A Q&A with Dan C. Goldberg

Recently commissioned black officers: front row (left to right): Ensigns George Cooper, Graham Martin, Jesse Arbor, John Reagan, and Reginald Goodwin; back row (left to right): Dennis Nelson, Phillip Barnes, Sam Barnes, Dalton Baugh, James Hair, Frank Sublett, and Warrant Officer Charles Lear. William Sylvester White was commissioned but is not pictured in this photo. February 1944.

At the start of World War II, Black men in the Navy could only hold menial jobs as cooks and cleaners. A relentless civil rights campaign forced the Navy in 1942 to reconsider a Black man’s role. It would take another two years before the Navy would reluctantly select the first Black men to undergo officer training. Facing prejudice and discrimination as civilians and on duty, thirteen courageous men broke the color barrier and set an example that would inspire generations to come. But they were given little accord once commissioned, and their story has too often been overlooked when recounting the saga of World War II and the coming civil rights movement. Until now.

Award-winning journalist Dan C. Goldberg brings these thirteen forgotten heroes out from the margins of history in The Golden Thirteen: How Black Men Won the Right to Wear Navy Gold. Isabella Sanchez, our assistant to the director of sales and marketing, caught up with Goldberg to chat with him about it and to ask what we can learn today from this hidden history.

Isabella Sanchez: How did you initially come across the Golden Thirteen?

Dan C. Goldberg: I stumbled upon an obituary for one of the men, and it mentioned the Golden Thirteen. It was not something I had ever heard of before, and I was curious. I had passing familiarity with the Tuskegee Airmen and the Buffalo soldiers but never heard of the Golden Thirteen. I looked for a book on the subject and realized that the only substantive work was Paul Stillwell’s oral history. That’s a fascinating book but it didn’t answer the question that gnawed at me. Namely, how did the Navy go from only allowing Black men as messmen in March 1942 to commissioning Black ensigns in March 1944? The president was the same, the Navy secretary was the same. What changed? And why? I wanted to answer those questions so that these men could be placed in the context of their time.

IS: You researched the Golden Thirteen for eight years, digging through military records and newspaper clippings. What was that process like? Were there any roadblocks along the way?

DCG: I often liken the process to making whiskey: there is a lot of distilling. I would spend days researching an event, a conversation, a moment, so that it could turn into one paragraph, or maybe even one sentence in the book. Sometimes it was cut entirely. The biggest roadblock was often my own ignorance. I didn’t always know where to look but kept trying different approaches, and one opened door led to another and, hopefully, that led to a worthwhile finished product.

IS: You write about how many Black Americans found the role of the US in World War II incredibly hypocritical, considering the racism, violence, and discrimination they faced at home. Tell me more about that.

DCG: In the course of my research, I came across Lee Finkle’s Forum for Protest, in which he describes a survey of Harlem residents that found most African Americans said they’d be treated better or the same under Japanese rule while only eleven percent believed conditions would improve for Blacks if the US won the war. These sentiments have been reported on and written about before, but it was distinct from the history I, a white kid from New York, was taught in school. We learned that everyone rallied around the flag, because the Nazis were so evil and the Japanese so treacherous. Well, that popular history isn’t the whole truth.

James Baldwin, in Notes From a Native Son, spoke of the “peculiar relief” Black families felt when their sons went overseas, because it meant that if they died, it would be by the hands of the enemy instead of from being lynched by their own countrymen.

I really wanted to explore that theme and remind readers that segregation and humiliation were having real effects on morale, which pushed the question of equality in the Navy to the fore. This wasn’t an academic debate. Black men burned draft cards and wondered why they should care all that much who won the war and why they should fight for a country that treated them as inferior. These were the arguments made by civil rights leaders and white liberals, which eventually persuaded the Navy to change its course.

IS: The Golden Thirteen had to fight an uphill battle in order to become commissioned officers. What discrimination did they face in training, and how did their experience differ from those of white recruits?

DCG: Discrimination, of course, didn’t start when they enlisted. Many of these men had lived with it their whole lives. James Hair’s brother-in-law was lynched in Florida, beaten to death by a white mob. The FBI told Syl White that they had no need for Black agents. Graham Martin grew up in segregated Indianapolis. When they first enlisted, they were segregated during boot training and during their service school training. The uniform gave them no protection from racism. Racial slurs were common.

Even after the Navy decided to send them to officer candidate school, they were segregated. The Navy wasn’t ready to integrate the station where they trained. George Cooper described it as a “letdown off the bat.” Then, they had to deal with instructors who, in the eyes of Graham Martin and Frank Sublett, seemed certain that training Black men was a waste of time. The racism they faced came in many forms. There was even physical abuse but often it was far more subtle. George Cooper said it best: “There are so many subtle ways of demonstrating prejudice, but as a black person, you just have antennas out, and you sense it and you feel it instinctively.”

IS: After these men became officers, their treatment didn’t change overnight. They were still disrespected on a daily basis, and white men refused to acknowledge their authority. Describe what the Golden Thirteen faced once they completed their training.

DCG: The Navy, at first, didn’t know what to do with these Black officers. Commanding white men in battle still seemed too radical. So, for the first few months, they were given menial chores. They ran drills, lectured on venereal diseases, patrolled the coast in a converted yacht. They were denied housing on base and prohibited from entering officers’ clubs. White men would cross the street to avoid saluting. Through it all, these thirteen officers never lost their cool. They knew that they were being watched. Excelling during officer candidate school was only the first step.

IS: The Golden Thirteen recognized their position in history and felt a personal responsibility to be successful in order to integrate the Navy. You describe the camaraderie these men felt toward each other, and their mission to succeed as a group. What were their relationships like and how did they support each other?

DCG: They decided the very first night that they would work together and swore off any competition. They figured that the only way to succeed was to help one another, so they took turns sharing their backgrounds and determining who was most fit in every discipline. And that person volunteered to help the others. In a sense, they were fortunate the Navy chose such a variety of men. White was a lawyer, Sublett a mechanic, Baugh an engineer. Martin, Cooper, and Barnes were natural teachers. Yes, they pushed each other to study hard, but the real benefit was in how they were there for one another when times got tough, when the pressure seemed too intense to bear. That’s when Jesse Arbor or James Hair might tell an off-color joke to break the tension. The bond they forged remained strong until the day they died.

IS: The United States Armed Forces is still an organization that is frequently criticized for their lack of inclusion and unequal treatment of its members based on race, ethnicity, gender, religion, sexual orientation, and other factors. How have things changed or not changed today? What lessons can we learn from this hidden history?

DCG: Every generation has a version of this fight. Blacks, women, gays, and transgender people are told that their inclusion in the Army, the Navy, the Marines, the military, will hamper efficiency and morale. It just can’t be done, they are told. Time and again, that’s been proven false. There are a couple lessons I take away from the Golden Thirteen. The first is that the nation is only as democratic as its least democratic institution. The second is that capability and honor aren’t limited by color. The third, and my favorite, is that, in the midst of struggle, the road can seem impossibly long and arduous, but if you keep pushing and fighting you can change the world.

About Dan C. Goldberg

Dan C. Goldberg is an award-winning journalist for Politico. Goldberg has researched the Golden Thirteen for eight years to restore these men to their rightful place in history. Follow him on Twitter at @DanCGoldberg.

By S. Brent Plate

Geraldine Weichman, handprint Passover towel, 1981. Los Angeles. Photo credit: Jodi Eichler-Levine.

“Let’s get in touch.”

“I feel like I’m losing touch with you.”

“That was a touching tribute.”

The English language is littered with metaphors of touch that tend to revolve around connection between people. Such word use creates an almost psychic understanding that communication, even when conducted over Wi-Fi and satellite transmissions, can still allow us, as the old AT&T commercial had it, to “reach out and touch someone.” We “touch” each other even when we are a thousand miles away.

Many of us have rediscovered this during the coronavirus lockdown, reconnecting with friends and family over the phone, Skype, and Zoom. We see and hear those we love through a screen, and we are touched. Of course, this experience has also shown us the limitations of communication, that ultimately, our metaphors are not reality.

We’ve been craving touch. And we want more than what AT&T promised. We want actual physical touch: a hug, a hand held, a kiss on the cheek, a casual brush of the finger on the back of the hand. Touch begs us to move beyond the metaphorical. It is a sense that needs to be fed, and when there is a shortage, we get what researchers refer to as “skin hunger,” while lack of touch in infancy has dramatic effects on human development. If touch only remains in the symbolic, linguistic realm, we eventually get out of touch and go hungry.

Touching Things

Even so, human touch is not the only touch we need. Human-human touch, in one form or other, is crucial to human flourishing, yet we also touch objects, things that are seemingly inanimate, and those experiences shape our spiritual and social lives.

In an essay on Medium, my colleague Jodi Eichler-Levine points to the new activities many of us have taken up during the coronavirus lockdown—baking bread, gardening, crocheting, playing guitar. She makes the astute observation that these activities directly relate to our hunger for touch. Since we can’t physically touch so many of our loved ones, we are turning to other practices that get us back in touch. She says, “we are re-learning touch, buildings nests of soft blankets, clutching our warm coffee mugs.”

In a brilliant new book to be released this fall called Painted Pomegranates and Needlepoint Rabbis, Eichler-Levine has explored contemporary Jewish life in the United States, and the ways Jewish identities are “crafted,” through quilting, paper collage, carving, knitting, amulet making, as well as the communities that often form around the physical activities. In a discussion of the importance of handmade gifts, she says, “Objects are not just objects; they are objects that have touched other hands, carrying with them the essence of another living being.”

Touching Stones

I, too, have long been impressed by the ways human senses are enacted in, by, and through religious traditions. In my book A History of Religion in 5½ Objects: Bringing the Spiritual to Its Senses (Beacon Press, 2014), I look at the role of various objects—stones, incense, drums, crosses, bread—and how humans sensually engage them in spiritual ways. In reference to touch, at the start of the chapter “Stones,” I suggest:

Stones are set, cut, clutched, chiseled, and hurled. They ride in our pockets for luck on journeys, or climb into our boots turning travels into travails . . . . Stones solicit attention, usually subtly, almost inaudibly. Among the vast number of stones, rocks, pebbles, and gravel on the planet earth and beyond, a handful are occasionally selected, unearthed, transported, and repurposed for sacred means, becoming talismans, amulets, altars, or memorials . . . . In each case, stones are objects sensed, felt with fingertips, seen with the eyes, and felt deeply within. Stones show us the way.

Touching a stone might strike one as contrary to what we need when we have a hunger for touch, as if stones could begin to speak and respond. Yet, history tells us a different story, and across time and tradition stones have rooted people in memory, stood as markers of our sacred spaces, and connected us with others.

Buddhists set stones in meditation gardens. Jews place them on gravestones. At the geographic center of Christianity, in Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulchre, is the “Stone of Anointing,” and the faithful travel to touch and kiss this stone. At the geographic center of Islam is the Black Stone, in the eastern corner of the ka’ba in Mecca, and during the hajj, Muslims aim to touch and kiss it as they walk around in the Great Mosque.

Stones, and our endemic need to touch them, has become a vital, if often overlooked, component to religious life across the world. As I note in the book, “People feel connections with stones; they fondle them, touch them, kiss them, and tell stories by them.”

Touching Keys

From human hands to knitting needles to stones, humans crave touch. There’s a time to touch the plush fur of our cat, a time for a warm hand of another, a time to feel the soil as we plant tomatoes, and a time to hold firm our stones. We clutch and caress and carry as we reach out and touch something, reaffirming our interconnection with the world.

Which brings me back here, and now, alone in a room in rural Central New York. As I write this, I touch keys on a keyboard, a familiar feeling at the edge of my fingertips. For me, writing has always been a profoundly physical sensation: sitting in a particular position, at my desk, fumbling for words and sensing the location of keys on the keyboard, from eye to screen to brain to muscles to fingers to keyboard and back again through cycles of stroke, sensation, and significance. Writing keeps me in touch.

About the Author

S. Brent Plate is a writer, editor, and part-time college professor at Hamilton College. Recent books include A History of Religion in 5½ Objects: Bringing the Spiritual to Its Senses (Beacon Press) and Religion and Film: Cinema and the Re-creation of the World (Columbia University Press). His essays have appeared at Salon, the Los Angeles Review of Books, America, the Christian Century, and the Islamic Monthly. More at www.sbrentplate.net or on Twitter @splate1.

A Q&A with M. V. Lee Badgett

What if production in factories, shops, restaurants, and other services suddenly sank by one percent? If the downturn lasted long enough, economists would call it a recession, and policymakers would rush to course correct. But what happens when the economy is dragged down for decades, caused by society’s prejudices and hostilities toward lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people? Not much. And that needs to change.

In The Economic Case for LGBT Equality: Why Fair and Equal Treatment Benefits Us All, economist M. V. Lee Badgett asserts that homophobia and transphobia not only harm individuals in many aspects of their lives—education, health, employment—but also damage economies in costly and often invisible ways. She presents data and real stories to show that the exclusion of LGBT people from full and equal participation in society reduces everyone’s well-being and that it is in all our interests to fix it. Beacon Broadside editor Christian Coleman caught up with Badgett to chat about her book and what we can learn from it during our current administration.

Christian Coleman: What was the inspiration behind writing The Economic Case for LGBT Equality?

M. V. Lee Badgett: The inspiration came from the many LGBT activists I’ve met and worked with who wanted to use the economic case to promote human rights. I have been making that economic case for LGBT equality for a long time and have seen the argument also appeal to policymakers, businesses, development agencies, and other groups. I decided to write this book to reach all of these audiences with the evidence and stories that show how stigma and discrimination against LGBT people hold back economies. The book gave me room to present a wide range of evidence about those links, and I could show how this idea is helping to expand rights for LGBT people.

CC: You’re a professor of economics and co-direct the Center for Employment Equity at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Tell us a little about your background and what interested you in focusing on economic inequality for LGBT people.

MVLB: My main professional identity is being a feminist labor economist, and I mostly study inequality and discrimination against LGBT people. The roots of my choice of profession and research are in my own experiences. As a cisgender white woman, I’ve experienced discrimination and seen race and gender segregation in the workforce—even today in my male-dominated profession. As a lesbian, I had some on-the-ground knowledge that made me question economic stereotypes about LGBT people as affluent, educated elites. Those experiences led me to study what happens to LGBT people in our economies and to learn how we can move toward equality.

CC: You write that human rights declarations and compliance processes haven’t been enough to stop discrimination and violence against LGBT people. Do you get any pushback from people who resistant to thinking about LGBT rights in the context of business and the economy? I can imagine some would be turned off by the idea that fair and equal treatment is dependent on businesses thinking about their bottom line.

MVLB: Some people prefer to make human rights arguments for LGBT rights, and those are excellent arguments for change. In my view, though, the economic case makes the human rights argument stronger. It adds up the harms of human rights violations in concrete terms and shows how our economy suffers as a result. The economic case can start conversations and open doors in places that aren’t likely to be motivated by human rights concerns, like businesses or economic development banks.

CC: Was there any research that took you by surprise as you were writing the book?

MVLB: The volume of research on LGBT people available now is much broader and deeper than I realized! The academic study of LGBT people has really blossomed over the last decade or two, especially in North America and Europe. In addition, many LGBT organizations in a wider range of countries have started collecting data about the LGBT people they work with. Those studies sometimes use different methods than academic researchers do, but they produce incredibly important insights into the lives of LGBT people in those countries.

CC: You cover not only the effects of homophobia and transphobia on our economy, but also on economies outside the US, including Canada, Australia, India, and Philippines, and the UK. Why was it important for you to bring in a global perspective?

MVLB: I think globally about this issue for several reasons. For one thing, every country has a lot of work to do to ensure full inclusion of LGBT people, including the US. Many of the people I talk with about using the economic case live in countries with little protection of LGBT human rights; they often live in low-income countries where economic development is crucial. Furthermore, we are all connected to each other globally, as we’ve learned with the COVID-19 pandemic. So positive news about one country allowing same-sex couples to marry might be seen in another country as an inspiration (to LGBT people) or a threat (to opponents of LGBT rights). Finally, LGBT issues are on the agendas of multilateral bodies, such as the UN and World Bank and multinational companies.  

CC: What are some business organizations taking a stand against anti-LGBT policies, locally or globally, that have caught your attention?

MVLB: Some large multinational businesses, like IBM, are speaking out on LGBT issues in multiple countries against anti-LGBT policies. Businesses are also coming together in coalitions to push for change, as in the Open for Business initiative or Out Leadership. For example, marriage equality is an issue that has been supported by both multinational and local businesses in countries like Australia, Ireland, Taiwan, and the US.

CC: What would you like readers to take from the book, especially as we continue to learn about how the current administration tries to axe nondiscrimination protections for LGBT Americans?

MVLB: While we’ve made big strides on some LGBT issues in the US, like marriage equality, we’ve been slow to enact explicit laws protecting LGBT people from discrimination. Among other anti-LGBT actions, the current administration has been trying to weaken and dismantle nondiscrimination protections policies that protect LGBT people in schools, health care settings, public housing, employment, and other areas. This political moment is a good reminder that the economic case for LGBT equality does not mean that change is inevitable or permanent. As the book shows, the economic case can be used to argue that inclusive policies will be good for our economy, but the converse also works: regressive changes that enhance inequality will be bad for our economy. We have to keep making the case.

About M. V. Lee Badgett 

M. V. Lee Badgett is a professor of economics and the former director of the School of Public Policy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is also a Williams Distinguished Scholar at the Williams Institute for Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Law & Public Policy (UCLA School of Law), where she was a co-founder and the first research director. She has also taught at Yale University and the University of Maryland. Connect with Lee Badgett at leebadgett.com and follow her on Twitter at @LeeBadgett.

Who says books are not essential? Where would we be without them during the pandemic? In the fallout of all but “essential” businesses being shutdown or closed to the public, books were deemed “nonessential.” So. Not. True. Along with the shows and movies we binge-watch, books are helping us keep our sanity. They are a lifeline as we continue to shelter in place. Don’t let anyone tell you differently. Not to mention, we cannot forget all the bookstores working hard to make sure we get the books we order delivered to our homes or ready to collect at curb-side pickups. The COVID-19 pandemic may have curbed our contact with the outside world, but it won’t curb the importance of reading.

We want to thank Publishers Weekly for starting their #BooksAreEssential campaign to drive this point home. Hopefully, as businesses start to reopen, bookstores will be ranked as the essential businesses they have always been. Some of our staff members took part in the campaign. Here’s what they had to say. Yes, we’re obviously biased.

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“Today, more than ever, we need great books to console and inspire us. There’s a good reason that Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning has sold sixteen million copies, and why 65,000 Americans have turned to it since the pandemic began. We’re so lucky to have Yes to Life, this newly discovered work, out right now.”
—Helene Atwan, director

“[H]uman beings are able to give meaning to their existence, firstly, by doing something, by acting, by creating—by bringing a work into being; secondly, by experiencing something—nature, art—or loving people; and thirdly, human beings are able to find meaning even where finding value in life is not possible for them in either the first or the second way—namely, precisely when they take a stance toward the unalterable, fated, inevitable, and unavoidable limitation of their possibilities: how they adapt to this limitation, react toward it, how they accept this fate . . .”
—Marcy Barnes reading an excerpt from Viktor E Frankl’s Yes to Life

“The timing of this book coming out at the moment we all began to quarantine is almost a divine level of intervention. She makes me laugh harder and longer—and shed a few tears too—more than any other writer. Yes, thank you, Sam Irby.”
—Marcy Barnes, production director

“Since early childhood, I’ve always considered books essential. Books have made me smarter, more inquisitive, and more open-minded to other perspectives and worlds outside my own lived experience. Without them, I would not be the constantly curious and verbosely inquiring person I am today. My quarantine read right now is schooling me on the history of a river that I’m also currently writing about in my own fiction, and every time I crack open this book, I’m transported to another era and another land entirely that I find fascinating. Thank you, Caroline Crampton and Granta Books!”
—Nicole-Anne Keyton, editorial assistant

“We learn from those who persevered through hard times.”
—Cliff Manko, chief financial officer

“Publishers Weekly launched their #BooksAreEssential campaign. So grab a book and post!”
—Gayatri Patnaik, associate director and editorial director 

By Rosemarie Day

This piece appeared originally on MomsRising.org.

As Mother’s Day approaches, this year feels different. In a time of coronavirus, we need more than flowers and a day off. We need more than traditional self-care. We need recognition, deep and lasting recognition, that the work we do as caregivers is invaluable. We need recognition from society as a whole, not just our families. The pandemic has shown everyone that we are essential—women make up over half of the workforce deemed “essential,” including 77% of healthcare workers. Our lives are on the line as frontline healthcare workers: the CDC reports that 73% of healthcare workers who have contracted coronavirus are women. On top of all of this, our stress is through the roof with the roles we play at home: women were already making 80% of the healthcare decisions in families, and now, as at-home caregivers, we are juggling even more, with home-schooling added to our paying jobs. 

Read more at MomsRising.org.

About the Author 

Rosemarie Day is the founder and CEO of Day Health Strategies, which helps to implement national health reform. She’s been working in healthcare and related fields for more than 25 years, including as the founding deputy director and chief operating officer of the Health Connector in Massachusetts, where she helped launch the award-winning organization that established the first state-run health insurance exchange in the state. She also served as the chief operating officer for the Massachusetts Medicaid program. Rosemarie lives in Somerville, MA; Marching Toward Coverage: How Women Can Lead the Fight for Universal Healthcare is her first book. Connect with her @Rosemarie_Day1 or at rosemarieday.com.

In these times when readers are responding to our books “more than ever,” when our authors—including Richard Blanco, Imani Perry, Robin DiAngelo, Dina Gilio-Whitaker, Daina Ramey Berry, and Kali Nicole Gross—are appearing in the media, their ideas going viral on social media, their voices being heard on so many platforms, we thought it might be good to take a break to focus on some of the staff who work hard to find, shape, edit, produce, and promote those works. Our blog series “Beacon Behind the Books” introduces to you a member of our staff and gives you a behind-the-scenes look, department by department, at what goes on at our office.

For the month of May, we introduce you to our editorial assistant, Alison Rodriguez! 

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

Like many people in publishing, I’ve just always loved reading and have always been interested in the entire book publishing process. I had my first internship in publishing when I studied abroad in college. That solidified my interest, and it became what I actively wanted to pursue. While that internship was in children’s editorial, I also worked as a publicity and editorial intern at PublicAffairs and was able to learn a lot more about the different sides of publishing, specifically in serious nonfiction. This led me to Beacon when I noticed an opening for an editorial assistant position last fall and applied. The timing ended up working out perfectly for me to start right after I finished school in January.

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

I know a lot of publishing consists of English majors, but I actually majored in journalism. I think it has helped me in anything I have to write, including any type of copy that needs to be clear and concise. Also, the importance of deadlines has been drilled into me in all my courses, which helps me prioritize certain tasks and manage my time at work—even if they are self-made deadlines that I make for myself throughout the day!

What upcoming projects are you excited about?

I’m excited about Ace by Angela Chen coming out in the fall. It was the first full manuscript I read when I started at Beacon, and I think it will be an important resource that everyone can learn something from. I’m also excited for What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat by Aubrey Gordon. I also learned a lot from this book, and I think it will spark a lot of important conversations that are long overdue.

What helps you focus when you’re at work?

I like to listen to music whenever I really need to focus and get something done. I’ve also found that taking a break by either walking outside at lunch or even just getting up from my desk to get coffee at the office can really help whenever I’ve been staring at something for too long.

What are you reading right now?

I just started reading Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng. I’m also reading We Should All Be Feminists by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and listening to Normal People by Sally Rooney on audio. Enjoying all three so far!

Favorite book ever?

It really always changes, but one of them is Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman. I bought this book in the UK and read it on my plane ride home. It had me laughing and crying and always reminds me of that trip!

Favorite podcasts?

I really enjoy true crime podcasts. Recently, I’ve listened to Dr. Death and To Live and Die in LA. I also love listening to The Daily every morning.

About Alison Rodriguez 

Alison Rodriguez joined Beacon Press in January 2020 after graduating from Boston University with a Bachelor of Science in Journalism and a focus in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Prior to joining Beacon, Alison interned at Hachette Book Group and Simon & Schuster UK.

Can you taste it? The taste of joy when quarantine ends, the panic shopping eases up, and we can get on with the new reality of civilian life. The coronavirus pandemic will change the way we live. However the new reality takes shape, we’ll be ready and eager to get back outside. Not to mention delirious with relief. Until then, safety first. But at least we have plenty of books to turn to as resources and for escape during quarantine!

We pulled together a list of titles from our catalog that speak to our homebound times. Whatever your fancy, there are three categories to choose from. Inspiring books to help find meaning and solace during this period of stress and despair. Books on remaking society to show how the pandemic affects many aspects of our day-to-day living and what we want to make better when this whole situation is behind us. And books to get lost in, because we could use a breather from the COVID-19 craziness, right? Scroll down to take a look! You can check out our website to see more titles as well.

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Inspiring Reads

Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything
Viktor E. Frankl
Introduction by Daniel Goleman

“This slim, powerful collection from Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist Frankl (Man’s Search for Meaning) attests to life’s meaning, even in desperate circumstances.”
—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

Man’s Search for Meaning
Viktor E. Frankl

“This is a book I reread a lot . . . it gives me hope . . . it gives me a sense of strength.”
—Anderson Cooper, Anderson Cooper 360/CNN

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.

The Stars in Our Pockets: Getting Lost and Sometimes Found in the Digital Age
Howard Axelrod

“Poetic, ruminative, and never preachy, this book is a game changer for readers who yearn to see beyond 240 characters.”
—Booklist, Starred Review

Remaking Society 

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

“Day makes the case for why activism by women for our health and healthcare is the path forward for a resilient nation.”
—Juliette Kayyem, former assistant secretary, Department of Homeland Security, author of Security Mom

Natural: How Faith in Nature’s Goodness Leads to Harmful Fads, Unjust Laws, and Flawed Science
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.”
—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

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

“An important study that extends the knowledge from other recent books that have demonstrated a stubbornly pervasive network of white nationalists.”
—Kirkus Reviews

Don’t Knock the Hustle: Young Creatives, Tech Ingenuity, and the Making of a New Innovation Economy
S. Craig Watkins

“An insightful guide to the humane potential of new ways of working and sharing. Ignore this book at your peril.”
—Juliet Schor, professor of sociology, Boston College

Books to Get Lost In 

Why I Wake Early
Mary Oliver

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

Odetta: A Life in Music and Protest
Ian Zack

“A thoughtful portrait of an artist who never quite became as famous as she deserved to be . . . A much needed biography of a crucial American artist and activist.”
—Booklist, Starred Review

Being Heumann: An Unrepentant Memoir of a Disability Rights Activist
Judith Heumann and Kristen Joiner

“Judy’s vision of a society that embraces all aspects of the human condition and where we face adversity with wisdom is truly transformative. . . . All who read her book will be better for it.”
—Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook, author of Lean In

Me Dying Trial
Patricia Powell

“Powell shows us the living within the dying, the foreigner within the native born, the male within the female. Her tales unfold like dreams spread out on a table.”
—Danzy Senna, author of Caucasia

And then COVID-19 shut the classroom doors. Nationwide, many schools are closed for the rest of the academic school year for in-person classes. Who knows what the new reality of education will look like when the pandemic is behind us? As teaching has moved online and as parents have taken up the role of at-home educators for little ones, one thing awaits at the end of quarantine: our appreciation for all educators who help guide the new generation to their futures. This Teacher Appreciation Week, we asked some of our authors to tell us about the teachers who made a difference in their lives. Here’s what they had to say.

***

“A high school English teacher, Mrs. Fryzel, was the one who got me to think that I could be a writer. As she walked me through a very imperfect essay I’d written, she paused at one sentence. Looking me in the eye, she told me that someone who could write that sentence should think about being a journalist. It’s not the career I ended up with, but I am definitely a writer.”
—M. V. Lee Badgett, The Economic Case for LGBT Equality: Why Fair and Equal Treatment Benefits Us All 

“The great teacher of my life was an acting teacher, Tracy Trevett, that I had at The American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York City. She was the very best kind of instructor. I’d watch her, and as each student got up to perform in class, she would completely modulate her teaching style and feedback to fit exactly what she could see that student needed—be it tough, coddling, pushing, inspirational, etc. She had a nearly preternatural ability to see right through to the core of people. I think she was the first person who ever really saw me for all of who I am.”
—Naomi McDougall Jones, The Wrong Kind of Women: Inside Our Revolution to Dismantle the Gods of Hollywood

“One teacher who I am especially appreciative of is Mr. Lawrence Puck. He consistently engaged us to think differently, as he would have us breakdown movies that were popular at the time. He is tremendously funny and insightful. He encouraged me to run for student body president and apply to colleges I would not have dreamed of attending. I am thankful for the paths that I might not have seen without his wit, insight, guidance, and belief in me as a student.”
—Zach Norris, We Keep Us Safe: Building Secure, Just, and Inclusive Communities

“In the very beginning of first grade, my teacher firmly taught us to write the following four words: ‘Written and Illustrated by.’ Ms. Zive conveyed to us, right from the start, to take ownership of our writing. I’ve never forgotten that lesson, and after I published my first book, I embarked on a years-long odyssey to track down Ms. Zive. Even if we can’t all find our early teachers, we owe them a collective debt, because they set us down the pathway that defined our lives.”
—Danielle Ofri, When We Do Harm: A Doctor Confronts Medical Error

“In eleventh grade, books lit a fire in my beleaguered belly. Words became, suddenly, as thrilling as roller coasters, as palpable as flesh, as infinite as space-time. Thank you, Mr. Macekura, for Joyce, and Eliot, and Pound, and for standing up from your too tiny desk to deliver your mustachioed, bespectacled incantation: ‘Isn’t that cool?’ It was. And here I am.”
—Ian Zack, Odetta: A Life in Music and Protest

As we spend more time indoors at the behest of shelter-in-place advisories, we find ourselves renegotiating and rediscovering our personal space in the company of others—often loved ones—or finding a new sense of solitude. Thus, in the best of circumstances, intimacy invites itself in moments of silence, of stillness, of understanding, of passion, of tenderness, of inner reflection. When we are at a loss for words to express how it makes us feel, we turn to the poets. In our fourth installment of this year’s National Poetry Month series, cocoon yourself in the poetry of Sonia Sanchez, Mary Oliver, and Sasha Pimentel.

***

Sonia Sanchez’s “5 love haiku” from Morning Haiku

1.
Under
a sexual sky you
coughed swords

2.
your smell
slides under my
fingernails

3.
love
walking backwards
towards assassinations

4.
locust man
eating the grain
of women

5.
your tongue
jelly on my
lips.

***

Mary Oliver’s “In the Evening, in the Pinewoods” from Red Bird

Who knows the sorrows of the heart?
God, of course, and the private self.
But who else? Anyone or anything else?
Not the trees, in their windy independence.
Nor the roving clouds, nor, even, the dearest of friends.

Yet maybe the thrush, who sings
by himself, at the edge of the green woods,
to each of us
out of his mortal body, his own feathered limits,
of every estrangement, exile, rejection—their
    death-dealing weight.

And then, so sweetly, of every goodness also to be remembered.

***

Sasha Pimentel’s “While My Lover Rests” from For Want of Water

Night divides from my pillow
as a man and a woman, one taking

breath, and the other, moving
to the pattern of his sleep. The soft

palate clicks as measure, and the dead
drip through the window. Here,

the plates of our women’s hips surface
from memory with my nakedness, like a body

and its reflection meeting at the point
of water, and I watch the man alone

in my bed curl, returning. In sleep
we are always aware of the presence

and absence of bodies, and he swims
in delicate ballet to the sheeted

center, knowing the lack of my weight
there. The wind buries herself

against the pane in this lovely, terrible
hour, and all the immigrants I know

of evening are coming to
gather themselves around. Tonight

I am swimming in this
inhalation—exhalation—and the wind,

larger than ever, is wailing, and his
throat relaxes, his uvula aquiver,

and I am listening now and learning
how little my need, in night, to speak.

It’ll be a while before we can go back to bookshops in person to browse the shelves, but that doesn’t mean we still can’t get exciting about the next book to dive into! Our editors came together to assemble a list of titles they’ve worked on that have been released this season and ones lined up later this year. Biography, history, criminal justice reform, queer equality . . . take your pick! We can’t wait for you to read them!

Jonathan Rapping’s Gideon’s Promise: A Public Defender Movement to Transform Criminal Justice  (August 2020)

Jonathan Rapping’s book on the key role of public defenders in criminal justice, Gideon’s Promise, is one I inherited from our recently departed and much mourned senior editor Rakia Clark. (I don’t mean she departed this world; she's hard at work at Houghton Harcourt these days. Hi, Rakia!) Rap is one of a kind, and his ideas are game changers. I don’t take credit for helping him make the book as sharp as it is, but I did do the blurber part with him. That consisted of my saying, “Would any of the big thinkers in the field maybe want to read the book for possible comment, do you think?” And then my receiving glowing endorsements from Paul Butler, James Forman, Ben Crump . . . and then Michelle Alexander, and then Bryan Stevenson, and then--hoping she wasn’t too late to the party—Stacey Abrams. But I’m also hearing from people he trained, and now from people his organization saved from the maw of the beast of our current system. Did I say I feel lucky that we're publishing this book? I’m humbled to be working with this guy. And adding this book to one we just published, Zach Norris’s We Keep Us Safe, feels like we’re really in the conversation about recognizing the humanity of all people and creating safer communities by ensuring justice and opportunity for all.
—Helene Atwan, Director

M. V. Lee Badgett’s The Economic Case for LGBT Equality: Why Fair and Equal Treatment Benefits Us All (May 2020)

I’m excited about this book because it’s doing something fresh and urgent. As we know, the human rights argument for queer equality is often made, including in books we publish at Beacon. And that’s important. Badgett agrees that, first and foremost, LGBTI equality is a human rights issue. But Badgett is also an economist who’s been working on issues of LGBTI equality for twenty years and she realized there are spaces where the human rights argument isn’t seen as persuasive or respected. In those spaces, what matters is the bottom line. What Badgett has found is that fair and equal treatment of LGBTI people is not only good for them and the ethical thing to do—it's also good for the bottom line.

The three things Badgett covers in the book are: first, that LGBT discrimination hurts individual incomes. In short, there are financial costs to not having the same opportunities as cisgender people. Secondly, discrimination hurts companies. More and more companies, including Fortune 500 ones and global companies, now recognize this. And finally, homophobia and transphobia are harmful to economies. Did you know that countries with more rights for LGBT people also have higher GDP per capita than other countries with similar economic characteristics?

Part of what’s effective about Badgett’s argument is that in addition to the US, she has conducted research in a number of other countries—including Canada, the UK, Australia, India, and the Philippines—so this is a global argument. 

The Economic Case for LGBT Equality will be in Beacon’s “Queer Ideas” series, which we’ve had for over fifteen years ago now, with Michael Bronski as the series editor. Michael and I are thrilled with this groundbreaking new addition to the series.
—Gayatri Patnaik, Associate Director and Editorial Director

Daniel S. Lucks’s Reconsidering Reagan: Racism, Republicans, and the Road to Trump (August 2020)

In 1980, Reagan ran for president, and his campaign slogan was “Let’s Make America Great Again.” Sounds familiar, right?! Trump took much more than that from Reagan’s playbook, and Daniel Lucks gets into some of that in this book.

I’ve been wanting to sign a book on Reagan and race for about twenty years now. Of course, there are many books on Reagan, including a number of hagiographies, and it’s striking that none of them focus on his views and policies on race, which were devastating.

We know Reagan had this cheerful and upbeat persona, but this book brings out an observation that Anthony Lewis once made about Reagan. He said, “. . . beneath the affability, there is a void.” This book is about that. Lucks’s goal is to help create dialogue around a new and sober reckoning of Reagan’s legacy which is long overdue.

This biography covers Reagan’s childhood and his surprising early liberalism. He traces Reagan’s gradual embrace of conservatism, his opposition to landmark civil rights legislation, his coziness with segregationists, and his skill in tapping into white anxiety about race. And using words like “welfare queen,” “law and order,” and “states rights” for political gain. Lucks argues that Reagan rode the wave of the “white backlash” all the way to the Presidency and was what we might call a polite racist. Never overt, but effective because he had this sunny demeanor and charm.

As president, Lucks argues Reagan had the worst civil rights record of any president since the 1920s. He supported the South African apartheid regime, packed the courts with conservatives, targeted laws prohibiting discrimination in education and housing. This book covers a number of Republicans, including Newt Gingerich, Jeff Sessions, Trent Lott, Rehnquist, and others, so there’s a lot of rich historical context.

Lucks feels that one important reason we need to have this reckoning about Reagan is because we’re still facing the effects of his presidency today. Reagan’s policies established the foundation for the current attacks on voting rights, assaults on Affirmative Action, and the demonization of poverty. And, of course, Reagan launched the war on drugs that targeted African Americans, Latinos, and the poor, leading to the carceral state.

