By this time, Congress had enacted, over Johnsons veto, the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which mandated racial equality in judicial punishments, and had approved the 14th Amendment, requiring states to provide to all people the equal protection of the laws. These, senators thought, would prevent the use of the courts to victimize African-Americans, rendering Kassons resolution unnecessary. Time would prove them tragically wrong.

During Radical Reconstruction, when hundreds of thousands of African-Americans voted for the first time and large numbers held public office, racial bias in the criminal justice system and the forced labor of those convicted of crime remained minor problems. There were hardly any prisons or prisoners in the South. But with the overthrow of Reconstruction and the imposition of the comprehensive system of white supremacy known as Jim Crow, the prison population expanded rapidly.

Southern states filled their jails with African-Americans, often former slaves convicted of minor crimes. They then rented them out as labor for the owners of railroads, plantations and factories, or required them to work on chain gangs building roads and other public projects, or inside prison walls for private businesses.

The labor of prisoners became a significant source of revenue for Southern states. The system also took hold, but in a much smaller way, in the North.

Without violating the 13th Amendment, Republicans in post-Reconstruction Texas complained, the courts of law are employed to re-enslave the colored race. Plantations, they added, are worked, as of old, by slaves, under the name of convicts.

Conditions were barbarous and the supply of convicts seemingly endless. One dies, get another, became a popular refrain among those who profited from the labor of prisoners.

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Opinion | We Are Not Done With Abolition - The New York Times

Oregons U.S. Sen. Jeff Merkley and U.S. Rep. William Lacy Clay (D-MO) introduced the Abolition Amendment, which would strike the punishment clause of the 13th Amendment and abolish forced prison labor.

That amendment is known, when we are in high school, as the amendment that ended slavery in America, Merkley said during a press conference Monday. The problem with that story is that slavery continued under the (punishment) clause of the 13th Amendment. That clause specifically says that slavery cant continue except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.

Merkley argued that the 14-word exception has allowed the U.S. to replace legal slavery with coerced labor in the prison system, and allowed the government to essentially outlaw being Black in America by disproportionately arresting citizens of color and renting them out as a workforce.

We think about the impact of slavery on the financial foundation for families, Merkley said during a virtual press conference on Monday.

Obviously a family under slavery built no financial foundation.

"Well, when you broke apart a family and arrested the adults and rented them into slavery, there was no financial foundation there. People lost what they had.

In Oregon, inmates are paid far below the minimum wage to do work that often puts them at risk, like performing laundry services for hospitals at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. In September, 150 prisoners fought wildfires alongside professionals. In Texas, inmates have been drafted to work in morgues overwhelmed by victims of COVID-19.

These laws started to have the state profit directly off slavery because the state governments who rented people back into slavery helped finance their state governments with the money, Merkley said. This whole process led to a theme that Black Americans are criminals. It led to dehumanization, it led to unequal treatment under the law.

"It was the first wave of mass incarceration, which continues to this day.

This is the first effort of its kind to be made at the federal level, although Merkley pointed out three other states have already passed laws striking such exceptional language from their state constitutions: Colorado, Nebraska and Utah.

Im encouraging the Oregon Legislature to send a constitutional referral out to the people during this coming session, so the people of Oregon can vote to take this out of our Oregon Constitution, Merkley said.

During the press conference, Sen. James Manning (D-Eugene) said the late Sen. Jackie Winters (R-Salem) had introduced such a bill in 2019, but that it was a casualty of the Republican congressional walk-out.

I have redrafted that resolution and plan to bring it back, Manning told Merkley. I am so happy to hear that youre doing this, but I want to make sure I mirror the work that youre doing. Maybe we can tag-team and call it the Merkley-Winters resolution.

Merkley admitted that he was first made aware of this form of legalized slavery, and its continuation of systemic racism, by the 2016 Ava DuVernay documentary The 13th, which served as a crash-course of sorts about systems of racial control and ways governments and private prison companies are financially incentivized to create targeted legislation to increase the carceral population, specifically among people of color.

Following the ratification of the 13th Amendment in 1865, southern jurisdictions arrested Black Americans in large numbers for minor crimes, like loitering or vagrancy, codified in new Black Codes which were only applied to Black Americans. The punishment clause was then used by sheriffs to lease out imprisoned individuals to work landowners fields, which in some cases included the very same plantations where they had been enslaved. The practice grew in prevalence and scope to the point that, by 1898, 73% of Alabamas state revenue came from renting out the forced labor of Black Americans.

The Punishment Clauses facilitating and incentivizing of minor crime convictions continued to drive the over-incarceration of Black Americans throughout the Jim Crow era. Ultimately, by creating a financial incentive for mass incarceration, it also continued to fan the flames of the War on Drugs and the proliferation of three strike laws, severe plea deals, and harsh mandatory minimum policies, which have had a disproportionate impact on communities of color in America for generations.

Those policies have driven an $80 billion detention industry. More than two million prisoners reside in the U.S., comprising 20% of the worlds incarcerated population.

By making it a choice, it means that there could be more accountability for work programs, because a lot of them absolutely dodge the health and safety provisions, Merkley said.

Our Abolition Amendment seeks to finish the job that President Lincoln started by ending the punishment clause in the 13th Amendment to eliminate the dehumanizing and discriminatory forced labor of prisoners for profit and that has been used to drive the over-incarceration of African Americans since the end of the Civil War, Rep. Clay said in announcing the resolution.

No American should ever be subject to involuntary servitude, even if they are incarcerated.

We want to thank Sen. Merkley and Rep. Clay for their leadership on this important racial justice issue, and for shining a light on something that is not just about a symbol or a vestige of the past, but something that reverberates and has consequences today, Clint Odom, senior vice president for policy and advocacy at the National Urban League, said.

The Abolition Amendment is supported by The Sentencing Project, Polaris, the Abolish Slavery National Network, the Constitutional Accountability Center, Amnesty International, the Anti-Recidivism Coalition, Human Rights Watch, Color of Change, the Justice Round Table Coalition, Indivisible, Democracy For America, International CURE, Dream Corps, and Alliance of Families for Justice.

Merkley and Clay were joined in the introduction by U.S. Senators Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), Edward J. Markey (D-MA), and Bernard Sanders (I-VT), and by U.S. Representatives Cedric Richmond (D-LA-2), Katherine Clark (D-MA-5), Andr Carson (D-IN-7), Danny K. Davis (D-IL-7), Marc Veasey (D-TX-33), Alcee Hastings (D-FL-20), Ral Grijalva (D-AZ-3), Sylvia Garcia (D-TX-29), Frederica Wilson (D-FL-24), Nanette Diaz Barragn (D-CA-44), David Trone (D-MD-6), Abigail Spanberger (D-VA-7), Deb Haaland (D-NM-1), and Gwen Moore (D-WI-4).

The full text of the legislation is available here. A summary can be found here.

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Sen. Merkley Co-Sponsors Bill to Close 'Slavery Loophole' in 13th Amendment - The Skanner

Black Lives Matter protest over police brutality in St. Paul, Minn., in Sept. 2015. (Photo by Fibonacci Blue) https://www.flickr.com/photos/fibonacciblue/21587635011/

This past summer, there was a national uprising led by Black people in response to our continued murders at the hands of the police. People called for defunding the police in order to abolish the police, for funding Black futures instead of funding our murders at the hands of the state. It was powerful. And how did the American theatre respond?

We put out statements about how we were listening and learning. We organized committees. We made demands and we issued next steps about how those demands would be met. We worked to see how we could make our institutions more antiracist.

But how is all that going to stop the police from killing Black people?

Is it that we think thats not our fight and we need to focus on what is? If so, thats where were wrong: It is our fight. The theatre industry is made up of human beings. Black people, who have fears of the police, and people of all races, who are worried about their friends. The American theatre is not separate from the rest of the world. We are the world!

Right now many of us are working as though we want to build more antiracist theatre institutions. And that work is valid! Thats why the two of us were given the space to write this article; weve been working on this issue within Baltimore Center Stage. There is space for that work. But that cant be the final goal. We cannot have the most antiracist institutions while the police are still killing Black and Indigenous folks. We cannot have the most antiracist institutions while Black and Indigenous people live in poverty. We cannot have the most antiracist institutions while people dont have healthcare. The theatre industry is made up of human beings who are affected by all of these problems. What sense does it make to only be working to erase biases within our institution when we know that wont erase all the other inequities that impact us every day?

So what is to be done to change the theatre industry? That is the question. Or at least, its the question we were asked when first approached about writing this. But were not so sure that is the question we should be asking.

One of the most powerful recent shifts in our cultural landscape has been the increased dialogue around abolition of the prison industrial complex. Among many lessons that the movement for police abolition has taught us is that we are often asking the wrong questions and thinking too small. In a recent panel conversation on mutual aid, abolitionist Mariame Kaba asked, How do you define the world you want to create, the world you want to build in, the world you want to live in? Rather than asking what needs fixing in the theatre industry by itself, we should be following Kabas lead: What is the world we want to create, and how do we as theatremakers actually take steps toward that world?

We need to shift our vision. Instead of working toward a more antiracist theatre industry, we need to be working toward a liberated world.

Power is infinite. There is no inherent limit on the amount of power people can create. Eric Liu

When American Theatre initially reached out to ask Baltimore Center Stage to contribute to this series, we were not the first people they thought of. In fact, we are probably not the first ones anyone thinks of when they think of BCS. We are both fairly low in the hierarchical structure of the staff. We are early in our careers. We are young. We are Black. (Wed be remiss if we didnt mention that we are both mixed and light-skinned, and benefit from all the associated privileges. It is not a coincidence that there are so few Black women on our staff and we are mostly light-skinned.)

When people talk about thought leaders in the theatre industry, in other words, they are not talking about us. But BCS doesnt exist without the people animating itand that includes the artists, the leadership, the production staff, the administrators, even those of us at the earliest stages of our careers. We all have so much more power than we think, and that power doesnt come from the institutions we work for. Its time we stop relinquishing that power and start mobilizing. There are steps each of us can take, and roles we can play, in manifesting the liberated world we want to live in.

