seven of Seattle’s nine City Council members publicly pledged to halve Seattle’s bloated $409 million police budget. But when the budget votes came this fall, only Sawant supported the 50 percent police cut. The other members agreed to trim about 8 percent from the police and pledge to do more at some point in the future, arguing that more community discussion and political deliberation were needed. Their disavowal matched other municipal retreats—most notably, in Minneapolis—from pledges to defund the police. At the same time, the Seattle council approved the mayor’s proposal to cut $200 million from affordable housing, bus hours, parks, and libraries.

Sawant was unsparing in her public response, issuing a statement that “the budget that Democratic Party Councilmembers have approved today is a budget that deeply fails working people and marginalized communities, including working-class and poor communities of color.”

Sawant and her allies will seek to galvanize the movement against the recall with their own set of broad demands on the city: increase the Amazon Tax to fund more Covid relief, a jobs program, and ramped-up local Green New Deal projects; cancel rents and mortgages for tenants and small businesses who’ve lost income during the pandemic; and establish a democratically elected community oversight board over the police, with subpoena, investigatory, and policy-setting powers.

They also will enlist a range of political leaders and activists—socialists, independents, and progressive Democrats—who recognize the broader impact of the recall effort.

“I don’t have to agree with everything that Kshama does to know that I am opposed to the recall,” said Democratic state Senator Rebecca Saldaña. “Kshama is a democratically elected woman who is doing work on behalf of her constituents…. Instead of spending money on the recall, businesses should focus on supporting economic recovery, our public health, addressing racial inequities, and creating a clean-fueled economy that recognizes the dire climate emergency.” Saldaña’s constituency overlaps with Sawant’s district.

Seattle civil rights leader Larry Gossett, who recently retired after serving 25 years on the council, noted that the attack on Sawant is an attack on the broader progressive movement. “I know, as an activist organizing Black Student Unions, Third World coalitions, and unemployed Black workers beginning in the 1960s, that our opponents always try to undermine our movement and movement leaders, especially when they are effective,” he said. “That’s exactly what’s going on here.”

Indeed, the Seattle power struggle between an embattled but formidable political establishment and a scrappy, socialist-led movement mirrors the growing tension nationally—the current honeymoon notwithstanding—between Biden’s political base and the insurgent left. In 2021, what happens in Seattle will be an important political bellwether, with significance far beyond the city limits.

 

About the Author 

Jonathan Rosenblum works as a community organizer for Seattle City Councilmember Kshama Sawant. He is the author of Beyond $15: Immigrant Workers, Faith Activists, and the Revival of the Labor Movement (Beacon Press, 2017), and a member of the National Writers Union/UAW 1981. Find him online at https://jonathanrosenblum.org/ or Twitter: @jonathan4212.

Is the coast clear? Any instances of blackface or diversity snafus on the horizon to mar Black History Month? Any of that nonsense to call out? Only last year and the year before did rashes of both spread in news headlines. But not this year. We’re conditioned to anticipate them like clockwork, but it’s a relief not to see them. Too soon to call it?

Anyway, this year’s Black History Month is starting on a more auspicious note. Kamala Harris was sworn in as the first Black and South Asian woman vice president. The Reverend Raphael Warnock was elected as Georgia’s first Black senator. And Stacey Abrams was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. We can never get enough Black excellence and change! To celebrate, we’re sharing a list of selected Black history titles by our Black writers. These are books that uphold the excellence of the Black literary tradition, that document the many legacies of excellence and change, that can make change happen.

 

Anarcha Speaks: A History in Poems

Anarcha
you are a house
of too many hands.
how else do
they build
but by blood?
by bone?
—Dominique Christina

 

A Black Women’s History of the United States

“To write a history about the United States from the perspective of Black women is to chart a course where the incredible, the fantastic, and the triumphant meet, mix, and mingle, often simultaneously, with hardship, and terror. Although it largely defies uniformity, African American women’s history is marked by the ways that we have marched forward, against all odds, to effect sustained change, individually, locally, and nationally.”
—Daina Ramey Berry and Kali Nicole Gross

 

Dance We Do: A Poet Explores Black Dance

“There are so many Black dancers who have gone unnamed and unrecognized and hopefully we will meet some of them in this book. We are fleeting in our knowledge of who our dancers are, how hard they work, what it takes to keep a company together, what it takes to make a dance, and what it takes to make a dancer is unknown to us because we do not write it down. I have tried to capture some of this mystery, this rugged creativity that informs Black dance.”
—Ntozake Shange

 

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

“The omnipresent racial and class divisions and creeping authoritarianism embedded within sporting events in post-9/11 America would collide with the most powerful black employees in the country recognizing their political power and showing a willingness to use it. Through the great unifier of sports, with the black players kneeling, the white players standing, the police heroes to one, center of protest to others, America would discover explosively and definitively just how severe its fractures truly were.”
—Howard Bryant

 

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

“Ahead of her time, Lorraine’s witness and wisdom help us understand the world, its problems and its possibilities. In her lonely reckonings, her impassioned reaching for justice, and the seriousness of her craft, she teaches us how to more ethically, more lovingly, witness one another today.”
—Imani Perry

 

Kindred

“You might be able to go through this whole experience as an observer . . . . I can understand that because most of the time, I’m still an observer. It’s protection. It’s nineteen seventy-six shielding and cushioning eighteen nineteen for me. But now and then . . . I can’t maintain the distance. I’m drawn all the way into eighteen nineteen, and I don’t know what to do.”
—Octavia E. Butler

 

Loving: Interracial Intimacy in America and the Threat to White Supremacy

“I believe that rising interracial intimacy, combined with immigration and demographic and generational change, will contribute to the rise of what I call the culturally dexterous class. From cross-racial marriage, adoption, and romance to the simple act of entering the home of someone of another race or ethnicity to have a meal, the dexterous cross different cultures daily and are forced to practice pluralism . . . . In this case, integrators are spreading the social epidemic or virus of cultural dexterity—an enhanced capacity for intimate connections with people outside one’s own tribe, for seeing and accepting difference rather than demanding assimilation to an unspoken norm of whiteness. For whites in particular, intimate contact reduces prejudice and anxiety about dealing with an out-group.”
—Sheryll Cashin

 

Notes of a Native Son

“Americans attempt until today to make an abstraction of the Negro, but the very nature of these abstractions reveals the tremendous effects the presence of the Negro has had on the American character.”
—James Baldwin, from “Stranger in the Village”

 

On the Courthouse Lawn: Confronting the Legacy of Lynching in the Twenty-First Century

“There is unfinished business in communities throughout this country, where the reality of lynching and racial pogroms has never been fully confronted, where the historical complicity of ordinary citizens in condoning racial terrorism continues to undermine the chance for trust and racial reconciliation, and where the participation of local institutions in upholding violent white supremacy continues to taint their legitimacy. I believe that communities can themselves take charge of the project of healing, reconciliation, and reparation.”
—Sherrilyn A. Ifill

 

One Drop: Shifting the Lens on Race

“If we can recalibrate our lenses to see Blackness as a broader category of identity and experience, perhaps we will be able to see ourselves as part of a larger global community. As a professor of Africana Studies in the United States, I believe that it is becoming increasingly important for all people, not just people of African descent, to recognize the existence of a global Black community. In my experience teaching students about issues related to the African Diaspora, I find that they have a particular level of difficulty assigning the category and thus the identity of Blackness to people throughout the world, even when those people themselves identify as Black . . . . [T]here are Black people all over the world. We are not a minority—we comprise a global community.”
—Yaba Blay

 

The Social Life of DNA: Race, Reparations, and Reconciliation After the Genome

“Combating color-blind racism requires the restoration of color-vision—that is, the return to visibility of historic and continued racial inequalities. Genetic ancestry testing is being used to make this case. In this “post-racial,” post-genomic moment, therefore, DNA further offers the unique and somewhat paradoxical possibility of magnifying issues of inequality in order to bring them into view, both literally and figuratively. Social inequities may then be challenged using other strategies such as the courts and social movements.”
—Alondra Nelson

 

Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?

“For its very survival’s sake, America must re-examine old presuppositions and release itself from many things that for centuries have been held sacred. For the evils of racism, poverty and militarism to die, a new set of values must be born. Our economy must become more person-centered than property- and profit-centered. Our government must depend more on its moral power than on its military power.”
—Martin Luther King, Jr.

By Leigh Patel

Jim Clyburn, Congressional representative from South Carolina and the majority whip, has an office in the Congressional Chambers with his name title displayed clearly. However, Clyburn does not work out of that office, instead working from an unmarked one with this staff. On January 6, the day of the storming of the Capitol building, some of the domestic terrorists attempted to enter Clyburn’s office. His staff had piled furniture and were texting from inside. They were able to block the rioters from entering. Clyburn stated in an interview with NBC news, “My question is how did they know where that office was? There were [inside] people taking selfies with these insurrectionists.” Part of the unfolding of events prior to the insurrection contain the report that on January 5, some lawmakers provided a reconnaissance tour for some of the insurrectionists.

As the nation moves past two weeks that included what many called a violent breach of ‘the peoples’ house,’ as well as the election of a career politician as the nation’s forty-sixth President, now is a good time to ask how some police officers, elected officials, and their college-educated aides came to play a role in fomenting the insurrection. Was this an aberration from their education or was it an outcropping of the education they received? The relationships between famous alumni are under a new light and are unveiling how deeply some lawmakers were complicit with the white supremacist attack on the US federal government.  

Institutions of higher education tend to lift up the public accomplishments of their alumni. Alumni of public standing are promoted via school websites and even hold advising roles at their alma maters. For example, the University of California, Berkeley has reserved parking spaces for winners of the Nobel prize. Several people who were involved in the insurrection and claimed voter fraud have been identified, and the universities they attended are now reckoning with what to say and how to, in essence, distance themselves from these famous alumni.

Universities are taking various actions to distance themselves from those caught in the video and records for having breached not just the Capitol but laws themselves. Republican congresswoman Elise Stefanik has been removed from a committee in Harvard’s Kennedy School for Politics. Sean Spicer, former press secretary in the Trump administration, had held a fellowship from the Kennedy School, but the school has not issued a statement about Spicer. In fact, the removal of alumni involved in manufactured voter fraud claims and supporting the insurrection, is unique. Most of the reaction from universities has been either silence or vague statements that condemn incitements. The University of Pennsylvania, whose alumni include Donald Trump, released a statement from the university’s president and provost, saying that they join “together with everyone who raises their voices and condemns threatening incitements and assaults on the political freedom of all citizens.”

These statements have only cited recent events and not addressed two crucial facts. One, graduates from elite institutions of higher education have social networks that are often used to facilitate remaining in power and building wealth. They have earned degrees from institutions that have been built through the stolen labor of enslaved Black people, and in all likelihood, their college educations did not teach them that history, nor the long-standing freedom struggles that students have mobilized for de-centering whiteness in admissions, faculty ranks, and curriculum. Second, these statements say nothing about the thousands of peoples’ homes that are invaded regularly, by police officers and sanctioned by the law. Black medical worker Breonna Taylor was fatally shot seven times on March 13, 2020 in her bed, after police dressed in plainclothes used a no-knock entry. In 2019, Anjanette Young, a Black social worker in Chicago, was woken in the middle of the night as police with automatic rifles, again with a no-knock entry, searched her apartment. For almost one full minute, Young was naked, repeating that the police were in the wrong apartment. The police then left, turned off their video cameras, and turned them back to re-enter and apologize to Young. There is precious little that is unprecedented about the terrorism that occurred in the nation’s capital on January 6. As scholar Sabina Vaught put it, “If we are the people, then where we reside is also the people’s house” (personal communication, January 8, 2012).

Elite universities are complicit when they mis-educate often well-monied students admitted through legacy policies into thinking that they are smarter and they must take up high positions—one would think—for the larger good. However, historian Craig Steven Wilder reminds us that the nation’s Ivy League schools were built through enslaved Black labor for the benefit of white men who attended those schools in the 1800s. Furthermore, Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz reminds us that the history of this nation, for Indigenous peoples, is nonstop invasion, destruction and erasure.

Four centuries after the first ship arrived on the shores of what is now called Cape Cod carrying enslaved African people, Black hourly employees were the ones cleaning up the glass and debris that the white, mostly male, terrorists left in their wake. The past was entirely present in the completely precedented invasion of the Capitol.

 

About the Author 

Dr. Leigh Patel is an interdisciplinary researcher, educator, writer, and is the Associate Dean for Equity and Justice in Education at the University of Pittsburgh. She works extensively with societally marginalized youth and teacher activists. Patel is a recipient of the June Jordan Award for scholarly leadership and poetic bravery in social critique and is a national board member of Education for Liberation, a long-standing organization dedicated to transformative education for and by youth of color. She is the author of Youth Held at the Border, Decolonizing Educational Research, and the forthcoming No Study Without Struggle. Connect with her on Twitter at @lipatel.

By Marilyn Sewell

At last, it’s over! I mean the last four years of suffering from an abusive relationship—with our former president. Why am I not alive with energy, ready to get back to my writing? Wanting to Zoom with friends? Pushing ever harder with my climate activism? I find that I’m simply exhausted, needing to recover.

The ethical and relational norms in our society have been breached, not just a few times, but almost every day for four years. Truth? Doesn’t exist. Decency? Don’t count on it. Integrity? So old fashioned. And so, for the duration of this time, I have felt upended, discombobulated—actually, crazy.

One day, years ago, when I was a single mom raising two tween boys, I got a call at work from the older one, saying that when he and his brother got home from school, they noticed that the kitchen window was broken.

“A big break?” I asked. “Big enough for someone to get in?”

“Yes,” he answered.

“Go to the library right now. Right now,” I said.

I called the police and raced home, just a few blocks from where I worked. The squad car was already there when I arrived. Nothing of value was gone except my good camera, which had hung on the hall tree. But I’ll never forget the sense of violation I felt when I saw the muddy footprints planted on the blue carpet in the living room.

For these last four years, that same shock of violation has messed with my psyche over and over again. At every new offense, each more egregious than the last, I have been newly incredulous: Did he really do that? I’ve felt bushwhacked emotionally, old fears laid bare. So, no, I’m not yet over the crazed mob’s invasion of the Capitol, the culmination of four years of incursions on human decency and decorum by the former president, four years of selfishness and neglect from one who should be our protector, our defender. I’m not.

Sometimes frustrated voters are misled (remember Brexit?), but it’s heartbreaking to see scores of Republicans in Congress aiding and abetting a president who lied blatantly about all manner of things, who abused women with impunity, who made fun of disabled persons, who supported the Proud Boys and QAnon as “good persons.” Is anything holy? Is winning an election really a good trade for selling your soul?

I have been affected not only emotionally, but physically: the irritated gut, the lost weight, the dry eyes, the sore throat, and hoarse voice. Stress, my doctors said, stress. Then came the slowly encroaching horror of the pandemic. Hundreds died, then thousands, then hundreds of thousands. Is all this death really happening? My Buddhist friend told me I’m too angry, that I should be a “non-anxious presence.” I told her she’s not in touch with reality. We’re both right.

January 20 brought me palpable relief, as Joe Biden was inaugurated as the forty-sixth President of the United States in a joyous and inspirational ceremony that promised very different values guiding our nation’s future. But my healing will take more time. Age has given me the privilege of working when and where I choose. For now, I have retreated to my fireplace and my easy chair. I’m on vacation from angst and despair. Doing a puzzle. Laughing at silly jokes a friend persists in sending. The frown that puckered my brow is gone. I’m beginning to smile again.

Just now, I’m waiting my turn for the vaccine. It’ll be a while, and that’s frustrating, but I can wait. As an elder, I do fear the virus, but I trust that our new president will do everything possible to protect us. Something like normality will come.

Maybe I’ll be able to get back to the book I was writing—there has been too much static in my brain of late to tap into my creativity. Each evening for many long months, I have written in my journal. I record the date at the top of the page and the hour. This lets me know, oh, yes, another day has passed, and I know what it is. Then I mainly just reiterate what I’ve done during the day—remembering what I had for lunch is another way of being present. And lastly, I record the number of cases and the number of deaths in our nation and in our state, both an acknowledgment and an act of mourning.

Today is Sunday. Yet another Sunday. This morning, I heard Rinpoche Yangsi, the founder of Maitripa, a Buddhist college here in Portland, talk about what it means to be a bodhisattva. I’ve got a ways to go. I think, for now, I’ll give thanks. For the constancy of the river outside my window and the nests of blue herons across the way. For the man in the bright yellow jacket I see walking his dog. For the sunshine breaking through the clouds.

 

About the Author 

Marilyn Sewell is the editor of Claiming the Spirit Within, Cries of the Spirit, Resurrecting Grace, Breaking Free. and recently, In Time’s Shadow: Stories About Impermanence. She is minister emerita at the First Unitarian Church in Portland, Oregon. Follow her on Twitter at @marilynsewell.

“Science and technology have permeated nearly every aspect of our lives throughout the course of human history. But perhaps, never before in living memory, have the connections between our scientific world and our social world been quite so stark as they are today. . . . As new technologies take root in our lives, from artificial intelligence to human genome editing, they reveal and reflect even more about the complex and sometimes dangerous social architecture that lies beneath the scientific progress we pursue.”

That’s Alondra Nelson, Dean of Social Sciences and professor of sociology and gender studies at Columbia University. She’s also the author of The Social Life of DNA: Race and Reparations After the Genome. And now she has another title to add to her already spectacular CV. She’s been appointed to President Biden’s science team as Deputy Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy for Science and Society! She stated the above at the televised ceremony introducing President Biden’s science team on January 15.

She is having a moment, and we at Beacon are here for it!

Our associate director and editorial director, Gayatri Patnaik, is especially excited: “I was overjoyed when I recently heard that Alondra Nelson would be part of the Biden-Harris cabinet. Beacon Press published Alondra’s book, The Social Life of DNA, in 2016. The word ‘brilliant’ is overused, but I recognized from the beginning that it was the correct word to describe Alondra intellectually.”

Nature Magazine was also abuzz with coverage around Nelson’s new role, highlighting experts who’ve said that she is an “inspired choice.” And we wholeheartedly agree.

At the televised ceremony, Nelson continued to say, “Science, at its core, is a social phenomenon. It is a reflection of people, our relationships, and of our institutions. When we provide inputs to the algorithm, when we program the device, when we design, test, and research, we are making human choices. Choices that bring our social world to bear in a new and powerful way. It matters who makes these choices. It matters who they’re thinking about when they do. As a Black woman researcher, I am keenly aware of those who are missing from these rooms. I believe we have a responsibility to work together, to make sure that our science and technology reflects us, and when it does, that it reflects all of us, that it reflects who we truly are together.”

Let’s take a step back and look at The Social Life of DNA, because it gets at the heart of the points she raised at the ceremony. It’s also an excellent entry point to understand where she’s coming from.

Since the turn of the twenty-first century, especially after the completion of the Human Genome Project in 2003, the interest in genealogy surged. Millions of people started tracing their roots with the latest technological advances, like direct-to-consumer DNA testing kits and the appearance of online genealogical websites that simplified uncovering one’s past, making it the second most popular hobby in the US. In her book, Nelson details her more than ten years of research into the ways that African American communities are specifically engaging with these new scientific insights, exploring the personal, cultural, and political impact that genetic data is having on issues of race in America.

The book unearths lesser-known but “truly momentous uses of genetic ancestry testing,” Nelson writes, including legal and political uses that aid in establishing ties with African ancestral homelands, transforming citizenship, recasting history, and making the case for reparations. From individual “root seekers” and “DNA Diasporas” groups collaborating to reconfigure and reconnect to their pasts, to contemporary activists and lawyers working on social justice campaigns, she details the surprising trajectory that genealogical information is having. She explores the global emergence of reconciliation projects that are incorporating DNA analysis, including a major class-action suit demanding financial restitution for unpaid slave labor that originated in a Brooklyn federal court in 2002. The book also considers the ongoing influence of the groundbreaking study initiated at the African Burial Grounds in New York City, beginning in the 1990s.

The Social Life of DNA examines the role that genetics now plays in the story of race in America. “DNA holds not only the molecular building blocks of life, but also some of our highest aspirations, for ourselves, our families, and our social communities,” writes Nelson, adding that, “the double helix now lies at the center of some of the most significant issues of our time.”

When it comes to Nelson’s book, Gayatri Patnaik said, “It’s no surprise that it broke new ground, showing how the double helix can be not only a portal to history—shedding light on historical injustices—but that science can be an ally to transform our present and future racial politics. We at Beacon Press can’t wait to see what Alondra and the Office of Science and Technology Policy do to use science to benefit and to promote a more just and liberated future.”

After living through four years of an endless horror franchise, Joseph Biden gets sworn in today as commander in chief. Kamala Harris, in a historic moment for the US, gets sworn in as the first woman of color Vice President. And they have so much wreckage laying before them. No easy reset button will fix it or spirit it away. The pressure is on their administration to do right by a country reeling from a traumatic relationship with a white supremacist tyrant, and rightfully so. We reached out to our authors to ask what they want Biden and Harris to know, understand, or be aware of. On Inauguration Day, we share their responses with you. 

 

“The Biden/Harris Administration will be facing some of the greatest challenges of our history because of a global pandemic that will likely take the lives of almost 400,000 American loved ones by the time they take office. They will face this grim human toll as well as the economic fallout, both of which have impacted Black, Indigenous, and Latino Americans disproportionally. I hope equality in the US, particularly in the area of healthcare, education, and social justice, is one of their highest priorities. One area I’m most passionate about is improving educational honesty in our teaching of American History. Reversing recent executive orders designed to limit the accurate teaching of our history is a good start and so is relying on primary documents to drive our revisions of US History textbooks.”
—Daina Ramey Berry, The Price for Their Pound of Flesh and A Black Women’s History of the United States

 

“It’s difficult to fathom just how much work it will take to clean up the mess, literal and figurative, left behind by the outgoing administration. In addition to dealing effectively with COVID-19, addressing a fragile economy, and the economic challenges faced by the most vulnerable among us—particularly people and communities of color, the assault on environmental protections, and so much more—it is critical that the outgoing President and his enablers and supporters in the House and Senate be held accountable for their actions. Not doing so will enable future elected officials to act out badly (like Senators McConnell, Graham, Cruz, Hawley, and others), and encourage the kind of violent uprisings we witnessed on January 6.”
—Thomas Norman DeWolf, author of Inheriting the Trade and Gather at the Table, Program Manager for Coming to the Table

 

“Four years of Trumpism has taken its toll on Indian Country, but Trump was always only a symptom of much larger structural, societal problems that have lingered since the violent beginnings of this country. The US settler state has a long way to go toward becoming accountable for the ways it has been built on and still maintains a relationship of domination and control over the Original Nations of this land. My hope is that President Biden and Vice President Harris will bring us closer as a nation to promoting an ethic of accountability for this long, painful history and effect real justice and respect to those relationships.”
—Dina Gilio-Whitaker, As Long As Grass Grows   

 

“President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have a daunting task ahead. Undoing four years of acrimony under The Vulgarian and healing centuries of malfeasance will not come easy. I can only HOPE that their administration will help America take a step FORWARD in healing the obvious breach in moral principles.”
—Sharon Leslie Morgan, Gather at the Table

 

“When Joe Biden is sworn in as President, it will not be true to say that the guardrails of democracy held. It would be truer to say that the underlying fissures in our frail democracy were widely exposed. After the January 6 Capitol Hill siege by white nationalists, pressure is on Biden to expand the police state and increase surveillance. It’s up to us to push the administration to divest federal resources from incarceration and policing and instead fund community-based organizations providing non-punitive, non-carceral programs related to restorative justice and transformative justice.”
—Zach Norris, Defund Fear

 

“Many presidential inaugurations are suffused by a feeling of hopefulness, a fresh start, a chance at long-overdue changes. Others have felt apocalyptic and dire, none more so than the last—Trump’s American Carnage inauguration. This inauguration in 2021 is both. Even as the fallout from the toxic white supremacist assault on the Capitol continues to settle, President Joe Biden laid out dozens of executive orders that will begin to stop on Day One some of the most horrific of Trump’s orders: the cruel Muslim ban; the barbaric frenzy of federal executions; the US’s return to the Paris Climate Accords and the World Health Organization; rescinding the permit for the Keystone Pipeline; restoration of Obama-era regulations protecting the rights of transgender students in public schools; to require masks for 100 days in federal buildings and interstate transport. And, desperately needed by tens of millions, he will order the rent, foreclosure, eviction, and student loan payment moratoria to continue.

The first piece of legislation he plans to send to Congress will be a COVID aid bill that includes direct $1,400 payments, an increase in weekly unemployment checks, desperately needed aid to the states, And, quietly, that bill would increase the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour. Also, on Day One, the new president will send to Congress the most sweeping immigration overhaul in thirty-four years. It will include green cards for Dreamers and those with Temporary Protective Status and an eight-year path to citizenship for 11 million undocumented Americans. In addition to those which, in the aftermath of Democratic victory in the Georgia Senate runoffs, it is possible those can pass. And new Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has promised that his first bill will be an expansive voting rights bill that will make it easier than ever to register and will prevent many currently used forms of voter suppression.

Kamala Harris, the first woman Vice President, who is of Jamaican and Indian descent, will be sworn in on Justice Thurgood Marshall’s bible. The new Energy Secretary will likely be a woman who wants to invest in and prioritize building a national infrastructure for electric cars. The Secretary of the Treasury will be a woman who has told Congress she thinks we must be bold and big in our stimulus packages—a chance to alleviate some of the terrible suffering sweeping our country. And the Secretary of the Interior, in charge of land policy and the major liaison to Native American peoples across the country, will be Deb Haaland, a woman of Pueblo descent who has promised to be a fiercely protective steward of our natural resources.

Only a few days ago, I was continuing the ritual of morning and middle-of-the-night anxious doomscrolling as headlines reported one horror after another. Today marks the end of the Trump era, and Biden seems to understand that he may only have two years to fulfill his slogan: “Build Back Better.” He had a front row seat as the Obama administration ran into roadblock after roadblock courtesy of Mitch McConnell. He just might have a different plan. It seems possible that he is going to be bold and that the sun may just shine again.”
—Annelise Orleck, “We Are All Fast-Food Workers Now”

 

“This inauguration unfolds against the backdrop of intense threats of domestic terrorism and an uncontrolled pandemic, both of which were fomented and enabled by the outgoing administration. A top priority for the Biden-Harris administration should be a concerted effort to address resurgent white nationalism and extremism, which will require an informed, purposeful, and multi-pronged approach.”
—Alexandra Minna Stern, Proud Boys and the White Ethnostate

 

“After years of treating immigrants and asylum seekers as criminals, in violation of international regulation and the United States Constitution, our country has an opportunity to get on track. I’m not just talking about the end of the Trump administration, but about an immigration system that was born broken. The immigration legislation in the US was designed to use immigrants as a disposable working resource, and in recent years, as a political bargaining chip. It also allows to use the rule of law under different criteria for different people and lacks a path to regularization for those who have lived for decades without documents while playing an essential role in the productive machinery of this country.

Over the next four years, the Biden administration can take the first steps toward becoming the country of open arms that we have pretended to be. In his action plan for the first hundred days of government, he has included revoking the travel ban for Muslim countries, the expansion of the DACA program, the reunification of families who were separated at the border, and the restoration of the asylum process. That’s a good start, but it’s not enough. The US needs to create a path to citizenship for the eleven million undocumented people in the country. The DACA and TPS programs have been a relief for some people in vulnerable situations, but we need that protection to be permanent through immigration regularization for them and their families.

During the Obama-Biden administration, priorities on the government's agenda and partisanship in Congress stopped any legislative progress on immigration. Once again, Joe Biden comes to the White House in a complicated situation, but now he is the President. He has a united and more diverse Democratic Party, and most importantly, he knows that this time around he’s in debt with the communities of color. It is time to pay it back. That's a good way to start building forward.”
—Eileen Truax, How Does It Feel to Be Unwanted?

 

“As we observe Inauguration Day in a politically polarized nation, it is essential that Biden/Harris recognize that, horrific and harmful as it is, most violence doesn’t ensue from the actions of “extremists” and far-right actors playing lethal games with guns and bludgeons. We must confront vigilante and paramilitary violence, of course. But the models for that violence come from state and corporate systems that embrace and embed the violence of supremacist actions and beliefs at every level. Structural racist, gendered, ableist, and economic violence is normative, not only in policing and the criminal legal system, but in virtually all systems, public and private. Until we face that unpleasant truth with integrity and determination, until we stop telling ourselves the group fiction that violence results from “extremism,” structural violence and inequality will expand and deepen. We have to reimagine and restructure US society; we have to completely transform how power and pain are distributed.”
—Kay Whitlock, Considering Hate

By J. A. Mills

I’ve lived in Washington, DC, for twenty years, but I’ve only been inside the US Capitol a handful of times. For meetings, hearings, and receptions related to protecting wild tigers, rhinos, and bears.