The last point I want to make is that Lucks notes that Trump’s election caused many conservatives to lament Trump’s takeover of the Party of Reagan, and claim he is an aberration. But Lucks shows that Trump is not an anomaly but in fact the logical continuum of where the Republican Party has been trending since Reagan. I think this is a worthwhile and urgent book and hope it’ll find the large readership it deserves.
—Gayatri Patnaik, Associate Director and Editorial Director

Judith Heumann and Kristen Joiner’s Being Heumann: An Unrepentant Memoir of a Disability Rights Activist (February 2020)

Every editor will recall humbling moments of receiving a proposal that promises to profoundly impact peoples’ lives. For me, one of those moments was receiving a proposal by Judy Heumann and Kristen Joiner, which became Being Heumann: An Unrepentant Memoir of a Disability Rights Activist. Candid, poignant, and written in her unforgettable cheeky voice, it recounts Judy’s remarkable and lifelong fight for equal access—from education to the workplace to inclusion in society. One climactic moment in Judy’s life, when she and other people with disabilities took over a governmental building, is portrayed in Comedy Central’s “Drunk History,” starring Ali Stroker as Judy. It was powerful and set an example not only because it presented a relatively unknown yet significant piece of US history that should be widely taught, but also because it featured disabled performers. Later, Ali Stroker would make history as the first wheelchair user to win a Tony. When searching for a voice actor for the audiobook, we were delighted and honored when Ali Stroker agreed to once again play Judy. Upon reading the book, Stroker endorsed it, writing, “Judy’s story has shaken me to the core. For the first time, I see myself in someone else.” We hope others will, too.
—Joanna Greene, Senior Editor

Ian Zack’s Odetta: A Life in Music and Protest (April 2020)

We’re so excited about Odetta, an inspiring biography of the well-known and beloved singer. The book follows her humble beginnings on the west coast to her shy entry into entertainment through her activism and emergence as the “Voice of the Civil Rights Movement,” all the way to her tumultuous later years. It’s the first definitive biography of the singer, and the book feels that way. Lots of interviews, lots of information revealed from her personal papers (housed at the New York Public Library), etc. Ian Zack has written a narrative book that rightly uplifts this iconic figure. Originally acquired and edited by former Beacon Press senior editor, Rakia Clark, this book fills a gap in our historical understanding and appreciation for the folk singer who inspired so many others, including Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Mavis Staples, and Janis Joplin.
—Maya Fernandez, Assistant Editor

Shelter-in-place advisories may be restricting the time we spend outdoors, but that doesn’t mean we still can’t enjoy it. With a face mask and a good six feet of distance, we can luxuriate in walks along the river, afternoons in the park, hikes in the woods—even if it’s only for a few hours. For the rest of the time indoors, the words of poets bring us back outside in the mind’s eye, revealing corners of the natural world we may have missed. In our third installment of this year’s National Poetry Month series, marvel at the beauty of nature in the poetry of Melissa Range, Jay Parini, and Mary Oliver!

***

Melissa Range’s “Cento: Natural Theology” from Scriptorium 

Partly like the sun and partly like the air,
the earth—just like a body
if it had no bones. As if by veins
it is held together so it does not crumble.
Like a lamb sucking milk, the plants
suck up the green; place the emerald
in their mouth and the spirit will revive,
a fire of burning mountains
which is difficult to put out,
like the thunder’s eye. It cannot be caught.
It ministers to those who bear it,
coming from the mystery of God
like limestone from stone, one drop
of dew found on clean grass. All its matter
is from the fresh greenness of the air,
the sharpness of the water, flame
in the heavens. God does not wish to cure it.

***

Jay Parini’s “A Night in the Field” from New and Collected Poems: 1975-2015

I didn’t mean to stay so late
or lie there in the grass
all summer afternoon and thoughtless
as the kite of sun caught in the tree-limbs
and the crimson field began to burn,
then tilt way.
                  I hung on
handily as night lit up the sky’s black skull
and star-flakes fell as if forever—
fat white petals of a far-off flower
like manna on the plains.

A ripe moon lifted in the east,
its eye so focused,
knowing what I knew but had forgotten
of the only death I’ll ever really need
to keep me going.

Did I sleep to wake or wake to sleep?

I slipped in seams through many layers,
soil and subsoil, rooting
in the loamy depths of my creation,
where at last I almost felt at home.

But rose at dawn in rosy light,
beginning in the dew-sop long-haired grass,
having been taken, tossed,
having gone down, a blackened tooth
in sugary old gums, that ground
where innocence is found, unfound,
making my way toward the barn,
its beams alight,
its rafters blazing in the red-ball sun.

***

Mary Oliver’s “When I Am Among the Trees” from Thirst 

When I am among the trees,
especially the willows and the honey locust,
equally the beech, the oaks and the pines,
they give off such hints of gladness.
I would almost say that they save me, and daily.

I am so distant from the hope of myself,
in which I have goodness, and discernment,
and never hurry through the world
      but walk slowly, and bow often.

Around me the trees stir in their leaves
and call out, “Stay awhile.”
The light flows from their branches.

And they call again, “It’s simple,” they say,
“and you too have come
into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled
with light, and to shine.”

Walter Brister as Armmah Sotanki, leader of the Sotanki’s troupe of “Hindoo” fakirs starting in 1898.

Once upon a Gilded Age, Americans once treated Islam and Muslims with both fascination and respect. Hard to believe in our post-9/11 timeline, but it’s true. Swept by romanticized images of Muslims found in most popular entertainment at the time and Arabian Nights, thousands of Americans were enthralled by the Islamic Orient. Some, in fact, saw Islam as a global antiracist movement uniquely suited to people of African descent living in an era of European imperialism, Jim Crow segregation, and officially sanctioned racism. Some, like enigmatic circus performer John Walter Brister, who would found the Moorish Science Temple of America in 1925, the prequel to the Black Muslims of the Nation of Islam. By then, he was known as Prophet Noble Drew Ali. Thus, at this moment in US history, the Black Muslim movement in America began.

The story of Brister’s transformations from the first Black child star on Broadway in 1893 to Noble Drew Ali is staggering, and historian Jacob S. Dorman vividly brings it to life in The Princess and the Prophet: The Secret History of Magic, Race and Moorish Muslims in America. Dorman traces Brister’s winding path through the world of Arabian acrobats and equestrians, Muslim Fakirs, Wild West shows, and eventually, Chicago politics. Working as a “Hindoo” magician, Brister traveled across the country to perform feats of strength and escape magic. This is how he met his wife Eva, who performed as Princess Sotanki. Famous as the first Black woman lion tamer and for her “Sacred Indian Snake Dance,” she would play a vital role in helping him found the Moorish Science Temple. Throw in a faked death, a new identity, and the anti-immigrant “America First” politics of the time—sound familiar?—to the mix of circus acts, and you have a life story that has to be read to be believed.

The Princess and the Prophet also features photos and poster art from the era. One curious thing becomes clear while looking them. Dorman writes, “As the first Black child star on Broadway, and then the founder of the first Muslim mass movement in America, Walter Brister was incongruously both the forerunner of the blond tap-dancing cherub Shirley Temple and of the militant Black Nationalist icon Malcolm X.” Take a gander at the life and times of Noble Drew Ali!

The Woodlawn Wangdoodles, the Black juvenile band that starred in the hit Broadway show In Old Kentucky starting in 1893. Note diminutive bandleader Walter Brister holding a cornet.

A photo of Walter Brister as “Armmah Sotanki,” a “Hindoo Magician,” used for the Pawnee Bill Wild West Show and the John Robinson Circus 1900-1902.

Princess Sotanki, aka Eva Brister, from the 1902 route book of the John Robinson Circus. The picture is the same as the one that ran in the 1900 Pawnee Bill Wild West Show route book, which identified her as E. Brister. This one is notable in that the book identifies her as a “Hindoo lion tamer.”

The five Ali Brothers, members of the Pawnee Bill Wild West Show of 1899, and a typical group of Arab acrobats and equestrians commonly found in American and European circuses near the turn of the twentieth century.

Prophet Noble Drew Ali (back row) seated between leading South Side politicians Louis B. Anderson (left) and Oscar DePriest (right). Aaron Payne is seated at bottom right. First Annual Convention, October 1928.

About Jacob S. Dorman

Jacob S. Dorman is a professor of History and Core Humanities at the University of Nevada, Reno. He is the author of the CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title Chosen People: The Rise of American Black Israelite Religions (Oxford University Press, 2013), which won numerous book prizes. Dorman has been awarded fellowships by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Columbia University, the University of Chicago, and many others.

Now this is how you round off a year and a decade. Just look at all these books on all these Best-Of lists! Our authors absolutely killed it. And they’ll kill it again in 2020. Let’s give them a round of applause into the new year! And while we’re doing so, let’s take a look at some highlights of the lists their books appeared on. (Someone pop open a bottle of bubbly while we’re applauding here. This calls for celebration!)

Memes to Movements: How the World’s Most Viral Media Is Changing Social Protest and Power
An Xiao Mina

“Essential reading. . . . An’s work demonstrates why we should be taking [memes] seriously.”
—Jonny Sun, author and illustrator of everyone’s a aliebn when ur a aliebn too

• Hyperallergic, “Best of 2019: Our Top 25 Books”

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

“If you want to understand the rising preeminence of black women in our modern day sociopolitical landscape, you would be smart to start with Feminista Jones.”
—Ijeoma Oluo, author of the New York Times bestseller So You Want To Talk About Race

• Mashable, included in “Books to give activists as they prepare for the upcoming election”
• Mashable, “17 books every activist should read in 2019”
• Bustle, “9 Books About Beyoncé, Feminism, And Music To Read After You Finish ‘Queen Bey’”

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

“A masterpiece and a vital road map for the ongoing fight for Indigenous sovereignty.”
—Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States

• Mashable, included in “Books to give activists as they prepare for the upcoming election”

Superior: The Return of Race Science
Angela Saini

“Angela Saini’s Superior: The Return of Race Science is nothing short of a remarkable, brilliant, and erudite exploration of what we believe about the racialized differences among our human bodies..”
—Jonathan Metzl, author of Dying of Whiteness

• Nature, “Top Ten Books of 2019”
• Smithsonian, “Ten Best Science Books of 2019”
• NPR’s Science Friday, “The Best Science Books of 2019”
• The Guardian, “Best science, nature, and ideas books of 2019”
• Library Journal, “Best Science & Technology Books 2019”
• Vanity Fair London, “The Best Books of the Year”
• BBC Science Focus (UK), “The 10 Best Science Books of 2019”
• Prospect Magazine (UK), “The best science books of 2019”
• Physics World, “Top Ten Books of 2019”
• New Statesmen (UK), “Books of the Year”
• The Telegraph (UK), “The 50 Best Books of 2019”
• Sunday Times (UK), “The Sunday Times Best Books of the Year 2019”

A Queer History of the United States for Young People
Michael Bronski, adapted by Richie Chevat

“A touchstone for LGBTQ readers seeking proof of the greatness that preceded them and confidence in the success that awaits in their future.”
—Shelf Awareness

• School Library Journal, “Best Nonfiction 2019”
• Mombian: Sustenance for Lesbian Moms, “2019 Holiday Gift Guide to LGBTQ Children’s Books”

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

“An important corrective to conventional narratives of our nation’s history.”
—Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review

• Chicago Public Library: one of the “Best Informational Books for Older Readers of 2019”
• New York Public Library: a “Best Books for Teens”
• Kirkus Reviews: “Best of YA Nonfiction 2019”
• School Library Journal, “Best Nonfiction 2019”

Breathe: A Letter to My Sons
Imani Perry

“Combines rigor and heart, and the result is a magic mirror showing us who we are, how we got here, and who we may become.”
—Tayari Jones, author of An American Marriage

• The Undefeated, “25 Can’t-Miss Books of 2019”
• BuzzFeed, “68 Books For Every Person On Your Holiday List”
• Kirkus Reviews, “Best Nonfiction of 2019”
• Kirkus Reviews, “Best Books of 2019 to Fight Racism and Xenophobia”
• The Atlantic, featured as one of “Twenty-One Books to Read After Becoming”

Unashamed: Musings of a Fat, Black Muslim
Leah Vernon

“I laughed and cried and read this book in awe of Leah Vernon’s brave, bold, and beautiful voice.”
—Randa Abdel-Fattah, author of The Lines We Cross and Does My Head Look Big in This?

• The Oakland Press, listed as #3 indie bestseller in Michigan during the month of October
• The Atlantic, featured as one of “Twenty-One Books to Read After Becoming”

White Negroes: When Cornrows Were in Vogue . . . and Other Thoughts on Cultural Appropriation
Lauren Michele Jackson

“Incisive and richly detailed. A vital text—one that offers new ways of seeing, hearing, and consuming.”
—Hanif Abdurraqib, author of They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us

• The Atlantic, featured as one of “Twenty-One Books to Read After Becoming”
• BuzzFeed, “68 Books For Every Person On Your Holiday List”
• Chicago Reader, “2019 Reader Gift Guide”
• The Undefeated, “25 Can’t-Miss Books of 2019”
• Chicago Tribune: “Books of 2019: 11 Notable Reads”

You won’t find corny-ass statements here proclaiming that the year 2020 will usher a time of clearer vision. Puh-lease. That’s tired. What’s worth saying here, however, is we need to keep our eyes on the issues that matter to us as we begin a new decade. Now that’s wired. We can get a picture of what matters by looking back at some of the top read blog posts on the Broadside in 2019. Clearly, we’re still coming to terms with our cultural identity as it pertains to race and injustice and the chokehold of whiteness on liberation, among other issues. And as always, we’re grateful to our authors for giving us the context and critique to understand these issues and where to go from here.

So here are the highlights of the Broadside this year. See you in the new decade with more insightful blog posts from our authors!

“Before Passing Away, Carol Channing Passed for White”
Lisa Page

“Americans like stories like [Carol Channing’s], because racial and ethnic passing is ubiquitous inside a culture known for self-invention. But being Black is about more than biology, one drop rule be damned. Being Black is not just about singing and dancing, and shucking and jiving. Being Black goes beyond complexion—it’s a cultural thing.”

“Robin DiAngelo Talking White Fragility in My Town, with Security Guards”
Thomas Norman DeWolf

“Let me be as clear with my readers as Dr. DiAngelo was with us that night. It is up to white people to understand that our ancestors created racism. We have inherited it. Our denial and deflection and fragility perpetuate it. It is on us to eradicate it.”

“For CaShawn Thompson, Black Girl Magic Was Always the Truth”
Feminista Jones

“Black Feminism can be a protection and a guide, and as more of us become parents, we have a responsibility to change the narrative, minimize the harm, and shift our culture and communities toward appreciation and respect for Black women and girls everywhere. Bringing our daughters up believing in and never questioning the existence of their own ‘magic’ is restorative and promising, electrifying and declarative, radical and hopeful.”

“Cutting to the Chase of the Covington Catholic Fiasco”
Dina Gilio-Whitaker

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

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

“The fact is that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor. It must be demanded by the oppressed—that’s the long, sometimes tragic and turbulent story of history. And if people who are enslaved sit around and feel that freedom is some kind of lavish dish that will be passed out on a silver platter by the federal government or by the white man while the Negro merely furnishes the appetite, he will never get his freedom.” (Originally posted in March 2018)

“Breaking Up Families of Color, an American Tradition as Old as the Slave Trade”
Daina Ramey Berry

“The sounds, sights, and smells of slave auctions contributed to the horror of enslaved children’s lives. Loud, rhythmic bid calls echoing from the mouths of auctioneers competed with chatter from potential buyers, the rattling of chains, and the everyday noises of a town center. Joining these audible oddities was another unpleasant sound that could be heard above all others at the end of a sale: the cries of wailing mothers, overcome with grief after being separated from their children.” (Originally posted in June 2018).

“Getting to We: Ten Points for Understanding Racism in the Trump Era”
Deborah L. Plummer

“We, as Americans, do not have a shared understanding of the definition of racism. We live segregated lives and are deeply divided along political lines. Relying on politicians and the media to unravel racial dynamics does not serve us well. Fully understanding racism requires deep understanding of history and the social sciences, and a lot of multiracial living, which most of us do not engage in.”

“In the Wake of El Paso and Dayton, Beacon Press Offers Free eBook Resources”
Helene Atwan

“Like most of us living in the US, I was sickened by this weekend’s news of shootings in El Paso and Dayton. Coming into work, feeling so stricken by these events, I was heartened by the fact that I could turn to a group of colleagues and immediately begin talking about what kind of resources we could offer in the wake of these senseless tragedies. I feel, as I often do, heartened to be working in an environment where it is our job to try to create these resources.”

“White Fragility and ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’”
Linda Schlossberg

“There’s a reason Mockingbird is assigned to thirteen-year-olds. The moral message of the novel is a simplistic one: Racism is bad. Very, very bad.  Also, bad people are racists. Good people, the reader is assured, are not racists . . . As readers, we are aligned with Scout and by extension Atticus, who embodies rational, educated “racial tolerance,” in sharp contrast to the novel’s depiction of an angry, ignorant, racist mob. Everything in the reading experience of the novel confirms a white reader’s sense of herself as open-minded, tolerant, woke. ‘If I lived in 1930s Alabama, I would never do that,’ the white reader thinks. ‘I am one of the good white people.’” (Originally posted in December 2018)

Well, that was fast. Can you believe the holiday season (and snow) is here again? Time to go on the hunt for gifts to inspire someone in your life! Save 30% on everything at beacon.org through December 31 using code HOLIDAY30.

By the way, orders must be submitted by 1 PM, EST, December 16, if you want them to be shipped before the holidays. USPS media mail takes 7-10 business days. To ensure delivery by December 24, choose one of our expedited shipping options.

Oh, and we’ll be closed Monday, December 23, 2019 through Thursday, January 2, 2020. Orders placed during this time will be fulfilled when we are back in the office on Thursday, January 2, 2020.

And now, without further ado, for our inspirational holiday picks, the categories are . . .

Radical Women

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

“A godsend that will inform not only how we are approached and regarded by others through social media platforms but how we interact with each other and value ourselves.”
—CaShawn Thompson, creator of #BlackGirlMagic

The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls
Mona Eltahawy

“Reading it will free you, and acting on it will free us all.”
—Gloria Steinem, writer and feminist activist

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

“She reminds us that bringing all of ourselves and our people with us is the only way any of us will get free.”
—Janet Mock, author of Redefining Realness and Surpassing Certainty 

Unashamed: Musings of a Fat, Black Muslim
Leah Vernon

“Unashamed is everything Leah Vernon embodies on a daily basis: authenticity, resiliency, and, most of all . . . unquestionable courage.”
—Jes Baker, author of Things No One Will Tell Fat Girls and Landwhale 

Indigenous Resistance

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

“A much-needed and excellent introduction to American Indian history and contemporary life for a broad audience.”
—Against the Current 

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. 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 Debbie Reese and Jean Mendoza

“An important corrective to conventional narratives of our nation’s history.”
—Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review

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

“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

Cultural Realness

Breathe: A Letter to My Sons
Imani Perry

“Deeply cathartic and resonant for parents attempting to raise their children with intention and integrity.”
—Tarana Burke

Me Dying Trial
Patricia Powell

“One of the most exciting writers living and writing on the island that is the Caribbean-American hyphen.”
—Edwidge Danticat, author of Breath, Eyes, Memory 

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

“Gives us all the gift of engaging our hearts and minds in the true stories of Christmas.”
—Nikki Giovanni

White Negroes: When Cornrows Were in Vogue . . . and Other Thoughts on Cultural Appropriation
Lauren Michele Jackson

“Miraculously, Lauren Michele Jackson is able to write about cultural appropriation in a way that doesn’t make you want to drink a glass of sand.”
—Eve L. Ewing, author of Electric Arches and Ghosts in the Schoolyard

A Q&A with Patricia Powell

Patricia Powell

Patricia Powell made a splash, in 1993, as a major voice in Caribbean literature with her debut novel Me Dying Trial. Her protagonist, Gwennie Glaspole, a schoolteacher trapped in an unhappy marriage, fights to resist Jamaican cultural expectations and for her independence. Now in the new century, we saw it was time to introduce her masterful story and signature voice to a new generation of readers. So we’ve reissued her novel in our Celebrating Black Women Writers series! Our assistant editor, Maya Fernandez, caught up with Powell to chat with her about it. 

Maya Fernandez: Is it true the you originally wrote Me Dying Trial while you were in undergrad? What inspired you to write it?

Patricia Powell: It is indeed true. I was initially an economics major but when I took my first creative writing class, everything changed. All my bottled-up feelings of loss came undone. I was twenty at the time and had only been in the States for four years. Writing had already stirred up so many feelings about home and the people I had left behind, those I had loved with all my heart and would never see again—my great aunt who raised me, for example, and who died shortly after I left. Writing then became a way to bring her back to life—her laughter, her stories, her larger than life love. As long as I was writing, there she was, close to me, filling my imagination, and this was the case, too, for many of the other characters: the men at the shop talking and drinking and smoking; the people in the village; the village itself. Writing was a way, too, of knitting myself back together with all these memories that I could then carry forever. 

MF: One of the reasons I personally love this book is that the characters feel full and actualized. Complicated in that good, human way. Are any of them based on people in your own life?

PP: Yes, some of the characters are based on real people and some on a number of people folded into one. But Me Dying Trial was really a story I made up about my origins since no one in my family would confirm the truth of where I had come from. A new place, a new country often requires a new identity. But even in the old place, I didn’t know who I was. I had always heard stories that my father wasn’t really my father, and that was why I was given away. My mother had one story, my great aunt had another, my grandmother had yet a third. Not to mention my cousins and their many speculations. It was impossible to know what was true, and in those days when you were a child that asked too many difficult questions, the adults were always quick to tell you, Don’t stir that up now, that was a long time ago, leave it, or even worst, Why are you asking about things that don’t concern you! Me Dying Trial was a way to invent an origin story for myself. With each word, I was weaving my own tale. I don’t know if it is the truth of my birth—my mother still won’t say—but it is a truth I created from bits of stories I overheard and a version I have chosen to live with.

MF: Though Gwennie is the central character of the book, Me Dying Trial also focuses on her daughter, Peppy, and her aunt, Cora, and the tumultuous relationships the exists between the three of them. Why did you choose to share these three different women’s stories together?

PP: Peppy, Gwennie, and Cora represent three generations of Jamaican women. I was curious to know what values, what gifts, what insights about life each could impart to the other. Peppy, of course, the youngest, had the most to learn. From her mother, she would learn both bravery and perseverance. Gwennie was brave in so many ways. For one, she went outside of her loveless marriage to seek affection. The consequences, of course, were grave, as women are not often expected to self-realize; but for a moment she allowed herself a little joy and a little intimacy. Then she not only left her marriage, she moved with her children to an entirely new country to start her life over, which is no small accomplishment. And though she had lived a middle-class existence in Jamaica as a teacher, she took the housekeeping jobs that were available to her to provide food and housing for her children. In many ways, Gwennie had gone further than the women in her lineage. None had moved away to seek their fortune in another country. Leaving her marriage had given her this freedom. From Aunt Cora, Peppy learned the true meaning of love and security. These were attributes her mother could not provide, but Cora could. She believed in the fullness and richness of all life. She had already adopted several children, providing them a home and love and abundance. Clearly, she had room to raise one more child. Cora was also a woman of the land. She owned a farm. She was an independent businesswoman and ran a successful store. She served her community in various ways, even building them a place for worship with her own funds. She was generous to everyone. Neither Cora nor Gwennie is without flaws, but together they will have given Peppy invaluable resources to make her own way into the world. 

MF: This book touches on important topics such as identity, sexuality, immigration, gender expectations, and abuse. When writing the book, did you imagine that the issues the characters face would remain relevant more than twenty years later?  

PP: I had no idea these topics would be relevant today. But the truth is they’ve been relevant for a long time. When I think of some of my favorite writers who have now passed—Virginia Woolf, James Baldwin, Michelle Cliff, Paule Marshall, among others—these were also some of the topics they explored. I think each generation adds not only a new perspective to the conversation but also contributes to the evolution of the topic. I don’t think Jimmy Baldwin could ever have imagined gay marriage in the US when he was writing Giovanni’s Room, but just by writing the story of their love, he was already infusing the world consciousness with that possibility. I doubt he could have imagined a Black president, but I also believe that his fiery essays were already making room for a Barack Obama to happen. I believe that when we write the truth of our experiences we are already weaving the possibility for a new and different outcome.

MF: How do you feel about the reissue of Me Dying Trial?

PP: I’m excited that a whole new generation of readers will get to read it and experience the characters and develop their own relationships with them. And I hope, too, that they’ll be inspired to write their own stories, adding new insights to the conversations about identity and abuse and immigration and sexuality. I’m also excited about up-and-coming literary scholars who will read the novel with new eyes and offer even newer interpretations of the material.

MF: What would you like to say about the Celebrating Black Women Writers series? How do you feel about having your book included in it?

PP: OMG! What an honor! To be celebrated amongst writers such as Gayl Jones, Sonia Sanchez, Ntozake Shange, Octavia Butler, Sindiwe Magona, Alina Troyano … I have no words. These writers are my literary ancestors and mentors. They taught me how to read, how to think, how to listen, how to write, how to dream. They taught me how to love. Their books are like old friends. I return to them again and again for inspiration, for comfort, for guidance, for renewal.

MF: Why do you think it’s important to read Black women’s work, stories, books, words, etc.?

PP: For Black people who might not often see ourselves reflected in literature, Black women’s work can be a mirror, an evaluation, and a celebration of our experiences. And their work can offer us alternate ways of seeing and interpreting those experiences as well as new possibilities for living and loving. Black women’s stories are important for all readers, as they can illuminate all those places where our shared humanness overlaps, no matter race, gender, religion, economic class, or sexual orientation, and also where our shared humanness diverges based on those very same categories. Because we don’t often occupy seats of power, at least in North America, Black women’s writings can reflect back to those at the center what life is often like on the outskirts, and whether or not social policies are effective in improving living and social conditions. Black women’s voices and perspectives are also vital to our ongoing national conversations about wealth redistribution, environmental health, racial and gender equality, food and housing and employment justice, safety and freedom of movement through the streets, and so much more. They are also vital to the way we think about our bodies and our relationships to each other and to the Earth. In Balm Yard, the new book I am writing about healing practices in rural Jamaica rooted in older West African religions, I explore the spiritual worldviews of Black women that are grounded in nature and in the realms of spirit. I am learning that Black women’s spiritualities have much to teach us about how to respond to our present moment. Because we are living through such chaotic times, where everything we have taken for granted is being upended and reevaluated, the very earth is shifting underneath us, my hope is that our work can continue to offer new ways of thinking, alternate ways of being in this changing world, medicine to soothe our aching hearts and minds, and new dreams that can birth new possibilities and realities.   

MF: What would you like readers, especially those just being introduced to Me Dying Trial, to take away from your book?

PP: I would like new readers to enjoy the book, to appreciate the details, the humor, the intricate ways the characters are portrayed. My hope, too, is that new readers might be able to see themselves or their families’ stories reflected here, and that this resonance brings new insights and deepens curiosity. I would like readers new to Caribbean or women’s literature to allow themselves to be enriched by these new perspectives so that their own lives might be transformed by the reading experience.

About Patricia Powell 

Novelist Patricia Powell was born in Jamaica and moved with her family to the United States in 1982. Powell has taught creative writing at Harvard University, Wellesley College, MIT, and Standford University, and is currently Professor of English at Mills College in California. She is the author of A Small Gathering of Bones, The Pagoda, and The Fullness of Everything.

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

To wrap up 2019, we introduce you to our business operations assistant, Isabel Tehan!

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

Like many people who work at Beacon, I have always loved books and reading, and I studied English as my major in college. Though my mother worked as an editor for a number of years, I did not consider a job in publishing for myself until later in school. I was worried that a lack of publishing-specific internships might make it more difficult to get a job in this industry but figured it was worth a shot! I found the listing for my position at Beacon during one of many frantic late-night job searches as a second-semester senior. As I looked further into the job, I realized Beacon published several books I had already read and found meaningful. I was lucky that timing worked out for me to begin at Beacon right after graduation.

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

Be open to roles outside of departments that don’t immediately jump to mind when thinking about publishing. Since Beacon is a small press, I am able to learn about what people in other departments do on a day-to-day basis. 

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

I work with the sales department regularly by helping to fulfill orders from different organizations and individuals. I enjoy this part of my job, because it is fascinating to see the different groups and people who are buying our books.

What are you reading right now?

I’m behind the times on this but I’m finally reading Educated by Tara Westover. I love memoirs and reading about others’ real-life experiences, and this is a really incredible story. I’m also strongly considering rereading the Twilight saga if I can manage to find my old copies anywhere.

Hobbies outside of work?

When it’s not freezing outside and dark at 4 p.m., I love most outdoor activities, especially any that bring me close to the beach. This winter, though, I am working on getting more advanced with my knitting. I’m hoping to make myself a sweater before it’s too warm outside to wear it.

Favorite thing about Boston?

Walking/running/biking along the Charles never gets old. I love the views from the Cambridge side of the river. In general, I love a waterfront view. The one down the street from the Beacon office in the Seaport is pretty great, too!

About Isabel Tehan 

Isabel Tehan earned a BA in English Literature and Spanish Language from the College of the Holy Cross. Before joining Beacon in June 2019, she worked as a research assistant at the Digital Transgender Archive and served as the Editorial Intern at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.

By Raj Kumar

Bill and Melinda Gates. Photo credit: Kjetil Ree

If you saw the latest episode of the Netflix show Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj, you heard Minhaj say we have to tax that ass . . . of the ultra-rich, that is. Minhaj asked if billionaires and big philanthropy can save us. He doesn’t think so, and nor does writer Anand Giridharadas. They believe billionaires’ wealth needs to be taxed. Devex founding president Raj Kumar doesn’t see it that way. In this passage from his book The Business of Changing the World: How Billionaires, Tech Disrupters, and Social Entrepreneurs Are Transforming the Global Aid Industry, Kumar argues that the debate on taxing the rich is shallow, that there are more factors to consider. Instead, we should have results-oriented metrics in place in addition to laws to keep Richie Rich donors accountable and transparent about their investments.

***

As much as billionaires might like to think of their giving as an unalloyed good, their philanthropy will increasingly be a subject of controversy and a political issue itself.

In the United States, where more than half of all billionaires live, even our president among them, there is growing concern that our political system is being undermined by the divide between the billionaire class and everyone else. That has, in turn, put major US philanthropy in the spotlight, as three recent books make clear.