As a culture worker who belongs to an oppressed people, my job is to make revolution irresistible Toni Cade Bambara

We are all here because we believe in the power of theatre, right? We think it has the power to change minds, to catalyze conversations, to shift narratives. But we most often limit that to whats on our stages, with the goal that our mostly wealthy, mostly white patrons might see our groundbreaking show and say, Wow, I never knew that.

But if we approached theatremaking as cultural workers, we wouldnt be measuring success only by the number of tickets sold, and our programming choices wouldnt be driven primarily by the institutions need to sustain itself. Everything we do could instead be measured by its impact on the material realities of the communities affected by the issues onstage, by its contribution to BIPOC healing and joy, and by its vision of an irresistible revolution.

As cultural workers, we dont have to limit that work to what happens within the walls of resident theatre companies. What would happen if all the playwrights and actors at theatres in every town went to their local Black-led organization, the one that organized protests over the summer, and said, How can we help you tell this story? What would happen if all the arts administrators went to these same organizers and said, How can we help you manage this work? What would happen if we actually chose to dedicate our efforts toward serving our local communities?

There are already people doing this work. There have always been people doing this work. We need to start doing this work too.

Small is good, small is all. (The large is a reflection of the small) adrienne maree brown

What does it matter if people in New York City or California are talking about the work of Baltimore Center Stage, if there are folks two blocks from our theatre who dont feel welcome in our building? Who are we doing this work for? Some things are universal, sure, but theatres in different cities with different histories and demographics cannot best serve their local communities by doing the same programs and shows.

As we move forward, we should be looking to the people in our surrounding neighborhoods and asking: What do they need? What are the organizations that are fighting for those things within our own cities? And how can we join that fight?

Over the summer, many theatres across the nation opened their lobbies for protesters. It was probably the most radical material action that any theatre took. We realized we had resources to offer (space, snacks, phone chargers, water, bathrooms), and we offered them to people who were doing the work of fighting for a liberated world. This is the kind of action that can happen when we are paying attention to our surrounding community. When we shift our vision to fighting for a liberated world instead of fighting for an antiracist theatre industry, we can go so much further.

We are each others harvest; we are each others business; we are each others magnitude and bond. Gwendolyn Brooks

This may be a hot take butinstitutions are not our friends. Weve known this for a long time. The major theatre institutions across the country were founded on white supremacist principles, on stolen land, on the exploited labor of Black and brown folks. We spend hours and hours strategizing how to maneuver around the very structures that define our nonprofitsi.e. boards, fundraising, subscriber modelsin order to shift toward anti-oppressive practices.

Think of all the things youve thought about your organization doing that couldnt happen because of restrictions limiting the way institutions can move in the world. For instance: Nonprofits often stop short of actions that seem overtly political, because they have to remain non-partisan (something to complain about in another essay). Maybe there are actions that Baltimore Center Stage cant take as an institutionbut a group of employees can. We dont need to wait for a national initiative with 50 theatres, or a program led by executive leadership of the institution. You and your coworkers can just do the thing.

A first step is to look to your coworkers and fellow cultural workers who share your vision as people to learn and build with. Start thinking about each other as humans with the capacity to care for each other and address our needs. We are each others business! How can each of us leverage our resources and skills in service of each other and our art? Often this could manifest in economic support: Venmo-ing a few extra dollars so your apprentices can stock up on groceries at the beginning of the pandemic, or offering free housing for furloughed employees.

There are practices beyond monetary support as well: At BCS, some of us have organized a writing group to support the creative practices of our staff. We regularly offer restorative spaces. We create the conditions for seeing each other as people and bringing our full humanity into what were doing.

What doors would open up if we thought about institutions as a way to build with community rather than a physical structure? In this pandemic, its more clear than ever that our buildings do not define us. At its best, the theatre industry could be a network of interconnected cultural workersthat is the core of what we do and why we do it, and we need to be building up those coalitions in order to weather the coming storms. As Mariame Kaba says, Everything worthwhile is done with other people.

Weve begun the work of this necessary coalition building at Baltimore Center Stage in our staff-organized Antiracism & Anti-Oppression Committee (ARAO for short). Among the key principles that guide ARAO is the notion that we do not work exclusively in service of the institution. Our work does not start and stop with Baltimore Center Stage, but instead focuses on how we can show up as better neighbors, how we can be advancing our own political education, how we can be in right relationship with one another.

ARAO looked outside our windows, saw the opioid crisis playing out right on our front steps, and planned a training with Baltimore Harm Reduction Coalition about how to care for drug users in our community. We looked among the staff, saw frustration about a lack of transparency, and organized a salary share. We looked at our community, saw a desire to learn, and built an antiracism library right in the hallway of our third floor.

The best version of ARAOs work would look like virtuous cycles, in which the learning we do together fuels how each of us shows up in the world at large, which in turn builds knowledge and informs our culture and practices at BCS. We are lucky that we are generally met with support from BCS leadership, but our work is not contingent on their permission. You do not need your leadership to be on board for you to email some coworkers and start meeting. If your vision isnt limited to serving the institution, it opens up expansive possibilities of claiming your own agency.

We cannot create what we cant imagine. Lucille Clifton

Abolition teaches us to think of institutions as experiments. We have tried the experiment of American theatre nonprofit institutions, in various guises, for more than half a century now, and we have not found it to be a sustainable and equitable way to support art-making. We should not only be looking behind us for answers. We need to dream forward.

The imagined borders weve erected between our industry and the rest of the world are keeping us from liberation by keeping our dreams in a box. The end of white supremacy isnt impossible. The end of capitalism isnt impossible. The end of imperialism, patriarchy, extractionnone of this is impossible. Its not unreasonablein fact its necessaryto be agitating for the biggest change we can imagine. We are not helping ourselves by assuming we wont ever be able to affect massive systemic change that extends beyond the scope of theatre institutions.

And the best part about this is that we dont need to do it alone. As soon as we realize that our struggle is interconnected with the protests on the streets is interconnected with prison abolition is interconnected with trans liberation is interconnected with Indigenous sovereignty (and so on), we can release ourselves from the pressure of having to solve it by ourselves. Theatre institutions dont need to singlehandedly solve our healthcare system or gentrification or state violence. We can start by noticing the places in our industry where it feels hardest to create change, the recurring uphill battles that feel like impossible treks, and taking that as an invitation to widen our lens and join forces with others in the fight.

As Angela Davis said, When we do this work of organizing against racism, hetero-patriarchy, capitalismorganizing to change the worldthere are no guarantees, to use Stuart Halls phrase, that our work will have an immediate effect. But we have to do it as if it were possible.

Taylor Leigh Lamb (she/her) is communications manager, and Sabine Decatur (she/they) is assistant to the artistic director, at Baltimore Center Stage.

Support American Theatre: a just and thriving theatre ecology begins with information for all. This Giving Season, please join us in this mission by making a donation to our publisher, Theatre Communications Group. When you support American Theatre magazine and TCG, you support a long legacy of quality nonprofit arts journalism.Clickhereto make your fully tax-deductible donation today!

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Change in the American Theatre Begins and Ends Outside the Theatre - American Theatre

As 2020 stumbles to a conclusion, the Death Penalty Information Center, in an annual survey released on Dec. 16, found much that was notable (Colorado became the 22nd state to abolish capital punishment) and much that was regrettable: The federal government made an aggressive return to the application of the death penalty after an informal moratorium of 17 years.

The Trump administration, in fact, was responsible for 60 percent of the nations total executions in 2020, thanks to an execution spree in the second half of the year that was without precedent and widely condemned. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops was among the institutions and advocates that repeatedly urged a halt to the federal executions.

In their most recent statement on the issue, the U.S. bishops said, The death penalty is not necessary to protect society. It is not necessary to hold people accountable for grave crimes. The decision not to execute someone, even someone who has done something terrible, is not soft on crime; rather, it is strong on the dignity of life.

A shameful aberration is how Krisanne Vaillancourt Murphy, the executive director of the Catholic Mobilizing Network, described the Trump administrations decision to resume federal executions this year. It goes against nationwide declines in executions, falling death sentencing rates and a long-term drop in public support for capital punishment, she said, responding to queries from America by email. And it clearly violates church teaching.

The Catholic Mobilizing Network promotes the abolition of the death penalty and models of restorative justice in collaboration with the U.S. bishops conference.

Ms. Vaillancourt Murphy added, These executions are not being carried out in the interest of public safety, as evidenced by the multiple Covid-19 outbreaks to which the federal executions have been linked. It is hard to describe the restart in executions, after a 17-year hiatus, as anything short of vengeance.

Pope Francis, in his address to the U.S. Congress during an apostolic visit to the United States in 2015, urged the global abolition of the death penalty, arguing that even just and necessary punishment must never exclude the dimension of hope and the goal of rehabilitation. In June, U.S. bishops voted to update the United States Catholic Catechism for Adults to reflect the churchs revised position that the death penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person.

[Want to discuss politics with other America readers? Join our Facebook discussion group, moderated by Americas writers and editors.]

And in his recent encyclical Fratelli Tutti, Pope Francis asserted that there was no turning back from this new understanding of the inadmissibility of the death penalty, committing the church to its full abolition.

For the first time in the nations history, the federal government carried out more executions10than all of the states of the union combinedsevenand more than any previous administration in the 20th or 21st centuries had authorized during a calendar year. The federal executions included the state-sanctioned killing of a Native American against the wishes of his tribal authorities for a crime committed on tribal lands, and, for the first time in 70 years, two federal inmates were executed for crimes committed as juveniles.

Three of the people executed in 2020 raised significant claims of innocence, according to D.P.I.C. researchers. Five people were exonerated from death row in 2020, bringing the number of people released from death row since 1973 to 172.

With just a few weeks left before the new year, there have been 17 executions in the United States in 2020. That is down from 22 in 2019, despite the unprecedented run of federal executions. Just five statesAlabama, Georgia, Missouri, Tennessee and Texasperformed executions this year and only one, Texas, conducted more than one. According to the D.P.I.C., the total number of executions this year was the lowest since 1991 and the lowest number performed at the state level since 1983.