I love this city for her vast green areas and restrictions on building height that bring attention to the sky, the dome of the Capitol, and the soaring Washington Monument. I also love her for her residents of all colors and beliefs, whom I overhear on the sidewalks speaking many of the languages of the world.

I have dear friends and respected colleagues who work for US government. I have worked with government agencies for years. There is no “deep state,” just as there are no Satan-worshipping child traffickers working out of the basement while middle-class families dine on pizza and wings at the Comet Ping Pong restaurant up the road from me.

As I write these words, I sit in my home just two miles from the White House and wait for the armed hordes of Trump supporters said to be headed our way to disrupt the inauguration of the duly elected next president of the United States, Joseph R. Biden Jr.

I think back to my first visit to China in the late 1980s, when I saw firsthand the remnants of a violent “people’s” revolution. I think of the nearly empty store shelves, the churches turned into factories, Chinese acquaintances afraid to invite a foreigner into their homes for fear of government reprisals, and the bug in my hotel room used to monitor my private conversations.

I remember my thoughts before I went to sleep in my Hong Kong apartment on the night of July 1, 1997—the day Britain handed the colony back to Beijing. I recall my fear of waking the next morning to find tanks manned by the People’s Liberation Army patrolling the streets.

I think of the immigrants who allowed me to be born an American. On my mother’s side, a Scotsman sent as an indentured servant to the American colonies in 1651 who was lucky enough to marry his owner’s daughter. On my father’s, two Polish peasants whose hope for prosperity was destroyed by systemic discrimination wrought by American nationalists who deemed them part of a criminally inclined underclass that threated the country’s moral and genetic integrity. 

Now, some of my family members—people who carry my Polish immigrant DNA—support the man who has dog-whistled these neonationalists to my beloved city, vowing to shed blood to defy the will of the 81.3 million Americans who chose Biden as the forty-sixth president of the United States.

Law enforcement authorities have said the “insurgents” could deploy with “suicide-type aircraft” or killer drones. The Ohio National Guard is sending specialists in biological and chemical attacks. Are they thinking a dirty bomb is possible?

Photos of National Guard members sprawled throughout the Capitol yesterday remind me of images taken in April 2003 of US Army soldiers lounging about in Baghdad’s Republican Presidential Palace after the bloody fall of Saddam Hussein.

A journalist friend just called from Hoboken, New Jersey. She spent two years researching a story for National Geographic in Trump Country, which she calls “Pennsyltucky.” She said she felt “an edge in gun states” that came from a “readiness” to act on some amorphous threat to America. Trump clarified that clarion threat with his lies about the “deep state” and an election he has tried to steal from Joe Biden. My friend said she’s hopeful, because “the eyes of the FBI and the nation are now watching” for what comes next.

I wish I could share her hope. But I keep thinking of China. Of how cosmopolitan and affluent it was before Mao Zedong’s revolution. How the Chinese people then could not fathom the violence and ruin that would be brought by Mao Zedong and his henchmen. How Americans like me, a mere eight days ago, could not have fathomed that Trump’s henchmen would storm the Capitol. That what is called “the capital of the free world” would one day look like a war zone.

And so, I wait in fear, incredulous that I am praying members of the National Guard and Secret Service don’t go rogue and wondering, on an endless loop, how a sleezy, pathological liar with clown hair could have brought my great country to this precipice.

 

About the Author 

J. A. Mills has worked for TRAFFIC, World Wildlife Fund, Conservation International, and Save the Tiger Fund. She is the author of Blood of the Tiger: A Story of Conspiracy, Greed, and the Battle to Save a Magnificent Species and lives in Washington, DC. Visit her website at jamillsauthor.com. Follow her on Twitter at @JAMillsAuthor.

By Rev. Dr. Raphael G. Warnock

Before Rev. Dr. Raphael G. Warnock ran for office to become senator-elect of Georgia, he wrote this commemorative piece in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr. and his legacy for Dr. King’s classic collection of sixteen sermons, A Gift of Love: Sermons from Strength to Love and Other Preachings. We share it with you here today on Dr. King’s birthday.

***

No one in American history has addressed more eloquently or advanced more effectively the ideals of freedom, justice, and equality than the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. With his voice, he discredited the fallacious doctrine of white supremacy; and through his activism, he changed America, liberating the sons and daughters of “former slaves” and “former slave owners” for the possibility of what he called “the beloved community.” Dr. King bequeathed to all of us a gift of love.

His epoch-making impact on law, public discourse, and culture is all the more stunning when one considers that he was a private citizen who never ran for public office and never held any official role within government. Yet because his legacy and impact were greater than that of most presidents, King is rightly regarded as a modern father of the nation and his memorial now sits appropriately on the national mall. Hailed during his lifetime as a civil rights leader and honored in death with a memorial befitting a president, it should not be forgotten that King was at his core a preacher. In fact, his identity as preacher and prophet was basic to his self-understanding and mission.

King himself said as much when he offered that “[In] the quiet recesses of my heart, I am fundamentally a clergyman, a Baptist preacher. This is my being and my heritage, for I am also the son of a Baptist preacher, the grandson of a Baptist preacher and the great-grandson of a Baptist preacher.” In his opening remarks, prior to preaching “The Man Who Was a Fool” at a Chicago church in 1967, he clarifies his sense of vocation in this way:

I did not come to Mount Pisgah to give a civil rights address; I have to do a lot of that . . . But before I was a civil rights leader, I was a preacher of the gospel. This was my first calling and it still remains my greatest commitment. You know, actually all that I do in civil rights I do because I consider it a part of my ministry. I have no other ambitions in life but to achieve excellence in the Christian ministry. I don’t plan to run for any political office. I don’t plan to do anything but remain a preacher.

So, this volume of sermons, which includes all but one sermon from Strength to Love, is important because here we encounter King the preacher. Also, we encounter King as pastor. All of these sermons were preached at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church or Ebenezer Baptist Church, congregations he actually served, respectively, as pastor and co-pastor while at the same time emerging as preacher, prophet, and pastor to an entire nation that needed to change.

In this way, his civil rights activism was rooted in his sense of ministerial vocation, and both emerged from the black church—the church that has had to be the countervailing conscience of the American churches with regard to racism, America’s original sin. So, as Martin Luther King, Jr., America’s great preacher, stood in the pulpit of Dexter Avenue during the days of the Montgomery bus boycott, and later alongside his father at Ebenezer Baptist Church, he stood well within the historical trajectory of African American prophetic Christianity. With his extraordinary academic training and preparation, King extended it and gave it a global voice such that at its height, the movement was appropriately multiracial and ecumenical, embracing believers across faith traditions and nonbelievers alike in a magnificent quest for human dignity. When the legendary Jewish cleric and friend to Dr. King, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, marched in the movement, he said he felt like his feet were praying! This deep yearning for freedom felt so strongly in Heschel’s feet and heard so clearly in Dr. King’s voice was expressed during slavery by sermons and spirituals that saw the story of black slaves through the lens of the story of Hebrew slaves marching out of Egypt. It was institutionalized by the independent black church movement of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and embodied in the ministries of King’s preaching forebears, whom he references in the autobiographical statement above.

His maternal great-grandfather, Willis Williams, was a preacher during slavery who well may have played a role in the establishment of a local independent black church. His grandfather, A. D. Williams, the second pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church, was an activist preacher who helped to launch the Atlanta branch of the NAACP, leading the fight, as its president, to establish the city’s first secondary school for African American children. Martin Luther King, Jr., and his siblings attended the Booker T. Washington High School, which existed only because of the activist ministry of his grandfather. Also, few people know that Martin Luther King, Sr., King’s father and Ebenezer’s third pastor, led a campaign for voting rights in 1935 in Atlanta, thirty years before King and others would create the conditions necessary for passing the Voting Rights Act. Moreover, “Daddy King,” as his father was affectionately called, fought for the equalization of teachers’ salaries decades before his son and others would lead a nonviolent war against segregation itself.

The activist tradition of a church born fighting for freedom, philosophically grounded in the other sources he cites in his “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence,” including Walter Rauschenbush’s Social Gospel, help to explain why, for King, preaching and activism were inextricably connected. In fact, in his work the two are so seamlessly connected that it is difficult to see where one ends and the other begins. The two feed and inform each other. Hence, at the heart of the sermons printed here is a view of the gospel that rejects any truncated or interiorized spirituality that seeks to save souls while ignoring bodies or focuses narrowly on matters of private morality while ignoring the moral implications of our public policy. In “Love in Action,” he laments that:

One of the great tragedies of life is that men seldom bridge the gulf between practice and profession, between doing and saying. A persistent schizophrenia leaves so many of us tragically divided against ourselves. . . . How often are our lives characterized by a high blood pressure of creeds and an anemia of deeds! We talk eloquently about our commitment to the principles of Christianity, and yet our lives are saturated with the practices of paganism. We proclaim our devotion to democracy, but we sadly practice the opposite of the democratic creed. We talk passionately about peace, and at the same time we assiduously prepare for war. We make our fervent pleas for the high road of justice, and then we tread unflinchingly the low road of injustice. This strange dichotomy, this agonizing gulf between the ought and the is, represents the tragic theme of man’s earthly pilgrimage.

In positive terms, Dr. King prescribed what he called in another sermon printed here, “The Three Dimensions of a Complete Life.” Herein is the clarion call of a spiritual genius and sober-minded sentinel who insists that we pray with our lips and our feet, and work with our heads, hearts, and hands for the beloved community, faithfully pushing against the tide of what he often called “the triplet evils of racism, materialism and militarism.” In a divided world and amid religious and political pronouncements in our public discourse that erroneously divide the self, we still need that message. The scandal of America’s prison-industrial complex that is disproportionately black, brown, and poor and continues to grow irrespective of actual crime rates, the yawning chasm between the haves and the have nots and the political maintenance of an unwieldy and costly Cold War–era military-industrial complex, decades after the death of Dr. King and the death of the Cold War, all suggest that we are mired in a continuing spiritual crisis that requires us to be vigilant in struggle against the triplet evils the preacher aptly identified so long ago. We need love in action. The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s gift of love, embodied in word and in deed, points the way.

 

About the Author 

The Rev. Dr. Raphael G. Warnock is senior pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church and senator-elect of Georgia.

By David R. Dow

According to reporting from Michael S. Schmidt and Maggie Haberman at the New York Times, President Trump was already exploring the possibility of pardoning himself, even before a riotous mob incited by Trump’s tweets and baseless charges of a stolen election stormed and defiled the US Capitol on Wednesday, January 6, the day Congress was meeting to fulfill its duty under the Twelfth Amendment to count the states’ electoral votes for President and Vice-President. With reports circulating that the Justice Department is investigating Trump’s role in instigating Wednesday’s lawlessness, the question is no longer merely hypothetical. May Trump pardon himself?

The constitutional text is short. Article II section 2 provides that the President “shall have power to grant reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States, except in cases of impeachment.” Some aspects of the pardon power are clear. For example, it applies solely to “offenses against the United States”—that is, federal crimes—and does not permit the President to pardon people for violations of state or foreign law. In addition, if the House were to again impeach the President, despite the fact there is almost certainly not enough time for the Senate to convict (or acquit) him, Trump could not pardon himself with respect to that new article of impeachment. 

Historically, there have been questions as to whether the pardon power extends to possible offenses that have not been adjudicated. When President Ford pardoned Richard Nixon, the proclamation extended to all offenses Nixon “committed or may have committed or taken part in.” Yet the Supreme Court held in Ex parte Garland that the President’s power does in fact extend to issuing pardons in cases where there has not yet been a conviction. 

So, the fact that Trump has not yet been charged or convicted would not preclude a pardon. If, for example, Trump were to resign, Vice-President Pence would assume the Presidency and he could pardon Trump for any federal offenses Trump might have committed in connection with the storming of the Capitol. But what if Trump doesn’t resign?

Nobody can be certain of the answer to a constitutional question that has never before arisen, and never before has a President attempted to pardon himself. With that caveat, however, we can be almost certain Trump does not have the power to pardon himself, and any attempt to do so would be ineffective.

Here’s why: Chief Justice Marshall recognized in United States v. Wilson, the first Supreme Court cases addressing the President’s pardon power, that the framers modeled the power on that of the English monarch. Much more recently, in Herrera v. Collins, Chief Justice Rehnquist observed that the constitutional power to issue pardons was understood by the framers to be coterminous with the monarch’s power in England, dating back to the 700s, to “extend mercy” or “soften the rigour of the general law.”

Yet in the 1,500 years that the pardon power has existed in the common law legal system, including the 234 years it has existed in the United States, it has never been used by a king or queen or President to pardon him or herself. Quite the contrary, Charles I was convicted of treason and beheaded in 1649 following the first English civil war. Edward II was imprisoned after being forced from the throne and succeeded by his son, Edward III. In all of English legal history, there is not a single instance of a king pardoning himself or even attempting to do so. 

From a constitutional perspective, therefore, the relevant question is whether, given English legal history, the framers would have intended for the pardon power to include the authority of the President to pardon himself—something that had never happened in the English legal system. The complete absence of any historical antecedent for that practice strongly suggests that the answer is no.

And there is more. In the Declaration of Independence, the colonists enumerated twenty-seven grievances against King George III. People remember the complaint about taxation without representation, but that was, in fact, the seventeenth grievance on the list. The first was that George did not follow the law—which of course impliedly assumed the King is required to do so. The eighth was that he obstructed justice; the twelfth was that he attempted to make the military power superior to that of the people. Most extraordinarily was the twenty-seventh, which charged the King with “excit[ing] domestic insurrections amongst us.” It is most implausible to imagine that the same men who wrote the Declaration of Independence would write a Constitution giving the President the authority to excuse himself for committing acts similar if not identical to those that inspired the colonists to declare independence. 

If Trump does purport to pardon himself, no one can be certain of the effect that effort will have unless and until he is criminally prosecuted and convicted in federal court. But democracies do not survive by permitting people who attempt to undermine them to escape prosecution simply because the outcome of the prosecution may be in doubt and simply because they once held the office of the the Presidency.

 

About the Author 

David R. Dow is the Cullen Professor at the University of Houston Law Center. He is the author of Executed on a Technicality: Lethal Injustice on America’s Death Row. He can be reached via email at DDow@central.uh.edu.

Give yourself a round of applause for running the marathon and sadistic obstacle course that was 2020! Or a glass of wine. Recollect yourself and recuperate with your self-care regimen if you have one. This year ran us so ragged we may not be in any mood to look back in annoyance, exhaustion, or terror. But this is one of those car wrecks worthy of a size-up so we can take stock of the issues that blew up in 2020. That way, we can recommit to learning about them in the New Year to set the nation back on course to the society we want. The top read blog posts on the Broadside are a good, and hopefully less painful, way to do that. Give our authors a round of applause and appreciation for giving us the context and critique to understand these issues and where to go from here!

Here are this year’s highlights of the Broadside with a few favorites from previous years. See you in the new year with more insightful blog posts from our authors!

 

“How We’re Silenced and the Power of Judy Heumann”
Kristen Joiner

“Writing Judy’s story, this is what I’ve learned: there is no path to challenging abusive societal norms that allows us to stay in the nice box. Speaking the truth about and taking on the wrongs of the world is never going to be nice. It is always going to be about challenging and dismantling power structures, and privilege will do anything it can to shame, bully, and exclude truthtellers. Talking about being a victim of sexual assault, being discriminated against, being violated—none of it is nice. The dehumanization of people is ugly business. Period.”

 

“Coronavirus Pandemic Could Trigger Happy Endings for Tigers”
J. A. Mills

“Here’s the potentially good news, as I see it. This is the moment—perhaps the last, best moment—for the world to finally put an end to commercial wildlife farming promoted by China and growing across Southeast Asia, South Africa, and elsewhere. Farming that has raised demand for wildlife parts and products and put a price on the head of every tiger, rhino, and bear in the wild, because many consumers believe those taken from the wild are of superior quality—not unlike wild versus farmed salmon.”

 

“When I Think of Pat: A Tribute to Patrick J. Carr”
Gayatri Patnaik

“I had the privilege of being Pat’s editor on Hollowing Out the Middle: The Rural Brain Drain and What It Means for America that Beacon published in 2009. He coauthored it with sociologist Maria Kefalas, who is also his wife, and I loved working with this duo immediately. They were an immensely talented and vibrant couple . . . . Today, I find myself thinking so much of this extraordinary couple and of this special man who meant so much to so many people. He’s left an amazing legacy and will be profoundly missed.”

 

“Martin Luther King, Jr.’s ‘The Other America’ Still Radical 50 Years Later”

“The great tragedy is that the nation continues in its national policy to ignore the conditions that brought the riots or the rebellions into being. For in the final analysis, the riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it that America’s failed to hear? It’s failed to hear that the plight of the Negro poor has worsened over the last few years. It has failed to hear that the promises of justice and freedom have not been met. It has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice, humanity, and equality, and it is still true. It is still true that these things are being ignored.”

 

“10 Practical Steps for Building a Less Racially Stupid Society”
Crystal Marie Fleming

“I know it’s tempting to wish racism away—to just sort of assume that there’s an inevitability to progress. But if you want to be less stupid about race, you need to let that shit go right now. There is no quick fix for racism. Go back and read that sentence. Then tell a friend. There’s! No! Quick! Fix! None . . . . If you want to pursue the cause of social justice, give up the need for quick fixes and gird your loins for a long struggle. To sustain your work for the long haul, you’ll have to build up your reserves of resilience, self-care, community care, and courage. You’ll have to nurture your capacity for hope, humor, love, and connection, even, and especially, in the midst of oppression.”

 

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

“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 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.”

 

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

“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.”

 

“James Baldwin Warned Us: The Fires Last Time Are the Fires This Time”

“The forces of Imani Perry and Eddie S. Glaude, Jr. are joining in our latest Baldwin publication. We’re excited to release Nothing Personal, his famous 1964 essay on social isolation, race, police brutality—sounds a lot like what we’re living through during the pandemic, doesn’t it?—with a foreword by Perry and an afterword by Glaude. A trifecta of Black brilliance. Baldwin’s critique of American society at the height of the Civil Rights movement is as incisive as ever.”

By Angela Chen

When I published Ace, I hoped for positive reviews and perhaps a reader email or two. I did not, however, expect that social media would bring a very particular joy to my life, which is that of readers sending me photos of the book with their cat.

For example:

One unexpected pleasure of publishing Ace is that people send me photos of their cats with the book. Someone said that she posted this one while coming out during Ace Week (reshared with permission): pic.twitter.com/cNQLxegSmO

— Angela Chen (@chengela) November 23, 2020

And this: https://t.co/NRkGyYoeuH

— Angela Chen (@chengela) November 23, 2020

This one is especially adorable:

Also pic.twitter.com/4qwCI4slaF

— Elle ??? (@scretladyspider) November 23, 2020

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

Black cats seem to be overrepresented, so here’s a cream-colored one for good measure:

I have to get in on this now pic.twitter.com/BXCEKaPj6j

— AceLord(Tempest)?? (@kat_veil) November 23, 2020

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

And a gray-and-white one:

Just got mine in the mail. Bout to curl up on the couch and read to my cat. pic.twitter.com/x0j30zGTWS

— Kaitlyn (@kaitlynintherye) December 5, 2020

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

As a lifelong admirer of felines in all forms, seeing cats hanging out with my book warms my heart. And as someone who barely knows how to do makeup but has immense respect for the creativity of those who do, I was utterly delighted to see that Ace had even inspired a makeup #BookLook:

Today’s #BookLook was inspired by Ace—a book on asexuality by Angela Chen! I haven’t read it yet but I’m very much looking forward to getting my hands on it.

(I mucked up the eyeliner a little but I fixed it best I could without spoiling the whole look.) pic.twitter.com/DAJlsVTEMg

— Beck the Halls (@BDingz) September 29, 2020

Truly, this has exceeded my wildest dreams.

 

About the Author 

Angela Chen is a journalist and writer in New York City. Her reporting and criticism have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Atlantic, Guardian, Paris Review, Electric Literature, Catapult, and elsewhere. Chen is a member of the ace community and has spoken about asexuality at academic conferences and events including World Pride. Find her on Twitter @chengela or at angelachen.org.

The pet-less hiatus at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue has gone on long enough. At last, four-legged friendos are coming back! In honor of President-elect Joe Biden bringing Champ and a future feline to the White House, we are sharing stories about our doggos, kitties, and other creature companions. Quality of life would suffer without them. Warning: the cuteness overload you are about to experience will cause uncontrollable squeeing. You may even try reaching through the screen to deliver boops to those faces.

***

Our dog, Kafka, has been the patron saint of my sanity through this pandemic year. She makes sure I unplug from my work-from-home station and step outside for some fresh air every single day, whether we’re going for a quiet walk around the neighborhood or venturing further afield for a longer hike. I’m a homebody by nature, and without her, would surely have withered away and broken down long ago.
—Daniel Barks, Print Planning and Digital Production Manager

 

Timothy has always been a cat of big feelings, clearly expressed. He wants what he wants when he wants it, whether it’s love, food, playtime, brushing, or going outside. (I allow him brief jaunts in the backyard in the morning.) He has wide tonal range in his meows—I often think I understand exactly what’s he saying—and he’s good with the impatient paw tap should I ignore his clear verbal expressions of his needs. He’s also terrified of all strangers, so one of the pleasures of this year of spending way too much time at home has been his Zoom bombing. Usually, he finds my Zoom meetings noisy, annoying, and mildly frightening, and exits the room in exasperation, but every now and then, he marches straight to the lap top screen to stare at the people looking back and to rub his chin against the screen’s edge.  And my friends or colleagues smile widely, because he’s a gorgeous, ridiculous creature, and a welcome break. And because this we all know: the matter-of-fact presence of our animal companions, lounging in the background behind journalists on TV screens, or popping into work meetings and book talks with a tail wag, has had the great effect of humanizing our professional selves, and hinting at the bonds, to humans and animals alike, that matter most.
—Amy Caldwell, Associate Editorial Director

 

This is Miss Kitty. For most of her life, she enjoyed a healthy and carefree lifestyle. But all that easy living caught up with her three years ago when her only functioning kidney started to fail. Her situation was so dire that we had a living wake for her. Thanks to her vet and her zest for life and turkey, Miss Kitty made a miraculous recovery. But her health struggles continued. Over the next year, her little kidney sputtered and failed two more times. We had more wakes, but she rallied from the brink again and again. Fortunately, she has been healthy and sassy for the past two years. She celebrated her fifteenth birthday this summer with tuna juice and a nap. When it seems like the pandemic is never going to end, Miss Kitty is there to remind me that there is always room for hope when things seem bleak.
—Beth Collins, Production Manager

 

Meet our orange tabbies, Dexter (back) and Willow (front), named after famous ginger TV characters of course. We adopted the brother-sister pair a little over two years ago as kittens. One thing we learned is that orange tabbies are male something like eighty percent of the time, so everyone at the shelter was really excited to have a female there! And much like a famous orange tabby Garfield, they love eating, except replace lasagna with cardboard, sticks, string, and everything else and you’ve got our cats—especially Dexter—so we’ve learned to keep the floors really clean to avoid any more costly trips to the vet ER.
—Alyssa Hassan, Associate Director of Marketing

 

Nicole and Sassy:

My partner and I adopted Sassy (full name: Sassypants. Trust us, it’s on her rescue papers!) during Boston’s lockdown in July 2020. We’d been scouring every pet rescue site for about six months and kept getting rejections (them: “Whoops, you’re too late!” me: “But the listing went up ten minutes ago!”). What’s made working from home, attending my night classes, and working on my graduate thesis all from my living room a little more bearable every day is having a friendly face to turn to when things get to be just a bit too much. No matter what, she’s always looking out for me—in exchange for some belly rubs and human hugs in return!
—Nicole-Anne Keyton, Editorial Assistant

 

Ode to King George

We adopted our tuxedo cat, George, when he was a sweet little kitten, but by the time he was half-grown, he’d become the swaggering alpha of our neighborhood. Walking home from Thayer, we’d spot him stalking about on the Brown quad and, pointing, say to the kids, “Look, there’s the big man on campus.” Sometimes he’d return from a night prowl smelling of perfume, and we’d know he’d been next door at Tina’s, where he liked to stop for a snack on the way home. In the afternoons, he’d hang about until our middle son rounded the corner coming home from school, and together they’d race up the driveway. 

One January, after a huge snowstorm, he went missing for six days. Just as I was looking at his bowls and thinking, Well, maybe he’s not going to make it home, Tina called, happily reporting that he was on her back porch.

Another time, now getting advanced in years, he again went missing for days; we were miserable with worry. Then, there he was, crouched low on the back steps. He’d somehow made it home with his shoulder blade broken in three places. Eventually, he healed, but it was clear his prowling days were over. With resignation, he’d follow us to his leash in the back garden, where he could at least watch the squirrels and take one of his long naps in the sun. Observing him there, resting in his dotage, we’d tease him, saying, “Oh my, look how the mighty have fallen.” He even started napping on my lap in the winter, now content to settle by the warmth of the fire.

At the end of June, when he was almost twenty years old, kidney failure caught up with George and, heartbroken, we had to put him down. Our neighbor’s cat, Alu, sensing the new order, started sashaying through our back yard, offering a mocking little wave with her tail. “Okay, Alu,” we’d say, “but our George will always be the king of Lloyd Avenue!”
—Pamela MacColl, Director of Communications

 

Norton and I have been through a lot together. As an eighth grader, I wanted a pet that would outlive me, so I made a pitch presentation for a Russian tortoise on a trifold foam board for my parents, complete with photos of Norton taken through the glass at Petco. Norton followed me to college (smuggled into my dorm in a blue bin), through multiple moves, and now resides in a large, reclaimed bookshelf in my Brighton apartment. She’s moody, but I’ve been trying to get on her good side with handfeeding—a new favorite pandemic pastime. She can feed herself (as pictured), but isn’t it so much nicer to perch on a rock and have someone feed you dandelions, clovers, Belgian endive, watercress, collards, and radicchio?
—Melissa Nasson, Esq., Contracts Director 

It was the breather from 2020 we were waiting for. The election is over, and the Biden/Harris ticket won, no matter how many petty lawsuits the defeated opponent files. But wreckage and repair work await us. As Vice President-elect Kamala Harris said in her acceptance speech, democracy “is only as strong as our willingness to fight for it. To guard it and never take it for granted. And protecting our democracy takes struggle. It takes sacrifice. But there is joy in it. And there is progress. Because we, the people, have the power to build a better future.” Yes, we do. And we will need to spend a lot of that power cleaning up after The Apprentice administration, too.

There is no time to coast on the results of the election. We must gear up for 2021, and for that, we put together this list of books to stoke our commitment to liberation and abolition. Referring to issues covered in the debates and Biden and Harris’s acceptance speeches, these books are a reminder of the struggle that lies ahead—which may even come from the new admin—and the tools we have to face it.

