By Sheryll Cashin

On October 15, 2021, at the invitation of Congresswoman Maxine Waters (yes, the Maxine Waters!), law professor and acclaimed author Sheryll Cashin testified before the Subcommittee on Housing, Community Development, and Insurance on Friday at noon about exclusionary zoning and what to do about it. She led with her book, White Space, Black Hood, and her theory of residential caste. She submitted the following testimony that is now part of the Congressional record.

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Good afternoon. As a law professor, author, and former White House staffer in the Clinton Administration, I have spent nearly three decades grappling with the issue of US residential segregation—its origins, persistence, and calamitous effects in producing racial and economic inequality. My most recent book, White Space, Black Hood: Opportunity Hoarding and Segregation in the Age of Inequality, reflects these decades of examination and analysis. It argues that we have a system of residential caste, in which government over-invests and excludes in affluent white spaces, and disinvests, contains, and preys on people in high-poverty Black neighborhoods. These are the extremes of American residential caste. But everyone who cannot afford to buy their way into high-opportunity neighborhoods is harmed by this system. People of all colors who are trapped in concentrated poverty are harmed the most. They are systemically denied meaningful opportunity for social mobility, no matter how hard they work to escape. In the book, I show that residential caste is animated by three anti-Black processes: boundary maintenance, opportunity hoarding, and stereotype-driven surveillance.

Boundary maintenance is a polite phrase for intentional state action to create or maintain racial segregation. The dominant response to at least six million Black “Great migrants” moving north and west to escape Jim Crow in the twentieth century was to contain them in densely populated Black neighborhoods and to cut those neighborhoods off from essential public and private investment that was and is regularly rained down on majority white areas. In addition to racially-restrictive covenants, mob violence, mortgage redlining, and racial discrimination in housing sales and rentals, exclusionary zoning was a key tool for creating and insulating predominantly white neighborhoods. Exclusionary zoning was first sanctioned by the US Supreme Court in 1926 in the case of Village of Euclid v. Amber Realty. The Court explicitly endorsed the idea that certain uses of land, like duplexes, were “parasitic” on single-family homes and the people who lived there. In ensuing decades, thousands of new suburban governments would form, enabling middle- and upper-class whites to wield the zoning power to exclude certain types of housing, particularly rental apartments, and therefore exclude unwelcome populations. Fast-forward to today and where high levels of Black segregation persist, researchers have found that it was actively promoted by zoning laws that restricted density and by high levels of anti-Black prejudice, particularly in places with large numbers of Blacks with lower incomes and education levels than most whites. And, according to a stunning, geographically mapped analysis produced by the New York Times, “[i]t is illegal on 75 percent of the residential land in many American cities to build anything other than a detached single-family home” (emphasis added). That figure is even higher in many suburbs and newer Sun Belt cities.

This hearing is about exclusionary zoning, which necessarily concerns local zoning power. But it is important to recognize the singular, outsized role of the federal government in creating and continuing America’s separate and unequal residential landscape. The federal government mandated redlining, marking Black neighborhoods as “hazardous” and cutting Black residents out of its largest wealthy building subsidies (HOLC, FHA, and Veterans Administration-insured mortgage lending). The federal government, through its mortgage underwriting rules, insisted that lenders insert racially restrictive covenants in deeds. The federal government spent billions for “urban renewal” to displace Black occupied housing and paid cities to build high-rise public housing that intentionally placed Black and white tenants in separate and unequal housing projects. These policies created iconic Black “ghettos” that exacerbated white flight and resistance to having Black neighbors. The federal government paid for and acquiesced in an interstate highway program laid to create racial barriers in cities and facilitate easy exit from cities to majority white suburbs. (For a detailed overview of this federal history see Sheryll Cashin, The Failures of Integration: How Race and Class are Undermining the American Dream, Chapter Three.)

The federal government still invests in segregation. To date, George Romney, Sen. Mitt Romney’s father, is the only HUD secretary to have pressured and penalized communities for exclusionary zoning laws and for refusing to build affordable, non-segregated housing. For decades, both HUD and local governments regularly violated the Fair Housing Act of 1968 requirement that communities “affirmatively further” fair housing. For decades, HUD has distributed about $5.5 billion annually in grants for community development, parceled among more than 1,000 local jurisdictions nationwide, with no meaningful accountability for promoting inclusive, integrated housing. The federal government also continues to concentrate poverty through the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) program, its largest subsidy for affordable housing. Each year, the LIHTC funnels about $10 billion for affordable housing construction, and only seventeen percent of those units get built in high-opportunity neighborhoods with high-performing schools, low crime, and easy access to jobs. That keeps Americans who need affordable housing concentrated in the same low-opportunity areas.

This history and present of federally-backed segregation inform the legal and moral case for congressional action to disrupt exclusionary zoning and residential caste. Intentional segregation of Black people in the twentieth century shaped development and living patterns for everyone and put in place an infrastructure for promoting and maintaining segregation that lives on. Racial steering by realtors who nudge homebuyers into segregated spaces; discrimination in mortgage lending; exclusionary zoning; a government-subsidized affordable housing industrial complex that concentrates poverty, local school boundaries that encourage segregation; plus continued resistance to integration by many but not all white Americans—all are forms of racial boundary maintenance today.

The negative effects of systemic exclusion are clear. As demonstrated by Harvard economist Raj Chetty and others, segregated communities tend to rate low on social mobility for poor children. And the gap in life expectancy between Blacks and whites in very segregated cities can rise to more than twenty years because of increased exposure to trauma, lead poisoning, allergens in poor-quality housing, fast-food “swamps,” and healthy-food deserts. Meanwhile, residents of exclusionary affluent spaces rise on the benefits of concentrated advantages, from excellent schools and infrastructure to job-rich social networks to easily accessible healthy food. Less understood is the fact that the government-created segregation facilitates poverty-free affluent white space by concentrating poverty elsewhere.

In considering policy options that Congress might pursue, it is important to acknowledge that the main reason exclusionary zoning persists is the vested interests and expectations of people who live in poverty-free havens. Government at all levels has catered to these expectations. And again, another reason for persistent exclusion, at least in some places, is high levels of anti-Black prejudice. In California, a so-called blue state where ostensibly liberal Democrats are in charge, despite a grave housing crisis and abundant problems with homelessness, the state was only able to take the baby step of opening single-family neighborhoods to duplexes. So, if Congress wants to disrupt a near century of exclusionary zoning, serious pressure and accountability are required. Congress and the executive branch also must atone for the federal legacy of promoting segregation.

It bears remembering that, in the face of Southern massive resistance to school integration, school districts did not begin to desegregate with alacrity until the Johnson Administration threatened to withhold federal education funds pursuant to Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (or they were ordered to do so by a federal court). I recommend not just spending incentives to deregulate or repeal exclusionary zoning ordinances but serious pressure on localities to adopt locally designed inclusionary zoning ordinances—like the highly successful mandatory ordinance Montgomery County, Maryland, has had in place for five decades. Because Montgomery County requires that all new development above a certain size include affordable units and sets aside some of those new units for residents of public housing, this extremely diverse, wealthy suburban county has no pockets of concentrated poverty, and poor children have more access to integrated, well-resourced schools.

In conclusion, I recommend that federal housing and community development and infrastructure funds should be conditioned on localities adopting inclusionary zoning ordinances and/or actually “affirmatively furthering fair housing.”

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Watch Sheryll Cashin give her testimony.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwsnvsvZirU?start=930]

 

About the Author 

Sheryll Cashin is an acclaimed author who writes about the US struggle with racism and inequality. Her books have been nominated for the NAACP Image Award for Nonfiction, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Nonfiction, and an Editors’ Choice in the New York Times Book Review. Cashin is the Carmack Waterhouse Professor of Law, Civil Rights and Social Justice at Georgetown University and an active member of the Poverty and Race Research Action Council. A law clerk to US Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall, Cashin also worked in the Clinton White House as an advisor on community development in inner-city neighborhoods. She is a contributing editor for Politico Magazine and currently resides in Washington, DC, with her husband and twin sons. Follow her at sheryllcashin.com and on Twitter (@sheryllcashin).

You’ve heard the news. Now’s the time to jump on your holiday book buying. Supply chain delays are affecting many industries, including the book industry. Some new books you’ve been waiting for may not make it to bookstores in time for the holiday, and hot sellers may be sold out by December and not reprinted in time. On top of that, what’s thrown a wrench into the works is—wait for it—the pandemic. Who saw that plot twist coming? (We’d probably be in less of this mess if everyone got vaccinated, but hey, let’s not digress.) So, gifts you would typically start buying in December may not be available. That’s why we, along with your favorite authors and bookstores, are recommending that you get started now if you haven’t already while bookstores are stocked up with your favorite titles.

October is the new December. Trust us: This is not like seeing Christmas decorations in retail stores in before Halloween.

We’re starting you off with some selections for the season from our catalog. Take a look!

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Breathe: A Letter to My Sons
Imani Perry

“Breathe is what is says it is, a letter from a mother to her sons, but it is more than that. It’s a meditation on child-rearing, world-building, fire-starting, and peace-building. 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

 

Dance We Do: A Poet Explores Black Dance
Ntozake Shange

“A gorgeous last offering from one of our most gifted and multifaceted artists. Her passion for dance, just like her passion for words, is among the many reasons she will be missed, though these insightful interviews, ruminations, and reflections will continue to be a balm, across generations, from her to us.”
—Edwidge Danticat, author of Everything Inside

 

How to Love a Country: Poems
Richard Blanco

“This clear-seeing and forthright volume marks Blanco as a major, deeply relevant poet.”
—Booklist, 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

 

One Drop: Shifting the Lens on Race
Yaba Blay

“One Drop presents a nuanced exploration of racial identity that serves as a practical guide for thinking critically about what it means to be Black in the twenty-first century.”
—Tarana J. Burke, author, activist, and founder of the MeToo movement

 

Owls and Other Fantasies: Poems and Essays
Mary Oliver

“Oliver has gained enormous popularity in recent years for the accessible yet highly articulate and profound treatment she gives each poem . . . This title will bring much pleasure to the many readers who claim Oliver as their favorite poet, as well as to people new to her work.”
—Library Journal

 

Palmares
Gayl Jones

“This story shimmers. Shakes. Wails. Moves to rhythms long forgotten . . . in many ways: holy. [A] masterpiece.”
—The New York Times Book Review

 

The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction: 1948-1985
James Baldwin

“With burning passion and jabbing, epigrammatic acuity, Baldwin fearlessly articulates issues of race, democracy, and American identity.”
—Toni Morrison

 

Prophet Against Slavery: Benjamin Lay, a Graphic Novel
David Lester with Marcus Rediker and Paul Buhle

“David Lester’s raw, expressive visual approach perfectly delivers. Prophet Against Slavery is a crucial account of abolitionism’s religious framework, its courage and moral clarity often recast as sin or insanity, and the necessity of taking outside risks in pursuit of justice and equality.”
—Nate Powell, National Book Award–winning artist of the March trilogy about US congressman John Lewis

 

The Radiant Lives of Animals
Linda Hogan

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

 

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

“Here was a veritable who’s who of Black writers, whose powerful stories and poems ran the gamut of literary expressions—from the tragic to the comic, fables to romance. A book for all seasons, these stories are bound to amuse, educate, and inspire all kids, from one to ninety-two.”
—Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams

 

Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer’s Enduring Message to America
Keisha N. Blain

“[A] riveting and timely exploration of Hamer’s life. . . . Brilliantly constructed to be both forward and backward looking, Blain’s book functions simultaneously as a much needed history lesson and an indispensable guide for modern activists.”
—New York Times Book Review

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Here’s what you can do as we get through this season.

1. See something you’d like a loved one to have? Buy it now!
2. If you aren’t too blitzed by Zoom fatigue and working remotely, consider buying it as an e-book or audiobook.
3. Are your eyes set on a title that’s not coming out for another few months? Smash that preorder button now! Your authors and indie bookstores will love you and appreciate you for this.

Which brings us to the next point. Speaking of indies, we need to really show up for them and for venues like Bookshop, Indiebound, and our personal favorite, InSpirt UU Book and Gift Shop. Publishing delays are likely to hit them harder than large chain bookstores. Holiday season keeps indies afloat during the slower seasons. The pandemic hasn’t made this any easier for them.

We’re all in this together. We thank you, your authors thank you, and your indie bookstores thank you.

A Q&A with Ruth Behar

Award-winning anthropologist Ruth Behar’s groundbreaking book, The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology That Breaks Your Heart, turns twenty-five this year! Eloquently interweaving ethnography and memoir, Behar offers a new theory and practice for humanistic anthropology—an anthropology that is lived and written in a personal voice. She did so with the hope that it would lead us toward greater depth of understanding and feeling, not only in contemporary anthropology, but in all acts of witnessing. (Spoiler alert: yes, it has!) For Hispanic-Latinx Heritage Month, Beacon Broadside editor Christian Coleman caught up with her to chat about the book’s anniversary.

Christian Coleman: The Vulnerable Observer was pioneering when it first came out in 1996 because it proposed the concept of vulnerability in social research. Why was this concept so novel at the time?

Ruth Behar: So much has changed in the last twenty-five years that sometimes we forget how different were the paradigms we worked with before. Anthropologists were taught that they had to approach their research from a distance. This meant silencing the story of your entanglement with a specific set of people, in a specific place, in a specific moment in time, and how knowledge gets produced in this messy, haunting, unrepeatable process. By concealing your presence, your feelings of vulnerability as an observer, and how the social world you observe connects with your own life, you would supposedly be “unobtrusive” and “neutral” and “more objective.” But that stance asked that you deny any self-positioning regarding gender, race, class, nationality, and other markers of identity, that you somehow be an invisible observer.

I felt extremely uncomfortable attempting to pursue research from this perspective. I questioned it from the start. In The Vulnerable Observer, I gave voice to the alienation I had felt about the detachment I was supposed to maintain when carrying out social research and writing about my experience. But that detached approach to social research was so ingrained that, when the book came out and I spoke of being vulnerable, some academic readers were taken aback. The word “vulnerable” wasn’t in wide circulation. Scholars weren’t supposed to be emotionally invested in social research, and if you were, that was not something you’d ever write about.

Over time, a paradigm shift took place, and now anthropologists, social researchers, and writers embrace their vulnerability and describe their self-positioning and speak openly of the emotional consequences of their work. The Vulnerable Observer has been part of this sea change. Since the publication of the book, the usage of the word “vulnerable” has gone through a boom in the English language. In anthropology alone, its usage has increased by 400%. The Vulnerable Observer played a role in spurring the word—and the concept—into our lexicon.

CC: Where did the idea of bringing vulnerability to anthropology come from? How did you find yourself developing this concept for your work?

RB: In the late 1980s, early 1990s, several scholars of diverse backgrounds challenged the norm of writing in third person, unwilling to accept self-erasure, and they wrote their scholarship in their unique personal voices. This was a dramatic shift. Much of the academic world rejected it, dismissing the idea of writing personally as “self-indulgent.” In anthropology, it was taboo, because the discipline prides itself on turning its gaze on the lives of those being observed, not on the observer; and we study and advocate for people in the plural, as collectives, communities, cultures. To call attention to yourself was not just distracting but shameful. Arguments arose as to whether work that incorporated the story of the anthropologist into the story of those being studied was “really” anthropology. I was so vexed about this that I ended up writing an essay for the Chronicle of Higher Education in 1994 that was called precisely, “Dare We Say ‘I’?”

The shift in the academy was a response to the late 1960s rallying cry: “The personal is political.” It was such an obvious assertion and yet so radical. Feminist scholars and African American and Latinx poets and writers began to tell stories about their lives in first-person voices that had never been told before, raising awareness about sexism and misogyny, racism, and inequality. Autobiographical writing was embraced across the disciplines, in medicine, law, and art. In anthropology in this era, there were calls to decolonize the discipline and do away with the idea of the “other” as the focus of our studies. This led to self-reflexive work that connected the personal with the ethnographic, and eventually, to the notion of autoethnography. And then the “literary turn” took place, which drew attention to the fact that anthropologists are writers constructing narratives of their journeys and so are always implicated in how they represent the people they are observing.

Allowing the personal voice into scholarship, into anthropology, was crucial for letting vulnerability come through the gates, too. Once you are writing as “I,” you can address your own vulnerability as well as the vulnerability of those who’ve let you into their lives. For me, writing as “I” made me want to know what it means to observe others and write about them. Who am “I” to have the right to do that? The concept of vulnerability grew out of my need to try to answer that fraught question.

Through experiences carrying out research in Spain, Mexico, and Cuba, I came to realize that the psychic state of the observer, the reality of what was going on in my life at the moment of observation, had consequences for what I could and couldn’t see, what I could and couldn’t understand. And this knowledge needed to be worked through in the writing, because it is in the retrospective act of writing that you process the multidimensional and sensorial experience of doing anthropological research. To do that research, you enter into relationships with people who are kind enough to let you into their lives. In the course of getting to know about their dreams and struggles, you come to care about them greatly. You form deep attachments to both the people and the places where you’ve lived, often for many years, returning over and over. In the end, as I’ve said in the book somewhere, what we’re enacting is our shared mortality. That’s the deep core of the concept of vulnerability.

CC: Have you seen the effect the book has had on readers over the course of twenty-five years? Do you have any favorite stories about people who have connected with it or use and recommend it as a reference?

RB: It’s been humbling to learn that The Vulnerable Observer is a widely-cited book, with thousands of citations. The book is described as a “classic,” as a book that sparked “an epiphany.” The Vulnerable Observer has influenced scholars not just in anthropology and sociology (where it is included in many qualitative research guides, handbooks, scholarly reflections, and ethnographies), but also across many disciplines well-beyond anthropology, ranging from psychology to education to health to rhetoric (and even to management studies). Readers say that the book poignantly put a label on something anthropologists and other scholars had been grappling with but had not coalesced around a fitting term for the practice of thinking through and laying bare one’s subjectivity and personal connection to research. Even academic readers who are critical describe the book as “the right way” to do vulnerable work, incorporating only those personal disclosures that add to the ethnographic account and analysis, rather than distract from it. I’ve been struck by how many scholars and writers borrow the book’s title for their own work, writing about “Trying to be a Vulnerable Observer,” or “Reflections of a Vulnerable Observer” or “When Collecting Data Can Break Your Heart.”

Beyond the academy, the book has engaged journalists, writers, and general readers. I was delighted to see The Vulnerable Observer included in a list of “The Best Books That Capture the Complexities of Writing About the Real World.” Travel writer Tim Hannigan, the author of that list, described my work as offering “a recognition of the way your own personal and cultural baggage colours your way of seeing, and of the way that you, the writer, are always part of the story.” A reviewer on Goodreads noted, “This book is introspective, passionate, and raw. Ruth Behar crafts a masterpiece of authenticity in this autoethnography.”

Throughout the years, I’ve received many kind letters and emails praising the book. I’ve met students and colleagues all over the world who’ve been influenced and inspired by the book. That has been so moving, and totally unexpected. I admit it’s a little scary when someone tells me they decided to go into anthropology after reading The Vulnerable Observer. That’s actually happened several times, and it’s a lot of responsibility to bear. I mean, what if they’re not happy once they’re pursuing a career in anthropology? But it’s consoling to know that people bring their own desires and needs to their reading of the book and draw the energy they’re seeking from it. Just two days ago, I received an email from a young professor who’s teaching a seminar on ethnography, and they said, “Your work and words often serve as a reminder for me to feed my soul. . . Every time I re-read or read anew your work, it reminds me of who I want to be when I ‘grow up’ someday. Thanks for what YOU gave us—both my students and me.” 

CC: And lastly, what surprised you about The Vulnerable Observer that you didn’t foresee or anticipate when it was first published?

RB: I didn’t expect that The Vulnerable Observer would end up on many course syllabi. I’ve learned that numerous students read it each semester. Or at least they’re assigned to read it. I hope they actually read it! Evidently, they are often asked to write about it. You can even purchase a student essay about the book online.

 

About Ruth Behar 

Ruth Behar, ethnographer, essayist, poet, and filmmaker, is professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan. The recipient of a MacArthur Fellows Award and a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, Behar is the author of several books, including The Vulnerable Observer. She lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Follow her on Twitter at @ruthbehar and visit her website.

By Philip Warburg

The Better Buildings Act, now making its way through the Massachusetts legislature, is a monumental step toward curbing fossil fuel use by larger commercial and public buildings. Yet even as we focus on these major carbon polluters, we cannot lose sight of the need to bring clean energy solutions to residential communities, particularly those that have been unable to tap the solar energy that shines on their rooftops.

In recent years, more than 100,000 solar arrays have been installed on Massachusetts homes and businesses, but the Commonwealth’s lower-income communities have experienced little of that growth. In some of those communities, local activists are teaming up with enlightened entrepreneurs to close the solar power gap.

When Boston-based Resonant Energy was looking for low-income homeowners to join its Solar Access Program, it’s no surprise that Elnora Thompson stepped up. For decades, she has dedicated herself to strengthening community ties and healing the environment in Boston’s Dorchester neighborhood, a few blocks from Codman Square. First, she spearheaded community gardening; then she turned to solar power. 

Shortly after moving to her current home in 1990, Thompson learned about a makeshift community garden where she could plant some vegetables. “There were ten guys here at the time, and I was the only woman,” she recalls as we sit in the morning shade beneath a pergola surrounded by tight rows of beans, greens, sunflowers, and staked tomato plants. “They appointed me the coordinator, so I have been doing it ever since.”

About a decade ago, when a condo complex was proposed for the garden site, Thompson was on the front lines rallying opposition to the project. “We got Codman Square Health Center, ABCD [Action Plan for Boston Community Development], all the grocery stores, and everybody with a nutritional link to come on board with us.” After a multi-year struggle, the community gardeners won title to the property from the City of Boston for a dollar and registered the Nightingale Community Garden as a nonprofit organization. Today, the garden has 134 plots and yields 25,000 pounds of fresh produce annually.

Thompson recalls her first encounter with Resonant Energy a few years ago. “A young lady showed up at my house, and I was in my front yard working. She said, ‘We have this program,’ and she started explaining it to me. I said, ‘I run a community meeting over at Codman Square Library and we’re meeting tonight. Why don’t you come over and present?’”

At the meeting, Resonant Energy’s field representative described the company’s offering. In exchange for leasing out roof space to Resonant for a solar array, homeowners would receive twenty percent of the sun-generated power free of charge. The estimated savings, deducted from their monthly electricity bills, would amount to roughly $500 per year, and after ten years, the homeowners would have the option to buy the solar arrays outright at a deeply discounted price.

Nine people expressed initial interest, but progress was slow. Thompson worked hard at reining in her neighbors’ impatience with the many months it took to line up financing for their installations and a contractor to install the solar arrays. After multiple neighborhood meetings and working sessions with Resonant staff around her kitchen table, Thompson and five of her Dorchester neighbors now have solar power on their property. Her own photovoltaic (PV) array was activated on August 24.

One of the barriers to low-income solar access is the cost of buying and installing a rooftop PV array, averaging more than $15,000 in Massachusetts. Federal and state investment tax credits on renewable energy—a real boon to solar buyers with sufficient taxable income—are of little use to low-income households. A low FICO credit score can pose other obstacles: it may bar homeowners of modest means from taking out a loan for the purchase of a PV array, prevent them from leasing solar equipment, and dim their prospects of signing a power purchase agreement that would let them buy electricity from a company that has installed its own solar panels on their property. Resonant’s Solar Access Program surmounts all those hurdles, offering solar power at no upfront cost and without any ongoing financial obligations.

Resonant Energy, as a certified B Corporation, is legally bound to conduct business in a socially and environmentally responsible way. The company’s mission, as co-founder and co-CEO Ben Underwood describes it, is “to fundamentally change how the profits of the solar industry are distributed and whom they benefit.” Resonant, a worker-owned company, has installed four megawatts of solar power on individual homes, multi-family affordable housing, and houses of worship across Massachusetts, plus a few in New York State. That’s more than the electricity needed for 650 average American homes.

Financing for Elnora Thompson’s roof and several other Resonant Energy projects comes from Sunwealth, a Cambridge-based investment firm whose mission aligns with Resonant’s goal of advancing solar access and inclusion. Jess Brooks, chief development officer at Sunwealth, describes the challenge her firm addresses: “On the investor’s side, how do you connect all the people who care about addressing climate change, particularly care about building strong and more vibrant regional solar economics, want to be invested in local solar projects supporting local businesses, and care about a more equitable clean energy future?” 