Two more states where the death penalty remains on the books, Louisiana and Utah, finished a decade without conducting an execution, joining 10 other U.S. states which likewise have ceased resorting to capital punishment. Only seven statesArizona, California, Florida, Mississippi, Ohio, Oklahoma and Texasimposed death sentences this year and just threeCalifornia, Florida and Texasimposed more than one.

At the end of the year, more states and counties had moved to end or reduce death-penalty usage, fewer new death sentences were imposed than in any prior year since capital punishment resumed in the U.S. in 1970s, and states carried out fewer executions than at any time in the past 37 years, said Robert Dunham, D.P.I.C.s executive director and the lead author of The Death Penalty in 2020: Year End Report.

What was happening in the rest of the country showed that the [Trump] administrations policies were not just out of step with the historical practices of previous presidents, he added, they were also completely out of step with todays state practices.

As a candidate, President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. said that he would support legislation to eliminate the federal death penalty and incentivize states to follow the federal governments example.

Ms. Vaillancourt Murphy acknowledged that Mr.Bidenwas likely to reverse the Trump administrations momentum on capital punishment but added, It remains to be seen how that stance might translate into measurable progress toward abolition.

Given the tragic federal execution spree we all have witnessed this year, declaring an official moratorium on federal executions should be prioritized, she said. Alongside a moratorium, President-elect Biden could pursue the commutations of death sentences for all those on the federal death row or choose to work with Congress to strip capital punishment from federal law, preventing its use even under future presidencies.

A strong Catholic voice on the issue could help move this second Catholic president of the United States into action, she said.

A May 2020 Gallup Values and Beliefs poll found that the percentage of Americans who consider the death penalty to be morally acceptable fell to 54 percent of U.S. adults, a six-percentage-point decline from 2019 and the lowest level in the 20-year history of the poll. The percentage of Americans who said the death penalty is morally wrong reached a record high of 40 percent. Just 14 years ago, more than 70 percent of respondents described the death penalty as morally acceptable.

Ms. Vaillancourt Murphy is convinced the continuing moral indictments of capital punishment by church leaders, particularly Pope Francis, are having a significant impact on perceptions of the death penalty, emboldening education, advocacy and prayer efforts of Catholics in the pews.

But, she added, Catholics still have real work to do to address lingering confusion and even misinformation surrounding the churchs position on the death penalty.

Given what Catholics believe about the dignity of the human person and recognizing the failures that riddle the system of capital punishment, the challenge before us is to redouble our commitment to ending death penalty once and for all, she said. Half of U.S. states have either already repealed capital punishment or are under current execution moratoria. It will take all of us to get death penalty abolition over the finish line.

She argues that the growing acceptance among many Catholics of a consistent-ethic approach to a wide range of life issues, including capital punishment, helps parishioners imagine more restorative approaches to justice that prioritize healing the harm caused, rather than outdated, retributive models that focus solely on the law that was broken and punishing the person who was guilty.

Growing public unease with capital punishment certainly contributed to its decline in 2020, but according to D.P.I.C. researchers, the coronavirus played a part as well, shutting down executions in states across the country in July, just as the federal government determined to restore capital punishment. The deep decline in death sentences and state executions was unquestionably a by-product of the pandemic, the surveys authors report, but even before the pandemic struck, the nation was on pace for the sixth straight year of near-record low sentences and executions.

According to the report, only two statesMissouri and Texasand the federal government continued to carry out executions after the pandemic reached the United States, and no state did so after July 8. But ignoring public health warnings, officials in the jurisdictions that carried out executions brought together attorneys, religious advisors, media witnesses, victims families, and others for executions, risking virus exposure for them and for those who live and work in the prison, D.P.I.C. researchers said. In the weeks afterward, Covid-19 outbreaks were reported in each of the facilities that conducted executions.

According to the report, racial disparities exhibited in this years executions remain consistent with decades-long trends, with almost half of the defendants executed being people of color and 76 percent of the executions for the deaths of white victims.

And executions and new death sentences in 2020 continued to be directed at defendants and prisoners who were the most vulnerable or who had the most defective court process, the survey found.

Every prisoner executed in 2020 had one or more significant mental or emotional impairments (mental illness, intellectual disability, brain damage, or chronic trauma) or was under age 21 at the time of the crime for which he was executed, D.P.I.C. researchers concluded.

Lisa Montgomery, the only woman on federal death row, is scheduled for execution on Jan. 12, just days before Mr. Bidens inauguration. She would be the first woman executed by the federal government in 60 years.

Ms. Montgomery was convicted in 2007 of the murder of a pregnant woman and the horrific extraction and kidnapping of her in-utero child. Her execution was delayed after her attorneys contracted Covid-19. They have urged clemency for Ms. Montgomery, arguing that a history of profound abuse as a child and severe mental illness make her ineligible for the death penalty.

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In 2020, the Trump administration executed more prisoners than all states combined - America Magazine

OLYMPIA With COVID-19 outbreaks springing up in Washington prisons, community advocates on Monday called for corrections officials to release more inmates and improve the conditions of their facilities.

The state Department of Corrections (DOC) avoided widespread outbreaks early in the pandemic, until hundreds of people were sickened in Coyote Ridge Corrections Center in late spring and summer.

Now, outbreaks are spreading at prisons across the state, including Airway Heights Corrections Center in Spokane County, Washington Corrections Center in Shelton, Mason County, and Stafford Creek Corrections Center in Aberdeen, Grays Harbor County.

There were 1,449 active COVID-19 cases among prisoners as of Monday, according to DOC's website. Last week, a male inmate at Stafford Creek died of COVID-19, the fourth coronavirus-related death of a state inmate.

In a news conference Monday hosted by the advocacy group Columbia Legal Services, community organizers called again for better conditions for inmates and a wide release of prisoners to make room for social distancing.

"Mass releases, whether through governor's proclamations, expedited clemency or through legislative bills, particularly of medically-vulnerable people and elders, is the only way to relieve the pressures that COVID places on DOC," said J.M. Wong, an organizer with the groups COVID-19 Mutual Aid and Free Them All WA.

The latter describes itself on its Facebook page as "a collective of people committed to the abolition of the criminal punishment system" in Washington.

"We implore the elected officials and the governor to investigate the conditions our incarcerated communities face," Wong added later.

In the news conference, Wong contended that the agency was also using solitary confinement to punish inmates, instead of DOC's stated purpose of using them as medical isolation to prevent further outbreaks.

Also speaking at Monday's news conference was an inmate at Bishop Lewis Work Release Facility who said he contracted COVID-19 after sharing a sleeping space with an inmate who was positive for the virus. Family members of inmates spoke about their fears amid the pandemic.

This spring, Columbia Legal Services sued Gov. Jay Inslee in an attempt to force him to free thousands of inmates to create space for distancing amid the outbreak. The state Supreme Court in April rejected that lawsuit, though Inslee did move to release about 1,100 inmates to free up space in the prisons.

Those releases were intended for incarcerated people who were not serving sentences for violent or sexual offenses, and who were nearing the end of their sentences.

There are no current plans to release more prisoners, Inslee spokesperson Tara Lee wrote in an email Monday.

But, "DOC is working on plans to improve the conditions in their facilities and to treat those impacted and prevent future outbreaks," wrote Lee. "We will continue to explore ways to further address these very difficult conditions."

In response to Monday's news conference, a DOC spokesperson said corrections officials take "the health and safety of the incarcerated individuals in the state's custody very seriously and the department is working hard to provide the best quality healthcare to all individuals in the state's custody."

DOC spokesperson Susan Biller added that the release of additional prisoners "is a decision that must be made legislatively or through executive order" but can't be made by the agency.

Biller added that the use of solitary confinement for medical isolation is not an effort at punishment but is done to protect the safety and health of inmates amid the pandemic.

A spokesperson for the state Department of Health said Monday the agency wasn't yet ready to release guidelines on when inmates or corrections staff would be eligible to receive vaccines, which have just begun arriving in limited numbers.

DOC is in talks with state health officials "to communicate Corrections' belief that incarcerated individuals and department staff should be prioritized," Biller wrote. "We are currently working on our implementation plan and continue to work towards our goal of being able to have vaccinations available for as many of our staff and incarcerated as possible."

___

(c)2020 The Seattle Times

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As COVID-19 Spreads in Washington's Prisons, Advocates Call for Better Conditions, Release of Inmates - Centralia Chronicle

The October raid on the No More Deaths camp. (Photo courtesy of No More Deaths)

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In early October, for the second time in less than three months, Border Patrol agents raided a No More Deaths humanitarian aid camp about 11 miles north of the Arizona-Mexico border. After being detained with her fellow volunteers, Paige Corich-Kleim watched as agents descended into the camp with military-style vehicles and weapons to terrorize and eventually detain 12 migrants seeking food, water, and medical aid at the camp. Despite past victories in court establishing that humanitarian aid is not a crime and that No More Deaths should be able to operate freely without Customs and Border Protection (CBP) intimidation, its camps and the people seeking lifesaving assistance there continue to be threatened.

The group believes their unrelenting practice of investigating and publishing Border Patrol abuses could be one of the reasons theyve seen an uptick in retaliation from the government and more frequent raids. On July 31, when the peak temperature of the day was about 110 degrees in the remote area of the camp, the Border Patrol and CBPs paramilitary arm, the Border Patrol Tactical Unit (BORTAC), invaded the aid area accompanied by an armored vehicle, three ATVS, two helicopters, and over 20 marked and unmarked vehicles. The agents, refusing to show a warrant and remaining unmasked, detained over 30 people seeking aid. The day before the raid, the Border Patrol had placed the camp under lockdown with 24-hour surveillance, turning away anyone else seeking to enter the camp for aid. In a No More Deaths press release describing the July raid, the group addresses the Border Patrols patterns of retaliation:

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The initial detention and surveillance of Byrd Camp was set up just 24 hours after No More Deaths released emails from a FOIA request revealing the role of BORTACthe tactical unit recently mobilized against protestors throughout the United Statesand the Border Patrol Unions role in a 2017 raid of the same aid station. The message is clear: expose Border Patrol abuses, face retaliation.