 

Race in America

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

“Dr. Fleming offers a straight-no-chaser critique of our collective complicit ignorance regarding the state of race in the United States . . . . This book will leave you thinking, offended, and transformed.”
—Nina Turner, former Ohio state senator

 

Proud Boys and the White Ethnostate: How the Alt-Right Is Warping the American Imagination
Alexandra Minna Stern

“In this carefully researched book, the historian Alexandra Minna Stern studies a wide array of online web sites, documenting a rise in claims to whiteness as a basis of identity, as a claim to victimhood and as an argument for a ‘white ethnostate.’ Drawing ideas from films (‘red-pilling’ comes from The Matrix) and from the left (the need for ‘safe spaces’), the Alt-Right, she argues, is trying to normalize a frightening shift from talk of civic nationalism to talk of race-based nationalism. This is very important work we should all know about.”
—Arlie Hochschild, author of Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, finalist for the National Book Award

 

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

“With clarity and compassion, DiAngelo allows us to understand racism as a practice not restricted to ‘bad people.’ In doing so, she moves our national discussions forward with new ‘rules of engagement.’ This is a necessary book for all people invested in societal change through productive social and intimate relationships.”
—Claudia Rankine

 

Climate Change

As Long As Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock
Dina Gilio-Whitaker

“As Long as Grass Grows is a hallmark book of our time. By confronting climate change from an Indigenous perspective, not only does Gilio-Whitaker look at the history of Indigenous resistance to environmental colonization, but she points to a way forward beyond Western conceptions of environmental justice—toward decolonization as the only viable solution.”
—Nick Estes, assistant professor, University of New Mexico, and author of Our History Is the Future

 

Climate Courage: How Tackling Climate Change Can Build Community, Transform the Economy, and Bridge the Political Divide in America
Andreas Karelas

“In the wake of the pandemic, nothing could help bring us out of this crisis in a more constructive way than working together to prevent the next one. Climate Courage offers a path towards getting back to something much better, and more united, than our old normal.”
—Bill McKibben, cofounder of 350.org and author of Falter

 

Radical Leadership

A Black Women’s History of the United States
Daina Ramey Berry and Kali Nicole Gross

“Black women have always been at the front line of change, and A Black Women’s History of the United States shows us in no uncertain terms that our DNA will have us here sculpting and writing the next chapters. Tell your sisters, mothers, and daughters to get this book for someone they love, because we owe it to ourselves, our daughters, our sons, and our future, to know the history that isn’t being taught in our schools. And it starts with us.”
—Anika Noni Rose, actor, producer, and singer

 

History Teaches Us to Resist: How Progressive Movements Have Succeeded in Challenging Times
Mary Frances Berry

“With a historian’s field of vision and a veteran activist’s understanding of tactics and strategy, Berry excavates how resistance to some of the most powerful men in modern America shaped the freedom struggles that have benefited us all—and in so doing provides a crucial road map for the work that lies ahead.”
—Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw

 

Faith in Action

Dangerous Religious Ideas: The Deep Roots of Self-Critical Faith in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam
Rachel S. Mikva

“In Rachel Mikva’s telling, the very things that make religion a force for good are also what makes it so dangerous. As both a scholar and a rabbi, Mikva is unblinking in her self-critical examination of these dangerous religious ideas, offering believers and nonbelievers alike a new way to think about the enduring the power of faith.”
—Reza Aslan, author of Zealot: The Life of and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

 

Trust Women: A Progressive Christian Argument for Reproductive Justice
Rebecca Todd Peters

“In Trust Women, Rebecca Todd Peters lays bare the real question underlying the abortion debate: whether or not women can be trusted to make their own decisions. She is compassionate and clear-eyed in constructing her faith-based case for abortion, and her voice cuts through the noise to affirm what we at Planned Parenthood have long believed: the best arbiter of a woman’s reproductive destiny is herself.”
—Cecile Richards, president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America and president of the Planned Parenthood Action Fund

 

Remaking Society

Defund Fear: Safety Without Policing, Prisons, and Punishment
Zach Norris

“A powerful book that is very much in the tradition of Ella Baker’s radical humanitarianism. Rejecting fear-based, revenge-based models of ‘justice,’ Norris’s work pays homage to an entire generation of activists who are not only clear about what they are against but who are collectively creating a vision and a practice of what the future could look like. A must-read.”
—Barbara Ransby, author of Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement

 

Marching Toward Coverage: How Women Can Lead the Fight for Universal Healthcare
Rosemarie Day

“Day offers a simpler remedy for fixing healthcare. If we want a healthcare system that’s more humane, more practical, and gets the important things right, turn to women. Read it and let’s get going.”
—Andy Slavitt, former administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services

 

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

“William Barber is the closest person we have to Martin Luther King, Jr. in our midst. His life and witness is shot through with spiritual maturity, subversive memory, and personal integrity. This book lays bare his prophetic vision, historical analysis, and courageous praxis.”
—Cornel West, author of Black Prophetic Fire

We made it! We got through the hot mess of 2020 to December. Phew! Time to go on the hunt for gifts to inspire the loved ones in your life! And gifts for yourself, too. After surviving a pandemic this long, you’ve earned it. Save 30% on everything at beacon.org through December 31 using code HOLIDAY30.

We laid out some selections below for you to look through for ideas—music biographies, inspirational lectures and speeches, and even some fiction and poetry. You can always check out our website to browse our whole catalog.

Orders must be submitted by 1 pm, December 10 to be delivered before the holidays. USPS media mail takes 7-10 business days.

Beacon Press will be closed Friday, December 18, 2020, through Friday, January 1, 2021. Orders placed during this time will be fulfilled when we are back in the office on Monday, January 4, 2021.

And as always, we encourage you support your local independent bookstore this holiday season!

Without further ado, let us entice you with these titles as we run past the finish line of 2020!

 

Breathe: A Letter to My Sons
Imani Perry

“In Breathe, Perry offers a lyrical meditation that connects a painful, proud history of African American struggle with a clarion call for present-day action to protect, defend, and celebrate the promise of the next generation.”
—Stacey Abrams, founder and chair of Fair Fight Action, Inc.

 

Dance We Do: A Poet Explores Black Dance
Ntozake Shange

“Through Ntozake Shange’s personal memories of dance—what it has meant to her, how she came to know, understand, and feel it—we are taken on a journey that chronicles some of the greatest dancers and choreographers of the latter part of the twentieth century.”
—Phylicia Rashad

 

Eva’s Man
Gayl Jones

“A literary giant, and one of my absolute favorite writers.”
—Tayari Jones, author of An American Marriage

 

Kindred
Octavia E. Butler

“Truly terrifying . . . A book you’ll find hard to put down.”
—Essence

 

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.

 

Natural: How Faith in Nature’s Goodness Leads to Harmful Fads, Unjust Laws, and Flawed Science
Alan Levinovitz

“Words have power—just look at the scrambles by ideological groups to own words like ‘right to life,’ ‘pro-choice,’ or ‘family values.’ In Natural, Alan Levinovitz explores the power of that word and the often highly consequential ways in which it has been appreciated, appropriated, distorted, hyped, commodified, consecrated, and weaponized. This is important stuff, as evidenced every time someone discusses the supposed naturalness and thus supposed inevitability of some appalling human behavior.”
—Robert M. Sapolsky, John A. and Cynthia Fry Gunn Professor of Neurology and of Neurosurgery, Stanford University, and author of Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

 

Odetta: A Life in Music and Protest
Ian Zack

“An absorbing portrait of a seminal artist. Odetta was my Queen.”
—Joan Baez, musician and activist

 

The Radiant Lives of Animals
Linda Hogan

“Linda Hogan’s work is rooted in truth and mystery.”
—Louise Erdrich

 

Strength to Love
Martin Luther King, Jr.

“If there is one book Martin Luther King, Jr., has written that people consistently tell me has changed their lives, it is Strength to Love.”
—Coretta Scott King, foreword

 

A Treasury of African American Christmas Stories
Compiled and edited by Bettye Collier-Thomas

“A book for all seasons, these stories are bound to amuse, educate, and inspire all kids, from one to ninety-two.”
—Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams

 

Woody Guthrie: An Intimate Life
Gustavus Stadler

“Stadler’s gorgeous book is both a paean to the Guthrie we know . . . and a revealing look at the embodied Guthrie, who is vulnerable, playful, and lustful . . . . It opens up an important new window into not only Guthrie the man but the history of the twentieth-century American Left.”
—Gayle Wald, author of Shout, Sister, Shout! The Untold Story of Rock-and-Roll Trailblazer Sister Rosetta Tharpe

 

Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything
Viktor E. Frankl

“This slim, powerful collection from Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist Frankl (Man’s Search for Meaning) attests to life’s meaning, even in desperate circumstances...This lovely work transcends its original context, offering wisdom and guidance.”
—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

It’s a kneejerk reaction to think about what James Baldwin would say about the state of things in the US when the anniversary of his death comes every December 1. Especially now. Much like how the issues that folk legend Odetta sang about are still, sadly, relevant today, so it goes for the issues Baldwin wrote about in Notes of a Native Son. Which is why our director, Helene Atwan, says it remains so potent a text to go back to:

Sixty-five years ago, Beacon Press had the honor and privilege to publish a landmark book: James Baldwin’s first collection of essays, Notes of a Native Son. It has never been out of print, and we have only witnessed the audience for Baldwin’s prophetic voice grow over the decades. But this spring and summer, and into this year of crisis and reckoning, James Baldwin’s writing is resonating more powerfully than ever.

It was thirty-three years ago, on November 30, that his family received the news of his death. Today, their solace and ours is that he is very much alive in the hearts and souls of all those, in this nation and internationally, who care about human rights and racial justice. We are so thankful in the holiday season to have Jimmy’s work to inspire us.

Noted Baldwin scholar Eddie S. Glaude, Jr. is also thankful for his shrewd insight. In fact, he recently published the much-praised biography Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Message for Our Own. When he talked to Trevor Noah about it on The Daily Show, he mapped out the connection between the US of Baldwin’s time to the US we live in today:

The later Baldwin is a Baldwin who’s trying to come to terms with America’s betrayal. Most folks say he’s bitter, he’s angry, [that] his rage has overwhelmed his art. But Baldwin is trying to come to terms with the fact that the country has assassinated Martin Luther King, Jr. He’s collapsed. In 1969, he tries to commit suicide. [He has a] failed relationship. The country is on the road to not only electing Richard Nixon but is on the road to electing Ronald Reagan. Many people don’t understand that Ronald Reagan was as notorious as George Wallace for Black folk in this country.

I was interested in [the] Baldwin who is trying to make sense of our trauma, our pain, our wound. Trying to pick up the pieces in the face of America’s betrayal. And here we are in our moment, after Barack Obama’s presidency, the vitriol of the Tea Party, voter suppression and voter ID laws. And then we vomited up Donald Trump. I was trying to deal with my own despair and disillusionment, so I turned to him in that moment.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qcLII_3IRxk]

Baldwin’s observations of our nation’s societal struggles were also in conversation with the work of his dear friend and confidant Lorraine Hansberry, or Sweet Lorraine. Interdisciplinary scholar Imani Perry wrote about their radical friendship and the reverberating intention of his words in her biography Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry:

Jimmy called A Raisin in the Sun a play in which Lorraine served as a witness to black America. He did too. In perhaps his most famous book, the 1963 epistolary text The Fire Next Time, he answered Walter Lee’s climactic action. In Raisin, standing before his son, Walter Lee insists upon moving into the white neighborhood and rejects the offer of a lot of cash in exchange for maintaining segregation and abdicating his dignity. In The Fire Next Time, Baldwin testifies to his nephew about his late father. Jimmy wants his nephew to see how his father (like their father before him) had been crushed by the forces of white supremacy in his life. He issues an appeal to his nephew’s generation to make use of their righteous anger rather than be distorted by it. Jimmy, a former child preacher, preaches to the Walter Lees of the world and to the others. He makes plain the wages of white supremacy.

In the second essay of the slim book, Jimmy echoes Beneatha, the character in Raisin whom Lorraine based upon herself. Beneatha, headstrong and sophomoric, questions Christianity and the existence of God. Mrs. Younger responds by slapping her across the face. As long as she is in Lena Younger’s house, Beneatha learns, she is required to believe. Jimmy, too, questions American Christianity and the way in which it inures people, black and white, to a vile order. Instead, he says, Americans ought to move beyond the status quo of their fears, beliefs, and oppressions. That was precisely what the young Beneatha, sometimes in a silly way, was trying to do. And what Lorraine and Jimmy tried to do in their lives also.

Now, the forces of Perry and Glaude are joining in our latest Baldwin publication. We’re excited to release Nothing Personal, his famous 1964 essay on social isolation, race, police brutality—sounds a lot like what we’re living through during the pandemic, doesn’t it?—with a foreword by Perry and an afterword by Glaude. A trifecta of Black brilliance. Baldwin’s critique of American society at the height of the Civil Rights movement is as incisive as ever. He recounts his own encounter with police in a scene disturbingly similar to those we see today documented with ever increased immediacy as more activists and average citizens alike capture injustice on iPhones. Baldwin's documentation of his own troubled times cuts to the core of the issues we find ourselves in today as the Black Lives Matter movement fights for a more just world. This will be the first time it’s published as a stand-alone gift edition. We can’t wait until it comes out next June!

By Eileen Truax

Mexico is a multicultural, multilingual country where seven million people speak Indigenous languages. Of those, more than a million speak only one of seventy-two Indigenous languages, and no Spanish. This population is concentrated in a few of Mexico’s thirty-one states. Oaxaca is one of the three poorest states in the country and is also the state with the largest Indigenous population, at over 1.5 million. Many Indigenous Oaxacans migrate to the United States for a better life, like interpreter Odilia Romero. But when it comes to finding translators and interpreters fluent in their languages, they don’t have as many resources as Spanish-speaking Mexicans do. Where can they turn for help in a new home where they face discrimination from the US and from fellow Mexicans? For Native American Heritage Month, this is Odilia’s story from Eileen Truax’s How Does It Feel to Be Unwanted?: Stories of Resistance and Resilience from Mexicans Living in the United States.

*** 

“Good afternoon, Senator Sanders. My name is Odilia Romero, Indigenous Bene Xhon.”

Standing onstage at the Casa del Mexicano in Boyle Heights, a neighborhood in east Los Angeles, Odilia holds a microphone in one hand and in the other her speech for Bernie Sanders, then a candidate for the Democratic Party’s nomination for president. It was May 4, 2016, and in the auditorium beneath the fifty-foot-high domed ceiling, four hundred people had gathered, a mix of pro-immigrant organizations, young activists, and members of the Latina community.

“I come from a sacred place where now very few people live; it’s a ghost town, because most of us now are here in Los Angeles,” Odilia says. She is dressed in a white skirt and blouse embroidered with brightly colored flowers, very typical of Zoogocho, the community she comes from. She explains that while Indigenous communities are rich in culture and natural resources, every day Indigenous peoples are forced to migrate north as a consequence of US agricultural policies.

“When we stand up for our land and human rights, we’re threatened with death by the Mexican police and army,” she says. “We go from being landowners to becoming low-wage workers. But in the United States, we are in the same condition: we are over 20 percent of the agricultural labor force in California, but we face discrimination, structural racism, and labor exploitation, along with racism from our other Mexican brothers and sisters.”

Sitting on a stool on the stage with one foot on the floor, wearing a light blue shirt with rolled-up sleeves, slightly hunched over, his hair a tousled mess as usual, Senator Sanders looks at Odilia and listens respectfully, sometimes looking surprised by what he hears.

“What will you and your team do to build a broad, inclusive coalition that acknowledges our diverse community and create policies that recognize Indigenous peoples’ right to stay home and make immigration voluntary instead of a forced necessity?” Odilia asks. “Will you prohibit any future agreements like NAFTA that increase unemployment, low wages, poverty, and displacement of Indigenous people all over?

“Thank you, and welcome to Oaxacalifornia.”

~~~

Odilia is a Bene Xhon, which means “Zapotec people.” she was born in Zoogocho, in Oaxaca state’s northern mountains—“where we walk in the clouds”—in 1971, at the beginning of the decade that would bring the devaluation of the dollar and the decline of rural life in Mexico. Odilia clearly remembers the first wave of migration from her community. A flatbed truck would come every week on market days, and along with the market vendors, the truck would take people who were going away in search of opportunity. “A truck full of empty baskets, and empty men and women, hoping to fill their wallets they would leave behind their people, their language, their traditions, and their hearts to go over to ‘the other side of the fence’ for a few years,” Odilia once wrote, remembering those years.

Eventually her day to climb aboard the truck came. She arrived in Los Angeles in 1981, where her family was already waiting. She does not remember the exact date, but she does recall “the ugly buildings I saw here on sixth and Union streets,” her first impression of the city. She was ten years old, and she was struck by the jarring change in her environment, going from living in a natural landscape, next to a river lined with trees, to spending her time inside in a room she rarely left, in a neighborhood where she was not allowed to go outside to play.

“It was the worst thing that had ever happened to me. I think I suffered from depression, but I didn’t know it.”

Like most children who come to the United States to live, Odilia learned English quickly. When she was only fourteen, she even acted as an interpreter for another native of Oaxaca preparing for a state exam to be licensed as a hairdresser: he did not speak English well, and knowing that Odilia could speak Zapotec and some Spanish, he asked her parents if she could help him. When he got his license, he offered to pay Odilia for her help, but her parents refused. At the time, Odilia couldn’t imagine that being an interpreter could actually be a professional career, but now she remembers that experience as her first real interpreting job.

~~~

It’s Friday in Los Angeles, and the heat announcing summer’s arrival can be felt rising in the air. Odilia, who I have known for several years through my work writing on migration issues in Southern California, meets me at a café a half block from Children’s Hospital, where she is working as an interpreter. The hospital is full of stories of pain, and of hope. Founded as a nonprofit in 1901, it is now considered the best children’s hospital in California and one of the top ten in the United states. Children and their families who come to the hospital generally receive unwelcome news involving organ transplants or intensive treatments for diseases like cancer and leukemia, but they also get resources to support them. For families who do not speak English, one of those resources is an interpreter’s services.

The hospital has a permanent staff of Spanish-English interpreters and hires freelancers such as Odilia when it needs additional people to translate the type of Zapotec she speaks (there are several variants of that language). Of the freelancers, Odilia is the only one who speaks an Indigenous language. She is often asked to try to find other interpreters through her networks. She has seen families at the hospital from Oaxaca and Guatemala who speak dialects of Zapotec that she does not understand, as well as Chinantecan, Mixe, Mam, Kanjobal, and Chibchan. If the patient and his or her family can communicate only in one of those six languages, no interpreters are available.

As for courtrooms, recent months have seen rising numbers of Indigenous peoples from Guatemala: Zapotecs from the southern sierra who, Odilia tells me, started migrating because of mining concessions in their areas that made the fields no longer arable as a result of unplanned water exploitation and soil contamination, among other factors. another growing group is the Triqui, fleeing political conflicts in their region. For the Raramuris, from northwest Mexico, their problems stem from their location near the US border: narco-traffickers use them as drug mules, and when caught, they have been sentenced to prison, even though they could not understand anything that was said at their trials for lack of an interpreter.

“Indigenous communities are faced with the structural racism of the justice, health-care, and education systems in the United States; with the language barrier on top of that, but also cultural issues, because in our communities, justice is not punitive,” Odilia explains. “The other day we were in a workshop for training new interpreters, and the instructor asked, ‘How would you say “judge”?’ There were Quichés, Zapotecs, and Mixtecs, and we thought it would be something like ‘the big man,’ or ‘the principal,’ or ‘the elderly man,’ because that’s who has authority—the role of judge does not exist in our communities. ‘and how would you say “court”?’ That would be ‘the big man’s house.’ ‘How would you say “prison”?’ Iron house, or metal house. ‘And how would you say “juvenile court”?’ Then that would be the house for children who do not walk straight, because you’re not going to say they did something bad or good. In our cosmic vision, when the child does not walk straight ahead, there is time to put him on the right path. It’s not like the punitive system in the United states that throws you in jail because you stole a pizza.”

In addition to the differences in customs and word usage in Indigenous communities, the justice system in the United States is also quite different from the Mexican system. The team Odilia works with is currently developing a glossary to help people express ideas in Indigenous languages, because in both the medical and legal fields, complex terms that come up can be very challenging for interpreters.

“In the hospitals, there are illnesses like muscular atrophy. What is that? Sometimes you don’t even know how to say it in Spanish. The cases that come to Children’s Hospital are sensitive.” Odilia reminds me that because of patient confidentiality, she cannot go into detail about specific patients. “And you realize there are people who don’t understand, they don’t even know what the diagnosis is. The worst thing that I’ve ever seen happen there was seeing how someone’s son died, and they never had an interpreter; they never knew why he died. They never knew why a resuscitation team of twenty doctors came into the room to try to revive him. No one could explain what they were doing to their child.”

For years, the issue of interpreting for non-English-speaking parents has come up not only in hospitals and courts but also in schools and government offices. Often, children who grow up speaking English at school and Spanish at home act as interpreters for their parents, helping them fill out official forms, translating instructions from operating manuals, and sometimes serving as interpreters in their own cases at schools and hospitals, which can of course be problematic.

When our conversation touches on this subject, Odilia recalls an incident from her own childhood. When she was in middle school, a boy was picking on her, and she responded by hitting him with a stapler, injuring him. The school suspended Odilia for a week and called her parents. But her parents did not speak English, and the school’s principal did not speak Spanish or Zapotec, so it fell to Odilia to translate for the principal. Instead of reporting her suspension, Odilia told her parents that because of her outstanding work, the school had given her a week’s vacation.

“These things still happen today. I see it at the hospital; I see it [in] the courts; I see it at school: the child is the interpreter, and of course that is not the best person to ask to be your interpreter, especially at school!” Odilia says with a laugh, remembering her own example. “Imagine what can happen with doctors. You can’t say to a kid, ‘Tell your mother she has cancer and she’s got six months to live,’ but that is what is happening on a national level, in Spanish and even more with Indigenous languages, because there’s no alternative.”

Paradoxically, the access these children have to bilingualism and even trilingualism, in Odilia’s case, as well as the level of responsibility they assume from a young age, means they have far greater academic and professional opportunities than their parents’ generation. During her speech to Bernie Sanders, Odilia underscored this point.

“We have integrated into US culture. We vote. We have graduates from Berkeley, Harvard, Stanford, and UCLA, not only with bachelor’s degrees but also with master’s and PhDs. We contribute economically and culturally to the social fabric of the United States. We are proud to call ourselves Americans, because we are the original owners of the American continent, yet we are also proud to be a part of this great country. We also have the right to be treated equally.”

 

About the Author 

Originally from Mexico, Eileen Truax is a journalist and immigrant currently living in Los Angeles. She contributes regularly to Hoy Los Angeles and Unidos and writes for Latin American publications including Proceso, El Universal, and Gatopardo. Truax often speaks at colleges and universities about the Dreamer movement and immigration. Follow her on Twitter at @EileenTruax.

Senator Kamala Harris’s win in the 2020 presidential election is an intersectional triumph. As she expressed in her acceptance speech, she will be the first woman, first Black American, and first South Asian American to serve as vice president. She will also bring interfaith cred to the Oval Office, the likes of which we last saw when Obama was commander in chief. Her success means so much to so many people, and we are anxious to see how she and President-elect Joe Biden plan to undo the damage of the reality-TV administration. Here is what some of our authors had to say.

***

When presidential candidate Biden chose Senator Harris as his running mate, it struck me that if we work hard enough to get out the vote, especially of disenfranchised voters, we might be able to have a Vice President with my mother’s name, Kamala. And when Harris talked about her “Chitti,” her mother’s younger sister, during her speech at the Democratic National Convention, as someone who is also half Tamilian American, it brought back childhood memories of summers spent with my own Chitti in Jamshedpur. I spent the weeks before the election phone banking South Asian American voters in Georgia and Pennsylvania and believe that Biden’s choice of a Black South Asian candidate helped bring more Black and South Asian voters to the polls, which ultimately helped to swing the election in his favor. But beyond identity politics and representation—which are certainly important—and visible milestones in our country’s evolution lie the more substantive issues of policy. And as someone who leans progressive, I’m most interested in if and how Harris brings her identity into championing policies that help her fellow Black and Brown Americans.
—Kavita Das, Sparking Change on the Page: Lessons and Reflections on Writing About Social Issues (forthcoming in Fall 2022)

 

I am drawn to the name in the middle, the one hidden in the Vice President-elect’s two formal names that stretch across continents in the Global South: Devi, my grandmother’s name. To hear Kamala Devi Harris draw on cultural touchstones embodied in her middle moniker, a ‘great goddess’, her offering of gratitude to her aunts, or “Chithis”, fostered the sudden recognition of “Tamil” as an identity in the racialized spectrum of America. It was an unexpected salve to those unsettled South Asian souls hovering between the subcontinent and American suburbs—a kind of proof of life.

The political possibilities of a Vice President-elect in America who emerges from deep legacies of conscious resistance has awakened in me, and in many others, a cautious optimism for our collective future. As she assumes power, however, I am wary of the seductive promise of representation. I remember my grandmother, and the generations of Tamil women chronicled in Radicalizing Her, that fought against lived experiences of repression intimately intertwined with identifying as Tamil, a deeply marginalized ethnicity in Sri Lanka. Racial kinship aside, my hope is that Vice President-elect Harris, too, will be a contentious force inside a state whose violence falls disproportionately on Black and Brown bodies. My insistence will be that her platform, built on an appeal to shift the gender and racial composition of government, transform into a radical agenda, a proof of identity anchored in the politics of the oppressed—the intergenerational, transnational struggle that consumed her ancestors and mine.
—Nimmi Gowrinathan, Radicalizing Her: Why Women Choose Violence

 

Like many millions, I celebrated Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’ win, not just for what it promised but for what it warded off. But I approach the Vice President-elect’s rather more unique victory with pride, elation, satisfaction and, sadly, trepidation. Mr. Biden is nearly seventy-eight; it is possible that, in advance of 2024, he will decline a second term. Therefore, Ms. Harris will run, and possibly against Donald Trump or somebody who has inherited his mantle. Barack Obama’s two terms were followed by a seismic shift to the right, with a kind of unabashed racial supremacism we would have hoped had receded. What kind of vitriol and venom will accumulate during Ms. Harris’ term as Vice President, and thereafter amplified by the 2024 contest? We should never forget how some people in our country chose to respond to the Presidency of a Black man. We should be ready for how some people in our country will respond to the Vice Presidency of a Black and South Asian woman.
—Haroon Moghul, How to Be a Muslim: An American Story

 

Joe Biden likes to say that his grandfather would tell him ‘Keep the faith’. And his grandmother would add, ‘No, spread it.’ With Kamala Harris and her family by his side, the new White House will have family traditions that include Catholicism (a deeply marginalized religion in America not so long ago), Hinduism, Judaism, and the Baptist variant of Protestant Christianity. Their new line should be: ‘Keep the interfaith – actually, spread it.’
—Eboo Patel, Acts of Faith: The Story of an American Muslim, the Struggle for the Soul of a Generation

Two things come to mind this Native American Heritage Month. Compared to whites, Native Americans have been hit hard with a higher percentage of COVID cases, not to mention severe COVID outcomes. On the flip side, voters of Indigenous descent in states like Arizona helped swing the vote in favor of President elect Joe Biden and Vice President elect Kamala Harris. (You’re fired, despotic Cheeto!) Their perseverance and commitment to a democracy that frequently forgets them attest to this year’s theme—Resilient and Enduring: We Are Native People. These titles from our catalog attest to this year’s theme, too!

Among the biggest takeaways—and there really should not be so many—from enduring an administration that enabled white supremacy and white-centric narratives about this nation is how important it is that today’s children learn to always talk about Native Americans in the present tense. Never in the past tense. And not just today’s children, but everyone. These books will make sure of that.

 

“All the Real Indians Died Off”: And 20 Other Myths About Native Americans
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and Dina Gilio-Whitaker

“‘All the Real Indians Died Off’ And 20 Other Myths about Native Americans offers a much-needed and excellent introduction to American Indian history and contemporary life for a broad audience.”
—Against the Current

 

As Long As Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock
Dina Gilio-Whitaker

“As Long as Grass Grows is a hallmark book of our time. By confronting climate change from an Indigenous perspective, not only does Gilio-Whitaker look at the history of Indigenous resistance to environmental colonization, but she points to a way forward beyond Western conceptions of environmental justice—toward decolonization as the only viable solution.”
—Nick Estes, author of Our History Is the Future

 

The Broken Spears: The Aztec Account of the Conquest of Mexico
Edited by Miguel León-Portilla

“A moving and powerful account, a unique reading experience which should not be missed by any reader interested in history.”
—Los Angeles Times

 

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

“An urgent book for our times. When immigrant voices are being silenced, when immigrant families are being torn apart, when immigrant youth are being denied their right to dream of a better future, this book inspires us to see, to listen, and to understand.”
—Reyna Grande, author of The Distance Between Us

 

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

“This may well be the most important US history book you will read in your lifetime. . . . Dunbar-Ortiz radically reframes US history, destroying all foundation myths to reveal a brutal settler-colonial structure and ideology designed to cover its bloody tracks.  Here, rendered in honest, often poetic words, is the story of those tracks and the people who survived—bloodied but unbowed. Spoiler alert: the colonial era is still here, and so are the Indians.”
—Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams

 

An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States for Young People
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, adapted by Jean Mendoza and Debbie Reese

“There is much to commend here: the lack of sugar-coating, the debunking of origin stories, the linking between ideology and actions, the well-placed connections between events past and present, the quotes from British colonizers and American presidents that leave no doubt as to their violent intentions . . . . The resistance continues, and this book urges all readers to consider their own roles, whether as bystanders or upstanders.”
—Booklist, Starred Review

 

The Radiant Lives of Animals
Linda Hogan

“Words for healing.”
—Joy Harjo

 

COMING SOON IN MARCH 2020! 
The Water Defenders: How Ordinary People Saved a Country from Corporate Greed
Robin Broad and John Cavanagh

“When the story of the courageous Salvadoran people came to my ears, I was full of pride and hope. Indigenous peoples everywhere are fighting for their water, and enlightened governments are valuing water over foreign corporate control. Our work in the Great Lakes, home to a fifth of the world’s water, is a parallel struggle, and we are inspired by the people from the south—the Eagle and the Condor meet again. Water protectors are the heroes of all time, and this book honors those epic battles.”
—Winona LaDuke, executive director, Honor the Earth, and author of To Be a Water Protector

By Susan Katz Miller

With Kamala Harris as our new Vice President elect, interfaith families reach a new level of prominence in America. Harris is not only the first woman and the first Black person to be Vice President; she will also be the first interfaith kid and the first person in an interfaith marriage. Harris epitomizes Generation Interfaith: she represents a religious trifecta with a Christian parent, a Hindu parent, and a Jewish husband.