In expanding the reach of solar power to households and communities that mainstream lenders steer clear of, Brooks emphasizes that Sunwealth operates within existing capital markets. “Sunwealth has intentionally chosen to develop in a way where we are delivering returns to investors. We are not requiring a grant subsidy to do the work.” In some older homes, though, antiquated wiring and aging roofs have to be replaced before solar can be safely installed. Ben Underwood says that Resonant has raised extra funds from philanthropic sources to cover those expenses.

Sunwealth’s CEO Jon Abe acknowledges that, while many of the installations it finances serve low-income households, it’s often cheaper to install solar systems in suburban and rural areas than in crowded cities with older buildings and electric distribution networks that strain under the added load of solar power. That’s part of what makes Sunwealth’s collaboration with Resonant Energy so impressive. Neither firm is charting the most effortless path to a clean energy future; both are dedicated to balancing profits and environmental gains with a commitment to leveling the solar power playing field for underserved communities.

Rev. Mariama White-Hammond, the City of Boston’s chief environmental officer, gave the keynote last month at a backyard celebration of Resonant Energy’s first half-decade. “I’m glad to be here, where a few crazy people said, ‘We’re going to try something different, we’re going to put ourselves out there,’” she said. “I hope it will make all of us walk away from here asking, ‘What is the next courageous, community-driven, creative solution that we are going to go for?’ Because time is running out and the status quo certainly isn’t working.”

 

About the Author 

Philip Warburg is a Senior Fellow at Boston University’s Institute for Sustainable Energy.

This year’s theme for Hispanic/Latinx Heritage Month is Esperanza: A Celebration of Hispanic Heritage and Hope. It invites Hispanic and Latinx communities to reflect on how good our tomorrow can be by holding onto resilience and hope. The following books from our catalog wouldn’t be here without our authors’ sense of hope, be it the hope of a better future embodied in the text or the hope that the book will reach the reader who needs it. In each one, you will experience stories of resilience in the face of seeking justice, of crossing borders and carving out a space for one’s self in an uninviting country, adding to the complexities and contradictions of the United States’ narrative. One of these books is for you. Happy Hispanic/Latinx Heritage Month!

 

An African American and Latinx History of the United States

I wrote this book because as a scholar I want to ensure that no Latinx or Black children ever again have to be ashamed of who they are and of where they come from. Collectively speaking, African Americans and Latinx people have nothing to apologize for. Every democratic right we enjoy is an achievement that our ancestors fought, suffered, and died for.
—Paul Ortiz

 

Boomerang/Bumerán

You are returning, you are going back to where it all
began, careful to engage in the necessary oblivion of the
circumstances that took you away in the first place. You will
hold your breath and pretend enough answers have been
provided to satisfy your pride, your urge to be here, on the
threshold of what might have been home if not for upheaval,
if not for the price of sugar and oil on the world market, if
not for the assurance of safety and comfort elsewhere, if not
for revolution and exile.

/

Vas de regreso, vas a volver a donde empezó todo, con
cuidado de establecer le obligade olvido de les circunstancias
que te alejaron en le primer lugar. Vas a contener le
respiración y pretender que suficientes respuestas han sido
proporcionades para satisfacer tu orgullo, tu afán de estar
aquí, en le umbral de lo que podría haber sido tu hogar, de
no haber sido por le agitación, de no haber sido por le precio
de le azúcar y de le petróleo en le mercado mundial, de no
haber sido por le garantía de seguridad y de confort en otre
lugar, de no haber sido por revolución y exilio.
—Achy Obejas

 

A Cup of Water Under My Bed: A Memoir

I begin resenting Spanish. At first, it happens in small ways. I realize I can’t tell my mother about the Pilgrims and Indians because I don’t know the Spanish word for Pilgrims. I can’t talk about my essay on school safety because I don’t know the Spanish word for safety. To share my life in English with my family means I have to give a short definition for each word that is not already a part of our lives. I try sometimes, but most of the time I grow weary and finally sigh and mutter, “Olvídate.” Forget it. This is how Spanish starts annoying me. I suppose it’s what happens when you’re young and frustrated, but you can’t be angry at the white teachers because that would get you nowhere, and you can’t be too upset with your parents because they want what they think is best for you.
—Daisy Hernández

 

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

Like millions, these Mexican men and women have worked diligently over the course of three decades to create networks of resistance and solidarity and keep forging ahead. They have refused to be the victims of the broken systems of both countries and have triumphed over adversity against all expectations. Thanks to this history of struggle and perseverance, on both sides of the border, they are standing up to the politicians in the United States who convey, in words and in actions, that they are not wanted here.
—Eileen Truax

 

How to Love a Country

Como tú, I question history’s blur in my eyes
each time I face a mirror. Like a mirror, I gaze
into my palm a wrinkled map I still can’t read,
my lifeline an unnamed road I can’t find, can’t
trace back to the fork in my parents’ trek
that cradled me here. Como tú, I woke up to
this dream of a country I didn’t choose, that
didn’t choose me—trapped in the nightmare
of its hateful glares. Como tú, I’m also from
the lakes and farms, waterfalls and prairies
of another country I can’t fully claim either.
Como tú, I am either a mirage living among
these faces and streets that raised me here,
or I’m nothing, a memory forgotten by all
I was taken from and can’t return to again.
—Richard Blanco

 

An Incomplete List of Names: Poems

No one calls me Miguel
except those who don’t know me
or those who do.

America what do you want me to say?
There are too many of your voices in my ear;
I don’t know what you look like anymore.
America what size are you now?
—Michael Torres

 

The Weight of Shadows: A Memoir of Immigration & Displacement

How strange to be welcomed now, since I’ve lived my life here from before I can remember. My cultural references are decidedly 80s and 90s United States—Urkel, Alex P. Keaton, Tom & Jerry, Biggie—and despite my best efforts I sometimes slip into a Chicago accent, cutting my A’s short. . . . I don’t feel any different after saying “I will,” but I know there are some real changes that have just taken place, not to my body—and it’s really too soon for anything to have changed in my mind—but to the relations I have to the place in which I live, its bureaucracy, and its ability to restrict my movement.
—José Orduña

 

Women Writing Resistance: Essays on Latin America and the Caribbean, ed. Jennifer Browdy

The big and the little screens have presented us with the picture of the funny Hispanic maid, mispronouncing words and cooking up a spicy storm in a shiny California kitchen. This media-engendered image of the Latina in the United States has been documented by feminist Hispanic scholars, who claim that such portrayals are partially responsible for the denial of opportunities for upward mobility among Latinas in the professions.
—Judith Ortiz Cofer, “The Myth of the Latin Woman”

By Joan Murray

Last week, I got a call from a stranger. She was an elder at a church planning a remembrance ceremony for the twentieth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks and asked if I’d read a poem. It was a poem I wrote on an Amtrak train four days after the attacks, and when I read it on NPR four days later, it became something of an anthem. Thousands of people from all over the world wanted copies: A factory owner in the Midwest wanted to read it to his workers; a Maryland police sergeant wanted to read it to her officers before they went on duty; a Canadian physician wanted to read it at a conference. People said they needed the poem.

The poem shot out of me after I ran into a group of young men in the train’s café car. They were wearing shorts and jeans but were standing in a way that made it seem they were on a mission. When I asked them, they said they were firemen on their way to New York “to dig at the Pile.” I said, “I hope you find some survivors,” and went back to my seat, and out came “Survivors—Found.” I believe its power lay in its empathy and compassion, the way it paid tribute to the goodness of everyday people, the way it shone a light on our better natures and gave us something to weigh against the horrors of that day. Those horrors were unspeakable, but, as people said, the poem spoke to their souls. It didn’t mention burning buildings. It mentioned window washers, waitresses, and firemen.

My grandfather was a New York fireman, yet it was the firemen on the train who reminded me of my parents’ generation, the so-called “greatest generation,” who did difficult and selfless things, often because they had to. My own generation was the movement-politics generation that questioned authority and created positive social change. With our casual anti-American posture and intellectual-class privilege, we dominated the media. But in the four days following the attacks, there were other people on our screens: Latina women ladling soup to rescue workers; iron workers cutting tangled beams; people in small cities donating blood. Everyday Americans. And we found ourselves among them.

That vision was widely embraced. I was invited to read the poem at the official New York State 9/11 Memorial Observance, at a stadium unveiling of the 9/11 stamp, and at a Fallen Brothers Foundation fundraiser. NECN TV in Boston used my reading as the voiceover for a 9/11 video, and three publishers asked me to put together an anthology in response to the attacks.

I agreed to do an anthology with Beacon since they’d published me before and I knew they’d do something meaningful and respectful. (No burning buildings on the cover!) I called the book Poems to Live By in Uncertain Times, and, for its contents, I chose poems from my home library that I’d turned to before in difficult times: poems about loss by Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Jane Kenyon, Daniel Berrigan, and others; poems of wisdom by Lucille Clifton, Seamus Heaney, and Primo Levi, and more; poems that spoke directly to the soul about fear, courage, war, and the elusive need to pray. And, at my editor’s insistence, I included “Survivors—Found.”

For two months, I worked day and night, as did everyone at Beacon, to ensure we’d have Poems to Live by in Uncertain Times in hand on November 11 (two months after the attacks) when I read at the firefighters’ fundraiser. The book quickly became a Beacon Bestseller, and five years later, in response to the unconscionable wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, I put together another anthology, Poems to Live By in Troubling Times. The books remain popular because they’re not about 9/11 or the post-9/11 wars, but about the struggles in the human heart and conscience. As a stranger said by phone, “My wife died a year ago, and the only thing that’s helped me is your book.”

So how do I feel about “Survivors—Found” now? I’m proud and grateful to have written it, and I’m enormously gratified that it helped so many who were wounded or traumatized by 9/11, or who needed words to express their grief and sympathy. But after all the horrifying deaths of the past twenty years—the COVID deaths of more than 640,000 people in the US alone; the opioid deaths of 500,000; the deaths of 7,000 US troops and untold Middle Easterners in the post-9/11 wars; as well as the numerous people killed by fires or floods or at the hands of civilian racists or police—is it still appropriate to remember those lost on 9/11?

I don’t believe tragedies vie for exclusivity or for a high notch on a sliding scale of grief. If I grieve for the mass-shooting victims at Sandy Hook Elementary, Pulse Nightclub, the El Paso Walmart, or Mother Emanuel Church, can’t I also grieve for those murdered on 9/11? If I mourn for Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Walter Scott, Alton Sterling, Philando Castile, Ahmaud Arbery, Stephon Clark, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Daunte Wright, and Elijah McClain, can’t I also mourn for Father Mycah Judge, the openly gay NYC firefighter chaplain; and Bernard Brown, the eleven-year-old Black boy on the plane that hit the Pentagon; and Walter Hynes, the brother-in-law of one of my oldest friends, who was one of the 343 firefighters among the nearly three thousand people murdered that day?

The 9/11 attacks came before all those other tragedies. I believe it hit us so hard because it was so unimaginable, because it was so instantaneous and enormous, because its images were so searing, and because we felt so innocent. But I also believe that the acute sense of loss we felt on 9/11 opened our hearts, and I hope that on this significant anniversary, our hearts will open even wider.

***

“Survivors—Found”

and the heroes standing ready—
not glamorous enough—
on days without a tragedy,
we clicked—and turned them off.

We only say the cynics—
The dropouts, show-offs, snobs—
The right- and left-wing critics:
We thought that they were us.

But with the wounds of Tuesday
When the smoke began to clear,
We rubbed away our stony gaze—
And watched them reappear:

the waitress in the tower,
the broker reading mail,
the pair of window washers,
filling up a final pail,

the husband’s last “I love you”
from the last seat of a plane,
the tourist taking in a view
no one would see again,

the fireman, his eyes ablaze
as he climbed the swaying stairs—
he knew someone might still be saved.
We wondered who it was.

We glimpsed them through the rubble:
the ones who lost their lives,
the heroes’ double burials,
the ones now “left behind,”

the ones who rolled a sleeve up,
the ones in scrubs and masks,
the ones who lifted buckets
filled with stone and grief and ash:

some spoke a different language—
still no one missed a phrase;
the soot had softened every face
of every shade and age—

“the greatest generation”?—
we wondered where they’d gone—
they hadn’t left directions
how to find our nation-home:

for thirty years we saw few signs,
but now in swirls of dust,
they were alive—they had survived—
we saw that they were us.

 

About the Author 

Joan Murray is a National Poetry Series winner, a two-time National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship winner, and winner of Poetry Society of America’s Gordon Barber Award. Her five full-length collections include Swimming for the Ark: New & Selected Poems 1990-2015, Dancing on the Edge, Queen of the Mist, Looking for the Parade, and The Same Water. She is editor of The Pushcart Book of Poetry and the Poems to Live By anthologies from Beacon Press.

Ch-ch-ch-changes are happening to the US population, and time is changing us. The results from the Census Bureau’s 2020 head count are in: the country is growing more urban and more racially and ethnically diverse! And more citizens are identifying as mixed race. Put another way, the population is growing less white. White Americans are on track to make up the minority by 2042. What does this mean for a country founded on enslavement, settler colonialism, and systemic disenfranchisement? Let’s take several steps back to get perspective. These books from our catalog will be enlightening for our increasingly diverse future.

 

Did That Just Happen?!: Beyond “Diversity”—Creating Sustainable and Inclusive Organizations
Dr. Stephanie Pinder-Amaker and Lauren Wadsworth

The more diverse the workplace becomes, the more we’ll need to improve cultural awareness of a variety of communities and identities to sustain inclusivity at the office. It’s not a one-size-fits-all solution. Drs. Stephanie Pinder-Amaker and Lauren Wadsworth offer real-life accounts that illustrate common workplace occurrences around inclusivity and answers to questions like “How do I identify and handle diversity landmines at work?” and “What can I do when I’ve made a mistake?”

 

Nice Racism: How Progressive White People Perpetuate Racial Harm
Robin DiAngelo

Old habits die harder than a block of cement. Racism is one of them, whether it’s explicit or dressed up in niceness by White progressives. Don’t be surprised to see White families flocking to strictly white enclaves, especially for “better” schools and school districts. One of the moves of “nice racism” that Robin DiAngelo identifies in White progressives is pretending their preference for segregation is accidental. “It’s just a fluke,” they’ll say, or “This school is a better fit for my child.” They’re rewarded for living in White neighborhoods and, consequently, perpetuating segregation.

 

One Drop: Shifting the Lens on Race
Yaba Blay

The US Census has a pitiful track record, and you need to know its history. It reveals a lot about how the country thinks about race. Since the period of colonial enslavement, Blacks have been defined by the one-drop rule. Through historiographic overview and sixty individual stories with photographs, Yaba Blay proves how the rule has everything to do with preserving the country club of whiteness and its privileges and nothing to do with Blackness as an identity and lived reality.

 

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

It will be inevitable. White nationalists will freak out and shout claims of white genocide because of the growth in our communities of color. Alexandra Minna Stern takes a deep dive down the rabbit hole to uncover the source of this ideology and teaches us how to recognize it in our cultural, political, and digital landscapes when it rears its ugly head. Because it will. White supremacy is quite the Hydra.

 

Same Family, Different Colors: Confronting Colorism in America’s Diverse Families
Lori L. Tharps

As more individuals and families identify has mixed race, they’ll find themselves navigating colorism, color bias, and skin-color politics. Weaving together personal stories and interviews, history, and cultural analysis, Lori L. Tharps illuminates the complex and multifaceted ways that colorism affects our self-esteem and shapes our lives and relationships. She also includes a brief history of the Census Bureau and how we got the term “Hispanic” in the census in the first place.

 

Some of My Friends Are . . . : The Daunting Challenges and Untapped Benefits of Cross-Racial Friendships
Deborah L. Plummer

In spite of the demographic ch-ch-ch-changes, people will still find ways of staying segregated within their social circles. Most US citizens tend to gravitate toward friendships within their own race. Plummer gives an insightful look at how cross-racial friendships work and fail. She also encourages all of us to examine our friendship patterns and to deepen and strengthen our current cross-racial friendships.

 

Superior: The Return of Race Science
Angela Saini

Continuing with the theme from Stern’s Proud Boys, mainstream scientists can hold fast to the idea that race is a biological reality, no matter how educated they are. The hope of finding simple genetic differences between “races”—to explain differing rates of disease, to explain poverty or test scores, or to justify cultural assumptions—stubbornly persists. Saini examines of the insidious and destructive nature of race science—and reminds us that, biologically, we are all far more alike than different.

 

Success Through Diversity: Why Inclusive Companies Will Win
Carol Fulp

Increasing demographics in our diverse society means our workforce will grow more racially and ethnically diverse. Companies that proactively embrace diversity in all areas of their operations will be best poised to thrive. Renowned business leader and visionary Carol Fulp explores staffing trends in the US and provides a blueprint for what businesses must do to maintain their competitiveness and customer base.

 

When One Religion Isn’t Enough: The Lives of Spiritually Fluid People
Duane R. Bidwell

With more people identifying as mixed race, there’s a good chance that they’ll come from two or more religious traditions. They’re part of the spiritually fluid community. No, they’re not confused or unable to commit. Duane R. Bidwell explores how they celebrate complex religious bonds, and in the process, blur social categories, evoke prejudice, and complicate religious communities. Religious and spiritual identity are not pure, static, and singular as we may assume.

 

White Space, Black Hood: Opportunity Hoarding and Segregation in the Age of Inequality
Sheryll Cashin

In spite of the growing diversity of our population, opportunity hoarding and segregation will still be a thing, because white supremacy lies at the root of the US caste system. Sheryll Cashin contends that geography is central to US caste and traces the history of anti-Black residential caste to unpack its current legacy so we can begin the work to dismantle the structures and policies that undermine Black lives.

By Jon Hale

Last week, the State Board of Education in Florida allowed parents to apply for vouchers and enroll in a different school if their children were subject to “COVID-19 harassment.” The policy enforces Governor Ron DeSantis’ anti-masking directive. His order protects parents’ “freedom to choose” whether to mask or not, despite an alarming rise in COVID cases in the state. The order also threatened to withhold funding if school boards did not comply with the law.

Gov. DeSantis’ “freedom to choose” and the use of vouchers to protect that freedom has a troubled history in Florida—as it does across the country.

A school voucher is publicly funded credit used to cover the cost of private schools. School vouchers fund or compensate a family directly as opposed to funding a public school. It is part of the conservative and libertarian mantra of “funding students, instead of systems” that is a cornerstone of the modern school choice movement.

The storied history behind vouchers and school choice in Florida and across the nation, however, is much more insidious than simply funding students.

In Florida and across the South, vouchers were initially designed to circumvent desegregation after the Brown v. Board of Education (1954) decision. They were an integral part of “school choice” policies.

Southern legislators amended state constitutions to support private school costs by compensating the cost of tuition through grants. They provided state tax credit for contributions to private segregated schools. In addition to vouchers, policymakers repealed compulsory education laws, authorizing school closures if ordered to desegregate by the government or courts. Legislators also expanded the decision-making authority of local school boards to implement pupil-placement laws.

Florida and other states also passed “freedom of choice” plans to avoid desegregation. On paper, anyone regardless of race could apply to any school in the area. But the plans placed the onus of desegregation on Black families. Withholding transportation for white schools while harassing Black transfer students, white parents and representatives ensured that such plans were largely ineffective, leading only to token desegregation.

These policies coincided with other forms of massive resistance to desegregation in the 1950s and 1960s that targeted Black schools and teachers. Legislators shuttered historically black schools and fired Black teachers with impunity.

Passed in the wake of the Brown decision, it was clear that vouchers and “school choice” were weapons in the larger fight to preserve segregation. Vouchers—and school choice in general—were used to maintain segregation and preserve control of the schools.

Though courts struck vouchers down as part of the “freedom of choice” plans in the 1960s, the idea of vouchers remained. Ronald Reagan, for instance, touted vouchers and privatization in his administration. His plans were soundly defeated, but the idea persisted and even garnered judicial support.

By the 1990s, courts retreated from enforcing desegregation goals and schools largely remained segregated—and many districts re-segregated. This paved the way for vouchers, which, on paper, promised to reform a broken public system. Once the Supreme Court affirmed the constitutionality of vouchers in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris (2002) and more recently in Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue (2020) decision, vouchers advocates renewed their commitment.

Betsy DeVos, the controversial Secretary of Education under Donald Trump, provided unabashed support for vouchers. She advocated for millions for vouchers and other choice options such as charter schools. Though largely rebuffed by Congress, like Reagan, DeVos ignited demand and support for vouchers, positioning them as a valid option in the larger school choice debate.

Vouchers remained an enticing option for DeSantis and other southern governors like Henry McMaster of South Carolina, who proposed spending COVID relief funding on vouchers for private schools.

Today, vouchers are used in Florida in the same way as they were in the past. Gov. DeSantis passed the anti-masking mandate to “protect the freedoms and rights of students and parents.” Much like the 1950s and 1960s in the attempt to avoid desegregation and federal oversight, “freedom” is used to protect the right of parents to avoid governmental intervention.

Then and now, the use of “freedom” in this way is detrimental to the public good. In the 1950s and 1960s, the freedom to choose schools protected the right of white parents to support private “segregation academies.” The sole purpose was to preserve all-white schools. This allowed racist policy, segregation, and diversion of public funds to fester.

Also like the past, linking vouchers to freedom—in this case freedom from masks—is not only suspect, but immediately precarious. In the current context of the pandemic, vouchers effect a parallel danger to society and the larger public good. DeSantis illuminates the harm perpetuated by vouchers and legislating the “right to choose” schools. After the schools reopened this fall, COVID cases have been soaring in Florida. In one district, over 10,000 students, staff, and teachers were isolated or quarantined after the first week of school. Other districts that reported hundreds of cases have defied the governor’s orders and mandated masks.

Public schools in Florida—and other states with voucher policies—are under dual threats. They face a continual risk of losing funds over implementing recommended CDC guidelines while also losing public funds to private schools through vouchers.

The historical record documents the danger of vouchers to a shared public good. The recent use of vouchers in Florida merely affirms the clear and present danger it continues to pose.

 

About the Author 

Jon Hale is a professor of educational history at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and an advocate for quality public education. Hale’s research in education has been published in The Atlantic, CNN.com, Education Week, the American Scholar, and the African American Intellectual History Series. His books include The Freedom Schools, To Write in the Light of Freedom, and The Choice We Face. Follow him on Twitter at @ed_organizer.

Back-to-School season is tinged with precariousness this year. While Delta variant cases surge, many schools are reopening and resuming in-person classes. Even though the Biden administration announced plans to offer COVID booster shots in September, the fact remains that conditions at institutions of learning aren’t safe or fully resourced. We asked some of our authors what they would like folks to be aware of on the education front as students and educators return to the classroom. And given our pandemic reality, we also asked them how they think schools could take this opportunity to re-envision themselves for a better, post-COVID future.

***

Billions of dollars in federal COVID relief funds are heading to local public-school districts, but administrators in these districts have few good ideas of where to put the money. There was already a teacher shortage; more teachers are not available to hire. Tech companies selling often useless online “solutions” will likely rake in huge profits. But a proven, crucial use for some significant part of these funds is at hand, though rarely discussed. Put the money directly into the pockets of high school students by employing them to share knowledge and skills with their peers and younger children. They can be paid to teach or use anything they know: solving an equation, making a video, putting on a play, running a sports league, doing a dance, speaking another language (including ASL), reading Braille, collecting oral histories from elders in the neighborhood, fixing a bike, and on and on. The “proven” part is that meaningful employment in high school leads to many great outcomes: high school and college completion, higher lifetime earnings, more stable marriages, better health, and more. And of course, the young people being taught reap all kinds of benefits as well. The key to rethinking American education is to understand that the students already in high school are the culturally informed experts we currently think we lack. Pay them, and they’ll start teaching right away.
—Jay Gillen, The Power in the Room: Radical Education Through Youth Organizing and Employment

 

I am scared as hell for my nieces and nephews and for all the wonderful teachers I know who are returning to schools. At the same time, this is an opportunity to reimagine education, and make it more equitable for the most marginalized. Now is the time for radical change in how we approach schooling for our young people.
—Kyle T. Mays, An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States

 

The United States has experienced the Global Pandemic as a horrific tragedy. But for the nation’s fatal embrace of “profits over people,” we could have avoided hundreds of thousands of agonizing deaths. What should have been a clarion call for re-examining the nation’s flawed institutions instead became a debate about “science vs. anti-science,” as if our problems were a matter of semantics instead of the crushing racial and class oppressions that magnify the devastating impact of COVID-19 on working class African American, Latinx, Asian, and immigrant communities.