We talked to Corich-Kleim, a volunteer with No More Deaths for the past seven years who was present at the raid in October, about why the Border Patrols retaliation tactics are escalating along the Southwest border, how publishing CBPs abuses is a tenet of the aid groups activism, and what reports and documents are in the pipeline to be published next. This conversation has been edited for clarity.out west

Jessica Suriano

Jessica Suriano: Can you describe the scene during the October raid?

Paige Corich-Kleim The camp had been under surveillance for a little over two days by that point. We were pretty aware of Border Patrols presence and thought that it was possible they would raid the camp. It felt pretty tense. We were still staffing the camp; normally what we do there is we provide food, water, and first aid to people crossing the desert. Its an off-grid camp, so theres a lot of maintenance we do, a lot of cooking and cleaning. Especially now with Covid-19, weve really upped our cleaning protocols. We got word from people that live in Arivaca, which is the nearest town, that there was a caravan of Border Patrol vehicles, including an armored BearCat tank, that was seen staging in town. We knew about 20 minutes before the raid happened that it was going to happen. A big helicopter was hovering over the camp before they actually entered on foot.Current Issue

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It was a military-style raid. The first wave that entered the camp was all BORTAC agents, which is the tactical arm of Border Patrol. Its like a SWAT team. They came in, guns drawn, in full camouflage. The sun had just gone down, so it was totally pitch-black. They detained all of the volunteers. We were all sitting at the entrance of camp. We were detained for about three hours. We couldnt see everything that was happening in the camp, but we definitely could see flashlights going around, and clusters of agents going around the camp with guns drawn to clear the area. We later heard from some people with other aid groups that came out that they saw flashlights chasing people. All of the people that were at camp receiving aid were chased in the darkness. Border Patrol detained 12 people there.

JS: Have you been present at raids before? If so, were they similar to this one or different?

PCK: Border Patrol has entered the property five or six times since weve been there over the past 12 years. I was present for the lead-up to the raid that happened in 2017, which was the first one they had a warrant for. I was there as they were increasing surveillance, and they set up a checkpoint at the entrance of camps. Nobody could come or go in a car without getting pulled over and searched. I left the morning that they actually came, issued the warrant, and raided the space. But that one in 2017 was very different than these last two raids. Volunteers filmed the whole [2017] raid, and agents did not have BORTAC support. They just entered like normal rank-and-file agents. The most recent raids were a lot more escalated as far as violence and military-style tactical gear.

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JS: Why does No More Deaths think that theyve escalated in this way?

PCK: I think the political climate has allowed them to do so. Its kind of a complicated question because Border Patrol has been a really violent and unaccountable agency for a long time. Weve been documenting their abuses since 2008, but under the Trump administration, more explicitly racist and violent policies and tactics are more widely accepted and endorsed by the president and by the political institutions. Theyve been able to normalize and escalate all of these tactics over the years. I think what were seeing now is Border Patrol is able to operate with even more impunity and in even more violent ways, and still get away with it.

JS: Does your group think a presidential change will create any tangible changes in this area?

PCK: I think under Trump were seeing our organization getting targeted more, but I think even if our organization isnt being targeted actively, the violence thats happening along the border is still going to be happening. The targeting of humanitarian aid is just an escalation of the targeting of migrants. We were able to win in court against humanitarian aid being criminalized, but migration is still being criminalized. Thats the core of it, and thats the root problem. Biden will likely stop wall construction, but I think under both Democrats and Republicans, weve seen a gradual increase in border militarization. He might stop the wall, but then have more towers and checkpoints, more agents on the ground, or a virtual wall. I dont think that the border is going to be demilitarized. Also, the last time Biden was in office with Obama, they deported about 3 million people. Everybody was really upset and mobilized around family separation, but deportation is also family separation. Its important to remember that nothing under Trump is totally new. Its just more egregious and explicit.

JS: No More Deaths uses publishing documents obtained through FOIA and other records requests about Border Patrol abuses as part of its activism. In your experience, has this led to even more targeting of the organization?

PCK: Weve been documenting abuses since 2008, and weve been active in the desert since 2004. The clearest examples that weve seen of retaliation were with the arrest of Scott Warren, one of our volunteers in Ajo. We video recorded Border Patrol destroying water gallons and published a report talking about widespread interference with humanitarian aid by Border Patrol, and just about six hours after we released that report, Scott was arrested and charged with felonies. With the raid back in July, we had just released documents from a FOIA request that were showing that the Border Patrol union had pressured the local sector to raid the aid station.

The July raid on the No More Deaths camp. (Photo courtesy No More Deaths)

Right after that, we had a big increase in surveillance. Border Patrol entered the property and arrested one person, and then later came back in force and raided the whole space. Weve seen a pattern of it. Those types of tactics, repressing and targeting groups that are being the most vocal, is meant to deter other people from speaking out. Its a tactic that goes along with just how secretive and unaccountable Border Patrol as part of the Department of Homeland Security is. They arent open to the same level of scrutiny as a lot of other law enforcement agencies, even though theyre one of the biggest police forces and most well-funded ones. Theyre now kind of popping up in cities and widening their jurisdiction.

It makes sense that when there are groups that are interacting with people and documenting the abuses that they are experiencing, theyre going to try to silence those people and silence that dissent. Weve also seen it in other ways within the interior, especially undocumented organizers and activists who are targeted by ICE for deportation for speaking out. Its part of a larger pattern of retaliation and trying to suppress dissent.

JS: You all have been working on this three-part report called The Disappeared Report. How was the information in these reports collected?

PCK: A lot of it is based on interviews. For part one, which is about deadly enforcement tactics, we interviewed people who had been detained by Border Patrol to understand and hear their stories about what was happening in the field when no ones watching. Part two is about interference with humanitarian aid. When we go out to the desert and we leave food and water on trails, we document all of that in a logbook so that we can track which areas have greater need. We went back through about four years of our data and analyzed it, and saw really widespread destruction of aid.

Our most current one thats going to come out in the next few months is about emergency non-response. It is all based on information from a missing migrant hotline that used to be run by Coalicin de Derechos Humanos, which is a local organization. If you call 911 in the borderlands, the call gets routed to Border Patrol. Theyve essentially monopolized emergency response for undocumented people that are crossing the desert, but they dont have the same standards or responses as if a citizen was lost, say, in a national park, for example. The most recent report is looking at all of the cases in the hotline database and tracking patterns of an emergency non-response.

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JS: Other than the immediate threat CBP poses for people traveling through the desert, what other elements compound the precarity of these trips?

PCK: Right now, something thats really impacting the border is the Covid-19 pandemic. When people are detained in the desert, instead of working under any kind of public health emergency protocols, theyre just being driven to the nearest port and dropped off. People are being taken and dumped in towns where theres no infrastructure to handle an influx of people whove just been in the desert. People might be medically compromised or just sick and exhausted, and theyre getting dropped off in a place that has no resources to support them. Weve also seen pretty bad practices within Border Patrol around mask wearing to try to prevent the spread of Covid-19. Theyre not wearing masks, and conditions in detention have been really bad. The USs lack of an actual pandemic response is manifesting itself in really unique ways along the border.

JS: What kinds of conversations have been happening within your group about what happens next?

PCK: One of the things that I really love about No More Deaths is that we are able to be really flexible and responsive to whatever pops up. With Covid-19, weve implemented a ton of new protocols. Weve changed our volunteer program. Right now, the biggest thing on a lot of our minds is that winter is here. Now its starting to freeze in the desert, which is something people dont always think about. People think about the extreme heat in the summer, but in the winter it also gets really cold. So were doing clothes donation drives and putting out blankets. Well just keep seeing what the needs on the ground are and adjusting our work to accommodate them. Its all very beyond us and what were able to control, but we are very committed to finding the most effective ways to intervene.

JS: How is the militarization of CBP that your group has been documenting for years connected to the abolition movement and calls for an anti-carceral country?

PCK: Border patrol started in 1924, but there were very few agents around until the mid-90s, and thats when the US started a border enforcement policy called prevention through deterrence, which is a policy that essentially walls off cities where its easier to cross, and pushes migration patterns into the remote desert areas. The idea was that it would be so difficult and dangerous to cross, that people would stop. That was put into place the same year as the North American Free Trade Agreement, which destabilized the Mexican agricultural economy. Since then, theres been a steady increase in militarization along the border and a continual funneling of people into some of the most dangerous and remote corridors.

Over the past 10, 15 years maybe, weve seen checkpoints pop up on all the roads leaving the borderlands region. Weve seen towers get put up and sensors buried in the ground, and all of this military infrastructure. Another thing that happened in 1994 that people dont always think of as relating to immigration enforcement was the Crime Bill, which really kickstarted the expansion of the prison-industrial complex and was tied with the war on drugs. All of these policies really work hand in hand. We see a lot of collaboration between ICE and local police forces, which then deport people, who then cross back through the desert, and may interact with Border Patrol.

Looking at people who are doing all of this current work towards abolition of the prison-industrial complex, we definitely see the ways in which that could also have a dramatic impact on people dying in the desert. If people arent getting picked up in the interior, they wont have to cross through the desert to get back to their families. The border is often used as a testing ground for a lot of technology and tactics as well. When we see things that are tried out along the border, we can often expect them to pop up in the interior in cities. A lot of people were talking about BORTAC showing up in Portland this year, and that wasnt the first time theyve shown up [in cities]. People are seeing that there needs to be a whole, huge shift in how all of these things are functioning.

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The Border Patrol Is Cracking Down on Humanitarian Aid - The Nation

Renowned Oxford University professor Roger Hood made an immense contribution to criminology spanning many decades.

He was Professor Emeritus of Criminology, Emeritus Fellow of All Souls College, and Director of the Oxford Centre for Criminology from 1973 to 2003.

Roger Grahame Hood was born in Bristol in 1936, the second of three sons of Ronald Hood, and his wife Phyllis (ne Murphy). He died aged 84 on November 17.

Prof Hood CBE remained active academically until the very end and had only just completed his most recent work on the death penalty in the Caribbean when he became ill.

Prof Roger Hood

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Colleagues at the universitys Faculty of Law said he was a man of immense intellectual generosity, the sponsor and inspiration of innumerable professional careers.