“I grew up going to a black Baptist Church and a Hindu temple,” Harris told the Los Angeles Times, affirming that both religions were formative in her childhood. And at her wedding to her husband, attorney Douglas Emhoff, they included both a flower garland from the Hindu wedding tradition and breaking a glass from the Jewish tradition. So a self-identified Baptist with a Hindu mother and a Jewish husband is now a heartbeat away from the Presidency. We can only hope this helps to normalize the rich religious complexity many of us now embody personally and in our families.

Harris’s mother, Shyamala Gopalan, a Tamil immigrant from India, met her father, Donald Harris, a Black immigrant from Jamaica, when they were both doctoral students at UC Berkeley. They gave both their daughters Sanskrit names to reenforce their connection to Hindu culture–Kamala means lotus and is a form of the goddess Lakshmi. Their mother took Kamala and her sister Maya back to Madras to spend time with their Hindu family. But the girls also attended church with a neighbor after their parents divorced. This was a mother who wanted her children to have bonds of affection with both family religions.

Harris is close to her Jewish stepchildren and in-laws and does a hilarious but affectionate impression of her Jewish mother-in-law. She’s also close to her husband’s ex-wife, Kerstin, who hails from Minnesota. The stepkids call Kamala “Momala” (a Yiddishism), and Harris has written that, “We sometimes joke that our modern family is almost a little too functional.”

It’s worth noting that another interfaith kid, Maya Rudolph, played Kamala Harris in an Emmy-nominated series of appearances in the Saturday Night Live primary campaign skits, and returned November 7 for the start of what should be four more years of playing Harris. Rudolph’s dad is an Ashkenazi Jew; her mother was Black singer Minnie Riperton. So here we have a Black interfaith kid with Jewish and Christian heritage playing a Black interfaith kid with Christian and Hindu heritage and a Jewish husband.

With interfaith marriage at almost forty percent in the last decade in the US, and twenty-five percent of US adults now hailing from interfaith families, we should no longer be surprised when prominent people come from interfaith families. When I give lectures on Interfaith Families as Bridge-Builders, I put up a slide filled with headshots of activists and leaders with interfaith heritage. Kamala Harris was already on that slide, but this week, I added Mauree Turner, who just because the first Muslim elected to the Oklahoma state legislature. They have a Christian parent and a Muslim parent, and identify as nonbinary (using they/she pronouns). And they are the first out nonbinary person to be elected to any state legislature. Of her campaign, Turner said, “This was about drawing space—not fighting for a seat at the table, but creating a new table altogether.” For me, this kind of outside-the-boxes leadership is a hallmark of interfaith kids.

When Joe Biden chose Kamala Harris as his running mate back in August, the New York Times described Harris with many of the phrases and images that were used for Barack Obama (another interfaith kid): “shaped by life in two worlds”; “without ever feeling entirely anchored to either”; “difficult to pin down”; and “by virtue of her identity, not like any other.” The language referred to insider/outsider political status, but also clearly echoes her complex racial and religious heritage.

With Harris as our incoming Vice President, we are one step closer to the time when language that telegraphs discomfort with racial and religious ambiguity starts to wane. Generation Interfaith (that is to say, every post-boomer generation from now on), is starting to take up space, to tell our stories, and to rise to leadership. We need these leaders—people with rich and complex heritage and multiple religious claims and practices—to inspire us and to demonstrate the benefits, not just the challenges, of our experiences.

 

About the Author 

Journalist Susan Katz Miller is the author of Being Both: Embracing Two Religions in One Interfaith Family (2015), and The Interfaith Family Journal (2019). This piece was adapted from a piece she wrote in August for her blog, onbeingboth.com.

A Q&A with Hilary Levey Friedman

The show must go on . . . even during COVID. Wait, what? The pandemic didn’t bring everything to a halt. As a surge of new cases reaches new peaks at the end of 2020, the Miss USA pageant was held last night, November 9, at the Exhibition Centre and the Soundstage at Graceland in Memphis, Tennessee. In years to come, it will become part of American feminist history as Hilary Levey Friedman writes about in Here She Is: The Complicated Reign of the Beauty Pageant in America. What importance does the competition hold today, especially during our pandemic times? Beacon Broadside editor Christian Coleman caught up with Levey Friedman to find out.

Christian Coleman: Why is Miss USA being held in person during the pandemic?

Hilary Levey Friedman: The simplest answer is that the organizers could make it happen, and the contestants wanted to compete (one exception is Miss Wyoming USA, who had to withdraw due to school obligations and her first runner-up stepped in a few days before the competition started). How could they make it happen? Endeavor, which owns Miss USA, also owns UFC and manages other sporting events, and they have been successfully organizing events since May. They were able to find a network and venue—FYI and Graceland respectively—where production and contestants could be safely housed together on a timeline that worked.

CC: This year’s Miss Utah USA, who identifies as bisexual, will be the first out LGBTQ contestant. Sexuality is an issue pageants have historically avoided. Do you think Miss USA is taking a step away from being one of the most heteronormative things a young woman could do?

HLF: Rachel Slawson is the first out LGBTQ contestant since 1952. Even if she wins, there’s still a long way to go to say participating in pageants is not an incredibly heteronormative activity. It’s worth noting Miss America has also only had one out contestant: Miss Missouri 2016 Erin O'Flaherty, who identifies as a lesbian. Miss America 2005 Deidre Downs did marry a woman in 2018, though she was not out when she won. The fact that I can list just three names shows there is much more work to do in terms of non-heterosexuality being embraced in national pageantry.

CC: This year’s Miss Hawaii USA, Samantha Neyland, is the first Black Miss Hawaii. She’s been using her title to get involved with a legislative coalition to make Hawaii recognize Juneteenth as a state holiday, as Hawaii is one of four states that does not. How do you see her involvement with civic engagement and racial justice in the evolution of pageants being a pivotal starting point in developing political skills?

HLF: Here are but a few things politicians and pageant queens have in common: representing a locality and/or state, engaging in community issues, and speaking in front of others, whether it be a legislators, press, or a crowd (well, someday that will happen again!). Neyland’s advocacy is very of-the-moment, as is the work of many politicians, so there is that similarity as well. Of course, there are fewer rhinestones in politics, but not necessarily fewer power suits.

CC: Many contestants like Miss Utah USA and Miss Oklahoma USA have a major focus on mental health. Is this the first time contestants have brought attention to this issue at a pageant?

HLF: Mental health has long been a focus of pageants and contestants, from anxiety and depression to eating disorders to obsessive compulsive disorder. But both of these women, Rachel Slawson and Mariah Davis respectively, have been very open about their suicide attempts, which is a very personal and brave decision that hopefully gives others hope and inspiration.

CC: And finally, you said before that the three Ts of Miss USA are Talent, Tuition, and Tits (formerly Trump). With the contestants’ rising level of engagement with social issues (and policy!), do you see Miss USA busting its stereotypes and having more in common with Miss America pageants?

HLF: Given that Miss USA does not have a talent competition, that difference remains. Ditto scholarship: Miss USA awards a cash prize. However, I do agree that, in terms of providing a platform for these women to engage on social issues, there is convergence. This year, partly due to the pandemic, Miss USA more than doubled the length of the interview from three to seven minutes, which brings it closer to the ten-minute Miss America interview. I think that alone is indicative of the increased emphasis on advocacy within Miss USA.

 

About Hilary Levey Friedman 

Hilary Levey Friedman is a sociologist at Brown University, where she has taught a popular course titled “Beauty Pageants in American Society.” She is a leading researcher in pageantry, merging her mother’s past experiences as Miss America 1970 with her interests as a glitz- and glamour-loving sometime pageant judge, and a mentor to Miss America 2018. Friedman also serves as the president of the Rhode Island chapter of the National Organization for Women. Her first book, Playing to Win, focused on children’s competitive afterschool activities. Connect with her at hilaryleveyfriedman.com and on Twitter (@hleveyfriedman).

Since COVID-19 elbowed its way in as a long-standing, unbidden guest, more women are losing their jobs than men. Even in our woke-ass times—we can’t wait to quit you, 2020—they’re still making reduced wages and taking on the greater brunt of childcare. For women and nonbinary entrepreneurs who are launching, funding, and growing their companies, the business landscape has been just as brutal. It shouldn’t take a pandemic to sound the alarm of gender disparity in the entrepreneurial world, an alarm we have heard but have yet to heed in earnest, but here we are. Again.

The obstacles for women, especially those of color, are—wait for it!—systemic, which journalist and professor Susanne Althoff investigates in her book Launching While Female: Smashing the System That Holds Women Entrepreneurs Back. They persist because the current start-up world was engineered by and for white men. Because white men will always do for white men. Must be nice. Through interviews with over a hundred founders across the country and in all industries, Althoff paints a picture of an entrepreneurial system rife with bias and discrimination, where women receive less than 3 percent of this country’s venture capital, struggle to find mentors in the wake of #MeToo, and are dismissed as “mompreneurs.”

The effects of this unequal system are felt by all of us: a weaker economy, fewer jobs, and less innovation. Althoff explains how more equitable structures in business and entrepreneurship will benefit all people, not just those hoping to fund a startup. These facts about gender inequality reinforce what desperately needs to change, because we’ll need women and nonbinary business leaders at the helm after we’ve kicked out COVID. The worst. House guest. Ever.

***

Fact 1: Women in this country are opening businesses at a remarkable rate—they went from owning 5 percent of all firms in 1972 to 42 percent in 2019—but dig deeper and the situation seems a lot less cheery. Women-owned businesses were responsible for just 8 percent of all employment and 4 percent of total revenues in 2019. Hitting $1 million or more in annual revenue is an important early marker of success for a company, yet in 2018 a mere 2 percent of women-owned firms had this distinction.

Fact 2: In 2019, start-ups founded only by women pulled in just 2.7 percent of the total venture capital investment in the United States. Women of color receive an even tinier slice.

Fact 3: By the end of 2017, only thirty-four Black women entrepreneurs and fifty-eight Latinx women entrepreneurs had raised at least $1 million in venture funding. Not in one year. For all time. Black women took in a mere 0.0006 percent of all venture funding from 2009 to 2017. There is some hope, though: the number of Black women–led start-ups more than doubled from 2016 to 2017.

Fact 4: The number of companies owned by Black women jumped 50 percent from 2014 to 2019, while it increased 41 percent for women who are Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander, 40 percent for Latinx women, 37 percent for Asian American women, and 26 percent for Native American and Alaska Native women. Yet there’s a troubling component: companies owned by women of color tend to pull in less money. In 2019, the average revenue for a business owned by a woman of color was $65,800, while it was $218,800 for a white woman.

Fact 5: In 2010, the Center for Talent Innovation reported that a whopping 89 percent of “highly qualified” women lack a sponsor and 68 percent have no mentor. A 2009 Catalyst survey of lawyers showed that 62 percent of women of color say the lack of an influential mentor holds them back.

Fact 6: In 1979, women-owned businesses received a mere 0.2 percent of federal prime contracting dollars, and at the time of the hearings in 1988, that number had inched up to about 1 percent. (Today, the federal government’s goal is to award at least 5 percent of procurement dollars to women-owned businesses—yes, equality is a slow march.

Fact 7: And women are good at running companies. According to research by the Boston Consulting Group and Mass Challenge, women-led start-ups make seventy-eight cents for every dollar of investment they receive, compared to thirty-one cents for companies led by men.

Fact 8: In a 1965 Harvard Business Review survey titled “Are Women Executives People?” only 35 percent of male executives said their attitude toward women in management was favorable and just 27 percent said they’d feel okay working for a woman.

Fact 9: According to a 2018 survey of women founders by Inc. and Fast Company magazines, 53 percent of respondents experienced harassment or discrimination while running their companies.

Fact 10: In her book Boss Lady: How Three Women Entrepreneurs Built Successful Big Businesses in the Mid-Twentieth Century, historian Edith Sparks notes that about 40 percent of women working in this era experienced sexual harassment on the job.

Fact 11: According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in households with a mother and father who both work full-time, the woman on average assumes 60 percent of the childcare and 60 percent of the household work.

Fact 12: Researchers from the University of Southern California discovered that when small business owners appeared in films rated PG-13, PG, and G, only 5 percent were played by women characters. For corporate executives featured in family movies, a mere 3 percent were played by female characters.

 

About Susanne Althoff 

Susanne Althoff is a veteran journalist and an assistant professor at Emerson College in Boston, where she teaches publishing entrepreneurship and women’s media. She’s also served as advisor to women-led start-ups. Before joining Emerson in 2015, Althoff worked for 22 years as a magazine editor, including 6 years as the editor in chief of the Boston Globe Magazine. Her writing has appeared in WIRED, the Boston Globe, and other publications. Connect with her on Twitter @SusanneAlthoff and at susannealthoff.com.

A Q&A with Rachel S. Mikva

All religious ideas are dangerous. Just ask religious scholar Rabbi Rachel S. Mikva. Scripture’s abiding relevance can inspire great goodness, such as welcoming the stranger and extending compassion for the poor. Likewise, its authority has also been wielded to defend slavery, marginalize LGBTQ individuals, ignore science, and justify violence. In Dangerous Religious Ideas: The Deep Roots of Self-Critical Faith in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, Rabbi Mikva reveals how Abrahamic religions have passed down constructed mechanisms for self-critique and correction that are integral to their teachings. A self-critical faith, she explains, is the litmus that properly distinguishes contemporary camps and encourages the willingness to grapple substantively with the potential harm their ideas may inflict. Beacon Broadside editor Christian Coleman caught up with Rabbi Mikva to chat with her about her book.

Christian Coleman: What was the inspiration behind writing Dangerous Religious Ideas? 

Rachel S. Mikva: Teaching and speaking in religious communities, I kept bumping into two assumptions. In progressive spaces, people often imagined that they had already reformed their traditions enough so their religious ideas were never dangerous. In more traditional spaces, people often worried that asking critical questions would weaken faith, when in fact it strengthens faith. I wanted people to reexamine these assumptions, to see the deep roots of self-critical faith and to recognize that its work is never done. 

CC: You’re a Professor in Jewish Studies and Senior Faculty Fellow of the InterReligious Institute at Chicago Theological Seminary. And you earned your PhD at Jewish Theological Seminary. Tell us a little about your background and what led you to specialize in rabbinic literature and the history of scriptural interpretation. 

RSM: I was a congregational rabbi for thirteen years but always felt that a rabbi is, above all, a teacher. So I decided to get my doctorate to study what I love to teach the most—the amazingly creative, multivocal interpretive traditions of rabbinic Judaism. I knew that many of the stories and teachings had profoundly shaped Jewish life and continue to do so. I’m fascinated by exploring how interpretation influences what we do and how we see the world.  

Living amidst the rich diversity of spiritual lifestances in the US, I think it’s imperative to understand something about other people’s traditions as well. So my focus expanded. As religious difference repeatedly emerges as a source of conflict, this work seems increasingly urgent. 

CC: You write that religion is a potent force, like fire, that has the potential to be wielded for good or evil. “Its very power makes it dangerous.” Tell us why that is.  

RSM: Power is always wielded both for good and ill. Religious power is particularly fraught because of its claims of ultimacy. It has astounding capacity to justify actions and beliefs that we would otherwise declare harmful or ill-conceived, even to create cultures of violence. At the same time, its power to imagine that the world could be different than it is, to inspire hope and motivate goodness, is necessary to our existence. Just like fire, it is immensely valuable, despite the potential for abuse. 

CC: What’s interesting is that you emphasize that all religious ideas, not just the extremist ones that make headlines, are dangerous. Why was it important to include this point in the book? 

RSM: The minute we assume that all the dangers of religion belong to someone else’s faith, we become part of the problem. 

CC: Why did you decide to look at Judaism, Christianity, and Islam to explore the importance of self-critical faith? Were there commonalities that you wanted to draw our attention to? 

RSM: Well, first because they are the three traditions I know anything about! And yes, there are countless intersections between the teachings and histories of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, encountering each other through the centuries. When I write about the tools used to moderate the use and abuse of scripture’s power, for example, they all show up in each one. 

But most of all, I want people to understand that this phenomenon is not about only one religion having dangerous potential, or only one tradition having the capacity for self-critical faith. We are all in the same boat. Doing the work together can also draw us closer, deepening our understanding through our shared struggles. 

CC: I like how you write about religion having cultural memes that get passed down generation after generation. Would you say that religion has been resilient and adaptable precisely because of its tools of self-critical faith? 

RSM: Yes, religion has to be able to adapt, because the world keeps changing. Of course, it could adapt simply to survive, not necessarily improving along the way. Richard Dawkins, one of the “new atheist” authors, described “faith as one of the world’s great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate.” Religion is resilient because it is woven into the psychological, sociological, anthropological, evolutionary, and neurological dimensions of our being.  

Adaptation is a-moral. The evolution of religion cannot be. It is self-critical faith that works to make it a force for blessing. 

CC: You teach a “Dangerous Religious Ideas” course. Have you had any surprising student reactions in response to the curriculum or to any key concepts you cover? 

RSM: When the students start thinking about dangerous religious ideas, they frequently start with someone else’s. What delights and surprises me is how quickly they realize that all religious ideas are potentially dangerous, including their own, including ones that stand at the heart of faith. They intuitively grasp that their faith will be better, stronger, as a result of the process. 

On the negative side, it surprises me how little most people know about religions other than their own—and that includes many of our students. Our seminary mandates Master of Divinity candidates take a course in a different religion, because we believe interreligious literacy should be a requirement to be a religious leader or teacher today. 

CC: As we see intolerance rear its head toward religions like Islam and a kind of herd mentality gear up on the evangelical side during the peak of election seasons, what would you like readers to take away from the book?  

RSM: There are all kinds of “others,” people we deem not like us because of their race, nation, ethnic identity, tribe, gender, sexual orientation, class, politics, etc. Religions create them too. But they also transmit teachings of transcendence, enabling us to see a fundamental unity of all humanity, an interdependence of all creation.  

We must look critically at the role of religion in our collective public life. That’s why the book keeps coming back to the way these ideas play out in our own time. 

 

About Rachel S. Mikva 

Rachel S. Mikva serves as Professor in Jewish Studies and the Senior Faculty Fellow of the InterReligious Institute at Chicago Theological Seminary. Rabbi Mikva went to teach and earn her PhD at Jewish Theological Seminary, focusing on rabbinic literature and the history of biblical interpretation. Her courses and research address a range of Jewish and comparative studies, with a special interest in the intersections of scripture, culture, and ethics.

A Discussion with Frances Moore Lappé, Adam Eichen, and David Daley

It’s Election Day! May the votes be ever in our favor. What will it take for us as a country to come together and dare for democracy after Decision 2020? Regardless of who wins the election, we as citizens will have to pick up the pieces and demand the democracy reform to bend the moral arc back in the direction of justice. Frances Moore Lappé and Adam Eichen, who coauthored Daring Democracy: Igniting Power, Meaning, and Connection for the America We Want, came together in our online event, Daring Democracy in 2020, on October 23, to discuss what that would look like and how to keep stoking the fires for social justice. David Daley, author of Ratf**cked: The True Story Behind the Secret Plan to Steal America’s Democracy, moderated the discussion. Here’s what they had to say.

This excerpt from their event has been edited and condensed for clarity.

David Daley: I want to talk about how we translate the spirit of Daring Democracy and the spirit of what we’ve seen across the nation over the course of the last three years, and how we keep that going. The fight for a more daring democracy has always been fought by those who had tugged Dr. King’s arc of moral justice in another direction, but there’s always the possibility that the White House changes hands in this election, that people feel less immediate fear. If you’re talking about turning fear into action, perhaps people will feel as if they have turned fear into action. And then they let go of the arc. Frances, I’m curious: How do we keep this energy and action going if Joe Biden wins? And in turn, how do we hold Democrats accountable for democracy reform if Democrats hold the trifecta in Washington come January?

Frances Moore Lappé: I know that Biden has said that democracy reform is important, and I wish he had highlighted it more. And who knows? It may take another march or several more marches. But I feel like we are in a different world today. President Trump is such an alert. Most people understand that this was a presidency that was not a fluke, but rather a direct product of a highly broken, warped system not in favor of the people. That’s clear now, and that’s a big gain for us. People are more awake. One of the things I love to say is: “To save the democracy we thought we had, we have to take it where it’s never been.” People get that it’s not about just patching up something broken but that we have to go forward and to go much deeper. Three quarters of us understand that money has way too much power in politics.

What’s key to going forward in helping everyone pushing for democracy reform is to frame it with the message of working toward a better life. That people have been so hurt by the brutalism of an extreme form of capitalist logic. That people have been made vulnerable in so many ways, especially to the very narrow messaging of an authoritarian voice. We can come forward linking all our reforms with everyone doing better, just as we did during my generation. (I was born in the forties.) From my generation on through the seventies, every social class benefited and doubled its family income, and the poorest gained the most. Can you imagine that? It’s important to link that with the day-to-day suffering people are experiencing to show what is possible.

 As for how to motivate people, we need to create a place where they can see the breadth and depth of the Democracy Movement, find their place in it, and see how they can plug in right now. We’ve created an online meeting ground that just launched. It’s called DemocracyMovement.us. There’s a map there. I just went to Massachusetts, and there it was! It shows who’s taking what money from whom and what campaigns are underway. It’s just a tool, but I’m very excited about it.

DD: Adam, let’s build on where this goes next. This is where my possibilist and my pessimist intersect, and I need you to pull me out to bring me back towards where we need to be. The US Supreme Court has issued troubling decisions on voting rights. This last week, we learned that there are four conservatives who would review the power of state constitutions to regulate free and fair elections. Which means you’ve got four justices to the right of the man who wrote the Shelby County decision, and a fifth still to come. We’ve seen the initiatives that have been undone by courts and legislatures. How does this movement need to evolve to address these challenges? How do activists need to think about the road forward and adjust their strategies if the other side has shifted in its tactics?  

Adam Eichen: This is profoundly discouraging. But, Dave, you know me: I will throw it right back at you in a more positive frame.

One of the things we highlight in Daring Democracy is the coordination of what we termed the Anti-Democracy Movement, inspired in large part by a secret memo written by another Supreme Court justice from long ago, Lewis F. Powell, Jr., about how to reign in corporate power in Washington, DC. Seems kind of silly now to think that corporations didn’t have a lot of power, but there’s accuracy there in the late 1960s and 1970s. The ways in which they have been deliberate about unleashing money in politics, restricting the right to vote, gerrymandering, but also as you said, packing the courts with these ideologues—they’re doing whatever they can for partisan gain. We may think they are non-partisan, intellectual jurists, but it’s very clear, if the past decade has shown anything, that they are partisan hacks. John Roberts and the rest of them in the Shelby County decision, which is one of the worst decisions in the last decade—maybe even post World War II—and the effect we see of it today are all very troubling.

But building off what Frankie said, there’s only one solution: to fight like hell. That involves massive citizen engagement not just to pass HR 1, which is a game-changer. It would mandate independent redistricting commissions for congressional elections. It would pass a slew of pro-voter laws. It would pass public financing of elections for congressional campaigns, and a whole bunch of other ethics reforms as well. It’s a number one priority. But I’m willing to go so far as to say that a big change in my package of democracy reform I would be advocating for now is the expansion of the Supreme Court and the federal court in every single circuit. This is imperative for our democracy. In fact, I’m not so sure what that court would do if we pass HR 1 without trying to reform the Court. We know from history that FDR tried this and failed. But times are different, and it will only succeed if citizens demand it.

My hope is that, despite the Democrats absolutely bungling the hearings recently in terms of legitimizing that sham proceeding, the shift will come from the grassroots, just like every other reform. Every other major shift in American politics has shown it comes from the grassroots.

If next year, in January, people don’t give up and realize the fight doesn’t end at the voting booth, that we can’t leave our democracy alone and trust it to the elites that don’t safeguard it themselves—and I’m not saying ‘elites’ in a derogatory way; they’re the ones who are supposed to govern us—we’ll realize that we must demand it of them, that we are the people they are accountable to. And we’re going to push you like hell to restore our democracy.

***

If you weren’t able to attend their event, you can watch it in full here.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FW1VvfWb0Y8]

 

 

About the Panelists

Frances Moore Lappé, author of the multimillion-selling Diet for a Small Planet and seventeen other books, is a recipient of the Right Livelihood Award, the “Alternative Nobel.” She is the coathor of Daring Democracy: Igniting Power, Meaning, and Connection for the America We Want. Follow her on Twitter at @fmlappe and visit her website. 

Adam Eichen serves as Campaigns Manager at Equal Citizens and is also a member of the Democracy Matters board of directors. He is coauthor of Daring Democracy: Igniting Power, Meaning, and Connection for the America We Want with Frances Moore Lappé. Follow him on Twitter at @AdamEichen.

David Daley is a senior fellow for FairVote and the author of Ratf**ked: The True Story Behind the Secret Plan to Steal America's Democracy, which helped spark the recent drive to reform gerrymandering. David's new book, Unrigged: How Americans Are Battling Back to Save Democracy, chronicles the victories and defeats in state efforts to reform elections and uphold voting rights. When writing for the Hartford Courant, he helped identify Mark Felt as the “Deep Throat” source for Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.

By Polly Price

This article appeared originally on plaguesinthenation.com.

Well, it’s official. A presidential administration that left US citizens to sink or swim when facing the worst pandemic in a century has finally admitted what we already knew. It has given up. Saying the quiet part out loud, White House Chief-of-Staff Meadows acknowledged the coronavirus task force no longer even pretends to address the spread of the virus. But this is no surprise to anyone paying attention. This presidential administration was never interested in using the full power, resources, and authority of the federal government to combat COVID-19. And shamefully, it shows.

Chance brought us the unhappy coincidence of a pandemic and an election year for a first-term sitting president. A president who speaks and acts as though the coronavirus pandemic was a plot by Democrats to deny him a second term, so he denies its existence, spreads falsehoods, and divides the country. A president who takes no responsibility for COVID entering our shores, the failure to contain it, or the preventable deaths that have occurred and will continue in frightening numbers this fall and winter. A president who calls medical experts in his administration “idiots” and the CDC—the world’s premier disease-fighting agency—part of the “deep state.” A president who left states to deal with basically everything and then undermined their efforts constantly, whether by calling for militia to “liberate” states from public health measures put in place to save lives, or by ridiculing face masks, which, after all, are a proven measure to help limit spread, allowing businesses and schools to remain open. Even though his own administration’s experts agree that mask wearing on a wider basis could save hundreds of thousands of lives.

All the while, the United States continues to lead the world in the number of COVID-19 infections and deaths, with numbers currently hurtling toward new records. How can it possibly be that the wealthiest nation on earth, with medical expertise and institutions the envy of the world, has responded very much like a second-rate, if not a third-world country?

Under the cover of a stingy, warped view of “federalism,” it’s every state and locality for itself. Territories, states, cities, tribes, hospital systems, and healthcare facilities all compete against each other for critical medical supplies, adequate testing, and other resources. Long-term care facilities are still unable to acquire adequate PPE, let alone adequate, affordable testing. The current administration has left the nation’s defense completely up to the States while at the same time undermining public health measures its own task force deemed essential. All while the federal government sits on enormous resources and capabilities yet to be tapped.

It need not have been this way. If President Trump were to be elected to a second term, would he work harder to save lives, no longer focusing on his reelection but instead concerned about his legacy? Or might he at least stay out of the way and let the medical experts at the world’s premier health agencies guide us, without undermining every effort?

Whoever is the occupant of the Oval Office come January still has time to turn it around. A do-over is possible. Here is a short guide to immediate steps the new administration should take.

It is not too late for the federal government to mobilize for an aggressive fight against COVID-19. Take these steps. 

A pandemic virus spreading as easily as COVID would always be difficult to contain, as the experience of other nations shows. Germany and France, for example, have returned to limited shutdowns in the face of a COVID resurgence. Step one for the next administration: study how other nations combat COVID-19, especially those that have been relatively successful and continue to learn. This is a pandemic, after all, and the US is not leading the way out.

There is no shortage of policy prescriptions for steps we must take. Fifty leading legal experts recently offered recommendations on how federal, state, and local leaders can better respond to COVID-19. Their proposals include: how to strengthen executive leadership for a stronger emergency response; expand access to public health; health care and telehealth; and fortify protections for workers.

My top three priorities for the next administration? Read about them here. There is so much that could yet be done, rather than just give up.