In his book The Givers, David Callahan, a philanthropy critic, worries that massive private philanthropy is diminishing the role of government when it comes to public policy. Rich donors shaping society the way they like through tax-deductible political campaigning in the guise of charity and direct provision of social services runs counter to a democratic American society making its own choices. Similarly, Robert Reich, a Stanford University professor and author of Just Giving, sees the fast growth in private philanthropy as a subversion of government: the charitable-giving tax deduction reduced government revenue in the US by $50 billion in 2016. All that philanthropic giving could have been directed by government according to the democratic wishes of citizens. Finally, Anand Giridharadas’s book Winners Take All examines how billionaire giving is part of a pernicious elitism that stops questions about inequality in their tracks. Writing big checks to good causes can take attention away from problems elites themselves are causing, he worries.

~~~

As we face a coming wave of billionaire philanthropy, what’s required are rules for the road, an example of which would be an admonition against anonymous giving. This is a historic opportunity to fundamentally change the world for the better, but we can only seize that opportunity if billionaire philanthropy is held to high standards of transparency and effectiveness. Those standards might need to be enshrined in law if billionaire philanthropists don’t act quickly to demonstrate they are engaged in responsible giving.

Those seeking solutions to broader inequality are on the right track. Left unchecked, inequality can lead to “state capture”—a situation where a few wealthy people or interest groups effectively control the government. That can happen even in countries that hold elections and are technically democracies. As a result, there are tax, regulatory, and campaign finance reforms that may be required to mitigate the worst aspects of our current “gilded age.”

But even if, for example, funds could be raised from a billionaire tax, governments would certainly not deploy the money entirely to end extreme poverty or achieve other critical zero goals. Already we face the problem of governments in rich countries dedicating too little funding to foreign aid—in the United States, it makes up just 1 percent of the federal budget. Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan have pledged their massive future giving to education and human health. If more of their money were to be taxed by the US government, according to its current budget priorities most of it would be spent on defense, entitlement programs, and interest on the debt.

That’s why the debate about billionaires paying more taxes versus donating more to charity is important, but too shallow on its own. We can’t focus only on the amounts. Just as there is scrutiny of what governments spend tax revenues on, there needs to be scrutiny of what billionaires do with their philanthropic investments. What kind of impact are they actually having?

Zuckerberg and Chan’s initiative is a case in point. Organized as a limited liability corporation, CZI is able to operate with little transparency, even though it is growing to become one of the largest philanthropic organizations in the world and could one day even eclipse the Gates Foundation.

The operating model Zuckerberg and Chan have in mind is also unusual and potentially problematic: they don’t focus on giving grants to achieve their objectives—as nearly all other foundations would. Instead, they want to launch and operate programs themselves. This means that rather than maintain a small staff for grantmaking and advocacy, they will need to build a large in-house implementation team. Already CZI has a staff of 250, two and a half times the staff size at Bloomberg Philanthropies, even though the funding levels are nearly identical. That team includes 125 engineers, as CZI aims to build technology tools to advance scientific discovery in the medical field and improve learning outcomes in education.

As CZI scales to an organization that spends billions of dollars per year, its staff size could end up in the thousands. Funds that could have gone to social entrepreneurs and NGOs competing against each other to present the best ideas and results may instead end up building a massive institution that faces no competitive pressures and can’t easily be scrutinized by the public. The approach might be practical, given CZI’s central focus on technological innovation and the unique skill sets of its founders, but it could also be a mistake that distorts the aid market. Ultimately the public will need to be able to have an open and transparent debate about CZI’s approach, even though CZI is organized as a private corporation.

The debate over whether billionaires should spend more on philanthropy or taxes isn’t restricted to the rich countries where most of them live. A big part of the global development challenge is increasing the tax base in low-income countries, improving the capabilities of governments there, and pushing those governments to spend more of their limited resources on health, education, and infrastructure. Part of this agenda entails better tax enforcement, especially for the richest citizens of the poorest countries. But that’s hard to achieve, and alone won’t close the gap. And there are some foreign aid programs that have these goals, but private philanthropy has the most flexibility to attempt to influence and incentivize the governments of countries where most extreme poverty exists.

Mo Ibrahim’s foundation does something no government aid program could: the African billionaire offers a $5 million prize to any African president or prime minister who leaves office when his or her term ends. It’s an incentive to prioritize democracy and the rule of law, and just this year it was awarded to the outgoing president of Liberia, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf.

Like the Gates Foundation’s funding of FAO and WHO and Ibrahim’s prize, private philanthropy might just be able to make United Nations agencies, international organizations, and governments more effective in a way that just increasing taxes on billionaires can’t.

The idea that trillions of dollars in new funding could soon become available to end extreme poverty, eliminate disease, and improve our planet and our lives strikes me as a good problem to have. That some of the most talented new economy leaders like Bill Gates, Michael Bloomberg, and Mark Zuckerberg would use their credibility, political clout, and expertise to move the needle on polio, smoking eradication, and education is a good thing. We need to both push more billionaires into that column and hold accountable those who don’t act. We need to call out billionaires who give just to popular causes or pet projects and encourage those who instead fund proven, cost-effective interventions that maximize impact.

It won’t be enough to sit back and watch more billionaires slowly sign up to the Giving Pledge and make their mark against the issues they care about. We’ll need a highly engaged public encouraging results-oriented philanthropy and holding billionaires accountable when their giving isn’t generating or even targeting the results the world needs. And we may well need laws and rules around transparency that allow us to do that. In the quest to end poverty, nearly eight hundred million ultrapoor adults and children are urgently counting on our ensuring their lives are on top of the global agenda.

About the Author 

Raj Kumar is the founding president and editor in chief of Devex, which the Washington Post compared to a “Bloomberg-style” media platform for the aid industry. A media leader for the World Economic Forum, Kumar is a noted commentator on global development. He lives in Washington, DC. Follow him on Twitter at @raj_devex and visit his website.

By Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and Dina Gilio-Whitaker

Jennie A. Brownscombe’s “The First Thanksgiving at Plymouth” (1914). Ugh! See how the artist centered the colonists to push the settler-centric mythos of Thanksgiving? This has settler-colonial Hallmark nonsense written all over it.

Editor’s Note: I don’t know about you, but what you’re about to read is not what I was taught about Thanksgiving—and I wish it was. In school, I got the Hallmark card mythos. The following excerpt from “All the Real Indians Died Off”: And 20 Other Myths About Native Americans by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and Dina Gilio-Whitaker busts the myth of this holiday. Spoiler alert: the history is much more complicated.

***

Second only to the Columbus discovery story, the Thanksgiving tale is the United States’ quintessential origin narrative. Like the Columbus myth, the story of Thanksgiving has morphed into an easily digestible narrative that, despite its actual underlying truths, is designed to reinforce a sense of collective patriotic pride. The truths are, however, quite well documented. Their concealment within a simplistic story inevitably depicts a convoluted reality about the Indigenous peoples who played crucial roles in both events, and it presents an exaggerated valorization about the settlers’ roles. The result is a collective amnesia that fuels the perpetuation of Native American stereotypes, playing out over and over again in the classrooms and textbooks of American schoolchildren, generation after generation. This only masks the complexities of the relationships between settlers and Indians, and thus the founding of the United States.

The Thanksgiving story as we know it is a story of unconditional welcome by the Indigenous peoples, a feel-good narrative that rationalizes and justifies the uninvited settlement of a foreign people by painting a picture of an organic friendship. A more accurate telling of the story, however, describes the forming of political alliances built on a mutual need for survival and an Indigenous struggle for power in the vacuum left by a destructive century of foreign settlement.

The Backstory

The offenses of the Thanksgiving story stem from lack of historical context. For example, it often gives the impression that the Mayflower pilgrims were the first Europeans to settle on the land today known as the United States. But by the time the Mayflower arrived at Plymouth, Massachusetts, in December 1620, Europeans had been traveling to the North American continent, and founding colonies there, for well over a century. Armed with information about the region—made available by the knowledge and mapping of predecessors like Samuel de Champlain—the Eastern Seaboard was dotted with numerous European enclaves and towns. Jamestown, for example, was founded in 1607, while Florida had been populated by the Spanish since the founding of St. Augustine, in 1565. Some colonies, such as the one in Roanoke, Virginia, had failed. The Mayflower immigrants, who came to be known as the Pilgrims, were thus, in December 1620, only the latest newcomers to the land, all of which was known at the time to the English as Virginia. Exposure to European diseases had resulted in pandemics among the Natives up and down the coast from Florida to New England throughout the sixteenth century, exacerbated by the Indian slave trade started by Columbus. Between 1616 and 1619 the region that would soon become Plymouth Colony underwent an unknown epidemic that decimated the Indigenous population by at least one third to as much as 90 percent—a fact the Pilgrims knew and exploited.

The settlement the Pilgrims called New Plymouth was the ancestral land of the Wampanoag (Pokanoket) people, who called the place Patuxet. Contrary to the popular myth that the Pilgrims arrived to an unoccupied “wilderness,” it had for untold generations been a well-managed landscape, cleared and maintained for cornfields and crops like beans and squash, as well as for game. Also contrary to popular mythology, the Wampanoags, like most eastern Indians, were farmers, not nomads. Up until the epidemic, the Wampanoag nation had been large and powerful, organized into sixty-nine villages in what is today southeastern Massachusetts and eastern Rhode Island. Their exact population is unknown, but estimates range from twenty-four thousand to upwards of one hundred thousand. The epidemic decimated their population, however, and destabilized relations with their traditional enemies, the neighboring Narragansett, Mohegan, and Pequot peoples, among others. In 1620 the Wampanoags were in a state of military tension, if not full-scale war with the Narragansetts.

When the Pilgrims arrived at New Plymouth in the depth of winter, food was the first concern. From colonists’ journal entries we know that right after their arrival Native homes and graves were robbed of food and other items. Written accounts describe taking “things” for which they “intended” to pay later. Ever pious and believing in divine predestination, the religious separatists attributed their good fortune to God, “for how else could we have done it without meeting some Indians who might trouble us.” Thus, the Pilgrims’ survival that first winter can be attributed to Indians both alive and dead.

Before the epidemic, Patuxet had been a village with around two thousand people. Months after their arrival, the colonists had their first serious encounter with an Indian. In March 1621 they came face to face with Samoset, a Wampanoag sachem (leader) of a confederation of about twenty villages. In rudimentary English learned from English fisherman and trappers, Samoset explained about the plague that had just swept through the area. He also told them about Massasoit, who was considered the head Wampanoag sachem, also known as a sagamore. Within a few days, Massasoit appeared at the Plymouth colony accompanied by Tisquantum (Squanto), eager to form an alliance with the colonists in light of the shifting balance of power in the Indigenous world due to the plague. A formal treaty was immediately negotiated, outlining relationships of peace and mutual protection. Massasoit sent Squanto as a liaison between the Native confederation and the colonists, and Squanto taught them Native planting techniques that ensured the bountiful harvest they would enjoy in the fall. Squanto had been kidnapped as a child, sold into slavery, and sent to England, where he learned how to speak English. Having escaped under extraordinary circumstances, he found passage back to Patuxet in 1619 only to find himself the sole male survivor of his village.

The First Thanksgiving

The facts about the first Thanksgiving come from two primary written sources, Edward Winslow’s Mourt’s Relation and William Bradford’s Of Plimouth Plantation. Neither of the accounts are detailed enough to surmise the familiar tale of Pilgrims hosting a feast to thank the Indians for their help, certainly not enough to imagine Englishmen teaching the Indians about thanksgiving as we are sometimes led to believe. The English had an ancient custom of harvest festivals that had been secular, not religious affairs. Spiritual ceremonials of gratitude had always been central cultural attributes among Indigenous peoples who believed in relationships of reciprocity, so the concept of thanksgiving was not new to either group.

Only Winslow’s account, written several weeks after the event, mentions the Indians’ participation. He wrote:

Our harvest being gotten in, our governor sent four men on fowling, that so we might after a special manner rejoice together, after we had gathered the fruits of our labors; they four in one day killed as much fowl, as with a little help beside, served the Company almost a week, at which time amongst other Recreations, we exercised our Arms, many of the Indians coming amongst us, and amongst the rest their greatest king Massasoit, with some ninety men, whom for three days we entertained and feasted, and they went out and killed five Deer, which they brought to the Plantation and bestowed on our Governor, and upon the Captain and others. And although it be not always so plentiful, as it was at this time with us, yet by the goodness of God, we are so far from want, that we often wish you partakers of our plenty.

Not all historians agree as to what actually happened that day. It is clear that the colonists decided to have a harvest celebration (note that nowhere is the word “thanksgiving” used). As can be deduced from the account, one widely espoused interpretation holds that the Indians were not initially invited to share in the celebration. They came when they heard in the distance the discharge of guns, fired in the exuberance of the festivities. Wondering if there was trouble, the Wampanoags entered the English village with around ninety men. It was only after arriving well-intentioned but uninvited that an invitation to stay was extended. Since there wasn’t enough food to go around, the Indians went out and caught some deer, which they ceremonially presented to the English.

Throughout Mourt’s Relation (written over a period of one year from November 1620 to November of 1621) references are made to the affection and camaraderie between the Plymouth colonists and Massasoit and Squanto, but the tenuous peace was to be short-lived. Acting independently, Squanto had developed rogue tendencies in an apparent power struggle with Massasoit. He increasingly undermined the authority of Massasoit and other sachems, eventually driving a fatal wedge between himself and Massasoit and straining the relations between Massasoit and the colony. By the spring of 1622, Massasoit had ended trade between the confederation and the English, and the colony held on desperately to their relationship with Squanto. In October Squanto died under mysterious conditions. Nataniel Philbrick wrote that although it is difficult to document, he may have been poisoned in an assassination plot masterminded by Massasoit.

Within a few months Massasoit had reestablished diplomatic relations with the colony. He appointed Hobamok as his intermediary, and an uneasy alliance was maintained with the colony until Massasoit’s death around 1661. He would be succeeded by his son Wamsutta, and by 1662 his second son, Metacom, known to the English as King Philip, was in charge. Because of the unrelenting pressure of the English demands for land, relations would deteriorate so severely between the English and the Wampanoags that by 1675, war broke out. Called King Philip’s War, it has come to be seen as the bloodiest, most violent conflict ever fought on American soil. Thus, in light of the larger history, the simplistic idea that Thanksgiving proves that the Indians welcomed the Pilgrims can be more accurately seen as a temporary chapter characterized by maximized political self-interest on all sides.

***

The sooner we disabuse the next generations of the settler-centric mythos of Thanksgiving, the better. For that, we have the young-adult adaptation of Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States for Young People, adapted by Debbie Reese and Jean Mendoza. For middle-school teachers, we have a complementary lesson plan about Thanksgiving.

About the Authors 

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz grew up in rural Oklahoma, the daughter of a tenant farmer and part-Indian mother. She has been active in the international Indigenous movement for more than four decades and is known for her lifelong commitment to national and international social justice issues. After receiving her PhD in history at the University of California at Los Angeles, she taught in the newly established Native American Studies Program at California State University, Hayward, and helped found the Departments of Ethnic Studies and Women’s Studies. Her 1977 book The Great Sioux Nation was the fundamental document at the first international conference on Indigenous peoples of the Americas, held at the United Nations’ headquarters in Geneva. Dunbar-Ortiz is the author or editor of seven other books, including Roots of Resistance: A History of Land Tenure in New Mexico. She lives in San Francisco. Follow her on Twitter at @rdunbaro. 

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

A Q&A with Carlos A. Ball

Walmart at Fresno Rainbow Pride Parade and Festival, June 2015. Photo credit: David Prasad

Nowadays, it’s commonplace to see Apple, Facebook, Google, Walmart, and other big businesses marching in Pride parades. You wouldn’t see them there several decades ago. In fact, you wouldn’t see them cosigning domestic partnerships benefits, marriage equality, or LGBTQ rights either. Corporations were openly hostile or indifferent to sexual minorities and transgender people until years’ worth of LGBTQ activism changed their understanding and treatment of queer people. Legal scholar Carlos A. Ball wrote about this little-known history in The Queering of Corporate America: How Big Business Went from LGBTQ Adversary to Ally. Beacon Broadside editor Christian Coleman caught up with Ball to chat with him about it.

Christian Coleman: What was the inspiration behind writing The Queering of Corporate America?

Carlos A. Ball: I was struck, a few years ago, by the ways in which large corporations were coming out (no pun intended) against the passage of anti-LGBTQ laws, such as so-called religious freedom laws and transgender bathroom laws. Partly in response to strong criticism by corporate America, several states, including Arizona, Indiana, and North Carolina, rescinded the anti-LGBTQ laws. That made me start wondering why corporations were taking such public stances in favor of LGBTQ equality, while remaining generally neutral on other so-called hot button social issues. What I uncovered was a long history of LGBTQ activism aimed at corporations that began shortly after the Stonewall riots and that played an instrumental role in pushing large companies to embrace policy positions favoring equality for sexual minorities and transgender individuals. 

CC: You’re a law professor at Rutgers University and an expert in constitutional law. How did your background inform and determine the way you approached the subject matter and wrote the book?

 CAB: I’ve written several books on the history of the LGBTQ movement. Before this project, I had focused, like most commentators, on the movement’s demands of the government, either to stop discriminating itself or to prohibit the private sector from discriminating. But as I started doing my research for this book, I realized my focus up until then had been too narrow, and that I had not paid sufficient attention to the ways in which early activists in the 1970s and 1980s sought to apply pressure directly on large companies to stop discriminating and to support LGBTQ equality positions. So I would say that I was already attuned to the effective pressure tactics of LGBTQ activists; what I did with this project was to expand the lens to cover activism aimed at the corporate sector.

CC: Would you say the 1990s were a watershed moment of big business, by and large, changing its attitude toward the queer community? It seems from this point on and through the 2000s that corporations were pretty much publicly on board with supporting LGBTQ equality.

CAB: Yes, I would say the 1990s were a tipping point of sorts. By then, LGBTQ activists already had spent about two decades pressuring large companies and educating them about the importance of LGBTQ equality for their employees. It was in the 1990s, especially with the adoption by many Fortune 500 companies of domestic partnership benefits, that many big businesses accepted the basic proposition that the relationships and families of their LGBTQ employees were as worthy of recognition and respect as those of their married heterosexual employees. And once large companies embraced that basic point, it became natural for them to care about not only how their LGBTQ employees were treated inside corporate walls, but outside of them as well.

CC: Do you think the stories in The Queering of Corporate America will help those who feel skeptical about corporate representation at Pride parades?

CAB: My book is not aimed at trying to reduce progressives’ skepticism of large corporations. I think it is important, for example, that Pride parades do not become simply a vehicle for corporate marketing. So I think it is healthy for activists to question excessive participation by corporations in the parades. I also think that progressive activists of all stripes should criticize corporations when they pursue or defend policies that harm society. For example, it is commendable that many large energy companies have LGBTQ-friendly policies, but that should not immunize them from forceful criticism when they pursue profits in ways that endanger the future well-being of the planet. The bottom line is that it is difficult to generalize. Sometimes corporations act responsibly and correctly, and they should be praised for that. My book praises large corporations for their general embrace of LGBTQ equality policies. But corporations should also be questioned and criticized when they pursue harmful policies in the name of maximizing profits.

CC: I was so touched reading about your daughter in the acknowledgments. You wrote that she was in the process of socially transitioning genders when you were working on the book and that she deepened your understanding of some of the transgender issues you address. What were some of those issues?

CAB: It is one thing to understand an issue politically and intellectually; it is another to live it. Over the last few years, I have seen my teenage daughter make her way in a world that repeatedly tries to put people in boxes depending on their assigned gender. Resisting those efforts by living according to one’s own definition and understanding of gender, rather than society’s, takes time, energy, commitment, and courage. Viewing that process from the inside, so to speak, has given me a new appreciation for what transgender individuals go through on a daily basis and has confirmed for me just how morally wrong and harmful discrimination on the basis of gender identity can be. 

CC: The publication of your book couldn’t be more timely. Seeing the news of the Trump administration erasing civil rights protections for LGBTQ health programs, what would you like readers to take away from it?

CAB: I agree with Martin Luther King, Jr., that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” The struggles for civil rights in this country have always entailed some steps forward and some steps backwards. While it is important to resist the Trump administration’s rollbacks in civil rights in every way that we can, we should take solace from the progress that we have made over the last few decades. My book provides part of that story of progress. I think that activists in the 1970s could have never imagined that, for example, hundreds of large American businesses would file a brief with the US Supreme Court in 2015 supporting marriage equality. That was a socially transformative change that resulted from decades of effective and committed LGBTQ activism. Change is possible, but it takes both time and hard work. In the end, I have little doubt that the Trump administration will be on the losing side of history when it comes to LGBTQ civil rights issues. 

About Carlos A. Ball 

Carlos A. Ball is Distinguished Professor of Law and the Judge Frederick Lacey Scholar at Rutgers University. An expert on LGBTQ rights, he is the author of several books, including The First Amendment and LGBT Equality and From the Closet to the Courtroom. He lives with his family in Brooklyn, New York.

By Peter Jan Honigsberg

A soldier stands guard on a cell block inside Camp Five at Guantánamo Bay. Photo credit: Staff Sgt. Jon Soucy, National Guard Bureau

University Press Week runs each year in November and was first established in 1978 by President Jimmy Carter to recognize “the impact, both here and abroad, of American university presses on culture and scholarship.” This year’s theme is Read. Act. Think., which emphasizes the role that scholarly publishers can play in moving national and international conversations forward on critical and complex issues. As a member of the Association of University Presses, Beacon Press is proud to participate in this year’s blog tour. In our contribution, we are sharing two selections from Peter Jan Honigsberg’s A Place Outside the Law: Forgotten Voices from Guantánamo about Guantánamo Bay prison guards who went off script and saw the humanity in the detainees.

The content of A Place Outside the Law comes from the interviews filmed by Witness to Guantánamo, an organization Hongisberg founded in 2008 to collect and preserve the personal stories from Guantánamo Bay Naval Base. The full-length interviews are held in perpetuity at the Duke University Human Rights Archive in Durham, North Carolina. Clips of them appear on the Witness to Guantánamo website.

***

Brandon Neely’s Story: Facebook Friends

When Brandon Neely sat down to interview with us in Houston, Texas, he brought his wife. She knew much of his story, but it seemed that he wanted her to hear him share his story with us. Maybe he would recall something new, something he had not told her before.

Neely had signed up with the military before the events of 9/11. “When I joined, it was quiet. There was nothing going on around the world. I wasn’t doing much. I was stocking groceries forty hours a week and I knew I needed change. I wanted really to go to college. I’ve been out of school almost two years. Because, you know, I grew up in a military household, so I figured I’d go get some training, something I want to do.”

Neely received his military training. But everything changed after 9/11. As a private, he was assigned to be a prison guard in Guantánamo. (Later, he was elevated to private first class.) Neely was part of the first wave of soldiers to arrive at the detention center before it opened on January 11, 2002. His job was to escort the second detainee off the bus.

One of Neely’s duties during the six months he was in Guantánamo was to walk through the cellblock each day and check on the prisoners. Military officials instructed the guards not to speak to the men. But when Neely heard several detainees speaking English, he could not resist. Perhaps conversing with the men would reduce his boredom. In his conversations, he discovered that the young men in the cells were similar in age and “were doing the same thing I was doing just two weeks ago.”

“I spoke to Ruhal [Ahmed, a detainee from Tipton, a town outside London]. We were talking about girls, nightclubs, music and that we had listened to a lot of the same music. I mean, this could be a guy that I would probably hang out with back in the States, but here he is in Guantánamo. At the time I thought everybody was guilty, so I was just like, he just had to do something to get here. Here we were at Guantánamo, but on opposite sides of the cage.”

Neely also conversed with several other English-speaking detainees, including Shafiq Rasul, who was also from Tipton.

Two years after he had completed his military service, Neely returned home and joined the Houston police force. Because he continued to be interested in Guantánamo, he noticed a story in the media about the Tipton Three. Neely turned to his Facebook account.

“I was like, yeah, I remember those guys. Just for kicks, I put in Shafiq [Rasul’s] name, and there it was. It just popped up with his picture and I said, man, no way this guy is on Facebook. So, I sent one message and we just started talking through [Facebook]. It was just weird.” Neely said, “You find everybody on Facebook now.”

I asked him whether he still communicated with them.

“I talk to Ruhal [Ahmed] and Shafiq [Rasul] through Facebook and text message, you know, maybe a couple of times a week, and we exchange photos of the kids, just normal conversation. Since we’re past the whole awkward stage, I would say that we’re friends.”

Neely flew to London in January 2010 for what he described as a reunion with the men he used to guard. That meeting is memorialized on YouTube.

When I asked Brandon Neely whether he was surprised in how he had once been a prison guard and had now become a good friend of the former detainees, he replied, “I used to be very close-minded. I’ve always said if I could change—anybody could change. I now look at stuff differently. I try to look at the whole picture instead of just one side of it. I really realized like not everything that the media says is what it is, and I’ve kind of opened myself up to different ways of life, ’cause not everything was the way they do it in Texas or any other place. I don’t know anything about their religion or kind of people. But now I’m just open to it all. I guess I’m more open to change and different cultures and different people and that part of it was positive. . . . I just look at it all different.”

Watch a clip of Brandon Neely’s interview from Witness to Guantánamo.

~~~

Terry Holdbrook’s Story: Convert

Before arriving in Guantánamo, Terry Holdbrooks’s military police unit went to visit Ground Zero in New York City, where the towers fell.

“I can only imagine that the purpose behind that was for propaganda, you know. Take us to the place where 9/11 happened, then tell us that Islam and Muslims are to blame. Take us to Guantánamo, obviously everyone is going to be riled up and it’s going to be an effective means of getting the job done,” he told us.

When Private Holdbrooks became a Guantánamo prison guard in summer 2003, the military described the prisoners as “the worst of the worst and a bunch of towel heads and dirt farmers and such.” He explained why the military used such phrases.

“They didn’t want us to trust them or develop any kind of friendship or relationship with them whatsoever. . . . Don’t have conversations with them. Don’t befriend them.”

However, many of the detainees were friendly to Holdbrooks, and he was encouraged by their openness to strike up conversations.

“I spent most of my time talking with detainees. If I was ever going to have an intelligent conversation, it was with a detainee. So, you know, talking about their lives, about where they came from, what society, education, and religion is like in the rest of the world. How often are you going to be in a place where you can meet people from forty some-odd different countries? It just wasn’t something I was going to pass up. I had to, you know, I had to take use of the opportunity,” he said.

Similar to the realizations of prison guard Brandon Neely, Holdbrooks recognized that “these individuals maybe listen to some of the same music that I do or they’ve watched the same movies, you know, we speak the same language, we’re really not all that different. So, I don’t understand why everything the military has told me is not equally up here.”

Becoming friendly with some of the detainees, observing their practices and learning about their lives and their Muslim faith had a powerful effect on Holdbrooks. He began to limit his drinking, changed his diet by eliminating pork and greasy foods, and cut down on the number of cigarettes he had each day. His health improved. He also tried to change his speech, using more descriptive words and eliminating profanity. And he worked on being more positive about others. “These are important in Islam,” he added.

At the time he was becoming more interested in the lives of the detainees and in their faith, it was also “right about that time my wife and I had truly hit our lowest point in our marriage.” It caused him to wonder what he was missing in life, and how other people dealt with life-affecting and life-transforming issues. He was feeling miserable during this period in his life, he told us.

But while feeling miserable, he would look at the detainees and observe that they were “always smiling and happy despite the interrogation, the abuse, and the being away from their families. They are still happy.”

Holdbrooks would wonder, “What are you guys so happy about? What do you have to be happy about? You have the same food, seven days a week. It’s awful. It’s hot out here, you don’t have any air-conditioning. What are you happy about?”

And he would answer his questions: “They got faith. It’s just a test. It’s all it was for them—a test. and seeing them have that cohesion, that brotherhood, that unity, that I didn’t even have with the military.”

Islam began to “make sense” to him. It felt right. “so, I should really just go with this wholeheartedly,” he thought.

He talked with a man known as the “General,” one of the leaders of the detainees in the prison, about converting to Islam. “He blew me off the first time,” Holdbrooks said. Holdbrooks persisted, and ultimately the General consented.

It happened on a midnight shift in December 2003, six months after Holdbrooks had arrived in Guantánamo. The prison was quiet and no other guards were around. Holdbrooks stood in the hallway outside the General’s darkened cell and said his Muslim statement of faith, his Shahada.

Holdbrooks was in Guantánamo for another six months. During that time, many of the detainees knew of his conversion. He kept it secret from the military, but he did reveal it to two of his closest friends. Holdbrooks left the military with the rank of specialist.

Holdbrooks wrote to me in spring 2019 that he is still practicing his Muslim faith.

Watch a clip of Terry Holdbrooks’ interview from Witness to Guantánamo.

About the Author 

Peter Jan Honigsberg is a professor at the University of San Francisco School of Law and the founder and director of Witness to Guantánamo. His research and teaching focuses on the rule of law and human rights violations that occurred in the detention center in Guantánamo, as well as on the study of terrorism and post-9/11 issues. His books include Our Nation Unhinged and A Place Outside the Law. Honigsberg lives in Berkeley, CA.

By Kyle T. Mays

This Native American Heritage month, I want to bring a moment of historical clarity to the topics of solidarity and tension as they play out in the contemporary connection between African American and Native American peoples. I am Black American and Saginaw Chippewa. My mother’s side of the family is from Cleveland, my dad’s side of the family from Detroit. I am the descendant of Indigenous peoples in North America and Indigenous peoples from Africa. I know the former; I have yet to find out about the latter. Coming to terms with the relationship between these peoples, their histories in the US—and recovering these histories—is important to me and surely to Native people committed to ending antiblackness and uplifting the voices of their relatives. 

From the moment the first Indigenous Africans were brought to a settler colony to work in lands that Europeans were taking from Native peoples, their futures would be embroiled in the ongoing twin oppressions of dispossession and enslavement. As we celebrate Native American Heritage Month, we should at least recall an important point: that the Africans kidnapped from their homelands were and remained Indigenous peoples. They had their own cultures, languages, spiritual beliefs, and above all, a deep tie to their lands. If that ain’t Indigenous, then I don’t know what is!  

In our telling of mainstream colonial history, we assume that African (Indigenous) selves were completely shattered during the Middle Passage. Yes, lives were changed, in some fundamental ways, but not in every way. As the saying in the Black Oral Tradition goes, they made a “way outta no way.” They still remembered their homelands. We know from numerous accounts, including the posthumously published Barracoon, written by Black literary genius, Zora Neale Hurston, which has become a New York Times best-seller, that Indigenous Africans kept the remnants of their languages, which still remain in, for instance, as Geneva Smitherman taught us, the form of US Black English. Moreover, as Black radical theorist Cedric Robinson argues in Black Marxism, Africans, though forced by Europeans to toil in dispossessed lands, maintained their humanity in the form of  “African cultures, critical mixes and admixtures of language thought . . . of habits, beliefs, and morality.” These African forms of language did not disappear. I now want to discuss the pits of linguistic solidarity.

Solidarity in general is fleeting, and Black and Indigenous solidarity has been up and down since the era of Black and Red Power. Since at least the Resistance at Standing Rock and the formation of Black Lives Matter, there have been numerous demonstrations of Black and Indigenous solidarity. Over the last year, I’ve seen numerous Native people comment on non-Black-Indigenous people using the N-word. The social media version goes something like this: if you’re not Afro-Indigenous (here meaning someone who is African American and Native American), then you should not be using the term. Here is a good example that resurfaced from 2015, during Indigenous Peoples’ Day (formerly Columbus Day; The only Christopher we now acknowledge is Wallace).

On November 26, 2015, The Daily Mail, a United Kingdom online news source, did a series of short videos featuring a variety of Native Americans on the topics of Christopher Columbus, Thanksgiving, and the term r*dsk*n (hereafter the ‘R-word). While the point of the videos was to offer Indigenous voices on these issues, perhaps the most intriguing one was on the R-word.

The interviewer asked one person about the use of the R-word. Here is the dialogue:

Offensive. Whenever you use the term nigger or redskin or whitey or ch*nk, it’s definitely not a good thing to use.

Interviewer: Has anyone ever called you a “redskin” or anything else insulting?

Respondent: “A river n****r.” I’ve been called that all throughout high school. I was like, 1 out of 4 Native Americans. So, I experienced a lot of racism. And I still do. I definitely speak up. I definitely, in a good way, let people know that using offensive words is not something that will help us progress as a nation.”

The issue that people had was her use of the N-word. She is correct in being offended. Both R-word and the N-word are steeped in white supremacy. Arguably, Black folks have more sway in the public sphere in getting attention on issues (from white people?), and so the comparison makes sense. The R-word is racist, demeaning, and, as far as I can tell, in general, Indigenous people don’t use it as a term of endearment. However, the missing part of the analysis is that, while both are steeped in white supremacy, the N-word is slightly more complicated.

Black people use the N-word in a variety of contexts. Black people don’t “call” each other the N-word. As Smitherman points out, to “call implies name-calling, a linguistic offense.” It can be used positively, negatively, or neutrally. The N-word is used, as Smitherman notes, “to address another African American, as a greeting, or to refer to a Brotha or Sista.” We hear the word in hip-hop music. And it’s a fact that some Black people allow for non-Black people to use it. However, Kendrick Lamar didn’t allow this white woman to use it last year. So, we can’t say that hip-hop is to blame for why non-Black people want to use it.

What we can learn from these lessons is that context matters. The question people should ask is this: Who can say what to whom and with what consequences? Another question we should ask, is should we even compare the two words in the first place? If we do, who benefits and who does not? Native people have been fighting racist epithets and mascots for a long time, most recently in the documentary More Than A Word, by Standing Rock Sioux brothers, John and Kenn Little.

The words we use matter. How and why we make comparisons matter. Most importantly, it is not simply the use of the comparison, but it is important for solidarity. The discourse we use and how we talk about racism and oppression are just as vital the actions we take. If we are going to engage in solidarity, then language must be a crucial part of our liberation.

As we celebrate Native American Heritage Month, let us remember that coalitions are not easy. Solidarity is hard work. As Black queer feminist Audre Lorde stated in ‘Learning from the 60s,’ “any future vision which can encompass all of us, by definition, must be complex and expanding, not easy to achieve.” There is no guarantee that we will get along. We are not “natural” allies. We will definitely make mistakes. But if we are going to defeat racial capitalism and Indigenous dispossession, we need solidarity. We need what Leanne Betasamosake Simpson calls a “radical resurgence” and what Robin D. G. Kelley calls “freedom dreams.” We need radical resurgent freedom dreams that recover histories and help us achieve the decolonial future we want. In this hour, at this moment, our very lives depend on them.

About the Author 

Kyle T. Mays, PhD (Black/Saginaw Anishinaabe) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of African American Studies and the American Indian Studies Center at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of Hip Hop Beats, Indigenous Rhymes: Modernity and Hip Hop in Indigenous North America (SUNY Press, 2018). He is currently writing An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States with Beacon Press.

By Jude Casimir

Little Miss Flint (Amariyanna “Mari” Copeny) leads the March for Science, April 14, 2018. Photo credit: Hillel Steinberg.

By now, you’ve probably heard of Greta Thunberg, the sixteen-year-old Swedish activist who’s credited with bringing much-needed attention to the climate crisis and reinvigorating youth environmental activism. You’ve most likely heard about how she passionately and bravely took the stage in September in the midst of the worldwide climate strikes to address the highly esteemed attendees of the United Nations Climate Action Summit. You’ve probably seen the #HowDareYou hashtag echoing throughout social media over the past few weeks. If you read Beacon Broadside regularly, you’ve definitely been introduced to her.

Point is, you probably know who Greta Thunberg is.

But you’ve probably heard much less about young people like Mari Copeny, otherwise known as Little Miss Flint, who has been bringing attention to the Flint water crisis since she was eight years old. You probably don’t know a lot about Anna Lee Rain Yellowhammer and the Indigenous youth activist group ReZpect Our Water that formed back in 2016 in opposition to the Dakota Access Pipeline. You probably aren’t tuned in on the Brown and Black kids and youth around the globe, from Myanmar to Brazil, who were out striking along with Greta.

If you didn’t know about these activists and groups, it isn’t your fault. There’s a reason why these groups haven’t been given as great a platform as Greta, and that has to do with the media’s consistent whitewashing of climate activism and White Environmentalism being framed as the only answer. And whether you’re ready to acknowledge it or not, you’re probably complicit in it. If you’ve shared the aforementioned coverage of Greta, you’re probably complicit. If you’ve said something along the lines of “the kids are alright” in response to your exposure to her, you’re probably complicit.

Whitewashing activism of any kind isn’t new. It wasn’t new when the abolition of slavery was centered around the morality of white people rather than the violent and systematic dehumanization of the actual slaves. It wasn’t new in the 1960s or 70s during anti-war movements, nor was it new last year in the wake of the Parkland shooting when the white child survivors were the ones centered and spotlighted as gun violence heroes.

It’s hardly surprising either. In a world shaped by subjugation at the hands of white supremacy, in systems built to uphold white injustice, it really shouldn’t come as any shock that this is the case. White supremacy is so prevalent it permeates through good intention and often perverts any good effort. So, it doesn’t surprise me. But it does infuriate me. As a Black disabled woman, it does wear me down. It’s exhausting that Black and Brown people who have been speaking and shouting and screaming about issues like this must constantly and consistently wait for white people to realize the value of nature before they can act and take anything seriously. It’s further dehumanizing to be ignored only to have white people be heard over you. Our message just isn’t digestible if it doesn’t come from white people.

And I’ve observed that the value white environmentalism extracts from nature is always abstract. It’s always rooted in a vague sense of being “out there,” and it never addresses very real environmental injustices like environmental racism. It never addresses the fact that pollution follows the poor most closely. It isn’t rooted in decolonization and anticapitalism as it should be. Rarely does it ever go deeper than veganism being super great and the idea that plastic straws should be banned even though disabled and chronically ill people, myself included, have spoken out repeatedly about the harm in pushing these as actual solutions. But, honestly, why should it? Middle- and upper-class white people, the people who are always placed at the forefront of these movements, the loudest ones, don’t have to worry about these things, so why should they care beyond abstractions?

I should stress that none of this is Greta Thunberg’s fault. The entirety of the impact of white supremacy and the media’s insistence on pushing white activism doesn’t fall on this one teen’s shoulders. In fact, she has been in the news recently for reaching out to Indigenous activists like Tokatawin Iron Eyes of the Lakota people, who participated in the Standing Rock protests and has engaged in climate activism for many years prior. Greta is paying the attention forward. But this isn’t enough. Greta may have a team behind her, but she is still only one person. Just as it isn’t her fault that white supremacy exists, it also shouldn’t all be on her to bring attention to environmental injustices that go beyond her reach as a middle-class white girl who has barely begun life. 

As Greta herself mentioned, this climate crisis shouldn’t be on any young person’s shoulders. But it is. And if you call yourself an environmentalist, if you take yourself seriously as an activist, you better be working on recognizing your complicity in white supremacy and listening to all the youth climate activists involved. If you truly think the climate crisis is an important issue, you need to uplift the voices of Black and Brown youth as much as you do the already megaphoned white ones.

About the Author 

Jude Casimir sometimes writes things, and her passions include movies, books, TV, (especially American Vandal, the best show Netflix has put out), and socialism. She lives in a small town in Central Massachusetts and is desperately hoping to get back to the city sometime soon. She graduated from Worcester State University, and she ultimately wants to start her own online publication for marginalized people. For now, though, you can find her on Twitter: @itsjustjude.

By Leah Vernon

Photo credit: Velvet d’Amour

When you nope your way out of stifling expectations of others to live life on your own terms, you find freedom to be your full, authentic self. Leah Vernon was often told she was too fat, too Black, too Muslim, too slutty, too angry. She broke free from the naysaying and found her calling as a plus-size Hijabi model, social media influencer, public speaker, and freelance writer. In this selection from her debut memoir, Unashamed: Musings of a Fat, Black Muslim, she tells us about her identity battle with her hijab.

***

The identity battle with my hijab continued well into adulthood. As I started to come to terms with it, that it was in fact my choice to wear it or not, others’ disdain for it mounted.

I was hyperaware of my surroundings when I wore it, especially around white folks—they were the ones doing the most when it came to assaults and verbal attacks. I was lucky that I didn’t live in the south where bigots gave zero fucks about putting their hands on you if they thought in their little minds that you were Muslim. Although I was Black, ancestors straight from slavery, I was still visibly Muslim. The more “Islamic” I dressed, the more people would side-eye me. I’ve had people in waiting rooms get up from their seats and move away. I’ve had people stare me down, make me feel like nothing. I’ve had comments made about my hijab, whether or not I was concealing a bomb underneath it. One day, I was asked if I was wearing all black to work because of Osama bin Laden’s death.

I once met this girl from the Middle East my freshman year of college. “I didn’t know you were Muslim,” I said and gave her the Islamic greeting.

“Yeah, it’s okay.” She shrugged. “My sister and I don’t wear it anymore, you know, cuz 9/11.”

I nodded. I got it, but then again, I didn’t. I wasn’t taking off my hijab. Not for other people’s ignorance. If I was going to take it off, it’d be because I wanted to. not because I was pressured by society’s ill view of Muslims.

People wear their hijabs (or don’t) for many different reasons, but the majority of people, including Becky at the restaurant, believe that it is a universal sign of oppression. The media has made it so that close-minded individuals have been brainwashed to think that when they see a Muslim woman covering her hair and body, it automatically equates with her being forced to by her evil Arabic-speaking father. They have all these notions of you being bald, forced into an arranged marriage, being subservient to a man, and that you absolutely, unequivocally, couldn’t be a feminist. All hell would break loose if a hijabi was a feminist.

Deciding, really deciding, to unapologetically wear my hijab for me has been the most freeing and rebellious and feminist thing I could possibly do.

I didn’t wear my hijab for others, so they could think that I was a good, practicing Muslim. Nah. I did it because it was me, my crown, my shield. It told people that I was strong in my belief, whether I said it or not. I was proud and loud of who I was. And because I was so “out there” with it, it made individuals (like Becky) very, very uncomfortable. They just couldn’t figure out how a girl like me continued to defy odds, being different, being openly true, while getting beat down daily for being a minority Muslim.

I went through a phase when the pressures of being a “poster girl” Muslim got to me. I was visibly hijabi, fat, and Black. I thought that I had something to prove. I wanted acceptance and validation from everyone. Fat girls were seen a certain way, so I needed to dispel those stereotypes. Black girls from Detroit were seen a certain way, so I needed to rise above and be totally non-ghetto, code-switch the hell out of my vocabulary. And Muslims were seen as homophobic extremists. So I had to be cool, and out-of-the-box, and most of all, nonthreatening.

All of that identity shit weighed on me. With all that bending and reshaping, I began to lose a sense of self. I didn’t have anyone to let me know that it was perfectly fine to be who the fuck I wanted to be. No one told me that I didn’t owe shit to anyone. I didn’t have to be a poster child, spokesperson, or representative for any one of the minority groups that I belonged to. I could be me. Unapologetically.

As Muslims, we are taught to be perfect. In front of our peers, in the media, at work, at that nearby coffee shop. We are taught that we are being watched by not only God, but others, and that we need to be amazing individuals who aren’t touched by mental illness, sexual abuse, or homosexuality. We’ve created these ridiculous ideologies that we can only fit nicely into these frames.

I stopped caring about unattainable expectations. I stopped striving for a level of perfection that I was never going to bask in. And every day, I worked on finding me. Not allowing stereotypes to define me.