He was a devoted husband of Nancy, whose loss last year affected him deeply, a loving father to Cathy, stepfather to Zoe, Clare and David, devoted uncle to Matthew, grandfather to Grace, Lola, Floyd and Jay, and great uncle to Eben.

He was a faithful friend to his students, colleagues and huge circle of contacts around the world.

Above all, he was a man of high principle and unimpeachable integrity, an anti-racist before the term had been invented, and a fierce opponent of the death penalty, a cause which absorbed much of his time after his supposed retirement in 2003.

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Throughout his long and distinguished career, he believed that criminology should not only be an academic discipline but also a resource to be deployed in the struggle for both legal and social justice.

Until his last weeks, he remained energetic, vigorous and fully engaged, still researching and writing, and making invaluable suggestions for current and future projects through his longstanding and fruitful relationship with the Death Penalty Project in London.

He spent nearly two decades working with Saul Lehrfreund and Parvais Jabbar at the Death Penalty Project, designing and conducting research to challenge assumptions about the death penalty and to provide empirical data to assist their efforts to bring about reform and indeed abolition around the world through litigation and policy engagement.

They were among his closest friends.

Read more: One million reasons to see Blenheim Palace lights

Many of the current members of the Centre for Criminology owe Prof Hood an immense personal and professional debt.

He was held in the same high regard at his college, All Souls, where he never tired of encouraging younger scholars, while developing, over his many decades there, friends for life.

All Souls College issued a statement following the professors death.

Prof Roger Hood: Pictures Andrew Walmsley

It said: It is with great sorrow that the college reports the death of Professor Roger Hood CBE, QC (Hon), FBA, on Tuesday, November 17, following a short illness.

A death notice in the Oxford Mail said last month: Roger was a devoted husband, father, stepfather, brother, uncle, grandfather, great uncle and friend to so many.

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He was held in the highest regard by his colleagues and former students around the world as a tireless champion of justice and a man of integrity and humanity.

Keep up to date with all the latest news on our website, or follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

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Have you got a story for us? Contact our newsdesk on news@nqo.com or 01865 425 445

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Obituary: Oxford criminologist Prof Roger Hood campaigned to abolish the death penalty - Oxford Mail

By Reinhard Jacobsen

BRUSSELS (IDN) The Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize to Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed Ali "for his efforts to achieve peace and international cooperation, and in particular for his decisive initiative to resolve the border conflict with neighbouring Eritrea." The prize was also meant to recognise all the stakeholders working for peace and reconciliation in Ethiopia and in the East and Northeast African regions.

The Prize is awarded to those who have "done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses".

Since November 4, 2020 one year after receiving the coveted award Abiy has been embroiled in a bloody war in the Northern region of Ethiopia involving Eritrea and the Federal Ethiopian troops in a military conflict that risks spilling over to Somalia, Sudan, South Sudan and Kenya.

The President of the African Union, Cyril Ramaphosa, has appointed three special envoys to mediate in the conflict. "Unfortunately, the envoys have not been able to meet with the parties involved and no mediation has happened," states the African Women Appeal for a Horn of Africa Initiative.

African women are calling on the 55-nation African Union, the seven-country Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) and the international community to set up a female peacekeeping force to promote peace in the Horn of Africa.

While the African Union headquartered in Addis Ababa has committed itself to "silencing the guns" initiative which kicked off in 2020, IGAD has been working on a development strategy for the Horn of Africa, a strategy that is being undercut by armed hostilities.

The appeal issued on December 14 is signed, among others by Julia Cassell, the former Minister of Gender from Liberia. It urges African leaders to create the conditions for peace on the ground.

Cassell is joined by nearly 110 women -- including entrepreneurs, teachers, humanitarian aid workers, scholars, civil servants, mothers and community workers, and health workers and from 19 countries across the African continent: Ethiopia, Eritrea, Sudan, South Sudan, Somalia, Tunisia, Morocco, Benin, Niger, Ghana, Nigeria, DR Congo, Uganda, Kenya, Rwanda, Cameroon, Tanzania, Zimbabwe and South Africa.

In Liberia, we know the pain women suffer from military conflict. Our sons, husbands and fathers were forced to join the fighting. Not knowing whether they are dead or alive, there is obviously only one way forward: fighting must stop," says Cassell. "Let us recall that a female peace-keeping force in Liberia helped end the fighting, and for women and their families to return to a peaceful life. We found that female peacekeepers on the ground were very effective.

The armed conflict is causing untold suffering. At least one of the six million people in the Horn region have been internally displaced and are still without food or support, notes the appeal. Four camps with 100,000 refugees have been targeted by the fighting and refugees are desperately trying to find a safe place. 50,000 refugees have reached Sudan, many of whom are young children without their families. Numerous other refugees are not able to reach Sudan safely.

Whilst leaders in the region have tried to reassure African leaders that the situation is under control, the women in the region are losing hope as their loved ones are not coming home, communication is not restored, and mobilisation for military purposes is ongoing. A humanitarian corridor has not been established and 2 million people have no access to food.

The African Womens appeal urges African leaders and the international community to act to protect civilians, refugees and Internally Displaced People.

"A female peacekeeping mission for the Horn of Africa will ensure that a humanitarian corridor is established, food gets in and peace can be restored so that mediation can begin. Women need to come forward as role models. Hate-speech and ethnic profiling needs to end. It is time for women to take the lead," stresses the appeal.

Female peacekeepers from Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa, Burundi, Niger and other African countries have proved to be role models, it adds and recalls that in 2016, the all-female Formed Police Unit from India was commended for their excellent contributions to the success of the mission in Liberia as it was completed. [IDN-InDepthNews 15 December 2020]

Photo: Ethiopian federal government's "final offensive" against Tigray regional forces. Credit: Ethiopian News Agency

IDN is flagship agency of the Non-profit International Press Syndicate.

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Visit https://www.eepa.be/?page_id=4237 for daily situation reports by Europe External Programme with Africa

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Spokespersons: Julia Duncan Cassell; Zaminah Malole; Reem Abbas

Website: https://africanwomenforpeace.business.site

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African Women Stress the Need for a Horn of Africa Peace Initiative - IDN InDepthNews | Analysis That Matters

Every year, Georgia Voice honors one brave LGBTQ Atlantan whos changing the landscape for LGBTQ people and making a difference. This year, the honor goes to State Senator Kim Jackson.

Jackson is a history maker. In the November election, she became the first out LGBTQ person ever to be elected to the Georgia Senate. Nationwide, shes the third black lesbian to serve in a state Senate. A graduate of Emorys Candler School of Theology, she is an Episcopal priest known for her activism on behalf of criminal justice reform particularly for the abolition of the death penalty and in support of unhoused Atlantans, among many other causes. We sat down with Jackson to discuss her plans for using the next two years of her term to enact racial and social justice.

Quotes have been edited for length and clarity.

Could [we] start by talking about some of your objectives for the next two years?

I came with a deep commitment to criminal justice reform Ive been doing that work for the last ten years, and I will continue to do that in the Senate. I am deeply committed to making sure we lower our prison population, especially since we are one of those states with the highest number of people under state supervision in the nation. I also come with a grave concern for public education and wanting to make sure our public schools are fully funded. I dont just mean funding the formula, the GDE, thats older than I am, but actually fully funding public education with a new formula thats updated based on where we are now.

Why [do you believe it is] so important that the state [abolish] the death penalty?

There are a few reasons.

This is not the best argument in terms of morality, but it is important in a state like Georgia where we need more money. Executing people is expensive. Its extraordinarily expensive. So, when we want to do things that promote a better life in Georgia, like increasing our funding of public schools, or increasing access to medical and mental health services, there is money that were using to still life instead of money that were using to advance life. Thats one argument, but not the moral argument.

I think [an]other reason is that we know without a shadow of a doubt the data reflects this the death penalty is imposed in ways that reflect racial disparities and economic disparities. If you are white and wealthy, you are not going to get executed. But if you are poor and Black, the likelihood of you [being sentenced to death is much higher].

Finally, for me I believe people can get better To quote Brian Stephenson, we are not the worst thing we have ever done. And so, I believe that we need to give people an opportunity to be better. In Georgia by the time we strap somebody down to execute them, they are not the same person that they were when they may or may not have committed a crime.

You have talked about being a faith leader in opposition to the so-called Religious Freedom Restoration Acts [What is] your theological argument against [them]?

Fundamentally, I am rooted in a theology that calls us to respect the dignity of every person. And this theological notion that all of us live with a divine spark within us. So, what that means on the ground is that we treat people fairly. That we recognize, whether you believe the same thing that I do, there is good in you, and therefore I am going to treat you with dignity and decency. I think that is the same principle grounding in multiple religious faiths and not just the Christian faith. And so what RFRA seeks to do is say that you can be a person of faith and because you are a person of faith you are not going to serve someone else What that ultimately does is it protects religious bigotry and I think it is in fact antithetical to what it means to be a person of faith.

I think some of the desire to pass [RFRAs] is misinformed We [faith leaders] already have protections [to marry only who we want to marry]. The federal Freedom of Religion Act already establishes [that protection]. So, I think were trying to fix a problem that doesnt actually exist.

Before we run out of time, [if you could pass any legislation], what, ideally, would you want to do?

I would very much want to see us move toward being a state in which we only imprison the people who are actually dangerous to us. Another piece of legislation I would love to see would be [to] expand Medicaid, and especially for women .

This also includes money being no object, right? So, my wife is a former public-school teacher. We should give our public-school teachers raises! Full stop! If COVID-19 has taught us anything else about [anything] it is that it is very hard to educate children! We need to pay [teachers] more.

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Q&A with Kim Jackson: 2020's Person of the Year - Georgia Voice

Correction

In the print version of this article, it states that Housing Justice Now is the group solely responsible for tracking evictions and hosting court watching sessions. However, Forsyth Court Support is actually the group responsible for tracking this data and running the court watching sessions. This information has been updated in the online version of this article.

On Dec. 11 around 2:30 p.m., the sound of Christmas music filled the air outside the Forsyth County Government Center as 10 activists from Housing Justice Now, Hate Out of Winston, and Triad Abolition Project protested the eviction hearings of over 60 people in less than two weeks before the Christmas holiday.