Congress is not off the hook either. In past public health emergencies, most recently Zika and Ebola, Congress held numerous oversight hearings to ask whether our federal health agencies were responding appropriately and had the resources they needed. What has the US Senate done in this pandemic? Oversight hearings in the Senate have focused on the so-called Russia “hoax” from four years ago. As if getting to the bottom of that will save lives now. The Senate committee overseeing the Department of Homeland Security has spent its time assessing discredited Russian propaganda funneled through presidential intermediaries in an apparent attempt to relitigate the prior election, or to find nonexistent crimes to make the president look better in guess what—an election year. These are not lethal threats to the American public like COVID is. If protecting Americans during a pandemic is not in the purview of Homeland Security, what is? And shouldn’t the Senate be interested in how DHS is responding?

When we think about how we can be better prepared next time—and there will be a next time, perhaps with even more lethality—what needs to change? No doubt better coordination is possible among our disease-fighting agencies and medical institutions (as President Obama’s Ebola czar proved). Harnessing the power of federal agencies to all row in the same direction requires constant effort, not the one-time appointment of a task force that soon gives up to go out on the campaign trail.

Is the federal government constitutionally restricted in favor of state action to address a pandemic? In other words, are our laws getting in the way of an adequate federal response? The answer is NO. The federal government can act on the many critical issues we face. The executive branch has ample legal authority to improve our situation, if only it would.

Our inability to control the pandemic within our borders has caused other nations to quarantine against us. We are now the exporting threat, but at least our allies express pity while they take the necessary steps to protect themselves from us. Instead of responding like a powerful, wealthy, nation with enormous reserves of scientific expertise, the US responds as if we were fifty different, relatively poor nations with inadequate access to critical medical supplies and other basics of public health. Harness the authority of the federal government and use it to protect us, please.

 

About the Author 

Polly Price is an award-winning legal historian and professor of law and public health at Emory, and is the author of two scholarly books and numerous articles on issues related to public health. Her book Plagues in the Nation, a narrative history of America through major outbreaks, is a forthcoming title from Beacon Press. Connect with her online at plaguesinthenation.com and on Twitter at @PollyJPrice.

A Discussion with Andreas Karelas, Katharine Hayhoe, and Bill McKibben

The existential threat of environmental collapse may loom high, but Andreas Karelas, founder and executive director of RE-volv, shows how we can move past our collective inaction on climate change and work together in our communities in his book Climate Courage. Climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe and environmentalist Bill McKibben joined him for his book launch on September 29 to talk about it. They also discussed how saving our planet, our economy, and our democracy are not mutually exclusive goals. Amy Caldwell, the book’s editor, moderated the discussion.

Climate change was a key topic in what turned out to be two rather than three presidential debates. On one hand, President Trump defended the fossil fuel industry while not displaying much understanding of how humans are responsible for changing the climate. On the other, Vice President Biden spoke about his climate plan’s goal of job creation. According to Karelas, we already have the tools needed to solve the climate crisis. Here’s what he, Karelas, McKibben, and Hayhoe had to say during the book launch about the power of community steering our course to solving our crisis with those very tools.

Amy Caldwell: We know that the fires that have been decimating California and the Pacific Northwest are related to climate change. There are also huge fires in South America and Australia. So this is a global issue. Every year, we hear bad news about the polar ice caps; there’s more bad news this year. What are some bright spots? What are some bright spots and solutions that focus on inclusivity within the climate movement?

Andreas Karelas: Bill, I was recently flipping through your book Falter, and one of the things you write that speaks to a big portion of Climate Courage is that we have two technologies that, if employed, could be decisive to the era: the solar panel and the nonviolent movement. RE-volv, the nonprofit that I founded, finances solar-energy projects for nonprofits that otherwise couldn’t go solar. Those nonprofits can then reduce their electricity costs, benefit the people they serve even more so, and demonstrate to the community the benefits of solar energy.

One of the things we have on our side in the fight against climate change is the fact that solar energy is contagious. When someone goes solar, their neighbor is more likely to go solar. And their neighbor is even more likely to go solar. We’ve seen this play out in communities across the country. It happens over and over and over again. You can see it on a map in clusters of people going solar.

To tie this to the equity piece, there was a great study that came out of Tufts and UC Berkeley about a year ago. It talked about the racial and ethnic disparity of solar installations in those communities. What they found, not surprisingly, is that communities of color, particularly African American communities, have much less solar, even after you account for wealth disparity. But what the study also found was the solution they call seed projects. These seed projects build off the idea that solar is contagious. In fact, if you put solar in a community of color, the adoption rates are even faster. The solar contagious effect is even higher, dramatically so, than it is compared to other communities. That is super powerful. It means that we as communities look to our neighbors to see how we can solve this thing, and if we see other people taking action, we want to take those same actions, and those can spread.

The climate movement, in my opinion, has often painted one of two areas of engagement. One is, as Bill mentioned, changing your lightbulbs, or taking individual actions. Like you said, we have a detector that says, “That’s not going to cut it.” I can bring a reusable tote bag, but that’s not going to stop companies from spewing carbon into the atmosphere. The other side looks at what our leaders can do. What can our federal government do? As somebody who’s been in this fight for a long time, we all know that none of us are holding our breath, waiting for the federal government to solve this, right? We send petitions, we sign letters to our congress folks and representatives, but we don’t necessarily think that’s the only way it’s going to happen, as important as that is. Between those, what I see is the way to engage people so that they can feel agency is at the community level. What can we do with our neighbors? What can we do in our cities and our counties that can actually have an impact, that can demonstrate the benefits of sustainability, and thus, like a seed project, have this contagious effect from one community to another?

Some examples, the Sierra Club has their Ready for 100 campaign. They’ve basically trained volunteers to say, “Go to your community. Go to your local city and county and convince them to commit to 100 percent renewable energy.” This campaign, in just a few short years, has been so successful that now we have one out of every three Americans lives in a city or county or state that is committed to 100 percent renewable energy. That’s the power of community.

Bill McKibben: I do think there are things that should give us plenty of reasons to be optimistic. Or if not optimistic, at least not a reason to give up. We’ve watched over the last year or so a real sea change in the way Wall Street thinks about carbon and climate. It’s happened because lots of people have gotten together and pushed. And it’s also happened because solar power and wind power are now the cheapest way to generate electricity, and that causes your spreadsheet to start blinking amber in alert. Between that, the way money gets allocated has begun to shift. And Andreas is right to caution us that Washington is not the only place that counts. There are lots of possibilities. The part about coming together is really important. There’s been some good coming together even over the course of this horrible year.

The most important thing anyone has said in 2020 was what George Floyd said as he was being murdered: “I can’t breathe.” There are lots of reasons why people can’t breathe. They can’t breathe because there’s a cop kneeling on their neck. Or because police brutality stifles their community. Often, in the very same communities, people can’t breathe because there’s a coal fire powerplant down the street. We know enough about the effects of COVID to understand that it follows lines of race and class vulnerability, too. People can’t breathe because the wildfire smoke gets so thick that the authorities tell people to tape shut their windows and stay inside. People can’t breathe because it gets too damn hot. We saw the hottest temperature ever reliably recorded on our planet this summer. 130 degrees in California. 120 degrees in San Luis Obispo, which is pretty much on the Pacific Ocean. That really shouldn’t be possible, but it is now. We have the possibility for a commonality that we have not felt before, or at least not for a while, in this overly divided nation and in this overly divided world. It’s a commonality of vulnerability as well as of possibility. We’re at this moment when the technologies that engineers gifted to us could be transformative if applied quickly and at scale. Our job is to make sure we create the conditions for that to happen.

Had Andreas’s book come out ten years ago, it would’ve been whistling past the graveyard, because we wouldn’t have had in place the possibility for solutions at scale. But now that we do, it makes enormous sense to be precisely having this conversation.

Katharine Hayhoe: People often ask, “How do we talk about this when there are so many other issues right up in our face?” There’s injustice, poverty, inequity, the inability to supply the physical needs of our families and put food on the table. Right here at home, as well as everywhere around the world, everybody is struggling right now. The reason we care about climate change is not because it increases the average temperature of the planet by one or two or three or five degrees; it’s because climate change is the great threat multiplier. It takes everything we already care about today and it makes it worse. It increases the risk of health impacts, the area burned by wildfires, the risks of extreme heat, which, of course, hit the poorest first. It makes our hurricanes stronger and much more devastating.

If you look at every basic goal to reduce poverty, eliminate hunger, insure people have clean water to drink, make sure that we have stable systems where people can go to school and go to the doctor—all of those basic things are threatened by climate change. So what I say to people is, “Who you already are is the perfect person to care. In fact, you already do.” It isn’t a case of moving climate change up your priority list and displacing something else. The only reason we care about climate change is because items 1, 2, 3, 4, 5—all the way down are being affected by climate change.

***

If you weren’t able to attend the book launch, you can watch it here in full.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BgZj_t7kCbE]

 

 

About the Panelists 

Andreas Karelas is the founder and executive director of RE-volv, a nonprofit organization that empowers people around the country to help nonprofits in their communities go solar and raise awareness about the benefits of clean energy. He is a dedicated clean-energy advocate with over 15 years of environmental and renewable energy experience. He is an Audubon TogetherGreen Conservation Leadership Fellow and an OpenIDEO Climate Innovator Fellow. He lives and works in San Francisco. Connect with him at re-volv.org and on Twitter at @AndreasKarelas.

Katharine Hayhoe, who wrote the foreword for Climate Courage, is an atmospheric scientist whose research focuses on understanding what climate change means for people and the places where we live.

Bill McKibben is a founder of the environmental organization 350.org and was among the first to have warned of the dangers of global warming. He is the author of several bestselling books.

By Gustavus Stadler

I knew that when my book, Woody Guthrie: An Intimate Life, came out, I would inevitably be asked questions like, “What would Woody Guthrie do today? Where would he stand on this issue? What would he think of this candidate or that elected official?” I’m mostly accustomed to writing about topics at least several decades distant from the present, and I try hard to honor the otherness of the past, rather than portray it as a simpler version of the now. Plus, responses to such questions so often depend more on the projections of the answerer than on historical evidence. Witness the sick spectacle of contemporary conservatives claiming the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. because they can cram a single phrase from a single speech into the mold of their ideology and conveniently ignore his fleshed-out views linking racism to capitalism and militarism.

Consequently, I confess to a bit of dread, and resistance, toward such questions. Nonetheless, in some very real way, these are also the essential questions to ask of a book like mine; why write a book about a historical figure without some sense that, in no matter how obscure or transparent fashion, something about them matters in the present? Also, I have seen the evidence, having viewed the vast majority of Guthrie’s archive. So, a fair assessment is somewhere within my reach. And some of its aspects might surprise you. So here goes.

His soul imprinted by personal and collective trauma in his childhood, Guthrie believed, unabashedly, that government should play a strong, reparative role in people’s lives, easing suffering, righting injustice, and enabling all citizens to flourish. To this extent, he would have despised the more and less militant, but nonetheless consistent anti-government orientation of our last six Presidents of both parties. And he would have enthusiastically welcomed the Bernie Sanders campaign, as well as the rise of the new stars of the leftier regions of the Democratic party: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the rest of “The Squad”: Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, and Rashida Tlaib, as well as the growing numbers of state and local politicians committed to grassroots campaigning and governing.

But here’s where things get more controversial. The politicians I’ve named straddle Democratic-party-approved liberalism and a more radical set of views that drives their advocacy for selected policies one could fairly call socialist. Fundamentally, though, they remain committed to “America” as a powerful ideal, a synonym for ideals of freedom and equality, and they have faith in its institutions to, ultimately, realize these ideals. I don’t believe Woody Guthrie shared this commitment or this faith, at least not in the same form.

Indeed, no person of sound judgment and good faith could leave a deep reading of his archive with the idea that Guthrie’s main passion was to celebrate America and Americans. No one could come out of that place believing he would ever have embraced calls for unity before calls for justice. Guthrie would have sacrificed America in a split second if doing so could eradicate fascism from the world.

Obviously, the sense that Guthrie is a celebratory nationalist comes largely from his by far best-known song, “This Land is Your Land,” which has become a favorite tune in elementary schools and at campfires. But this is not a song about inclusivity. Even overlooking the seldom-sung verse in which he explicitly condemns private property, the song’s refrain carries an implicitly negative message alongside the explicitly positive one: this land is your land, not the land of the people who, in market terms, own it, who hold the deeds to it. Those deeds are fictions, these people are thieves. (The question of the song’s erasure of Indigenous people and settler colonialism is more complicated.)

I won’t hazard a guess as to whether he would have bent his principles, as so many leftists are doing, and supported the centrist-liberal Biden-Harris campaign for the Presidency. I do know that Woody Guthrie was a radical, not a liberal. He didn’t believe that any of the ideals America claim as its foundation could be realized without the destruction—or at the very least substantial transformation of—capitalism. The ideal America he envisioned, in other words, would look wholly alien, if not utterly terrifying, to many of the nation’s citizens today—perhaps even to the majority of them.

Another largely underexplored area of his writing speaks meaningfully to the struggles of the present. Later in his life, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, before his permanent hospitalization with Huntington’s disease, he began to think about race and racism in ways that challenged nationalist liberal common sense. He had worked hard to shed the influence of his white supremacist father and the ambient racism of his growing years in Oklahoma and Texas. As his positions drew him more and more toward communism, he learned of the Party’s efforts, led by Black members, to address a range of issues related to racism—not only voting rights and equal access to institutions, but problems faced specifically by working class Black people, like economic inequality and police violence. In 1949, he was among the crowds leaving a Paul Robeson concert in Peekskill, New York, only to be set on violently by white supremacist gangs and police officers. He called it the worst thing he’d ever seen.

In the following couple of years, Guthrie grew closer to his friend Stetson Kennedy, a white anti-racism activist in Florida, who worked with the Civil Rights Congress, a largely Black group affiliated with the Communist Party. In 1951, the CRC issued a petition to the United Nations titled “We Charge Genocide,” which condemned the history of racial inequality in the United States as a deliberate program of mass extinction, led in the present day by the state via the police. Appended to the petition were hundreds of newspaper accounts of police brutality. Guthrie turned several of these cases into never-recorded songs. He also wrote a long poem embracing the document’s position, titled “Genocide.” Despite the growing acknowledgment among white liberals that structural racism exists in the US, and the wide acceptance of the idea that racist police violence is a serious problem, it’s hard to imagine any electoral candidate or elected official taking a stance this confrontational and not destroying their career.

Finally, Guthrie believed that fascism and capitalism overlapped significantly. They were both driven by rapaciousness and cruelty, and they both stifled the lives of the vast majority of a nation’s people, all so that a small minority could systematize their self-inflating, sadistic vision of the world while living in opulence. If the last four years haven’t convinced someone of this truth, it seems safe to say nothing will.

 

About the Author 

Gustavus Stadler is a professor of English at Haverford College. A well-established scholar of nineteenth- and twentieth-century US culture and popular music, he is the author of Troubling Minds: The Cultural Politics of Genius in the U.S., 1840–1890. His writing has appeared in the Bay Guardian, SF Weekly, the North Carolina Independent Weekly, Social Text, Sounding Out!, avidly.com, and numerous other outlets. He lives in Haverford, Pennsylvania. Connect with him at gustavusstadler.org and on Twitter at @majortominor.

By Linda Hogan

When Chickasaw poet and essayist Linda Hogan fell in love with her current home, a 1930s cabin in Idledale, Colorado, she would be continually astounded with wonder from learning the surrounding environment and animals. As she writes in this selection from her latest book of poetry and prose, The Radiant Lives of Animals, cultivating her connection with the land has been a lesson in the impact human life leaves behind and, with the insight of Indigenous knowledge systems, the kinship between us and the natural world begging to be nurtured to this day.

***

The story of this land is ancient. The red earth, crags, and canyons were once an inland sea. I imagine the currents when this mountain basin was ocean, water swaying as the moon became full or as wind moved it, swaying. Within the water, a shining circle of fish, many lives all thinking and moving as one. Sea animals hid inside stone caves and indentations that now, so many years later, shelter canyon wrens and swallow nests, once protecting numbers of indwelling bats.

In the times that passed between all these, dinosaurs left behind their footprints and bones for humans to find and fight over. Those are on the other side of this mountain that holds me.

On a dry day with particles of dust shining in sunlight, I drove up one hill and down another, my Blackfeet friend having me stop the car several times to gather red and yellow ochre for ceremonies or to use as paint for powwow dancing. That was long ago when I lived several homes away, but even then, I looked down this valley and knew one day I would live in this home and with this land so alive, so vibrantly enchanted with songs from ancient times, and with the night animals wandering through the forest of trees or the ones crossing hillsides by day. I knew other tribes had once stayed in this place of accepted amnesty as was the rule at the hot springs not far away. The earth here is created of all their stories, ancient and new.

Even so, down below the main road, at Bear Creek, Col. Chivington planned the massacre of human beings at Sand Creek, while promising them peace and safety. This betrayal, unfortunately, is also a story of this land.

Four miles up the road, Buffalo Bill is buried, a man known only for his abuses. Not so far away from his remains is a large buffalo herd. It is a joy for me to watch them calve in the spring, then watch the light-colored calves grow and darken, but mostly it is a pleasure to witness the tenderness between mother and calf, knowing that love is an unmeasured emotion even for human beings.

Not far over the mountain, northward down a highway, the land was once a great buffalo wallow filled with large numbers of bison. Now it is the city of Denver.

~~~

I fell in love with my home a few years back when I was hiking animal trails through the forest across from here. At the time this uncared-for little place wasn’t rented, so when I saw the cabin, I felt I was not trespassing. I crossed the creek and climbed up the hill, then tried to look inside. I found only one window allowing me to see a wall with wallpaper peeling like bark from a birch tree. But for me, the condition of this 1930s cabin didn’t matter. The land was my gravity and eventually gravity won. All these years later, it still holds me.

This became my home twenty years after that day of window-peeking. It is land that owns me. At first, I didn’t know the large number of animals that lived here and passed through, needing protection from development to the north. Nor would I have guessed I’d be years learning an environment so powerfully alive. Here are a million years of stories to tell. Some are immediate and very present, like the flattened morning grasses that reveal what slept here last night, usually a small group of doe and fawns curled together in herd dreaming. Or how the marmots across the way call out with a gentle trilling voice when they see a predator, and the three o’clock fox sings as it passes by on its daily journey with its wide tail full and beautiful. From hidden places, crows scream out and fly down to swarm their enemy, cawing loudly, alerting me to danger.

Then all becomes peacefully quiet forest and canyon once again, the singing creek passing through green mountain curves, traveling past the location where the lion keeps her bones, past the infant forest, an entire world filled with both visible and secretive lives.

Perhaps the ancestors dreamed it into existence, dreamed the future where I now live after many years of looking down into this valley with curiosity and longing, hoping I would one day live here and feel safe with the animal lives around me. I do feel that safety, living and planting above the place where water seeps out through the canyon walls, pure and clear from its secret journeys of underground miles.

I continue learning the animals, but I also want to learn the human animal. After all, we are the puzzle, the most difficult to understand or know. All the others may cohabit a field together easily: wild turkey, deer, rarely even a coyote, and the small birds at the edges. They are fine together until a human is near. Seeing us, they scatter. I am a predator known to them, when my own inner sea wants to know how we might be a part of the wilderness congress.

~~~

It is not my purpose to create a pastoral world. There are nights I hear death cries or screams of animals caught by others. I am also aware not only of the great number of species lost everywhere each day, but of the toll climate change is taking on the entire beleaguered planet. We are inundated with this pain in every book, every story on the news.

When I think of change, I consider the re-minding of ourselves and I mean that it is time to consider other kinds of intelligence and ways of being, to stretch our synapses to take in new ways of thought. As an Indigenous woman, I look toward our Native knowledge systems, the times when our relationship with the earth wasn’t the disjointed connection most of us have learned from our Euro-American education systems. I am one human animal who wants to take back original meanings and understandings in ways that are possible and are necessary.

Perhaps some of us make poetry, music, and art because the ancient story still dwells inside our body, as does a feeling for old ways of seeing and knowing the world. I see it in our work, our circles of native science conversations and the popularity of our books. We also know it in some quiet moments, intimations that surface from deep in the marrow as a brief yearning. Sometimes it feels like grief, sometimes it is grace. Sometimes it is like loneliness. Sometimes a joining together with all others. In any case, it is a true and deep need, this desire to change our systems of thought and vision. In this same way, we still feel our animal kinship, our own animal life, and the primordial green and dirt-rich odor of our world connection as a reminder.

The kinship and relationship between human and nonhuman others rise from inside to seek what is relevant in this changing world. But there is more. Many of us remember this in our shared histories. We want to know what sees us when we do not know we are being watched, but only feel that watching. Our need is like the shadow attached at our feet, never to be walked away from. Instead of speaking to what is beneath that shadow, it is often easier to ignore the dialogue asked of us by earth, its language spoken within and without our own skin.

In most Indigenous creation stories, humans were the last ones created. Around us are our many teachers. For now, it is enough to simply know that we do not live alone in the skin of any environment. We are part of a collective, the way marmots hibernate together in their complicated burrows beneath ground.

 

About the Author 

Linda Hogan (Chickasaw) is a poet, novelist, essayist, teacher, and activist. Her work illuminates environmental and Indigenous activism, as well as Native spirituality. She was born in Oklahoma and now lives and works in Idledale, Colorado, a town of 252 human souls. Her literary works have earned her awards and fellowships including a National Endowment of the Arts award, a Guggenheim, a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers Circle of America, and, most recently, the Thoreau Prize from PEN and a Native Arts and Culture Award. Connect with Linda at lindahoganwriter.com.

By Judith Ortiz Cofer

It’s a minefield that women of Hispanic and Latinx heritage have to navigate in mainstream white culture and spaces—the media-engendered image of the Latina in the United States and all the stereotypes that come with it. For Hispanic/Latinx Heritage Month, we share with you an excerpt from writer Judith Ortiz Cofer’s personal essay on the subject, “The Myth of the Latin Woman,” collected in Women Writing Resistance: Essays on Latin America and the Caribbean, edited by Jennifer Browdy.

***

On a bus trip to London from Oxford University where I was earning some graduate credits one summer, a young man, obviously fresh from a pub, spotted me and as if struck by inspiration went down on his knees in the aisle. With both hands over his heart he broke into an Irish tenor’s rendition of “Maria” from West Side Story. My politely amused fellow passengers gave his lovely voice the round of gentle applause it deserved. Though I was not quite as amused, I managed my version of an English smile: no show of teeth, no extreme contortions of the facial muscles—I was at this time of my life practicing reserve and cool. Oh, that British control, how I coveted it. But Maria had followed me to London, reminding me of a prime fact of my life: you can leave the Island, master the English language, and travel as far as you can, but if you are a Latina, especially one like me who so obviously belongs to Rita Moreno’s gene pool, the Island travels with you.

This is sometimes a very good thing—it may win you that extra minute of someone’s attention. But with some people, the same things can make you an island—not so much a tropical paradise as an Alcatraz, a place nobody wants to visit. As a Puerto Rican girl growing up in the United States and wanting like most children to “belong,” I resented the stereotype that my Hispanic appearance called forth from many people I met.

Our family lived in a large urban center in New Jersey during the sixties, where life was designed as a microcosm of my parents’ casas on the island. We spoke in Spanish, we ate Puerto Rican food bought at the bodega, and we practiced strict Catholicism complete with Saturday confession and Sunday mass at a church where our parents were accommodated into a one-hour Spanish mass slot, performed by a Chinese priest trained as a missionary for Latin America.

As a girl I was kept under strict surveillance, since virtue and modesty were, by cultural equation, the same as family honor. As a teenager I was instructed on how to behave as a proper señorita. But it was a conflicting message girls got, since the Puerto Rican mothers also encouraged their daughters to look and act like women and to dress in clothes our Anglo friends and their mothers found too “mature” for our age. It was, and is, cultural, yet I often felt humiliated when I appeared at an American friend’s party wearing a dress more suitable to a semiformal than to a playroom birthday celebration. At Puerto Rican festivities, neither the music nor the colors we wore could be too loud. I still experience a vague sense of letdown when I’m invited to a “party” and it turns out to be a marathon conversation in hushed tones rather than a fiesta with salsa, laughter, and dancing—the kind of celebration I remember from my childhood.

I remember Career Day in our high school, when teachers told us to come dressed as if for a job interview. It quickly became obvious that to the barrio girls, “dressing up” sometimes meant wearing ornate jewelry and clothing that would be more appropriate (by mainstream standards) for the company Christmas party than as daily office attire. Th at morning I had agonized in front of my closet, trying to figure out what a “career girl” would wear because, essentially, except for Marlo Thomas on TV, I had no models on which to base my decision. I knew how to dress for school: at the Catholic school I attended we all wore uniforms; I knew how to dress for Sunday mass, and I knew what dresses to wear for parties at my relatives’ homes. Though I do not recall the precise details of my Career Day outfit, it must have been a composite of the above choices. But I remember a comment my friend (an Italian-American) made in later years that coalesced my impressions of that day. She said that at the business school she was attending the Puerto Rican girls always stood out for wearing “everything at once.” She meant, of course, too much jewelry, too many accessories. On that day at school, we were simply made the negative models by the nuns who were themselves not credible fashion experts to any of us. But it was painfully obvious to me that to the others, in their tailored skirts and silk blouses, we must have seemed “hopeless” and “vulgar.” Though I now know that most adolescents feel out of step much of the time, I also know that for the Puerto Rican girls of my generation that sense was intensified. The way our teachers and classmates looked at us that day in school was just a taste of the culture clash that awaited us in the real world, where prospective employers and men on the street would often misinterpret our tight skirts and jingling bracelets as a come-on.

Mixed cultural signals have perpetuated certain stereotypes—for example, that of the Hispanic woman as the “Hot Tamale” or sexual firebrand. It is a one-dimensional view that the media have found easy to promote. In their special vocabulary, advertisers have designated “sizzling” and “smoldering” as the adjectives of choice for describing not only the foods but also the women of Latin America. From conversations in my house I recall hearing about the harassment that Puerto Rican women endured in factories where the “boss men” talked to them as if sexual innuendo was all they understood and, worse, often gave them the choice of submitting to advances or being fired.

It is custom, however, not chromosomes, that leads us to choose scarlet over pale pink. As young girls, we were influenced in our decisions about clothes and colors by the women—older sisters and mothers who had grown up on a tropical island where the natural environment was a riot of primary colors, where showing your skin was one way to keep cool as well as to look sexy. Most important of all, on the island, women perhaps felt freer to dress and move more provocatively, since, in most cases, they were protected by the traditions, mores, and laws of a Spanish/Catholic system of morality and machismo whose main rule was: You may look at my sister, but if you touch her I will kill you. The extended family and church structure could provide a young woman with a circle of safety in her small pueblo on the island; if a man “wronged” a girl, everyone would close in to save her family honor.

Because of my education and my proficiency with the English language, I have acquired many mechanisms for dealing with the anger I experience. This was not true for my parents, nor is it true for the many Latin women working at menial jobs who must put up with stereotypes about our ethnic group such as: “They make good domestics.” This is another facet of the myth of the Latin woman in the United States. Its origin is simple to deduce. Work as domestics, waitressing, and factory jobs are all that’s available to women with little English and few skills. The myth of the Hispanic menial has been sustained by the same media phenomenon that made “Mammy” from Gone with the Wind America’s idea of the black woman for generations; Maria, the housemaid or counter girl, is now indelibly etched into the national psyche. The big and the little screens have presented us with the picture of the funny Hispanic maid, mispronouncing words and cooking up a spicy storm in a shiny California kitchen.

This media-engendered image of the Latina in the United States has been documented by feminist Hispanic scholars, who claim that such portrayals are partially responsible for the denial of opportunities for upward mobility among Latinas in the professions. I have a Chicana friend working on a PhD in philosophy at a major university. She says her doctor still shakes his head in puzzled amazement at all the “big words” she uses. Since I do not wear my diplomas around my neck for all to see, I too have on occasion been sent to that “kitchen,” where some think I obviously belong.

One such incident that has stayed with me, though I recognize it as a minor offense, happened on the day of my first public poetry reading. It took place in Miami in a boat-restaurant where we were having lunch before the event. I was nervous and excited as I walked in with my notebook in my hand. An older woman motioned me to her table. Thinking (foolish me) that she wanted me to autograph a copy of my brand-new slender volume of verse, I went over. She ordered a cup of coffee from me, assuming that I was the waitress. Easy enough to mistake my poems for menus, I suppose. I know that it wasn’t an intentional act of cruelty, yet of all the good things that happened that day, I remember that scene most clearly, because it reminded me of what I had to overcome before anyone would take me seriously. In retrospect I understand that my anger gave my reading fire, that I have almost always taken doubts in my abilities as a challenge—and that the result is, most times, a feeling of satisfaction at having won a convert when I see the cold, appraising eyes warm to my words, the body language change, the smile that indicates that I have opened some avenue for communication. That day I read to that woman and her lowered eyes told me that she was embarrassed at her little faux pas, and when I willed her to look up at me, it was my victory, and she graciously allowed me to punish her with my full attention. We shook hands at the end of the reading, and I never saw her again. She has probably forgotten the whole thing but maybe not.