As educators and students by the millions return to unsafe and under-resourced classrooms, we must carry forward the lessons of the global Black Lives Matter movement and fight harder than ever to end systemic racism, homophobia, and economic injustice. As teachers, we must practice compassion, patience, and antiracism in our classrooms. We should embrace lifelong learning and remember that our students, no matter how ‘disadvantaged,’ bring new forms of wisdom and dissident knowledge into our classrooms. These forms of knowledge “from below” are superior in intellectual content and liberatory potential than the ideologies of the corrupt status quo in this society. ¡La lucha continúa!
—Paul Ortiz, An African American and Latinx History of the United States

 

The back-to-school pictures this year on social media carried an unmistakable tone of worry that tempered the excitement of back-to-school routines. Children’s infection rates are skyrocketing with Delta variant of COVID-19, many schools have shifted from in-person to quarantine or back to online after positive cases surfaced quickly. What explains this seemingly haphazard collection of steps and missteps? In keeping with the deeply regional control over education policies that are still consistently imbued with nationalist narratives of boot-strap grit and individualism, schools are reopening as petri dishes in which those narratives are overriding the ability to say “We reopened too quickly” or “There is still so much we don’t know about this virus” or perhaps the most important statement “We are not going to run real-time experiments on people, including children.” Universities have been making strong plans to fully reopen face-to-face instruction, with a mixture of requiring vaccinated status and masks. Those hallowed halls, much like K-12 districts, are announcing changes to teach remotely days before course start; meanwhile, students are arriving on campus. 

The much decried ‘learning loss’ pales in comparison to the literal loss of life. A sad but reasonable observation is that it may take the chaos of schools reopening and full beds in pediatric units of hospitals to sober a ‘COVID fatigued’ society to revisit what it claims to be its core values and actually enact them. We have, still, the opportunity and responsibility to learn the foundational lesson of this pandemic: everything we do affects others.
—Leigh Patel, No Study Without Struggle: Confronting Settler Colonialism in Higher Education

By Peter Jan Honigsberg

Daniel A. Medina’s excellent article on Mohammed al-Qahtani, the would-be twentieth al-Qaeda terrorist hijacker, identifies an important long-term problem that all presidents have faced since al-Qaeda terrorists crashed planes into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a field in Pennsylvania on September 11, 2001. Does due process apply to Guantánamo? As Medina points out in discussing al-Qahtani’s case, the Biden administration has not taken a stance on this question.

Under a due process and rule of law system, the men in Guantánamo would not have been held for years and, for some, even a decade or more without charges. They would have had access to attorneys from the time they were first incarcerated to challenge their detentions and assure them of other due process rights. They would have been guaranteed full and fair trials in federal court to defend any charges brought against them. They would not have been systematically physically and psychologically tortured in the prison. (Psychological torture includes periods of isolation, sleep deprivation, and sensory deprivation such as wearing hoods.)

Al-Qahtani was physically and psychologically tortured in Guantánamo. He nearly died during one episode of unrelenting abuse. His heart rate dropped precipitously in an interrogation session, and he was rushed to the hospital. In 2008, senior Pentagon official Susan Crawford refused to allow the military to prosecute al-Qahtani. “We tortured Qahtani,” she admitted. 

As Median notes in his article, the Biden administration has until September 8 to decide whether to: 1.) challenge a federal judge’s order to permit a due process right to an independent medical evaluation for al-Qahtani to determine his eligibility for repatriation to Saudi Arabia for psychiatric care; 2.) agree to the medical evaluation for al-Qahtani; or 3.) repatriate him to Saudi Arabia and dodge the issue.

Key to the administration decision is whether Guantánamo detainees are entitled to due process. Previous administrations have argued that such rights do not apply to the detainees.

Due process and the rule of law are the cornerstones of our democracy. We cannot accept that administrations deny these rights to people we have detained. President Biden must take a stand if he is going to lead the US back to the respect it once commanded around the world. He must acknowledge that due process and the rule of law apply at Guantánamo. Denying these rights impacts not only the detainees but has long-term implications for the future of our nation.

“Guantánamo Bay, I think, is going to be seen as the significant start of the fall of American democracy.” In 2012, Australian attorney Stephen Kenny spoke these words to our Witness to Guantánamo project. 

For nearly a decade, Witness to Guantánamo filmed interviews with 158 people who lived or worked in Guantánamo across twenty nations. Fifty-two of the people interviewed were former detainees. Others included prison guards, interrogators, interpreters, chaplains, attorneys, medical personnel, reporters, high ranking military and government officials, and family members of the detainees.

Stephen Kenny was referring to how the United States government broke the rule of law by imprisoning 780 alleged Muslim terrorists from more than forty countries at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The US government denied the men the due process rights that all people detained by the US government are entitled to under the Constitution. Rather than charge them with crimes and hold fair trials, the Bush administration incarcerated the men and threw away the key. 

We will never know how many of the 780 prisoners were international terrorists because nearly all were never charged, tried, or convicted of a crime. In fact, many of the men held in Guantánamo were not captured by US soldiers but were purchased by the US military for ransom or bounty from Pakistani and Afghan soldiers.

Of the thirty-nine prisoners currently at the base, eleven have been charged. Ten other people have been thoroughly vetted by six national security agencies and cleared for release. Although they have been recommended for transfer, they continue to remain housed at the prison until the government can repatriate them or find other countries that are willing to accept them. The Biden administration repatriated one person to Morocco last month.  

Al-Qahtani, along with seventeen other people who were never charged, are essentially “forever” prisoners. The Biden administration should apply the rule of law and due process to Guantánamo and release al-Qahtani, the other seventeen other forever prisoners, and the ten men who have been cleared for release. What kind of message are we sending to the world on the rule of law when we hold people for nearly two decades without charges? 

President Biden must apply our cherished Constitution to the men in Guantánamo. We must be mindful of due process and the rule of law in all our actions. Stephen Kenny’s words should not haunt us in the future.

 

About the Author 

Peter Jan Honigsberg is professor of law at University of San Francisco, founder, and director of Witness to Guantánamo, and author of A Place Outside the Law, Forgotten Voices from Guantánamo, published by Beacon Press.

By Robert P. Moses and Charles E. Cobb, Jr.

Bob Moses left us with a legacy to honor and live up to in the spirit of the civil rights movement today. His work to organize Black voters in Mississippi in the early 1960s famously transformed the political power of communities. Nearly forty years later, he organized again, this time as founder of the national math literacy program called the Algebra Project. The following passages are highlights from Radical Equations, which he wrote with Charles E. Cobb, Jr., that delve into what the Algebra Project was all about and the importance of its foundation in civil rights movement building.

***

The Algebra Project is first and foremost an organizing project—a community organizing project—rather than a traditional program of school reform. It draws its inspiration and its methods from the organizing tradition of the civil rights movement. Like the civil rights movement, the Algebra Project is a process, not an event.

Two key aspects of the Mississippi organizing tradition underlie the Algebra Project: the centrality of families to the work of organizing, and organizing in the context of the community in which one lives and works. As civil rights workers in Mississippi, we were absorbed into families as we moved from place to place with scarcely a dollar in our pockets, and this credential—being one of the community’s children—negated the white power structure’s efforts to label us “outside agitators.” In this way we were able to sink deep roots into the community, enlarging and strengthening connections in and among different communities, absorbing into our consciousness the community’s memories of “where we have been,” forcing us to our own understanding of our collective experience.

We are struggling to frame some important questions: Is there a way to talk with young people today as Amzie Moore and Ella Baker did with us in the 1960s? Is there a consensus for young Blacks, Latinos, and poor whites to tap into that will drive such a literacy effort? What price must they pay to wage such a struggle?

Like Ella Baker, we believe in these young people, that they have the energy, the courage, the hope to devise means to change their condition. Although much concern about the education of African-American young people is voiced today, I am frequently asked why I have turned to teaching school and developing curriculum—teaching middle school and high school no less. There is a hint of criticism in the question, the suggestion that I am wasting my time, have abandoned efforts at attempting real, meaningful social change. After all, in the end, such work “merely” leads to youngsters finding a comfortable place in the system with a good job. Nothing “radical” about that, I am told. This is a failure to understand what actually is “radical,” so it might be useful to repeat what Ella Baker posits as necessary to the struggle of poor and oppressed people: “It means facing a system that does not lend itself to your needs and devising means by which you change that system.”

~~~

So, to understand the Algebra Project you must begin with the idea of our targeted young people finding their voice as sharecroppers and day laborers, maids, farmers, and workers of all sorts found theirs in the 1960s. Of course, there are differences between the 1960s and what the AP is doing now. For one, the time span between the start of the sit-in movement and the challenge by the MFDP in Atlantic City was incredibly brief, sandwiched between two presidential elections (Kennedy-Nixon and Johnson-Goldwater). When I look back it feels like twenty years folded into four; I still can hardly believe how short a time period that was. Math literacy, however, will require a longer time frame. There is a steep learning curve and what we’re looking at with the AP is something evolving over generations as math literacy workers/organizers acquire the skills and training through study and practice and begin tackling the system. Young people, however, may speed this up as youth clearly did in the civil rights movement. And, whereas the right to vote campaign took place in the Deep South, the math literacy problem is throughout the entire nation.

Yet to understand the Algebra Project, you need to understand the spirit and the crucial lessons of the organizing tradition of the civil rights movement. In Mississippi, the voiceless found their voice, and once raised, it could not be ignored. Organizers learned to locate the vast resources in communities that seemed impoverished and paralyzed at first glance. The lessons of the movement in Mississippi are exactly the lessons we need to learn and put into practice in order to transform the education of our children and their prospects for the future. As with voting rights four decades ago, we have to flesh out a consensus on math literacy. Without it, moving the country into systemic change around math education becomes almost impossible. You cannot move this country unless you have consensus. That’s part of what we learned in Mississippi. We learned it on the ground, running.

~~~

The Algebra Project is founded on the idea that the ongoing struggle for citizenship and equality for minority people is now linked to an issue of math and science literacy. This idea determines strategies and choices made about the organization, dissemination, and content of the curriculum. It’s important to make it clear that even the development of some sterling new curriculum—a real breakthrough—would not make us happy if it did not deeply and seriously address the issue of access to literacy for everyone. That is what is driving the project. The Algebra Project is not about simply transferring a body of knowledge to children. It is about using their knowledge as a tool to a much larger end.

~~~

Organizing around algebra has the potential to open a doorway that’s been locked. Math literacy and economic access are the Algebra Project’s foci for giving hope to the young generation. That’s a new problem for educators. It’s a new problem for the country. The traditional role of science and math education has been to train an elite, create a priesthood, find a few bright students and bring them into university research. It hasn’t been a literacy effort. We are putting literacy, math literacy, on the table. Instead of weeding all but the best students out of advanced math, schools must commit to everyone gaining this literacy as they have committed to everyone having a reading-writing literacy.

This is a cultural struggle, the creation of a culture of mathematical literacy that’s going to operate within the Black community as church culture does. And that means that math won’t be just school-based, but available as reading and writing are. Kids now routinely assume that someone will be able to explain some word to them, or teach them how to read a sentence if they don’t understand it. They also take it as a matter of course that no one can help them with their “higher” math studies. Projecting several generations down the road we can see a youngster who has grown up in a Black neighborhood being able to get his or her questions about mathematics as easily answered in the neighborhood.

~~~

Many people will see our vision as impossible. There’s a sense in which most people are not going to believe or accept any of this agenda until they are confronted with the products of such an effort: students who come out of classrooms armed with a new understanding of mathematics and with a new understanding of themselves as leaders, participants, and learners. As I said before, in the sixties everyone said sharecroppers were apathetic until we got them demanding to vote. That finally got attention. Here, where kids are falling wholesale through the cracks—or chasms—dropping out of sight, becoming fodder for jails, people say they do not want to learn. The only ones who can dispel that notion are the kids themselves. They, like Mrs. Hamer, Mrs. Devine, E. W. Steptoe, and others who changed the political face of Mississippi in the 1960s, have to demand what everyone says they don’t want.

 

About the Authors 

Robert P. Moses (1935-2021) was the founder of the Algebra Project and was the winner of many awards, including a MacArthur fellowship and a Heinz Award in the Human Condition. He was the coauthor of Radical Equations: Civil Rights from Mississippi to the Algebra Project.

A journalist for major magazines for thirty years, Charles E. Cobb, Jr. is senior writer at allAfrica.com. He is the coauthor of Radical Equations: Civil Rights from Mississippi to the Algebra Project.

By Perpetua Charles

Two years ago, my partner and I took a small getaway to Portland, Maine. To feel confident on this trip, I was going to need my best early spring outfits and my trusty travel makeup bag. At the time, my natural curls were cropped close to my head and, to be honest, the stylist had done the cut a little lopsided. Unbeknownst to me, I’d also been struggling with the effects of an undiagnosed GI issue. But it didn’t take long into our first afternoon there to discover that my makeup bag didn’t make the trip with me. Dread and panic set in. My partner, a white, straight, cisgender male, had trouble understanding why I was briefly spiraling over this realization. In the moment, I couldn’t find the words to explain what I innately knew. In a city like Portland, I was going to stick out. Without makeup, I was going to stick out even more.

In All Made Up: The Power and Pitfalls of Beauty Culture, from Cleopatra to Kim Kardashian, Rae Nudson explains that white people have historically used beauty standards they set up as a way to keep Black and Brown people from the social and economic capital that could come from being viewed as stylish or beautiful. This dates as far back as the mid- to late-nineteenth century, where formerly enslaved people were still considered and treated as last-class citizens. Nudson writes that skin color and other physical traits associated with Black people were visible ways to make distinctions between people, reinforce social and economic hierarchies, and maintain power structures that kept Black people out.

The next day, my partner and I visited the center of town. I had fun but felt insecure. I regretted leaving my hair creams and gels at home. If I’d brought them, maybe they’d have given me a fighting chance of looking “put-together” in a strange city, I thought. Without my makeup or hair products, I walked the line between enjoying myself and trying to will myself invisible.

Black women frequently struggle with two societal extremes: being scrutinized as though under a microscope or being ignored and looked past as though we were air itself. The more access a Black woman has to beauty products that match her skin tone and conform to beauty standards of the day, the easier she can move through society, hopefully lessening the number of microaggressions she experiences daily. As Nudson explains, Black women stand out, not because of our phenotype, but because the white supremacist structure we live in uses our visible traits to discriminate against us. I couldn’t fully enjoy my lobby-pop (it’s a lobster lollipop; you really had to be there) because of a nagging feeling that I wasn’t blending in.

Later that evening, my partner and I went out for dinner. I was a little self-conscious about my look, but after a day out and about with no incidents, I told myself it was okay to settle into the evening. Then we were seated in the back corner. We had to wait a very long time between visits from our server. We never heard the specials. Our food was lackluster. The tables around us were dutifully attended to but we had to eavesdrop to hear what the night’s specials were. When my partner offered feedback about our experience, our server was passively apologetic. We left the restaurant in search of more (better) food and a place where we could hopefully relax after that tense dinner. We found a bar with a live band. After choosing a spot near the back, I ordered a bite to eat while my partner went to the restroom. As he returned, I watched one white woman’s eyes take him in lasciviously, only for her nose to wrinkle in disdain when he sat next to me.

Now I was ready for the evening to end, and I was ready to get out of Portland.

Nudson writes that the “wrong” makeup can cause funny looks or lead to harassment, while the “right” makeup can be completely unnoticed and unremarked upon. In my case, I felt that the “wrong” makeup was no makeup at all. While my partner raged at the injustice on our way back to our Airbnb, I replayed the events of the evening in my head. Would we have had better service if I’d worn some eyeliner and blush? If my curls had been more defined? Did the contempt of the woman from the bar stem from seeing a Black woman with a white man? Would she have been less contemptuous if she could see a hint of gloss on my lips?

Probably not. And yet, I felt some level of responsibility for how the evening had gone.

There is something to be said for the confidence we’re all called to develop and practice so that we can feel secure in ourselves no matter where we are. Black women are especially encouraged to cultivate this confidence because we often can’t count on non-Black environments to affirm us. But again, when even beauty culture is rooted in white supremacy, we can still feel self-conscious, regardless of how many mantras of self-love we whisper to ourselves every day before leaving the house.

All the Fenty in the world may not have protected me from the microaggressions of that night in Portland. What it might have done was make it easier to wave away the ignorance of others. But as writer Jia Tolentino said in The New Yorker, “What did it mean…that I have spent so much of my life attempting to perform well in circumstances where an unaltered female face is aberrant?” That trip to Portland was an invitation for me to think about how I can use my bare face to resist the demands of white-dominant beauty culture. Could I challenge myself to wear makeup only when I wanted to, and to leave it behind when my face needed a break? Could I accept that others might think I’m tired or ill without my makeup and still feel free to live my life?

Nudson’s book came to me at the right time. The last eighteen months have been an ongoing examination of my relationship with makeup. If I wear a beautiful red lip stain and then step outside wearing a mask, do I even exist? As the Delta variant spreads widely and quickly, me and my fashion favorites may have to shut ourselves away after enjoying a few months of relative freedom. Thanks to Nudson’s engaging histories that illustrate the relevance and importance of makeup when planning to smash the patriarchy, I’ve gained a new perspective on what beauty culture is, why it matters to me, and what I want my relationship with it to be like going forward.

 

About the Author 

Perpetua Charles joined Beacon Press in 2015. She is a graduate of Florida Southern College and earned her MA in Publishing and Writing from Emerson College. Perpetua has extensive publicity experience in the areas of race and culture, memoir, education, and history. Some of her favorite things include the Lord, TV, Disney princesses, books, 90s-00s teen pop, and the color pink. Connect with Perpetua on Instagram at @princessperpetuaa.

The Civil Rights Movement has lost another great one. Radical educator, global-minded activist, MacArthur genius fellow. On July 25 at age 86, Bob Moses joined the ancestors. While we’re heartbroken about his passing, we remain honored to have published Radical Equations, which he wrote with Charles E. Cobb to tell his story of founding the Algebra Project. He provided a model for anyone looking for a community-based solution to the problems of our disadvantaged schools and improving education for poor children of color.

He meant so much to us at Beacon and our authors. Here’s what they have to say about him.

It was a great privilege for Beacon Press to work with the legendary civil rights activist Bob Moses and his colleague and coauthor Charles E. Cobb on his revolutionary book, Radical Equations. Bob did something completely fresh, building on his experience organizing in Mississippi to create a model for using math literacy as a new frontier in civil rights. He didn’t just teach math; he used it to build bridges and community. He was audacious even as he was entirely modest and self-effacing. His voice was ever so soft, but his witness and his work were both huge and very audible. I feel lucky to have known him and very proud to see his legacy continue to grow.
—Helene Atwan, director

In every classroom or meeting space, Bob Moses listened better than anyone. The speaker might be five years old, or a sharecropper studying for the voter’s literacy test in Mississippi, or an Algebra Project student in Chicago, or the student’s grandmother, or the Attorney General of the United States. Bob wanted their words to become a part of his life, to figure in the enormous tapestry of experience that he lived in and that he built all around him. He listened to you and then he invited you to do something more than just speak: to consider something; to look from a different angle; to try to apply what you said; to go somewhere; to meet someone; to tell someone else; to make something happen. He put tens of thousands of us in motion with this simple technique: listen, and then invite someone to move as if they meant what they said. Teacher and organizer. Listener, questioner, doer.
—Jay Gillen, The Power in the Room: Radical Education Through Youth Organizing and Employment 

A reminiscence about the late Bob Moses, one of the most courageous and creative activists of our time. I organized a panel for the annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians, which was held at the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis on April 4, 2003, the thirty-fifth anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Our topic was “Remembering SNCC and SDS.” Two of the speakers were Bob Moses and Staughton Lynd, who had worked together in SNCC. The meeting included historians, but it was primarily a community event. The large room, packed to overflowing, included reporters and cameramen from local news stations. Jesse Jackson, who had been with Dr. King when he died, showed up and asked to join the panel. The moment Bob Moses walked into the room, unintroduced, the audience rose in a thunderous standing ovation. Staughton told a story about Bob, who in 1964 was speaking to a small gathering in front the charred remains of a Black church that had recently been burned down in Philadelphia, Mississippi. In that moment, Bob chose to speak about a bill that had just been passed by the US Congress called the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which signaled a vast expansion of US involvement in the Vietnam war. Bob said everyone needed to pay close attention because the war overseas and the Civil Rights movement at home would be closely linked. His vision of struggle was international—and prescient.
—Marcus Rediker, The Fearless Benjamin Lay: The Quaker Dwarf Who Became the First Revolutionary Abolitionist

Some of our authors took to Twitter to share their outpouring of love for him.

Deeply saddened to learn about the passing of Bob Moses. He was a brilliant organizer and civil rights activist who provided a model of effective leadership. He worked closely with Fannie Lou Hamer who admired and respected him. May his memory be a blessing to us all. ♥️ https://t.co/0GwEZPdAUu

— Dr. Keisha N. Blain (@KeishaBlain) July 25, 2021

Rest In Peace, brother Bob Moses. May we honor the memory of all you taught us by fighting like heaven for voting rights.

— Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II (@RevDrBarber) July 26, 2021

Bob Moses is my model for organizing. Principled, intellectual, humble, deliberate, willing to work with all who come, never berating but consistently challenging. Fun loving, kind, reflective, tender.

— Imani Perry (@imaniperry) July 25, 2021

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My dearest brother Bob Moses – spiritual genius, intellectual giant and moral titan – has left us! Words fall short! He was larger than life and one of the great exemplars of our humanity! Let us never forget him!

— Cornel West (@CornelWest) July 25, 2021

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Rest in power, Bob Moses.

By Ben Mattlin

On July 25, 2021, a day before the thirty-first anniversary of the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA), the New York Times Magazine published a story about the proliferation of ADA litigation. “The Price of Access” was the headline of the print edition; the online version, which had appeared a few days earlier, was titled “The Man Who Filed More Than 180 Disability Lawsuits.”

The titles say it all: the piece was sarcastic, hard-hitting, and largely disparaging of disability rights campaigns. As a lifelong wheelchair user, I was offended.

Understanding the ADA

The ADA is often referred to as a landmark civil rights bill. It outlawed discrimination against people with disabilities in employment, government programs and buildings, public accommodations such as stores and restaurants, and telecommunications. In its recognition of widespread past discrimination, it elevated the disability population—currently estimated to represent roughly a fourth of the US population—to a legally protected minority status.

As sweeping as the law is, however, it has one primary flaw: The government doesn’t go around actively enforcing it. You can’t get a ticket for access violations. Instead, the regulations must be implemented through lawsuits filed by those who feel they’ve been unfairly discriminated against. Disabled people themselves are deputized to become a sort of unpaid labor force of ADA cops.

The Times article acknowledged this. “In response to right-wing resistance to expanded governmental reach, those who fought for the ADA’s passage decided against setting up a federal office to monitor or enforce it, the way the Drug Enforcement Administration enforces narcotics laws and Immigration and Customs Enforcement pursues immigration violations. Instead, lawmakers concluded that ADA enforcement should happen through the courts—essentially transferring the role of enforcement from the government to individual disabled people and the judges who heard their cases.”

So, the fate of accessibility fell to the slow-moving courts. No one wants to be sued for an ADA violation, of course, but that doesn’t stop many companies and cities from taking their chances.

Complicated Standards

Granted, the specific access codes can be complicated. Ramps can only be so steep. Doorways must have a certain width. Menus and signs must be in Braille. No doubt, some violations are accidental or inadvertent. And no doubt, there are lawyers who recruit disabled people to pursue litigation, as the Times article implied. “In 2012, plaintiffs filed 2,495 Title III cases in federal court,” said the article, referring to charges against stores and other public accommodations. “By 2017, that had more than tripled to 7,663 cases.”

That may sound alarming, yet this spate of litigiousness doesn’t mean the ADA is a bad thing. Moreover, litigation is only part of the story. Judging the ADA by the court cases it’s engendered completely misses the point of one of the most important events in recent history.

Repercussions of Equal Rights 

I’ve been researching a book about what the disability community and the disability movement have been up to since the ADA became law. One key theme I kept finding was how the civil rights protections laid out in the ADA helped change perceptions as well as legal statutes. Not only does the average American now have an inkling about disability rights that never existed before, but disabled people themselves gained an unprecedented sense of entitlement, of belonging. The ADA enabled them to imagine a fairer, more just world. It made it seem actually possible, almost within reach.