For one thing, I knew I was Muslim. Wasn’t really sure what kind of Muslim I was, but I was Muslim. I knew I was probably always going to be fat. And I couldn’t change that I was Black, and I wasn’t going to start bleaching and looking like the new Lil’ Kim. So, I swam in the greatness of what those individual things meant to me. They meant originality, they meant power, they meant hope.

~~~

Before the internet, real-life trolls, aka haters, would shame me. My earliest memory was at the mosque for Friday prayer. When a Muslim makes salat, it is a sacred time, a quiet time; one must not break concentration and one must not talk or touch the person who makes salat. When I knelt down to put my head to the prayer rug, someone, some-fuckin-body, thought that my outfit was obviously not up to prayer standards and proceeded to grab the bottom hem of my shirt and yank it down over my lower back and butt. As you can only imagine, all concentration was lost, and my link to our creator was broken as anger grew around my soul like vines. I wanted to break my prayer and be like, “Which one of y’all touched me?”

Muslims don’t show their skin! I imagined one of the old heads saying, once I found out who the culprit was. Needless to say, I never found out who inadvertently policed my body, even during something as sacred as prayer.

My Muslim girl indecencies only grew from there.

I started to wear short sleeves. Was scolded for that. I wore pants instead of skirts. Was scolded for that. I wore sundresses instead of an abaya. Was scolded for that.

Muslim men made me feel the most uncomfortable in my own skin. They’d secretly call me names like “slut” and “whore” and “bitch,” because a girl who dressed the way she wanted couldn’t have been good news. The interesting thing was that many of them would’ve slept with me (and a few tried), yet I was all the bad things in the holy book and labeled as a “hoejabi.”

I first heard the term “hoejabi” when I was a teenager. A hoejabi wore red lipstick, and with her hijab rocked tight jeans with rips in them exposing her thigh meat. She partied just as hard and went on dates with non-Muslim men. She cussed and did as she pleased. All secretly, of course. A lot of us Muslim women live double lives out of fear of the term, being deemed a hoejabi. Being outed in the community and ostracized for doing the same as men.

I used to be one of those women. Delving into the hoejabi lifestyle, yet checking over my shoulder for brothers in the community in the same damn club waiting to uncover a Muslim sister doing the same wrong as them. One time I was at the club with two of my Muslim girlfriends. It was New Year’s Eve. Neither of them wore their scarves, and as for me, I had the most un-Islamic dress on ever. My boobs were out, as well my legs and arms. I gave zero fucks. I just wanted to see what it was like to not be all covered up. In the crowd, one of my friends suddenly pointed, and I ducked when I saw who it was.

“Girl! That’s ole dude from the mosque.” I grabbed her wrist, trying to pull her into the other direction. “We can’t go over there. I don’t have any clothes on!”

She rolled her eyes. “It’s whatever.”

“Fuck,” I said under my breath, as I followed behind.

I crossed my arms over my chest trying to maintain some form of modesty, and barely made eye contact as they gave hugs and Islamic greetings.

One of them had alcohol in his hand. “So, what are y’all sisters doing at the club with no scarfs on?”

“What are you doing here in the same club with a drink in your hand?” I cocked my head to the side.

He laughed uncomfortably.

“I’m out,” I said, squeezing back into the crowd. At that moment, I knew he was going to go back to the community and tattle on us.

Not only are Islamic communities policing and playing into this one-size-fits-all hijabi stereotype, but the media is as well. now, folks are confused as to what a real Muslim woman looks like. We’ve turned the common hijabi into a one-dimensional caricature. And, once again, anyone else who doesn’t fit into that mold is quickly discredited, and if we don’t shut up, we get trolled and dismissed.

Look around you. The rise of the Instagram hijabi blogger has swept the internet for the last decade. She is usually a size four, her aesthetic is pastels; either she wears her hijab wrapped traditionally or, if she’s a little edgy, she may even wear a loosely tied turban that she claims is so cutting-edge, when Africans have been wearing turbans for hundreds of years. She’s either a pale Middle Easterner or white-passing, with a hubby with an amazing beard that he obviously conditions weekly cuz like, wow, it’s incredibly shiny. He makes corny cameos in her YouTube videos. She has someone take photos of her making salat in a very New York chic way. Can beat her face, travels the world, expenses paid. And bills? What’s a bill? Owns a fancy Bengal cat named Sahar. Usually a virgin, even though she has two kids, because Muslim women definitely don’t have sex and are just impregnated by sheer will and the divinity of God.

If you look at all the diversity and inclusion campaigns meant to fight against Islamophobia or from companies wanting to jump on them Muslim millennial dollars, you will see the cookie-cutter Muslimah. Tell me, where is the lie here?

As a fat, Black Muslim who definitely doesn’t wear pastels and may or may not cuss like someone’s disgruntled uncle, I am overlooked. My voice unheard. My stories discredited. and my faith constantly questioned. Muslims as a whole are fighting today for equality and proper representation in the media and within non-Muslim communities. Funny how they seem to forget the in-betweenies, the dark Muslim, the alternative Muslims, and Muslims who are queer. How do you fight for justice for one and not for all?

About the Author 

Leah Vernon is a plus-size Hijabi model, social media influencer, public speaker, and freelance writer. She’s been featured by Buzzfeed, Yahoo, CBC, Cosmopolitan, Marie Claire, Seventeen, and the New York Times, and she’s worked with brands including Adidas, Lululemon, and Universal Standard. She speaks at universities and organizations across the country on topics of intersectional feminism, race, religion and spirituality, cultural sensitivity, social media, and branding. She grew up in Detroit but currently resides in New York City. Connect with her on Instagram (@Lvernon2000) and on her website (Leahvernon.com).

By Maya Fernandez

Photo credit: Peter Monsanto

To know Ntozake Shange was a privilege. Like many Black women, I was first introduced to her brilliance in college when I read her choreopoem for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf and found myself in her words. As I immersed myself in her other written work, I learned that she wrote boldly with a heartbreaking and beautiful honesty that centers the stories and lives of Black people across the diaspora, and particularly, Black women and girls. She never dulled her experience or language for the sake of making a mainstream white audience feel comfortable, and instead, wrote plays, poetry, novels, and essays that affirmed Black lives, culture, and being. Her writing exuded pain, joy, warmth, brilliance, and she was constantly moving beyond the written page and letting her art take multiple forms, especially on the stage. In both her writing and life, Ntozake Shange practiced a mesmerizing authority that required those around her to make space and take in her dynamic presence, intelligence, and artistry.

I began working with Ntozake Shange on the reissue of If I Can Cook/You Know God Can for Beacon’s Celebrating Black Women Writers series. When we first reached out to her about reissuing the book, she was thrilled to hear we were refreshing her collection of recipes, memories, and stories from the Black diaspora and eagerly offered to write new material. What I anticipated as being limited interactions with a literary icon quickly turned into frequent communication, as she started to call me regularly to discuss her ideas for the reissue. Ms. Shange (and, no, I never called her “Ntozake” or even her nickname “Zake,” because my mother would not have approved of that, and I couldn’t bring myself to refer to the Ntozake Shange by her first name) began each of our conversations with, “Hi Maya, it’s Ntozake.” It was always a short and direct greeting, and before I could fully respond she was already ahead of me, discussing her most recent drafts and thoughts for the book, leaving me to quickly scribble notes.

As a young assistant and then editor, I relished in these phone calls, soaking up her words and grasping onto each sentence knowing that this was an artist at work. When she couldn’t reach me, I’d return to my desk to find a voicemail waiting with her signature, “Hi Maya, it’s Ntozake,” followed by a flurry of information I’d have to listen to a few times in order to I catch every word.

Once we covered the business in our calls, she would take a moment to catch up. The conversation would shift to discussing topics such as the origins of my last name or her recent trip to Brooklyn for an Afropunk festival, which she very much enjoyed. I am forever grateful for these casual conversations with a woman whose work impacted me so personally.

Last year on her seventieth birthday, Ms. Shange left me a voicemail that ended up being our last correspondence. At the time, she was in the midst of preparing for the release of the new edition of If I Can Cook and working on several new projects. Her excitement was palpable. Something I learned while working with her, was her unrelenting need to always create and write. Her work never ceased, regardless of the health issues she experienced during her later life, exemplifying her innate artistry. Though shortly after her birthday, she passed away in her sleep on October 27, 2018.

One of the new projects she was working on her next book, which focuses on Black movement and dance. As a dancer and performer herself, Shange’s written work often coincided with the stage, and her love of Black dance was something that she believed needed to be shared widely. Originally signed to Beacon by former editor Tisha Hooks, in 1997, the book was put on hold for two decades, because Shange suffered from two strokes and needed time to recover. But following the completion of the new material for If I Can Cook, she was determined to pick the project back up and share her personal history of Black dance with readers.

I am pleased and honored to share that in October 2020, Beacon Press is publishing Dance We Do: A Poet Explores Black Dance. Told through a series of portraits and interviews with prominent Black dancers and choreographers, along with her personal journey as a dancer, Ntozake Shange welcomes us into a world of movement, culture, and expression. She documents her early beginnings as a student learning from those who trained her, moved with her, and inspired her, as she shares the exquisite power of the Black body. In her authoritative tradition, she places these often-overlooked Black stories at the center of her writing, affirming that Black dance is a life of a people, and argues that it passes along the intergenerational history of the diaspora. Though she couldn’t complete the book in its entirety, this is one of the many gifts she has left behind. Dance We Do commands space while also welcoming readers into her early rhythmic beginnings.

The loss of Ntozake Shange is one that affected so many of us. Her writing gave solace, her art inspired, and her poetry provided guidance. But like she lived, Ms. Shange acted with a purpose, and her determination to create work that we can enjoy after she is no longer with us was intentional. In a 1995 interview with Rebecca Carroll for Mother Jones, she said, “I write for young girls of color, for girls who don’t even exist yet, so that there is something there for them when they arrive . . . I concentrate on giving this to young people because they are the treasurers of black culture.”

So today, on what would be Ms. Shange’s seventy-first birthday, I would like to thank her for doing exactly that. She leaves behind a collection of work that each day impacts a new reader. Her timeless art continues to be enjoyed through multiple mediums. This is definitely true with the exciting revival of for colored girls that is currently onstage at the Public Theater from October 8 to December 1. With the upcoming publication of Dance We Do, her legacy continues to tell the untold stories of Black culture and provide space for those who have yet to come. If you are interested in updates about the book, please subscribe to our newsletter.

In the 2018 epilogue of the new edition of If I Can Cook/You Know God Can, Ms. Shange signs off saying she is “Somewhere in the Diaspora.” With her work findings new readers each day, I like to think that with her writing and spirit remains somewhere in the diaspora. Happy Birthday, Ms. Shange!

About the Author 

Maya Fernandez, assistant editor, joined Beacon Press after graduating from American University in 2016.

In these times when readers are responding to our books “more than ever,” when our authors—including Richard Blanco, Imani Perry, Robin DiAngelo, Dina Gilio-Whitaker, and Bettina Love—are appearing in the media, their ideas going viral on social media, their voices being heard on so many platforms, we thought it might be good to take a break to focus on some of the staff who work hard to find, shape, edit, produce, and promote those works. Our blog series “Beacon Behind the Books” introduces to you a member of our staff and gives you a behind-the-scenes look, department by department, at what goes on at our office. And not only our staff, but our interns, too! 

This month, we introduce you to our digital and social media intern, Victoria Torres! 

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

When I first started college, I saw myself working in magazine publishing or doing political writing. But the more I talked to people in my classes about why they were passionate about book publishing, the more drawn to it I became. I always knew I wanted to work somewhere at the intersection between art and public policy, and Beacon felt like exactly that place. The mission statement and the books they have published line up perfectly with so many of the issues I’m passionate about.

How much of what you learn in school applies to your work at Beacon?

I’m a double major in English and Political Communications, so I find that both my literature classes and my communications classes have taught me a lot of the skills I use at Beacon. Everything from audience analysis to digital user experience and digital publishing trends are all things I talk about in my classes and use at Beacon every day.

What skills have you taken from previous jobs to help you do your work at Beacon?

A lot of the more technical, hands-on things I do at Beacon I learned through past internships and jobs rather than in my classes. Things like using Adobe Creative Cloud to create content for social media, gathering analytics, and the best ways to promote blog content.

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

The biggest piece of advice I can give for someone wanting to enter the publishing field is to use your resources. Your professors, mentors, and university’s career center all have a wealth of knowledge and contacts that you can tap into in order to break into a new industry. Also keep in mind that publishing is so vast, so look into all of the different departments to find what the best fit is for your goals and skills.

How do you stay focused at work?

In true millennial fashion, I get super distracted by my phone if I’m not careful, so turning it on airplane mode is super helpful. That way I can still use all the essential functions without getting distracted by notifications.

Favorite podcast?

As a political communications major, I love the Crooked Media podcasts. Since the company was started by former members of Obama’s communications staff, it has a specific communications perspective I don’t always find in other news podcasts. They also have a huge variety of podcasts and are constantly releasing new ones focused around specific issues, so there truly is something for everyone.

Best vacation destination?

Before working at Beacon, I actually took a semester off from college to work as a performer on a cruise ship, and it sparked a huge love of travel in me! My favorite port we visited was Aruba, because the port itself has a beautiful, walkable shopping district; and I was able to rent an ATV for the day with some co-workers and go off-roading around the island.

Favorite book ever?

My favorite book of all time is actually The Great Gatsby. I feel like a lot of people think it’s kind of a cop-out answer since it’s required reading in most high schools, but I find the language in it so beautiful and feel like I discover something new every time I re-read it.

Favorite thing about Boston?

I love what a big arts scene Boston has! I love walking through the theater district and seeing what shows are in town or searching on Facebook for film screenings, panels, and new exhibits at museums, or even just running into a street performer on my walk home. It always feels like there’s something new and exciting going on.

What are you reading now?

I’m currently about halfway through The Brief and Wondrous Life or Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz.

By Wen Stephenson

This article appeared originally on Medium. (Adapted from remarks given at the Rubin Museum in New York City for the program “We Are Doomed. What Would Buddha Do?”)

Speaking honestly about the climate catastrophe is hard. One reason for this at times excruciating difficulty is that it requires us to acknowledge and to live with what we know—as well as what we don’t know.

As one who writes and speaks about climate and politics, perhaps I’m not supposed to admit this, but the fact is, most days I don’t know what to say—much less do—as I stare into our climate and political abyss. Frankly, I wonder if any of us really do. The situation is unprecedented. It’s overwhelming. All bets are off. And for a lot of us who are trying to face this, there can be a kind of paralysis—a blank, frozen, deer-in-the-headlights feeling.

Which, as it turns out, is a pretty good description of how I oftentimes feel when I’m sitting face to face with my longtime Zen teacher—a respected Zen master whose own teacher, Seung Sahn Soen-sa, always emphasized what he called “don’t know mind.” (“What am I? Don’t know! What is the meaning of my life? Don’t know! Only go straight—don’t know. Try try try, ten thousand years non-stop. Save all beings from suffering.”) And so I’m sitting there, and my teacher has given me a kong-an, or koan, one of those Zen riddles or impossibly paradoxical questions that the student is supposed to answer without hesitation—and I’m stuck, unable to answer, unable to move or speak, until after several seconds, as is the custom, I hit the floor with the palm of my hand—boom!—and grunt, “Don’t know!” And my teacher smiles at me compassionately and shakes his head. “You think too much. You read too many books. Put it all down. You already have the answer. Show me. Teach me.” Which, of course, is no help at all, given my attachment to words and thinking—and, yes, knowing—and I fail again. (I don’t always fail, but mostly I do.)

I’m still relatively new at this. I’ve only been a student of Zen Buddhist teaching and practice for about a dozen years, and I hasten to add, not a very “good” one. I’m a “bad” Buddhist. In fact I’m such a bad Buddhist that I’m actually—dare I say it?—a Christian, of sorts. (The not very “good” sort.) Like other spiritually restless types—Thomas Merton comes to mind—I find the two traditions, when held in balance, to be mutually supporting.

So it’s with a keen awareness of my own attachments and limitations and constant failings that I approach the topic at hand and the whole question hanging over it—itself a kind of koan, an unanswerable question that nevertheless demands an answer: Is it too late? Are we, to put it politely, doomed? And what would Buddha do?

***

First of all, what does “too late” even mean? Too late for what? And what is “doom”? And who’s the “we” in that statement? In what sense have “we”—as humans, as living creatures—ever not been doomed? Isn’t “doom” just another word for impermanence? I mean, the Earth itself will someday no longer exist.

But even if we’re only speaking specifically in terms of the topic at hand, climate catastrophe, is “doom” really the word for it? Is it really a simple binary, doomed or not doomed? Of course, according to most climate scientists, it’s almost certainly too late to prevent “catastrophic” climate change on some scale, at least by any humane definition; indeed it’s already happening in many parts of the world, starting with the poorest, most vulnerable, and least powerful. But the same scientists tell us there’s still a wide range of possible outcomes within this century and beyond. Just how catastrophic the human situation will get, and how fast, is unknown—and still depends a great deal on what human beings do, most importantly what we do politically, right now and in the coming years. And no matter what happens, many billions of human beings, and countless non-human, will live into the coming decades and centuries, however catastrophic they may be—and precisely because of that, our choices and actions still matter a great deal. Perhaps more than we can imagine. Perhaps more than ever before in human history. Because we don’t know exactly when it will be “too late” (again, too late for what?), or what may prove to be possible—politically, technologically, humanly—if enough of us have the resolve to keep pushing hard enough, relentlessly enough. We simply don’t know. That’s the point.

Perhaps, then, it’s better to say that we’re both “doomed” and “not doomed,” that it’s both “too late” and “not too late”—or, at least, not entirely too late, quite yet.

***

What, then, would Buddha do? It’s a question that might interest anyone, not only Buddhists, but in order to answer it, one needs to know what “Buddha” is. I don’t mean the Buddha, the quasi-historical figure who sat beneath a tree, woke up to the morning star, and founded Buddhism, but rather, Buddhism’s ultimate truth, the ineffable essence of its teaching. And, as it happens, the question “What is Buddha?” turns out to be one of the oldest of koans in the Zen (or Chan) Buddhist tradition—which means, admittedly, that we may not get very far with this line of inquiry. When a monk asked the great Chan master Yun-men, who lived a thousand years ago in China, this very question—“What is Buddha?”—Yun-men answered: “Dry shit on a stick!”

OK. But maybe that’s not all Buddha is. Hopefully not.

Maybe another way to pose the question, “What is Buddha?”—and here I go thinking too much again—is simply to ask, “What is compassion?” After all, no compassion, no Buddha; no compassion, no Buddhism. What is Buddha? What is compassion?

Surely compassion is more than just a word, more than just an abstract concept. What is it, then? Don’t know? As my teacher would tell me, just saying the words “don’t know” won’t cut it. “Show me. Right here in this moment. You already have the answer.”

Even a child knows what compassion is. Someone is sad and needs a hug, you give them a hug. Someone is thirsty, you give them something to drink. Someone is sick, you tend to them. Someone is in danger, you protect them. Someone is suffering as a direct result of your actions, or inaction, you change your behavior so that they will no longer suffer. Someone is suffering because of your government’s actions or inaction, or because of the oppressive political system under which you live, you work with others and try to change your government or your whole political system.

Maybe Buddha is simply compassionate direct action. Maybe compassion is as easy as a hug and as hard as a revolution.

There’s an old saying: “Zen is sitting, Zen is walking, Zen is lying down.” So, what would Buddha do? Don’t know. But maybe Buddha would be sitting-in. Maybe Buddha would be walking, marching, in a crowd. Maybe Buddha would be lying down—or locking down—in front of pipelines and bulldozers and militarized police. Maybe Buddha would be shutting shit down. Maybe Buddha would revolt.

Maybe Mahatma Gandhi, and everyone with Gandhi, was Buddha. Maybe the Reverend Dr. King, and everyone with King, was Buddha. Maybe everyone at Standing Rock was Buddha. Maybe Black Lives Matter and the Poor People’s Campaign and #AbolishICE—maybe all the kids walking out of school to join the climate strikes and demand that we face up to the facts—are all Buddha. Maybe all of us, including the police, are Buddha—if we only wake up and realize it.

Are we doomed? Yes! No! Don’t know! What would Buddha do? Don’t know! But as my teacher would tell me, just saying “don’t know” won’t cut it. “Try try try, ten thousand years non-stop. Save all beings from suffering.”

Near the end of my book about the climate-justice movement, I note how the American poet Gary Snyder, a Zen Buddhist, wrote a short prose-and-verse piece in 2001 called “After Bamiyan,” about the destruction of the ancient Buddhas of Bamiyan in Afghanistan. In this piece, Snyder recalls his correspondence at the time with a fellow Buddhist who remarked that since Buddhism teaches the impermanence of all things, what did any of it really matter?

To which Snyder replies, “Ah yes . . . impermanence. But this is never a reason to let compassion and focus slide, or to pass off the sufferings of others because they are merely impermanent beings.”

And then Snyder quotes a famous haiku by the Japanese poet Issa, which he translates:

This dewdrop world
Is but a dewdrop world
And yet—

Snyder adds: “That ‘and yet’ is our perennial practice. And maybe the root of the Dharma.”

Is it too late? Are we doomed? What would Buddha do?

[Boom!]

Don’t know!

And yet—

About the Author 

Wen Stephenson, an independent journalist and activist, writes for The Nation and is the author of What We’re Fighting for Now Is Each Other: Dispatches From the Front Lines of Climate Justice. Follow him on Twitter at @wenstephenson.

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

For the month of October, we introduce you to our designer, Louis Roe!

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

It feels like a cliché, but I’ve always been interested in books and bookmaking. My dad ran a print shop in Cambridge for many years, so I had what felt like limitless access to paper in a rainbow of colors, giant staplers, laminators and plastic binding. I made my first book when I was five or six and called it “Beautiful Birds,” a collection of bird illustrations for my grandma. When I started thinking about college ten years later, it was pretty much a toss-up whether I’d study writing or art. Designing books is a career where I get to be excited about both, so I set my heart on it early.

As far as I’m concerned, landing at Beacon was an act of fate, or perhaps dumb luck. I sort of stumbled out of college into a content marketing job I found very difficult. It wasn’t a good fit. I wrote my resignation letter on the flight home from a vacation where my relatives had convinced me it’d be worth it to leave the job, even without having my next move lined up. But a couple of days later, I lost $1,000 to a scam; leaving the job was no longer an option. Perhaps a month later, I answered a job listing for a designer at Beacon. It was exactly what I wanted. The interviews were already under way, but there was still time to squeeze me in. My interview turned into a four-hour conversation with the creative director about aesthetics, politics and music—an immediate connection! I was offered the job the next day.

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

The challenges are similar to those of any creative job: inspiration, creative freedom, and budget. Juggling deadlines. Tempering perfectionism with trust. Knowing when to defer to others’ expertise and when to stand by your decisions. Now that I’ve been designing covers for four years, I’ve been learning to present my designs more from a place of authority. It can be a daunting task when the people judging your work have been in the business much longer, and have the memory of you coming onboard as an assistant—will they take my input seriously? But one of the most rewarding things about my experience as a designer at Beacon is learning that my comments are heard and respected, and that’s a direct result of the work I’ve put in. It’s pushed me to trust my instincts more and more.

In an alternate universe, what career would you have?

I’ve always wondered what might’ve happened if I’d taken a more technical route, like working with printers. Or perhaps cabinet making, or forensic science. Lately, I’ve been dreaming about what it’d be like to work in ecology or environmentalism. Probably quite frustrating! I suppose in my ideal alternate universe, I could try them all. Then master each one in a series of branching universes.

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

I’m currently listening to an artist called A Beacon School. I know it sounds made up, but his song “It’s Late” recently popped up on Spotify radio and I’ve been listening to the Cola album more or less on repeat since then. It’s dreamy and sweet, sort of an aural comfort food for dreary fall days and trying political times.

About Louis Roe 

Louis Roe has been designing at Beacon Press since 2015, after graduating from Emerson College’s Writing, Literature, and Publishing program and a brief stint in content marketing. He previously interned at Wind Ridge Books in Shelburne, VT.

By Paul Ortiz

Latin American flags. Photo credit: Steven Damron

I wrote An African American and Latinx History of the United States because I believe that history has an indispensable role to play at a time when many of our leading politicians are again invoking anti-Latinx and anti-Black hatred in order to garner votes. I was born in 1964. I grew up in the 1970s, a time of “backlash” against the Mexican American and African American civil rights movements. Politicians like California’s Pete Wilson, Arizona’s Joe Arpaio, and New York’s Donald Trump rose to political power by blaming immigrants and African Americans for society’s problems. (Many white citizens were genuinely angry at what they perceived to be a loss of status in the society. As a boy, my Chicano friends in San Leandro, California, and Bremerton, Washington—the two towns of my youth—were called “spics” and “wetbacks” so often that we often internalized degrading ideas about our identities and families.) African American children had it even worse.

School did not help us. Our history textbooks loudly praised Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, and John Adams for giving us our liberties. The US Constitution was extolled as the greatest document in the history of the human species even though it strengthened slavery, limited naturalization to whites, and all but guaranteed the outbreak of a bloody civil war a few generations later. The same history textbooks were silent about our contributions as Latinx and African American peoples to the country’s institutions. Frankly, we were taught to be white nationalists from an early age. No wonder so many people in this country believe that building a wall between the United States and Mexico will solve many of our problems!

In this time of national and global crisis, we need a new, more intersectional, and inclusive Hispanic Heritage Month. A month where young and old, and people from all walks of life can come together to learn the lessons of solidarity, mutual aid, and emancipatory internationalism—the idea expressed by generations of organizers that our liberties are best secured when the ideals of self-determination and equality are enacted within and between nations.

An African American and Latinx History of the United States re-envisions American history as a global narrative where people of Latin America, the Caribbean, and Africa resisted assimilating to a debilitating status quo and instead played invaluable roles in creating this nation’s democratic traditions. Readers will learn how the Haitian Revolution fueled anti-slavery struggles and independence movements from the United States to South America. In subsequent generations, independence struggles in Cuba, Mexico, Nicaragua, and other nations fired the imaginations of anti-slavery activists in the United States and led to the creation of cross-border solidarity movements. The abolition of slavery in Mexico opened a new front in the war for freedom. Mexicans offered sanctuary and liberty to escaped slaves from the United States and this set in motion the fatal events resulting in the US invasion of Mexico in 1846, known incorrectly as the “Mexican-American War.”

Even after the US triumphed in the war, American diplomat Nicholas Trist discovered that “[T]he Mexicans not only understood the project of forcing slavery into the territory sought to be acquired from them, but viewed it with an abhorrence which strangely contrasts with the pro-slavery proclivity of [the United States].” When Mexicans traveled to El Norte later in the century, they brought this love of liberty with them.

Understanding that Mexicans, Haitians, and Latinx people have much to teach us about the struggle for freedom requires a new framing of US history, one that does not relegate Black and Brown people to colorful sidebars in textbooks. Many of the students I work with at the University of Florida, as well as in antiracist workshops, are first-generation immigrants. They are frustrated that their high school history books are silent on the sacrifices and the contributions made to this nation by their ancestors and elders from Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, and other nations. In conducting history workshops in high schools using the teaching guide to An African American and Latinx History of the United States, I have been deeply moved by students’ excitement when they discover connections between movements for justice in their countries of origin and the traditions of revolutionary internationalism in the United States.

If we decry the narrow nationalism of today’s political debates, we must begin to write histories that demonstrate how individuals in the United States have tried to build linkages to struggles in other countries. In 1927, in his essay “The World in Ferment,” Black journalist William Jones wrote: “Now let your vision travel in a circle as the world whirls and passes over Mexico, South America, South Africa, India, Haiti and some of the islands of the sea, and you get the real significance of what is happening in China.” The Afro-American newspaper writer capitalized his next sentence for full effect: EVERYWHERE UNDER DOG NATIONS AND GROUPS, MOST OF THEM COLORED ARE TRYING TO PRY LOOSE FROM THE STRANGLE HOLD OF WHITE GREED.”

Half a century later, Howard Jordan, New York Assemblyman Jose Rivera, and Congressman Roberto García founded Latinos for a Free South Africa (LAFSA) in 1985. “Growing apartheid repression in South Africa ‘mandates a collective response by the Latino community,’” Rivera said at the time. “‘Our new organization represents the first endeavor to bring isolated initiatives together under one banner for freedom.’” In a collective statement given to the press, the founders of LAFSA noted that, “Latinos who along with their African-American brothers have been the victims of discrimination and racism in this nation, are particularly repulsed by this South African system of apartheid where resources are allocated on the basis of color.” Jordan stated that, “we want to foster Black-Latino unity through an understanding of the relationship between the struggle in South Africa, Central and Latin America and the domestic situation affecting Blacks and Latinos in the US.” Learning how Latinx organizers built political alliances in the past can help us today as we recognize that it is impossible to make progress unless we can forge new intercultural, interracial, and intergenerational coalitions.

When the history of Latinx people is placed at the center of our national narrative, US history becomes profoundly a working class affair. It is the history of Mexican American steelworkers, copper miners, and sharecroppers forming the bedrock of the Congress of Industrial Organizations and driving the rebirth of the industrial unionism of the Great Depression. The foundations of this nation’s wealth have been built not by the billionaires beloved by mainstream media, but by centuries of unpaid as well as profoundly under-paid labor of African Americans and Latinx people—slaves, braceros, sharecroppers, undocumented workers and many others.

Exploring the complex relationships between African Americans and Latinos during the past two centuries is also a necessary precursor to creating a new kind of multicultural society that does not rest on racial scapegoating and victim blaming. In recent antiracist workshops sponsored by remarkable social justice organizations like the South Florida People of Color and the Broward People of Color, I participated in candid discussions of antiblack racism within Latinx communities. We should use Hispanic/Latinx Heritage Month to challenge racism of all forms and to acknowledge that British, French, Portuguese, and Spanish colonialism thrived for centuries by using the divide-and-conquer strategies of racial and caste distinctions to fuel self-hatred and conflict.

Today, we live in a culture where one group’s gain is perceived as another’s loss. Yet, cooperation under duress has been a major theme of our shared histories. More than a century after Mexico freed itself from Spanish rule, Mexican American railway men in Austin, Texas, were still telling stories of the African-descent heroes of the Mexican War of Independence, particularly about Vicente Guerrero, a man of mixed African, Indigenous, and European ancestry. “I’ve just come back to my typewriter after listening to tales of [Vicente] Guerrero told me by citizens of the Mexican-American community here in my Texas home town,” Harold Preece, a white journalist, noted. “After hearing those tales of that knight of humanity, I am planning to get a picture of Vicente Guerrero to hang alongside the picture of Abraham Lincoln in my den.” A man who worked as a section hand for the Missouri Pacific Railway told the journalist: “My great grandfather fought with him, barefooted and bareheaded, in the hills of Mexico, when all the white leaders of the revolution had surrendered and accepted pardons from the King of Spain. You see, Guerrero would never make peace with the King because the King would not grant any reforms that ended discrimination against Guerrero’s people, Los Negroes de Mexico.” Mexican railway workers taught Preece that Black struggles for freedom had helped to liberate an entire nation. What a great lesson to learn and to teach during Hispanic/Latinx Heritage Month!

Sharing each other’s stories is more important than ever in a time when we have been encouraged to return to racial scapegoating and animosity between nations. Building bridges of communication is a more effective technique for getting along in the twenty-first century than in building walls. We must demand that our historical narratives reflect the rich diversity and connections between the peoples of the Americas and beyond.

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.

By Eileen Truax

Image credit: Favianna Rodriguez

The day after her detention, on February 9, Lupita, thirty-five and the mother of two US-citizen children, was deported to Nogales, Sonora. Her children and her husband, also undocumented, stayed in Arizona. Lupita’s case received wide media coverage, since she had the dubious distinction of being the first Mexican to be deported by the Trump administration.

Throughout his presidential campaign, Trump said that if elected, he would prioritize deporting criminals. But under the executive orders he signed five days after taking office, modifying immigration guidelines, almost any undocumented person who had ever used false documents to get a job would have been categorized as having committed a crime, whether or not they had a criminal record. By this criterion, people like Lupita became targets for deportation.

Although no large-scale deportations took place in the following months—which of course does not guarantee that they will not happen in the future—Lupita’s case illustrated one of the biggest and least discussed problems in the immigration debate: there are nine million people living in the United states with mixed-status families. Of those, four million are undocumented parents, and a half million are children who lack documentation, even though they grew up here. The remaining four and a half million are citizen children who enjoy the benefits that come with being born in the US every day. What happens in a family when the parents are undocumented while the children aren’t, or when children in the same family have a different immigration status? What is it like for families when one member has access to all the services and privileges that come with citizenship, but another does not? Journalist Eileen Truax tells their story in this selection from How Does It Feel to Be Unwanted?: Stories of Resistance and Resilience from Mexicans Living in the United States.

***

I first met the Romero family in 2013 on a trip to Arizona. In this household, the three children were taught that everyone was equal. they were raised to respect their elders, to be proud of their country of origin, and to love the United States, where they had lived for twenty years. But deep down, they all knew they were not the same: though Cynthia, the youngest, was a US citizen, her older siblings, Steve and Noemí, were undocumented.

In recent years, the number of children born in the US to undocumented parents has risen, and as a result more families are living with the tension that comes when members of mixed status are living under the same roof. though older children may lack documents because they were brought to this country when they were small, the youngest children tend to be citizens. According to the most recent data available, as of 2013 there were more than five million children in the US with at least one undocumented parent. Eight out of ten of those children, a little more than four million, are US citizens.

Of the three Romero children, Noemí, then twenty-one years old, was the first to understand what their different status meant. When she was fifteen and her friends from school started taking the test to get a driver’s license, Noemí asked her parents why she couldn’t get one. María, her mother, explained the situation and why Noemí would be denied access to other privileges in the years to come.

Noemí found out what some of those other privileges were when she decided she wanted to continue her education after high school. She found that colleges opened their doors to her only to slam them shut when she let them know she did not have a social security number. Then she realized that of the three children in her family, getting a higher education would be a privilege reserved only for Cynthia, who was thirteen years old at the time.

“There’s so much tension you feel,” María Gómez, the mother of the Romero children, told me. Like her husband, María was undocumented. We met in Phoenix at an event organized by Puente, one of the most visible pro-immigrant activist groups in Arizona. Originally from the Mexican state of Tabasco, in 1995 the couple and their two small children, three-year-old Noemí and one-year-old Steve, came to live in Glendale, Arizona. Cynthia was born five years later.

“As they got older, they figured it out,” María said of her two oldest kids. “I told them we couldn’t go to Mexico for a few reasons. Well, okay, we could go, but how would we get back? They didn’t understand it very well at first, but they accepted it.”

The Romero children went to school and grew up as Americans, like everyone else. But once they entered adulthood, the difference between being documented and being undocumented took a toll on the family’s stability: compounding the frustration generated by opportunities denied to her siblings, Cynthia lived with the fear that someone in her family, including her parents, could be deported at any moment.

Children in families where one or both parents are undocumented grow up with certain disadvantages. Much has been written about how the children of undocumented parents tend to score lower on cognitive development and achievement tests in school compared to their peers because their family incomes tend to be low. Families have fewer resources to devote to their children’s activities and supervision, and they have less autonomy because they depend on whatever jobs they can get, which are not necessarily those they are best qualified for. Children of undocumented immigrants tend to have fewer years of formal education than children of documented immigrants.

Ever since she was little, Cynthia, the youngest Romero child, had to serve as a bridge between her family and the outside world. As is common in Latino communities, Cynthia’s primary language is English, but she understands Spanish perfectly well since her parents speak it at home. This means she plays an important role in her family’s communications. As we were talking, even though I asked her every question in English, Cynthia answered me in Spanish, out of courtesy to her mother, who was with us.

“I help my mother, for example, when she goes to make a deposit at the bank or when we go to see her lawyer, who doesn’t speak Spanish,” Cynthia said. “I want to be a lawyer too, to help out our . . .” she paused, searching for the right word in Spanish. “to help our community.”

Although Cynthia still had several years before she would need to decide on a career path, at that moment her choice of future profession was certainly influenced by what her family had experienced in recent years. In 2010, María was arrested and taken to an immigration detention center in Arizona, where she was held for four weeks.

Deportation proceedings were opened, and María’s case had still not been resolved in court. Her lawyer had told her clearly from the beginning that the deportation process takes years to be completed and informed her that a delay wins time so parents can be with their children and the family can be together in the United States. But if María’s final court date was not postponed by 2015, María would be deported.

According to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) data, in 2013 one of every six people deported, more than seventy thousand people, said they had one or more children who had been born in the US. Their deportations not only separated families but deprived one or more US citizens of the right to live in their country with their parents.

“Since then, and even today, Cynthia thinks about what will happen when that moment comes, because she really doesn’t want to go to Mexico,” María tells me, worried. “The weeks when I wasn’t here were very hard for her. I told her to think positive, that something good was going to come of this, so she wasn’t overwhelmed, because it is really stressful. But then with what happened to Noemí, that made everything worse.”

Noemí had lived in the US for seventeen of her twenty years when, on June 15, 2012, President Obama announced the implementation of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. This was wonderful news for Noemí, who met all the requirements to apply. The only problem was the application fee, $465, which she did not have. She did not have a work permit either.

She decided to get a job to save up the money for the application. She starting working as a cashier at a convenience store, using a false name, earning $7.65 an hour. She had only been working there for a few weeks when an immigration raid put her behind bars at the Eloy Detention Center, under threat of deportation.

“It was awful. I wondered how they were doing at home, if the only one working was my father, to support the whole family, pay the rent, the bills, and on top of that, the lawyers to get me out,” Noemí said. “I thought about my brother, that someday they’re going to get him too. or my dad, he’s undocumented too. And I thought about Cynthia, what’s going to happen to her if they send us all back to Mexico?”

María was desperate. Noemí was locked up in detention for four months while the family tried to find lawyers to help. Cynthia translated from English into Spanish so her parents understood. The family also grappled with the uncertainty of what to do if Noemí was deported. Could they leave her on her own in Mexico, where she did not know anyone?

Thanks to help from Puente, Noemí was released. But in a bitter irony, her situation worsened: since she had pleaded guilty to using a false name to get a job and save up money to apply for DACA, she now had a criminal record, making her ineligible for the program. “Now, there’s nothing for me,” she said with a look of profound sadness.

Facing the dismal prospects of her own case, Noemí is concerned that an eventual move by her family to Mexico would shut down Cynthia’s chance at the education she and her brother could never have because of their undocumented status. “It’s not fair that Cynthia, who was born here with all the rights of a citizen, would have to go with us just because we can’t be here legally. Sometimes I do feel bad that I don’t have those privileges, and that there are people here who have them but just don’t take advantage of them. I just want my sister . . .”—Noemí pauses and starts to cry, overcome with emotion—“to appreciate what she has, what my brother and I couldn’t do. I want her to do it for us.”

A few minutes later, after Cynthia has left the room, María expressed her worries a bit more openly. “At home we talk about it very clearly, because my process ends in 2015. Then we had Noemí’s situation, and my husband could be detained at any time, like any of us, and what do we do? I can’t be separated from any of my three children, either we all go, or we all stay. Cynthia gets upset and says, ‘Why me, Mom?’ she says she is not going, and that’s it. But then, what do we do? That’s a battle we have at home right now. I’ve thought about how we’re going to need to get Cynthia some psychological help. I tell her not to think about it so much, because sometimes she’ll say all day, ‘Listen, I’m not going. What am I going to do over there?’ talking about Mexico. I know it’s not fair not only for her but my other two children, who are practically from here too. Sometimes the sense of guilt their father and I have, especially when Noemí was in prison . . . It’s very hard to realize my daughter was locked up because I brought her here. I didn’t consider the consequences of coming to a place that didn’t want us.”

After seeing what happened to her sister, Cynthia decided she wants to be a lawyer, like all the lawyers she had to talk to who helped get her sister out of prison. When I ask her what it feels like to be the only documented person in her family, she says, “Having papers is a privilege.”

Two years after our conversation, in the summer of 2015, I tried to track down the Romero family to find out what had happened to them. I called the only contact number I had for them, María’s cell phone. No one ever answered.

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.

A Q&A with Andrew S. Lewis

Photo credit: Andrew S. Lewis

How much longer can they stay? That’s a question to ask about the last working-class residents of the Bayshore holding out as the state of New Jersey buys out the homes of their rural community, ransacked by Superstorm Sandy and rising sea levels. You meet them and others in journalist Andrew S. Lewis’s The Drowning of Money Island: A Forgotten Community’s Fight Against the Rising Sea Forever Changing Coastal America. In his book, the realities of climate change, state politics, class, and memories of a home disappearing in real time intersect and clash in a future glimpse of how climate change is already intensifying preexisting inequalities. Beacon Broadside editor Christian Coleman caught up with Lewis to ask about climate science denial in the Bayshore, displacement, and what he hopes readers take away from reading his book. This is part two of their two-part Q&A. Click here to read part one.

Christian Coleman: In the news, we’ve seen reports of climate refugees from Syria and other countries impacted by global warming. Your book makes it clear that we’re already feeling the effects of global warming in the States, yet some of the residents you write about see climate change as a hoax and hunker down to fight the Department of Environmental Protection and keep their homes. How did you approach writing about these residents? Because I think they give us insight into why some deny the evidence that climate change is real.

Andrew S. Lewis: This was a challenging aspect of reporting on the book. I am a person—an American—who believes in climate change. (I hate that we even have to say “believe,” as if it were a religion and not a simple fact of science that’s been proven for decades.) More difficult was the fact that I was writing about people from my hometown, people who knew people in my family, people who members of my family have to see on a regular basis. It’s a small place. But structuring the book in an investigative way, which allowed me to lean on the core tenants of journalism, offered me the opportunity to extract myself from large sections of the narrative and to simply listen objectively. Then, at strategic points, I could interject with moments of subjectivity that were informed by my intimate—non-journalistic—knowledge of the Bayshore and its people.

And whereas prior to reporting the book I was unsure of the source of the denial in my hometown, after spending so much time with several of the characters in the book, simply listening objectively, I was able to finally get at some answers to that denial. The answers, again, have to do with many Bayshore residents and local politicians’ deep feeling of being forgotten by the rest of the country.

Politics, which are unfortunately conflated with human-caused climate change, have never really served Bayshore residents well. Delaware Bay oystermen have been in conflict with regulators since colonial times—in 1719, the colonial government imposed catch restrictions, which are some of the earliest regulations in this country’s history. In the 1970s, the Army Corps of Engineers largely turned their backs on Bayshore towns that were pleading for the kind of coastal infrastructure that was being built to save Jersey Shore towns. And then, after Sandy, instead of getting money and encouragement to rebuild, those same Bayshore towns got attention from only the state’s Blue Acres program.

Bayshore residents and local politicians are watching Jersey Shore beaches actually expand rather than contract like their own waterfronts. That expansion, of course, is only because of the fact that the state has pumped a staggering 177 million cubic yards of sand on Jersey Shore beaches in order to slow the encroachment of the ocean. But if you’re not privy to all the details of infrastructure investment and annual beach replenishment, or don’t have the time to read journal articles about the collapse of Arctic and West Antarctic ice sheets, all you see is one coastline thriving and the other dying, which makes messages from already-distrusted politicians about things like four or six or even twelve feet of sea level rise seem inaccurate, or at least overly alarmist. 

The irony now, of course, is that politics, in the form of the Trump Administration rolling back environmental standards, actually are intertwining ever tighter with human-caused climate change. Such neglect is only going to cause sea levels to rise faster, and drown the Bayshore faster.

CC: In the beginning of The Drowning of Money Island, you introduce us first to Mike and Kate Nelson, a couple who live in one of the fishing villages. Then you introduce us to other locals, such as aquaculture entrepreneur Tony Novak, and township mayor Bob Campbell, who sees “tree huggers” as the enemy. How did you decide on who to interview to tell the Bayshore’s story?

ASL: When you start reporting for a book of journalism, you have to cast as wide a net as possible. Your goal is to find people who represent the various ideologies and life experiences that define the place you are reporting on. In one sense, it’s a simple matter of access—this kind of reporting takes tremendous commitment from subjects; they have to be willing to tolerate you constantly calling or texting them, showing up to their homes unannounced, expecting you to invite them to family gatherings or to sit down and talk with their family members about intimate things. Not everyone is willing to sacrifice that kind of intimacy with a stranger who constantly has the notebook out, recording God-knows-what about their lives.

Other times, a subject is wonderful but there’s only so much page space to fit short, specific anecdotes from your time spent with them. In the end, if I had had unlimited time and page space, I might have channeled my inner Joyce or Tolstoy and written a voluminous account. But that wasn’t an option—so you really home in on the characters that best convey the story you want to tell.

CC: For Money Island, it wasn’t cost effective to invest public funds in protecting and repairing the many homes facing erosion and future storms. The Department of Environmental Protection’s Green Acres program was a voluntary homeowner buyout for people who owned those homes. But it didn’t seem like the residents had much choice. Why would the state and federal government give them the illusion of having a choice when in reality they were buying these residents out and effectively displacing an economically disadvantaged community?

ASL: Well, ultimately, every homeowner maintains their right to choose—Mike and Kate Nelson are examples of this. They may not have the community they loved so much surrounding them anymore, but they did get to stay by the water, which is what they love most.

The problem, of course, is most people are not willing to endure the hoop-jumping required to prevail against the years of mixed messages from state and local officials, who promise you help in the form of permitting lenience or beach replenishment or a new centralized sewage collection system but at the same time are issuing you notices of violation for problems that would be remedied by those promises. Government moves slowly, even in the best of circumstances, but in the case of the Bayshore—or any low-income area that contributes little to the economic engine of a state or the federal government—progress is truly Sisyphean. Most cannot endure the red tape and leave.

And in the case of the Bayshore, my reporting showed miscommunications between both state and local authorities, as well as between state agencies, in the wake of Sandy. The Blue Acres program, however, had a specific mandate and they got to work—they wanted to target communities where they could buy out large clusters of homes, not one home here and another home there. The fatal flaw of such a mandate in New Jersey is that it only works where home prices are modest to low and going down because of flooding—i.e. middle-to-low income neighbors on rivers, creeks, back bays, and bays. Certainly not the Jersey Shore, where billions of federal dollars were and continue to be distributed to build up beaches and properties—which in turn results in real estate values rising and rising. 

So this is the fundamental conundrum of managed retreat policy going forward. As long as the federal government, via the National Flood Insurance Program and FEMA disaster relief, continue to rely on traditional cost-benefit equations to determine whether a community should be saved or not, managed retreat is always going to be inequitable and unfair. Lower income communities equate to low hanging fruit—if your mandate, if the funding of your program is predicated on the amount of homes and properties you can acquire and demolish, then you’re going to go for the low hanging fruit and ignore the fact the most at-risk properties, the Jersey Shore properties, cannot be touched for the very simple reason that they have the money and the power to be untouched.

CC: And what would you like readers to take away from reading The Drowning of Money Island?

ASL: I want readers to see the story of the Bayshore as a clear and present foreshadow of the future for huge swaths of America. While climate change, and sea level rise specifically, is already having deep impacts on the Bayshore, it is just a fragment of impacts to come. If sea levels rise to the upper ends of some scientists’ estimates—six, eight, or even twelve feet—no one is immune from managed retreat. Rich and poor, it won’t matter—there will be mass migration from much of this country’s coastlines.

This country was founded on the ideal that all men are created equal. Every day, school children from New Jersey to Alaska salute the American flag and say the words, “indivisible and justice for all.” God knows that America has not lived up to those ideals, not in the past and not right now. And we know this failure has too often landed squarely on the shoulders of America’s middle class and poor, black and brown citizens and immigrants. If we can move beyond arguing over a science that is settled, and accept the fact that the earth is sick, that it is our fault, and that we need to take steps to make it better, than perhaps we can get to the real work of enacting policies informed by an attention to equality and equity.

The story of the Bayshore offers us an opportunity to plan for a future in which managed retreat does not have to fall victim to the kind of inequities that stain the narrative of our past.

Read part one.

About Andrew S. Lewis 

Andrew S. Lewis is a contributing writer for Outside and has also written for the New York Times Magazine and Guernica. He received an MFA in nonfiction writing from Columbia University. In 2018 he was awarded a CATWALK Art Residency. He lives in South Jersey, between the ocean and the bay. Connect with him at andrewslewis.com and on Twitter at @andrewslewis1.

A Q&A with Andrew S. Lewis

Photo credit: Andrew S. Lewis

How much longer can they stay? That’s a question to ask about the last working-class residents of the Bayshore holding out as the state of New Jersey buys out the homes of their rural community, ransacked by Superstorm Sandy and rising sea levels. You meet them and others in journalist Andrew S. Lewis’s The Drowning of Money Island: A Forgotten Community’s Fight Against the Rising Sea Forever Changing Coastal America. In his book, the realities of climate change, state politics, class, and memories of a home disappearing in real time intersect and clash in a future glimpse of how climate change is already intensifying preexisting inequalities. Beacon Broadside editor Christian Coleman caught up with Lewis to ask about the inspiration behind the book, what it feels like to return to only the memory of a former home, the deep impacts of global warming yet to come, and more. This is part one of their two-part Q&A.

Christian Coleman: Tell us a bit about what inspired you to write the book.

Andrew S. Lewis: It was a succession of factors.

I grew up on the Bayshore, and my family was deeply connected to the water and wetlands that surrounded us. We fished the bay, went crabbing in the creeks. I understood that we lived within a beautiful, ecologically diverse natural space. I always wanted to be a writer, and one of my favorite books as a kid was The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. One of the main reasons that it was my favorite book was because the Mississippi River landscape Twain evokes reminded me a lot of the Bayshore. Later, in my teens, my grandfather would tell me stories about the Prohibition years, when bootleggers paid off his father to use his Bayshore land to transport booze smuggled in from the bay. For years, I toyed around with fictional stories about the Bayshore during Prohibition, just believing there was a story there.

When I moved away from New Jersey, I always surprised people when describing my hometown. To them, New Jersey was highways and factories and pollution. No one could believe such a pristine, rural place existed there. Growing up, the adults were always talking about how the Bayshore—and Cumberland County, where the Bayshore is located—had been forgotten. Then, as an adult myself, describing the Bayshore to incredulous listeners, it seemed that the adults of my youth were indeed right.

So when I visited home after Sandy and discovered the bayfront communities—Bay Point, Money Island and others—had been just as decimated as communities on the Jersey Shore (though no one would have known that since no media beyond the local came to document it), I immediately began to wonder how recovery would play out. Sure enough, the Jersey Shore got the bulk of New Jersey’s federal disaster relief money, not to mention state lawmakers’ attention, while Cumberland County was, at least for the first year after Sandy, given no federal public emergency funding at all.

The idea for this book fully matured in my mind on November 8, 2016. That day, on my way to vote, I took a detour through the Bayshore. So many yards had “Make America Great Again” signs. I remember thinking about how, despite a very clear preference for Trump here in a slice of rural America, it just wouldn’t hold up against the urbanized Democratic centers of America. Then I was proven wrong. Trump had won largely on the backs of rural Americans who had felt forgotten. I’d been hearing that line my whole life. And for people on the Bayshore, they’d felt forgotten by the Democratic Party via its strong support of environmental policy, and they’d felt forgotten by then New Jersey governor, Chris Christie, who prioritized Sandy recovery on the Jersey Shore and had done nothing to help the Bayshore. They hadn’t voted for a Democrat and they hadn’t voted for a Republican—they’d voted for someone who they felt could upend the entire political system.

CC: What was your initial reaction to returning home to the Bayshore after having been gone for so long and seeing how much it had changed?

ASL: On the Bayshore, it was a combination of extremes. Culturally speaking, economically speaking, nothing had really changed. Old friends had gotten older, married, bought themselves homes and secondhand fishing boats, but we shared the same old fishing and hunting stories, frequented the same places. People always talk about how the Bayshore is stuck back in time—and I guess that’s true.

But on the other hand—environmentally—radical change had happened between when I left, in 2000, and returned in 2016. In this regard, I’m reminded of a small peninsula of marshland that separated the last bend of a local creek from the bay. We used that creek to access the bay to go fishing, and, when I was a kid, the peninsula was dry at both high and low tide. My father and uncles used to hang out there when they were kids. Today, that peninsula is completely gone, underwater. The creek is literally one bend shorter now. The Bayshore marshland is losing a football field’s worth of land a year.

And, because of the same forces that are eating away the marsh, the bayfront communities are either greatly diminished or, in the case of Sea Breeze and Bay Point, pretty much gone. As the water rises, and the land subsides, the State of New Jersey has been systematically buying out property owners in these small, flood-prone hamlets, demolishing their homes and preserving the land for open space. So, the communities that I remember from my childhood are no longer—instead there are just a few holdouts that have kind of hunkered down and keep to themselves. The festive, boisterous communities that once existed have been relegated to memory only.

CC: In addition to writing about the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy, you write about the history—geological and social—of your hometown, anchoring us in a very rich sense of place. Tell us why it was important to include it in the narrative of the book.

ASL: In a sense, the deep history included in the book was a visceral reaction to this idea that the Bayshore, and so many small, rural, climate-change-impacted communities like it, have largely been forgotten by both modern society and the politicians who run it. And also, quite frankly, I wasn’t aware of a lot of the history that’s included in the book until I began writing and reporting. In that way, I myself am a reflection of American society today, which I think is, to borrow a recent line from Ta-Nehisi Coates—“addicted to forgetting.” So, by including so much history of the Bayshore was me kind of shouting from the rafters to anyone who may listen, urging us—Americans—to remember our history, all of it, so that when we confront future societal crisis, we confront them with an eye to the mistakes of the past so that they may not be repeated.

Regarding the geological history, it just so happens that what’s happening on the Bayshore is a clear example of how complex sea level rise is. The water is not rising on the Bayshore only because of anthropogenic forcing. It’s also “rising” because the land is sinking, due to the fact that South Jersey sits on a coastal plain that is still settling from the final glacial retreat, about 8,000 years ago. Additionally, South Jersey sits on top of a 17-trillion gallon aquifer that is being drained faster than it can be replenished—this is also causing the land to sink. The confluence of rising water and sinking land is a perfect example of what scientists call relative sea level rise, and the reason why some areas of the world, like the mid-Atlantic US, have higher rates of sea level rise than other parts of the US and world.

Stay tuned for part two of their Q&A.

About Andrew S. Lewis 

Andrew S. Lewis is a contributing writer for Outside and has also written for the New York Times Magazine and Guernica. He received an MFA in nonfiction writing from Columbia University. In 2018 he was awarded a CATWALK Art Residency. He lives in South Jersey, between the ocean and the bay. Connect with him at andrewslewis.com and on Twitter at @andrewslewis1.

By Fred Pearce

Amusement park at Pripyat near the Chernobyl Plant, now abandoned, Ukraine, September 2013. Photo credit: Stephen J. Mason.

Did you watch the Emmys? HBO’s historical drama miniseries Chernobyl won awards for Outstanding Limited Series, Outstanding Directing, and Outstanding Writing out of its nineteen nominations! Environmental journalist Fred Pearce also wrote about the Soviet Union’s infamous nuclear disaster and the ensuing cleanup efforts in Fallout: Disasters, Lies, and the Legacy of the Nuclear Age. This excerpt from his book goes beyond the end of the series, showing how life went on when people known as self-settlers returned to their homes in the exclusion area after their forced evacuation. How safe is it to live in all that radiation? Apparently safe enough to enjoy vodka.

***

The exclusion zone that has stretched for twenty miles around Chernobyl’s stricken nuclear reactor since the 1986 accident is not quite the inaccessible dead zone often portrayed. Thousands of Ukrainians commute there every day to work on making safe and dismantling the plant and managing the zone itself. Yes, I needed an official permit to pass through the guarded gates on the road north from Kiev and a radiation scan before I could leave. But the scientists I was with had no trouble arranging my entry—and thankfully I was allowed to go home afterward.

First on my list was meeting some of the people who defied the government and returned to live in the exclusion zone in the months and years after their forced evacuation. Many live off the land in their old homes or have simply moved into abandoned buildings. After checking into Chernobyl’s only hotel, I headed down the road to a high door that opened onto a small yard. It was opened by Markeyevych Federovych, one of the tribe of aging authority-defying returnees known locally as self-settlers. It was several hours before we were allowed to leave, a little unsteady on our feet.

Federovych, you see, is an effusive host and serves good vodka. He flavors it with herbs picked in the exclusion zone. Who knows how radioactive it is. He certainly didn’t care, as we sat in his cozy front room, emptying his bottle and discussing his three decades of life as a radioactive outlaw. He was, he said, one of almost two thousand self-settlers who snuck back to their villages after the accident because they didn’t like life as evacuees. They grew vegetables in radioactive gardens, hunted radioactive animals, gathered radioactive herbs in the radioactive forests, and sometimes drew water from radioactive wells. They were getting old now, but many were hale and hearty. It was good evidence, he insisted, for their claim that life was good in the radioactive zone.

Many of the self-settlers had been outlaws once before, he said, as members of the resistance movement fighting the Nazis in the Second World War. So when they went on the run in the early days of the exclusion zone, they knew where to hide to evade police and guards. Some, in their advancing years, spend the winter in cities but return in summer to live in their radioactive dachas. Some, like Federovych, live permanently in Chernobyl town, cheek by jowl with the workers and scientists maintaining the exclusion zone. Others live in distant parts of the zone; somewhere out there is a monastery of self-settling monks.

All self-settlers live in a shadowy world, officially tolerated in recent years, but outside the normal rules of state law. Some scavenge radioactive scrap metal and barter it for meat and potatoes from the clean world outside. I read before my trip that “the Chernobyl landscape is a space of exception.” A research paper by sociologist Thom Davies, of the University of Birmingham, England, argued that “the sense of abandonment is matched by an intensification of social networks, unofficial risk understandings, and informal activities, making possible life within this nuclear landscape.”

Federovych laughed at such language. His life was not governed by academic abstractions. When the accident happened, he told me, he was a handicraft teacher at a school in Chernobyl. He joined the evacuation, taking his nine-year-old son on his motorbike to Kiev. Like many other evacuees, he took a summer break to the Black Sea, awaiting events. “But I was curious,” he said. “I just wanted to see what was going on. So I visited. It was illegal, but I had a friend who was a captain on a small boat that went up and down the River Pripyat, past the power station. I borrowed a policeman’s uniform and hopped off the boat when nobody was looking.”

Somewhere he seems to have lost touch with his wife and children. Perhaps there were hidden motives behind his return, but if so he wasn’t letting on: “I came back to my old house here in Chernobyl. It is a hundred years old and was built by my grandfather. It was sealed up. There was no water or light. So for a few months I lived in hiding, just with a few candles. But I felt at home. I soon realized there were quite a few of us doing this, both in Chernobyl and out in the villages.” The police patrols guarding the exclusion zone knew about them, he said, but didn’t know what to do.

The critical time for the self-settlers was 1989, three years after the accident. The government decided to clear a cadre of them out of a small, remote village called Ilinci. The police turned up en masse. But close to the village there was a military camp, and the commander there was friendly with the self-settlers. He intervened. There was a standoff, and the military won. “After that, the government’s attitude changed and we became ‘officially registered self-settlers,’” Federovych said, raising his glass to celebrate the triumph. “We got some electricity in our old homes.”

In the early 1990s, there were an estimated 1,800 self-settlers. “But we are getting old. Now we are down to about two hundred, with fifty of us in Chernobyl town,” Federovych said. “Some villages are empty again.” He had no intention of departing “except in a box,” he said, his clipped mustache twitching at the absurdity of his own mortality. Until then, he will take on anyone who tries to stop him living his life as he wants. Such as the policeman who had recently accosted him as he sat on the bank of the Pripyat River and told him to stop fishing because the water was radioactive. “I just told him that my father and grandfather fished here and I have fished here since I was a boy. He had no right to stop me. He went away.”

Wasn’t he afraid of the radiation in the fish, wild mushrooms, and berries that all the self-settlers ate? Not to mention the herbs in our vodka. No, he said. Chemical additives in the food eaten by outsiders were far more dangerous. “Anyway, look at me; don’t I look healthy?” he asked. “There’s nothing wrong with my fitness.” He called his new wife from the kitchen and embraced her in a bear hug to reinforce the point. She seemed a little startled.

“Of course I know a lot of people who have died of radiation,” he said. “But they were people cleaning up the contamination. The liquidators handled highly radioactive material. The rest of us have done fine. We only die of old age.” Was this bravado? I don’t think so. All the evidence is that the self-settlers are living longer and often healthier lives than the many evacuees who languish unhappily in distant towns—free of radiation but often consumed by angst, junk food, and fear. As Federovych leapt from his chair to bid me goodbye with another bear hug, I could not deny it. After three decades consuming the radioactive produce of a radioactive landscape, he looked remarkably well on it.

About the Author 

Fred Pearce has reported on environmental, science, and development issues from eighty-five countries over the past twenty years. Environment consultant at New Scientist from 1992 to 2018, he also writes regularly for the Guardian newspaper and Yale University’s prestigious e360 website. His many books include The New Wild, When the Rivers Run Dry, With Speed and Violence, Confessions of an Eco-Sinner, The Coming Population Crash, and The Land Grabbers.

By Gayatri Patnaik

Author photo: Sameer Khan

Several months ago, when I was in the midst of editing Imani Perry’s biography of Lorraine Hansberry (Looking for Lorraine), I remember stopping and thinking about how special Imani’s voice was. She is extremely knowledgeable and intellectually sophisticated, but she also had this ability to write about Hansberry in an intimate way, and with an eloquent simplicity. A few minutes later, I happened to read a Facebook post from Imani about one of her sons and I immediately thought, How lucky her kids are to have Imani as their mother. And then I became curious and wondered, How is she educating them? What is Imani telling them about life and about coming of age as Black men in America? That led to my asking her if she’d write a book about it . . . and it’s almost as though Imani were waiting to be asked, because Breathe: A Letter to My Sons literally poured out of her in two months!

Breathe is a profound take on parenting and mothering. It’s moving, tender, gut wrenching, wise, and intense. Most of all, it’s fresh and authentic. To me, Breathe feels like spending time with a brilliant, thought-provoking, and true friend—one who never shies away from harsh realities but simultaneously refuses to succumb to despair. Imani effectively conveys how terrifying it is to be Black in America; however, she also instructs her sons to refuse to be cowed by fear and injustice, insisting they live a robust and full life.

 I wanted to mention that the cover art here is original and was created for the book by Ekua Holmes, a Roxbury-based artist. Using Ms. Holmes’s art, a suggestion by assistant editor Maya Fernandez, was a good one; her art hangs in many collections, and Imani happens to be a fan of her work as well. Ms. Holmes’s goal was to create a bold, rich, meditative, elegant, and rhythmic design. We think she succeeded!

Finally, I would say that this is a book you’ll want to re-read, discovering something new each time. It’s truly a remarkable book and an original one, and I can’t wait for more readers to discover it.

About the Author 

Gayatri Patnaik is associate director and editorial director at Beacon Press. She was previously an editor at both Palgrave Macmillan and Routledge, has been at Beacon Press over fifteen years and has published authors including Imani Perry, Cornel West, Kate Bornstein, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, and Jeanne Theoharis. She acquires in US History, with a focus on African American History and race/ethnicity/immigration, and began Beacon’s award-winning “ReVisioning American History” series. Gayatri occasionally signs memoir, began Beacon’s LGBTQ series, “Queer Action/Queer Ideas,” (edited with Michael Bronski) and developed books in “The King Legacy,” with Joanna Green, in a series about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Follow her on Twitter at @gpatnaik1.

By Rakia Clark

Author photo credit: Angel García.

Meeting Mona Eltahawy for the first time is like a bolt of lightning. Bold, vibrant, bright red hair, tattoos on both forearms, big, big smile, the works. Sitting down for the first time to discuss what would become The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls, I was captivated by the powerful simplicity of the book’s central questions: What would happen if girls around the world were trained up to embrace the same qualities we encourage in boys? What if women around the world lived their lives with the same freedom men felt?

These are not difficult questions and yet they don’t get asked enough, much less implemented. Mona’s been asking these questions for years, of course, through her journalism and through her activism. But never have the questions felt as important as they do today.

In a moment when the rights of women worldwide are slowly being rolled back and the cultural markers of progress are being relitigated, The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls feels like a much-needed breath of fresh air. Mona’s advocacy for the tactical use of anger, attention, profanity, ambition, power, violence and lust feels provocative and daring, because she is unapologetic in her demands for equality. It becomes clear why she is one of the loudest, most followed voices on feminism today. She weaves in her personal experience as a woman of color and as a Muslim throughout. And I was particularly heartened to read stories of foreign activists whose struggles are often portrayed as distant or unrelated to Western feminism. They’re not as different as you think. Mona connects it all.

Both Mona and the book are fantastic. (This is not the only F word you’ll find associated with either!) The writing is lively, energetic and utterly compelling. There are passages where you will cheer. You will take out your highlighter. And you will share this book with women and men so that they, too, can feel what you feel after reading it: that, to paraphrase Mona, the book is not a roadmap to peace with patriarchy; rather, it is a Molotov cocktail to throw at it.

About the Author 

Rakia Clark was former senior editor at Beacon Press and the editor of Mona Eltahawy’s The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls. Follow her on Twitter at @rakiathegreat.

By Lyn Mikel Brown

Greta Thunberg, outside the Swedish parliament. Photo credit: Anders Hellberg.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know that sixteen-year-old Swedish climate activist, Greta Thunberg made her way to New York City a few weeks ago via an emission-free racing yacht. She’s here to tell us, as she’s been doing since she was eleven, that “our house is on fire.” The climate crisis is urgent. We dismiss it at our own peril.

You don’t have to believe her. You don’t have to believe photos of starving polar bears rummaging through piles of garbage or videos of Greenland’s glaciers transformed to rushing water. You don’t have to believe NASA or the Academies of Science from eighty countries or 97% of climate researchers. You can dismiss non-sharpie-altered maps of sea level rise and floods devastating the Midwest and South, wave aside the significance of fires burning in the Amazon rainforest, roll your eyes at UN rights chief, Michelle Bachelet’s assessment that climate change is an unprecedented global threat to human rights.

No, you don’t have to believe any of it. But if you are a parent or a teacher, if you raise or educate or care for a young person, you have a responsibility to listen and understand why they do and why this matters so much to them. Because if there’s any chance, any chance in hell, that this is all really happening, it’s in their lap, and trust me, they are plenty worried and plenty angry. 

I’ve been listening to and working with young activists for a long time. Guess what? They don’t need adults to believe in their causes. But they do need us to support them, to have faith in them, to care that they believe enough to act. And we should. It is good for all of us when youth feel they are in the world to change the world. It is good for a world rife with wicked problems to have a young generation filled with energy that hasn’t yet been dispersed, drained, or redirected.

Activism isn’t something anyone does alone. For Greta and fellow US youth climate activists like Xiuhtezcatl Roske-Martinez, Isra Hirsi, Jerome Foster II, and Jamie Margolin, indeed for any young person working for social change, there’s always a network of adults and fellow activists supporting. And make no mistake, youth want us in their corner, helping them to create the conditions for movement. But being the kind of adult youth activists need isn’t easy. The hardest thing of all is learning how not to be a well-intentioned version of what feminist scholar Sarah Ahmed calls “the wall”: how not to be the barrier between youth and their passions; how not to interrupt the flow of energy and ideas; how not to be the force that cuts them off from the deepest parts of themselves.

When I ask young activists what advice they would give adults who want to support them, they say, “Let us be creative and have our strong feelings.” Give us “the opportunity to speak out and have our opinions heard.” Don’t “dim down our energy and excitement,” don’t “take control over a lot of things.” The list goes on: “be honest,” “be a decent person,” “show that you care,” “be open,” “listen,” “check your adult privilege.” And, most of all, “show up!”

As Rebecca Solnit says, “perfection is a stick with which to beat the possible.” What makes youth activism especially powerful—its rich, organic imperfection—can turn adults off. But I can say from experience that showing up is not only vital to the success of youth movements, it’s good for us. Youth have a way of teaching us unexpected things, helping us rediscover the value of openness, of messiness; they reveal truths we’ve forgotten. Listening to young people is mind-altering. As they learn to care deeply and act to make the world better, as they bravely step into the fray, as their willfulness reveals the wall, we learn how to be more porous, more open; we learn to let go, to use our power to create more space and opportunity.

As we speak, Greta and team are marshalling a youthful army of climate activists via Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook to join a global climate strike on Friday, September 20. They are hoping adults everywhere believe enough in them and in this cause to walk out of our homes and work places in support.

I hope you believe. I hope you take your kids out of school, arrange carpools and class trips, and attend Friday’s march-out with the young people in your life. If you don’t buy it, I hope you engage in a little willing suspension of disbelief and support them on this issue they feel so passionate about. They can’t vote, but they can march; they can be visible and heard. If you do nothing else, just write the permission slips, purchase the markers and posters, pack the lunches, and make sure they get on the bus.

About the Author 

Lyn Mikel Brown is professor of education at Colby College, founder of SPARK Movement, and author of Powered By Girl: A Field Guide For Supporting Youth Activists. Follow her on Twitter at @LynMikel and visit her website.

By Michelle Oberman

This is bad news. Since the Trump administration finalized a gag rule banning organizations that get money through Title X from providing or referring patients for abortions, Planned Parenthood has withdrawn from Title X. This sort of rule will seriously impact low-income women, because all Planned Parenthood centers will be barred from getting funding that helps provide affordable contraception, STI testing, and other services in addition to abortions. In Her Body, Our Laws: On the Front Lines of the Abortion War, from El Salvador to Oklahoma, Michelle Oberman has written about the damning hurtles and obstacles poor women face when dealing with an unplanned pregnancy or seeking reproductive health care. This excerpt shows what their reality looks like.

***

None of the laws Oklahoma passed were new. They simply passed every measure enacted by other pro-life states, along with the occasional model bill drafted by Americans United for Life.

The laws cover a broad range of issues. Some of the laws, such as a ban on sex-selective abortion, are plainly symbolic. Women seeking abortions in Oklahoma, as in other states, need not provide a reason for terminating their pregnancies. There is no way to enforce this provision.

Other laws have had a direct impact on the delivery of reproductive health care in the state. For example, one state law forbids the use of public funds or facilities for the provision of abortion services. This law bars doctors at the University of Oklahoma hospital—the state’s leading health-care center—from providing abortions for any reasons other than rape, incest, or medical necessity. The ban’s most dramatic consequences are seen in cases involving poor women, who learn, typically halfway through their pregnancies, that their fetuses have severe anomalies.

Consider what happens when a poor woman finds out that her fetus has trisomy 18, a condition that causes severe developmental delays due to an extra chromosome. As anomalies go, it’s fairly common—one in 2,500 pregnancies, and one in 6,000 births. Most of the time, the woman miscarries. For those who survive, life is precarious and profoundly limited. Only 10 percent will reach their first birthday. Those who live require full-time, institutionalized care.

Yet unless this pregnant woman has money to pay for a private abortion—which by mid-trimester, when these anomalies typically are discovered, will cost thousands, rather than hundreds, of dollars—she must continue her pregnancy.