Yet I am one of the lucky ones. My parents made it possible for me to acquire a stronger footing in the mainstream culture by giving me the chance at an education. And books and art have saved me from the harsher forms of ethnic and racial prejudice that many of my Hispanic compañeras have had to endure. I travel a lot around the United States, reading from my books of poetry and my novel, and the reception I most often receive is one of positive interest by people who want to know more about my culture. Th ere are, however, thousands of Latinas without the privilege of an education or the entrée into society that I have. For them life is a struggle against the misconceptions perpetuated by the myth of the Latina as whore, domestic, or criminal. Every time I give a reading, I hope the stories I tell, the dreams and fears I examine in my work, can achieve some universal truth which will get my audience past the particulars of my skin color, my accent, or my clothes.

 

About the Author 

Judith Ortiz Cofer was born in Hormigueros, Puerto Rico, and spent her childhood traveling back and forth between Puerto Rico and the United States. She has published ficion, creative nonfiction, and poetry, including The Latin Deli: Telling the Lives of Barrio Women, which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize; a memoir, Silent Dancing: A Partial Remembrance of a Puerto Rican Childhood; several children’s books, including An Island Like You and Call Me Maria; and several volumes of poetry, including Reaching for the Mainland and A Love Story Beginning in Spanish. Cofer teaches at the University of Georgia as the Regents’ and Franklin Professor of English and Creative Writing.

By Enrico Gnaulati

Under normal circumstances, family life in America is a “fire shower of stress, multi-tasking, and mutual nitpicking” according to journalist Benedict Carey, covering the results of a four-year-long UCLA observational study of thirty-two urban families for the New York Times. A survey funded by Sleepopolis a few years back discovered that kids have an eye-popping 4,200 arguments with their parents before they turn eighteen, averaging fourteen minutes long, with parents “winning” upwards of sixty percent of the time. I’m assuming “winning” meant parents successfully cajoling their kids to complete household chores, clean up bedrooms and shared spaces, and finish homework—the most common reasons for disagreements.

Under the pandemic, it’s not just kids’ homework that parents are placed in the thankless task of overseeing, but also their entire remote learning experience. Schools in the majority of states across the country have shuttered their doors, leaving in excess of forty-three million kids in grades K-12 housebound. Earlier this spring, as families sheltered in place, parents stepped in to manage their kids’ distance-learning needs. It was thought to be a stop-gap measure, even a novelty for many involved. There was the added advantage of having the “morning rush” eliminated, allowing for more sleep and less stress. This is notwithstanding kids winning back the free time they were used to sacrificing by being overscheduled with extracurricular activities. Family members hunkered down at home. Many parents I work with confessed during Zoom therapy sessions that they enjoyed the family togetherness. Working mothers, in particular, felt released from the guilt and anxiety they often carry juggling professional demands and domestic responsibilities, never quite performing either up to their standards.

Months along, the novelty has worn off, and parents are concerned about the ramifications of prolonged virtual classrooms for the quality of education their kids are receiving. A recent poll by the FM3 Research firm found that a whopping seventy-five percent of parents believed that distance learning was inferior to in-class instruction. Parents are concerned about the learning loss their kids face as well as the social drawbacks. Socially anxious kids may be the most hard hit because they are void of the social exposure that attending school offers, which over time provides them with the interactional practice and acquisition of social skills that renders them less socially avoidant.

Overuse of screens—especially videogaming—is more the bane of parents’ existence than usual. Virtual learning leaves many kids bored and undermotivated. A perfect storm arises—kids rushing through their schoolwork to maximize their videogame time and parents feeling hamstrung, capitulating when they know they shouldn’t, because their own job responsibilities working remotely from home leave them, understandably, otherwise preoccupied. Several months ago, nearly seventy-five million residents of California, Illinois, Connecticut, and New York were ordered to sequester themselves at home. Simultaneously, videogame play during Verizon’s peak hour of internet usage increased seventy-five percent from the week before. Being lax about kids’ videogame usage may be unavoidable. But it’s an arrangement that’s unsustainable since data indicate that most parents are deeply concerned about the risks posed to their kids while playing videogames—ninety-four percent, in fact, according to a McAfee study.

For high-school and college students, the struggles imposed by the pandemic are especially pronounced. Adolescence and young adulthood are phases of life that emphasize individuating from one’s family and venturing out into the world to build greater personal assertiveness and agency. Having teachers, professors, coaches, and other supportive adults to educate and mentor them strengthens the individuation process and fosters teenagers’ and young adults’ social competence and self-confidence. Millions of teenagers and young adults are now housebound, reliant on social media to stay in contact with peers and stuck having parents as the omnipresent adults in their lives to whom they feel accountable. Time will tell to what degree stay-at-home orders and remote learning have thwarted and delayed the individuation experience of this generation of teenagers and young adults.

How are we to stay sane during these insane times? Top of the list, for me, pertains to respectfully honoring spacial and emotional boundaries. Confined at home—often in close quarters—having to locate the ideal conditions for them to stay motivated, focused, and productive, it behooves parents and kids alike to be overt with their needs. Under the best of conditions, it is extremely difficult, even for adults, to assertively ask for alone time. Kids and teens often communicate their needs for separateness—to have physical and emotional space from a parent—indirectly through their behavior, conveying grumpiness, irritation, or defiance. Having a family meeting to discuss matters such as: how closed doors signal a wish to be alone; better ways to rearrange the physical environment at home to allow each family member access to their ideal working conditions; and the acceptability of requesting alone time in kind, assertive ways are all highly relevant issues.

The way we conduct our emotional lives and relate to one another as family members even has a bearing on the health or ill-health of our immune systems. Just like viruses, emotions are contagious. Partners “catch” each other’s stress, and there are adverse health implications. The good news is that partners also “catch” each other’s happiness. Cooped up at home to protect against the transmission of COVID-19, sharing humor and goodwill gestures will not only help avert the outbreak of a parallel pandemic—more strife in family life—but keep our immune systems well-toned.

 

About the Author 

Enrico Gnaulati, PhD, is a nationally recognized reformer of mental health practice and policy. His latest book is Saving Talk Therapy: How Health Insurers, Big Pharma, and Slanted Science are Ruining Good Mental Health Care (Beacon Press, 2018).

A Q&A with Michael Torres

Who do we belong to? This is the question Michael Torres ponders as he explores the roles that names, hometown, language, and others’ perceptions each play on our understanding of ourselves in his debut poetry collection An Incomplete List of Names. More than a boyhood ballad or a coming-of-age story, this collection illuminates an artist’s struggle to make sense of the disparate identities others have forced upon him. Poet Raquel Salas Rivera selected it as our winner in the National Poetry Series. For Hispanic/Latinx Heritage Month, he caught up with Torres to chat with him about it.

Raquel Salas Rivera: One of the things that struck me the most was your use of metaphor. You seem to be doing something akin to what I’ve long been trying to do in my own work—find metaphors in the quotidian, in your surroundings. In your opening poem, “1991,” for example, you compare “an eyelash/ resting on the fingertip” to “an empty/ teeter-totter at the park.” Each of these alone would stand its ground, but the fact that you are able to draw them together, through both movement, precarity, and intimacy, that's something else. It reminds me of Federico García Lorca's argument that Luis de Góngora was able to create island-metaphors, small solar systems around metaphors, where two things are comparable on only one point, but work at different levels. Who do you feel taught you some of what you know about metaphor, or who, I guess, influenced you?

Michael Torres: I’d have to say Larry Levis has been the biggest influence. Though, I don’t think I intentionally went to his work for metaphors. I just loved the way another, surreal world could blossom from within the real world of the poem. I’m always fascinated at the point in which an image or description sinks into a deeper space.

RSR: Who is the Pachucho? When do you decide to speak in the third person and when in the first? Talk to me about those choices.

MT: The Pachuco is based on an imagined version of my grandfather, and understanding that my speaker is the grandson, I was able to write about topics or concerns in ways that, for some reason I still can’t quite name, I couldn’t when I perceived the speaker as me. Simply put, the Pachuco gives his grandson confidence (maybe I’m speaking to lineage); the Pachuco’s grandson is a lot bolder/more daring than the speaker I’d been writing through before he came to the page.

RSR: The poem where the Pachuco's Grandson is first introduced is particularly interesting because, in a way, it is not just the generality of your multiple names, but also about institutional erasure. The speaker responds to the moment in which the teacher chooses not to call your name in roll call with “That’s how I knew/ I didn’t have to answer no more. I became absence/ in my seat, asleep.” I was also left thinking about tagging in graffiti, how the tag is more about getting your name everywhere than about being aesthetically pleasing, more about having a presence in public space. Talk to me about the importance of naming in the book. 

MT: Growing up (particularly in middle school), some of my best friends and just the funnest people to hang with at lunch were who the adults—proctors, vice principals, PE coaches—thought were only troublemakers and were often, in my opinion, mistreated. I have a distinct memory of returning with a homie to the vice principal’s office at the end of the school year to retrieve his pager. That year, I’d worked as an office assistant (insert nerd emoji here), and when the vice principal saw me walk in with my homie, he said, “You’re friends with this guy?” He seemed genuinely confused. I, on the other hand, thought: Yes, of course; he’s a wonderful friend. Needless to say, very early on, I learned not to trust what authority figures thought of people they knew only from certain angles or aspects. Naturally, this led me to want to take control of my own identity as I grew into adolescence. The homies I then made in high school were all mostly graffiti artists. Our identity, the names we gave ourselves, were the most important aspects of us. It was reputation and recognition, on our terms. 

RSR: Poems like “The Very Short Story of Your Knuckles” and “The Pachuco’s Grandson Smokes His First Cigarette After Contemplating Masculinity,” in fact most of the poems of the book, deal with masculinity and lineage directly. I’m struck by the verses, “What mean teach/ boys to be, girls witness as well.” Do you think poetry has given you the face to rethink patriarchal masculinity? If so, why? If not, when do you think that questioning began?

MT: Since poetry, for me, is explorative, I’ve been able to expand on masculinity, its various manifestations. It’s more complicated and complex than I gave it credit for growing up. (How could I fathom it, right?) It runs deep. It modulates and corrects every action and answer. I still find myself abiding by it, even as I critique it. Yes, I like to think about the harm in that but I also think it’s as important to identify/label as many parts of this creation, and its reverberations—in my community, in the greater society. There’s nothing and no one it doesn’t permeate. I think a lot of the tension in my poems stems from the speaker’s desire to simultaneously stay true to a macho masculinity while also presenting and maintaining tenderness.

RSR: In the poem, “Empties” you write, “How many hours did I spend/ inventing my childhood? And what did it look like/ to my father who never stopped to play, who instead/ crushed each stubborn can under his heavy boot?” Do you think of poetry as a kind of “play”?

MT: I think play truly happens for me in metaphor. Most of my work is narrative and elegiac in tone and execution, so metaphor is almost like a moment of excitement, or something that means shaking up that narrative. I also understand it as playful, because metaphor is also a way where I/the speaker is once removed. There’s a degree of separation (from the narrative) that opens up this space to be playful—usually that’s where I’m also dipping into being lyrical.

Also, poetry has been, for me, a place where my imagination—something I can’t separate from childhoodness—thrives. What is the imagination if not play? I never wanted to lose that part of me. Thinking about it like that, it makes sense that I ended up in the arts.

RSR: I grew up obsessed with hip hop in Puerto Rico during the early 2000s. I listened to everything from Black Star to Intifada, which back then was still called Conciencia Poética. So I was listening to 90s underground stuff I could get my hands on and early Vico C, then I was going to shows and b-boy competitions with a tape recorder doing interviews because I was an obsessed teenager. Not that many people know about how obsessed I used to be with hip hop, its history, and how it got to Puerto Rico. Then I met my first boyfriend, Edgar Vidal—may he rest in peace—and Edgar had his old crew from the Bronx who he sometimes freestyled with. With him, I learned so much more about hip hop in New York. All this to say, your book probably hit me hard also because of that background. I saw that you tagged a few copies of the book with bubble letters and I got so excited. When did hip hop enter your life and how do you see it relating to your poetry? Oh, and who is your favorite MC?

MT: Being brought up on the West Coast during the era of East Vs. West beefs, hip hop was always around. LA and Hollywood were like an hour away. Though we lived in the hood, the aura of celebrity and rappers was there. I listened to Tupac. Learned and loved The Pharcyde, Tribe Called Quest. Black Star too! So those experiences coupled with an older sister who exposed me to Shakespeare and Dickinson when I was really young really set the foundation. 

Not long after high school, I learned about a local open mic spot, A Mic and Dim Lights. Spoken word and slam poetry with a DJ to mix and play music during breaks. That’s actually where I got my first taste of performing poetry. I’d write and memorize pieces that I performed there. I even got to feature there once. Back then, a lot of what I wrote was a mix of hip hop and its rhythms and narrative storytelling that would later become the focus of my writing process. This is probably why I still love a hype, high energy reading event over a quiet-snaps, nodding-type reading. 

So many MCs to choose from! I have to say Kendrick Lamar. I have to. West Coast, represent! He was also coming up when I decided on being a poet. So I loved watching his growth and success as I began to move through the literary world.

RSR: Thank you again for taking the time to answer these questions, Michael. My final question is, how do you hope this book moves through the world? Who would you love to see reading it and why?

MT: When I started writing this book, I imagined it for my homies primarily, and I still do; but now they have kids who are getting to the age I was when who I was going to be developed through adolescent experiences. I want this book in their hands too. I want this book in the hands of anyone who uses the term “homie” or the phrase “this foo”—which to me is a masculine cariño. I hope these poems are worthy. That someone may flip through its pages and find themselves in it.

 

About Michael Torres 

Michael Torres was born and brought up in Pomona, CA, where he spent his adolescence as a graffiti artist. In 2019, he received fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Loft Literary Center for the Mirrors & Windows Program. His writing has been featured in POETRY, Ploughshares, and other literary journals. Currently, he teaches in the MFA program at Minnesota State University, Mankato, and through the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop. Connect with him at michaeltorreswriter.com.

We were hoping Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg would hold out through November. After serving twenty-seven years on the nation’s highest court, she passed away on September 18. She was eighty-seven. A legal, cultural, and feminist icon and champion of gender equality, she was an inspiration, a bastion of strength and courage. We asked some of our authors to reflect on her legacy and share their remembrances here.

***

“FROM THE PERSONAL . . .

Justice Ginsburg showed that size doesn’t matter. Just over five feet tall, she proved that true stature does not need to come in a six-foot-tall, loud, male package. Her legacy is historic. She wielded incredible power through her words and deeds. As someone who has been routinely underestimated due to my size and gender, this is especially meaningful. She was also inspiring to older women, including my mother and her friends, proving that you can work out and do planks well into your eighties.

She also exemplified persistence, arguing numerous cases before the Supreme Court, through which she built a path toward gender equality, step by step. As only the second woman appointed to the Supreme Court, she knew that “women belong in all the places decisions are being made . . .”

. . . TO THE POLITICAL

Which brings me to health reform. Her now famous statement that “women belong in all the places decisions are being made” is one of my all-time favorite quotes. I included it in my book as the lead-in to the chapter on health reform solutions. I, too, have seen that we cannot have true fairness in our policies if women are not at the table, in seats of power where they can decide or strongly influence the outcome. Decades ago, Ruth paved the way for this to happen. And health reform proves the point. Justice Ginsburg MUST be replaced with someone who will protect the ACA, as well as a woman’s right to choose whether or not she has a child. 

Losing Ruth Bader Ginsburg at this critical moment threatens so many of the issues she fought for. In this fall’s election, we have to fight for her legacy, and our own lives. She deserves no less.”
—Rosemarie Day, Marching Toward Coverage: How Women Can Lead the Fight for Universal Health Care

 

“Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (aka the ‘Notorious RBG’), taught the world that women’s rights were human rights. She believed that discrimination against women harmed everyone—not just women, but also men, children, families, the economy, and the larger society. As a lawyer for the ACLU in the 1970s, she regularly convinced the nine men on the Supreme Court to see discrimination that way, too. She then served on that Court for twenty-seven years, helping to shape the law through her own opinions. But for me personally—as for many other women in law—her greatest impact was to open the door of the mostly-male legal profession to all the women that have followed in her footsteps.”
—Amanda Frost, You Are Not American: Citizenship Stripping from Dred Scott to the Dreamers

 

“So many thoughts swirl following Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s passing; some I have written down, some I have yet to write. The first was a paean to her and her influence on my generation of women lawyers. She was all I wanted to be, as I said in a Washington Post op-ed. She put her considerable legal skills at the service of social change and was successful beyond her wildest expectations. She conceived of an expansive and robust view of equality, where men and women would be freed from the stereotypes that trapped them. She applied her vision to her litigation, spoke about it in her speeches, used it in her teaching and then embodied it in her judging. At the same time, I feel an overarching sense of peril—for the rights that my generation of women won over the course of forty years, the right to choose abortion first and foremost. Justice Ginsburg viewed reproductive rights as part of a skein of rights, each dependent upon the other. In situating abortion squarely in the fight for women’s equality, she tried to reframe the debate. Not about competing interests (fetal life vs. a woman’s rights), not just about abortion, but also birth control. If a woman cannot choose when or if to be a mother, no other protections mater. And I feel rage—flat-out rage (at who? The Divine?)—that she could not have lasted just few months longer, that the Republicans, by rushing through a Ginsburg replacement—as if they could—are dancing on her grave. This beyond the trope: elections have consequences. The Court the latest nominee, Amy Coney Barrett, may join has a fundamentally premodern view of American democracy, hearkening back to the years before the New Deal. Then I swing back to profound gratitude for knowing her at all.

In 2014, I gave the Ruth Bader Ginsburg lecture for the New York City Bar Association. I ended by quoting a speech of Jill Ruckelshaus, a founder of the National Women’s Political Caucus, in the 1970s: 

‘We are in for a very, very long haul . . . . I am asking for everything you have to give. We will never give up . . . You will lose your youth, your sleep, your arches, your patience, your sense of humor, and occasionally . . . the understanding and support of the people you love very much. In return, I have nothing to offer you but . . . your pride in being a woman, all your dreams you’ve have had for your daughters, your future and the certain knowledge that at the end of your days you will be able to look back and say that once in your life you gave everything you had for justice.’   

“And I turned directly to the Justice and said, ‘Justice Ginsburg, in all of the roles you have played, role model, advocate, judge, justice, one thing is clear. You gave everything you had for justice.’”
—Nancy Gertner, In Defense of Women: Memoirs of an Unrepentant Advocate

 

“First and foremost, I will remember Justice Ginsburg with gratitude for her pathbreaking work in creating, as legal scholar Linda Greenhouse has put it, ‘a new jurisprudence of sex equality’—work that has changed the life possibilities for millions of Americans. But I will also remember her for her extraordinary deftness at combining the roles of brilliant and highly respected Supreme Court Justice and popular culture icon. I will never forget the moment when asked how she felt about her new identity as the ‘Notorious RBG,’ a name clearly based on the rapper The Notorious B.I.G., she calmly answered, ‘Well, we have something very important in common—we were both born in Brooklyn.’ Or, how she, a well-known lover of opera, actually agreed to act in one! By agreeing to be such an icon, while never sacrificing her dignity, this octogenarian reached countless people, of all ages, and inspired them with a vision of gender equality.”
—Carole Joffe, Dispatches from Abortion Wars: The Costs of Fanaticism to Doctors, Patients, and the Rest of Us  

 

“The last public event I attended was in February at Union Theological Seminary in New York where Ruth Bader Ginsburg gave the annual Women of Spirit lecture. It was evident then that her health was fragile, but it was also clear that her mind was not! Listening to her wisdom in the twilight of her life was a gift and a blessing. As we remember her legacy and consider the fight that is brewing over her replacement, I believe her own words offer us all something important to remember about the power of the Court. She said, ‘The Court is a reactive institution. If the people don’t care, nothing will change.’ Her legacy is also our responsibility to support and to defend.”
—Rebecca Todd Peters, Trust Women: A Progressive Christian Argument for Reproductive Justice

 

“Ruth Bader Ginsburg worked tirelessly for justice and equality, with a humility and strength that has inspired me and countless others. As a personal remembrance, Justice Ginsburg generously wrote the foreword to one of my books, a judicial biography. Judge Richard S. Arnold, she wrote, was ‘ever mindful of the people law exists to serve.’ She recognized this value in others, because it was so much a part of her judicial work. She best served people, as she put it, by helping ‘repair tears in her society, to make things a little better.’ Justice Ginsburg leaves an incredible legacy and the inspiration to continue to fight for justice and equality.”
—Polly Price, Plagues in the Nation (forthcoming)

 

“The death of Justice Ginsburg has been simply crushing, for all the obvious reasons. The work of pioneering advocates like Ginsburg was what inspired me to go to law school in the first place, and her most famous accomplishments are so well-known that I do not have to repeat them here. Instead, I'll write something that may be fairly unpopular: I was never a fan of the ‘Notorious RBG’ nickname. For one thing, RBG was a liberal incrementalist; she was not a radical judge (if such a thing can even exist). But more importantly, I always felt this nickname diminished her—it reduced her to a symbol, an inoffensive logo to slap on a tote-bag or t-shirt. Yet RBG was more than a symbol, more than a logo, more, even, than a judge. She was, at her best, a clear-eyed and incisive and inclusive activist, one who never failed to credit Pauli Murray and Dorothy Kenyon for the legal theories on which she drew. As an advocate, Ginsburg challenged the death penalty, forced sterilization, and racially disparate sentencing, in addition to her well-known fights for gender equality. So many of us have benefited from her advocacy. The movement of which she was a part continues to embolden and inspire me, even in our dystopian present.”
—Scott W. Stern, The Trials of Nina McCall: Sex, Surveillance, and the Decades-Long Government Plan to Imprison “Promiscuous” Women

By Paul Ortiz

The outbreak of COVID-19 is far from the first time immigrants and the Latinx community have been taken for granted as the labor force that keeps this country running. Today, they face poverty wages, the threat of infection, white supremacist violence, and/or deportation. As Paul Ortiz shows in this selection from An African American and Latinx History of the United States, they faced poverty wages, displacement, white supremacist violence, and deportation in the past. So little has changed, including the demonizing rhetoric used against them. Sound familiar? And yet, they still thrive and resist.

***

The reconfiguration of racial capitalism in the early twentieth century hinged upon the exploitation of agricultural workers who were fired, deported, or driven into cities when they tried to organize in defense of their interests. Local governments, growers, and vigilantes in the Sunbelt counties stretching from Orange County, Florida, to Orange County, California, put the hammer down on agricultural laborers seeking to achieve independence. Employers and their enforcers ruthlessly suppressed Mexican, Chinese, Sikh, Japanese, Indian, Italian, white, and African American farmworkers seeking to organize. In 1908, a group of armed white citizens marched into a camp of farmworkers of Indian extraction in Live Oak, California, and “burned it to the ground, beat and terrorized a hundred or more Hindus in the camp, drove them out of the community, and, in doing so, robbed them of about $2,500.” For decades, politicians in California used anti-Chinese racism as bluntly as the Democratic Party used anti-Black hatred in the South to consolidate power. Leading growers in Jim Crow Florida urged their industry to look to California for a solution to the “labor problem” in agriculture.

The birth of modern agribusiness in the United States is a chronicle of dispossession. The Texas Rangers and other law enforcement agents played a key role in the bloody process of expropriating lands belonging to Mexican and Native American people. The historian Robert Perkinson writes, “From the beginning, the territory’s pioneering lawmen did less to suppress crime in any conventional sense than to force open lands for Anglo American settlement.” Mexican victims of the Texas Rangers’ furious attacks were quite often landowners with extensive holdings: “Title challenges and outright theft led to a loss of more than 187,000 acres of land for Tejanos in the lower Rio Grande Valley from 1900 to 1910.” The historian Zaragosa Vargas notes, “The eventual violent collapse of Tejano ranching society took place in the early twentieth century, when the Texas Rangers, intermediaries in the transition to capitalism, cleaned out the remaining Tejano landowners, summarily executing more than three hundred ‘suspected Mexicans.’” Over time, the pace of land theft quickened. Native Americans suffered most grievously, losing approximately ninety million acres of land in the decades after the implementation of the Dawes Act in 1887.

Agribusiness in the Sunbelt was marked by an authoritarian pattern of social control whereby racism, patriarchy, and rule by force overwhelmed democratic institutions. Writing in 1928, the Trinidadian American sociologist Oliver Cromwell Cox noted, “The Southern leadership, because of its success in disenfranchising its colored labor force, has remained a turbulent, primitive group of capitalists. It has been relatively untouched by the democratic restraints operative in other sections of the country. It can be depended upon, therefore, to throw its vast weight against organized labor and to obstruct movements to implement the democratic gains of the people as a whole.” When one extends Cox’s thesis to the entire Sunbelt, it is apparent that the disenfranchisement of farm labor lent an antidemocratic thrust to rural American politics with regressive implications for democracy that can be felt up to the present day.

In 1915, inspired by the land reforms of the Mexican Revolution, insurgent Tejanos and Mexicans promulgated the Plan de San Diego, which called for the reclaiming of land in southern Texas for Mexican people and Native Americans as well as an independent state for African Americans. The insurgents launched bloody attacks on white ranchers under banners reading “Equality and Independence,” but they were defeated, and a new reign of Ranger-led violence was initiated. It resulted in the murder of hundreds of Tejanos and “the forced displacement of thousands of Mexicans who fled for their lives across the border.”

The US Border Patrol was created in 1924, ostensibly to provide border security. However, as the historian Kelly Lytle Hernández observes, officers of the agency quickly understood immigration enforcement as labor control. Hernández quotes one Texas farmer as saying, “We tell the immigration officers if our Mexicans try to get away to the interior, and they stop them and send them back to Mexico. Then in a few days they are back here and we have good workers for another year.” Mexican laborers who regularly crossed the border between Mexico and the United States to work in Texas—for example, from Ciudad Juarez to El Paso—were sprayed with DDT, Zyklon B, and other carcinogenic chemicals by US health inspectors who used these Mexicans as unwilling subjects in experiments with different delousing treatments. Jose Burciaga, who worked as a janitor in El Paso, recalled, “At the customs bath by the bridge . . . they would spray some stuff on you. It was white and would run down your body. How horrible! And then I remember something else about it: they would shave everyone’s head . . . men, women, everybody. . . . The substance was very strong.” On January 28, 1917, Carmelita Torres, a domestic worker, organized Latinas who refused to be deloused: they shut down traffic in El Paso and protested the racial stereotype of Mexicans as disease carriers.

Employers and politicians invoked racialized stereotypes of Mexican workers to justify poverty wages and the denial of citizenship. Dr. George P. Clements, manager of the Agriculture Department of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce during the 1920s, denigrated the Mexican American worker: “He is ignorant of values; he knows nothing of time; he knows nothing of our laws; he is as primitive as we were 2,500 years ago. He does not know our language, the result being that he becomes a petty criminal through ignorant violations. . . . He rarely if ever takes out his citizenship, mixes in politics, or labor squabbles unless directed by some American group. He is the most tractable individual ever came to serve us.” Ralph H. Taylor, the executive secretary of the California Agricultural Legislative Committee, claimed, “The Mexican has no political ambitions; he does not aspire to dominate the political affairs of the community in which he lives.” Growers and state officials repeatedly emphasized that Mexican workers were preferable to any other form of labor because if they demanded rights or citizenship they could easily be deported.

 

About the Author 

Paul Ortiz is director of the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program and a professor of history at the University of Florida. He is the author of Emancipation Betrayed: The Hidden History of Black Organizing and White Violence from Reconstruction to the Bloody Election of 1920, An African American and Latinx History of the United States, and coeditor of the oral history Remembering Jim Crow: African Americans Tell About Life in the Segregated South. He lives in Gainesville, Florida.

Be Proud of Your Past, Embrace the Future. That’s this year’s theme for Hispanic Heritage Month. In times like these, the theme is a manifesto to live by. The books in our catalog about the lives and contributions of Hispanic/Latinx communities attest to it. Whether writing about Latinx folks joining fellow Black Americans throughout history in the shared struggle for civil rights, personal stories of crossing borders and of staking a claim in a place to call home for a new beginning, or even the human condition in all its complexities in poetry, our authors highlight how important these voices are in the ongoing narrative of the United States. Take a look at these titles from our catalog! Happy Hispanic Heritage Month!