Today, the changes brought by the ADA can be seen everywhere—wheelchair ramps, of course, but also Braille signs in elevators and elsewhere, public transit lifts, emotional-support animals, sign language interpreters at many political rallies and during the National Anthem at big sporting events, electronic listening devices in movie theaters, “reasonable accommodations” by employers such as flextime and telecommuting, and myriad other modifications.

Moreover, you see disabled people out and about, interacting with society in ordinary ways, which wasn’t always true before.

But perhaps chief among the ADA’s successes is the simple fact that so many people now accept the idea of equality for disabled people. This very notion “approaches disability in a new, unfamiliar way,” wrote Doris Zames Fleischer and Frieda Zames in the Disability Studies Quarterly. The old approach, they explained, was the “impairment model,” which essentially presumed you couldn’t expect equality if you couldn’t do certain things to function effectively in the world. After the ADA, though, disability was redefined in terms of a struggle for fairness and social parity.

The ADA as a Spark 

This proved an essential spark. Almost immediately after its passage, pro-disability celebrations began happening in Boston and New York. At “disability independence” marches, people quickly started talking about disability pride. It may not have been a brand-new concept, but it soon spread and gained traction. In time, every anniversary of the ADA’s passage became known as Disability Pride Day. Recently, the entire month of July was dubbed Disability Pride Month.

At the same time, disability studies curricula began cropping up. These gave a generation of students a unique perspective on the disability experience and the trajectory of the disability movement. As a result, perhaps, more young people are identifying as disabled (though some of that is because of improved diagnosing of learning disabilities and other neurodivergencies).

Soon, previously unrecognized pockets of the disability community began to speak out and gain attention. People of color, with all types of disabilities and chronic health conditions, of all gender identities, stressed that the disability community is not all about White men in wheelchairs, as the media had been portraying it. Disability, after all, knows no racial, ethnic, geographic, socioeconomic, or gender bounds.

This, in turn, led to greater awareness of intersectionality—the interplay of what’s come to be known as ableism with racism, sexism, homophobia, trans-phobia, and all other forms of oppression.

The Crusade Continues 

Though it had once seemed the ultimate goal, the ADA proved to be a starting point for the ever-broadening disability community. It provided a legal framework, a schematic for the future, but the disability community has taken the cause—the crusade—much farther.

Lawsuits are only one part of that. There would be fewer lawsuits, of course, if there were fewer violations. But as long as people and institutions continue to thwart the notion of fair and equal access, disabled people will keep fighting by whatever means necessary.

Beyond fighting for our rights, though, the disability community asserts itself by simply coming out of the shadows—coming to embrace our identity and connectedness to one another. That’s a key part of what disability pride signifies. We’ve moved beyond self-acceptance to redefine what it means to be disabled.

The ADA may have been society’s way of recognizing us as a group deserving of equal rights. But the legacy of the ADA is what we make of it and do with it every day.

 

About the Author 

Ben Mattlin is the author of Miracle Boy Grows Up and In Sickness and In Health: Love, Disability, and a Quest to Understand the Perils and Pleasures of Interabled Romance, and a frequent contributor to Financial Advisor magazine. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, USA Today, and Vox, and on NPR. He lives in Los Angeles, California. Follow him on Twitter at @benmattlin and visit his website.

A Q&A with Leigh Patel

An inconvenient truth lies beneath the promises of opportunity and prestige that higher education degrees offer. US academic institutions are built upon legacies of stolen labor on stolen land. Through history, this settler-colonial foundation has trapped us in history and perpetuated race, class, and gender inequalities on campus. Social protests, often led by youth, have fought for equitable access to education and continue to do so. But as Dr. Leigh Patel argues in No Study Without Struggle: Confronting Settler Colonialism in Higher Education, it’s high time for these institutions to reckon with their legacy. Beacon Broadside editor Christian Coleman caught up with Patel to chat with her about her book and how we see these structural inequalities take place today.

Christian Coleman: Tell us about what inspired you to write No Study Without Struggle.

Leigh Patel: As someone who has a deep love of learning and teaching, places of formal education have often brought me some amount of heartbreak. We have absolutely stunning teachers because they are also learners, and students who teach as they continue to learn. However, much of education, and glaringly so in higher education, has been shaped by mythologies of who is smart, intelligent, deserving, and more recently in higher education, what to do to bring in money. I often say to my students that they have been told lies about society in their K-12 education and that they’ve come to love those lies. In this book, I hope that readers will join me in tracing how often those lies and those mythologies have been challenged through the closely intertwined and historical struggle to study.

CC: You write that naming the problem of racism in higher education is necessary but insufficient. Why is settler colonialism a more comprehensive framework for explaining how marginalized communities experience harms and barriers to higher education?

LP: With all the inequities in society, a key question is: How do I look at or frame this inequity? What does this approach allow, even obligate, me to know? What does it leave out? Racism is undeniably the bedrock to this nation’s formation. However, racism is not often discussed in relation to the ongoing attempt to erase Indigeneity. We lose track of this vital component that continues to manifest itself. In higher education, where property rights are central as an asset and as an arm of the government, the framework of settler colonialism allows and obligates us to do better. It might be a good and important move to take down the statue memorializing an eighteenth-century enslaving man, but what do we learn about the relationships to land and Indigeneity where that statue stood? For the white students in universities who are not taught about the stolen land that required stolen labor in this nation’s creation, higher education is doing them a disservice and prolonging the harm that is done to Indigenous, Black, disabled, and poor people.

CC: You also write that settler colonialism is continuous as a process and a structure, not just a distant historical event that can be glossed over with the narrative of education as the great equalizer. Why was it important to make this point?

LP: Most people are in touch, emotionally and psychically, with the idea of education as the great equalizer as well as a constant reflection of their worth. Who hasn’t received a low grade or a rejected paper and felt that it was a reflection of their intelligence? This individualism is a largely shared belief system that says if you work hard, play by the rules, and are a good person, this country will open opportunities to you. It’s the myth of meritocracy that blurs population-level inequities and places all the responsibility in one person’s lap. It also alleviates the ongoing practices of the ongoing enclosure of Black and brown people’s bodies and spirits, denying them the ability to thrive, as Bettina Love writes about so eloquently. Settler colonialism has the potential to remind us that education often comes out of a political economy that is deeply interested in wealth accumulation for a few rather than well-being for all, including land as a life form. The ongoing structure of settler colonialism offers us, again and again, the opportunity to be in right relation with historical accuracy and to act. Reading land acknowledgements is a start but has not moved many institutions to, for example, fly the flags of the Indigenous peoples whose land the college occupies.

CC: There’s a part where you identify the gift economy as part of the settler colonial structure. It’s devised to make students and faculty of color feel indebted to universities, to make them feel they owe gaining entrance to colleges to some great benefactor. Would you say this invokes the white savior complex in university gatekeepers to absolve them of reckoning with the inequalities they uphold on campus?

LP: This is a fantastic question. There are lots of labels that have been uttered, more frequently in the past years and months following the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, including white ally, white co-conspirator, and white savior. All of higher education has engaged in gatekeeping. Even the legislation that created the first historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) included gatekeeping of separatism and financial stability. What HBCUs have done with the lesser gift is shape transformative leaders, including Thurgood Marshall, Zora Neale Hurston, Julian Bond, and Toni Morrison. So, when we understand that universities, still overwhelmingly led by white administrators and faculty who don’t share many lived realities as their first-generation students of color, use gift-like awards and scholarships, it can also blur the fact that universities often exploit labor. Students are made to feel like they are indebted to the university or that one professor who gave them an override into a full course, when all the time our role as university educators is to serve students and their learning to transform society.

CC: As someone who spent years mired in student loan hell, I felt vindicated seeing how you address and indict student loan debt as part of the settler colonial structure. What tipped you off to include it in your argument?

LP: I wish I could topple over the horrible and intricate reality of student loan debt! Addressing the rapidly rising rates of student loan debt has always been central to me. Because I love learning, it feels odd to me, if not offensive, to charge people to learn. To be even more plain about it, universities are often charging people for a credential, an opportunity to build social networks, and sometimes they learn important histories or ways of knowing in the process. Looking at student loan debt through race, class, gender, and parents’ or caregivers’ education gives us a better understanding that, as with all institutions in the United States, there are tremendous differences in not only how much loan is carried by Black and Latinx students but also how likely they are to secure employment in a society that questions their intelligence at every corner.

CC: How do you see this book in conversation with your previous books, Decolonizing Education Research and Youth Held at the Border?

LP: I very much see this book in relation to both of those books. Across all three books, I dig deeply into the national narratives that we are told and how different those narratives are from the intertwined realities of colonialism, racial capitalism, and wealth and wellness for a few. Across the ways that migrant youth encounter national, racial, gender, sexuality, and cultural borders, the ways that graduate students are taught research that has often been extractive to their home communities, to the study groups that have demanded better from higher education, I am consistently tracing the logics of oppression and the important struggles from students for higher education and the nation to do better.

The fantastic news for colleges who are confronting settler colonialism in their policies and practices is that there are innumerable examples of collectives coming into formation to study in order to act. Learning is much bigger than school, college, or university. Reckoning with settler colonialism is an invitation to destabilize who is an expert and who is need of an expert. Reckoning helps us to tell the truth and realize that there are openings and invitations for us to work, to study, and to struggle together for a society where schools are not warehouses or fickle distribution bureaucracies of credentials.

CC: And lastly, do you consider Cornel West’s resignation from Harvard as exemplary of the issues you unpack in No Study Without Struggle?

LP: This is a great example of what else we can see if we widen our lens from racism to settler colonialism. The public coverage of Nikole Hannah-Jones’s and Cornel West’s treatment by two of the most heralded universities in this land animate settler colonialism.

In Hannah-Jones’s case, it was the impact of wealthy alumni calling a member of the University of North Carolina’s board of trustees and taking issue, purportedly with Hannah-Jones’s approach to journalism. Settler colonialism claims knowledge as property, as well as land and some people. UNC lost one of our most impactful journalists to an HBCU because UNC deferred to wealth and what money told them was valid.

In Cornel West’s case, he is one of five faculty who are Black and/or scholars of color who have spoken and written about US imperialism. All were denied tenure. A settler colony does not like being reminded that it is actively occupying land and materially sustaining that practice in other places in the world, including Israel and Palestine. Were these racist practices? Yes. Without an analysis of setter colonialism, though, we might collapse it into a problem of racism in hiring and processes. It’s much deeper and wider than that.

 

About Leigh Patel 

Dr. Leigh Patel is an interdisciplinary researcher, an educator, a writer, and a professor at the University of Pittsburgh. She works extensively with societally marginalized youth and teacher activists. Patel is a recipient of the June Jordan Award for scholarly leadership and poetic bravery in social critique and is a national board member of Education for Liberation, a long-standing organization dedicated to transformative education for and by youth of color. She is the author of Youth Held at the Border and Decolonizing Educational Research. Connect with her on Twitter at @lipatel.

By Philip Warburg

The cryptocurrency rush is on. Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs now offer Bitcoin as an investment option to preferred clients, and electronic payments giant NCR will soon be offering cryptocurrency services to customers of some 650 smaller banks and credit unions.

As they open cryptocurrency to clients, these and many other stakeholders seem utterly unconcerned about the mammoth energy waste associated with this emerging industry. Cryptocurrency leader Bitcoin consumes nearly three times Switzerland’s total electricity and about a quarter of Germany’s total power use—roughly 0.4 percent of the world’s electricity. This is especially appalling when one considers that all data centers worldwide, excluding those used for Bitcoin, account for about 1 percent of global electricity. 

A twisted variant of pay-to-play is responsible for Bitcoin’s energy gluttony. Would-be buyers must expend enormous amounts of computer power—and money—solving hugely complex mathematical riddles that serve as the gateway to earning, or “mining,” Bitcoin. These computational gymnastics and the energy they consume make it prohibitively expensive for attackers to undermine the integrity of the Bitcoin ledger.

Chris Larsen is executive chairman of Ripple Inc., which markets another leading cryptocurrency asset called XRP. He makes a point of distinguishing his own company’s modest energy demand from other cryptocurrencies that rely on Proof of Work, the energy-devouring validation method used by Bitcoin. Instead of setting costly computational hurdles, XRP operates through a network of peer-to-peer servers that secure their transactions with collateral. According to Ripple’s estimate, XRP uses an average of 0.0079 kilowatt hours per transaction, in striking contrast to the 952 kilowatt hours of electricity needed to transact in Bitcoin. Over the course of a year, Larsen claims that “low-energy” cryptocurrency providers like Ripple consume about as much electricity as fifty average US homes.

Not all cryptocurrency proponents are ready to take on Bitcoin’s outsized energy appetite, preferring to focus instead on the type, rather than the amount, of energy consumed. Elon Musk’s erratic messaging of recent months is emblematic. In February, he purchased $1.5 billion of Bitcoin; in May, he signaled that Bitcoin could not be used as payment for Tesla vehicles because of its outsized carbon footprint; in June, he put cryptocurrency back on the Tesla table so long as the electricity used to “mine” it comes from renewable energy.

According to a recent survey across 59 nations, 39 percent of the power fueling cryptocurrency comes from renewable sources, but that still leaves a huge share of the industry’s energy coming from conventional sources that pollute the environment and endanger our global climate. To meet this exploding demand, fossil fuel dinosaurs like the idled coal-fired Hardin Generating Station in Montana and the Greenidge coal plant in Dresden, New York, are being retooled to serve the industry. Greenidge, which has been converted to natural gas, is already powering nearly 7,000 Bitcoin data servers, or “mining rigs” as the industry calls them, and that number is expected to quadruple in the years ahead.

In an attempt to mitigate the industry’s environmental downsides, an alliance of cryptocurrency purveyors, financial technology firms, and the nonprofit Rocky Mountain Institute are now working to advance a Cryptocurrency Climate Accord. This voluntary agreement seeks to shift all “blockchains,” or cryptocurrency ledgers, to 100 percent renewable energy by 2025. It also targets net zero carbon emissions for the industry as a whole by 2040.

These may sound like laudable goals, but they fail to address head on the cryptocurrency sector’s stratospheric energy use. We already face a colossal challenge in converting our power sector to renewable energy—a transition whose magnitude will certainly grow as we shift to electric vehicles and all-electric buildings. Every increment of electricity wastefully consumed will only make the switch away from fossil fuels harder to achieve. 

Another summer of extreme heat, wildfires, drought, and habitat destruction reminds us that the ravages of climate change are already upon us. In our eagerness to hop onto the cryptocurrency bandwagon, let’s not add fuel to the fires of global warming.

 

About the Author 

Philip Warburg is the author of two books published by Beacon Press, Harvest the Wind and Harness the Sun.  He is a Senior Fellow at Boston University’s Institute for Sustainable Energy.

By Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II with Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove

Since the summer of 2013, the Reverend Dr. William J. Barber II has been championing the Third Reconstruction to dismantle racist policies and structures in a sweeping effort at the level of federal government. And just three years ago, he stepped down as North Carolina state chapter president of the NAACP to join the new Poor People’s Campaign to advocate economic justice for all across the racial spectrum. Now his calls to reimagine US society for the betterment of us all has gained traction over the last year. This passage from The Third Reconstruction, which he wrote with Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, not only lays out the blueprint for movement building but also lays out the issues the moral movement advocates for. This is where it all began.

***

As I’ve traveled to share North Carolina’s story, I’ve seen how a reconstruction framework can help America see our struggles in a new light. Everywhere we’ve gone—from deep in the heart of Dixie to Wisconsin, where I saw water frozen in waves for the first time—I heard a longing for a moral movement that plows deep into our souls and recognizes that the attacks we face today are not a sign of our weakness, but rather the manifestation of a worrisome fear among the governing elites that their days are numbered and the hour is late.

Sharing the story of North Carolina’s Forward Together Moral Movement, we’ve had the opportunity to drink from tributaries that run toward the great stream of justice throughout America—whether in the Hands Up, Don’t Shoot, I Can’t Breathe, and Black Lives Matter movements; the fast-food workers’ Raise Up and minimum wage movements; the voting rights and People Over Money movements; the women’s rights and End Rape Culture movements; the LGBTQ equality movements; the global movement to address climate change; or the immigrant rights, Not One More movements. Within the framework of a Third Reconstruction, we see how all of our movements are flowing together, recognizing that our intersectionality creates the opportunity to fundamentally redirect America.

Within two years of our first Moral Monday in Raleigh, we saw Moral Mondays movement coalitions come together in fourteen states, not only in the South but also in the Midwest, New York, and Maine. Even as our North Carolina coalition partners organized over two hundred events, rallies, and protests across the state, the Moral Mondays movement was taken up and extended in other states, growing beyond our ability to keep count. Ours is a movement raising up leaders, not an organization recruiting followers.

If we refuse to be divided by fear and continue pushing forward together, I have no doubt that these nascent movements will swell into a Third Reconstruction to push America toward our truest hope of a “more perfect union” where peace is established through justice, not fear. This is not blind faith. We have seen it in North Carolina. We have seen it throughout America’s history. And we are witnessing it even now in state-based, state-government-focused moral fusion coalitions that are gathering to stand against immoral deconstruction. Ours is the living hope of America’s black-led freedom struggle, summed up so well in Langston Hughes’s memorable claim that although America had never been America to him, even still he could swear, “America will be!”

Despite the dark money, old fears, and vicious attacks of extremists, we know America will be because our deepest moral values are rooted in something greater than people’s ability to conspire. All the money in the world can’t change that bedrock truth. This is the confidence that has sustained every moral movement in the history of the world.

In 1857, when the Supreme Court ruled in its Dred Scott decision that a black man had no standing in America’s courts, Frederick Douglass said:

In one point of view, we, the abolitionists and colored people, should meet this decision, unlooked for and monstrous as it appears, in a cheerful spirit. This very attempt to blot out forever the hopes of an enslaved people may be one necessary link in the chain of events preparatory to the downfall and complete overthrow of the whole slave system.

The whole history of the anti-slavery movement is studded with proof that all measures devised and executed with a view to ally and diminish the anti-slavery agitation, have only served to increase, intensify, and embolden that agitation.

He was right, of course. But he was speaking a long eight years before the end of the Civil War. Only as we reconstruct this moral movement mentality can we begin to shift the conscience of the nation. But we know as surely as Douglass did in 1857 that we will. We’ve not won yet, but we are gaining ground. When we started Moral Mondays in North Carolina, most of the issues we supported didn’t have majority support in the polls. But after we shifted the public consciousness by engaging in moral critique, 55 percent of North Carolinians oppose refusing federal aid for the long-term jobless and the unemployed. Fifty-five percent of North Carolinians support raising the minimum wage. Fifty-eight percent of North Carolinians say we should accept federal funds to expand Medicaid. Sixty-one percent of North Carolinians oppose using public funds for vouchers to support private schools. Fifty-four percent of North Carolinians now would rather raise taxes and give teachers a pay raise than cut taxes. Sixty-six percent of North Carolinians now don’t agree with the North Carolina legislators’ strict limits on women’s reproductive rights. Only 33 percent agree with cutting funding for prekindergarten education and child care. Fewer than 25 percent agree with repealing the Racial Justice Act. Seventy-three percent favor outlawing discrimination against gays in hiring and fi ring, and 68 percent of voters oppose cutting early voting and favor an alternative to voter ID.

After the 2014 elections, when the extremists held on to power and succeeded in sending their leader, Thom Tillis, to the US Senate, some suggested we had failed by not running Forward Together Moral Movement candidates who would champion our agenda. But a reconstruction framework helps us to see that we will not win by starting a third party. We will win by changing the conversation for every candidate and party. To be sure, we’re not there yet. But if we reconstruct a movement mentality that begins to create a public consensus about what is acceptable, then we will see a reconstruction of the legal and statutory protections that establish justice and ensure the common good.

Indeed, this is already beginning to happen. At home in North Carolina, we’ve seen local people’s assemblies emerge in “conservative” districts, changing the conversation in places that are bright red on any political strategist’s map. When we educate people about how our state’s refusal to expand Medicaid is closing rural hospitals and killing white people just the same as black people, they don’t follow the party line. They see how their own health is tied to the well-being of others.

As we’ve walked with service workers, framing their life-and-death struggle as a moral issue, we see living-wage campaigns becoming a ballot issue. When public opinion gets ahead of the party line, we need to put the question directly to the people.

Likewise with education. We’ve seen that we have to expose the connections between “community schools” or voucher programs and resegregation. Fully funded public education is a bedrock of multicultural democracy. In North Carolina, our constitution has provided legal grounds for this argument. But it is an essential moral issue in every state.

As our coalitions move from a new moral consensus toward legal and statutory changes, we know we have to put faces on the issues that our partners care about. We cannot be abstract. Directly affected people must lead the way and we must support and stand with them. While we continue to petition for Medicaid expansion in North Carolina and in a score of other states, we are convening People’s Grand Juries to hear testimonies of citizens who are suffering because their elected officials are failing to uphold their oaths of office.

Even as we focus on real people’s lives and stories, we must work to help people see how their issues are connected. Constitutional marriage amendments and so-called “religious freedom bills” must be exposed as a cynical political ploy to exploit religious convictions to divide gay folks from black folks. When any of us suffer, all of us suffer. We must stand together.

The same is true in our criminal justice system. The Third Reconstruction must abolish the death penalty in America on grounds of its unjust application. But this cannot be narrowly defined as an abolitionist struggle in which convicted killers are pitted against victim’s family members. We must end the death penalty instead as a first step toward dismantling America’s system of mass incarceration, which has rightly been called a “new Jim Crow.” We cannot do this without reexamining three-strikes-you’re-out laws and a broken plea-bargaining system in which prosecutors elected by a white-majority electorate in counties have unchecked power in over-policed inner-city neighborhoods.

Because political power is a democracy’s chief safeguard against injustice, we must continue to engage the voting rights issue after the US Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby County v. Holder, which removed protections against voter suppression in Southern states that had been in place for half a century. This fight is, in many ways, bigger than Selma and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. That expansion of voting rights fifty years ago was a concession to the civil rights movement. We didn’t get all we were asking for. Now, fifty years later, we’re fighting to hold on to the compromise. What we really need is a constitutional amendment to guarantee the same voting rights in every state. This must be a cornerstone of the Third Reconstruction.

 

About the Authors 

The Reverend Dr. William J. Barber II is the president and senior lecturer of Repairers of the Breach, cochair of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival, and pastor of Greenleaf Christian Church in Goldsboro, North Carolina. A visiting professor of public theology and activism, Rev. Dr. Barber is also the author of The Third Reconstruction.

Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove is cofounder of the Rutba House for the formerly homeless and director of the School for Conversion. His books include Common Prayer: A Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals (with Shane Claiborne) and The New Monasticism.

This will be our second summer with our favorite global party-crasher, the pandemic. (Leave already, Pandy! We want to get on with our lives.) Seems like a lifetime ago when this started, huh? Except this season, the rollout of vaccines is making outdoor time under the sun a little freer and a little less fraught with worry. Although still nowhere near the comfort and safety level we need, some of us may make to the beach. Others may make it as far as their backyard. Wherever you set your beach blanket or beach chair, vaxxed and masked, we have some audiobook suggestions for the occasion.

First off, we are so stoked about our audio rerelease of Kate Bornstein’s memoir, this time narrated by the gender outlaw herself with a new epilogue! A Queer and Pleasant Danger is as outrageous as it was when it first came out. Listening to it in Kate’s own voice makes it all the more delicious. From nice Jewish boy to Scientologist to the lovely lady she is today, her story is unforgettable and wickedly told. Just in time for Pride Month, too!

 

“I don’t call myself a woman, and I know I’m not a man. That’s the part that upsets the pope—he’s worried that talk like that—not male, not female—will shatter the natural order of men and women. I look forward to the day it does.”
—Kate Bornstein

Listen to a selection.

Summer is also the season for blissing out to bops and jams. We selected some choice memoirs and biographies on music and musicians from our catalog for you to cue up on your playlists, four of which are perfect for Black Music Month! You may even discover some new tunes to carry into the fall and winter. (I know: Let’s not think that far ahead into the year yet. We need to enjoy what we can of months coming up.)

 

In a rocking debut that Kimberlé Crenshaw calls “a spellbinding odyssey,” G’Ra Asim pens a survival guide to his younger brother, Gyasi, for tackling the sometimes treacherous cultural terrain particular to being young, Black, brainy, and weird in the form of a punk rock mixtape.

Listen to a selection.