HJN volunteer Rachael Fern was dressed as Santa Claus as she held a sign that read END EVICTIONS NOW and rang a bell each time cars passed by, while HJN and TAP volunteer Sara Hines repeated on a megaphone the phrase: There is a disconnect between the privileges of the few and the needs of the many.

Activists protesting last Fridays en masse eviction court hearings criticized government officials for continuing to allow housing displacement of many Forsyth County/Winston-Salem families and for not addressing what is to come in early 2021.

In this two-part series, YES! Weekly will outline the concerns of activists, discuss the findings of a 2014-2018 case study addressing housing loss in Forsyth County, as well as report local government officials responses to criticisms from activists and whether or not they could (or would) implement the studys policy recommendations.

If you think about how the governor put out an order restricting the number of people you can gather, at the same time, they are summoning 60 plus families to come here at 2 p.m. and go into that building and get evicted, said Fern outside of the government center last Friday. We are about to see a tidal wave [of evictions] in Forsyth County.

Displaced in Forsyth

In September, the Future of Property Rights program of New America, a D.C.-based progressive think-tank, teamed up with researchers from Wake Forest University and Winston-Salem State University to release their findings of a study called, Displaced in America.

The study attempts to answer the questions: Where is forced displacement most acute? Why does housing loss occur? Who is most at risk? And what happens to people after they lose their homes?

In doing so, it aims to help municipal leaders better understand where the pandemic might exacerbate already established patterns of housing loss.

According to the executive summary of the Displaced in America report, the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated the effects of stagnant wages, the lack of affordable housing, insufficient federal housing assistance, and discriminatory policies that contribute to housing loss.

The findings of the study also assert that emergency measures such as eviction and foreclosure moratoriums may prevent people from losing housing in the short term; however, those measures alone would not address the systemic policies and economic factors that lead people to lose their homes.

Evictions and foreclosures persistently affect the same areas and communities, the executive summary states. While shock events like the 2008 foreclosure crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic add to the volume of housing loss, these surges often follow familiar patterns: the people and places most vulnerable to housing loss during steady-state periods are often the ones who experience it most acutely in times of crisis.

By identifying and examining which places have traditionally experienced the most acute housing loss, we can predict where future housing loss will occur and who will be impacted, and direct resources to prevent the harm before it proliferates.

In Displaced in America, New America and its partners visualized the scale and breadth of displacement across the United States through a National Housing Loss Index, which ranks U.S. counties based on their combined eviction and foreclosure rates. Additionally, it took a closer look at three census tract-level displacement case study locations: Forsyth County(Winston-Salem); Marion County, Indiana (Indianapolis); and Maricopa County, Arizona (Phoenix, Tempe, Mesa).

In the Displaced in Forsyth case study, researchers interviewed government officials, housing advocates, real estate developers, journalists, lawyers, service providers, and community members to determine who housing displacement mostly affects, how it occurs, and what happens after people are displaced.

However, in the midst of completing this research, the world changed, the introduction states. As the COVID-19 pandemic swept across America, it rapidly became clear that we would release this report at a time when millions of Americans are without jobs and at risk of losing their housing. This report became more than a way to show historic housing loss, but a tool city leaders could use to better predict where the hardest-hit neighborhoods of their city may be.

Based on examining data from 2014-2018, Displaced in Forsyth found that residents experience acute housing loss at a rate of 2.6%, the county ranks 89th worst housing loss in the nation (of more than 2,200 counties measured) and the 10th worst of the 50 North Carolina counties for which we have data. The eviction rate for those years was 4.4% (12,276 households), and the foreclosure rate was 1% (6,221 households), however foreclosure rates jump to 3-6% in East Winston and the Southeastern region.

This case study found that evictions primarily affect minority populations and households living below the poverty line; some of the highest eviction rates (13%) are concentrated to the east of downtown and East Winston. Each year, 9.6% of residents in the East Winston census tracts lose their homes.

A few of these tracts lie directly to the east of U.S. Route 52, while others lie between Smith-Reynolds Airport, the Wake Forest University athletic stadiums, and the local fairground.

It also found that August had the highest average number of evictions (256) and that when evictions go to court, tenants often lose.

Evictions in Forsyth County often exceed 3,000 per year, but only 200 cases or so receive pro-bono legal representation.

Forsyth County also has 1,524 heirs properties, which is the fifth-highest in North Carolina.

Heirs property is passed down through generations outside of the formal probate process and often lacks clear title. Disproportionately present in Black communities, this form of property ownership exposes owners to significant vulnerability.

The case study findings also noted that the COVID-19 pandemic has significantly affected North Carolinians, as 46% of households reporting that at least one person in their household has lost employment income since the pandemic began. In June, The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that Forsyth Countys unemployment rate doubled (to 8.2%) from June 2019.

In terms of who is most at risk, the findings of the case study showed that census tracts where residents lacked health insurance and relied on public transportation had higher rates of housing loss.

It also showed that predominately non-white households had higher eviction and foreclosure rates than predominately white households.

In particular, we found a strong positive relationship between the number of Black households in a census tract, and the rate of mortgage foreclosures. Predominantly Latinx census tracts also showed higher rates of evictions and foreclosures than white census tracts, but the relationship was not nearly as strong as for Black households.

As for the question of why people are losing their homes in Forsyth County, the study attributed the affordable housing crunch, in particular, Winston-Salems 16,244-unit shortage of affordable rental housing for extremely low-income families. Households that earn less than 30% area median income can afford an apartment for $464 in monthly rent, but the fair-market rate for a two-bedroom apartment in the city is $729.

Perpetually low wages also contribute to housing loss, as noted by a county official: 5.5% of rent increase versus 30% decrease in wages for county residents.

And, of course, gentrification and concentrated poverty resulting from the redevelopment of low-income neighborhoods also contributed to displacement and housing loss.

Thus, the Displaced in Forsyth case study found that the consequences of displacement included neighborhood neglect, in which foreclosed homes resulted in $170,000 of losses in tax value to the surrounding communities; over 6,000 vacant Winston-Salem properties in the North East, East, and Southeast wards of Winston-Salem; and in those same wards, 50% of rental units reporting a pattern of habitability issues.

Another consequence of displacement is education disparity, as the studys key informants estimated that, at the countys lowest-performing schools, between 20-50% of students finished the school year at a different school than the one they started. The lack of accessible public transportation is also a consequence of displacement, as many low-income residents who dont own a car tend to live near public transportation, which limits their ability to commute to work, school, grocery stores and doctors appointments.

Overcrowding and homelessness are also consequences which according to the case study, is well documented within Forsyth County, and particularly dangerous in the context of the coronavirus pandemic. Families unable to find community support after displacement can end up in a shelter, in their car, or on the street.

EVICTIONS KILL'

Its Christmas, and we are evicting people; its a pandemic, and we are evicting people, Fern said. Its well documented that as evictions go up, so do coronavirus deaths. That is what we are doing in Forsyth County we are killing people unnecessarily.

In her experience advocating this year for housing justice, Fern has noticed that not much, if any, attention is being paid to housing displacement in Winston-Salem and Forsyth County by elected officials and by those who are unaffected.

Thats why she decided to make people pay attention through visually-striking cosplays during protests. For instance, shortly before the Thanksgiving holiday, she portrayed the grim reaper, and on Dec. 11, she dressed as a not-so-jolly Santa Claus.

Its Christmas, and we are evicting people; its a pandemic, and we are evicting people, Fern said. Its well documented that as evictions go up, so do coronavirus deaths. That is what we are doing in Forsyth County we are killing people unnecessarily.

Ferns claim appears to be correct as a Vox article published the same day as the protest quotes that a recent study called, Expiring Eviction Moratoriums and COVID-19 Incidence and Mortality, confirms this.

Coincidentally, one of the studys seven co-authors is Wake Forest Universitys School of Law Visiting Professor Emily Benfer, who is also the chair of the American Bar Associations COVID-19 Task Force Committee on Eviction, co-creator of the COVID-19 Housing Policy Scorecard with the Eviction Lab at Princeton University, and principal investigator in a study of nationwide COVID-19 eviction moratoriums and housing policies.

According to that study, states that let eviction protections and moratoriums lapse saw an estimated 433,700 excess individuals contract COVID-19, and 10,700 people die from the virus.

According to the Vox article, this situation, nationally, is dire because as many as 40 million Americans could suffer in the coming months.

To make matters worse, on the day after Christmas, 14 million workers unemployment benefits are set to expire because, as of Dec. 15, Congress has yet to pass the second round of COVID-19 relief funds. All of this during the winter months and a pandemic with a historic death toll of 300,000.

In October, Fern provided YES! Weekly with data collected by Forsyth Court Support from June 22 to Oct. 9, that tracked eviction hearings in Forsyth County. This data found that near the end of June, there were 40 eviction hearings; in July, there were 517 eviction hearings; in August, there were 558 eviction hearings, and in September, there were 446 eviction hearings.

In an Oct. 9 email, HJN noted that according to data from WFDDs Eddie Garcia, from June 21, 2018, to Sept. 17, 2018, there were 961 summary ejectment hearings, meanwhile in 2020, Forsyth Court Support data shows that there were 1,377 over that same time period, which is a 43.3% increase this summer in eviction hearings in Winston-Salem.

According to the group's recent data, since June, the number of eviction hearings has reached over 2,000. Fern noted that this is roughly 10% of renter households in Winston-Salem.

Dec. 11 was the last day many in-person court cases would be in session before Chief Justice Cheri Beasley postponed most proceedings for 30 days starting Dec. 14 due to the recent spike in COVID cases. The Forsyth County Public Health Department reports that as of 2 p.m. on Dec. 15, there are 17,035 COVID cases in the county, 189 deaths, 250 new cases, and 3,372 new cases reported in the last two weeks, with 10.9% of people in North Carolina testing positive for the virus.

Fern has volunteered with Forsyth Court Support's court watch sessions since the summer, but at the beginning of December had to quit because she said the explosion of COVID cases in Forsyth County made it unsafe for her to continue. Fern said during her time watching hearings and standing outside protesting, she has witnessed people getting traumatized, especially children.