 

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

“A welcome antidote to the poison of current reactionary attitudes toward people of color, their cultures, and place in the US.”
—Booklist

 

How Does It Feel to Be Unwanted?: True Stories of Mexicans Living in the United States
Eileen Truax

“It celebrates the tenacity and resilience of a community whose stories are, without any doubt, part of the American experience.”
—Reyna Grande, author of The Distance Between Us

 

A Cup of Water Under My Bed: A Memoir
Daisy Hernández

“Hernández writes with honesty, intelligence, tenderness, and love. I bow deeply in admiration and gratitude.”
—Sandra Cisneros, author of The House on Mango Street

 

Family Sentence: The Search for My Cuban-Revolutionary, Prison-Yard, Mythic-Hero, Deadbeat Dad
Jeanine Cornillot

“As incisive as she is lyrical, funny as she is profound, Cornillot dislodges the bolero-and-palm-tree nostalgia associated with Cuban American identity, and asserts claim to a new and very real history.”
—H. G. Carillo, author of Loosing My Espanish

 

How to Love a Country: Poems
Richard Blanco

“A visionary hymn of love to the human beings who comprise what we call this country. Whether he speaks in the voice of an immigrant who came here long ago, or the very river an immigrant crosses to come here today, Blanco sings and sings.”
—Martín Espada, author of Vivas to Those Who Have Failed

 

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

“Compelling and complex . . . Told with the authority of a much-respected journalist, whose own experience as an immigrant lends this book the depth, insights, and poignancy that only someone of her experience can convincingly—and rightfully—convey.”
—Oscar Hijuelos, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love

 

An Incomplete List of Names: Poems
Michael Torres

“This spectacular collection of acutely conscious poems awakens readers to our universal need to belong. . . . He speaks to the constant naming and renaming of the self and others at the intersection of multiple identities and perceptions through an arresting voice that is provocative yet vulnerable, urban yet serene, mournful yet buoyant.”
—Richard Blanco, author of How to Love a Country

 

The Lost Apple: Operation Pedro Pan, Cuban Children in the US, and the Promise of a Better Future
María de los Ángeles Torres

“Deeply felt and impressively researched, The Lost Apple undertakes the difficult work of reconciliation—between parents and children, exiles and revolutionaries, the Cuba of yesterday and the Cuba of today.”
—Gustavo Perez Firmat, author of Life on the Hyphen: The Cuban-American Way

 

The Weight of Shadows: A Memoir of Immigration & Displacement
José Orduña

“A provocative and insightful work that is destined to introduce a new form to the world of creative nonfiction...This memoir will no doubt be required reading for years to come.”
—Willie Perdomo, author of The Essential Hits of Shorty Bon Bon

 

When I Walk Through That Door, I Am: An Immigrant Mother’s Quest
Jimmy Santiago Baca

“This slim, salient volume will open readers’ eyes wide to the true human stories behind blaring headlines about immigration policies and debates.”
—Booklist, Starred Review

A Q&A with Angela Chen

Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex is the first book of its kind to offer an in-depth examination of asexuality, contextualize it within the queer community, and resist characterizing aces as a monolith. Journalist Angela Chen centers Ace on the experiences of asexual people and traces a path to understanding her own asexuality through a blend of reporting, cultural criticism, and memoir. She candidly explores the misconceptions around asexuality and challenges us to rethink the meaning of pleasure and intimacy. Our intern, Priyanka Ray, caught up with Chen to chat with her about it.

Priyanka Ray: In Ace, you argue that the experiences of aces can outline the constrictive system of compulsory sexuality and reveal alternate forms of eroticism. What does a world without compulsory sexuality look like, and what steps can we take to dismantle this system?

Angela Chen: A world without compulsory sexuality doesn’t mean desexualizing everything. It means removing the “compulsory” part. It means removing pressures and presenting more ways of how to live. It means more choice. People will be able to choose what they want—a lot of sex, no sex, and so on—without pressure or shame or judgment and without feeling like they need to explain themselves to doubters. People will be encouraged to really question what pleasure is and whether it has to be sexual and find what other forms of pleasure exist in their lives. There will be many types of relationships and relationship models, both in real life and expressed in popular culture. Drug companies won’t prey on people’s fears about low desire to sell medication; there will be more equality in relationships when it comes to desire and consent; and sex ed will include the ace perspective too. 

It’s wonderful when people learn about asexuality and the ace lens and see things differently, but it’ll take so long to get anywhere if we wait for people to discover this way of thinking one by one. I really do believe that it’s important to politically organize, to lobby and campaign and work together to show that there are many ways to live a full life and we should all get to choose the way that works best for us. 

PR: You write that performing sexuality is often a prerequisite for male identity and social inclusion. How do the experiences of asexual men encourage us to deconstruct gender expectations?

AC: There is a pervasive message that “real men” have a lot of sexual desire and are supposed to be able to score with a lot of people. Especially in the cis and hetero context, men are encouraged to speak about women sexually as a bonding activity and as a way of proving their masculinity. Ace men say that this has made them feel like outcasts, encouraged them to “play along” and pretend to have crushes they don’t, encouraged them to have unwanted sex with partners, and at times made them question their gender. One trans man I interviewed said that before his transition, people were fine with what they saw as his sexual hesitancy, but afterward told him that he needed to just “get out there.”

It’s not a secret that these pressures exist, especially because there’s been a lot of discussion about incels (involuntary celibates) in the past couple of years. But the experiences of ace men show that the same pressures that affect incels affects this seemingly opposite group of ace men. In fact, ace men say that people sometimes think they’re actually incels who are just pretending to be asexual because they’re bitter that they can’t get laid. I’m not an incel apologist—plenty of people feel unattractive and excluded without becoming entitled—but this shows how just deeply the idea that men have to be sexual is ingrained. It also shows that working to reduce this pressure would help a lot of different groups of men. 

PR: With the advent of sex positivity, sex has become viewed as a way to perform feminist politics. Therefore, women who do not want or enjoy sex are seen as conservative and repressed by patriarchal control. How can we acknowledge that women’s sexual liberation is political while decentering sex from feminist politics?

AC: Sex is political, of course. Many women are shamed by double standards and don’t feel comfortable exploring their sexuality. I would never contest this. But sexual variation also exists. People are different! There are asexual women out there who simply don’t experience sexual attraction, and it’s not because of shame or repression or because they need to try more sex positions or sex toys. And there’s nothing wrong with that. (It’s also true that you can be both shamed into feeling disconnected from sex and discover that you’re ace. A lot of nuances exist.)

It’s important for people to walk the line between encouraging women to explore, which is good, while also believing them and not being pushy if they say that they’re apathetic about sex and simply not that interested. Don’t assume that, deep down, every woman has a high libido and just needs to throw off the chains of repression to discover it. In general, I advocate letting other people be the experts on themselves. 

I also think it’s important to have more representations of asexuality in popular culture, especially feminist popular culture. Very few feminists would explicitly say that not having sex makes you repressed or that having a lot of sex makes you more feminist or cool—but the message of sex as liberation and sex as cool and sex making you more fun is still present. It’s a feeling in the air and in the culture. I don’t have a problem with explicit content about desire, but I don’t think it’s good for any one message to dominate, because those messages can and do make ace women (and anyone ace-adjacent or anyone who simply isn’t that into sex) feel ashamed. We can keep those messages and also have different stories and different messages brought to prominence, too.

I always advocate for focusing on the power of organizing and collective action. Ace women can feel like they’re not “feminist enough” because they don’t fulfill this supposed requirement that feminist women personally enjoy sex a lot. But the greater potential of organizing is that you work politically to help others and to change structures around a wide variety of issues. Who cares if you don’t care about sex if you’re writing to politicians and campaigning and lobbying for better pay and domestic abuse protections and uplifting women of color? That’s the work that will change systems and do so much good for so many people. 

PR: Throughout the book you illustrate how understanding ace experiences can liberate all of us from harmful cultural narratives, particularly those surrounding consent. What new ways of thinking about and practicing consent do asexual people’s experiences with sex give us? 

AC: There are two things I’d like to highlight. One is this often unspoken belief that while nobody should have unwanted sex with strangers, within a relationship you need a “good enough reason” to say no. A good enough reason is that you’re sick or stressed or that your partner is treating you badly. “I don’t want to” is not a good enough reason. It means you’re withholding and selfish. I think this idea comes from the belief that everyone has a baseline of sexual desire; so if everyone has that baseline and nothing is wrong, why wouldn’t you want to have sex with someone if you love them? 

This kind of reasoning really makes aces feel like “no” within relationships is not okay, that they can say “no” right now but cannot say “no” forever and have to keep fending their partner off. (Well, this reasoning can make everyone feel this way, but the pressure is especially acute for aces.) My position is this: if we believe that people should never have unwanted sex with strangers, no matter how good of a person the stranger may be, we should believe that people should never have unwanted sex with their partners, no matter how good and loving their partner is. Entering a relationship should never mean giving up a measure of consent. I should add that partners are free to not date someone if sex is a dealbreaker, and that is completely their prerogative. But there’s a difference between setting your own boundaries and feeling entitled to sex without ever discussing it and then shaming the other person.

Similarly, there is also a very common narrative that the lower-desire partner is “broken” and it’s their responsibility to work on themselves to fix their libido. But there are two people in a relationship, and this is a shared problem that needs a shared solution. If one person wants to have sex just as much as the other person wants not to have sex, why is the preference of the higher-desire partner given more moral weight? Shouldn’t they be equal, because they’re equal people in the relationship? There are so many books on learning to desire again, whereas it’s rare to ask the higher-desire partner to have less sexual desire. Asking someone to work on themselves to have more sex seems reasonable, but asking someone to try to be celibate or have less sex seems like asking too much. 

Don’t get me wrong. Of course I acknowledge that most people in relationships have and enjoy sex and that having sex is “normal”—insofar as “normal” means “statistically common.” But I argue that “statistically common” is less important in a relationship than carefully considering what the two people in the relationship want and what works for them and how each can feel valued and learn to compromise. In that case, the preferences of both people should have equal weight.

PR: What insights would you want allo (non-asexual) readers to take away from your book?

AC: The questions that aces have regarding sexuality and desire are questions that almost everyone (ace or not) will deal with at some point, and a lot can be gained from the ace perspective. Learning about asexuality can encourage allos to rethink their very definitions of sexual attraction and sexuality. It can help them consider more carefully the ways that sexuality intersects with race and disability and gender; the ways we privilege romantic relationships over friendships; the invisible inequalities in relationships and consent. It can help them think through questions such as the difference between platonic and romantic feelings and the difference between “normal” low-sexual desire and asexuality and a medical condition. The ace lens really offers new ways of evaluating sexual ethics and pleasures and intimacy.

 

About Angela Chen 

Angela Chen is a journalist and writer in New York City. Her reporting and criticism have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Atlantic, Guardian, Paris Review, Electric Literature, Catapult, and elsewhere. Chen is a member of the ace community and has spoken about asexuality at academic conferences and events including World Pride. Find her on Twitter @chengela or at angelachen.org.

By Alan Levinovitz

This is so unfair and tragic for South African Olympic champion Caster Semenya. She lost her appeal against the restriction of testosterone in female athletes and cannot compete in the 800m because of her hyperandrogenism. She is being punished for what happens naturally in her biology. For us, she’ll always be a winner. But it’s a complicated issue—our shifty idea of what counts as “natural” in athletes and what is biologically permissible in sporting competitions. In this excerpt from Natural: How Faith in Nature’s Goodness Leads to Harmful Fads, Unjust Laws, and Flawed Science, Alan Levinovitz shows just how fraught the division between women and men in sports has been along these lines . . . and what Semenya was up against.

***

The value of inclusiveness, like fairness, is written into the International Association of Athletics Federations’ (IAAF) official constitution. One of the organization’s primary goals is “to strive to ensure that no gender, race, religious, political or other kind of unfair discrimination exists, continues to exist, or is allowed to develop in Athletics in any form, and that all may participate in Athletics regardless of their gender, race, religious or political views or any other irrelevant factor.”

That gender shouldn’t affect one’s ability to participate in athletics is now taken for granted, but only after overcoming centuries of pseudoscientific sexism arguing that women were naturally unfit to compete. In ancient Greece, women could not participate in the Olympics, and married women were prohibited from watching. They were also left out of the first modern Olympics, since, in the words of Baron Pierre de Coubertin, founder of the games, their inclusion would be “impractical, uninteresting, unaesthetic, and incorrect.”

Even after women were allowed to participate, it was only in those sports believed to accord with their naturally delicate physiology: tennis, croquet, sailing, and golf. Experts warned that more strenuous events might cause women to age prematurely, their uteruses to fall out, and perhaps turn them into men. When the 800 meters was opened to women in the 1928 Olympics, scandalized journalists exaggerated or invented the fatigue experienced by the competitors. “Below us on the cinder path were 11 wretched women, 5 of whom dropped out before the finish, while 5 collapsed after reaching the tape,” claimed one account in the New York Evening Post. “It is obviously beyond women’s powers of endurance, and can only be injurious to them,” asserted another writer in the Montreal Daily Star. In fact, only nine women had run the race, all of them finished, and only one could conceivably be characterized as collapsing. But the truth didn’t matter. In accordance with an invented version of natural law, women were banned from the 800 meters until 1960.

When it comes to women’s participation in sports, there’s an important distinction to be drawn between two types of discrimination. The first type of discrimination bars women from participating in sports thought to be incompatible with women’s biology, such as ski jumping, the 800 meters, and boxing (men’s only until the 2012 Olympics). This type of discrimination has been repeatedly shown to have no basis in science. When it comes to women’s ability to participate in and excel at any sport, gender should be considered an “irrelevant factor,” as the IAAF describes it.

The second type of discrimination is that which divides men and women for the purposes of competition. With the exception of equestrian events and sailing, in every Olympic sport, and in nearly every professional sport, men compete against men and women compete against women. Some have suggested that having men’s and women’s categories also represents an unfair form of discrimination, and ought to be replaced with different classificatory categories that more accurately reflect the physical traits demanded by a given sport, a practice that already has precedent in the use of weight classes. “For example, for a 100m sprinter, the ideal athlete would perhaps be made up of muscle mass and fast-twitch fibres,” writes Roslyn Kerr, a sociologist of sport, “Therefore, rather than classifying by sex, sprinters could be classified by their level of muscle mass and fast-twitch fibres.”

Despite such critiques, advocates of female participation in sports generally recognize the need for, and benefits of, sex segregation. The exercise physiologist Ross Tucker puts it straightforwardly: “Being genetically male is the single biggest performance advantage in sport.” The advantage enjoyed by biological males exceeds that of other comparatively advantageous traits, including height and weight. A 2010 study quantified the gap between men’s and women’s top performances in eighty-two different events, from swimming to speed skating. Starting in 1896, the gap narrowed significantly over time as women were allowed to participate in sports. But by 1983 the gap stabilized “at a mean difference of 10.0% ± 2.94 between men and women for all events.” The gap depends on the sport, from 5.5 percent for 800-meter freestyle swimming to 36.8 percent for weightlifting. Nevertheless, the overall conclusion is clear: “Results suggest that women will not run, jump, swim or ride as fast as men.” Discrimination of the second type is based on good science, not pseudoscientific sexism, and there’s a very strong case to be made that it is beneficial for elite female athletes, who would not otherwise get to compete at the highest levels of their sport.

However, policing the division between men and women in sports has a long and fraught history. Since men have the biological advantage, the only athletes subject to sex testing have been women. In the 1960s, when official testing standards were first adopted by the International Olympic Committee and the IAAF, female athletes were subject to incredibly humiliating inspections, including being paraded naked in front of doctors who would inspect their genitalia and pronounce them genuine women. Widespread indignation led to the adoption of chromosome testing, but that proved equally controversial. Unlike weight and height, biological sex occasionally defies simple forms of measurement. This fact was vividly and tragically illustrated in a horrific ordeal endured by the Spanish hurdler Maria José Martínez-Patiño. In 1985, she was looking forward to competing in the World University Games in Japan as a woman, just as she always had. Now a physician, Martínez-Patiño has made public the painful details of what happened. “Our team doctor told me—in front of the teammates I sat with on the night before my race—that there was a problem with my result,” she recalls. The doctor told her to fake an injury and withdraw from the race. She agreed, devastated, not knowing what exactly had gone wrong. “Did I have AIDS? Or leukaemia, the disease that had killed my brother?”

Two months later, the official results arrived. She was 46, XY—the male karyotype. But because of a condition known as androgen insensitivity, Martínez-Patiño was insensitive to testosterone, which is why no one, including her, had any idea: “When I was conceived, my tissues never heard the hormonal messages to become male.” Eventually her story was leaked to the press, with catastrophic results:

I was expelled from our athletes’ residence, my sports scholarship was revoked, and my running times were erased from my country’s athletics records. I felt ashamed and embarrassed. I lost friends, my fiancé, hope, and energy. But I knew that I was a woman, and that my genetic difference gave me no unfair physical advantage. I could hardly pretend to be a man; I have breasts and a vagina. I never cheated.

Martínez-Patiño successfully appealed her disqualification, and after a few different attempts to standardize the testing practices, the IOC gave up and adopted a “suspicion-based” approach. If someone seemed like they might not be a woman, well, then they’d be subjected to further testing.

Unsurprisingly, this approach failed miserably. In 2009, South African runner named Caster Semenya, then eighteen years old, won gold at the Berlin World Championships, crushing her rivals in the once-forbidden-to-women 800 meters. Some of them were suspicious. “These kind[s] of people should not run with us,” stated the Italian sixth-place finisher Elisa Cusma. “For me, she’s not a woman. She’s a man.” The IAAF responded by requiring tests, and, as in Martínez-Patiño’s case, news of the testing leaked to the press. Some members of the media mocked Semenya’s “masculine” appearance and called her a hermaphrodite. She reportedly spent two hours with her legs in stirrups to facilitate examination and photographs of her genitalia, and eventually went into hiding, undergoing treatment for trauma.

In the wake of the Semenya debacle, the IAAF issued a new standard for competing as a female, this time based on testosterone. Again, there were problems. The new standard disqualified all female competitors with hyperandrogenism, a rare condition that causes women to have testosterone levels that are in the typically male range, which, some speculate, is what Semenya has. In 2014, testing revealed that the Indian sprinter Dutee Chand was also above the limit set by the IAAF for female competitors. The Sports Authority of India subsequently ruled that Chand “will still be able to compete in the female category in [the] future if she takes proper medical help and lowers her androgen [testosterone] level to the specified range.”

Appalled at the thought of having to artificially lower her naturally produced androgen level with medication, Chand appealed her case to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), the same administrative body that considered Pistorius’s case. The naturalness of her hyperandrogenism, as well as the potential side effects of a medical intervention, was central to her case. She argued that any advantage she enjoyed was a “natural genetic gift,” and that in no other case do natural physiological advantages disqualify an athlete. “These interventions are invasive, often irreversible and will harm my health now and into my future,” she said in a statement to the CAS. “I am unable to understand why I am asked to fix my body in a certain way simply for participation as a woman. I was born a woman, reared up as a woman, I identify as a woman and I believe I should be allowed to compete with other women, many of whom are either taller than me or come from more privileged backgrounds, things that most certainly give them an edge over me.”

Chand’s case was taken up by numerous experts, including the Stanford bioethicist Katrina Karkazis. “When a man has unusually high levels of testosterone, the next step is a carbon isotope test,” she told me. “If it’s deemed to be natural, the case is closed. But for women, if it’s natural the case is not closed, and you get ushered into more tests.” Although Chand won her appeal, the issue is far from settled. In late 2018, the IAAF issued new testosterone limits that would, once again, disqualify Chand and other hyperandrogenous female athletes. The limits sparked outrage, and Caster Semenya made a rare public statement denouncing them. “I don’t like talking about this new rule,” she said. “I just want to run naturally, the way I was born. It is not fair that I am told I must change. It is not fair that people question who I am. I am Mokgadi Caster Semenya. I am a woman and I am fast.” (As of this writing, Semenya’s fate still hangs in the balance. By the time you read these words, it may have been settled.)

The IAAF’s clarifying comments are notably unhelpful, lurching between recognition that sport “seeks to celebrate” a combination of “natural talent and sacrifice and determination” while also maintaining that high testosterone levels are a unique natural biological advantage that should be regulated.26 Part of the dilemma is that the distinct biological advantage enjoyed by men over women cannot be translated into a rule about testosterone. Hyperandrogenous women are not men. They do not exhibit the same kind of dominance in their respective sports that men would. Nevertheless, the question remains open: If testosterone levels fail to capture that advantage, how can regulatory bodies like the CAS fairly adjudicate the division between men’s and women’s sports.

 

About the Author 

Alan Levinovitz is associate professor of religious studies at James Madison University. In addition to academic journals, his writing has appeared in Wired, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, Aeon, Vox, Slate, and elsewhere. He is the author of Natural: How Faith in Nature’s Goodness Leads to Harmful Fads, Unjust Laws, and Flawed Science. Connect with him on Twitter at @AlanLevinovitz.

A Q&A with Vicki Mayk

Owen Thomas, star football player at Penn, took his own life when he was only twenty-one. The result of the pain and anguish was caused by chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). His landmark case demonstrated that a player didn’t need years of head bashing in the NFL, or even multiple sustained brain concussions, to cause the mind-altering, life-threatening, degenerative disease.

In her book Growing Up on the Gridiron: Football, Friendship, and the Tragic Life of Owen Thomas, award-winning journalist Vicki Mayk explores his story, the community touched by it, and the cultural allure of football. Her exploration raises a critical question: does loving a sport justify risking your life? Beacon Broadside editor Christian Coleman caught up with Mayk to chat with her about it and to ask what the impact of high schools and colleges canceling or delaying football seasons has had during the pandemic.

Christian Coleman: Tell us about what inspired you to write Growing Up on the Gridiron.

Vicki Mayk: What really drew me to the story was Owen Thomas, the young man who is at the center of my book. When he died by suicide in April 2010, I was invited to join a private memorial page that friends set up for him on Facebook. The way that everyone talked about him—from his teammates at his high school near Allentown, PA, and at the University of Pennsylvania to friends, former teachers, casual acquaintances—was mesmerizing. They told stories about him being a warrior on the field and one of the kindest humans off the field. One girl in his high school said Owen changed the energy when he entered a room. I wanted to answer the question: Who was Owen Thomas and how did someone who was so beloved by so many come to this tragic end? When it emerged that he had chronic traumatic encephalopathy, what we know as CTE, that added another important dimension to the story.

CC: How did you find out about the RIP Owen Thomas memorial page on Facebook?

VM: I actually never met Owen, but a series of events made me feel as if this story chose me. For nearly thirty years, I had lived five minutes away from Union United Church of Christ in Neffs, PA, where Owen’s father, the late Rev. Thomas N. Thomas, was pastor. One day, I decided to go to a service there and began attending somewhat regularly. I don’t know why I chose that particular time to begin attending a church I had passed almost every week for decades. It meant that, when Owen died, I was invited to join the memorial page on Facebook.

CC: His friendships are at the heart of the book. What was it like to interview his friends and teammates to learn about his story?

VM: It was an emotional experience to connect with these young men and women and hear them reminisce about Owen. I stayed in touch with his friends, family, and teammates off and on for nearly a decade after his death, and that longitudinal look at their lives is an integral part of the book. What struck me is that many still shed tears over his loss three, five, even seven years after his death. They keenly felt his loss at key milestones in their lives. One of his friends wore one of his t-shirts under his tux on his wedding day so that Owen would be present for him. I felt they had entrusted me with their memories and were relying on me to document their friendship with someone they had loved.

CC: Even though the dangers and risks of long-term harm are numerous, football matters deeply to many young men like Owen Thomas. Why is that the case?

VM: I learned that the reason young players love this game has as much to do with relationships formed on the team as it does about the game itself. In the book, I refer to this as the brotherhood of football. As human beings, we crave belonging, and football gives young men a powerful sense of belonging. Yes, they enjoy the sport. But bound up with that are the relationships they form on a football team.

CC: During the pandemic, there has been a lot of disappointment over high schools and college football conferences canceling or delaying football seasons. Does your book offer any insights about that?

VM: Football is central to American culture. That is something that has certainly been well documented over the years. Losing it is jarring. But I think my book highlights a key issue about what losing a football season during the pandemic specifically means to high school and college players. Jonathan Holloway, the president of Rutgers University, was interviewed on National Public Radio about canceling football season, and he talked about how much a student athlete’s identity is wrapped up in playing their sport. He said losing that identity is “destabilizing.” My book examines how players’ personal identity is developed by playing football and about how it defines them. Losing a season means disrupting that identity.

CC: And lastly, what would you like readers to take away from reading the book?

VM: I want readers to realize that, given the passion for football in America by players on all levels and by fans, there aren’t easy answers about the future of the sport. I also hope my book will raise awareness about head injuries. If you are a fan, be aware of the risks this game poses for the players you idolize. If you are a player, be aware of the risks you are taking in playing. And if you are a parent, be aware of the fact that research has found that the earlier boys start playing and the longer they play, the greater the risk. Make informed choices. Finally, I hope Owen’s story raises awareness about suicide. Suicide is a complicated issue. It sometimes happens despite treatment and the support of friends and family. But anyone who has lost someone to suicide will tell you: If you see a friend struggling, reach out.

 

About Vicki Mayk 

A former reporter for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Vicki Mayk has enjoyed a 35-year career in journalism and public relations. Her love affair with football began at the age of nine, when her father first took her to a Steelers game. She is the author of Growing Up on the Gridiron: Football, Friendship, and the Tragic Life of Owen Thomas. Connect with her at vickimayk.com and follow her on Twitter (@VickiMayk).

By Pamela D. Toler

If you’ve been waiting with bated breath for the release of Disney’s live-action Mulan, the time to wait is over. For a price. Delayed again and again and again because of the pandemic, the film will be available to stream on Disney+ for $30. Say what? But if you’re in no mood to throw any coin at the House of Mouse, here’s another option. Read this selection from Pamela D. Toler’s Women Warriors: An Unexpected History about her. In all its variations and incarnations (Conglomoland is late to the adaptation party with its animated and live action versions), the story of the cross-dressing warrior is one of many in overlooked history, proving that women have always fought—not in spite of being women but because they are women.

***

The Chinese heroine Hua Mulan is one of the oldest and most enduring examples of a woman who becomes a warrior because of her role as a daughter¹.

Scholars have argued for centuries over whether or not Mulan was a historical figure. At some level, it doesn’t matter as far as piecing together her story is concerned. The available information about her life is scarce to nonexistent, even by the often-shaky standard of what we know about other women warriors of the ancient world.

Our oldest source for her story is the “Poem of Mulan,” which appears in a twelfth-century poetry anthology compiled by Guo Maoqian², who attributes it to a sixth-century collection that no longer exists. The poem is anonymous, undated, and three hundred words long. A few details, such as the use of the title “khan” rather than “emperor,” suggest the poem dates from the Northern dynasties period (386–581 CE)³.

For the most part, I chose not to discuss the stories of mythical women warriors, because there are plenty of historical examples to consider⁴. But Mulan is a special case. She is as well known in China as Joan of Arc is in the West. Despite the absence of biographical details in the original source, several regions of China claim her as their own folk heroine.

Mulan’s story is familiar to American audiences thanks to the 1998 Disney film Mulan⁵. But the Walt Disney Company is simply one in a long tradition of Mulan adapters, and by no means the most fanciful in its interpretation. Over a period of 1,500 years, Mulan’s story has been told in Chinese operas, plays, folk tales, and now video games.

While the versions differ in the details, the basic structure of the story remains the same: Threatened by invaders from the north, the emperor (or the khan) conscripted soldiers to defend the country. Because her father was too old to fight and her brother too young, Mulan purchased a horse, weapons, and armor; disguised herself as a man; and joined the army to fulfill the family’s conscription obligation.

The original poem gives us a brief, vivid impression of Mulan’s life as a soldier, but no details:

She did not hear her parents’ voices, calling for their daughter,
She only heard the whinnying of Crimson Mountain’s Hunnish horsemen.
Myriads of mile: she joined the thick of battle,
Crossing the mountain passes as if flying.
Winds from the north transmitted metal rattles,
A freezing light shone on her iron armor.
A hundred battles and the brass were dead;
After ten years the bravest men returned⁶.

This is war from the common soldier’s viewpoint, stripped down to misery and poetry. Later versions of the story fill this space with heroic deeds, gender-problematic romances, and, in the Disney version, a smart-mouthed dragon sidekick.

At the end of their tour of duty, Mulan and her comrades met with the emperor, who offered them honorary ranks, appointments at court, and rewards “counted in the millions.” (In one late version, the emperor discovers her gender and offers to make her his consort. She tells him she would rather die.) Mulan refused everything; all she wanted was a fast horse (or sometimes a camel) to take her home. Once there, she went into the house and put on a woman’s clothing and makeup. When she came back out, her army buddies were flabbergasted by the truth. During the ten (or sometimes twelve) years she served in the army, none of her fellow soldiers suspected she was a woman⁷.