 

An AudioFile Earphones Award winner and selected as an AudioFile Best Audiobook of 2020! Ian Zack brings the legendary singer and Voice of the Civil Rights Movement back in the spotlight in her first in-depth biography. So many folk roads lead back to Odetta. Where’s her Grammy?

Listen to a selection.

 

Leslie Uggams, Shawn T. Andrews, and Anthony Heilbut lend their vocal talents to narrate Gayle Wald’s biography of America’s first rock guitar diva, 2018 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee Sister Rosetta Tharpe. She was the Woman Who Rocked before Women Who Rock.

Listen to a selection.

 

The late pop music critic and culture journalist Rashod Ollison had such an ear for music and such acumen for laying out the cultural context in which it was written. In his memoir, he described how music was his refuge during his tumultuous upbringing, especially soul and R&B, as he came of age Black and gay in 1980s’ Arkansas. 

 

What’s left unexamined in many Woody Guthrie bios is how the bulk of his work delves into the importance of intimacy in his personal and political life. Gustavus Stadler dismantles the man we’ve been taught to reveal the overlapping influences of sexuality, politics, and disability on his art.

Listen to a selection.

 

If you get through these as fast as you get through a tall glass of lemonade on a hot day, look no further than our bestselling audiobooks! They cover a wide range of subject matter—asexuality, abolitionist teaching, fat justice, white fragility, embracing life and meaning in the face of stark hardship—to tide you over through the season. 

 

Aces today are not concerned with how to have sex, but we are not anti-sex either. We don’t ask people to stop having sex or feel guilty for enjoying it. We do ask that all of us question our sexual beliefs and promise that doing so means that the world would be a better and freer place for everyone.
—Angela Chen

Listen to a selection.

 

Abolitionist teaching stands in solidarity with parents and fellow teachers opposing standardized testing, English-only education, racist teachers, arming teachers with guns, and turning schools into prisons. Abolitionist teaching supports and teaches from the space that Black Lives Matter, all Black Lives Matter, and affirms Black folx’ humanity.
—Bettina L. Love

Listen to a selection.

 

Regardless of our size, working toward fat justice will call upon our most honest, compassionate selves. It will require deep vulnerability, candor, and empathy. Together, we can create a tectonic shift in the way we see, talk about, and treat our bodies, fat and thin alike.
—Aubrey Gordon

 

Though white fragility is triggered by discomfort and anxiety, it is born of superiority and entitlement. White fragility is not weakness per se. In fact, it is a powerful means of white racial control and the protection of white advantage.
—Robin DiAngelo 

Listen to a selection.

 

The rules of the game of life . . . do not require us to win at all costs, but they do demand from us that we never give up the fight.
—Viktor E. Frankl

Listen to a selection.

Put on your shades, pull up your umbrella, and jack in those headphones.

The townspeople have clutched their pearls and fetched their pitchforks to raise hell against the new boogeyman du jour allegedly stomping the horizon. Do we dare speak its name? That boogeyman is . . . Critical Race Theory. White conservatives don’t want its antiracist agenda infecting children’s minds. During a Newsmax segment, even political commentator Dick Morris went as far as to call Critical Race Theory a “cancer” and suggested that teaching it to children in schools could “reinforce the Oedipal notion all kids have of wanting to kill their father and marry their mother.” Honestly, there are wilder conspiracy theories that make more sense. The backlash is no different from the time when our former white supremacist in chief called for teaching “patriotic” histories.

Amid the hubbub, President Biden signed a law, making Juneteenth a federal holiday. But you can’t appreciate the celebration and relevance of the holiday without knowledge of the US’s original sin and its overarching reach in our policies today. In response to this, we reached out to some of our authors to weigh on all the sound and fury. Here’s what they had to say.

 

The recent decision of the Biden-Harris administration to recognize Juneteenth as a federal holiday coincides with widespread efforts to pass new laws restricting voting at the state level and renewed attempts to limit the teaching of diverse histories in classrooms across the country. These developments are connected and serve as an important reminder that symbolic gestures, while meaningful, fall short of addressing systemic racism in American society. Making Juneteenth a federal holiday does nothing to dismantle racism or its legacies. It should, however, serve as an impetus to reaffirm our commitment to building a more just and equal society—one that truly encapsulates the spirit of Juneteenth.
—Keisha N. Blain, Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer’s Enduring Message to America

 

This is less a backlash against Critical Race Theory—a set of rigorous, theoretical concepts that obviously very few of the current CRT critics have read—and more a blow against the global Black Lives Matter movement. We are in an Empire Strikes Back moment when elements of the ruling class are trying to crush movements for policing reforms, historical truth, and working-class power. 

The people inside of the vibrant social movements today have developed a new understanding of this nation’s past as well as its potential. They are on the cusp of major breakthroughs. The millions of people who have marched, organized, and have attended city council meetings across the country in support of BLM are moving toward creating the conditions for dismantling mass incarceration and creating a universal health care system. Above all, this is what the enemies of Critical Race Theory fear. They fear the power of a people awakened to their potential and they tremble at the vision of a truly antiracist and democratic society. We must push ever harder to bring a new world into existence.
—Paul Ortiz, An African American and Latinx History of the United States

 

For an educator like me, the federal observance of Juneteenth brings up a familiar and well-historied divide between word and deed that has worked, for centuries, to perpetuate contorted versions of US history. In the same week that Biden signed into law the national holiday observing Juneteenth, four states had voted in laws forbidding the teaching of Critical Race Theory in K-12 schools, and similar bills were in process in nineteen other states. Critical Race Theory is a multi-faceted legal theory with evidence that asserts that racism is enshrined in the nation’s laws. Some states, such as Iowa, are extending this McCarthy-esque ban to higher education. Iowa House Bill 802 “prohibits the use of curriculum that teaches the topics of slavery, racial oppression, racial segregation or racial discrimination . . . ”

It is literally impossible to teach the accurate history of Juneteenth without referring to slavery as an economic system that enslavers in Texas simply refused to cede until Union soldiers came to Galveston to enforce the then two-year-old Emancipation Proclamation. Interestingly, these white supremacy-fueled backlash bills and laws do not forbid teaching about the ongoing project of erasing Indigeneity.

Like the struggle to make Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday an observed federal holiday, Juneteenth is surrounded by watered down references that blur historical accuracy. However, the long-standing antiracist teaching parses out these contradictions and lifts up accuracy and facts.
—Leigh Patel, No Study Without Struggle: Confronting Settler Colonialism in Higher Education

 

The current controversy over Critical Race Theory is a reflection not of the American Right’s cultural strength, but of its waning ideological influence. Under the eras of Ronald Reagan and even George W. Bush, when conservatives controlled the bipartisan policy conversation around cutting taxes, going to war, and neglecting racial inequality, terms like freedom, equality of opportunity, and democracy were used, without second thought or much philosophical elaboration, to support right-wing initiatives.

Now, as the Right is unable to win national elections through the popular vote and is forced to confront a cultural landscape where—after the George Floyd protests of 2020—antiracism is a mainstream idea, it resorts to increasingly technical attacks on racial justice through demonizing an academic discipline like Critical Race Theory. In doing this, the Right is playing on the home turf of the scholarly journals and elite law schools that it claims to despise and showing that it can no longer control the narrative around race in the US. The Right no longer is confident that populist terms like “All Lives Matter” or “Blue Lives Matter” are winning slogans, like they were in the early 2010s. The Right can’t brazenly invoke the idea of colorblindness like it used to, effectively, in the 1990s—not after public attention on mass incarceration and police brutality. So, instead, it tries to say “Critical Race Theory” is dangerous and anti-American. Doing this might be fine for playing to the Right’s hardcore Fox News watching base, but it isn’t a strategy for seizing the US cultural vocabulary.

And yet, as the Right watches from the sidelines and seethes around the culture’s shift on antiracism, the young interracial activists on the ground are doing just this. They’re not just taking about Critical Race Theory; they’re already putting it into practice: running for office, organizing in their communities, and unapologetically advocating for policies to end racism.
—Alex Zamalin, Against Civility: The Hidden Racism in Our Obsession with Civility

A Q&A with Aviva Chomsky

She really said that, didn’t she? During her visit to Central America, Vice President Kamala Harris told Guatemalans, “Do not come” because “the United States will continue to enforce our laws and secure our border.” There is a lot to unpack, namely the US’s history of interventions in Central America and the cycle of its neocolonial policies implemented there, which caused the migration crisis we see unfolding today. That’s missing from her statement. Historical amnesia at work. Aviva Chomsky delves into this suppressed history in Central America’s Forgotten History: Revolution, Violence, and the Roots of Migration. Our publicity assistant, Priyanka Ray, caught up with her to chat about it and about Harris’s visit.

Priyanka Ray: In Central America’s Forgotten History, you argue that the US interventions of the 1980s and 90s set the stage for violent unrest and neoliberalism in Central America. How did this, in turn, lead to the influx of refugees seeking asylum today? How else has the US been complicit in creating migration?

Aviva Chomsky: The United States has tried to remake Central America in its own (US) interests and in the interests of US corporations, time after time. During the 1970s and 80s, Central Americans rose up in protest against a system that dispossessed peasants from their land in favor of big plantations and export agriculture enforced by US-supported militaries and police. Nicaraguans won their revolution in 1979, toppling the US-supported Somoza dictatorship. In Guatemala and El Salvador, popular movements and armed guerrilla forces also fought to overthrow the system that left foreigners and small elites in control of their countries’ politics and economies.

The United States intervened savagely to destroy the Nicaraguan revolution and to crush the movements for social change in Guatemala and El Salvador. By the 1990s, a US-supported government was elected in Nicaragua and peace treaties signed in El Salvador and Guatemala, and the path was clear for a full-fledged neoliberal assault. The Central America Free Trade Agreement followed in the footsteps of NAFTA, basically “opening” the economies to US imports, foreign extractivism and megaprojects, maquiladoras (export-processing plants), and tourism.

What makes most profit for foreign investors is exactly the opposite of what the poor in Central America need. Investors want low wages, low taxes, easy access to land, no environmental regulation, and a strong, armed police presence to make sure that workers and peasants don’t get ideas about trying to fight for their rights. That’s basically the neoliberal project.

Central American refugees from the US-sponsored wars started coming to the United States in the 1980s. But neoliberalism is another kind of war against the poor.

PR: You write that, in Central America, “forgetting is layered upon forgetting.” And in the US, we have the “privilege of forgetting” our culpability in producing many of Central America’s crises. What is the “politics of forgetting”? And how has “forgetting” shaped both US and Central Americans’ conceptions—or misconceptions—about Central America’s history? 

AC: People in the United States are taught that our country is essentially good and innocent, and that we go around helping people around the world. When we hear facts that contradict that narrative, we dismiss those as errors or exceptions.

Most people in the United States don’t even know—that is, they have the privilege of forgetting—how many times the United States has invaded Central American countries, how many times we’ve overthrown democratically-elected governments there, how many war criminals and death squad leaders we’ve trained and armed, how many peasants our corporations have displaced, and how much our corporations have profited from US “aid” to Central America and from their investments there.

Biden and Harris claim that they want to address the “root causes” of migration, which they’ve defined as poverty, violence, and corruption. But those aren’t the “root causes”—they are the result of over a hundred years of US imposition of our policies and our goals in Central America.

We can’t go back and undo that history. But if we want to change course, we need to begin by confronting honestly what we’ve done rather than pretending that Central America’s poverty, violence, and corruption have nothing to do with us.

PR: On her recent trip to Central America, Vice President Harris told Guatemalans, “Do not come,” warning them that the US will “continue to enforce our laws and protect our borders.” How do these statements reflect the “politics of forgetting”? 

AC: Harris takes it for granted that “our laws” treat people fairly and “our borders” are something that should be “protected.” But our immigration laws are unjust and discriminatory, and our border was created by colonialism, conquest, and genocide. The militarized border serves to “protect” stolen privilege, stolen resources, and stolen labor on stolen land.

PR: Given the US’s role in creating much of the violent conditions that Central Americans are forced to flee, you point to the need for accountability and restorative reparations. What should restorative reparations look like? And considering Vice President Harris’s controversial statements, do you think the Biden administration will actually take steps towards meaningful accountability? 

AC: Biden has made it clear that he has no interest in accountability. His Plan for Security and Prosperity in Central America emphasizes militarization and foreign investment, and its prime aims are making profits and stopping migration, not helping Central Americans.

Given how much harm the United States has caused in Central America, it’s kind of the height of arrogance to think that now, suddenly, we’re going to come up with the “right” solution and impose it.  But I do have some ideas about ways we could be thinking about restorative reparations.

One.) There is something very concrete that Central America needs from us right now: vaccines. That one’s simple: we have them, they need them. And not, as Biden-Harris have insisted so far, with strings attached, like requirements that Central American governments up their enforcement of US immigration policy.

Two.) We could undo the provisions of the Central America Free Trade Agreement that privilege corporations over the Central American people. Some aspects of this are very straightforward, like removing the legal privileges the agreement gives to corporations that invest there, or to US agricultural companies that want to dump their products there.

Three.) Central America, like other poor regions, is ensnared in unpayable debts that undermine governments’ ability to carry out progressive social policies. We need to have a debt jubilee.

Four.) Central America, again like other poor regions, is suffering inordinately from the effects of the warming planet. Think drought, hurricanes, floods. And who is responsible for the climate crisis? More than anywhere else, we need to look in the mirror. The United States bears, by far, the greatest responsibility for cumulative emissions—the amount of greenhouse gases currently in the atmosphere.  We need to stop burning fossil fuels.

Finally, we could open our borders, remove restrictions on working, and raise the minimum wage. That would allow Central Americans to travel freely, increase remittances (one of the most effective forms of foreign aid), and reduce inequalities between the United States and Central America. The purpose of the closed border is to turn the United States into a kind of gated community, hoarding resources and keeping the poor out (while continuing to exploit their resources and their labor).

 

About Aviva Chomsky 

Aviva Chomsky is a professor of history and the coordinator of Latin American Studies at Salem State University. The author of several books including Undocumented and “They Take Our Jobs!”, Chomsky has been active in the Latin American solidarity and immigrants’ rights movements for over 30 years. She lives in Salem, Massachusetts.

By V. P. Franklin

This essay appeared originally on youngcrusaders.org.

In the fall of 2019, award-winning actress and political activist Jane Fonda felt compelled to launch a campaign of civil disobedience to call attention to the climate crisis facing current and future generations. Atmospheric greenhouse gases had reached their highest levels that year, and the Trump administration was not only denying the climate crisis but was also engaged in striking down federal regulations aimed at mitigating the impact of fossil fuels.

On Friday, October 11, 2019, Fonda spoke before a small crowd of political activists near the Capitol and declared, “We have to ensure that the climate crisis remains front and center, and that’s why we’re here.” The “climate strikers,” following the lead of Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg, had drawn international attention to the climate emergency, and high school students in countries around the world organized “Fridays for Future” with marches and rallies beginning in August 2018. “I’m standing here with the young people,” Fonda announced, because “our house is on fire. And so we’re calling these rallies Fire Drill Fridays.”

Over the next fourteen Fridays, weekly teach-ins, along with the rallies, were held by representatives of Greenpeace, Climate Action Network, Friends of the Earth, Poor People’s Campaign, the Sunshine Movement, Africans Rising for Justice, Peace, and Dignity, Kenya’s Green Belt Movement, Women’s Earth Alliance, Women Environment and Development Organization, Veterans for Peace, New York City’s WE ACT, the Environmental Justice Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice, Green Latinos, and others. At the end of the rallies, Fonda and her supporters marched toward the Capitol building, chanting “The fossil fuel industry will not bury us. We will live to bury them . . . . Tell me what democracy looks like! This is what democracy looks like!”

As they approached the Capitol steps, a police officer gave them a warning: “Move back, people. Move all the way back!” When they refused, the police grabbed them and secured the hands behind them with plastic zip ties. Fonda had been arrested before, so she was not afraid. “As each of us were taken by an officer to the waiting vans, people cheered, clapped, and chanted in support. It felt good.” They were taken to the station, placed in cells, and after three hours were processed, fingerprinted, and paid the $50 fine. Upon leaving the station, friends were waiting and provided food, water, and other types of “jail support.”

Afterward, Fonda convinced many other celebrities to join the Fire Drill Friday rallies and teach-ins—Lily Tomlin, Sam Waterson, Ted Danson, Sally Field, Gloria Steinem, Joaquin Phoenix, and others. “And for every one of our fourteen Fridays that involved arrests, rain or shine or frigid weather, jail support was always there.” And when Fonda could no longer risk another arrest, “I would be part of it myself.”

In her book, What Can I Do? My Path from Climate Despair to Action (2021), Fonda recounts her experiences and those others who joined her. She includes broadsides and speeches from those who participated in the protest. The speakers addressed the Green New Deal, “Women and Climate Change,” water pollution, food, agriculture, and climate change; environmental racism, health and employment outcomes; and most importantly, the damage to people’s lives, the environment, and our children’s future carried out by the fossil fuel industry.

Hundreds of children from the local public and private schools attended the rallies, and speaker after speaker emphasized the need to hold the fossil fuel industry accountable for the damage it has done. “My advocacy as an environmentalist,” declared Robert Kennedy Jr., “is about democracy, is about fairness, and about equality and justice.” With the assistance of the political establishment, “These corporations are commodifying the commons.”

Addressing the global COVID-19 pandemic, however, became political leaders’ main preoccupation in 2020 after the Fire Drill Fridays ended. The deceased use of fossil fuels during the lockdowns allowed people in many locations to experience what their lives would be like without the unrelenting pall of pollution. However, the oil and gas companies merely raised their prices to make up for the loss of profits during the pandemic. The Biden administration has promised to move the economy toward greater use of renewable energy, but the billions of dollars in subsidies to the coal, gas, and oil companies continues, as well as the practice of fracking, the extraction process that pollutes the air and water and damages the health of those living nearby.

In answering the question, “What Can I Do?” Jane Fonda describes the importance of marches, rallies, teach-ins, and civil disobedience. However, the most effective weapon in the arsenal of nonviolent direct action protest—the boycott—is not discussed. The profiteering before and during the pandemic must be challenged, and environmental and racial-justice groups and organizations that participated in the Fire Drill Fridays and other protests need to come together and target a gas and oil company for a nationwide boycott. The situation for future generations is becoming more and more perilous, and something must be done before 2030. If the adult leaders and organizations do not organize the oil company boycott, then the young people in the Sunrise Movement, Black Lives Matter, and March for Our Lives must take the lead because they are the ones who suffer the economic and physical burden of environmental destruction.

Eighteen-year-old Abigail Leedy described what it was like for her and other children growing in South Philadelphia near an oil refinery. Large numbers of children suffer from asthma and other respiratory diseases due to the pollution, where fossil fuel explosions release tens of thousands of pounds of hydrofluoric acid into the air. So Leedy decided to defer going to college and founded the Sunshine Movement because “in Philly, people die because of fossil fuels.”

 

About the Author 

V. P. Franklin is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of History and Education at the University of California, Riverside, and author of The Young Crusaders: The Untold Story of the Children and Teenagers Who Galvanized the Civil Rights Movement.

A Q&A with Dr. Stephanie Pinder-Amaker and Dr. Lauren Wadsworth

It’s common for the phrase “Did that just happen?!” to cross the minds of employees from marginalized communities. Be it because of a microaggression (“you’re so . . . articulate!”); a misguided marketing campaign (Barnes & Noble’s 2020 Diverse Editions gaffe); or a short-sighted diversity statement (an online post in solidarity with Black lives with little or no follow-through internally), people from marginalized identities have witnessed and experienced incidents that leave them uncomfortable at best, and at worst feeling unsafe to be authentic in their jobs. With their book Did That Just Happen?!: Beyond “Diversity”—Creating Sustainable and Inclusive Organizations, clinical psychologists Dr. Stephanie Pinder-Amaker and Dr. Lauren Wadsworth invite professionals at every level, in companies, schools and nonprofits, to reconsider common “diversity landmines” and how to manage them. They also bring their expertise in diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) work at various companies and their own experiences to the book. Beacon Broadside editor Christian Coleman caught up with them to chat about it.

Christian Coleman: What was the inspiration for writing Did That Just Happen?!

Dr. Stephanie Pinder-Amaker and Dr. Lauren Wadsworth: As people who hold marginalized identities, we often have been the “only” or the “pioneer” in our workplace. As a result, we frequently experienced not only identity related aggressions but consistent requests to train those around us on how to be more culturally aware and responsive. Neither of us started our careers aiming to be “diversity experts,” but like many with marginalized identities, we continued to be called upon, and eventually embraced the role. Over the years that we worked at the same institution, we found solace and support connecting over this experience. One day while walking the campus, both a bit burnt out and tired from recent identity-related events, Lauren turned to Stephanie and said, “Maybe we should just write a book about all of this!”

We found the book a powerful place to channel our pain, experience, and voices. We poured everything we could think of into it: examples, strategies, terms we’d coined in our trainings. Our hope was that we could write a book that could not only help leadership who want to do better but also to validate those who had been harmed, giving them a book packed full of skills to anonymously slip under their boss’s door in hopes of creating change while keeping them safe.

CC: Both of you are clinical psychologists. Tell us a bit about your backgrounds and how you bring your expertise to your work as co-founders of Twin Star – Intersectional Diversity Trainers.

Drs. SPA and LW: As psychologists, we know that trying to force people to change can often backfire. We also know the power of empathy in inspiring change. So instead of writing a book about why diversity and inclusion are important, we opened each chapter with a real-life story about something going wrong in the workplace. Our hope was that the reader could connect to and care about the characters, and from that place, get curious about how they could reduce and recover from harm in similar situations.

We also realize that self-efficacy is key if someone is going to keep trying something hard (for example, work against their racist socialization). We wrote the book to be accessible, with takeaways on every page, so that the reader can feel smarter and more skilled as they read along and try the simple and complex skills in their interactions across identities.

CC: That brings me to a question about the book’s structure. As you just mentioned, each chapter begins with an individual/s’ real-life story/ies and then moves onto a diagnostic of what went wrong and a section on what to do about it. How did you decide on this format?

Drs. SPA and LW: In our experience, books on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) can be dense and textbook-like. One of our goals for the book was to keep it interesting, trying not to lose the readers who might be on the fence about the whole DEI thing. We thought that breaking each chapter into these repeated three sections would make each chapter appear more “bite size.” The reader knows what they’re getting into in each chapter and can see goal posts ahead of what’s coming. We thought this would feel more approachable. Also, we thought this would be a format that would lend itself to being shared in smaller chunks. For example, an employee might relate to a particular example and choose to just share that chapter with their team. With this format, each chapter can stand alone or flow from and to the chapters surrounding it.

CC: The terms “diversity” and “inclusion” are often used interchangeably in daily lingo. Why was it important to make a distinction between them in the book?

Drs. SPA and LW: The distinction is important because grabbing for diversity without inclusivity is counterproductive, costly, and painful. In the book, we refer to this as putting “the cart before the horse.” A company might quickly hire new BIPOC and queer staff, trying to “do the right thing.” This is the cart. The horse is the skill set people need to communicate and work well across identities. Try to visualize the cart going before the horse. Now, picture the cart going before the horse while climbing a steep incline. We all know it’s not going to end well, and yet this is what we do over and over again in the workplace. The goal is to create environments in which people feel welcomed, seen, heard. We want people to know that they can bring their full selves to work and relationships and be rewarded for doing so. Put the horse in front of the cart and it might actually take flight!

CC: Last year, you wrote for us an essay on Barnes & Noble’s Diverse Editions gaffe. Are there any examples, current or old, of organizations that have been successful at sustaining diversity and inclusion in the workplace that have caught your attention? Or better yet, any examples of organizations that have learned from their gaffes?

Drs. SPA and LW: We want to encourage individuals and organizations to shift their view of what success looks like in this realm. There is no such thing as a “D&I Seal of Approval.” Gaffes are inevitable because no one can be perfect in this work 100 percent of the time. What we can be is committed to ongoing growth and learning. Companies that are doing the best right now are those that have committed to investing (financially and emotionally) in ongoing DEI trainings and skill development. We can name bias and oppression when we see it. We can commit to change. The companies that are moving toward sustainable, inclusive organizations are learning how to do these things. As we discuss in the book, the growth is not linear. As organizations commit to doing better, people will feel empowered to share their truths. We need to be prepared to hear them, express gratitude for the feedback and recommit—even when it hurts. 

CC: Now that we’re in the full swing of the new admin though still in the throes of repeated injustices against marginalized communities, what would you like readers to take away from the book?