If I had to describe what I have been seeing in one word, it would be trauma.

What about the CDC Moratorium?

From Sept. 4 to the end of this month, the Center for Disease Control set a nationwide temporary moratorium on evictions.

Its been really hard for people to get protection under that order, Fern explained. People have really had to fight to be protected under that order and what little protection they had is about to go away.

North Carolina Legal Aid attorney Ed Sharp said in a phone interview on Oct. 9 that the CDC moratorium carries pretty severe criminal penalties for violating it either for the landlord or the tenant. Sharp said the University of North Carolina School of Government has sent out guidance to civil magistrates that the CDC moratorium holds legal weight until it doesnt, which will come on Dec. 31, when it expires.

If the landlord violates the CDC order and thereby commits a Federal crime, they should not be allowed to gain an advantage (that is, evicting somebody in civil court here in North Carolina) by committing this Federal crime, Sharp said, paraphrasing University of North Carolina School of Governments Dona Lewandowski.

At the end of October, Gov. Roy Cooper issued Executive Order 171, which was supposed to strengthen eviction protections under the CDC moratorium. According to the Governors website, the Order required landlords to make tenants aware of their rights under the CDC moratorium, set forth procedures to ensure protection for residential tenants, and clarified the CDC moratorium, so that it clearly applies to all North Carolinians who meet its eligibility criteria.

However, Sharp noted that the CDCs moratorium is not a blanket moratorium by any means. He noted that the moratorium does not invalidate a lease meaning tenants still must pay the rent it just prevents tenants from being thrown out on the streets and therefore, spreading COVID.

But in order to invoke these protections, Sharp noted that a tenant has to sign the CDC declaration, and it has to be truthful and many tenants arent able to sign it. He said some of the qualifications to truthfully sign is that tenants have to ask for rental assistance and have experienced a loss of income. Sharp cautioned that landlords and tenants would suffer greatly from the expiration of the CDC moratorium if they dont work together while it is still in place.

One of my biggest worries is that whenever the CDC order ends the bill will come due, so to speak, and they will have this enormous crisis of tenants being thrown out in the middle of winter with COVID still raging, Sharp said. It could be a disaster for tenants and landlords. If a tenant gets thrown out at that time, the landlord might suffer significant financial losses due to all of this. We could be looking at a real mess. What I am hoping happens instead is that tenants and landlords work together, while the CDC order is in place, to get rental assistance from whatever source, to get the landlords paid and get the tenants up to date and no longer facing evictions. The CDC order is potentially a time bomb. Everyone will suffer if it is not addressed.

However, volunteers with HJN are doubtful that the majority of local landlords (or slumlords, as they call them) have the emotional capacity to work empathetically with tenants especially since the City of Winston-Salems tenant-landlord mediation service doesnt require landlords to participate.

Fern wrote in a text message that she has personally worked with tenants who are technically protected under the CDC moratorium but are still getting evicted because landlords are bypassing the moratorium through other eviction methods, such as parking and pet violations.

The most common is holdover, which just means the landlord chooses not to renew the lease if the tenant is behind on rent and can successfully bypass the moratorium, Fern said. Im working with a 70-year-old disabled veteran (the guy we got the emergency order for) whose landlord did just that. The landlord said he is aware that given his age and health, his tenant could die on the streets this winter but [claimed], Im the victim here and have to protect myself. It cost him a total of $50 to have the Sheriff go and lock the tenant out. Without direct aid from the government, this is just a blood bath being fought between landlords and tenants, and the stakes are incredibly high for some folks.

(Part 2 will address the criticism of city and county officials, their responses, and whether or not they will consider implementing the Displaced in Forsyth policy recommendations.)

Originally posted here:

No home for the holidays: Activists, researchers say a 'tidal wave' of evictions is coming soon Part 1 - Yes! Weekly

Abolition Action was one of the many small mutual aid collectives fundraising online in March when the COVID-19 lockdown hit New York City. After raising money for their grocery fund, the group posted their request form on social media in the hope that it would reach people in need. Their email inbox was soon inundated with requests for money transfers.

A mutual aid collective asks no questions and has no requirements. It trusts people to know what their needs are, and it tries to meet those needs.

Were just one group, and we immediately got thousands of requests, says Cheryl Rivera, an organizer with Abolition Action, which describes itself as an anti-capitalist collective that creatively resists carceral systems and mindsets.

The challenge at the beginning of the pandemic for Rivera was moving money and resources as quickly as possible. Abolition Action ran into roadblocks when it tried to transfer money to many families at once.

Money is made to move to the wealthy, says Rivera, who was hampered in her organizing by transfer restrictions from money payment systems like Venmo and PayPal.

Now, through the NYC-DSA Mutual Aid COVID-19 Relief Fund, a trust fund set up by members of Democratic Socialists of America, Rivera has been able to transfer tens of thousands of donated dollars to families in need; nevertheless, the mutual aid learning curve at the beginning of the pandemic was steep. Networks of resource distribution needed to be started from scratch and then scaled up swiftly.

Whitney Hu, one of the founders of South Brooklyn Mutual Aid (SBMU), says her collective began by working in a single Excel spreadsheet. Given the vastness of the undertaking before them, they had to quickly develop more systematic methods of organizing. Now they have a warehouse and a van to mass distribute groceries to more than 500 families every week.

Mutual aid, a term popularized by the anarchist philosopher Peter Kropotkin in the nineteenth century, can roughly be defined as the reciprocal exchange of resources for the sake of mutual benefit. But many contemporary mutual aid collectives, especially those that came into existence during the pandemic, may appear to have more in common with charities than with mutual aid collectives in the traditional sense. Yet, nearly all of the organizers I spoke with see what they are doing as very different from philanthropy.

According to these organizers, a lack of means-testing makes mutual aid organizing distinct from other kinds of resource distribution. Hu says that in SBMU, they dont ask who deserves and who doesnt. Nor are they interested in asking people about their salaries, citizenship status, or where they are.

Rivera contrasts mutual aid collectives with government welfare services as they currently function. She believes that the primary role of mutual aid collectives is to serve peoples needs. This, she says, is in contrast to the official support structures of the city in its response to the pandemic, which are frequently centered around how do we make sure the people who dont deserve to have their needs met are not served.

She juxtaposes mutual aid work with programs like state unemployment benefits, in which the receiver is required to appear to be searching for work in order to receive payment. A mutual aid collective asks no questions and has no requirements. It trusts people to know what their needs are, and it tries to meet those needs.

In April of this year, Hu received a call from a young single mother who had lost her job and was in debt. She asked me if she could set up a payment plan to feed her babies, Hu recalls. The womans assumption was that she could only receive aid from SBMU if she went into debt.

The fact that I could have a mom of two children in the richest city in the world want to set up a payment plan so she could buy rice to feed her family, thats just a moment when you really reevaluate everything youve known about the government, about our place in society, about the way things should and should not be, Hu says. I said, dont worry about a thing, were buying you groceries. She started crying and I didnt know how to respond.

Though many new mutual aid organizations may not conform to traditional leftwing conceptions of what mutual aid is, they open up a community space for non-transactional relationships between strangers. And a growing corp of radicalized volunteers suggests that these collectives will continue after the pandemic.

Scott Heins, a member of Crown Heights Mutual Aid, says many members of his mutual aid group began with little organizing experience. They began the work with the expectation that mutual aid is going to be a six-week sprint to the finish line. As long as we can deliver as many boxes of food as we can, well make it and well get out of it.

A mixture of the pandemic and the protesting rewired how people see each other and changed mutual aid.

The reality of the pandemic changed that. Heins says, The reality is not only is the COVID-19 crisis ongoing, but crises of food insecurity, income inequality, and racial capitalism continue and have been going on for centuries.

Heins would like to see the mutual aid organizations that came about as a result of the pandemic become further embedded in their communities. He hopes that newly radicalized organizers try to address not just the immediate need of folks but also the root cause of whats going on.

In the first two months of the pandemic, 5 percent of New York Citys population moved away. Of that 5 percent, 40 percent were from the wealthiest Manhattan neighborhoods.

As the real estate market dipped slightly and the richest people fled to the suburbs, many media outlets decreed that New York was dead. However, of those who remained (which is to say the overwhelming majority), many may come out of this era with a different set of politics than they entered into it with.

These New Yorkers have stayed through the first coronavirus spike and witnessed the police violence during the Black Lives Matter protests. Mutual aid collectives participated in the protests, giving out food, water, medical attention, and personal protective equipment. Some even opened up their homes to those who were fleeing police violence.

The protests in the summer helped people recognize this idea of giving when you have and being able to receive when you dont. That has helped make sure mutual aid can walk that delicate line between mutual aid, solidarity, and charity, Hu says. A mixture of the pandemic and the protesting rewired how people see each other and changed mutual aid.

As a result of organizing during COVID-19, many groups are now more embedded in their communities and have a more ideologically coherent outlook than they started out with. They are establishing hubs of solidarity and community that could continue long after the pandemic comes to an end.

Read the original post:

Rebuilding the Solidarity Economy During COVID-19 - Progressive.org

Statue of Shakespeare, Central Park, New York City. (Courtesy of Getty Images)

Before Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton asserted that slavery had been a necessary evil and urged that the US military be deployed in American cities in an overwhelming show of force, he made a quieter but equally extreme proposal during an appearance on the Fox News show Sunday Morning Futures. While railing against allowing STEM students from China to study at US universities, he staked a claim for what counts as our foundational national texts. If Chinese students want to come here and study Shakespeare and the Federalist Papers, thats what they need to learn from America, he said.BOOKS IN REVIEW

Using Shakespeare as an ideological cudgel is rooted in the countrys history of conflict, and Cottons screed confirms what literary scholar James Shapiro shows in his latest book, Shakespeare in a Divided America: For a couple of centuriesat least since Tocqueville noticed that in America there is hardly a pioneers hut that does not contain a few odd volumes of Shakespearereactionaries and radicals alike have fired from the same canon. While Cotton may be wielding Shakespeare for another volley in the conservative culture wars, progressives have used the plays for their own ends, too. Just this July, for instance, New Yorks Public Theater teamed up with the citys public radio station, WNYC, to transform its canceled Shakespeare in the Park production of Richard II into a superb podcast, the action framed by discussions with actors and with scholars like Shapiro. With a predominantly BIPOC cast and a woman playing Bolingbroke, director Saheem Alis production boldly invited us to hear race and gender in a story, as Shaprio points out, that begins with a politically charged killing that the authorities refuse to take responsibility for and that sets off an uprising. Describing how such bipartisan utility requires a shared idea of the works value, Shapiro notes, Shakespeares plays remain common ground, one of the few places where Americans can meet and air their disparate views.