In Mulan’s story, the link between being a daughter and becoming a soldier is direct and irrefutable. Chinese readers/listeners/viewers would understand her action as an extreme act of filial piety. In fact, in one version of the story she receives the posthumous title Filial-Staunchness. Filial piety—respect for and obedience to one’s parents—is the foundation on which Confucian society stands. Children are loyal to their parents. Wives are loyal to their husbands. Subjects are loyal to the ruler. The ruler is loyal to the kingdom itself. If everyone performs their duties to those above them in the hierarchy, society flourishes. If duties are not faithfully performed, chaos reigns, the emperor loses the mandate of heaven, and dynasties fall. It is an alien concept for those of us who grew up in a culture defined in terms of rights rather than social duties. But it is as powerful a fundamental social principle as “all men are created equal.”

Seen through this lens, Mulan became a warrior in order to protect her father, her family, and the social order as a whole. She preserved society’s norms by stepping outside them.

 

1. Also known as Wei Hua Hu, Fua Mulan, or Wei Mulan. Names don’t always travel well across time, space, and transliteration.
2. Who is known to history primarily for said anthology. Women aren’t the only people who leave thin trails in the dusts of time.
3. Just to make it clear how vague all this is: there are scholars who disagree and place the poem, and therefore Mulan, in the Sui dynasty (581–618 CE). Imagine how difficult it would be for future historians to write about Abigail Adams if they didn’t know whether her letters dated from 1776 or 1976.
4. No Amazons, except once or twice in passing.
5. Disney’s Mulan wasn’t the first appearance of the Chinese woman warrior in American popular culture. Under the name Fa Mu Lan, she is a central image in Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts. Published in 1976, Kingston’s book opened the genre of memoir to women and minority writers in the United States.
6. Quotations from “Poem of Mulan” are from Mulan: Five Versions of a Classic Chinese Legend, with Related Texts, ed. and trans. Shiamin Kwa and Wilt L. Idema (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2010), 1–3.
7. This is the major point at which the Disney version departs from the basic shape of the story. In Disney’s Mulan, her fellow soldiers discover her deception when she is wounded and reject her—at least until she saves the empire. The change is powerful and reflects the historical experience of many women who fought disguised as men (except for single-handedly saving the empire). Being wounded always brought with it the risk of exposure.

 

About the Author 

Pamela D. Toler goes beyond the familiar boundaries of American history to tell stories from other parts of the world, as well as history from the other side of the battlefield, the gender line, or the color bar. She is author of The Heroines of Mercy Street: The Real Nurses of the Civil War and Women Warriors: An Unexpected History, among other books. Her work has appeared in Aramco World, Calliope, History Channel Magazine, MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History, and on Time.com. Visit her website and follow her on Twitter at @pdtoler.

A Discussion with Thomas Norman DeWolf and Sharon Leslie Morgan

In light of our current fractured moment, Thomas Norman DeWolf and Sharon Leslie Morgan discussed the roots of our division and the forms reconciliation can take by reexamining their book Gather at the Table: The Healing Journey of a Daughter of Slavery and a Son of the Slave Trade. The discussion took place during their Unlearning Division, Coming Together online event on July 15, moderated by the book’s editor Gayatri Patnaik.

One of the forms of reconciliation they spoke about was reparations. Amid the protests over the unending police shootings of unarmed Black people, some US cities, such as Providence, Rhode Island, and Asheville, North Carolina, have proposed ways to finally work toward reparations and to funnel more funding toward programs for Black communities. Here’s what Morgan and DeWolf had to say.

Gayatri Patnaik: How do you feel about the government doing some type of reparations for descendants whose ancestors were enslaved?

Sharon Leslie Morgan: I absolutely feel like there should be reparations. But I feel they do not have to take the form that people immediately think about, which is, “Write me a check.” Because if you write a check, you’re absconding. You’re not really engaging the process. I think that it takes many forms.

The best form would be investing money in repairing the damage, not as much to individuals as to people on a societal level. There should be scholarships. There should be changes in mortgage lending. There should be things like that to give economic benefit to individuals, but not necessarily in the form of a check. And I would urge the House Bill 40, which was presented by Congressman John Conyers for years and years and years and never got any consideration. The US government has even not wanted to look at the possibility of researching what needs to be repaired. That is actually a first step toward reparation, which is looking at what happened, what needs to be repaired, and how much that would be worth, how much should be invested in that.

Thomas Norman DeWolf: I would support writing the checks to individuals. I look at the wealth in this nation, the disparity of wealth and how much more wealth white families own and control compared to African-descended families. The GI Bill at the end of World War II was supposed to support GIs coming home. Ninety-eight percent of that money went to white GIs who then built the all-white suburbs, left the cities. Our schools are funded by property taxes, and these all-white suburbs, with all of their higher property values, built these really nice schools. And the schools in the inner cities suffer as a result. So white folks have ten or fifteen times the wealth over Black folks.

[My organization] Coming to the Table has a reparations working group. We have a twenty-three-page reparations guide on what individuals and groups can do in terms of history, healing, connecting, and action. It’s a wonderful document and it’s available on the website.

I agree with Sharon on scholarships and what have you. I just watched a documentary on Asbury Park, New Jersey, and how fifty years ago this month, race riots just decimated this town that was famous for its music primarily. Over the five decades since then, all the repair has been done on the east side of tracks where all the white people live. On the west side of the tracks, where Black folks and Italian folks and people of color have lived, it’s still just devastated. That happens that way throughout the United States, where there’s always support for people who look like me.

Look at the parallels right now, how Congress provided the additional $600 per week in unemployment because people have lost their jobs. Well, this, to me, is much longer history of people being discriminated against who should be provided direct financial support. People of color, to Black folks in particular. Legacy of slavery is a perfectly reasonable approach to dealing with the economic disparity that has been set up within the systems of this country. It doesn’t take away from me. This is white people’s biggest fear. The word ‘reparations’ strikes fear in white people.

What we’re talking about is repair. We’ve created a breach. That’s what it talks about in the Christian bible—repairing the breach, the brokenness that we have created since the founding of this nation. And it’s going to take money. It’s going to take effort. It’s going to take change. Not always easy. But how can we imagine a difference in this world where we look at repair for the sake of repair, not repair for what’s in it for me or what’s going to cause me and my family harm. Get past that. Get past living in fear and imagine a better world we all know is possible when we create a world that is more equitable financially, educationally, justice-wise.

 

If you weren’t able to attend their event, you can watch it here in full.

 

 

About the Authors 

Thomas Norman DeWolf is the author of Inheriting the Trade: A Northern Family Confronts Its Legacy as the Largest Slave-Trading Dynasty in U.S. History, and co-author of Gather at the Table: The Healing Journey of a Daughter of Slavery and a Son of the Slave Trade, (both published by Beacon Press). His latest, The Little Book of Racial Healing, was published in January. Tom DeWolf facilitates workshops and speaks regularly about healing from the legacy of slavery and racism at colleges, conferences, and other venues throughout the United States, and serves as Executive Director for Coming to the Table. Learn more at http://tomdewolf.com/. Follow him on Twitter at @TomDeWolf and on Facebook.

Sharon Leslie Morgan is co-author of Gather at the Table: The Healing Journey of a Daughter of Slavery and a Son of the Slave Trade (Beacon Press). She is the founder of OurBlackAncestry.com, a website devoted to African American family research.

A Q&A with Hilary Levey Friedman

This year, Miss America, turns one hundred! Many predicted that pageants would disappear by the twenty-first century, yet they are still thriving. Why do they persist? In Here She Is: The Complicated Reign of the Beauty Pageant in America, Hilary Levey Friedman reveals the surprising ways they have been an empowering feminist tradition. Using her unique perspective as a NOW state president, daughter to Miss America 1970, sometimes pageant judge, and scholar, she traces their role in many of the feminist movement’s signature achievements, including bringing women into the public sphere, helping them become leaders in business and politics, providing increased educational opportunities, and giving them a voice in the age of #MeToo. In this Q&A, she tells us how she got interested in beauty pageants, how they are linked with feminism, and more. 

Q: What got you interested in beauty pageants?

A: I have never competed in a beauty pageant, but my mother was Miss America 1970, so pageants have always been a part of my life. My mom and I are different—for example, I am a bookworm and she was not the best of students—but studying pageants has been a way for me to think how our lives and generations are similar, yet different.

The way I got started studying beauty pageants was when I did a paper in a sociology class about why mothers enroll their young daughters in beauty pageants after the murder of JonBenét Ramsey. That paper turned into my senior thesis and started me down the path of writing about childhood, culture, and more!

Q: How are feminism and pageantry linked?

A: Pageants and feminism are inextricably linked. At key moments of the feminist movement, beauty contests have been right there. For example, in 1854, a few years after the Seneca Falls Convention, P. T. Barnum started the first commercial beauty contest. Even more telling, the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment and Miss America nearly share a (one hundredth!) birthday—and the pageant sash comes from the suffragist sash. Fast forward a few decades, and one of the events considered foundational to the establishment of Second Wave feminism took place outside of the Miss America pageant in 1968, selected as a site because of its cultural resonance. More recently, the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States has ignited a new wave of organized feminism and protests. Trump famously used to own Miss Universe/USA, and his behavior as owner was part of the campaign. Recall that at the end of the first presidential debate in 2016, Hillary Clinton brought up his treatment of Miss Universe 1996 Alicia Machado.

Q: I hadn’t thought about how pageants and politics are so connected! Can you tell me more?

A: Beauty contests have been a vehicle for business/showmen like Barnum and Trump, who turned to elected office later in life. But this makes sense given that there is definitely an element of pageantry in politics. Think of the elaborate ceremony of the party convention, or a State of the Union.

It used to be that many pageant winners wanted to marry a politician. Think of Miss America 1964 Donna Axum, who married the Speaker of the Texas House of Representatives; or Miss America 1971 Phyllis George, who became the First Lady of Kentucky. Now many pageant winners want to be the politician. Several former Miss Americas have recently run for office. A few examples include:

• Miss America 2000 Heather French Henry ran for Secretary of State in Kentucky in 2019
• Miss America 2013 Mallory Hagan ran for US Congress out of Alabama in 2018
• Miss America 2004 Ericka Dunlap ran for Orlando City Commission in 2017
• Miss America 2003 Erika Harold has also run for Congress and for Attorney General in Illinois in 2018.

Other state winners have won:

• Miss Nevada 2002 Teresa Benitez-Thompson is currently the Majority Floor Leader in the Nevada Assembly
• Miss Hawaii 2011 Lauren Cheape Matsumoto is the Minority Floor Leader in Hawaii’s State House of Representatives

When I have spoken to many of these women, they identify their pageant experiences as pivotal in developing political skills (like speaking to large groups or giving a media soundbite) along with civic engagement (like local parades or Rotary lunches).

Q: Wait, what is the difference between Miss America and Miss USA?

A: This is a common question! I sum up the difference between Miss America and Miss USA as the three “T”s: Talent, Tuition, and Tits (I used to say Trump). Miss America has the first two, Miss USA has the latter.

Miss USA was born from the Miss America pageant. Miss America 1951 Yolande Betbeze said that she would not do any appearances in her bathing suit, which displeased pageant sponsor Catalina, the swimsuit company. Beginning in the later 1930s, talent and education had emerged as priorities at Miss America under the aegis of the new Executive Director, Lenora Slaughter. Catalina, miffed by the change, determined to start its own event, which would place swimsuits, and hence the female form, front and center. In June 1952, the first Miss USA was crowned in Long Beach, California, followed by the first Miss Universe.

Q: How do stereotypes of beauty pageant contestants match up with reality?

A: A common stereotype of a pageant winner is that she is white, blonde, light-eyed, Christian, thin, and from a small Southern town. In my analysis of historical pageant program books, I find that most winners are, in fact, brunettes—though other stereotypes do hold up over time. One important distinction is that national pageant winners come from all over the country, while more contestants participate in Southern events. The reality is that, for most of the twentieth century, participating in a national beauty pageant, like Miss America or Miss USA, was quite simply one of the whitest and most ableist and heteronormative things a young woman could do. That profile has changed somewhat in the twenty-first century, but certain groups of women, like Latinx women and lesbians, remain underrepresented in major American beauty pageants.

Q: Do most Miss USA and Miss America contestants get their start in child beauty pageants?

A: In fact, they do not. The child beauty pageant circuit is quite separate from adult pageants, though a few child winners have gone on to win big. For example, Blaire Pancake, Miss Tennessee 2006, did many pageants as a child, as detailed in a 1994 Life article, and she also was one of the first MBAs to compete on the Miss America stage. Child pageants, in many ways, share more in common with competitive reality television shows—like So You Think You Can Dance and Dance Moms—and drag pageants, which also celebrate an exaggerated form of femininity. If you want to combine all these elements, watch some episodes of RuPaul’s Drag Race. Pageant culture really is everywhere.

 

About the Author

Hilary Levey Friedman is a sociologist at Brown University, where she has taught a popular course titled “Beauty Pageants in American Society.” She is a leading researcher in pageantry, merging her mother’s past experiences as Miss America 1970 with her interests as a glitz- and glamour-loving sometime pageant judge, and a mentor to Miss America 2018. Friedman also serves as the president of the Rhode Island chapter of the National Organization for Women. Her first book, Playing to Win, focused on children’s competitive afterschool activities. Connect with her at hilaryleveyfriedman.com and on Twitter (@hleveyfriedman).

By Lori L. Tharps

This essay appeared originally on My American Meltingpot.

In 2016 my book about colorism, Same Family, Different Colors: Confronting Colorism in America’s Diverse Families was released. In that book, I wrote about how colorism manifests in Asian American, African American, Latino, and Mixed-Race Families. While I have been tangentially writing and talking about colorism as long as I have been talking and writing about Black hair, writing Same Family, Different Colors forced me to deep dive into skin color politics and history on a global scale. Needless to say, I have a much deeper understanding about this insidious, discriminatory social construct we call colorism.

Colorism Isn’t a Black Thing, but It Is Rooted in Anti-Blackness

Before I started my research for the book, I knew Black Americans weren’t the only people who were “color struck.” I knew skin color mattered in Latino cultures and in Asian cultures as well, but I had no idea how globally pervasive colorism really was. What’s more, even though the path to fetishizing white skin differs in each global community, here in the United States, where all of these different cultures live together, colorism is rooted in anti-Blackness, which then prohibits any true community building between Black Americans and other communities of color. It’s depressing and complicated.

Black Lives Matter Makes South Asians Confront Their Colorism

As a person who is a firm believer in the power of coalition building, I am very encouraged by the current energy bubbling up in the South Asian community around colorism, thanks to this current iteration of the Black Lives Matter Movement. Of course, there have been activists in this community who were doing this work before George Floyd’s brutal murder, but there is a new sense of urgency and commitment to confront colorism from this community—both here in the US and in Asia—that gives me hope.

Confronting Colorism in South Asian Communities Makes the News

Here are some recent stories about the South Asian community, here and abroad, and their recent conversations and actions against colorism.

• A new Indian matchmaking show gets criticized for supporting colorism.
• In the United States, a petition is started to remove the “lightening” feature on Indian dating site.
• The Washington Post reports on how South Asian mothers are teaching the next generation to reject colorism.
• NBC Asian America provides context on how Bollywood and American immigration policies contribute to colorism and anti-Blackness in the South Asian communities here in the United States.

Embrace Blackness So We Can All Be Free

I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again: Racism, colorism, and anti-Blackness are inextricably linked, and we can’t attack one without encountering the other. Our antiracism work has to encompass defeating colorism and anti-Black bias as well. The resources are out there if you’re looking for help, but at the end of the day, the message is simple.

Black Lives Matter. Blackness Matters. Black Is Beautiful. Black Excellence Is All Around You.

Once the world can acknowledge these simple truths and actually believe them, then our work will be done.

Peace!

 

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 Sumbul Ali-Karamali

Shariah is a topic that gets bandied about in public and in the news with all the bluster and stereotypes and zero substance. In Demystifying Shariah: What It Is, How It Works, and Why It’s Not Taking Over Our Country, author Sumbul Ali-Karamali draws on scholarship and her degree in Islamic law to explain how shariah operates in the lives of Muslims and what it means in terms of law. She describes the anti-shariah movement’s deliberate misinformation campaign as an appropriation of Islamic academic terms redefined to frighten non-Muslims, alienate Muslim Americans and Europeans, and portray the religion as incompatible with the Constitution. The book is an introduction to the principles, goals, and general developments of shariah—and the relevance of these topics today. Beacon Broadside editor Christian Coleman caught up with Ali-Karamali to chat with her about it.

Christian Coleman: Your first book on Islam is The Muslim Next Door. What was the difference between writing that book and writing this one?

Sumbul Ali-Karamali: Well, both books were born of my lifelong habit of answering questions about Islam. I grew up Muslim and bicultural (Indian and American) in a time and place where I happened to be the only Muslim most of my acquaintances knew. So I got saddled with answering all their questions! Not only did I become good at answering questions about Islam in a way that those around me could understand and relate to (starting in elementary school!), but I also found I really loved coming up with answers that built bridges between my religious-cultural community and theirs. The questions I got were never addressed in the media and still aren’t. So The Muslim Next Door was a book aimed at answering the kinds of questions that had been asked of me all my life. Demystifying Shariah is a little different because I was never asked about shariah until 2010, when it first came onto the scene in American public discourse; when “shariah” or “sharia law” did become generally known, its definition was so distorted and full of fearful tall tales that I knew I had to write about what shariah truly meant.

CC: In Demystifying Shariah, you write about people coming up to you and saying they’re afraid of “shariah law” taking over the country. How did the term “shariah law,” which has monstrous meanings in the West, become so prevalent in US media?

SAK: Yes! I was stunned when fellow (but quite a bit older) alumni at one of my Stanford reunions saw me standing by a pile of my books at the bookstore, ready to autograph them, before approaching me to say that they were afraid shariah was taking over the United States. “Shariah” is an Islamic term of art, with defined meanings, but in 2010, the well-documented but loosely connected Islamophobia network in this country took the term and redefined it as a “scare word.” This was a deliberate move to spread fear of Islam and Muslims. Individuals in this network urged state legislators to pass “anti-shariah” laws, even though our Constitution prohibits any religious law from taking over our country. They accomplished their purpose, though, which was to bring shariah into the public discourse. As a result, hate crimes against Muslim Americans spiked in 2010.

CC: What are one or two of the current lies and misunderstandings of shariah that you see in today’s discourse?

SAK: That it’s a rigid set of archaic, black-and-white laws! Shariah is not “law” the way we think of law—rigid and enforceable. Shariah is religious guidelines, usually containing more than one answer to a particular question, mostly concerning personal conduct, and largely not enforceable. We usually think of punishments when we think of shariah, but only about two percent of shariah concerns punishments, and—contrary to popular wisdom—most of those punishments are so legally restricted by shariah that they are nearly impossible to apply. Of course, there are countries in the world that apply these punishments anyway (such as Saudi Arabia), but that does not mean they are complying with shariah requirements.

CC: I love the Star Trek references in the book and how you weave them into your explanations and examples. What made you a fan of the show?

SAK: Star Trek showed us what humankind could be! Gene Roddenberry, who created it, wanted to create a show that addressed issues of social injustice, but because he feared the obstacle of 1960s television censors, he set it in a science fiction context. Despite only three seasons, the show became iconic for its espousal of universal values and fairness and justice. I always loved the show, but wasn’t a super-Trekkie—never attended conventions or anything—so I was utterly surprised when, during the writing of my first book, I found that episodes of Star Trek kept popping into my head as examples and similes in my explanations. It makes sense, though: my books are about universal values (in the Islamic context) and shared humanity—and so is Star Trek.

CC: At turns, humorous, ironic, and compassionate, the tone of your books is also hopeful, which I think is sorely needed as we head into another fraught election season. Why was it important for you to end with a note of optimism?

SAK: Our world is getting smaller, and we all have to learn to live with one another. That means achieving at least a rudimentary understanding of each other and dispelling xenophobic views and stereotypes of anyone who is different from us. It might be human nature to indulge in these stereotypes, but then we must fight human nature! We can achieve the goals that Captain Kirk (my first crush) and Captain Picard fought for—peace, intercultural understanding, and the recognition that aliens were not to be feared but worthy of friendship. Muslims are worthy of friendship, too. It just takes a little intercultural understanding.

CC: And one last question. After becoming a corporate lawyer, you earned an additional degree in Islamic law, and you’re a popular speaker on topics related to Muslims and Islam. How did you get interested in law.

SAK: I’m the child of Indian immigrants and, contrary to what so many people believe, my parents’ overpowering ambition for me as a Muslim girl was—wait for it—financial independence. They put great pressure on me to achieve this goal by attending medical school, but because I’m probably the most squeamish person on the planet, and because I’ve always loved writing, I applied instead to law school (thus gravely disappointing my parents). During and after law school, and especially while practicing corporate law, I continued to field questions about Islam and Muslims; but my friends also started asking me for book recommendations on Islam as well. Since there were no fun ones out there, I decided to write one myself. That’s why, when my husband’s job took us to London, I earned a degree in Islamic law at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies. It was the first time in my life that I’d studied something just for fun, and I was fascinated. I’m not a cleric but an academic, and I’ve found a calling synthesizing academic material into a relatable, engaging format for the general audience. It can be challenging, educating people about Islam in today’s climate, but it’s more often rewarding to know that I’m bringing people together.

 

About Sumbul Ali-Karamali

Sumbul Ali-Karamali is a Muslim American who grew up in California, answering questions on Islam ever since she can remember. After becoming a corporate lawyer, she earned an additional degree in Islamic law. She specializes in synthesizing academic material for general audiences and is the author of The Muslim Next Door and Growing Up Muslim. A popular speaker on topics related to Islam and Muslims, she hopes to promote intercultural understanding with her work, at least when she’s not watching Star Trek reruns, listening to opera, or (reluctantly) white-water rafting with her husband. Connect with Sumbul on her website: sumbulalikaramali.com.

By Philip Warburg

In his newly released $2 trillion energy and infrastructure plan, Joe Biden set a nationwide goal of 100 percent carbon-free electricity by 2035. Solar power figures prominently in his plan, but it’s not clear whether low-income households will share in this historic opportunity. 

With racial injustice and economic inequality gaining long-overdue attention, we need to look at the gap between established homeowners who have solar power on their homes and people living in more modest circumstances who can’t afford this climate-friendly investment. 

Anyone flying into Boston’s Logan Airport can’t help noticing the sea of triple-decker buildings that line so many neighborhood streets in and around the city. Built as multi-family worker housing more than a century ago, these hardy structures share a feature that bodes well for our region’s solar future: flat, uncluttered roofs seldom shaded by trees or adjacent buildings. 

Why are we letting this readily accessible renewable energy resource go to waste? The Massachusetts Clean Energy Center, a state agency, has just issued a Triple Decker Design Challenge aimed at “transitioning these iconic New England dwellings into high-performing, low-carbon buildings.” Though the Challenge calls for deep energy retrofits, strangely missing is any reference to solar power.

More encouraging is the Mass Solar Loan program, which offers low-income borrowers a 1.5 percent interest rate discount on their solar loans plus a thirty percent reduction in loan principal once their solar arrays begin operating. Incentives such as these, if adopted on a national scale, could go a long way toward bringing solar power’s benefits to millions of low-income households.

But what about the homeowner with too low a credit rating to qualify for a commercial loan? Outright grants should be made available, allowing these households to enjoy vastly reduced electric bills while benefiting the planet with lower carbon emissions. This approach was pioneered by GRIDAlternatives, a nonprofit founded in California with generous state support. Relying heavily on volunteer crews whom they train as solar installers, GRIDAlternatives has brought free solar power to more than 16,000 financially challenged single-family and multi-family households.

Much more ambitious in scope is the District of Columbia’s Solar for All program, which aspires to bring the benefits of locally generated solar power to 100,000 low-to-moderate income families. Income-qualified households that have access to their own rooftops can apply for grants to install their own solar arrays. Renters and others lacking their own solar-suitable rooftop access can subscribe to a community solar plan that credits their monthly electric bills with a share of the output of a solar facility in the DC area.

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) has projected that residential and commercial rooftops could meet up to thirty-nine percent of America’s present-day electricity needs using photovoltaic (PV) panels that were standard when the study was published in 2016. Using today’s more efficient PV modules, NREL estimates that rooftop solar could supply half of our nation’s power needs.

Today, we have reached a tiny fraction of that potential: less than one percent of our electricity comes from “distributed” solar installations—rooftops, parking canopies, and moderately scaled ground-mounted arrays. Larger utility-scale solar installations supply only slightly more: about 1.8 percent of electricity sales nationwide.

Vice President Biden’s call for clean electricity by 2035 demands strong and decisive action now. He’s right to call for extending the investment tax credits that have made solar appealing to many homes and businesses, but more must be done to ensure equitable access to this transformative technology. 

Regardless of income, American homeowners should be able to tap the sun beaming down on their roofs.

 

About the Author 

Philip Warburg, author of Harness the Sun, is a Senior Fellow at Boston University’s Institute for Sustainable Energy.

This summer, the uprisings for racial justice and the marches for Black lives have been heartening. And believe me, we need something to root for during our pandemic timeline. This wake-up call to reckon with systemic racism and to dismantle it—and there have been many before—is ringing loud and clear. Now we need that same momentum to carry into the classrooms—all virtual please!—with the same gusto. Because schools are part of the system, too. From kindergarten to the lecture hall, they are a microcosm of the forces of oppression at large on the macro level. The school-to-prison pipeline and resource officers are permanent reminders of how white supremacy culture is dangerously upheld and enforced in the name of education.

With back-to-school season practically knocking at the door, we’d like to point to some select titles from our catalog on making antiracism a reality in schools.

 

A New York Times Bestseller

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

“There are power dynamics, personal histories, and cultural clashes stemming from whiteness and all it encompasses that work against young people of color in traditional urban classrooms. This book highlights them, provides a framework for looking at them, and offers ways to address them in the course of improving the education of urban youth of color.”
—Christopher Emdin 

 

Winner of the ACE Lifetime Achievement Award

Holding Fast to Dreams: Empowering Youth, from the Civil Rights Crusade to STEM Achievement

“We now have African Americans who are placed in faculties of science and engineering departments and medical schools. We are making progress, but it is bittersweet. We are encouraged when one of our students who has recently earned the PhD becomes the first African American hire in a department, but we also need to finally, as a nation, get beyond each of these hires being ‘the first.’ We can accomplish this only by working deliberately, as a STEM community, to achieve this goal.

All of this requires culture change. Not a change in behavior alone but a change in perspective, values, and the willingness to act. Telling stories is the first step. Inspiring others is the next. Looking in the mirror comes next. Then come identifying the problem, collecting data to understand the problem, and bringing those who can enact change into the conversation and into solving and working on the problem. This is not an easy, comfortable, or brief process. It takes a community, it takes hard work, it takes time, but it can be done.”
—Dr. Freeman A. Hrabowski, III 

 

“Lift Us Up, Don’t Push Us Out!”: Voices from the Front Lines of the Educational Justice Movement

“Profound racial inequities and injustice in public education far predate the Trump and Obama administrations. They are rooted in deep-seated systems of white supremacy in the United States. The struggle for educational justice is part of a long-term historic struggle for freedom and liberation. We are at a new moment and must respond to new challenges.”
—Mark R. Warren with David Goodman

 

None of the Above: The Untold Story of the Atlanta Public Schools Cheating Scandal, Corporate Greed, and the Criminalization of Educators

“People had strong reactions to the Atlanta Public Schools cheating scandal because it’s true that there are real problems facing our public education system. Education is integral to a healthy democracy, so our concerns about education often illicit deeper anxieties about societal well-being. But the only way toward a public education that benefits all students, and society as a whole, entails addressing the root causes of the inequities and shortcomings that now exist. The Atlanta Public Schools cheating scandal was a distraction that deferred the real reckoning that we need to have”
—Shani Robinson and Anna Simonton

 

Twenty-First-Century Jim Crow Schools: The Impact of Charters on Public Education
Raynard Sanders, David Stovall, Terrenda White

“The fight for publicly funded public education is a constant struggle for poor, working-class, and even middle-class families. The introduction of so-called choice and competition in the form of charters is surrounded by opportunity for the ruling class to basically extort monies from already financially strapped public schools, while shifting those funds into the hands of those who benefit the most from the opportunity gap and their friends and families.”
—Karen Lewis, foreword

 

Winner of 2020 Society of Professors of Education Outstanding Book Award

We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Education Freedom

“To begin the work of abolitionist teaching and fighting for justice, the idea of mattering is essential in that you must matter enough to yourself, to your students, and to your students’ community to fight. But for dark people, the very basic idea of mattering is sometimes hard to conceptualize when your country finds you disposable.”
—Bettina L. Love