Drs. SPA and LW: We would like readers to walk away from each chapter, and the book as a whole, with increased hope. We would like them to feel like they have new words to label and describe injustices in their day-to-day lives and be able to pull from a large toolbox of new skills to address each injustice (if they so choose). We hope that readers will use the book as a road map to navigate complex issues and feel inspired to build new relationships across identities and feel the incredible benefits that follow.

 

About the Authors 

Dr. Stephanie Pinder-Amaker is a clinical psychologist and Harvard Medical School professor committed to achieving multicultural excellence in organizations. As founding director of McLean Hospital’s College Mental Health Program, she has consulted with numerous institutions on diversity and inclusion. She is also the cofounder of Twin Stars Diversity Trainers, a consultation company offering diversity and identity-related trainings for organizations. Dr. Pinder-Amaker currently serves as the McLean Hospital-Harvard Medical School’s chief diversity, equity, and inclusion officer.

Dr. Lauren Wadsworth is a clinical psychologist passionate about furthering diversity and inclusion efforts. She serves as a senior advisor on the Anti-Racist, Justice, and Health Equity team at McLean Hospital/Harvard Medical School. She is the founder and director of the Genesee Valley Psychology (GVP), a clinic providing evidence-based treatment to the Rochester, NY, area and specializing in OCD, trauma, DBT, and a newly launched Racial Trauma and Healing center. She is also the cofounder of Twin Stars Diversity Trainers, a consultation company offering diversity and identity-related trainings for organizations and leadership. Finally, she is a clinical senior instructor in psychiatry at the University of Rochester Medical Center.

This year’s theme for Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month is Advancing Leaders Through Purpose-Driven Service. Beacon Press views their writers as leaders, charting the way to a better future with uncovered histories, cultural commentary, and more. Which is why, as AAPI Heritage Month wraps up, we’re putting the spotlight on the work of our Asian American writers. The following list of recommended reads—by no means exhaustive—honors their work and contributions to our society and American history at large, especially during a time when anti-Asian violence has been on the rise. These are titles to be savored all through the month and beyond.

 

Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex
Angela Chen

“A book that makes room for questions even as it illuminates, Ace should be viewed as a landmark work on culture and sexuality.”
—Nicole Chung, author of All You Can Ever Know: A Memoir

 

Acts of Faith: The Story of an American Muslim, the Struggle for the Soul of a Generation
Eboo Patel

“Eboo Patel has crafted an elegantly written and brilliantly argued manifesto-a call to arms, really-about the importance not of interfaith dialogue but of interfaith cooperation. Acts of Faith is more than a book; it is an awakening of the mind. It should be required reading for all Americans.”
—Reza Aslan, author of No God but God

 

Demystifying Shariah: What It Is, How It Works, and Why It’s Not Taking Over Our Country
Sumbul Ali-Karamali

“With clarity and wit, [Ali-Karamali] describes shariah’s origins, central texts, methodologies, and schools of thought, exploring something that was never a code of law, but rather a system of interpretation designed to evolve and be flexible . . . This is a remarkably nuanced and thought-provoking history.”
—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

 

For Want of Water: and other poems
Sasha Pimentel

“In language of fierce compassion and tenderness, Pimentel humanizes the dehumanized. And oh, how we need such poems.”
—Martín Espada, author of Vivas to Those Who Have Failed

 

How to Be a Muslim: An American Story
Haroon Moghul

“Both authentically American and authentically Muslim, Moghul navigates the perilous fault lines of each dysfunctional identity while gracefully juggling the hot-potato topics of race, religion, nerd pop culture, and awkward first dates. . . . By showing us his warts, pain, flaws, insecurities, demons, and hypocrisies, Moghul ultimately reveals the joy, wonder, and purpose of living and being in the messy, conflicted playground that is modern life.”
—Wajahat Ali, author of The Domestic Crusaders

 

Prison Baby: A Memoir
Deborah Jiang Stein

“Deborah Jiang Stein has beaten the cycle of intergenerational incarceration, despite the odds against her—multiracial, born in a federal prison to a heroin-addicted mother. Her story offers hope to the possibility of personal transformation for anyone.”
—Sister Helen Prejean, author of Dead Man Walking and Pulitzer Prize nominee

 

“Prisons Make Us Safer”: And 20 Other Myths About Mass Incarceration
Victoria Law

“Law has offered us a very important tool. Her careful and accessible analysis, her feminist approach, and her methodical demystification of widely held views about incarceration enable precisely the kind of understanding we need at this moment.”
—Angela Y. Davis, Distinguished Professor Emerita, University of California, Santa Cruz

 

Radicalizing Her: Why Women Choose Violence
Nimmi Gowrinathan

“This is the kind of book that will unravel your understanding of the world. Reading Gowrinathan is a rare treat: when she narrates a story, she is as gripping and lyrical as Arundhati Roy—when she presents her philosophical takeaways on violence, she is precise and incisive, the Hannah Arendt of our times.”
—Meena Kandasamy, author of When I Hit You

 

Rescuing Jesus: How People of Color, Women, and Queer Christians Are Reclaiming Evangelicalism
Deborah Jian Lee

“Lee’s reporting indicts modern American evangelicalism’s failure to be good news for those who aren’t conservative, straight, white men. Weaving in her own story, she movingly chronicles her subjects’ search for a spiritual home, and what emerges is a profoundly hopeful, deeply Christian narrative about redemption and resurrection.”
—Jeff Chu, author of Does Jesus Really Love Me?

 

Soul Repair: Recovering from Moral Injury After War
Rita Nakashima Brock and Gabriella Lettini

“An eloquent, deeply human reminder that war is not just what takes place on a distant battlefield. It is something that casts a shadow over the lives of those who took part for decades afterwards. The stories told by Lettini and Brock are deepened by what the authors reveal about the way the tragic thread of war’s aftermath has run through their own families.”
—Adam Hochschild, author of To End All Wars

 

Thousand Pieces of Gold
Ruthanne Lum McCunn

“From Shanghai to San Francisco, Lalu Nathoy’s courageous journey is an important contribution to the history of pioneer women.”
—Ms. Magazine

 

The Upstairs Wife: An Intimate History of Pakistan
Rafia Zakaria

“From a window in the upstairs of her family’s house, Rafia Zakaria parts the curtain, looks down on Pakistan, and writes its history. The Upstairs Wife roams between the lives of a family and the life of a nation—and finds itself in the heart of a society that is much maligned and little understood.”
—Vijay Prashad, author of The Poorer Nations

 

By Zach Norris

The police state that took George Floyd’s life and countless other Black lives operates on five systemic harms: capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy, violence, and trauma. Understanding the harms is crucial in order to work toward defunding the police. Zach Norris identifies each one in great detail in this passage from Defund Fear: Safety Without Policing, Prisons, and Punishment. This is part one of a two-part post.

***

From among all the things that actually harm us, a mere sliver is addressed by our criminal legal system—a term I prefer over “criminal justice system,” because calling it a “justice system” inaccurately links it to justice, as well as fairness, healing, and safety. Generally speaking, the criminal legal system works great at protecting you and keeping you safe if you are a rich white man. It protects your power, prestige, and property, while debunking, debasing, and diminishing those who would question your right to those privileges. If you’re anyone else, it’s a lot less likely to result in justice, let alone healing.

Much of what people go to prison for are actions that were not harmful to anyone. Meanwhile, there are so many actions that are actually harmful that we’re not taking into account because the current criminal legal system can’t or won’t apply to them. In focusing so much on crimes—defined as what’s against the law—we have increasingly lost sight of morality.

Belief systems that have to do with the allocation of power—such as capitalism and sexism and racism—are also the cause of immense harm. In fact, they probably bear the lion’s share of the blame for suffering on this planet. But how do you hold a belief system accountable? Occasionally the criminal legal system can punish individual racists, sexists, or capitalists for harms they have caused (Bernie Madoff comes to mind). Targeting and weeding out individuals doesn’t change a toxic society- wide culture, whether we’re talking about white supremacy, male supremacy, or the supremacy of profit over people.

At the same time, much of the harm that feels most devastating to us individually is intimate and interpersonal: every hurt that gets dealt, inside families, between friends, between parents and offspring, between lovers. We know that the prevalence of child abuse and domestic violence is far wider than what is reflected by reported offenses, let alone arrests or prosecutions. Harms that happen inside the home are largely invisible, occurring in a private sphere behind closed doors. Regardless of whether it happens at home or elsewhere, psychological and emotional abuse almost never gets “counted,” yet causes tremendous damage. The more #MeToo stories we hear about harassment and abuse in the workplace, the more we understand how vulnerable women are—and how they risk retaliation, humiliation, and termination when they do come forward. Some of the most popular stories have been about celebrities, but we know that the reach of sexual harassment and abuse is at least as extensive in everyday occupations.

This is why I focus on “harms” rather than on “crimes.” I’m not proposing that we do away with laws and the criminal legal system. I just don’t think they’re how we generate safety.

Shifting the focus away from crimes to harms means we address actions, policies, and behaviors that are most harmful. Shifting focus would mean we look at psychological harms, environmental damages, and social and economic suffering. Finally, it means that when it comes time to address harms and keep further harms from happening, we involve far more bodies than merely the law; the players include academics, policymakers, community leaders, historians and community members who are involved in arenas such as public health, epidemiology, urban planning, and social policy.

HARM #1: CAPITALISM

In a system where the primary directive is to promote profit, human well-being will always lose out. Inequality is not an accident, but a central defining feature of capitalism. Capital doesn’t naturally trickle down like part of a watershed—as we were promised for much of the second half of the twentieth century. Instead, what it naturally does is amass and concentrate in the hands of a few. Umair Haque does a great job of explaining the logic of wealth concentration in simple language:

Mom-and-pop capitalism is a healthy and beautiful thing, an economy of a million little shops, bakeries, artisans — but it takes only a modest attachment to a profit motive. But thanks to the rise of massive, global speculation, only aggressive quarterly profit-maximization was allowed. CEO earnings were hitched to share prices, and your share price only went up if your earnings did, relentlessly, illogically, crazily, every single quarter, instead of stabilizing at a happy, gentle amount — and so the only way left, in the end, to achieve it, was to build titanic monopolies, which could squeeze people for every dime. Once the economy had Macy’s, JC Penney, K-Mart, Toys-R-Us and Sears. Now it has Walmart. The story was repeated across every single industry.

Part of that squeezing for every dime involves jobs, of course, which have been moved around as companies look for the least amount of friction with profit, whether that has meant reduced occupational health and safety standards, or reduced rights and wages for workers. Now, in the newest iterations of squeezing, we have automation and machine learning, along with increasing numbers of companies hiring for temporary, flexible, precarious jobs, instead of offering full-time, long-term employment with benefits. It is not so much that employers don’t want stable employees as much as they don’t want to reciprocate with stable hours and benefits. Why would they, if they can get away without doing so, increasing their all-important profit margins?

Meanwhile, the so-called “financialization” of the economy has meant that speculation—investment banks and hedge funds and others making money “placing bets with each other”—has grown to be a huge part of the economy, dwarfing the real economy, where things that we actually need are invented and made and maintained, whether that means food, or the cure for cancer, or a new energy grid.

In 2008, all the house of cards speculation upon speculation led to a collapse, which is exactly what houses of cards inevitably do. And when that happened, it took down everyone. Except that the wealthy few at the top had the resources and connections to allow them to recover; and the rest of us did not, further undermining our already insecure positions. Almost three-quarters of the US population has under a thousand dollars in savings, and a third has zero. This is why a single unexpected expense like a hospital visit or a car repair is all it takes for someone not to make rent. Then they’re forced to make impossible choices: to stop refilling the prescription they depend on, or stop paying utilities, or to skip subway fare and risk getting caught. Even then, it’s often not enough.

An economy that is geared toward speculation with a focus on short- term profits is like a hungry beast that must be fed. A wealthy few refuse to compromise the expansion of their profit, regardless of the impacts on natural resources and the planet, as well as on the majority of people’s well-being and security. When the US government (among others) chose to spend its money propping up this system, it declared the need to make cuts elsewhere. Outside the United States, this gets called “austerity.” Inside the US, some have referred to this framework as “Reaganomics,” but its basic tenets have been enthusiastically endorsed by Democratic and Republican presidents alike. Healthcare, support in old age, the environment, renewable energy—the government decided the budgets for these items could be slashed. Let corporations make money providing them—a.k.a. “privatization.”

That’s where we are today in this stage of capitalism. Most resources are going to a tiny minority of people, while the majority can’t get their basic needs met. Millions of Americans face a constant struggle to keep a roof over their heads. Four evictions are filed every minute.37 Many Americans go without healthcare, given the absence of universal coverage in the US. As a result, the US ranks poorly on key indicators of health, such as infant mortality, and a hundred thousand Americans die each year from causes that were preventable with medical treatment.38 This is really a violation of common decency and dignity, as well as a source of instability and insecurity for us as a society. There’s a tendency to think of capitalism as inevitable, but like all human systems it was created by humans and there are other options.

And because wealth equals power, its concentration in the hands of a few means our democracy is getting replaced by oligarchy—the rule of the few. They make new laws and bankroll elected officials to protect their interests, while geting rid of all the laws and politicians who impinge on those interests. Pretty much everyone else is left suffering and plagued by anxiety about how much worse things can get.

HARM #2: WHITE SUPREMACY

There is no end to the harm done to people of color by the long prevailing belief system that holds that white people are superior to others and deserve more—more resources, more second chances, more of the credit, more starring roles, and on and on; more of all the good stuff. People of color, by contrast, get more of things like asthma, freeways through our neighborhoods, bad mortgages, and jail time.

“When over decades the police, courts, banks, buses, schools, and other parts of society regularly ignore, exploit, and harm non-White people, yet these incidents are largely denied, excused, or blamed on the victims, without being properly investigated, before disappearing from the accounts of history or the evening news or the general discourse: this is white supremacy. The humanity of certain people is made invisible,” writes Native American Edgar Villanueva in his 2018 critique of philanthropy, Decolonizing Wealth.

There are the explicit examples of racism that should be shocking but instead are unrelenting. If you are a parent of black children, your confidence in their safety is likely to be at an all-time low as videos and stories of police misconduct and violence emerge on what seems like a daily basis. Antwon Rose was seventeen. Cameron Tillman was fourteen. Tamir Rice was twelve. Aiyana Jones was seven. “I see mothers bury their sons / I want my mom to never feel that pain / I am confused and afraid,” Antwon had written in a poem that ended up being recited at his funeral.

White supremacy also manifests more subtly in behavior and attitudes, for example as white people believing that everything they’ve achieved is based on merit and hard work, as opposed to a system set up to make their success more likely, which leads to absurd ideas like “playing the race card” or “reverse racism,” or defensiveness and woundedness when white privilege is mentioned—a phenomenon known as “white fragility,” a term coined by the whiteness studies professor Robin DiAngelo.

Most intractable of all is white supremacy that has been baked into institutions, culture, and policies, also known as structural racism, which has served to deprive people of color of resources over the entire history of the United States. These implicit forms of white supremacy are nefarious, making it hard to assign responsibility.

Even when we consider certain threats that appear to apply to everyone indiscriminately, such as nuclear war, natural disasters—people of color almost always bear more harm. Hurricane Katrina is an example. The lack of adequate evacuation plans and disaster relief caused the worst and most immediate hurt to low-income people, people with disabilities, and black people. According to Mimi Kim of Creative Interventions: “People with less power can be more vulnerable to violence because they are an easier target, because they are less likely to be protected, more likely to be blamed, and [have fewer] places to go to get help.”

The harm done is physical, economic, psychological. Physical: this includes police brutality and hate crimes, and the bias in medical care that has thousands of black women suffering, as legendary tennis player Serena Williams did during the birth of her daughter, because doctors don’t listen to them or trust them to know their situation; and the diseases and chronic conditions caused by having highways, waste treatment facilities, and toxin-spewing factories disproportionately located in communities of color. Economic: such as the disparity in wealth between white people and people of color, which doesn’t correlate to education or income level; or the disproportionate impacts of job losses and mortgage crises upon people of color. Finally, psychological: the depression and trauma that come from all the other harms compounded, and from feeling the whole world, or at least the whole nation, considers you as less worthy.

Writing about the historic and intergenerational trauma that Native Americans experience, Edgar Villanueva writes: “Imagine that all your family and friends and community members regularly experienced traumatic events: upheaval, violence, rape, brainwashing, homelessness, forced marches, criminalization, denigration, and death, over hundreds of years.” He goes on, and the next passage can be applied just as much to all people of color: “Imagine the trauma of this experience has been reinforced by government policies, economic systems and social norms that have systematically denied your people access to safety, mobility, resources, food, education, dignity, and positive reflections of themselves. Repeated and ongoing violation, exploitation, and deprivation have a deep, lasting traumatic impact not just at the individual level—but on whole populations, tribes and nations.”

 

About the Author 

Zach Norris is the executive director of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, which creates campaigns related to civic engagement, violence prevention, juvenile justice, and police brutality, with a goal of shifting economic resources away from prisons and punishment and towards economic opportunity. He is also the cofounder of Restore Oakland and Justice for Families, both of which focus on the power of community action. He graduated from Harvard and took his law degree from New York University. Connect with him at zachnorris.com and on Twitter (@ZachWNorris).

A Q&A with G’Ra Asim

When millennial writer and punk rocker G’Ra Asim noticed his teenaged brother, Gyasi, going through the same paces and challenges he went through at that age, he decided to write him a survival guide for tackling the sometimes treacherous cultural terrain particular to being young, Black, brainy, and weird in the form of a mixtape. That mixtape is his epistolary memoir Boyz n the Void, in which he reflects on navigating Blackness, masculinity, and young adulthood and discovering punk music and straight edge culture as outlets to express himself freely. Asim also shreds on social commentary and pop culture critique in the mix while grounding each chapter in a totemic punk track. Beacon Broadside editor Christian Coleman caught up with him to chat about it.

Christian Coleman: Toni Morrison’s oft-quoted aphorism on writing goes: “If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” Was this the case for you when writing Boyz n the Void? And given the similarities between you and your brother, Gyasi, did you wish someone had written a mixtape like this for you?

G’Ra Asim: Morrison’s aphorism is definitely germane to the genesis of this book. As I write about in the chapter “Evidence of Things Unscene,” I started working on Boyz in a grad school MFA workshop. At first, I was trying to write essays on punk and straight edge in a less overtly personal way. The feedback I got from my instructors and classmates was that the “I-character” in my essays was difficult to fully imagine or believe. That led me to a larger idea: for the most part, we all walk around with our own IRL dramatis personae of what kind of people we think exist in the world. We generate this dramatis personae based on mass culture, lived experience, and stereotypes. If you’re someone whose personality and social location—the combination of factors like gender, race, class, etc.—are perceived not to correspond, you’re probably absent from most people’s dramatis personae. You aren’t a plausible figure for them until you instantiate yourself as thoroughly and persuasively as possible. The book became a way of writing myself, my brother, and many others like us out of the void, and an exploration of how punk rock has served as a coping mechanism for otherwise dwelling in the margins.

CC: I really connected with the passages where you write about neighborhood kids in Maryland chiding you for “talking like a white boy” or other people calling you out for not living up to their expectations of authentic Blackness because of your upbringing and love for punk. (I was an anime and classical music fiend growing up, so my Black card was often revoked and given the stamp of disapproval.) And punk is all about defying expectations. Would you say that punk and straight edge culture played a significant part in you claiming Blackness on your own terms?

GA: I felt comfortable embracing punk rock and straight edge because I’d already accepted that the most visible and propagandized representations of Blackness weren’t the only valid ones. My parents are artists and eccentrics, and lots of their characteristics—and even their relationship, as a happily married couple in which each party is an attentive and committed parent—were at odds with so many of the stereotypes about Black people. Merely daring to internalize and abide by the values impressed upon me in that household would and did amount to cultural treason in some people’s eyes. The world withholds full humanity from Black people as it is. I didn’t want to narrow the scope of possibilities for myself even further by feeling beholden to some dreadfully rigid script.

It’s worth noting, too, that when Black people make interventions in cultural traditions where they aren’t the norm, those interventions bear the traces of our Blackness. At a certain point, insisting that a Black person making rock music is making “white music” is like saying Washington Wizards point guard Russel Westbrook’s game is white because he incorporated the Eurostep. Whatever the origin of the tools we absorb into our process, Black folks inevitably imbue what we create with the markers of our particular history, styles, and affects.

CC: You’ve written about the punk scene for AfroPunk, especially the POC punk scene. Did these pieces prepare you in any way for writing Boyz?

GA: Maintaining an engagement with all the incredible and inspiring POC punk bands that are continually reimagining the punk tradition for the twenty-first century was crucial to the development of Boyz n the Void. I’m super grateful to AfroPunk for providing a space where I could geek out about groups like the Muslims, Rebelmatic, the 1865, Choked Up, and Bachslider, and to fine tune some of my ideas about what Black punk cultural production means. AfroPunk is also a platform that is perhaps more known for elevating Black music that may, in the broadest sense, reflect a punk sensibility but doesn’t necessarily resemble, for example, the Clash or the Ramones at all in terms of its sound. So with my contributions to the site, I relished reminding people that Black rockers are out here making provocative and timely music that specifically foregrounds loud electric guitars, too.

CC: I came across AJ+’s video on the Black history of punk music, which features Bad Brains. You have a chapter centered on them and their song “Attitude.” I was wondering what you thought of the band, Death, as a proto-punk band that introduced a Black footing into the genre. Are they foundational to your punk ethos?

GA: I hadn’t heard of Death until I watched the excellent documentary on them that came out in 2012, A Band Called Death. While I had already been an enthusiastic punk fan for a long time by then, watching the film did encourage me to start thinking about exploring punk as a literary subject at book length. It was moving to see punk music as a bridge between Black family members, so there’s some intriguing overlap there as well.

CC: Are any of the bands from your mixtape influences for your own band, babygotbacktalk, and if so, which ones?

GA: With all sincerity, every single band on the mixtape has made an impact on babygotbacktalk. They’re all taproots, and we’re a subsidiary.

Propagandhi and Bad Religion are especially huge influences. They’re the OGs at marrying a catchy, melodic, and accessible sound with socially conscious lyrics. That’s a recipe we study closely and aspire to add our own spin on. Fefe Dobson is a godmother to our band. It might seem odd to position her that way, since she and I are close in age, but she’s a model of punk precocity; she’s been making bops since I was in middle school. I discovered her music at a formative time when even the faintest indication of a Black person within two feet of an electric guitar beckoned to me like iron filings to a magnet. I try to bring Fefe’s attitude to my day-to-day life, so naturally, it also comes out in the studio and on stage.

CC: Do any of the songs on your album, Genre Reveal Party, touch on the themes you write about in your book? Is your book in dialogue with your album?

GA: Genre Reveal Party and Boyz n the Void have a lot to say to one another. When I was hammering away at Boyz and needed a break, I’d pick up a guitar and work on riffs and melodies that would end up on the album.

There’s resonance between lead single “Space Jam” and the second chapter of Boyz. Both metaphorize outer space as a bastion of the freedom, peace, and safety that continue to elude Black people on Earth. “Historically White College” engages some of the book’s primary themes by poking fun at all colleges as raced spaces—rather than just HBCUs. “When They Go Low, We Go Six Feet Under” addresses the use of respectability politics to dehumanize Black people lost to racist state violence. The song is an example of how punk and protest have been mutually reinforcing projects in my life, as detailed in the Boyz chapter “Marching Through the Mosh Pit.” Album closer “NYhilism” details the perils of Dating While Straight Edge, which makes it a companion piece to the book, and especially the chapter titled “To the Edge and Back.”

CC: And now for the million-dollar question: Has Gyasi read the book? Have you all hashed out his impressions of it yet?

GA: He has! He read it pretty recently, so our conversation about it is still ongoing. One of his main takeaways is that even though a lot of what I wrote is aimed at his specific personality and unique suite of concerns, Gyasi thinks Boyz n the Void is a useful survival guide for a broad range of readers. I mopped my brow when he said so. The kid’s a tough and trenchant critic, so his approval means a lot.

 

About the Author 

G’Ra Asim, a writer and musician, is an assistant professor of nonfiction writing at Ithaca College. He has served as writing director at the African American Policy Forum and as graduate teaching fellow in Columbia’s Undergraduate Writing Program. His work has appeared in Slate, Salon, Guernica, The Baffler, and The New Republic. When not writing prose or teaching, he sings, plays bass and writes lyrics for NYC DIY pop punk band babygotbacktalk, who were named one of Afropunk’s “Top 8 Punkest Bands on the Planet Right Now.”