~~~

At the national level, there’s a bitter dispute about whether restrictive abortion laws lead to lower rates of abortion. Since 2008, abortion rates have been declining all over the country. The leading pro-life economist says this decline proves the laws are working to deter women from having abortions. The pro-choice economists respond that he’s wrong, because abortion is declining throughout the country, including in states without pro-life laws.

For our purposes, though, the question is not necessarily how often or how much the laws deter abortion. What we want to know is how the law might tip the balance away from abortion.

Sociologist Sarah Roberts has undertaken a deep inquiry into how abortion restrictions affect women’s actual decisions. After Utah enacted a seventy-two-hour waiting period, one of the longest in the country, Roberts surveyed five hundred women who sought abortions in Utah. Her study found that the waiting period had an impact on women’s decisions, but in a surprisingly indirect manner:

The 72 hour waiting period and two-visit requirement did not prevent women from having abortions, but it did burden women with financial costs, logistical hassles, and extended periods of dwelling on decisions they had already made. The wait also led some women to worry that they would not be able to obtain abortion drugs, and pushed at least one beyond the clinic’s gestational limits for abortion.

Roberts found no evidence suggesting that the three-day waiting period led women to change their minds about abortion. But it is clear that the law had an impact on the woman contemplating abortion: it increased the costs of having an abortion.

Laws restricting abortion by banning insurance coverage or requiring waiting periods don’t target any particular set of pregnant women. The laws are neutral on their face. Yet poor women disproportionately feel the impact of these laws.

Take, for example, a hypothetical low-income single mother in Wisconsin. In recent years, that state enacted a law requiring a twenty-four-hour waiting period, and another law banning the use of telemedicine by abortion providers. The state has only three abortion providers, all in Madison or Milwaukee. The abortion procedure itself costs, on average, $593. For a single mother in rural Wisconsin, though, the actual costs are much higher. To the cost of the procedure, she must add the costs triggered by the waiting period and the distance she must travel. Gas, lodging, child care, and missed work add up, so that in the end, an abortion actually costs her $1,380.

In the end, abortion laws aim to nudge women away from abortion by raising the costs of getting one. And the women most likely to be nudged away from abortion because of the costs are those who are poor. Ironically, and to my mind most cruelly, these are the same women who were nudged toward abortion because of the high costs of motherhood.

Our policies on both ends of the scale leave poor mothers so constrained by their options that it is hard, in good faith, to see either motherhood or abortion as a “choice.”

About the Author 

Michelle Oberman is the Katharine and George Alexander Professor of Law at Santa Clara University School of Law and an internationally recognized scholar on the legal and ethical issues surrounding adolescence, pregnancy, and motherhood. She works at the intersection of public health and criminal law, focusing on domestic and international issues affecting women’s reproductive health. Her book When Mothers Kill (2008) won the Outstanding Book Award from the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences. She is also the author of Her Body, Our Laws: On the Front Lines of the Abortion War, from El Salvador to Oklahoma.

By Jacy Reese

Mmmmm. I can’t believe it’s not beef! Photo credit: Sarah Stierch.

It’s a savory, juicy way of saving the environment, and it tastes no different from meat! The plant-based Impossible Burger from Impossible Foods made its debut sizzle on the griddle at Burger King this month, and meat-lovers are eating it up. Om nom nom! Seriously though, the animal-free alternative to fast-food chomping is a significant step toward reducing the toll of agriculture on the planet to feed us beef. And at this rate, we may not need beef at all in the future. Just ask Jacy Reese. In The End of Animal Farming: How Scientists, Entrepreneurs, and Activists Are Building an Animal-Free Food System, he writes about taking his first bite of the wonder patty, and he says the same thing. Guess that means we can have our burger and eat it, too. Pass the ketchup, please!

***

When I met Oliver Zahn in 2015, he was director of the Center for Cosmological Physics at the University of California, Berkeley. Zahn was a fellow member of the local effective altruism community, a social movement and philosophy based on trying to maximize one’s positive impact on the world. In July 2016 I helped the German-born scientist and his family pack up some of their possessions as they prepared to move out of their California home. By this time, Zahn had transitioned to apply his expertise to a mission-driven startup, working as chief data scientist at Impossible Foods, one of the most famous animal-free food companies today. Instead of mapping out the stars to trace the origin of the universe, he was now mapping out plant ingredients to build an animal-free food system.

As the team helping with the move grew hungry, Zahn pan-fried burgers for us with some frozen plant-based beef that he had brought home from work. This was my first encounter with an Impossible Burger, what was already being referred to in media outlets as the food of the future. The pink, raw patties were visually unmistakable from animal-based ground beef. The first thing I noticed in the cooking process was the distinctive color change to the grayish- brown color of a typical beef burger. The Impossible Burger’s outside char was a little crispier than that of beef, and overall the patty looked a little dry, but I worried that I was just imagining differences because I expected the product to be imperfect in some way.

When it was my turn to try one, I opened my mouth wide and posed for a picture, then took my first bite. To be honest, I actually couldn’t distinguish what the patty tasted like apart from the bread, lettuce, and condiments packed together, so I took out the patty and bit into it alone. I was blown away by the complex, rich flavors and truly meaty texture. I’ve enjoyed plenty of ersatz burgers, because I lost my taste for meat after being vegetarian for so long, but this is the first one I tried that captured the unique culinary experience of animal flesh. The patty was a bit thin and dry, but overall, I couldn’t complain, and I knew that those issues could be fixed in future iterations. As a meat eater who was enjoying the Impossible Burger along with me said, “I wouldn’t be able to tell this apart from animal flesh.”

When people taste new animal-free foods, they often fail to appreciate the significant variation that exists within a single food category like a beef burger. How much and what kind of seasoning was mixed into the meat? Exactly how long was it cooked? What was the fat ratio of the ground beef? Was the cow grass-fed? I would guess that the difference between the Impossible Burger and the average beef burger was similar to that between any two beef burgers the average American eats in a year.

Zahn heavily qualified our tasting with his own view of the product’s issues, especially the imperfections that had been fixed in more recent versions. His critiques were precise, highlighting all the specific tastes and aftertastes of the burger, like how long the iron flavor persisted in your mouth. I wouldn’t have noticed any of those issues on my own, but surely Impossible’s taste-testers—some are vegetarian, but most aren’t—have much more refined palates.

The Impossible Burger is built from the ground up using isolated plant fats and proteins to fill the same culinary niche that animal flesh does. It aims to satisfy even the most voracious carnivore. That “meat hunger” has been described by chefs, food scientists, and hunter-gatherer tribes over the millennia. Some cultures differentiate meat and plant hunger, such as the Mekeo tribe of Papua New Guinea, which uses aiso etsiu, translating literally to “throat unsweet,” to refer to meat hunger, and ina etsiu, meaning “abdomen unsweet,” to indicate a desire for plant-based food. There’s no scientific evidence of a hunger specifically for animal meat driven entirely by biology, but the social forces behind it are very real—from “Beef: It’s what’s for dinner” ads to the historical association of meat with wealth and prosperity.

Impossible Foods and Hampton Creek represent a huge leap from VegeBurgers and Tofurky. In 2008, Tofurky’s founder, Seth Tibbot, explained his product’s popularity: “People are happy to have something that is easy to prepare and that can cook right alongside the turkey and is served alongside the turkey. Now everybody’s got something to eat. It’s kind of a peacemaker product I guess.” Contrast that with a 2017 statement by the founder of Impossible Foods: “My company’s goal is to wipe out the animal farming industry and take them down.”

This bold founder is Patrick “Pat” Brown, a former Stanford University biochemistry professor who left academia and committed himself to solving what he sees as the world’s biggest environmental problem. Like many vegans these days, he decided, “it’s easier to change people’s behavior than to change their minds.” Brown felt the food industry was decades behind the curve in biotechnology, leaving wide room for innovation. “The stuff we’re doing now that’s new to the food system was old news 40 years ago in the biotech world.”

His first challenge was to identify the compounds in animal flesh that construct its meaty flavor, so that he could replicate them in plant form. This is no easy task. You can find dozens of active chemicals from hexanal to 4-hydroxy-5-methyl-3(2H)-furanone in beef alone, and these vary widely by the breed of the slaughtered animal, where on their body the meat came from, and even the cooking method. Impossible narrowed its scope by focusing on a specific meat product, Safeway 80/20 ground beef.

The search revealed a key compound that Impossible claims is the holy grail of plant-based beef. It’s called “heme,” and it’s an organic compound with diverse biological function, most well known for its role in hemoglobin, the iron-containing compound that carries oxygen in our blood. Apparently heme is responsible for over 90 percent of beef’s flavor, and that gives Impossible a huge advantage in the vegetarian marketplace. Ground beef is around ten parts per million heme, while chicken flesh clocks in at only two. In fact, heme is so beefy that adding it to chicken leads taste testers to think it tastes like beef. On the other hand, a 2011 meta-analysis associated heme in red meat with colon cancer, which adds concerns about Impossible’s use of the molecule instead of other plant-based ingredients. The Impossible Burger also has much more saturated fat than other plant-based meats, which could be both a necessary taste factor and a health concern for some people.

Impossible originally found heme in soy root nodules, which are actually colored red from its presence. However, harvesting these and extracting the heme would leave an environmental footprint too big for Brown’s taste and would likely come with a prohibitive financial cost. The solution the company found was yeast. If you add heme-coding soy DNA to yeast, the yeast microorganisms dutifully produce the compound for easy harvest. This is the same technology that’s been used for decades to produce insulin for diabetics and rennet for cheese.

About the Author 

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

Slave-owner shooting a fugitive slave (1853). New York Public Library, “Five hundred thousand strokes for freedom; a series of anti-slavery tracts, of which half a million are now first issued by the friends of the Negro.” by Armistead, Wilson, 1819?-1868 and “Picture of slavery in the United States of America” by Bourne, George, 1780-1845.

This letter, published in the North Star on November 5, 1850, reprinted in several other papers, and read in Congress, was adopted at a gathering known as the Fugitive Slave Convention in Cazenovia, New York, on August 21–22, 1850. More than two thousand people—among them Frederick Douglass and some fifty fugitive slaves—attended the meeting to galvanize opposition to the Fugitive Slave Act, proposed federal legislation that mandated the capture and return of fugitive slaves, even those found in the North, where slavery was illegal. It also imposed stiff penalties for harboring a fugitive slave. The controversial measure was passed by Congress on September 18, 1850, and helped energize the abolitionist movement and the Underground Railroad.
—Pamela Newkirk, from Letters from Black America: Intimate Portraits of the African American Experience

***

The following passages come from “Fugitive Slaves to Enslaved Brethren” from Letters from Black America, edited by Pamela Newkirk.

Afflicted and Beloved Brothers:

The meeting which sends you this letter, is a meeting of runaway slaves. We thought it well, that they, who had once suffered, as you still suffer, that they, who had once drunk of that bitterest of all bittercups, which you are still compelled to drink of, should come together for the purpose of making a communication to you.

The chief object of this meeting is, to tell you what circumstances we find ourselves in—that, so you may be able to judge for yourselves, whether the prize we have obtained is worth the peril of the attempt to obtain it.

The heartless pirates, who compelled us to call them “master,” sought to persuade us, as such pirates seek to persuade you, that the condition of those, who escape from their clutches, is thereby made worse, instead of better. We confess, that we had our fears, that this might be so. Indeed, so great was our ignorance that we could not be sure that the abolitionists were not the friends, which our masters represented them to be. When they told us, that the abolitionists, could they lay hands upon us would buy and sell us, we could not certainly know, that they spoke falsely; and when they told us, that abolitionists are in the habit of skinning the black man for leather, and of regaling their cannibalism on his flesh, even such enormities seemed to us to be possible. But owing to the happy change in our circumstances, we are not as ignorant and credulous now, as we once were; and if we did not know it before, we know it now, that slaveholders are as great liars, as they are great tyrants.

The abolitionists act the part of friends and brothers to us; and our only complaint against them is, that there are so few of them. The abolitionists, on whom it is safe to rely, are, almost all of them, members of the American Anti-Slavery Society, or of the Liberty Party. There are other abolitionists: but most of them are grossly inconsistent; and, hence, not entirely trustworthy abolitionists. So inconsistent are they, as to vote for anti-abolitionists for civil rulers, and to acknowledge the obligation of laws, which they themselves interpret to be pro-slavery.

We get wages for our labor. We have schools for our children. We have opportunities to hear and to learn to read the Bible—that blessed book, which is all for freedom, notwithstanding the lying slaveholders who say it is all for slavery. Some of us take part in the election of civil rulers. Indeed, but for the priests and politicians, the influence of most of whom is against us, our condition would be every way eligible. The priests and churches of the North, are, with comparatively few exceptions, in league with the priests and churches of the South; and this, of itself, is sufficient to account for the fact, that a caste-religion and a Negro-pew are found at the North, as well as at the South. The politicians and political parties of the North are connected with the politicians and political parties of the South; and hence, the political arrangements and interests of the North, as well as the ecclesiastical arrangements and interests, are adverse to the colored population. But, we rejoice to know, that all this political and ecclesiastical power is on the wane. The callousness of American religion and American democracy has become glaring: and, every year, multitudes, once deluded by them, come to repudiate them. The credit of this repudiation is due, in a great measure, to the American Anti-Slavery Society, to the Liberty Party, and to anti-sectarian meetings, and conventions. The purest sect on earth is the rival of, instead of one with, Christianity. It deserves not to be trusted with a deep and honest and earnest reform. The temptations which beset the pathway of such a reform, are too mighty for it to resist. Instead of going forward for God, it will slant off for itself. Heaven grant, that, soon, not a shred of sectarianism, not a shred of the current religion, not a shred of the current politics of this land, may remain. Then will follow, aye, that will itself be, the triumph of Christianity: and, then, white men will love black men and gladly acknowledge that all men have equal rights. Come, blessed day—come quickly.

~~~

Numerous as are the escapes from slavery, they would be far more so, were you not embarrassed by your misinterpretations of the rights of property. You hesitate to take even the dullest of your master’s horses—whereas it is your duty to take the fleetest. Your consciences suggest doubts, whether in quitting your bondage, you are at liberty to put in your packs what you need of food and clothing. But were you better informed, you would not scruple to break your master’s locks, and take all their money.  You are taught to respect the rights of property. But, no such right belongs to the slaveholder. His right to property is but the robber-right. In every slaveholding community, the rights of property all center in them, whose coerced and unrequited toil has created the wealth in which their oppressors riot. Moreover, if your oppressors have rights of property, you, at least, are exempt from all obligations to respect them. For you are prisoners of war, in an enemy’s country—of a war, too, that is unrivalled for its injustice, cruelty, meanness—and therefore, by all the rules of war, you have the fullest liberty to plunder, burn, and kill, as you may have occasion to do to promote your escape.

We regret to be obliged to say to you, that it is not everyone of the Free States, which offers you an asylum. Even within the last year, fugitive slaves have been arrested in some of the Free States, and replunged into slavery. But, make your way to New York or New England, and you will be safe. It is true, that even in New York and New England, there are individuals, who would rejoice to see the poor flying slave cast back into the horrors of slavery. But, even these are restrained by public sentiment. It is questionable whether even Daniel Webster, or Moses Stuart, would give chase to a fugitive slave; and if they would not, who would?—for the one is chief-politician and the other chief-priest.

We do not forget the industrious efforts, which are now in making to get new facilities at the hands of Congress for re-enslaving those, who have escaped from slavery. But we can assure you, that as to the State of New York and the New England States, such efforts must prove fruitless. Against all such devilism—against all kidnappers—the colored people of these States will “stand for their life,” and, what is more, the white people of these States will not stand against them. A regenerated public sentiment has, forever, removed these States beyond the limits of the slaveholders’ hunting round. Defeat—disgrace—and, it maybe, death—will be their only reward for pursuing their prey into this abolitionized portion of our country.

About Pamela Newkirk 

Pamela Newkirk is the editor of A Love No Less: More Than Two Centuries of African American Love Letters and the author of Within the Veil: Black Journalists, White Media. An award-winning journalist and professor of journalism at New York University, she lives in New York City.

By Fred Pearce

Castle Bravo mushroom cloud, the first in a series of high-yield thermonuclear weapon design tests conducted by the United States at Bikini Atoll, Marshall Islands, March 1, 1954.

Insensitive much? Texas-based Manhattan Project Beer Company—yes, you read that correctly—named one of their cold ones “Bikini Atoll” after the nuclear testing site in the Marshall Islands. Marshall Islanders are rightfully incensed, as it trivializes the impacts of the high-level radiation they’re still living with to this day. The company said the name was meant to raise awareness of the implications of nuclear research. Needless to say, it seems like they knocked back too many before thinking this through, and their name isn’t helping.

America’s love affair with all things atomic goes further back. In Fallout: Disasters, Lies, and the Legacy of the Nuclear Age, environmental journalist Fred Pearce explains why nuclear technology looms like a kaiju in American culture. Call it a serious problematic fave. This excerpt is on the house.

***

America’s iconic nuclear landscape is the Nevada National Security Site, a fenced-off and largely deserted tract of sand, cactus, and Joshua trees that is bigger than Rhode Island. Once, when America was testing its atomic bombs here, it was the site of high jinks and revelry. Everything new and exciting in America was labeled “atomic,” and Nevada was the place to experience the cutting edge of the new age.

The flashes could be seen 350 miles away in San Francisco. But in the up-and-coming desert resort of Las Vegas, less than seventy miles from the test site, the bombs were a weekend tourist attraction. The Chamber of Commerce tagged Las Vegas “Atomic City, USA” and distributed calendars giving detonation times. Staying up all night drinking atomic cocktails and then driving down Highway 95 for a closer look at the dawn blasts was the height of fashion. Or you could see the mushroom clouds and feel the ground shake from your hotel room. They charged premium prices for suites facing the test site.

Even the stars felt the allure of the atomic. When a young Elvis Presley took the stage, Vegas billed him as “America’s only atomic-powered singer.” To add to the glitz, the city for several years crowned a Miss Atomic Bomb. Nuclear bombs, Elvis, and showgirls—what could be more Vegas? What could have been more emblematic of modern America?

There were four Miss Atomic Bombs. They reigned through the heyday of the desert tests, from 1952 to 1957. First was Candyce King, a dancer at Vegas’s Last Frontier Hotel “radiating loveliness instead of deadly atomic particles,” as one caption writer put it. Technically, she was Miss Atomic Blast, and there was no actual beauty contest. It was just a publicity shot of her wearing a mushroom cloud as a cap.

Next came Paula Harris, who sat on a parade float beside a mushroom cloud to depict the Oscar-nominated movie The Atomic City. Released in 1952, the film told the story of the kidnapping of a scientist’s son in the secret bomb-making town of Los Alamos. She was followed in early 1955 by Linda Lawson, a singer at the Sands Hotel. She was said to have been crowned “Miss Cue” in ironic honor of the much-delayed Operation Cue, a series of blasts that year that tested the impact of atomic bombs on buildings, bridges, and other urban infrastructure.

Finally, and most famously, in 1957 there was another showgirl from the Sands Hotel who went by the name of Lee Merlin. She was photographed in a swimsuit largely consisting of a cotton mushroom cloud. That was the picture that did it. Blond curls in the breeze, arms spread high, red lips—and a white mushroom cloud. Oddly, to this day nobody knows what happened to her or whether that was her real name. She disappeared almost as quickly as the cloud itself.

So sexy was the bomb that, just as women got named after bombs, so bombs got named after women. A blast in June 1957—during which seven hundred pigs were deliberately exposed to massive radiation burns and flying glass to see how they got on—was called Priscilla. That was reputedly the name of a favored prostitute from Pahrump, a small town near the testing ground where many site workers were billeted.

Kids were brought into the celebrations too. In 1954, St. George, a Mormon town in Utah downwind of the test that later suffered high cancer rates, crowned a young girl with a mushroom cloud on her skirt “Our Little A-Bomb.” But bizarrely, says Robert Friedrichs, a radiation safety technician at the time who later researched the phenomenon for the test site’s oral history project, the first Miss Atomic Bomb was not in Nevada at all. Not even in America. She was crowned after a beauty contest organized by the occupying US military forces in Nagasaki in 1946, just months after an American bomb had destroyed that city.3 Pictures published in a women’s journal of the day showed four finalists, all wearing kimonos rather than swimsuits, with a bunch of GIs standing behind them grinning.

~~~

After [World War II], bomb makers initially decided not to besmirch the American landscape with atomic tests. To conduct their continuing tests into ever larger bombs, they headed for the Marshall Islands in the Pacific Ocean, which had been recently liberated from Japan, and to one of its most remote atolls, Bikini Atoll. That’s how we got the bikini. The first two-piece swimsuit began as the “Atome,” excitedly marketed by French fashion designer Jacques Heim in early 1946 as “the world’s smallest bathing suit.” But after the first US atom test at Bikini that summer, a French automobile engineer named Louis Reard, who had just taken over his mother’s lingerie business, brought out his own even smaller two-piece, named the Bikini. The Vatican called it “sinful”—not the bomb test, but the swimsuit.

After the Soviet Union went nuclear in 1949, the pace of testing heated up, and the convenience of the Nevada desert brought the atomic bombardiers back home. From January 27, 1951, when the ABLE “device” was detonated at Frenchman Flat, a dried-up lake bed in the middle of the new Nevada Test Site, the early-morning skies were regularly illuminated by the tests, which often received live national TV coverage.

That’s when the whole nation became enthralled by the atomic spectacle. Everything from clocks to lamps to corporate logos soon adopted “atomic” designs, such as a mushrooms cloud or the nucleus of an atom circled by electrons. High school football teams were renamed the Atoms. (One school team near the Hanford plutonium complex still has a mushroom cloud as its symbol.) The thrall was spiced with fear. This was the McCarthy era, when public hearings chaired by Senator Joe McCarthy into suspected Communist infiltration of the government led to a period of political paranoia. But there were real spies, too, such as the recently imprisoned Fuchs. And the fear of an all-out nuclear war between America and the Soviets led to scarily methodical preparations.

About the Author 

Fred Pearce has reported on environmental, science, and development issues from eighty-five countries over the past twenty years. Environment consultant at New Scientist from 1992 to 2018, he also writes regularly for the Guardian newspaper and Yale University’s prestigious e360 website. His many books include The New Wild, When the Rivers Run Dry, With Speed and Violence, Confessions of an Eco-Sinner, The Coming Population Crash, and The Land Grabbers.

19th Century woodcut depiction of the Southampton Insurrection

Nat Turner’s confession provides a chilling example of Christian inspiration that sets it apart from any slave narrative recorded. The leader of the largest and most significant slave revolt in American history, Turner was brought up by his mother, a slave who had been kidnapped from Africa, to believe that great things were expected from him. As a child he learned to read, and from the teachings of the Bible grew up associating religion with freedom. Turner grew up to become a charismatic preacher whose religious visions even led some blacks to consider him a prophet. In fact, one such vision—a solar eclipse that Turner took to be a sign from God—inspired his final and most historic act.

On the night of August 22, 1831, Turner, in an ill-fated attempt to free his people, led four accomplices on a three-day rampage through Southampton, Virginia. Going from house to house, the fugitives murdered every white person—regardless of sex or age—whom they encountered. Their destination was the arsenal in Jerusalem, Virginia, and along the way Turner’s army swelled to as many as seventy slave rebels. However, a militia intercepted the army and killed more than one hundred blacks. Turner escaped but was apprehended weeks later.

Turner’s narrative, dictated to his attorney as a confession made shortly before his execution in November 1831 , demonstrates how his fanatical devotion to God led to a “divinely inspired” killing spree that left fifty-seven whites dead. But, just as significantly, Turner’s rebellion attests to the extreme lengths slaves were prepared to go to in order to achieve their freedom by any means necessary.
—Devon W. Carbado and Donald Weise, The Long Walk to Freedom: Runaway Slave Narratives

***

The following passages come from The Confessions of Nat Turner, excerpted in The Long Walk to Freedom.

CONFESSION

By this time, having arrived to man’s estate, and hearing the scriptures commented on at meetings, I was struck with that particular passage which says : “Seek ye the kingdom of Heaven and all things shall be added unto you.” I reflected much on this passage, and prayed daily for light on this subject—As I was praying one day at my plough, the spirit spoke to me, saying “Seek ye the kingdom of Heaven and all things shall be added unto you.”