A Q&A with Eric Berkowitz

If free speech is one of the West’s most revered values, it is also among the most contentious. The base impulses driving many famous acts of suppression of free speech date way back. Book burnings, decrees of death, violent attacks of retaliation—censorship comes in several guises, which writer, lawyer, and journalist Eric Berkowitz covers in Dangerous Ideas: A Brief History of Censorship in the West, from the Ancients to Fake News. His book illuminates the power of restricting speech; how it has defined states, ideas, and culture; and (despite how each of us would like to believe otherwise) how it is something we all participate in. Beacon Broadside editor Christian Coleman caught up with Berkowitz to chat with him about it and why censorship doesn’t work.

Christian Coleman: Tell us about the inspiration behind writing Dangerous Ideas.

Eric Berkowitz: Not terribly inspiring, really. My UK publisher was proposing ideas for new projects, none of which seemed likely to hold my—or the public’s—interest very long, until one or another censorship/free speech issue popped up. I think it was the censorship of “drill” music—a hardcore rap genre—there, along with the inevitable battles and accusations. It struck us that every time an issue like this comes up, it’s as if it was for the first time. We realized that there were no books for the non-specialist audience unlocking what Western censorship or free speech has meant over the centuries, and how the same issues continually emerge in new forms. I started to read and didn’t look up for a long time.

CC: In addition to the writer hat, you wear two others: lawyer and journalist. How has your background informed the writing of Dangerous Ideas?

EB: It’s easy to see where journalism and the book intersect. As for my lawyering life, my very first case involved an unlikely free-speech hero: a captain in the Alameda County Sheriff’s Department. He had worked against the reelection of the miserable incumbent sheriff and found himself working the night shift in the county jail. We sued, claiming retaliation against his expressed political beliefs and—much against the obvious wishes of the judge—won big. That taught me the power behind the words of the First Amendment. I now represent Central American women seeking asylum. No one has experienced silencing like they have.

CC: One of the main points of your book is that censorship doesn’t work. Suppressing speech gives it that much more power. How is that?

EB: It doesn’t work because it can’t work. A text might be burned, a person or group might be punished or worse, but the ideas expressed invariably carry on and gain more currency for being forbidden fruit. Words, the poet John Milton said, have their own life apart from the page they appear on. Once the invention of the printing press supercharged the spread of ideas to the masses, censorship laws bloomed as well, along with an exploding black market. Printers told writers to write “anything that will be forbidden” while Catholic monks drove up the price of Galileo’s works the Church had forbidden.

Censors eventually got into the act, as the profits from trading in printed contraband outpaced their official pay. As time pressed on, government prohibitions became marks of quality. France’s chief eighteenth-century censor declared that anyone who read only approved books was behind the times by at least a century.

This is no less true now. The Chinese government, for example, knows that its “Great Firewall” against Western news is being circumvented millions of times a day—recently a raft of forbidden news was routed through Spotify and the online game Minecraft—but that has only hardened its resolve. It’s not just speech authorities fear but also the appearance of toleration. And once an aggressive stance toward speech has been taken—even a symbolic one—to abandon or soften it seems to dig them into a deeper hole.

CC: I want to look at two current issues of Dangerous Ideas to see how they form part of the cultural history of censorship. For starters, our former president had the habit of speaking untruths—boasting the size of his inauguration turnout and downplaying the severity of the pandemic—while decrying “fake news” whenever he was fact checked. Why is it so important for world leaders like him, including Mao Zedong and others before him, to make history, as you write, “an instrument of ideology and power?”

EB: The curation of history—by smashing statues and images, censoring books and records, or even destroying people—has always been a preoccupation of authoritarians, and similar impulses have spilled over to democratic societies. The past, as the historian J.H. Plumb noted, has always been “a created ideology with a purpose,” sculpted to shore up power and class structures and provide people with a sense of collective destiny. As such, it’s best to think of history less as an accumulation of verified facts than a psychological reality. For governments, the management of that reality is critical to justify their authority and undermine their opponents, living and dead.

There are so many examples of this. Napoleon banned the Roman historian Tacitus because he didn’t want the descriptions of tyrannical emperors to remind readers of him. An American filmmaker was jailed during World War I for a movie depicting British atrocities during the Revolutionary War—the judge didn’t want Americans to know how badly America’s current ally had behaved. Poland has a new law censoring any scholarship showing its complicity in the murder of Jews during World War II, and right now there is a move from the right to bar schools from teaching the New York Times’ 1619 Project, which documents (among other things) the persistent legacy of American slavery.

CC: Secondly, would you consider cancel culture to be a form of censorship?

EB: I defy anyone to give a coherent definition of cancel culture, other than by pointing to the consequences—fair or otherwise—of one’s speech or actions. Terms like this, or “woke,” or “politically incorrect,” or even censorship, have become bleached by weaponized overuse, and maybe that’s not a bad thing. It forces us to be more precise in our thinking.

It’s comical to think of congresspersons, or famous celebrities, or zillionaire businessmen as being silenced, and they rarely suffer lasting consequences for their words or actions. But when the less powerful are driven from their jobs or are threatened by online mob attacks, well, that looks like silencing. Is it censorship in the traditional sense of government action against citizens? Generally not, other than when Trump called out the online dogs against his enemies du jour. Is it fair? Often not, in my estimation, as the subtleties of speech, context, and meaning are lost in instant online pile-ons.

Way back in 1968, Marshall McLuhan warned of “womb-to-tomb surveillance” made possible by “the electrically computerized dossier bank—that one big gossip column that is unforgiving and unforgetful, and from which there is no redemption, no erasure of early ‘mistakes.’” I fear we may have reached that point.

CC: How do you see Dangerous Ideas commenting on our post-truth cultural landscape? What do you hope readers will take away from reading it?

EB: I’m not sure this landscape is that novel. Can we forget that our country was founded in part on the belief that a large part of the population was less than fully human? Or that millions of Jews were killed on the false notion that they were undermining Christian society? Or that we went to war on the lie—amplified by the likes of the New York Times—that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11? All this predated Mark Zuckerberg.

We have long bathed in bullshit because it often answers knotty questions, affirms what we want to believe, and demonizes those we already hate. I hope Dangerous Ideas sensitizes us to this and to our innate hostility to ideas that jar our beliefs. Hopefully, the book will nudge us toward greater toleration of ideas unlike our own. Tolerance isn’t easy, it’s a flimsy muscle that easily atrophies.

 

About Eric Berkowitz

Eric Berkowitz is a writer, lawyer, and journalist. For more than 20 years, he practiced intellectual property and business litigation law in Los Angeles. Berkowitz has published widely throughout his career, and his writing has appeared in periodicals such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Economist, the Los Angeles Times, and LA Weekly. His previous books include Sex and Punishment and The Boundaries of Desire. He lives in San Francisco. Connect with him at ericdberkowitz.com and on Twitter at @ericberkowitz4.

By Laura Erickson-Schroth and Laura A. Jacobs

Notice how certain pleas to “protect the children” don’t actually consider the well-being of children? Especially if children and teens are trans? 2021’s latest rash of anti-trans bills aims to restrict their access to gender-affirming healthcare and make it illegal, restrict transgender students’ right to fully participate in school and sports, and bar them from using bathrooms aligned with their gender identity. Cis-gendered folks need to show up for trans youth! These points from Laura Erickson-Schroth and Laura A. Jacobs’s “You’re in the Wrong Bathroom!”: And 20 Other Myths and Misconceptions About Transgender and Gender Noncomforming People explain why support and acceptance is so important for their mental health and development. Erickson-Schroth and Jacobs also debunk the myths fueling these anti-trans bills.

***

Bullying from Peers and Teachers

Many transgender people have been marginalized from a young age. Children and adolescents who demonstrate gender variance can be harassed by their peers simply for dressing in the “wrong” garment or for having a hairstyle that more closely matches norms for the “other” gender. Teachers often refuse to acknowledge students’ trans identities and insist on referring to individuals by their birth names and pronouns, something most transgender and gender-nonconforming people find to be an aching nullification of their identity. Very frequently, youth who do not conform are subject to ostracization, jeers, bullying, physical violence, and sexual assault. Many youth also face similarly unsupportive or hostile families.

These explicit and implicit attacks can become a chronic trauma individuals face daily. Lack of physical and emotional safety can lead to poor school performance, less access to higher education, fewer opportunities for stable and lucrative employment, and less safe living conditions.

 

Because Bathrooms . . . Again

There have been numerous attempts to legislate trans people’s restroom use based on allegations that we are sexually exploitative. These laws are framed not as infringements on the rights of transgender people but as “protection” for women, children, and others. Those in favor of “bathroom bills” argue that trans people are more likely than others to perpetrate physical or sexual violence, or to spy on their neighbors while using the restroom. There is little discussion of the burden imposed on transgender and gender-nonconforming people when they are forced to use bathrooms inconsistent with their genders.

In fact, as of 2015, there had been no recorded incidents of anyone trans or gender nonconforming being arrested for sexual misconduct in a bathroom within the United States ever, and trans people are far more likely to be the victim in such settings. Up to 70% of transgender people report having been denied access to restrooms, harassed while using restrooms, or even physically assaulted.

 

Hormones and Gender-Affirming Healthcare

Even with the numerous steps that trans people are required to take in order to gain access to hormones and surgeries, critics of current practices still argue that they are too easy to obtain. One of the biggest concerns is that those seeking hormones or surgery will regret the decision later on, but decades-long follow-up studies conducted by researchers around the world demonstrate extremely low regret rates (0–3 percent).

Many are concerned about these health-care interventions being applied to children, unaware that children do not physically transition with hormones or surgeries. Instead, children who express gender-nonconforming behaviors or thoughts and have supportive parents often work with therapists to explore their feelings, and some socially transition, adopting clothes, hairstyles, names, and pronouns that they feel fit them. There are times when children socially transition and then later decide that the gender they were assigned at birth actually fits more comfortably, and these individuals, in supportive environments, still thrive. The distress often experienced is more commonly due to an intolerant social atmosphere; it is more harmful to prevent children from exploring their gender identities than to follow them on their journeys, wherever they may lead.

Some adolescents are prescribed hormone blockers, which can be offered in the early stages of puberty to halt the development of secondary sex characteristics, or even later in puberty to prevent ongoing body changes and menstrual cycles, or to provide time for an individual to make decisions. However, hormone blockers are extremely expensive and financially prohibitive for most families. Teenagers with supportive families may have the option to start adult hormones like estrogen or testosterone if they are mature enough to understand their decisions.

Our current approaches to care for transgender people seeking hormones or surgeries are less restrictive than they were in the past, but far from making it too easy to obtain hormones and surgeries, these systems continue to put up numerous barriers. Unfounded fears related to regret rates, which are actually quite low, continued to drive opposition to efforts to increase access and make it harder for trans people to live as their authentic selves.

 

The Importance of Trans Visibility for Trans Youth

In a 2015 Marie Claire article, activist and writer Janet Mock wrote that the cultural acceptance of multiple genders in her native Hawaii “served as a backdrop for my best friend and me as we embodied our womanhood, enabling us to transition through the halls of our high school and become who we knew ourselves to be.” A 2016 study in the journal Pediatrics demonstrated that transgender children with supportive families have no more anxiety or depression than children who don’t identify as trans.

Rather than being threatening to others, the visibility of trans and gender-nonconforming people contributes to the well-being of youth, both trans and cis, and to a safer, more civil society. Exposure to trans and gender-nonconforming individuals benefits our society both directly and indirectly. Normalizing transgender and gender-nonconforming lives through visibility on television, in movies, and in daily life offers role models people can identify with, especially during the agonizing process of coming out. Additionally, these representations help our allies address their own fears by seeing us in everyday settings, and they help everyone, trans or cis, explore the rich diversity of gender and sexuality by offering a vision of a broad range of possibilities for how we might live our lives.

 

Family Support

In addition to formal mental health care, there are other strategies that have been shown to promote resilience in transgender people. Helping parents with gender-nonconforming children learn to be supportive can have a significant impact. In a 2010 study by the Family Acceptance Project, LGBTQ+ young adults with high levels of family acceptance showed greater levels of self-esteem and general health and lower levels of depression, substance abuse, and suicidal ideation and attempts. A 2016 study on the mental health of transgender children clearly demonstrated that “out” trans youth living in supportive environments with supportive families, schools, and friends have no greater rates of depression and anxiety than youth in similar environments who do not identify as trans. In addition to environmental changes that can be made to assist trans people in building resilience from a young age, trans people often engage in behaviors that build their capacity to thrive in difficult situations. Studies of transgender people’s strategies for coping and resilience show that they often use techniques like positive reframing and self-talk, and turn to hobbies, humor, and spirituality to deal with transphobia in society. They also find ways to act as mentors to younger people, boosting their own and their mentees’ sense of agency.

Fighting anti-trans legislation in schools and other public spaces is important. But there are a number of smaller changes we can make as individuals or as members of organizations or companies to improve bathroom access for transgender people. Single-stall, gender-neutral restrooms can be beneficial not only for trans and gender-nonconforming people but also for families and people with disabilities. In larger, multi-stall restrooms that cannot currently be converted to single bathrooms, urinals can be removed and stalls upgraded for complete door and side coverage, so that people of all genders can be invited in. Work can also be done to change the language of bathroom access, acknowledging that many people, including trans people, require more access rather than less.

 

About the Authors

Laura Erickson-Schroth, MD, MA (New York, NY), is a psychiatrist working with LGBTQ people in New York City. She is the editor of Trans Bodies, Trans Selves, a resource guide written by and for transgender people.

Laura A. Jacobs, LCSW-R is a psychotherapist, activist, author, and public speaker in the NYC area.  She is co-author of “You’re In The Wrong Bathroom!” and 20 Other Myths and Misconceptions about Transgender and Gender-Nonconforming People, and Chair of the Board of Directors of the Callen-Lorde Community Health Center, one of the largest LGBTQ+ health centers in the nation. Follow her on Twitter at @LauraAJacobsNYC and visit her website.

A Q&A with Emily Paige Ballou

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

In this blog series, our editorial intern, Evangelyn Beltran, introduces you to each of the editors to talk about the book and about how parents can avoid common mistakes and misconceptions, and make their child feel truly accepted, valued, and celebrated for who they are. For the conclusion of our series during Autism Acceptance Month, here’s Emily Paige Ballou!

Evangelyn Beltran: What was it like to be diagnosed as autistic in your twenties rather than as a child?

Emily Paige Ballou: I think I actually benefited more from being diagnosed as an adult than I would have as a child. It came as a huge vindication and a relief, to have confirmation that I wasn’t just imagining all the ways I was different. Things really were harder for me. I wasn’t making it up. I wasn’t being spoiled or dramatic, and I wasn’t just broken.

Growing up without any knowledge or explanation was not a picnic that I would wish on anyone, but I also think that given the time period in which I was growing up (the early 1980’s-1990’s), nothing better would have happened to me if I’d been correctly diagnosed as a child.

EB: Were your parents supportive of your interests and encourage them growing up? 

EPB: My parents definitely weren’t unsupportive, for which I’m thankful, but I think they also didn’t quite know what to do with a kid with interests so intense and so uncommon. (For example, I became intensely obsessed with Buddy Holly when I was eight years old.)

But I think it was also helpful that I was growing up in a time in which kids tended to have far more unstructured, unsupervised time than they seem to have now. We were largely expected to entertain ourselves after school, on the weekends, and in the summertime. That meant we watched a lot of TV, but I also just had a lot of free time to read, work on whatever crafts I was into at the time or walk in the woods. While there were definitely things I wish I’d had more access to, it was important to me to figure things out for myself—both what I was interested in and what I was capable of.

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

EPB: I think that’s still a work in progress, and probably will continue to be so.

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

EPB: For me, anyway, the irony is that a lot of the strengths of autism have to be spent on navigating or compensating for the ways in which our society is still very hostile toward autistic people. And I think a lot about the kinds of things we might be able to create or accomplish if we all had the support that we need or weren’t required to expend a lot of our energy and cognitive bandwidth having to look out for ourselves in ways that non-autistic and non-disabled people don’t, if we didn’t have to leverage our strengths so hard just to survive.

But I love reading and writing, which feel like much more of a native language to me than speaking does, and that was definitely helpful in pursuing the kind of education I wanted. And through having to learn to navigate the world in ways that many people don’t have to, I’ve developed instincts for logistics and planning that are a huge asset in my career field. I have a job where, a lot of the time, I’m responsible for communicating to other people the information they need in order to feel secure in their ability to do their jobs, and I have a really visceral understanding of how important that is because of how important it is to me to be able to know what to expect and what’s expected of me.

EB: Have you dealt with any struggles in the workplace relating to your autism, and how did you handle it?

EPB: Yes, definitely. Because I have sensory issues that most people don’t understand well, combined with the facts that stage managers frequently aren’t thought of as having needs of our own as opposed to just being able to deal with anything and everything, and that most people still don’t think of autistic people as possibly being in the room, and there are risks to making your presence known. The combination of factors can make it hard to even know where or how to start advocating for yourself.

And learning how to handle it is also still a work in progress, partly because employers in my industry usually don’t have the same kinds of HR departments that more conventional employers do. But I think I’m getting better at figuring out who the right person is to talk to about getting what I need or at least starting a conversation about whether there’s a possible solution to whatever challenge or obstacle I’m facing.

This can also just be a physically and mentally exhausting profession to work in whether you’re disabled or not, and I’ve found it increasingly important as I get older to set limits and make sure I’m getting enough rest. Leaning on my affinity for routines and rituals actually helps a lot with this. I made a checklist of exactly what I have to do as soon as I get home from rehearsal every day, before I do anything else, so that my work that has to be done is done and I can rest and take time for myself with the rest of my evening.

 

About Emily Paige Ballou 

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

By Andreas Karelas

Considering how the pandemic has called attention to the harms we’ve caused our planet, it’s fitting that this year’s theme for Earth Day is Restore Our Earth. The theme reminds us to value the home we share with so many other species as well as the opportunities we have to do better by our planet. Andreas Karelas, founder and executive director of RE-volv, is all about the opportunities to act on climate change solutions. One of the ways we can restore our Earth is to take a page or two from this passage of his book, Climate Courage, and adopt the three community-centered values he suggests. Our psychology and mindset toward climate change is just as important to be aware of.

***

Based on the latest findings of positive psychology research, I suggest that, in order to address climate change, we need to cultivate different values—values that place a greater emphasis on community and less on consumption—and that living according to these values will have the benefits of reducing our impact on the planet and increasing our personal well-being. To do this I’ll describe what I believe to be an effective three-step approach: (1) cultivate gratitude, (2) choose simplicity, and (3) focus on serving others. If we can learn to be more grateful for what we have, simplify our lives, and put more effort into serving others, I think we’ll be well on our way to a happier, more sustainable world.

 

GRATITUDE

Our ability to be grateful can be one of the most important factors that determine our happiness. As the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi reminds us, “Happiness . . . does not depend on outside events, but, rather, on how we interpret them.” This, he points out, brings us to the reasonable conclusion that “it seems that those who take the trouble to gain mastery over what happens in consciousness do live a happier life.” As the old saying goes, our happiness often boils down to whether we see the glass as half empty or half full.

Do I often look around and feel thankful for the number of good things going on in my life? Or do I look at what’s missing, what’s lost, or what hasn’t yet been attained? Rather than constantly being in a state of want, in a state of lack, in a deprived, craving mentality because we choose to focus on all the things we don’t yet have or haven’t yet achieved, we can instead choose a different focus. We can focus on what we feel grateful for. Through mindfully guiding our thought patterns, we can cultivate the attitude that our lives are abundant, full, and that we have plenty of everything we need. We don’t have to feel compelled to get a bigger home when the home we have is comfortable, cozy, and lovely in all its imperfection.

Wabi-sabi is a Japanese term that embodies the spirit of perfection in imperfection or taking pleasure in the imperfect. It stems from the idea that nothing is perfect, nor will it ever be. That piece of furniture with the slightly worn corners is perfect the way it is. It’s the worn corners that give it that special something. A little character, perhaps. The key to seeing things this way is a gratitude mindset.

Save Money

When we’re not constantly shopping, spending, or upgrading the material things in our lives, we can actually save a lot. That means fewer credit card bills to pay, less stress and conflict about money in the family, less pressure to stay at the job you hate because the pay is good, and a greater ability to put some money away and feel more financially secure.

Using Less

When we cultivate gratitude in our lives, we tend to switch our mentality from one of scarcity to one of abundance. It gives us a sense of confidence. A hop in our step. Coming from a place of abundance allows us to approach life more compassionately and less competitively, more collaboratively and less selfishly.

Generosity

If we know that overall we’re doing fine, we’re going to be more willing to help others. Even if we’re not well off, even if money is tight, if we cultivate an attitude of abundance, we’ll find that we’re more often able to spare something to help someone else out. It’s this type of generous, altruistic spirit that binds us together, that creates community.

How to Increase Gratitude

Psychologists have found a simple routine to implement that does just the trick: gratitude journaling. At some point during the day, write down three things you are grateful for. It could be anything: The breakfast you had. A compliment you received at work. A nice phone call with a friend. Getting through your to-do list. A beautiful sunset. Once you begin this practice, you may find the number of things you’re grateful for increasing dramatically. It also can help remind us of our interconnectedness.

 

SIMPLICITY

The evidence shows us that what really gives us happiness are the very things we’re not getting enough of: Social relations. Leisure. Community. Quality time with the people in our lives. Taking time for ourselves and enjoying the fruits of our labor. If social relations and leisure are important factors in our happiness, is modern society helping? As technology replaces social interaction, it increasingly isolates us. And ironically, with all our time-saving devices, it’s actually speeding up the pace of our lives, leaving us with less leisure time to just be and enjoy life.

Simplicity at its core is about removing the extra activities, possessions, and responsibilities that don’t bring us joy, so we can put more time and energy into the things that do. Perhaps there’s no greater advice on simplicity than that given by the American author, philosopher, and father of the environmental movement, Henry David Thoreau. Thoreau, who spent two years, two months, and two days at Walden Pond observing nature, journaling, and reflecting on life, believed that even during his lifetime in 1840s Massachusetts, people needed to simplify their lives: “Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!” he wrote. “I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand.” I can certainly relate. Unfortunately, I often feel as though the items on my to-do list number closer to a thousand than two or three. And frankly, I have a lot less on my plate than many people.

Simple living, however, does not mean we need to go live in the woods like Thoreau. Duane Elgin, author of the classic Voluntary Simplicity, argues that living simply is not about living in poverty or deprivation. It’s about living an examined life in which one has determined what is truly important and how much is enough and then letting go of the rest.

Elgin’s research led him to the conclusion that “the American public has experienced . . . limited rewards from the material riches of a consumer society and is looking for the experiential riches that can be found, for example, in satisfying relationships, living in harmony with nature, and being of service to the world.”

He goes on to say that the call to live simply is both pulling and pushing humanity at the same time. “On the one hand,” Elgin says, “a life of creative simplicity frees energy for the soulful work of spiritual discovery and loving service—tasks that all of the world’s wisdom traditions say we should give our highest priority.” That’s a strong pull. But there’s also a push. “On the other hand,” he points out, “a simpler way of life also responds to the urgent need for moderating our use of the world’s nonrenewable resources and minimizing the damaging impact of environmental pollution.” That’s also true. “Working in concert, these pushes and pulls are creating an immensely powerful dynamic for transforming our ways of living, working relating, and thinking.”

Declutter

Decluttering our spaces by removing what no longer brings us joy frees us up to pursue activities and experiences that do bring us joy. “As a result,” Marie Kondo writes, “you can see quite clearly what you need in life and what you don’t, and what you should and shouldn’t do.”28 These dramatic changes in lifestyle and perspective, she argues, are life transforming. I’m so glad to see that her message resonates with so many people, because this shift to simplicity is exactly what we need to reduce the overconsumption that contributes to climate change.

Declutter Our Schedules

Let’s also embrace the value of simplicity for its own sake. As we slow down, take on fewer responsibilities and commitments, and declutter our schedule, we’ll find we have more time for relaxing, more time for our loved ones, more time for ourselves, more time just to enjoy being alive. And by the way, we’ll create a lot less carbon than we do rushing about in our currently overscheduled lives.