Question—what do you mean by the Spirit. Ans. The Spirit that spoke to the prophets in former days—and I was greatly astonished, and for two years prayed continually, whenever my duty would permit—and then again I had the same revelation, which fully confirmed me in the impression that I was ordained for some great purpose in the hands of the Almighty. Several years rolled round, in which many events occurred to strengthen me in this my belief. At this time I reverted in my mind to the remarks made of me in my childhood, and the things that had been shewn me—and as it had been said of me in my childhood by those by whom I had been taught to pray, both white and black, and in whom I had the greatest confidence, that I had too much sense to be raised, and if I was, I would never be of any use to any one as a slave. Now finding I had arrived to man’s estate, and was a slave, and these revelations being made known to me, I began to direct my attention to this great object, to fulfil the purpose for which, by this time, I felt assured I was intended. Knowing the influence I had obtained over the minds of my fellow servants, (not by the means of conjuring and such like tricks—for to them I always spoke of such things with contempt) but by the communion of the Spirit whose revelations I often communicated to them, and they believed and said my wisdom came from God. I now began to prepare them for my purpose, by telling them something was about to happen that would terminate in fulfilling the great promise that had been made to me—About this time I was placed under an overseer, from whom I ran away—and after remaining in the woods thirty days, I returned, to the astonishment of the negroes on the plantation, who thought I had made my escape to some other part of the country, as my father had done before. But the reason of my return was, that the Spirit appeared to me and said I had my wishes directed to the things of this world, and not to the kingdom of Heaven, and that I should return to the service of my earthly master—“For he who knoweth his Master’s will, and doeth it not, shall be beaten with many stripes, and thus, have I chastened you.”

~~~

Ques. Do you not find yourself mistaken now? Ans. Was not Christ crucified. And by signs in the heavens that it would make known to me when I should commence the great work—and until the first sign appeared, I should conceal it from the knowledge of men—And on the appearance of the sign, (the eclipse of the sun last February) I should arise and prepare myself, and slay my enemies with their own weapons. And immediately on the sign appearing in the heavens, the seal was removed from my lips, and I communicated the great work laid out for me to do, to four in whom I had the greatest confidence, (Henry, Hark, Nelson, and Sam)—It was intended by us to have begun the work of death on the 4th July last— Many were the plans formed and rejected by us, and it affected my mind to such a degree, that I fell sick, and the time passed without our coming to any determination how to commence—Still forming new schemes and rejecting them, when the sign appeared again, which determined me not to wait longer.

Since the commencement of 1830, I had been living with Mr. Joseph Travis, who was to me a kind master, and placed the greatest confidence in me; in fact, I had no cause to complain of his treatment to me. On Saturday evening, the 20th of August, it was agreed between Henry, Hark and myself, to prepare a dinner the next day for the men we expected, and then to concert a plan, as we had not yet determined on any. Hark, on the following morning, brought a pig, and Henry brandy, and being joined by Sam, Nelson, Will and Jack, they prepared in the woods a dinner, where, about three o’clock, I joined them.

Q. Why were you so backward in joining them.

A. The same reason that had caused me not to mix with them for years before.

I saluted them on coming up, and asked Will how came he there, he answered, his life was worth no more than others, and his liberty as dear to him. I asked him if he thought to obtain it? He said he would, or lose his life. This was enough to put him in full confidence. Jack, I knew, was only a tool in the hands of Hark, it was quickly agreed we should commence at home (Mr. J. Travis’) on that night, and until we had armed and equipped ourselves, and gathered sufficient force, neither age nor sex was to be spared, (which was invariably adhered to.) We remained at the feast until about two hours in the night, when we went to the house and found Austin; they all went to the cider press and drank, except myself. On returning to the house, Hark went to the door with an axe, for the purpose of breaking it open, as we knew we were strong enough to murder the family, if they were awaked by the noise; but reflecting that it might create an alarm in the neighborhood, we determined to enter the house secretly, and murder them whilst sleeping. Hark got a ladder and set it against the chimney, on which I ascended, and hoisting a window, entered and came down stairs, unbarred the door, and removed the guns from their places. It was then observed that I must spill the first blood. On which, armed with a hatchet, and accompanied by Will, I entered my master’s chamber, it being dark, I could not give a death blow, the hatchet glanced from his head, he sprang from the bed and called his wife, it was his last word, Will laid him dead, with a blow of his axe, and Mrs. Travis shared the same fate, as she lay in bed. The murder of this family, five in number, was the work of a moment, not one of them awoke; there was a little infant sleeping in a cradle, that was forgotten, until we had left the house and gone some distance, when Henry and Will returned and killed it; we got here, four guns that would shoot, and several old muskets, with a pound or two of powder. We remained some time at the barn, where we paraded; I formed them in a line as soldiers, and after carrying them through all the manoeuvres I was master of, marched them off to Mr. Salathul Francis,’ about six hundred yards distant. Sam and Will went to the door and knocked. Mr. Francis asked who was there, Sam replied, it was him, and he had a letter for him, on which he got up and came to the door, they immediately seized him, and dragging him out a little from the door, he was dispatched by repeated blows on the head; there was no other white person in the family. We started from there for Mrs. Reese’s, maintaining the most perfect silence on our march, where finding the door unlocked, we entered, and murdered Mrs. Reese in her bed, while sleeping; her son awoke, but it was only to sleep the sleep of death, he had only time to say who is that, and he was no more. From Mrs. Reese’s we went to Mrs. Turner’s, a mile distant, which we reached about sunrise, on Monday morning.

About the Editors 

Devon W. Carbado, is professor of law and African American studies at the University of California at Los Angeles and the coeditor of several books, including Acting White? Rethinking Race in "Post-Racial" America (with Mitu Gulati). 

Donald Weise is an independent scholar in African American history and coeditor of The Huey Newton Reader (with David Hilliard). He lives in New York.

Where our societal trauma began. Slave auction block at Green Hill Plantation, Pannill family plantation, Long Island vicinity, Campbell County, Virginia.

It’s a clear-cut case of PTSD: Post-Traumatic Societal Disorder. The centuries-long trauma wrought by our nation’s history of slavery requires intensive therapy, because everybody is affected. Even our author, Daina Berry, said, “We are still living in the aftermath of slavery. It’s the stain on our flag and the sin of our country. Once we recognize this, face it, study it, and acknowledge the impact it has on all Americans, then we will be in a position to determine how we can move forward.” One of the ways to come to terms with it and move forward is to take in the full history, unabridged—free of sugar-coating, mythmaking, and claims of “American exceptionalism.” (What’s “exceptional” is the amount of damage done.) What better occasion than the 400th anniversary of this inhumane industry? Working back to 1619 and before, here’s a list of titles from our catalog to get us on the path to recovery . . . and hopefully, reparations.

“Bailey is not afraid to ask difficult questions . . . [She] expands and troubles our understanding of the African diaspora. In this fine and accessible study of the slave trade, Bailey places African voices of this era at the center of the writing of history.”
—Atlanta Journal Constitution

“A brilliant resurrection of the forgotten people who gave their lives to build our country. Rigorously researched and powerfully told, this book tallies the human price paid for the nation we now live in and restores these unrecognized Americans—their hopes, loves, and disregarded dreams—to their rightful place in history. Searing, revelatory, and vital to understanding our nation’s inequities.”
—Isabel Wilkerson, author of The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration

“A powerful and important book that charts the rich and dynamic history of Black women in the United States. It shows how these courageous women challenged racial and gender oppression and boldly asserted their authority and visions of freedom even in the face of resistance. This book is required reading for anyone interested in social justice.”
—Keisha N. Blain, author of Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle for Freedom 

“In Kindred, Octavia Butler creates a road for the impossible and a balm for the unbearable. It is everything the literature of science fiction can be.”
—Walter Mosley

“This book is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand the historical reality of the slave experiences. Carbado and Weise have diligently selected narratives that will challenge readers’ presumptions and cut against the mythology that slaves were passive, that mostly men (and not women) ran away, that slaves typically ran North (not South), and that gender and racial passing were rare occurrences. A landmark achievement, The Long Walk to Freedom allows fugitive slaves to speak for themselves—on their own terms and in their own voices.”
—Dr. Mary Frances Berry, author of History Teaches Us to Resist: How Progressive Movements Have Succeeded in Challenging Times 

“Dominique’s poems paint brutal truths. Beautiful truths. They seek to uncover a history hidden under the skin. In an era in which such truths are in danger of being forgotten, Dominique’s voice is an essential. Her stories are an unearthing, the soil that connects us to our past, a lens through which, if we look close enough, we may see something that directs us to a kinder future.”
—Staceyann Chin, author of The Other Side of Paradise 

“DeWolf’s intimate confrontation with white America’s ‘unearned privilege’ sears the conscience.”
—Kirkus Reviews 

“What a courageous journey-communicated in an engaging, readable style with candor, humor, and deep feeling. This book shed light on the thoughts, questions, and feelings I have about race, society, culture, and historical, generational, and structurally induced trauma—and the human ability to transcend. In reading it, I realized there are questions I’m still afraid to ask about race, things I’m afraid to say, and yet I realized anew the power of acknowledgment, mercy, justice, and conflict transformation. I’m grateful to DeWolf and Morgan for not just taking the journey but for sharing their story with us.”
—Carolyn Yoder, founding director of STAR: Strategies for Trauma Awareness & Resilience 

“An African American and Latinx History of the United States is a gift. Paul Ortiz wields the engaging power of a social historian to bring vividly to life so many Black and Brown fighters for human rights in the Americas. Ambitious, original, and enlightening, Ortiz weaves together the seemingly separate strivings of Latinx and Black peoples into a beautiful tapestry of struggle.”
—Ibram X. Kendi, National Book Award–winning author of Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America 

“This book shines because of Ms. Cassandra Pybus’s stellar research. Her description of the upheaval surrounding the American Revolution is sound . . . Cassandra Pybus’s book adds much needed historical documentation to a group of people who have largely been forgotten by history. Every school and public library should own a copy of this book.”
—Christina Maria Beaird (PLA), Plainfield Public Library District, Plainfield, IL

“A modern biography of the radical abolitionist Benjamin Lay has long been overdue. With the sure hand of an eminent historian of the disfranchised, Marcus Rediker has brought to life the wide-ranging activism of this extraordinary Quaker, vegetarian dwarf in a richly crafted book. In fully recovering Lay’s revolutionary abolitionist vision, Rediker reveals its ongoing significance for our world.”
—Manisha Sinha, author of The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition 

“A fascinating book . . . that brings to life the historical soundscape of 18th- and 19th-century African Americans at work, play, rest, and prayer . . . This remarkable achievement demands a place in every collection on African American and US history and folklife.”
—Library Journal

Eyre Crowes’s oil painting “Slaves Waiting for Sale – Richmond, Virginia,” 1861.

1619, a year to go down in infamy like 1492. 400 years ago this month, a ship reached a coastal port in the British colony of Virginia, carrying more than twenty enslaved Africans. Stolen from their homes, these men and women were sold to the colonists in what would become known as the United States. The Atlantic Slave trade would feed this vicious cycle of reducing Africans to commodities through the brutal bondage of forced labor and sexual coercion, the repercussions of which we live with centuries later. How do we as a country reckon with and heal from this history? We asked some of our authors to reflect on this and share their remarks below.

***

“Now is the time, 400 years after the beginnings of slavery in what became our nation, to acknowledge the origins of the perpetuation of white racism. What better time than the ascendancy of another white supremacist, president Donald Trump, to move seriously to become an anti-racist nation.”
—Mary Frances Berry, History Teaches Us to Resist: How Progressive Movements Have Succeeded in Challenging Times

“Early generations of white property-owning men told stories of black inferiority to justify slavery. Later generations cast black men as sexual predators to justify Jim Crow and residential segregation. Politicians, most recently Donald Trump, told myths about the ghetto America created and still maintains. Inferior, nigger, rapist, thug. Such rhetoric was critical to maintaining supremacist institutions, and each time this nation seemed to dismantle a peculiar, black-subordinating institution, it constructed a new one. Four hundred years on, the past is not past.”
—Sheryll Cashin, Loving: Interracial Intimacy in America and the Threat to White Supremacy

“‘Now more than ever’ is such a cliché, and yet . . . Now more than ever, it is critical we know and understand our history, the legacies and aftermaths of 400 years of slavery and its present-day consequences. Now more than ever, it is critical that we understand our power to effect change, beginning with ourselves and extending to our children, grandchildren, friends, colleagues, communities and our nation. Now more than ever, it is time (way past time) for racial healing.”
—Thomas Norman DeWolf, Inheriting the Trade: A Northern Family Confronts Its Legacy as the Largest Slave-Trading Dynasty in US History and Gather at the Table: The Healing Journey of a Daughter of Slavery and a Son of the Slave Trade

“By 1619, when enslaved Africans were sold to English colonizers in Jamestown, Virginia, the 15,000 Indigenous Powhatan Confederacy had been decimated, survivors forced to the margins of the homeland in a decade of genocidal attacks on their villages and farm lands, their fields of corn, beans, and squash turned into commercial agriculture—plantations of tobacco to be worked by the enslaved. The original crimes against humanity—genocide and slavery—were thereby baked into the founding of what would become the United States.”
—Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States

“Last week, images taken at the farm of the current GOP leader of the Senate, Mitch McConnell, featured a group of white boys smiling as they surrounded, choked, and groped a cardboard cut-out of one of the newest congressional members elected to the House of Representatives—a woman of color, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez. The photograph captures everything that is wrong with America and its current administration, as it spotlights the national legacy of enslavement, white supremacy, racist violence, and misogyny. The GOP response, which attempted to depict the boys as victims once citizens rebuked their conduct, summons the willful, self-excusing denial enslavers relied upon to dismiss the humanity of Africans. 400 years later, that kind of reasoning jeopardizes US democracy; yet that we have unabashedly diverse, progressive women in Congress contains answers for the country’s way forward past bigotry, violence, and political corruption.”
—Kali N. Gross, A Black Women’s History of the United States

“More than a dozen of my ancestors were enslaved. The youngest was sold away from her mother at the age of nine. As I contemplate the 400th anniversary of slavery in North America, I am abhorred. Millions of descendants are permanently scarred by this historical harm and the racism it inflamed. America has a race wound that will never be healed until contemporary society comes to terms with the past. As we endure the latest politically-driven assaults on our moral values, we must resist descent into an abyss of hate. I am hopeful that the commemoration of the signal moment when African people were first sold into bondage at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619 will inspire a wake-up call that leads toward a society in which ALL people are treated equally and with respect. As Alice Walker said, ‘Healing begins where the wound was made.’”
—Sharon Leslie Morgan, Gather at the Table: The Healing Journey of a Daughter of Slavery and a Son of the Slave Trade

“The twenty-plus enslaved Africans who arrived in Virginia aboard the White Lion in 1619 were the first victims of an enduring national nightmare. The 400th anniversary of that momentous arrival provides an excellent opportunity for soul-searching about the meaning and legacy of slavery in America’s past. Slave ships are ghost ships that haunt us still. It is high time to repair the deep and violent damage they have done, and continue to do, to all generations of Americans, past and present.”
—Marcus Rediker, The Slave Ship: A Human History

In these times when readers are responding to our books “more than ever,” when our authors—including Richard Blanco, Imani Perry, Robin DiAngelo, Dina Gilio-Whitaker, and Bettina Love—are appearing in the media, their ideas going viral on social media, their voices being heard on so many platforms, we thought it might be good to take a break to focus on some of the staff who work hard to find, shape, edit, produce, and promote those works. Our blog series “Beacon Behind the Books” introduces to you a member of our staff and gives you a behind-the-scenes look, department by department, at what goes on at our office. And not only our staff, but our interns, too!

This week, we introduce you to our publicity intern, Lillie Ahearn! 

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

It’s probably no surprise to hear that I, like much of the staff at Beacon, have always been a book nerd. My mom loves to embarrass me by recalling all the times she would check on me during childhood playdates, only to find me steadfastly ignoring my friends in favor of getting in one more chapter. It wasn’t until I landed a job at a local indie bookstore when I was seventeen that I became interested in the work that goes into transforming a person’s idea into a book on a shelf (shout-out to An Unlikely Story for continuing to indulge my coffee and book addictions after all these years!). My first experience with the publishing industry was an internship in the sales department at Candlewick Press for a semester, and I enjoyed their small size and focus on children’s literature. I poked around online looking for a similar internship this summer. Though I hadn’t considered working with a nonfiction publisher, Beacon’s commitment to truth and equality really stood out to me. The work they do here is so important, now more than ever, and I’m lucky to be a part of it!

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

I’m pursing a double major in Spanish Literature and Classical Studies, so literature is kind of my jam. Working with an ancient Greek drama and a contemporary nonfiction book might sound like two very different tasks, but they require a similar attention to detail and ability to process large amounts of text efficiently. I also write a lot of papers, so my command of language has improved a lot since entering college—an invaluable skill in a writing-heavy position.

This isn’t specific to publishing, but organization and time management are important in any workplace. I used to be the kind of person that could only be productive with a deadline looming over me, but one instance of waking up on a Saturday morning with two papers, a presentation, and a hand-coded replica of the game 2048 all due on Monday was enough to change my ways. I learned the hard way that taking a few minutes to plan things out never hurts.

In an alternate universe, what career would you have?

I think if I had any numerical aptitude at all, I would definitely have a career in planetary science. I can’t help but be enticed by the countless discoveries waiting to be made in the vast expanse of our universe. Unfortunately, my dismal performance in physics and calculus in high school was enough to put that career path out of my mind, so now I mostly stick to reading articles from Science magazine and the occasional visit to a planetarium.

What are you reading right now?

I’m often juggling a few different reads, since I can never commit to just one genre at a time. Right now, I’m halfway through volume two of Alice Oseman’s adorable graphic novel Heartstopper. It takes me back to my first middle-school crush in the best way. I also started Jonathan Harris’ The Lost World of Byzantium a few days ago. I took a class on Byzantine history last fall with an amazing professor and have been itching to read more about the Byzantines ever since. Lastly, I’m currently on my second read of The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller, since I can’t resist her gorgeous prose.

Hobbies outside of work?

I’m on the fencing team at my university, so despite the treadmill being my mortal enemy, I spend a fair amount of time practicing or working out. Aside from that, I’m a huge video game fan and I occasionally try my hand at cooking. Whether or not I’m successful is neither here nor there.

By Helene Atwan

Like so many thousands, hundreds of thousands of others, I was deeply saddened by the news of Toni Morrison’s death. Like others, I had been moved and changed by reading her work over many years. And like hundreds of others, I was fortunate to have worked with her oh so briefly over the years, once as a publicist at Knopf, when Song of Solomon was coming out. She still worked at Random House as an editor in those days and would take the elevator up to visit us at Knopf. The power and mastery of the novel was unlike anything I’d worked on before (and remember, I was working at Knopf, with many masterful writers). I was, I admit, awed by her. But at that time, she had just published a second novel by Gayl Jones (Eva’s Man, which followed Corregidora), and so her skills as an editor and mentor were also on display. Many years later I would become Gayl’s editor and thus all the more aware of how acute Toni’s eye was. The last time I saw Toni was at a tribute for Nikki Giovanni, and I was especially happy to be in company with both of them at that great occasion, and with my daughter, who was, as you can imagine, thrilled to meet these legendary writers. Toni was walking, but with difficulty, and she asked my daughter, Emily, to serve as her crutch. I know she will feel Toni leaning on her shoulder for all the years to come, as we all have been pushed and guided by her will and her work. When my friend Anita Hill reached out to me to add a tribute to the growing swell, she asked me to speak to the literary loss: it’s both incalculable, and it’s illusionary. Her work stands, and though we could have asked for more books, we have a deep trove that will deeply influence writers from all races and ethnicities, all along the gender spectrum, and over the centuries to come. I could go on, but I defer to the many who knew her better, understood her work more intimately, and who will miss her more keenly.

About the Author 

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

By Helene Atwan

Like most of us living in the US, I was sickened by this weekend’s news of shootings in El Paso and Dayton. Coming into work, feeling so stricken by these events, I was heartened by the fact that I could turn to a group of colleagues and immediately begin talking about what kind of resources we could offer in the wake of these senseless tragedies. I feel, as I often do, heartened to be working in an environment where it is our job to try to create these resources.

And as a nonprofit, we can make some of these resources available for free, or at least donate our profits to other nonprofits working on these issues more directly, as is the case with 2 of our books that address gun violence: “Guns Don’t Kill People, People Kill People”: And Others Myths About Guns and Gun Control, by Dennis A. Henigan, and the landmark poetry anthology, Bullets into Bells: Poets & Citizens Respond to Gun Violence, coedited by Brian Clements, Alexandra Teague, and Dean Rader. Both books are now available for free wherever eBooks are sold.

We also have resources for better understanding the rhetoric of hate, white supremacist groups that continue to spread hatred, several books about the contributions of immigrants to our society, and the struggles immigrants endure today. Please see the books and blog posts below. And join us not merely in empathy, but in pressing for action.

Dismantling White Supremacy and Hate

• Fourteen Steps Forward Together for America’s Third Reconstruction, Rev. Dr. William J. Barber with Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove’s Beacon Broadside blog post, outlines fourteen steps to mobilize in the streets, at the polls, and in the courtroom to build a social justice movement
• The Alt-Right Curriculum, Linda K. Wertheimer’s Atlantic piece, highlights teachers who are facilitating conversations with students about white nationalism
• American Horror Story: 5 Myths About Hate and Violence in America, Kay Whitlock and Michael Bronski’s Beacon Broadside blog post, debunks five common myths and misconceptions about “hate violence” and explains the machinations of institutionalized violence
• White people assume niceness is the answer to racial inequality. It’s not, Robin DiAngelo’s op-ed in the Guardian, urges white people to move away from niceness to active antiracist action for racial equality
• It’s Come to This: White Nationalism Is Inciting Mass Murder in America, Alexandra Minna Stern’s Newsweek op-ed, explains the white nationalist ideology behind the El Paso, TX, shooting tragedy
• Why race science is on the rise again, Angela Saini’s essay in the Guardian, outlines how the false notions of race science has returned with the resurgence of the far right
• What’s in a Frame?: The Perils of “Domestic Terrorism”, Kay Whitlock and Michael Bronski’s Beacon Broadside blog post, argues that framing hate crimes as domestic terrorism only intensifies policing and surveillance rather than dismantle structurally violent polieces and practices
• Books: Gather at the Table, Considering Hate, The Radical King, White Fragility, Superior, Proud Boys and the White Ethnostate
• More resources

About the Author 

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

Toni Morrison speaking at “A Tribute to Chinua Achebe - 50 Years Anniversary of ‘Things Fall Apart.’” The Town Hall, New York City, February 26th, 2008. Photo credit: Angela Radulescu

Another legend gone. And more than a legend, she was a force! Novelist, editor, and professor Toni Morrison died on August 5 at age eight-eight and she was last surviving American Nobel laureate. Pick any book from her bibliography, and you will be mesmerized by her command of prose, her power to conjure up the ambience and lived-in feeling of Black communities and their heroines and heroes to the finest, vibrant detail. She was Black love, Black resilience, and Black brilliance personified. There won’t be another writer like her.

She meant a lot to our authors. Poet Sonia Sanchez was interviewed in the latest documentary Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am and spoke reverently about her and her work. If you haven’t seen the documentary yet, you’re missing out! Sanchez also wrote fifteen haiku in honor of Morrison in her collection Morning Haiku. Here are a few of them:

3.
in the beginning
there wuz we and they and others
too mournful to be named;

4.
or brought before elders
even held in contempt. they were
so young in their slaughterings;

5.
in the beginning
when memory was sound. there was
bonesmell. bloodtear. whisperscream;

6.
and we arrived
carrying flesh and disguise
expecting nothing;

For award-winning pop music critic and culture journalist Rashod Ollison, Morrison was an incredible source of inspiration. “Toni Morrison’s work gave me permission to write,” he said in his Q&A about his memoir Soul Serenade: Rhythm, Blues, and Coming of Age Through Vinyl. “She assumed the centrality of being Black and steeped the narrative in all these cultural nuances that were very familiar to me, which enriched the humanity of the characters. I knew I wanted to write like that.” Ollison’s first introduction to her work was in a class for advanced students when he was middle school. In his memoir, he wrote about how life-changing reading The Bluest Eye was.

When I was moved to advance classes, I was assigned a Talented and Gifted coordinator, Mrs. Baugh, whose trailer we reported to twice a day—first thing in the morning and later in the afternoon. In the sparsely decorated room, we worked on artsy projects and assignments from other classes, and we talked about current events, like the Gulf War, to which I paid no attention

Toward the end of class on the Friday before winter break, she called me to her desk and explained that she was taking a course in African American literature.

“I have a few books here I think you’d like, Rashod.”

There on her desk was a small stack of paperbacks: a slim short-story collection by Alice Walker, The Women of Brewster Place by Gloria Naylor, and a dog-eared copy of The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison.

“It’s not homework,” she said, smiling. “But I think you’d like these books.”

During the time off I devoured all three, but The Bluest Eye left the deepest impression. The story of Pecola Breedlove, a girl nobody validated and who ultimately surrendered to insanity because of a woeful lack of affirming love, wasn’t my story. But I was able to engage it—the pain of isolation, of loneliness, of longing for a parent to shine a light your way.

Pecola had no one, and I often felt that I had no one, but music was always a harbor. And there was music in the way Morrison wrote—a prose suffused with a blues impulse, beautiful lines weaving an ugly tale. The oppressive funkiness of the people in the novel’s Ohio city reminded me of Happy Street and all the sad-eyed neighbors who streamed in and out of Mama Teacake’s. What she sold helped them get from day to day—a fifth of brown liquor in which to down their sorrows and fried pork skins drenched with her homemade barbecue sauce, among the many salty and fatty foods that pacified them.

After reading The Bluest Eye, I knew what I was going to do one day: tell stories. In the meantime, I continued writing poems and reciting them in front of the dignified congregation at Emmanuel Baptist.

And tell stories he did. Ollison dedicated his life to journalism up until his died from non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma last year at forty-one.

Some of our authors took to Twitter to pay their respects.

Rest in power, Toni Morrison. We’ll close our tribute with a few more haikus from Sonia Sanchez.

13.
in the beginning
there was a conspiracy of blue eyes
to iron eyes;

14.
new memory falling into death
O will we ever know
what is no more with us;

15.
O will weselves ever
convalesce as we ascend into wave after
wave of bloodmilk?

In these times when readers are responding to our books “more than ever,” when our authors—including Richard Blanco, Imani Perry, Robin DiAngelo, Dina Gilio-Whitaker, and Bettina Love—are appearing in the media, their ideas going viral on social media, their voices being heard on so many platforms, we thought it might be good to take a break to focus on some of the staff who work hard to find, shape, edit, produce, and promote those works. Our blog series “Beacon Behind the Books” introduces to you a member of our staff and gives you a behind-the-scenes look, department by department, at what goes on at our office. And not only our staff, but our interns, too!

This week, we introduce you to our marketing intern, Noelle Tardiff! 

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

I feel like so many people I’ve spoken to who work in publishing have always known they wanted to be a part of this industry, but that’s definitely not the case for me! When I was in high school, I thought I wanted to pursue some sort of health science career, but then I had the classic “I don’t know what I want to do with my life” freak-out just before it was time to apply to schools. My mom encouraged me to think about the subjects I truly enjoyed studying, and those were always my English and Latin classes. I ended up connecting with a family friend who works in publishing, and she was the person who showed me how much you really can do with an English/Liberal Arts degree!

In terms of how I found my way to Beacon, I had a lot of help from my boss (also my amazing publishing mentor) from another internship. I was searching for summer internships, and she knew that Beacon would be a great fit for me because of its meaningful mission and incredible staff!

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

Mona Eltahawy’s The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls is absolutely amazing. It was the first book I got to work with this summer, and I ended up reading the whole thing in about a day! Women are so often told that we shouldn’t be angry, ambitious, profane, violent, attention-seeking, lustful, or powerful, but that’s not true at all. Owning those qualities and defying the patriarchy is so important, and you can’t help but to want to do so after reading this book.

What helps you focus when you’re at work?

I have a playlist I like to listen to when I’m working on designs or more creative projects. I get super distracted if I listen to music while I’m reading or writing, though. I’ve been a dancer my entire life, so sometimes I’ll find myself making up dances to music in my head rather than actually doing what I’m supposed to be doing.

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

So much of what I do in school has been useful to me during my internship. I’ve taken book publishing classes that focus on designing covers and writing marketing plans, so getting to see all of that happen with real books is so fun! I’ve even found that a lot of my extracurricular work has been helpful. I’m the marketing director for my dance company, so knowing how to use Photoshop and InDesign was great. I’m able to get a little more creative with my work than I would be if I had to learn those programs now.

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

Something that has been helpful to me is having a mentor in the field. It’s great to have someone to go to for advice about internships, jobs, and school! Not being afraid to ask about opportunities has been an important part of my experience as well. I got my first internship in publishing after my freshman year of college just by sending an email! If I hadn’t done that, I don’t think I would have learned as much as I have about the aspects of publishing that I like, dislike, and would consider pursuing as a career.

In an alternate universe, what career would you have?

I always say that in an alternate universe, I would be an interior designer. I’ve always been pretty creative and visual, and walking through the pillow section of HomeGoods is just the best.

Hobbies outside of work?

My favorite hobby outside of work is dancing! I’ve been a dancer since I was two and have studied styles like tap, jazz, ballet, modern, pointe, and lyrical. About two years ago, I started choreographing for my school’s dance company, and that’s been an exciting new challenge for me. I’m very lucky that I got to continue dancing throughout college.

Favorite podcast?

I have two right now: Getting Curious with Jonathan Van Ness and Why Won’t You Date Me? with Nicole Byer. Getting Curious is fun for a lot for a lot of reasons, but I love it because it dissects complicated political, cultural, and historical topics in a way that’s funny and intriguing. Why Won’t You Date Me? is hilarious, and I feel like most people can relate to the crazy dating stories Nicole tells.

Favorite food?

I found my favorite food this year when I went to New Orleans for Mardi Gras. It was at a breakfast restaurant called The Ruby Slipper and it was so good that my friends and I got up early the day of our flight so that we could eat there one more time. My friend didn’t want to leave her leftovers behind, so she somehow got them through airport security and ate them on the flight home. I would go back to New Orleans just for the food.

On a normal day, though, anything involving buffalo chicken is my favorite.

Favorite thing about Boston?

My favorite part about Boston is that it has a little bit of everything. I’m from New Hampshire, so I appreciate that I’m still not far from the beach and the mountains, and we still get to experience all four seasons (except when New England decides to skip over spring). I also love that it’s small enough to walk around so that I don’t always have to take the T.

By Lori L. Tharps

This essay appeared originally on My American MeltingPot.

I’m coming at you live and in-person from the sunny south of Spain. It is absolutely gorgeous here—clear blue skies, radiant sun, palm trees, flowers flaunting every color from the deepest purple to the sharpest pinks. We’re currently staying with el esposo’s [Tharps’ husband] family and they live in a beautiful home that is within walking distance of the beach, plus they have a swimming pool in the backyard. So, yes, I’m living in paradise. But everything that glitters is not quite gold.

Let me begin by saying that what I’m about to write here is neither a complaint nor is it coming from a place of anger or malice. These are simply my observations of being the Black body in a white family. It’s been almost ten years since I’ve visited my in-laws and so some of these things I’m noticing feel brand new. Even though, they probably aren’t. What is different is that I’m in Spain for the first time with all three of my children and it is clear to me that my presence as the outsider in this Spanish family is causing some identity issues.

Don’t Touch ‘Mi Pelo’ 

So, I’ve known for a very long time that I’m never going to be able to go incognegro in Spain. In other words, I’ll never be mistaken for a Spaniard as long as my melanin levels stay the same and the kinks in my hair stay put. And I’m fine with that. So fine, that I happily shaved the sides of my head to the lowest levels and added colorful thread-wrapping to my locs before I arrived to my in-laws house. I love the look, but it is always a conversation starter with my Spanish relatives. And when I met one of new 5-year-old nieces, the first thing she did before even an hola was to put her little white hands all over my head and pull on my locs with her eyes growing wide. The response from the family, “Oh, look, she’s attracted to your hair.” I wanted to remind my well-meaning family that pulling on someone’s hair is neither acceptable nor normal when you’ve never met a person before. But I held back. I know there was no bad intent, but if she tries to touch my hair again, I will definitely share with her that she should ask permission before touching anyone’s hair. And pulling is no bueno. Side note: My eldest son has had his own share of “hair touching” because his curls are “amazing.” So . . .  sigh

The Last (Black) Wife Standing 

So, this isn’t really about being Black, but because I am Black it feels even more obvious. So, el esposo has two brothers—one younger and one older. They all get along really well and as they age, begin to look more and more alike. Here’s the thing: both brothers divorced their first wives within a year of one another and they both re-married younger women who are both tall, blonde, and very attractive. I have only gotten to know one of the new wives, and she’s a lovely person inside and out, and I look forward to our evolving friendship. But I’d be lying, dear readers, if I didn’t admit that I feel like a little chocolate dumpling compared to these Spanish glamazons. From their nails, to their highlighted hair, to their very fashionable clothes, I feel like Cinderella. Let me be clear: I don’t draw my self worth from my exterior appearance, nor do I feel like I have to compete with these other women; it’s more like I can’t get the Sesame Street refrain, “one of these things is not like the other…” to stop looping through my head every time they come over. LOL! I find myself contemplating outfit changes when I know they’re coming over, or maybe trying to teach myself how to apply makeup and then I’m like, who am I kidding? I just gotta be me.

Mama or Mamá? 

I had to check in with my favorite psychotherapist for this one (Thanks, Mom), but it seems that Babygirl is having trouble figuring out how to be Black and Spanish or maybe, it’s just American and Spanish. Ironically, before we left the United States, I was telling el esposo that babygirl [their daughter] knows how to codeswitch. I noticed when she’s with her friends from dance class, who all happen to be Black, she uses different vocabulary and accent than she does with her white friends at school. But here in Spain, Babygirl seems to be struggling with how to love me and “be Spanish” at the same time. So, she’s decided to reject me. If I wasn’t so aware of what was going on, I might be hurt, but I get it. Since we’ve arrived at her grandparents’ home, Babygirl stays away from me, runs to her father, and corrects me whenever she can about all the things. I believe she is trying to figure out how I fit into her Spanish identity when I’m so clearly “not Spanish.” I know she has to figure this out for herself, and I am confident she will, but it is compounded by the fact that her American mom is also Black. I just can’t blend in. Sorry. My boys aren’t having the same level of identity crisis, but I can tell they too want me to fit in with their Spanish family and not be too . . . you know, Black Panther mom like I am at home. I am doing my very best, dear readers, because my kids’ feelings matter. I want them to feel like there is a place for them . . . and me in Spain.

Blessings Not Burdens 

At the end of the day, dear readers, I feel so blessed to have such a warm and loving family on the other side of the Atlantic. My life is so much richer for them. What’s more, they have never made me or my children feel anything less than welcome in their home and in their lives. But being the only Black body in a white family will always come with unique challenges and experiences. That’s life, at least that’s been my life.

What about yours? What has your experience been like as the only person of color in an all white family? Or the only (fill in the blank) in the (fill in the blank) family? The more we share, the easier it becomes for everyone.

You know I’m listening.

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 Alexandra Minna Stern

Networked in virtual communities that disseminate their ideology, the alt-right is more international, suited-up, and image conscious than its predecessors.

How deep does the rabbit hole of the alt-right go? And how long has it been here? In 2016, back when the term was couched in scare quotes, we witnessed the alt-right’s breakthrough in the mainstream as it heralded the era of a bigoted presidential candidate. Years later, we’re wondering how this ideology insinuated itself in our public consciousness. Historian Alexandra Minna Stern ventured down the rabbit hole to mine its memes, screeds, and history and reveals them in Proud Boys and the White Ethnostate: How the Alt-Right Is Warping the American Imagination. Our blog editor Christian Coleman caught up with her to ask her about the book and about the machinations of this movement.

Christian Coleman: What was the inspiration for writing the book?

​Alexandra Minna Stern: I wrote this book to bear historical witness to disturbing and reactionary political and cultural changes that were afoot in the United States in the mid-2010s. Specifically, I became interested in how and why eugenic ideas from the early 1900s, including race suicide—repackaged today as white genocide—were making a comeback and being disseminated by what came to be called the alt-right. Once I started writing the book, I became more and more interested in understanding the transnational dimensions of the rise of populist nationalism, and how this connects to the resurgence of white nationalism in the United States. 

CC: Tell us a little about your background. You’re a scholar well-versed in the history of eugenics and white nationalism in the United States. What drew you to these fields of study?

​AMS: My academic training is in social and medical history, and I have written extensively on the history of eugenics, examining how it shaped twentieth-century ideas and policies in both the United States and Latin America. In recent years, I have expanded this work into a collaborative project on eugenic sterilization in several US states, looking at demographic patterns of state-mandated reproductive control. In addition, I have studied the emergence of the field of genetic counseling, demonstrating how it bifurcated from eugenics starting in the 1960s but has continued to be fraught with complex bioethical quandaries. Although these projects took me in different directions, they are driven by a deep interest in studying how genetic essentialism can inform categories and identities. I have tracked how such concepts have been used in divergent ways: to justify the most egregious forms of social engineering and population control, to guide meaningful medical decisions, and to provide individuals with seemingly irrefutable truths about their heritage and ancestry.  

CC: What was it like for you to spend hours online mining alt-right literature to do research for the book? What was running through your mind as you took it all in and studied it?

​AMS: It was intense and upsetting, but a necessary task to map the discursive field of the alt-right. Sometimes I needed to take a break to detoxify and decompress. Given that I have written about eugenics and white supremacy, I was familiar with salient alt-right tropes. However, there are multitudinous rabbit holes online, and it's not hard to encounter viciously misogynistic, xenophobic, and racist memes. Once you see these images, you cannot “unsee” them. Overtime, I became adept at deciphering more obscure and euphemistic alt-right memes, which are crucial boundary objects given that they can slip with greater ease into the mainstream. 

CC: Alt-right memes and tropes have appropriated what would be considered left-leaning or innocuous tropes of popular culture. We’ve seen what happened to Pepe the Frog. You write about ‘red-pilling,’ a concept taken from the film The Matrix. And alt-righters have seized on Wakanda from Black Panther as a possible paradigm. Why do they use appropriation to promote their ideology?

​For a brief moment, the alt-right successfully seized upon and commandeered tropes circulating in popular culture and discourse. They continue to try to do so. Lately, they seem taken with clown memes to convey the idea that the Western world has become a “clown world” in which the perverse and corrupted values of liberalism, feminism, and multiculturalism reign supreme and have upended normalcy. Yet such techniques of pastiche and reassemblage are not particular to the alt-right. That simply is what millions of people do on social media and can help explain why the traffic between “left” and “right” memes can be relatively fluid. In 2015 and 2016, the alt-right's meme factory was operating at full tilt and they pushed tropes into full view. Since then, waves of deplatforming, despite their inconsistency and randomness, have shrunk but certainly not closed the virtual space for effective alt-right meme-making. 

CC: You have a chapter on white nationalists’ take on history. What is archeofuturism and how does it figure into their notion of a white ethnostate?

​AMS: Archeofuturism is an idea proposed by the late French ethnonationalist Guillame Faye in his book with the same title. He rhapsodized about a marriage of the traditional past with a technologized future in which peoples of white and European descent would be able to reclaim their lands, control their boundaries, and have boundless babies, using scientific tools to their advantage. The archeofuture is aspirational and saturated in nostalgia for an idealized past. ​

CC: Media coverage familiarized us with the alt-right, but we aren’t as familiar with the alt-light. How do you define it and who are some if its key spokespersons?

​AMS: As I have worked on this project, the line between the alt-right and alt-light has become blurrier. I increasingly view them as having more in common than not. The conventional distinction is that the alt-right is synonymous with white nationalism, while the alt-light refrains from embracing an explicitly white nationalist agenda. What they share, however, is a palpable disdain for liberalism and diversity, as well as unbridled misogyny and transphobia. One of the best examples of a prominent alt-light social media celebrity is the self-proclaimed Canadian philosopher Stefan Molyneux, who on Twitter and YouTube espouses exceedingly rigid ideas about gender roles and eugenically-minded theories about race and intelligence. I have noticed that over time his posts and vlogs increasingly have become focused on the dangers of multiculturalism and endorse, often in coded language, the viewpoint that whites are facing demographic extinction. The back-and-forth dynamic between the supposed alt-right and alt-light will continue to evolve; even if the alt-right likes to scorn the alt-light, the latter has proven to be more effective at reaching and red-pilling “normies.”

CC: And lastly, why are misogyny and transphobia prevalent features in their rhetoric and what does that say about their worldview?

​AMS: One of the main takeaways from Proud Boys and the White Ethnostate is that misogyny and transphobia (and in more fraught ways homophobia) are not secondary aspects of the alt-right but sit at its core. If the alt-right is anything, it is deeply patriarchal and beholden to traditional gender and sexual norms. In this sense, the alt-right expresses a neo-fascist fixation with order and hierarchy, systems for which the binaries of gender and sexuality almost always are foundational beliefs.

About Alexandra Minna Stern 

Alexandra Minna Stern is the author of the award-winning Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America (2d. ed., 2015) and Telling Genes: The Story of Genetic Counseling in America (2012). In addition to dozens of scholarly essays, she regularly contributes to the popular media through opinion pieces, blog posts, and interviews. She leads the Sterilization and Social Justice Lab at the University of Michigan whose work on eugenic sterilization in California has been featured in The Atlantic, the New York Times, and NPR, and many other media venues. Stern is a Professor of American Culture, History, and Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan, where she leads the acclaimed Sterilization and Social Justice Lab. 

By Jacy Reese

Photo credit: Melissa Rae Dale

What’s in a name? That which we call a plant-based meat by any other name would taste as sweet. But there’s a lot to a name when the labeling seen in your local grocery story could be punishable with jail time. In Mississippi, a new law that bans plant-based meat providers from using such labels as “veggie burger” or “vegan hot dog” on their products has gone into effect. The argument is that said labels confuse consumers, which actually isn’t the case; it has more to do with getting rid of competition. Consumers know what they’re buying. Just take it from Jacy Reese. In this passage from his book The End of Animal Farming: How Scientists, Entrepreneurs, and Activists Are Building an Animal-Free Food System, he argues that we should call a veggie burger a veggie burger. More importantly, he also points out that the terminology we use should signal social information about the products we eat.

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One roadblock that is probably slowing down mainstream acceptance of plant-based products, even artisan ones, is labeling. When the California Department of Public Health inspected Schinner’s production facility, the agent saw that the product was labeled only according to flavor, such as Aged English Fresh Farmhouse. It couldn’t be categorized as cheese, so the agent asked her for the actual name of the product. Schinner, on the spot, decided to call it a cultured nut product.

While this was a snap decision, it has stuck, though Schinner is now moving toward mainstream dairy titles for her products when possible. For example, when her company launched its first butter in 2016, the name was unabashedly European Style Cultured Vegan Butter. This name does include the word “vegan,” but that more reflects Schinner’s desire to “hold the vegan banner high” than reservation about using the term “butter” alone.

Plant-based milk producers are already facing legal challenges. The standard of identity for milk defines it as “the lacteal secretion, practically free from colostrum, obtained by the complete milking of one or more healthy cows, which may be clarified and may be adjusted by separating part of the fat therefrom; concentrated milk, reconstituted milk, and dry whole milk. Water, in a sufficient quantity to reconstitute concentrated and dry forms, may be added.”

These laws are necessary to help consumers easily identify different food products. If there were no criteria defining what makes ketchup, for example, we would have to constantly watch out for companies trying to peddle ketchup products made with improper ingredients or production methods.

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In 2011, two Spanish businessmen were sentenced to prison for selling “olive oil” that was actually 70–80 percent sunflower oil.17 In 2008, Chinese fraudsters added water to cow’s milk used to produce infant formula while using the chemical melamine to increase the apparent protein content of the formula when tested. Nearly three hundred thousand babies fell ill, approximately fifty-three thousand were hospitalized, and six died. Eleven countries stopped dairy imports from China after the incident.

Such profit-driven food crimes are good reasons to enforce strict labeling standards. But the animal agriculture industry has also tried to twist the intent of these laws to drive up their own profits. Take “soy milk,” for example. This is an established product name that identifies a white, milky beverage made from soy. I’ve never heard anyone wonder whether “soy milk” refers to soy-flavored cow’s milk. Nonetheless, the dairy industry is waging a campaign to prevent plant-based milk producers from using “milk” to describe products such as soy and almond milk. They want the standard of identity enforced, seemingly just because it would harm their upstart competitor. It also seems the cow’s milk industry is willing to throw other animal products under the bus: because the definition of milk specifies that it must come from a cow, the implication is that the beverage that comes from goat udders needs to be called something like goat juice.

These labeling efforts are supported by US congressional representatives from high dairy production states. As of this writing, they have received little support from other legislators, but this serves as a reminder of how industry affects policy and should make us hopeful about the support we can obtain for animal-free meat, dairy, and eggs once they become significant parts of at least some state economies.

The fact is that the public’s perception of “milk” is no longer aligned with its outdated legal definition, and food standards should be updated to reflect that. When the media reported on the 2016 and 2017 efforts by US congresspersons from agricultural states to enforce the strict definition of the term, they spent less time in their articles discussing the proposed rule change than they did on the growing popularity of plant-based milks. An article by the Los Angeles Times editorial board used the headline “Got ‘Milk’? Dairy Farmers Rage Against Imitators but Consumers Know What They Want,” and Yahoo! Finance reported, “Dairy Farmers Are Losing the Battle over ‘Milk.’”

In 2015, there was 9 percent growth in plant-based milk compared to a 7 percent decrease in dairy milk sales, making the plant-based milk market 10 percent the size of conventional milk. The dairy industry feels threatened, and it’s lashing out by any means possible.

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In the meat market, the leading plant-based products have nutritional and culinary profiles quite similar to animal-based products. Ethan Brown, CEO of Beyond Meat, argues that it makes sense to call his products “meat.” In an interview with TV personality Dr. Oz, he explained: “We like to use the language of plant-based meat, and what we’re doing is, we’re taking all of the core constituent parts of meat. We’re taking those directly from plants: basically protein, fat, and water. We’re assembling those in the architecture of meat or muscle, and we’re providing it to consumers in that form. So they’re getting a piece of meat in terms of its constituent parts. It just doesn’t come from an animal.”

The only differences, Brown argues, will be the nutritional benefits of the Beyond Burger. For example, it lacks cholesterol, which despite being a common feature of animal meat, has no noticeable impact on taste or texture.

There’s also historical and contemporary precedent for using terms like “meat” outside of animal products, such as coconut meat, nut meat, and even the “meat of the matter” to refer to the substance of an issue. We also say “peanut butter” and “cocoa butter,” terms that certainly aren’t confusing consumers. To refer to plant-based meats as “fake” or “alternative” is not more accurate; it implies that animal-based meats are the gold standard in a way that doesn’t properly reflect the ethical, health, and taste considerations, and doesn’t reflect the commonsense use of the relevant terms. In fact, a few years or decades down the road, we can hope to see labels and terminology that help consumers understand the harms of animal-based foods, similar to the cautionary text on cigarette cartons. We’ve already seen some restrictions on the misleading positive labels like “humanely raised,” though this is usually done without an explicit label, such as with picturesque farm images that in no way actually reflect the appearance of the vast majority of modern farms.

Overall, I think there’s a good case for calling the Beyond Burger “meat” without qualification. However, it would be concerning to me at this time if companies called soy milk, almond milk, and especially a product with a significantly different nutritional profile like coconut milk—tasty as it is—simply “milk” without identifying the plant it’s derived from. But remember, that’s not important for the current debate over the term, which concerns products such as those that are labeled “almond milk” and have pictures of almonds on the packaging. In those cases, it seems clear that consumers know what they’re buying and the dairy industry is simply trying to hassle a competing industry in an effort to bolster its tumbling sales. If the dairy industry has a genuine concern that consumers are missing out on protein, I’d note that the average American consumes far more than the Recommended Daily Allowance of protein, around 145 percent the RDA for women and 176 percent for men.

We should also consider that our terminology is a way for producers to convey important social information about their product. By using “meat” to refer to plant-based foods with the same taste, texture, mouthfeel, and nutritional profile as animal flesh, we are telling people that they can get all those features without the animal cruelty, environmental devastation, and negative health impacts.

At the time of this writing, Beyond Meat labels its burgers as plant-based without using the term “meat.” Ethan Brown told me that the company’s current focus is on perfecting the product, and once it does that and public opinion data shows consumers are on board with this use of the term, they might switch. This seems like the right call because consumers are still getting familiar with plant-based meats, and regulatory issues at this stage would be a big hassle. As the industry establishes itself and public attitudes shift, updated labeling will be an important stepping-stone on the path toward an animal-free food system.

About the Author 

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

The summer solstice has graced us with its yearly cameo. Time to bask in the warmth and light (and that charming humidity when it gets here) of longer nights! Which means more time to enjoy reading outside! Our staff has some recommendations for the season. Now, we know what you’re thinking: You already have a to-be-read pile that’s about ready to topple over and bury you up to your ears. But another recommendation won’t hurt. Trust us. After you’ve dug yourself out of your book avalanche, you’ll thank us later.

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No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know about Domestic Violence Can Kill Us by Rachael Louise Snyder, published by Bloomsbury. Maybe not the perfect beach read, but a riveting, narrative driven book that is oh so important. Not to be missed, even if you do have to read it on the beach.

She Would Be King by Wayétu Moore, from Graywolf. A breathtaking debut about the founding of Liberia, blending historical fiction with a bit of magical realism. Read this anywhere!

The Not Good Enough Mother by Sharon Lamb, from us! A completely unique look at the complex and fraught job of evaluating families, skillfully blending narrative, factual background information, memoir, and even humor. This one you’ll want to read in one gulp, wherever you may be.
—Helene Atwan, director

If you’re an Octavia Butler fan and you’re exasperated with Hollywood blockbusters for showing only the US mainland getting all the first-contact action, crack open Cadwell Turnbull’s debut novel The Lesson. This is the first book I’ve read where an alien invasion takes place in the Caribbean—St. Thomas, actually. Turnbull leans into the influences from Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy and Ursula K. Le Guin’s anthropological approach while spinning a story completely his own that delves into Caribbean history, occupation, cycles of violence, and the complicated mess of different cultures interacting and struggling to find common ground. Extra points if you find all the Butler references!
—Christian Coleman, associate digital marketing manager

The Feather Thief by Kirk Wallace Johnson starts with a question: Why would anyone want to steal old, dead birds from an obscure museum? The answer is fascinating, complex, and sad.
—Beth Collins, production manager

I have two!

#1: Queenie by Candice Carty-Williams. I read this book expecting to laugh a lot (which I did), but I also found myself so emotionally invested in the protagonist’s journey. For all of my fellow twenty-somethings who are attempting to figure out their lives, only to realize that things are kind of a mess, and for those with the added experience of being a Black woman, this book is an affirming must read.

#2: My Sister the Serial Killer by Oyikan Braithwaite. Funnily enough, my sister gifted me with this gem, but lucky for me, she is not a serial killer . . . I think. Braithwaite’s novel takes place in Lagos where two sisters with a complicated relationship and bond is tested, as older Korede is tasked with the burden of cleaning up her celebrated younger sister Ayoola’s habit of murdering her boyfriends. This dark and surprisingly humorous novel is a combination of crafted writing, witty characters, and a thrilling storyline that is difficult to put down. I would recommend taking this with you if you’ll be stuck in a car, train, or a plane, as it is a quick and engrossing read.
—Maya Fernandez, editorial assistant

Chandler Baker’s Whisper Network is a super timely “workplace thriller”—I don’t know another way to describe it—set firmly in the #MeToo era. A version of the “Shitty Media Men” list begins to circulate around an office, changing the company and a group of friends forever. I couldn’t stop reading this, and it brings up some really tough questions about gender politics at work, but it’s still a great book to read outdoors with a glass of wine (and then text your work friends about after!).
—Emily Powers, associate marketing manager 

By Philip Warburg

Photo credit: James Cridland

For all their ideological differences, progressives and conservatives share an aversion to dealing with global population growth. 

Progressives commonly argue that privileged white people from the Global North shouldn’t meddle in the reproductive politics of poorer nations. To many in this camp, efforts to slow population growth conjure up past coercive efforts to limit fertility in places like India, with its forced sterilization programs dating back to the 1970s, and China, with its recently modified one-child policy.

Conservatives have their own concerns, tied largely to religious doctrines that treat certain kinds of contraception—abortion in particular—as apostasy. This has translated into restrictions imposed by successive US Republican administrations, barring aid to organizations working abroad that call for legalizing abortion or provide abortion information, referrals, or services.

Environmental groups likewise tend to avoid grappling directly with population growth. They assert that urbanization and the rise of a global middle class are creating social and economic conditions that favor fewer children per family. Yet especially in societies with deeply embedded religious beliefs and cultural norms favoring larger families, change comes more slowly than simple demographic shifts might suggest.

Another common argument is that overconsumption by wealthier nations, not overpopulation in poorer ones, is the ultimate environmental culprit. Calling out resource gluttony is surely valid, but it need not cause us to ignore the effect of billions more people inhabiting our planet by the end of this century.  According to the United Nations, the world’s population will likely reach 10.9 billion by 2100, up from 7.7 billion today. How can these numbers not place an enormous added strain on the earth’s already overtaxed resources?

Finding constructive ways to engage population growth isn’t easy, but one group that has forged ahead is the Population Media Center (PMC). Headquartered in South Burlington, Vermont, its staff works closely with in-country counterparts, mainly in the Global South. Together they produce radio serial dramas that help reshape popular norms about family planning, sexual and maternal health, and reproductive choice. Since its founding twenty-one years ago, PMC claims that its broadcasts have reached half a billion listeners in more than twenty languages.

PMC scriptwriters refrain from telling people what they should and shouldn’t do. Instead, they use storytelling to leverage behavioral change, based on a methodology first developed for Mexican telenovelas in the 1970s. 

Here’s one of the threads in a multi-episode radio drama that recently aired in Rwanda:

Bacyenga, a young villager, presses his girlfriend Rosine to marry him. She agrees but tells him that she does not want to get pregnant right away and only wants two children. Bacyenga counters that, to honor his father and prove himself a real man, he must have at least seven kids.

Just before their wedding, Rosine becomes pregnant. The strains between them deepen when he refuses to take her to the local health clinic for prenatal care. 

Following the birth of their child, Bacyenga is full of remorse for having kept Rosine from getting proper medical attention. They meet with a family planning counselor and he agrees to have just two children.

PMC launched its first Rwandan radio serial in 2006, with a show called Umurage Urukwiye (Rwanda’s Brighter Future). During the show’s revival several years later, twenty-six percent of the Rwandans polled said they listened regularly to its broadcasts. When the second revival aired last year, one in five listeners said they were motivated by the show to seek family planning assistance, reproductive health services, child protection, nutrition guidance, or help in addressing gender-based violence.

There’s a reason why these radio dramas reach so many Rwandans.  While 64 percent of households have at least one radio, televisions are rare and smartphone access is still limited.

Umurage Urukwiye isn’t just influencing its radio audience. Jean Bosco Kwizera, PMC’s resident representative in Rwanda, acknowledges the program’s impact on his own family. “As you write these scripts, you are also training yourself . . . . My wife and I discuss family planning, and how we can do birth spacing, and how many kids we’re going to have.” So far, they have a two-year-old son, and they want two more children—about one child less than the average Rwandan family. Jean Bosco, now age thirty-three, has seven brothers and sisters—a typical family size when he was growing up.

Alfred Twahirwa has been writing Rwandan radio scripts for PMC since 2007. He describes the difficulties he has had getting his sister to tune in to the broadcasts. She already has six children. “I know she used to follow my program but when I asked her, she said, ‘No, my radio is not working.’ So I said, ‘I will give you a radio!’  She is now following our programs and has decided to stop having children.”

Rwanda today, with 12.6 million people, is already one of the world’s most crowded nations. By 2050, its numbers are expected to reach 23 million, and by 2100, this small country’s population is likely to top 33 million. With such rapid demographic growth, Rwanda will have a tough time surmounting the poverty that now afflicts 39 percent of its population. 

If the UN is right, Africa’s population will more than triple by 2100, approaching 4.3 billion by 2100. For many African nations, the resource strains of population growth will be compounded as climate change takes its toll, flooding heavily settled coastal areas, turning marginal farmlands to desert, and exhausting already strained freshwater resources. 

Slowing population growth in traditional and transitional societies is no small challenge. Breaking the radio silence on reproductive choice is one important step in this transformation.

About the Author 

Philip Warburg, an environmental lawyer and author, is former president of New England’s Conservation Law Foundation. His two books, Harvest the Wind and Harness the Sun, were published by Beacon Press. Follow him on Twitter at @pwarburg.

Stonewall Inn. Photo credit: Flickr user NicestGuyEver

Today marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall riots. We reached out to some of our authors to reflect on the impact of this landmark and turning point in the centuries of queer history in America and in the ongoing fight for queer equality. We share their statements with you below.

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“Given that I was four years old at the time of Stonewall, the riots and their aftermath have had a profound influence on both my personal life as a gay man and my professional life as a scholar of LGBTQ rights. I have been fortunate to benefit from the changes to American politics, law, and culture that Stonewall helped to foment. I only hope, for my transgender daughter and others of her generation, that the next five decades are as transformative and exhilarating as the last five have been on matters related to gender and sexuality.”

—Carlos A. Ball, The Queering of Corporate America: How Big Business Went from LGBTQ Adversary to Ally 

“In the fifty years since the Stonewall riots, we have seen enormous progress in the acceptance of LGBTQ people in mainstream society. We have not witnessed the most radical impulses of the Gay Liberation Front—which arose immediately after Stonewall—to challenge and change a wide range of injustices in our society. Despite the enormous amount of HIV-related deaths of gay men, there has never been a sustained effort in the LGBTQ community to systemically reform and humanize our health care system. Despite the clear, anti-LGBTQ biases of the criminal legal system—including in past decades men going to jail for consensual sexual activity—carceral reform has never been prioritized by national LGBTQ organizations. In the long run of history, fifty years is a small fraction of time. We can begin deep, lasting change now.”

—Michael Bronski, A Queer History of the United States 

“Stonewall was a riot. Police violence and police indifference to violent acts committed by homophobic and transphobic citizens won’t be solved with palliatives like ‘it gets better’ or with ‘sensitivity training’ for the police. What will work, what is working, can be seen in the next generation of queers who, in solidarity with their forebears, have disavowed respectability politics and gender conformity. They’re queers who don’t care about the liberal political agenda of national LGBTQQIA organizations, who critique proposed federal laws prohibiting discrimination against LGBT people on the grounds that only ‘respectable’ citizens will benefit from them. That’s why I won’t be ‘gay’ on June 25. I’ll be holding up a red umbrella for the rights of sex workers and a protest sign demanding the end to police violence.”

—Melinda Chateauvert, Sex Workers Unite: A History of the Movement from Stonewall to SlutWalk 

“Coming of age in New York in the eighties, the Stonewall Veterans were our heroes, mentors, protectors. First among them, to me, was Storme DeLarverie, the biracial drag king who always claimed to have thrown the first punch. When I talk about the Queer Virtues of courage and risk, Storme leaps to mind: her tall, confident frame standing at the door of Fat Cat or Cubby Hole, nodding silent greetings to her girls as we’d walk in, her presence itself the signal that we were safe—safe to gather, safe to be ourselves; her presence itself embodying the gift, the legacy, of Stonewall.” 

—Rev. Elizabeth M. Edman, Queer Virtue: What LGBTQ People Know About Life and Love and How It Can Revitalize Christianity 

“As individuals, we exercise agency every day, whether we realize it or not: we can wait for change or agitate for change; wish or engage. Challenging the status quo only happens when individuals act, modeling courage and inspiring others to join them. The Stonewall riots provide an apt lesson in generating change. Having spent fifteen years in the darkness of my own personal closet before I mustered enough courage to step out into the light, I am one of the countless many whose life course has been profoundly altered by those who refused to wait and wish. #DeeplyGrateful.”

—Ginny Gilder, Course Correction: A Story of Rowing and Resilience in the Wake of Title IX 

“We are living through a moment of physical and political assault, and our communities are under siege. Those of us with privilege in any of its forms have an obligation to resist by all means available. 

We have overcome before and we will overcome again, but I urge everyone to stay visible, to make clear that we are here, that we are queer and trans and genderqueer, and that those who would see us returned to the shadows and closets had better get used to it.”

—Laura A. Jacobs, LCSW-R, “You’re in the Wrong Bathroom!”: And 20 Other Myths and Misconceptions About Transgender and Gender Nonconforming People 

“Andy Warhol once famously said, ‘They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.’ The changes that have swept America in the half-century since Stonewall did not occur because time passed but because people fought (and in some cases died) for change to occur. As we celebrate this June, let us not forget what it took for us to get to where we are now, nor take it for granted, as these gains are fragile and can easily be swept away.”

—Kevin Jennings, One Teacher in Ten in the New Millennium: LGBT Educators Speak Out About What’s Gotten Better . . . and What Hasn’t 

“When Stonewall unfolded, I was a nervous nine-year-old Catholic school kid living in Denver, Colorado, utterly unaware of the fierce queer souls paving the way. It took many years, but I learned to uncover and to love my queer self. Now I feel the full measure of gratitude I hold for my beautiful brave ancestors.”

—Martin Moran, All the Rage: A Quest to Understand Anger, Loss, and Forgiveness 

“On the fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising, I am simultaneously paying my respects to the queers, drag queens, transgender women, who fought back against police violence and rolling my eyes at the NYPD ‘apology’ for raiding Stonewall Inn. An apology that counts would have come decades sooner and been accompanied by structural changes in the raced/classed/gendered policing of queers and all marginalized communities. But no. I don’t fall for performance and feel-good symbolism over structural transformation and hope you won’t, either. Oh, and by the way: we should also honor August, 1966, when trans people and drag queens and gay hustlers fought back against police at Compton’s Cafeteria in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district; like Stonewall, this was not gay, white respectability protesting, but rather furious, fed-up people, especially trans women, drag queens, and queers of color who’d been fucked with one too many times.”

—Kay Whitlock, Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States 

A Q&A with Sharon Lamb

A mother’s parenting is always under scrutiny. This is especially true in high-stakes cases concerning the termination of parental rights. Psychologist and expert witness Dr. Sharon Lamb evaluates mothers struggling with mental illness and poverty in these cases and in the conclusions of her forensic evaluations must ask: Do they understand their children’s needs? Have they turned their lives around under child welfare’s watchful eye? Are they good enough? There are never easy answers. Lamb turns the last question on herself when her son’s struggle with opioid addiction comes to light and she starts to doubt her right to make judgments about other mothers. She reflects on these points in her latest book The Not Good Enough Mother. In this Q&A, she tells us about the inspiration for the book, how she got started as an expert witness, what she’s learned about addiction, and more.

Q: What inspired you to write this book?

A: I don’t know whether it was inspiration or necessity. I wrote this book because I had to. When I would come home from a parent interview or an observation during a visit with a mother who maybe could lose her child, I had to get my thoughts down on paper. And I couldn’t write up my report in that dry, impersonal, professional style. I needed to express the enormity of what I was witness to that day. Then, when my own parenting came into question, via my son’s addiction, I started to compare myself to the mothers I saw. Was I good enough? What is good enough? Writing helps me to structure wildly incompatible thoughts and feelings. It was a kind of therapy.

Q: How did you get started evaluating the fitness of parents whose children had been removed from their custody?

A: I began being called as an expert witness in the early nineties because of some research I was doing on sexual abuse. When I moved to Vermont, lawyers began to seek me out to perform what they called “attachment” evaluations, to assess the amount of attachment a child still had to a birth mother (or father) after being in the foster care system for many years. At that time, parents’ attorneys were arguing that because of attachment, a child would be harmed if freed for adoption. I was seeing children in therapy and knew the field of developmental psychology from my graduate work with Jerome Kagan, one of the early critics of attachment theory, and from teaching Human Development. I knew I would be able to use what was good and solid about attachment research and assessment and throw out the rest. I’d also had some significant assessment training. And finally, as a feminist, I am wary of all the mother-blaming that goes on and am able to have empathy for the plight of mothers dealing with trauma and poverty.

Q: And were you successful?

A: Although there are tens of thousands of psychology articles on attachment theory and research, I think attachment between a mother and child is very hard to measure, but I think I am open-minded, knowledgeable, and curious, and that helps. The chapters in the book about assessment show how suspicious I am about traditional methods. Regarding mother-blaming? God, I try, but as the book shows, my self-blame and underlying beliefs that I should have been better than “good enough” are something I need to always keep an eye on.

Q: Do you think you are ever biased in your approach?

A: I don’t. Not really. We all have hidden biases, I guess, but I’m beholden to ethical guidelines of my profession that state that no matter who hires me for an evaluation, I need to be true to what I’m observing and assessing. I write about how I have to watch myself around the charming fathers, who look good in comparison to the bedraggled and often traumatized mothers. And I do have a belief, though I wouldn’t call this a bias, that older children who are separated from their parents would do well to continue to have some contact with them if they are being raised by someone else.

Q: Your book follows the form of a braided memoir. Can you explain a bit what that means?

A: The core of the book is the individual chapters that describe a mother, sometimes a father, sometimes a child, at some part of the evaluation process. I might describe what I was seeing in an interview or at an observation I was doing at a supervised visit. Then “braided” throughout is the discovery of my son’s addiction and how that unfolded—first, my blindness to it, then my frantic search for the right treatment navigating the “big business” of addictions treatment, then the experience of attending one of these “family weekends” at a rehab, and coming to understand the biology of addiction and relapse. But there’s another plait in this braid and that’s a description of Vermont, its rural poverty, and my own class consciousness having grown up in a poorer family with uneducated parents. I try to take readers down the long empty Vermont roads that I drive down to do home visits, inside trailer parks, small homes, abandoned homes, and reflect on my prejudices borne of my own strivings to overcome my beginnings.

Q: Evaluating other mothers, do you evaluate your own?

A: Attachment is a theme in the book, and I do, in the end, have to look at my own attachment to my own mother. There are no big revelations, but an authentic self-inquiry throughout, grounded, unfortunately, in the burden of motherguilt that most mothers carry.

Q: What did you learn about addiction and how did that change you?

A: I finished this book a couple of years ago, writing most of it in 2016. We now know how addiction has ravaged many states and over time, I learned more about how drugs became an answer to underlying mental health issues like anxiety, attachment issues, and trauma. But I think the most important thing I learned was that relapse is part of the process of recovery. People relapse an average of seven to nine times, and this is the norm. The longer the time between relapses and the shorter the relapse, the better. Cravings, as I understand them, are so much more powerful than we think, and our blaming individuals for lack of willpower is damaging and a way to let the state and insurance companies off the hook for treatment.

Q: Are there any stories in the book that are particularly important to you?

A: I like the story I tell of the observation I did in a church basement of a child I call Mirabel visiting her mother. This story shows the ambivalence in a child who both loves her mother and who is angry at her, who is happy in her current foster home, and wants to be kept safe but who also wants to run away with her mother and hide. I also like my description of Family Weekend at a Texas rehab because I got to throw in some Texan witticisms I heard there, and to use a bit of humor about this dark subject.

Q: Is there a message you’d like readers to take from the book?

A: Oh, I think there are many messages, but I like best the takeaway message about “othermothers.” “Othermothers” is a phrase coined by Patricia Hill Collins to discuss the legacy of how Black motherhood involved the support of and reliance on other mothers. When children have multiple supportive adults who truly care about them, and are concerned about their welfare, they are better off. And if mothers mothered within a network of supportive others, if their responsibility could be shared, not only with fathers but with a variety of other adults, mothers would be relieved of the enormous individualized and unrealistic burden society places on them.

About Sharon Lamb 

Sharon Lamb, EdD, PhD, ABPP, is a professor of counseling psychology at UMass Boston. An experienced clinician, she sees children, adolescents, and adults at her therapy office in Shelburne, Vermont. She’s the author, editor, and coauthor of many books and articles about children, women, and trauma. Visit her website and follow her on Twitter at @drsharonlamb.

By Melinda Chateauvert

Marsha P. Johnson. Artwork reprinted with permission from Micah Bazant.

This year on the fiftieth anniversary of Stonewall, I won’t be participating in the parties and parades that celebrate a movement for LGBTQ equality. It’s not JOMO (Joy Of Missing Out), really. I won’t be “gay” on June 25, because I want to honor the transwomen of color who started this protest and still haven’t gotten what they wanted. Stonewall was a riot. It was led by sex workers, street kids, drug users and hustlers, by marginalized African Americans and Latinx who were pissed off with police harassment and police violence. As World Pride approaches, I’m going to remember what caused that 1969 riot, and refuse to participate in the historical amnesia.

A very vocal younger generation are demanding the LGBTQ movement acknowledge that Stonewall was a riot led by sex workers of color against the police. It’s shameful that it has taken a half-century for LGBTQ leaders to only now begin to contemplate what a riot against police brutality means for queer activism. From the first Christopher Street Liberation Day March held in 1970, white gay and lesbian leaders have commandeered the event, whitewashing the actions of those courageous—and camp—queers of color who threw the first bricks while publicly reading those helmeted cops. Sylvia Rivera, Marsha P. Johnson, Miss Major, with their fellow street kids and hustlers, had been harassed and fighting back for years. And Stonewall was not the first trans-led riot against the police: in 1966, transwomen in San Francisco’s Tenderloin smashed windows and burned a building outside Gene Compton’s Cafeteria after yet another night of harassment by the SFPD. And there were other riots even before that. Frankly, as observers noted at the time, “the Village’s established gay community” arrived rather late to the party, joining only after they “rushed back from vacation rentals on Fire Island” (and they were treated rather nicely too). The establishment may (or may not) have been mourning the death of Judy Garland, but the transwomen of color who later founded Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries were standing up for their murdered, imprisoned, and missing sisters and brothers.

Those victims of police violence and police indifference numbered in the hundreds, even tens of thousands. In the context of New York’s history of state violence, Stonewall was only one of many riots led by black and brown people. In 1712, enslaved Africans burned buildings and attacked white settlers while during the Civil War; white mobs hunted down and lynched black people in riots against the Union Army draft. Black folks rioted in 1935 and again in 1943 because of beatings by the police. In July 1964, Harlemites rioted for a week when fifteen-year-old James Powell was shot by a white off-duty officer. In nearby Newark, NJ, five days of riots erupted in 1967 when police arrested John William Smith, a black taxi driver, and rumors flew he had been beaten to death. Riots and “racial outbreaks” in large cities and smaller town were frequent in the long hot summers of 1966 and 1967. Amid the Kerner Commission’s extensive documentation of deaths, arrests, and destruction, was an indictment of the police violence that was the source of almost every riot. In this context, the Stonewall uprising—in which no one was killed, injuries were few, little was property damaged, and most of the arrests were for minor offenses—six nights of “riots” seemed to be rather orderly.

How did a riot, started by Blacks and Latinx fed up with police brutality during a decade that experienced more than a hundred major race riots, get reframed as a “gay rights” uprising? The deracination was a deliberate strategy. “Homophile” groups had been organizing for several years. They believed assimilation into “straight society” was key to acceptance and equality. The politics of respectability commanded that members distance themselves from public markers of “deviant” sexuality, including “transvestitism” in formal public spaces. (In fairness, black-led civil rights organizations made the same demands on its leaders.) They thought their strategy to show gay people as “heteronormative” rather than as sexual deviants and prostitutes was working. But it came at a price: the erasure of transwomen, of sex workers, drug users, street kids and hustlers, most of them black and brown. When Philadelphia veteran activists from the Mattachine Society allied with some New Yorkers as the one-year anniversary of Stonewall approached, they decided to rechristen June 25 as “Christopher Street Liberation Day” with a march up Sixth Avenue to Central Park.

The problem with respectability is that some queers and gender nonconformists will always be “out.” The “T” and “Q” in LGBTQ is almost never at the beginning of movement strategy. The construction of a heteronormative cis-gender appearance depends on both class aesthetics and the racial privileges of the able-bodied. Since the 1970s, lesbian and gay male leaders in the of the movement expected transwomen of color and other queers to follow to this “white picket fence” strategy, sometimes going so far as to discourage trans participation for political expediency (for example, the Millennium March on Washington for Equality). It is grossly unjust to expect transwomen of color to “pass” for their safety and freedom.

It is because of perceptions of “deviancy” or “freakishness” that transwomen remain always at the risk of civil vigilantism and police violence. The NYPD is under court order to change their practice of arresting transwomen on charges of prostitution merely for being on public streets at night. For Layleen Palcano, detention at Rikers on June 10, 2019 was her death sentence; the Department of Corrections has yet to explain why another Latinx transwoman died. The death toll is much greater: the murders and uninvestigated disappearances of transwomen of color that have yet to be reckoned with—including the unexplained death of Marsha P. Johnson in 1992.

For these reasons and more, an apology from Police Chief James P. O’Neill for the actions of the NYPD fifty years ago will never be enough. Will the Chief, along with the City of New York, apologize for the deaths of James Powell (Harlem, 7/16/1964)? For Eleanor Bumpurs (Bronx, 10/29/1994), or Kawaski Trawick (Bronx, 4/16/2019)? For other black and brown people killed by the NYPD? Where’s the apology for the “New Jersey 7”? In 2006, the NYPD arrested seven lesbian and gender-nonconforming women for “gang assault” after a man physically assaulted them and threatened them with “corrective” rape. For that matter, when will national LGBTQ leaders joining with #SayHerName, #BlackLivesMatter and #SexWorkersRightsNow to disavow the respectability politics of the past?

Stonewall was a riot. Police violence and police indifference to violent acts committed by homophobic and transphobic citizens won’t be solved with palliatives like “it gets better” or with “sensitivity training” for the police. What will work, what is working, can be seen in the next generation of queers who, in solidarity with their forebears, have disavowed respectability politics and gender conformity. They’re queers who don’t care about the liberal political agenda of national LGBTQQIA organizations, who critique proposed federal laws prohibiting discrimination against LGBT people on the grounds that only “respectable” citizens will benefit from them. That’s why I won’t be “gay” on June 25. I’ll be holding up a red umbrella for the rights of sex workers and a protest sign demanding the end to police violence. 

About the Author 

Activist Melinda Chateauvert has been involved in many grassroots campaigns to change policies and attitudes about sex and sexuality, gender and antiviolence, and race and rights. As a university professor she has taught courses on social justice organizing, the civil rights movement, and gender and sexuality. She is a fellow at the Center for Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and author of Sex Workers Unite: A History of the Movement from Stonewall to SlutWalk. Follow her on Twitter at @whorestorian and visit her website.

By Melinda Chateauvert

Marsha P. Johnson. Artwork reprinted with permission from Micah Bazant.

This year on the fiftieth anniversary of Stonewall, I won’t be participating in the parties and parades that celebrate a movement for LGBTQ equality. It’s not JOMO (Joy Of Missing Out), really. I won’t be “gay” on June 25, because I want to honor the transwomen of color who started this protest and still haven’t gotten what they wanted. Stonewall was a riot. It was led by sex workers, street kids, drug users and hustlers, by marginalized African Americans and Latinx who were pissed off with police harassment and police violence. As World Pride approaches, I’m going to remember what caused that 1969 riot, and refuse to participate in the historical amnesia.

A very vocal younger generation are demanding the LGBTQ movement acknowledge that Stonewall was a riot led by sex workers of color against the police. It’s shameful that it has taken a half-century for LGBTQ leaders to only now begin to contemplate what a riot against police brutality means for queer activism. From the first Christopher Street Liberation Day March held in 1970, white gay and lesbian leaders have commandeered the event, whitewashing the actions of those courageous—and camp—queers of color who threw the first bricks while publicly reading those helmeted cops. Sylvia Rivera, Marsha P. Johnson, Miss Major, with their fellow street kids and hustlers, had been harassed and fighting back for years. And Stonewall was not the first trans-led riot against the police: in 1966, transwomen in San Francisco’s Tenderloin smashed windows and burned a building outside Gene Compton’s Cafeteria after yet another night of harassment by the SFPD. And there were other riots even before that. Frankly, as observers noted at the time, “the Village’s established gay community” arrived rather late to the party, joining only after they “rushed back from vacation rentals on Fire Island” (and they were treated rather nicely too). The establishment may (or may not) have been mourning the death of Judy Garland, but the transwomen of color who later founded Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries were standing up for their murdered, imprisoned, and missing sisters and brothers.

Those victims of police violence and police indifference numbered in the hundreds, even tens of thousands. In the context of New York’s history of state violence, Stonewall was only one of many riots led by black and brown people. In 1712, enslaved Africans burned buildings and attacked white settlers while during the Civil War; white mobs hunted down and lynched black people in riots against the Union Army draft. Black folks rioted in 1935 and again in 1943 because of beatings by the police. In July 1964, Harlemites rioted for a week when fifteen-year-old James Powell was shot by a white off-duty officer. In nearby Newark, NJ, five days of riots erupted in 1967 when police arrested John William Smith, a black taxi driver, and rumors flew he had been beaten to death. Riots and “racial outbreaks” in large cities and smaller town were frequent in the long hot summers of 1966 and 1967. Amid the Kerner Commission’s extensive documentation of deaths, arrests, and destruction, was an indictment of the police violence that was the source of almost every riot. In this context, the Stonewall uprising—in which no one was killed, injuries were few, little was property damaged, and most of the arrests were for minor offenses—six nights of “riots” seemed to be rather orderly.

How did a riot, started by Blacks and Latinx fed up with police brutality during a decade that experienced more than a hundred major race riots, get reframed as a “gay rights” uprising? The deracination was a deliberate strategy. “Homophile” groups had been organizing for several years. They believed assimilation into “straight society” was key to acceptance and equality. The politics of respectability commanded that members distance themselves from public markers of “deviant” sexuality, including “transvestitism” in formal public spaces. (In fairness, black-led civil rights organizations made the same demands on its leaders.) They thought their strategy to show gay people as “heteronormative” rather than as sexual deviants and prostitutes was working. But it came at a price: the erasure of transwomen, of sex workers, drug users, street kids and hustlers, most of them black and brown. When Philadelphia veteran activists from the Mattachine Society allied with some New Yorkers as the one-year anniversary of Stonewall approached, they decided to rechristen June 25 as “Christopher Street Liberation Day” with a march up Sixth Avenue to Central Park.

The problem with respectability is that some queers and gender nonconformists will always be “out.” The “T” and “Q” in LGBTQ is almost never at the beginning of movement strategy. The construction of a heteronormative cis-gender appearance depends on both class aesthetics and the racial privileges of the able-bodied. Since the 1970s, lesbian and gay male leaders in the of the movement expected transwomen of color and other queers to follow to this “white picket fence” strategy, sometimes going so far as to discourage trans participation for political expediency (for example, the Millennium March on Washington for Equality). It is grossly unjust to expect transwomen of color to “pass” for their safety and freedom.

It is because of perceptions of “deviancy” or “freakishness” that transwomen remain always at the risk of civil vigilantism and police violence. The NYPD is under court order to change their practice of arresting transwomen on charges of prostitution merely for being on public streets at night. For Layleen Palcano, detention at Rikers on June 10, 2019 was her death sentence; the Department of Corrections has yet to explain why another Latinx transwoman died. The death toll is much greater: the murders and uninvestigated disappearances of transwomen of color that have yet to be reckoned with—including the unexplained death of Marsha P. Johnson in 1992.

For these reasons and more, an apology from Police Chief James P. O’Neill for the actions of the NYPD fifty years ago will never be enough. Will the Chief, along with the City of New York, apologize for the deaths of James Powell (Harlem, 7/16/1964)? For Eleanor Bumpurs (Bronx, 10/29/1994), or Kawaski Trawick (Bronx, 4/16/2019)? For other black and brown people killed by the NYPD? Where’s the apology for the “New Jersey 7”? In 2006, the NYPD arrested seven lesbian and gender-nonconforming women for “gang assault” after a man physically assaulted them and threatened them with “corrective” rape. For that matter, when will national LGBTQ leaders joining with #SayHerName, #BlackLivesMatter and #SexWorkersRightsNow to disavow the respectability politics of the past?

Stonewall was a riot. Police violence and police indifference to violent acts committed by homophobic and transphobic citizens won’t be solved with palliatives like “it gets better” or with “sensitivity training” for the police. What will work, what is working, can be seen in the next generation of queers who, in solidarity with their forebears, have disavowed respectability politics and gender conformity. They’re queers who don’t care about the liberal political agenda of national LGBTQQIA organizations, who critique proposed federal laws prohibiting discrimination against LGBT people on the grounds that only “respectable” citizens will benefit from them. That’s why I won’t be “gay” on June 25. I’ll be holding up a red umbrella for the rights of sex workers and a protest sign demanding the end to police violence. 

About the Author 

Activist Melinda Chateauvert has been involved in many grassroots campaigns to change policies and attitudes about sex and sexuality, gender and antiviolence, and race and rights. As a university professor she has taught courses on social justice organizing, the civil rights movement, and gender and sexuality. She is a fellow at the Center for Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and author of Sex Workers Unite: A History of the Movement from Stonewall to SlutWalk. Follow her on Twitter at @whorestorian and visit her website.

By Carlos A. Ball

Gillette at the 2018 Boston Pride Parade. Photo credit: Gillette Twitter account

There has been much commentary on the internet and social media about a recent Gillette ad showing a father helping his transgender son shave for the first time. The ad gives a whole new meaning to Gillette’s long-time slogan “The Best a Man Can Get.” The ad also reflects the extent to which corporate America has fully embraced LGBTQ visibility and equality. In many ways, large corporations have become crucial allies of the LGBTQ rights movement.

It has not always been like this. Back in the 1970s and 1980s, large corporations repeatedly discriminated against LGBTQ people. For example, in 1971 the Pacific Bell Telephone Company, one of the largest private employers in the country at the time, announced that it would not hire open “homosexuals” because doing so would “disregard commonly accepted standards of conduct, morality, or life-styles.” For its part, the Coors Brewing Company until 1978 routinely asked job applicants, while attached to lie detector machines, whether they had engaged in same-sex sexual conduct and denied them jobs if they had. (The company also asked applicants whether they were communists or had committed crimes.)

At around the same time, Eastern Airlines fired Karen Ulane, who had flown its airplanes for more than a decade, when she returned to work after having gender confirmation surgery. In 1985, Boeing fired a transgender engineer—who was contemplating but had not yet undergone gender surgery—after she insisted in using the company’s female bathrooms and wearing feminine clothes to work. Although Boeing claimed it was willing to accommodate the employee after the surgery, it warned her that the company would fire her if she persisted in flaunting her femininity at work before the surgery. Shortly after that, Boeing fired the engineer when she reported to work wearing a strand of pink pearls that her supervisor believed was “excessively feminine.” Although both Ulane and the Boeing engineer sued their employers for discrimination, they both lost their cases.

Most historical accounts of the LGBTQ movement have focused on activism directed at the government to show how the movement tried to either end discrimination by the state itself or to persuade government officials to prohibit private-sector discrimination. Commentators have paid relatively little attention to LGBTQ activism aimed at the policies and practices of corporate America. This is an unfortunate omission because, as I seek to show in my forthcoming book The Queering of Corporate of America, some of the earliest, most important, and most successful LGBTQ rights activism focused on the actions of corporations.

LGBTQ activism aimed at corporations through the decades has been extensive and varied, and included the street protests and “zap actions” of the early 1970s targeting high-profile companies, such as television networks and regional telephone monopolies; the boycott of the Coors Brewing Company starting in the late 1970s; the AIDS activism targeting pharmaceutical companies in the 1980s; the concerted push for corporate LGBTQ nondiscrimination policies and domestic partnership benefits in the 1990s; and the criticizing of corporations like Chik-fil-A, after the turn of the century, that opposed marriage equality.

LGBTQ rights activism in the United States aimed at corporations played a vital role in persuading many large businesses to ban discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity in their workplaces and to recognize (primarily through the provision of domestic partnership benefits) the relationships and families of their LGBTQ employees before a significant number of government entities did the same. The fact that these gains in the corporate sphere frequently preceded gains in the government sphere has also received insufficient attention. In the decades following Stonewall, it was easier for the LGBTQ rights movement to persuade corporate board members and executives to adopt LGBTQ equality measures than to convince government officials to do the same.

The progress made by the LGBTQ movement in the corporate sphere contributed in crucial ways to the progress that came later in the public sphere. That activism, by the early twenty-first century, helped turn many companies from targets of activism to sources of activism by persuading their board members and executives that the same types of LGBTQ equality measures that were working so well within company walls, and that reflected important corporate commitments to values of diversity, inclusion, and equality, would also benefit the country as a whole. Indeed, the political and policy debates involving LGBTQ rights in the public sphere implicated precisely the same issues—fairness, competiveness, discrimination, and relationship recognition—that LGBTQ activists had been raising with corporations for several decades. It was therefore not particularly surprising that companies which had already decided that issues of LGBTQ equality were important to their objectives as private firms became increasingly willing to advocate on behalf of that equality in the public sphere.

By the turn of the new century, most large companies in the United States had instituted policies prohibiting sexual orientation discrimination and many offered domestic partnership benefits. Years of experience proved to corporate board members and executives that these LGBTQ-friendly policies helped companies attain diversity objectives, bolster morale, hire and retain qualified employees, and attract business from members of LGBTQ communities. Many corporate leaders were also persuaded that considerations of fairness and equality required that their firms adopt LGBTQ-friendly policies. All of this meant that by the time LGBTQ rights issues in the 2000s reached a level of national prominence they had never enjoyed before, corporations began to more frequently and vigorously promote LGBTQ equality, not only within their institutions but in the public sphere as well. They did so primarily by urging governments at the federal, state, and local levels to adopt laws prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity; by pushing for marriage equality throughout the country; and by strongly opposing laws, such as so-called religious freedom measures proposed in response to marriage equality and so-called transgender bathroom regulations, which harm LGBTQ individuals.

Large corporations across the country joined forces with civil rights groups and other liberal advocacy organizations to criticize a 2016 North Carolina law, which required people to use bathrooms in government buildings and public schools according to the gender markers on their birth certificates, on the ground that it targeted transgender individuals for discrimination. Some corporations went so far as to announce that they would rescind pre-existing plans to invest in North Carolina or refuse to make new plans for such investments. Corporate activism on behalf of LGBTQ equality in North Carolina proved instrumental in framing the public debate over a law that sought to render LGBTQ people second-class citizens. In the end, corporate activism persuaded the Republican-controlled legislature in North Carolina to partially repeal the transgender bathroom law. Similarly, corporate opposition convinced the GOP-dominated Texas legislature to reject a transgender bathroom bill in 2017.

All of this history tells us that the recent Gillette ad showing a loving father helping his transgender son shave for the first time is both welcomed and moving, but not particularly surprising. It is a natural continuation of the growing corporate embrace of LGBTQ visibility and equality over the last few decades, an embrace that has helped transform not only corporate America, but the nation as well.

Carlos A. Ball is Distinguished Professor of Law at Rutgers University. His book The Queering of Corporate America will be published by Beacon in November. He is also the author of, among other books, The First Amendment and LGBT Equality and From the Closet to the Courtroom.

A Q&A with Michael Bronski

Even though some states have recently passed legislation requiring inclusive curricula in public schools, many LGBTQ students still grow up without ever seeing themselves reflected in textbooks and history lessons. According to a 2017 report by GLSEN, less than twenty percent of LGBTQ students in the United States are taught positive representations of queer people or queer history in their schools. That’s where Michael Bronski’s A Queer History of the United States for Young People comes in. Adapted by Richie Chevat, the book shows that queer people have long been vital to shaping our understanding of what America is today. Our blog editor Christian Coleman caught up with Bronski to ask about the inspiration behind the book, what’s new in this edition, and more.

Christian Coleman: How did the idea of publishing a young adult edition of A Queer History of the United States come about?   

Michael Bronski: The idea for YA versions of some of the titles in Beacon’s ReVisioning History series was my editor Joanna Green’s. She had been asked repeatedly by educators if there were YA versions of this material available, so it felt like there was a need for it. At the moment, Beacon is releasing my book A Queer History of the United States for Young People as well as Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States for Young People. There have been, in the past five years or so, a surge in YA nonfiction publishing, particularly adaptations of adult non-fiction for younger readers. So, the time seemed right, and the fiftieth anniversary of Stonewall seemed to be perfect timing.

CC: What about the project excited you?

MB: I think what excited me most about the project was having the chance to rethink so much of this material. Not only because it was for younger readers—although that was a challenge—but rather going back to the original sources and funding new insights. This material is so rich that there are always fresh angles to be discovered. For example, I discovered, after I had published the original book, that the emotional relationship between George Washington and the Marquis de Lafayette was so intense—as we see in their letters in the book—that Lafayette named his son after Washington (Georges Washington Louis Gilbert de Lafayette), and when he died was buried with coil from Mt. Vernon that he had transported back to France for this purpose. I included this information in the YA version of the work.

CC: What are some examples of changes made from or added to the original publication?

MB: Aside from new details I discovered—such as Lafayette naming his son after George Washington—the most major change in the YA version is that I take the history up to the present. A Queer History of the United States essentially ended in 1992 with a nod to the activism that had happened since then. But this book includes people and events that are still in today’s headlines. I write about Aiden DeStefano’s lawsuit against his high school for not allowing trans-inclusive locker rooms. He won the first round of the suit, and just last week he won an appeal. So, the book is very much up to date.

The other big change is that this is not the usual narrative history that covers 500 years in sweeping strokes. Because it is a YA book, the format had to be different, and I break the story down to thirty-four short chapters that focus on individuals or themes, so the sweep of 500 years is now more personalized through a series of short, detailed portraits and vignettes. It is a different way of telling history and it gave me more freedom to explore the lives of these incredible people—such as Jemima Wilkinson, Victoria Woodhull, Bayard Rustin, and Marsha P. Johnson—many of whom only got a sentence or two in the original book.

CC: Were there any challenges with adapting the text for a younger readership?

MB: Yes, challenges that Joanna and I never even imagined when we began. The main challenge was that a YA book is completely different from an adult book, and we were enormously helped and guided by Richie Chevat—listed as the adapter—who has written and adapted numerous books for young people before. The main challenge was to tell the entire story through the lens of smaller stories and to always keep in mind that each piece of the mosaic had to tell an important part of the larger story. There was no problem with the material—this is not a “cleaned up” version of LGBTQ history for kids—and all of the individuals in the book are presented as complicated, complex people who have faults and sometimes serious problems. Young people today are sophisticated and intelligent to know that people, even heroic people who change the world, are complicated.

CC: Who are some of your favorite historical figures that you’ve written about in the book?

MB: One of my favorite people in the book is Charlotte Cushman, who was one of the most famous and critically acclaimed actors of the nineteenth century. She lived a very public life with a series of women partners who were accepted as her spouses. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, one of the leading British poets of the time, said that Cushman and Matilda Hayes “made vows of celibacy and of eternal attachment to each other—they live together, dress alike . . . it is a female marriage.” However, we know from Cushman’s letters that they were certainly not celibate. Cushman played many roles but was famous for playing male parts and was celebrated for playing Romeo to her sister Susan’s Juliet.

I also am intrigued by Felix Gonzalez–Torres, a Cuban-American artist who did some of the most important work reflecting the loss and pain of HIV/AIDS epidemic. His 1991 installation Untitled (Placebo) consisted of a pile of hard candies the exact weight of a human being in a corner of the museum. Visitors are urged to take a piece of candy, and during the day the pile becomes increasingly diminished like the body of a person who is suffering from HIV/AIDS. The installation was inspired by the death of Gonzalez–Torres’s lover, Ross Laycock, who died shortly before the piece was conceived.

CC: Why do you think it’s important for educators to have a resource like this in the classroom?         

MB: In both this book and the original A Queer History of the United States, I say, counter-intuitively, that there is no such thing as gay American history: there is only American history. Unfortunately, historically, many LGBTQ people, as well as other minoritized people, have been left out—erased—from the “official” history of America. All I have tried to do in each of these books is to give a fuller, more complete picture of how the United States evolved and who took part in that. Most, if not all, educators want to give their students the most rounded, full education possible. The problem is that they do not have all the resources easily available. And let’s not forget that middle-school and high-school teachers are incredibly over worked, underpaid, and generally unappreciated. It would take a prohibitively large amount of time to do the research required to bring all of this “erased” material into the classroom, as it is not in the assigned history texts that are used. I hope that both of these books will be useful tools for teachers—as well as students—to see the full range and scope of American history.

CC: And what would you like for educators and kids to take away from the book, especially now with the news of Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera getting statues made in their honor in NYC?

I think there is an easy lesson to take away from A Queer History of the United States for Young People. LGBTQ people have always been a part of American history. They helped shape it, move it forward, and are integral to it today. They are not separate from American history but rather they are part of it. This is slowing changing, and we now see historians considering how the sexual identity of historical figures may have played a part in their lives. Also, we as a culture are coming to a better understanding of what is important in our history. Just recently, New York City announced it was going to erect a memorial to Silvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson, two of the founders of transgender activism just after the Stonewall riots. This is great and should be applauded. But we also need to remember—and teach—their lives in the full tapestry of American history and how important they were in shaping and improving the lives of so many people in their time and later.

About Michael Bronski 

Michael Bronski has been involved in gay liberation as a political organizer, writer, and editor for more than four decades. The author of several award-winning books, including A Queer History of the United States, he also coauthored “You Can Tell Just by Looking”: And 20 Other Myths about LGBT Life and People. Bronski is Professor of the Practice in Activism and Media in the Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.