Experiences

Money, it turns out, gives us a lot more happiness when it’s spent on experiences, rather than on things. So as we clean out our closets, getting rid of all the extra things we don’t need, we should make a mental note: the next time we’re tempted to make an impulse purchase, use that money instead on a fun excursion, a concert, or an evening out with a friend, which we’d be sure to enjoy more.

Nature

Time spent in the natural world reminds us that we are part of the biosphere. The plants, animals, bugs, mountains, waterways, and woodlands nearby are an extension of our homes and part of our community. It’s important for us to remember these natural areas surrounding us, to spend time in our local environment, and, hopefully, to cultivate a sense of stewardship in the process.

People

Science shows us, not surprisingly, that the area that gives us the most happiness, fulfillment, and meaning in our lives is our relationships. This is why rebuilding our sense of community is at the core of combatting the climate crisis.

 

SERVICE

The fast-paced, hyper-individualized materialistic world we’ve inherited was made by people. And as Frederick Douglass pointed out when analyzing the brutalities of slavery, “What man can make, man can unmake.” I was reminded of his words when I saw an inspiring poster at a bus stop recently that said “Tomorrow’s World Is Yours to Build.”

Wow. That’s a powerful message. And, frankly, very good news. I find it uplifting because it puts us in the driver’s seat. We have the ability to reinvent the world.

The cultural narrative of our day is very much focused on individual development, individual power, individual fulfillment—in other words, on “me.” My money, my stuff, my job, my image. Our individualistic culture is making us ever more anxious, ever more concerned with our appearance, and generally preoccupied with our life story—our personal narrative of the dramas of our day-to- day lives.

One way to break from this self-absorption is to direct our energy toward service. By service I mean serving other people, other living beings, for their primary benefit, and not our own. Not only do we end up better off by creating waves of positive impact that uplift our communities, but studies show that it makes us happier.

Why does service make us feel happy? A lot of reasons.

Human Connection

First and foremost, serving others allows us to connect with people and strengthen our relationships to them. As social animals, we get a tremendous amount of joy and satisfaction from connecting with our friends, family members, coworkers, neighbors, and fellow community members.

Purpose Driven

Nothing makes us feel more accomplished than helping others, lifting others up, and creating real impact in the lives of other people. I’m sure you’ve had plenty of these experiences. Serving others brings the best out of us and that feels great. And nothing feels better than giving your all, especially when it’s for someone or something you really care about.

Interconnection

Service isn’t something done only for the benefit of others. Because we are interconnected, whatever impact I have on others will undoubtedly affect me too. Whether we can measure the benefits of service or not, whatever benefits I provide to one person, I provide to the whole, which includes myself, and thus improves the situation for everyone.

 

TYING IT ALL TOGETHER

With the Earth and all life that depends upon it hanging in the balance, living a simpler life has become an imperative. The world simply cannot sustain 7.8 billion people living the lifestyle of the average American or anything close to it. If we don’t change our behaviors and tastes, driven by our underlying mindsets, we risk it all. But if we can shift our attitudes, minds, and behaviors toward living simply, with gratitude, with a purpose to serve, then not only can we avert planetary disaster, we may also find peace in our hearts and love in our communities. We may have more days filled with joy, ease, and happiness.

 

About the Author 

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

By Aviva Chomsky

This piece appeared originally in TomDispatch.

Joe Biden entered the White House with some inspiring yet contradictory positions on immigration and Central America. He promised to reverse Donald Trump’s draconian anti-immigrant policies while, through his “Plan to Build Security and Prosperity in Partnership with the People of Central America,” restoring “US leadership in the region” that he claimed Trump had abandoned. For Central Americans, though, such “leadership” has an ominous ring.

Although the second half of his plan’s name does, in fact, echo that of left-wing, grassroots organizations like the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES), its content highlights a version of security and prosperity in that region that’s more Cold War-like than CISPES-like. Instead of solidarity (or even partnership) with Central America, Biden’s plan actually promotes an old economic development model that has long benefited U.S. corporations. It also aims to impose a distinctly militarized version of “security” on the people of that region. In addition, it focuses on enlisting Central American governments and, in particular, their militaries to contain migration through the use of repression.

Linking Immigration and Foreign Policy

The clearest statement of the president’s Central America goals appears in his “US Citizenship Act of 2021,” sent to Congress on January 20. That proposal offers a sweeping set of changes aimed at eliminating President Trump’s racist exclusions, restoring rights to asylum, and opening a path to legal status and citizenship for the immigrant population. After the anti-immigrant barrage of the last four years, that proposal seems worth celebrating. It follows in the footsteps of previous bipartisan “comprehensive” compromises like the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act and a failed 2013 immigration bill, both of which included a path to citizenship for many undocumented people, while dedicating significant resources to border “security.”

Read closely, a significant portion of Biden’s immigration proposal focuses on the premise that addressing the root causes of Central America’s problems will reduce the flow of immigrants to the US border. In its own words, the Biden plan promises to promote “the rule of law, security, and economic development in Central America” in order to “address the key factors” contributing to emigration. Buried in its fuzzy language, however, are long-standing bipartisan Washington goals that should sound familiar to those who have been paying attention in these years.

Their essence: that millions of dollars in “aid” money should be poured into upgrading local military and police forces in order to protect an economic model based on private investment and the export of profits. Above all, the privileges of foreign investors must not be threatened. As it happens, this is the very model that Washington has imposed on the countries of Central America over the past century, one that’s left its lands corrupt, violent, and impoverished, and so continued to uproot Central Americans and send them fleeing toward the United States.

Crucial to Biden’s plan, as to those of his predecessors, is another key element: to coerce Mexico and Guatemala into serving as proxies for the wall only partially built along the southern border of the US and proudly promoted by presidents from Bill Clinton to Donald Trump.

While the economic model lurking behind Biden’s plan may be old indeed, the attempt to outsource US immigration enforcement to Mexican and Central American military and police forces has proven to be a distinctly twenty-first-century twist on border policy.

Outsourcing the Border (from Bush to Biden)

The idea that immigration policy could be outsourced began long before Donald Trump notoriously threatened, in mid-2019, to impose tariffs on Mexican goods to pressure that country’s new president into agreeing to his demand to collaborate with Washington’s anti-immigrant agenda. That included, of course, Trump’s controversial “remain in Mexico” policy that has continued to strand tens of thousands of asylum-seekers there.

Meanwhile, for almost two decades the United States has been bullying (and funding) military and police forces to its south to enforce its immigration priorities, effectively turning other countries’ borders into extensions of the US one. In the process, Mexico’s forces have regularly been deployed on that country’s southern border, and Guatemala’s on its border with Honduras, all to violently enforce Washington’s immigration policies.

Such outsourcing was, in part, a response to the successes of the immigrant rights movement in this country. US leaders hoped to evade legal scrutiny and protest at home by making Mexico and Central America implement the uglier aspects of their policies.

It all began with the Mérida Initiative in 2007, a George W. Bush-initiated plan that would direct billions of dollars to military equipment, aid, and infrastructure in Mexico (with smaller amounts going to Central America). One of its four pillars was the creation of “a 21st century border” by pushing Mexico to militarize its southern border. By 2013, Washington had funded 12 new military bases along that border with Guatemala and a 100-mile “security cordon” north of it.

In response to what was seen as a child-migrant crisis in the summer of 2014 (sound familiar?), President Barack Obama further pressured Mexico to initiate a new Southern Border Program. Since then, tens of millions of dollars a year have gone toward the militarization of that border and Mexico was soon detaining tens of thousands of migrants monthly. Not surprisingly, deportations and human-rights violations against Central American migrants shot up dramatically there. “Our border today in effect is Mexico’s border with Honduras and Guatemala,” exulted Obama’s former border czar Alan Bersin in 2019. A local activist was less sanguine, protesting that the program “turned the border region into a war zone.”

President Trump blustered and bullied Mexico and various Central American countries far more openly than the previous two presidents while taking such policies to new levels. Under his orders, Mexico formed a new, militarized National Guard and deployed 12,000 of its members to the Guatemalan border, even as funding from Washington helped create high-technology infrastructure along Mexico’s southern border, rivaling that on the US border.

Trump called for reducing aid to Central America. Yet under his watch, most of the $3.6 billion appropriated by Congress continued to flow there, about half of it aimed at strengthening local military and police units. Trump did, however, temporarily withhold civilian aid funds to coerce Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador into signing “safe third country” agreements that would allow the United States to deport people with valid asylum claims to those very countries.

Trump also demanded that Guatemala increase security along its southern border “to stem the flow of irregular migration” and “deploy officials from US Customs and Border Protection and US Immigration and Customs Enforcement to advise and mentor host nation police, border security, immigration, and customs counterparts.” Once the Central American countries conceded to Trump’s demands, aid was restored.

This February, President Biden suspended those safe third country agreements, but is clearly otherwise ready to continue to outsource border enforcement to Mexico and Central America.

The Other Side of Militarization: “Economic Development”

As Democratic and Republican administrations alike outsourced a militarized response to immigration, they also sought to sell their agendas with promises of economic-development aid to Central America. However, they consistently promoted the very kind of assistance that historically brought violence and poverty to the region—and so led directly to today’s migrant crisis.

The model Washington continues to promote is based on the idea that, if Central American governments can woo foreign investors with improved infrastructure, tax breaks, and weak environmental and labor laws, the “free market” will deliver the investment, jobs, and economic growth that (in theory) will keep people from wanting to migrate in the first place. Over and over again in Central America’s tormented history, however, exactly the opposite has happened. Foreign investment flowed in, eager to take advantage of the region’s fertile lands, natural resources, and cheap labor. This form of development—whether in support of banana and coffee plantations in the nineteenth century or sugar, cotton, and cattle operations after World War II—brought Central America to its revolutions of the 1980s and its north-bound mass migration of today.

As a model, it relies on militarized governments to dispossess peasant farmers, freeing the land for foreign investors. Similarly, force and terror are brought to bear to maintain a cheap and powerless working class, allowing investors to pay little and reap fantastic profits. Such operations, in turn, have brought deforestation to the countryside, while their cheap exports to the United States and elsewhere have helped foster the high-consumption lifestyles that have only accelerated climate change—bringing ever fiercer weather, including the rising sea levels, more intense storms, droughts, and floods that have further undermined the livelihoods of the Central American poor.

Starting in the 1970s, many of those poor workers and peasants pushed for land reform and investment in basic rights like food, health, and education instead of simply further enriching foreign and local elites. When peaceful protest was met with violence, revolution followed, although only in Nicaragua did it triumph.

Washington spent the 1980s attempting to crush Nicaragua’s successful revolution and the revolutionary movements against the right-wing military governments of El Salvador and Guatemala. The peace treaties of the 1990s ended the armed conflicts, but never addressed the fundamental social and economic divides that underlay them. In fact, the end of those conflicts only opened the regional floodgates for massive new foreign investment and export booms. These involved, among other things, the spread of maquiladora export-processing plants and the growing of new export-oriented “non-traditional” fruits and vegetables, as well as a boom in extractive industries like gold, nickel, and petroleum, not to speak of the creation of new infrastructure for mass tourism.

In the 1980s, refugees first began fleeing north, especially from El Salvador and Guatemala, then riven by war, repression, and the violence of local paramilitary and death squads. The veneer of peace in the 1990s in no way brought an end to poverty, repression, and violence. Both public and private armed forces provided “security”—but only to elites and the new urban and rural megaprojects they sponsored.

If a government did threaten investors’ profits in any way, as when El Salvador declared a moratorium on mining licenses, the US-sponsored Central America Free Trade Agreement enabled foreign corporations to sue and force it to submit to binding arbitration by a World Bank body. In the Obama years, when the elected, reformist president of Honduras tried to enact labor and environmental improvements, Washington gave the nod to a coup there and celebrated when the new president proudly declared the country “open for business” with a package of laws favoring foreign investors.

Journalist David Bacon termed that country’s new direction a “poverty-wage economic model” that only fostered the rise of gangs, drug trafficking, and violence. Protest was met with fierce repression, even as US military aid flowed in. Prior to the coup, Hondurans had barely figured among Central American migrants to the United States. Since 2009, its citizens have often come to predominate among those forced to flee their homes and head north.

President Obama’s 2014 Alliance for Prosperity offered a new round of aid for investor-driven economic development. Journalist Dawn Paley characterized that Alliance as in “large part a plan to build new infrastructure that will benefit transnational corporations,” including “tax breaks for corporate investors and new pipelines, highways, and power lines to speed resource extraction and streamline the process of import, assembly, and export at low-wage maquilas.” One major project was a new gas pipeline to facilitate exports of US natural gas to Central America.

It was Obama who oversaw Washington’s recognition of the coup in Honduras. It was Trump who looked the other way when Guatemala in 2019 and Honduras in 2020 expelled international anti-corruption commissions. And it was Trump who agreed to downplay the mounting corruption and drug trafficking charges against his friend, Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, as long as he promoted an investor-friendly economy and agreed to collaborate with the US president’s anti-immigrant agenda.

The January 2021 Caravan Marks the Arrival of the Biden Years

All signs point to the Biden years continuing what’s become the Washington norm in Central America: outsourcing immigration policy, militarizing security there, and promoting a model of development that claims to deter migration while actually fueling it. In fact, President Biden’s proposal designates $4 billion over four years for the State Department and the US Agency for International Development to distribute. Such disbursement, however, would be conditioned on progress toward Washington-approved goals like “improv[ing] border security,” “inform[ing] . . . citizens of the dangers of the journey to the southwest border of the United States,” and “resolv[ing] disputes involving the confiscation of real property of United States entities.” Significant resources would also be directed to further developing “smart” border technology in that region and to Border Patrol operations in Central America.

A preview of how this is likely to work came just as Biden took office in January 2021.

One predictable result of Washington’s outsourcing of immigration control is that the migrant journey from Central America has become ever more costly and perilous. As a result, some migrants have begun gathering in large public “caravans” for protection. Their aim: to reach the U.S. border safely, turn themselves in to the border patrol, and request asylum. In late January 2021, a caravan of some 7,500 Hondurans arrived at the Guatemalan border in hopes that the new president in Washington would, as promised, reverse Trump’s controversial remain-in-Mexico policy of apparently endless internment in crowded, inadequate camps just short of the US.

They hadn’t known that Biden would, in fact, continue his predecessors’ outsourcing of immigration policy to Mexico and Central America. As it happened, 2,000 tear-gas and baton-wielding Guatemalan police and soldiers (armed, trained, and supported by the United States) massed at the Guatemala-Honduras border to drive them back.

One former Trump official (retained by President Biden) tweeted that Guatemala had “carr[ied] out its responsibilities appropriately and lawfully.” The Mexican government, too, praised Guatemala as it massed thousands of its troops on its own southern border. And Juan González, Biden’s National Security Council director for the Western Hemisphere lauded Guatemala’s “management of the migrant flow.”

In mid-March, President Biden appeared to link a positive response to Mexico’s request for some of Washington’s surplus Covid-19 vaccine to further commitments to cracking down on migrants. One demand: that Mexico suspend its own laws guaranteeing humane detention conditions for families with young children. Neither country had the capacity to provide such conditions for the large number of families detained at the border in early 2021, but the Biden administration preferred to press Mexico to ignore its own laws, so that it could deport more of those families and keep the problem out of sight of the US public.

In late January 2021, CISPES joined a large coalition of peace, solidarity, and labor organizations that called upon the Biden administration to rethink its Central American plans. “The intersecting crises that millions in Central America face are the result of decades of brutal state repression of democratic movements by right-wing regimes and the implementation of economic models designed to benefit local oligarchs and transnational corporations,” CISPES wrote. “Far too often, the United States has been a major force behind these policies, which have impoverished the majority of the population and devastated the environment.”

The coalition called on Biden to reject Washington’s longstanding commitment to militarized security linked to the creation and reinforcement of investor-friendly extractive economies in Central America. “Confronting displacement demands a total rethinking of US foreign policy,” CISPES urged. As of mid-March, the president had not responded in any fashion to the plea. My advice: don’t hold your breath waiting for such a response.

 

About the Author 

Aviva Chomsky is a professor of history and the coordinator of Latin American Studies at Salem State University. The author of several books including Undocumented and “They Take Our Jobs!”, Chomsky has been active in the Latin American solidarity and immigrants’ rights movements for over 30 years. She lives in Salem, Massachusetts.

Beacon Press supports our authors, the Asian and Asian American and Pacific Islander communities, and all those fighting against American xenophobia and hatred. This violence is not new. It has a long history in this country. We know that recent acts of violence are rooted in the same white supremacy and hate that take the lives of Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and other people of color. We remain committed to publishing resources to help dismantle the systems of white supremacy, hate, and toxic masculinity. #StopAsianHate #EndWhiteSupremacy

As a department of the Unitarian Universalist Association, their seven principles guide the work that we do. Through partnerships with the UUA, its affiliated organizations, and other groups, our books reach audiences who can use our books as resources for movement building. They are also used for professional development to help improve teacher and student experience in the classroom and transform education. Reading groups choose our books to gain a better understanding of current issues or events in American history.

See below for some recommended reading that helps to make sense of the issues and also provides ways for people to take action. Now more than ever, we are committed to lifting up the voices and providing resources that speak to the current political climate and social activism.

Reading Up on the Issues

Bullets into Bells: Poets & Citizens Respond to Gun Violence
Edited by Brian Clements, Alexandra Teague, and Dean Rader

Focuses intensively on the crisis of gun violence in America. This volume brings together poems by dozens of our best-known poets. Each poem is followed by a response from a gun violence prevention activist, political figure, survivor, or concerned individual.

 

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

Boldly assert that American society’s reliance on the framework of hate to explain violent acts against marginalized communities is wrongheaded, misleading, and ultimately harmful. Kay Whitlock and Michael Bronski invite readers to radically reimagine the meaning and structures of justice within a new framework of community wholeness, collective responsibility, and civic goodness.

 

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

Lays out a radical way to shift the conversation about public safety away from fear and punishment and toward growth and support systems for our families and communities. The result reinstates full humanity and agency for everyone who has been dehumanized and traumatized, so they can participate fully in life, in society, and in the fabric of our democracy.

 

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

Draws upon critical race theory to unveil how systemic racism exposes us all to racial ignorance—and provides a road map for transforming our knowledge into concrete social change.

 

Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color
Andrea J. Ritchie

A timely examination of how Black women, Indigenous women, and women of color experience racial profiling, police brutality, and immigration enforcement. It documents the evolution of movements centering women’s experiences of policing and demands a radical rethinking of our visions of safety—and the means we devote to achieving it.

 

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

Brings awareness to the underlying concepts that guide the alt-right and its overlapping forms of racism, xenophobia, and transphobia. By unearthing the hidden mechanisms that power white nationalism, Alexandra Minna Stern reveals just how pervasive the far right truly is.

 

The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls
Mona Eltahawy

Seizes upon the energy of the #MeToo movement to advocate a muscular, out-loud approach to teaching women and girls to harness their power through what Mona Eltahawy calls the “seven necessary sins” that women and girls are not supposed to commit. It’s a manifesto for all feminists in the fight against patriarchy.

 

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

Chronicles the event that would lead to the first US Supreme Court case to challenge the constitutionality of racial segregation in Southern public schools, an astonishing 30 years before the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision, led by one Chinese family and an eccentric Mississippi lawyer.

 

We Are All Suspects Now: Untold Stories from Immigrant Communities After 9/11
Tram Nguyen

Reveals the human cost of the domestic war on terror and examines the impact of post-9/11 policies on people targeted because of immigration status, nationality, and religion. Tram Nguyen tells the stories of people who witnessed and experienced firsthand the unjust detainment or deportation of family members, friends, and neighbors.

 

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

Explores the counterproductive reactions white people have when their assumptions about race are challenged that serve to maintain racial inequality.

 

Yellow Peril, Again: Coronavirus and the Echoes of Chinese Exclusion
Adrienne Berard

“The coronavirus outbreak has put into sharp relief the American tradition of conflating immigration and infection. In fact, America’s fear of the ‘diseased immigrant’ dates back to the nation’s first major wave of immigration and our initial understanding of disease itself.”

• Racism, sexism must be considered in Atlanta case involving killing of six Asian women, experts say, an NBC News piece featuring future Beacon author Catherine Ceniza Choy, explains that while police said the suspect of the Atlanta shooting denied having racial motivations, experts and activists alike say it’s nearly impossible to divorce race from the discourse, given the historical fetishization of Asian women.
• Atlanta spa shootings spotlight spike in violence against Asian Americans, an NBC Today piece featuring Catherine Ceniza Choy, covers how the country is grappling with a disturbing spike over the past year in hate crimes against Asian Americans, as documented by police departments from New York to Los Angeles.
• Why anti-Asian hate incidents often go unreported and how to help, from ABC News, reports on wany people still “doubt there is such a thing as anti-Asian racism.”

 

Taking Action

• Literary Hub listed AAPI-led organizations where you can donate today.
• Stop AAPI Hate tracks and responds to incidents of hate, violence, harassment, discrimination, shunning, and child bullying against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in the United States.
• Asian Americans Advancing Justice | Chicago is partnering with New York-based nonprofit Hollaback! and CAIR-Chicago to plan and implement an aggressive scaling up of locally-led bystander hate incident intervention trainings for community members.
• Asian American Journalists Association has some good resources on how journalists/writers should cover various issues, including the Atlanta shootings.

A Q&A with Sharon daVanport

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

About Sharon daVanport

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

A Q&A with Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

About Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

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

A Q&A with Morénike Giwa Onaiwu

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

About Morénike Giwa Onaiwu

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

By David Freedlander

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

About the Author 

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

By Emily Paige Ballou

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

About the Author 

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

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

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

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

 

Being Heumann: An Unrepentant Memoir of a Disability Rights Activist

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

 

A Black Women’s History of the United States

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

 

Radicalizing Her: Why Women Choose Violence

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

 

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

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

 

The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls

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

 

Women and Other Monsters: Building a New Mythology

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

 

Women Warriors: An Unexpected History

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

By Christian Coleman

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

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

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

— Merrilee Heifetz (@MerrileeHeifetz) September 2, 2020

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

About the Author 

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

By Yaba Blay

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

About the Author 

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

By Jeanne Theoharis and Brandy Colbert

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ten: Her personal hero was Malcolm X.

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

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

 

About the Authors 

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

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

By Helene Atwan

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

About the Author 

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

By Julian Bond

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

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

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

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

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

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

—Erik Wallenberg

***

Movement Music
by Julian Bond

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bernice Reagan explained that process:

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

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

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

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

Leader: “Have you got good religion?”

Audience: “Certainly, Lord.”

Leader: “Have you got good religion?”

Audience: “Certainly, Lord.”

Leader: “Have you got good religion?”

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

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

Leader: “Do you want your freedom?”

Audience: “Certainly, Lord.”

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

and you can’t find me nowhere,

come on up to the front of the bus,

I’ll be sitting up there.”

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

“If you miss Jim Clark,

and you can’t find him nowhere.

Come on over to the graveyard,

He’ll be lying over there.”

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

About the Authors 

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

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

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

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

***

 

Gladys Bentley

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

By Julian Bond

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

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

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

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

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

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

—Erik Wallenberg

***

Movement Music
by Julian Bond

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bernice Reagan explained that process:

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

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

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

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

Leader: “Have you got good religion?”

Audience: “Certainly, Lord.”

Leader: “Have you got good religion?”

Audience: “Certainly, Lord.”

Leader: “Have you got good religion?”

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

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

Leader: “Do you want your freedom?”

Audience: “Certainly, Lord.”

 

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

 

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

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

James Bevel explained how it was written.

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

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

 

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

 

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

Leader: “Oh Pritchett.”

Response: “Oh, Kelley.”

Leader: “Oh, Pritchett.”

Response: “Open them cells.”

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

 

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

 

About the Author 

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

By Daniel S. Lucks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

About the Author 

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

By Jonathan Rosenblum

This article appeared originally in The Nation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

~~~

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

~~~

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

About the Author 

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

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

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

 

Anarcha Speaks: A History in Poems

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

 

A Black Women’s History of the United States

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

 

Dance We Do: A Poet Explores Black Dance

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

 

Kindred

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

 

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

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

 

Notes of a Native Son

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

 

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

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

 

One Drop: Shifting the Lens on Race

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

 

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

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

 

Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?

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

By Leigh Patel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

About the Author 

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

By Marilyn Sewell

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

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

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

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

“Yes,” he answered.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

About the Author 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

By J. A. Mills

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

About the Author 

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

By Rev. Dr. Raphael G. Warnock

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

About the Author 

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

By David R. Dow

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

About the Author 

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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