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Shapiro surveys the battlefield by looking at what he calls eight defining moments in American history when disputes over Shakespeare revealed deep and abiding sociopolitical rifts. Other Shakespeareans have responded to our times by seeking lessons in the plays for how we might comprehend, cope with, and maybe climb our way out of the current political abyss. Stephen Greenblatts polemical Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics, for instance (expanded from an op-ed he published on the eve of the 2016 election), never names Donald Trump, but it evokes him on every page as Greenblatt shows how Shakespeare grappled again and again with an unsettling question: how is it possible for a whole country to fall into the hands of a tyrant? Jeffrey R. Wilsons Shakespeare and Trump more bluntly examines the uses of the plays in a MAGA world, probing, for example, the Shakespeare-quoting political punditry of the 2016 election cycle.

Shapiro, in contrast, mostly looks back to Shakespearean disputes that predate our current crisis, not so much mining the plays for nuggets of contemporary insight as assessing them as cultural artifacts that have acquired layers of meaning by dint of their bipartisan utility over time. Most of all, he argues, they have been used as a means for Americans to engage race, class, gender, sexuality, and immigration, issues they otherwise dont know how to talk to one another about.

For decades, Marxism, feminism, queer theory, and critical race theory have been opening up the voluminous field of Shakespeare studies to reveal how the plays and their performance traditions have grappled with these very matters. Shapiro is certainly informed by such workthe bibliography for each of his eight chapters mentions his indebtedness to some of the scholars focusing such lensesbut it is not where he turns to make his case. Rather, as in his previous books, A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare:1599 and The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606, he entwines cultural analysis with character-driven narrative. In A Year in the Life he wrote, It is no more possible to talk about Shakespeares plays independently of his age than it is to grasp what his society went through without the benefit of Shakespeares insights. Apparently, the same is true of the United States in any age.

The seeds for Shapiros new book were planted in a 2014 anthology he edited for Library of America: Shakespeare in America, a nearly 800-page collection of essays, parodies, diatribes, comedy routines, letters, and poems from the American Revolution to the 21st century that expound upon the plays in one way or another. Some of these primary materials animate Shapiros latest project, among them John Quincy Adamss essay objecting to Desdemonas marriage to Othello as a violation of the law of nature; John Wilkes Booths letter quoting Julius Caesar to justify his plan to assassinate Abraham Lincoln; and A School Boy Hamlet, a 1946 short storyby a Japanese American, Toshio Mori, incarcerated in an internment campthat criticized how racism shaped both the country and the way Shakespeare was staged.

In Shakespeare in a Divided America, Shapiro narrates around such texts to bring their authors into scenes of conflict with contemporaries who expressed opposing views about Shakespeare, which is to say, about politics. We see, for example, the emergence of Manifest Destiny in 1845 as an aggressive, masculinist vision of America competing with a gentler image of manhood through the contrast between a production of Othello and another of Romeo and Juliet. The former took place at a US Army camp on the Mexican border, where soldiers sought to expand the territory for slavery; a young, lithe Ulysses S. Grant had been cast as Desdemona but was replaced by an imported actress before he could go on. In contrast, the butch lesbian Charlotte Cushman was enjoying international success playing Romeo, more capable than any man at the time of conveying both his tender heart and his derring-do.

Class conflict and anti-abolitionism were at the core of the infamous Astor Place Riots of 1849, in which proletarian New Yorkers fought the upper crusts restricted new opera house as well as its presumed support for abolition, by violently disrupting a production of Macbeth and then breaking up a nearby meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society. Protests escalated three nights later; scores were killed and hundreds wounded. In 1916, as part of celebrations marking the tercentenary of Shakespeares death, an adaptation of The Tempest, called Caliban by the Yellow Sands, cast hundreds of diverse New Yorkers (and locals in other cities where it was performed) in an outdoor pageant celebrating the civilizing power of moral educationeven as lawmakers were hatching national quotas for immigration, promoting eugenics, and holding up Shakespeare as a banner of the Anglo-Saxon character of the United States. Over time, Shapiro notes, It turns out that who gets to perform in Shakespeares plays is a fairly accurate index of who is considered fully American.

An eye-opening analysis of Kiss Me Kate shows how the daring 1948 musical based on The Taming of the Shrewcowritten by a woman and a closeted gay manwas tweaked and twisted for the movie version into a back-to-the-kitchen fable of suburban whiteness only five years later, scrubbed clean of its Black characters and queer innuendo. Shapiros discussion of the blockbuster 1998 film Shakespeare in Lovewhich he juxtaposes against the concurrent Bill Clinton sex scandaldetails how debates over the films ending hinged on attitudes toward women. Producer Harvey Weinstein unsuccessfully pressed for a conclusion in which a heterosexualized Shakespeare (Joseph Fiennes) could keep his mistress (Gwyneth Paltrow) on the side by offering her parts in his plays from time to time.

Still, its the actor John Wilkes Booth who is the books most appalling figure. In a gripping middle chapter, Shapiro traces Booths and Lincolns parallel passions for Shakespeare up to their violent intersection at the Ford Theater in April 1865, by which point Booth had been thoroughly radicalized by white supremacists. Booth likened himself to Julius Caesars Brutus, imagining that he was saving America from a tyrant and would be remembered as a hero; instead, Lincoln was mourned as Macbeths Duncan, a rightful leader felled by a cruel assassin.

As a play that addresses how a republic should respond to threats of autocracy, Julius Caesar makes a fitting bookend to the volume as well. Shapiro begins by recounting the uproar over the 2017 New York production at the Public Theaters Shakespeare in the Park and returns to it at the end to draw a pessimistic conclusion. Featuring a blustery, orange-tinted Caesar in a blue suit and long red necktie, whose high-fashion wife spoke with a distinctly Eastern European accent, the performance drew immediate denunciations from right-wing media, which alleged that it advocated the assassination of the president. An Obama stand-in would never have been tolerated as Caesar, conservative pundits huffed, ignoring an unperturbed 2012 coproduction by the Acting Company and Guthrie Theater that was set in contemporary Washington, D.C., cast a lanky African American in the title role, and gave him fist-bumping counselors.

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Shapiro served as an adviser to the Shakespeare in the Park Julius Caesar, so he can offer an inside view of how the controversy intensified over the shows nearly four-week run: fulminations on Breitbart and Fox News; performance interruptions, death threats against cast members, and menacing phone calls to the wife and daughter of director Oskar Eustis; the pulling of corporate sponsorship by Delta Airlines and Bank of America; and a disavowal from the National Endowment for the Arts, which announced that none of its funds had supported the play. Even theaters in other cities that had nothing to do with the production but simply had Shakespeare in their names (there are some 150 summer Shakespeare festivals in the United States) were attacked by Trump supporters.

This sort of lashing out by a rabble too amped up to consider the factsnot least that the play shows political violence to be counterproductive and morally indefensibleleads Shapiro to despair. After all, he reasons, those raging against the production werent simply disagreeing with its interpretation; they were refusing to acknowledge what actually happens in the plot. And by proudly disdaining any need to engage the work itself, he notes, they were abandoning the two-century-long fight over the shifting meanings of the plays. Thats a sign that Americans common ground has collapsed into a sinkhole of political muck, Shapiro warns, going so far as to suggest that we may be facing the kind of civil war that, in 1642, closed Englands theaters altogether for nearly two decades.

I hope this prediction is too dire. The right has not actually abandoned Shakespeare to the extent Shapiro fears. Not all of it, anyway. Republicans are divided between those who decry art (and science) as a tool of a liberal conspiracy and those who still hold tight to the conservative end of the rope in what Shapiro calls the ongoing tug-of-war over Shakespeare in America. So Shapiro can take heart: Shakespeare is not likely to be canceled anytime soon. The National Endowment for the Arts keeps funding its Shakespeare in American Communities program (begun in 2002 under George W. Bush), and his work is so frequently staged in this country that when American Theatre magazine publishes its annual list of most produced plays, it eliminates Shakespeare from the count so as not to skew the results. With our own theaters closed amid the Covid-19 pandemic and much of the country sheltered at home, Shakespeare has been the go-to playwright for bringing back as well as for rebukeafter all, he wrote King Lear while quarantined during an outbreak of bubonic plague.

Well, actually, as Shapiros earlier work clarifies, Lear was written during a respite from the periodic eruptions of plague that closed the theaters for various stretches during Shakespeares lifetime. He turned toward writing tragedies then, sometimes conjuring up images of pestilence, cankers, and potent and infectious fevers. In this period, Shapiro has noted, his work was subject to rejectionists every bit as vituperative as the disruptors trying to shut down Caesar in the Park. Anti-theatrical Puritans railed against the theaters constantly; one, Shapiro recounts in The Year of Lear, reasoned that since the cause of plagues is sin and the cause of sin are plays, then the cause of plagues are plays.

One reason the Puritans protested the theater had to do with how it made a mockery of their beliefs. It flouted Levitical proscriptions against cross-dressing (especially in the convention of adolescent boys playing female characters), while acting itself ran counter to the idea of identity as a God-given immutability. More than any of his contemporaries, Shakespeare called attention to these representational fissures of the genre, winking at the contradictions between what one sees and hearsthat a bare wooden platform stage is a battlefield or a forest or the cliffs of Dover, that a boy is Cleopatra or Juliet or, for that matter, that an Elizabethan man the ruler of ancient Rome or prince of late medieval Denmark. So while a tangled plot might seem to be straightened out in the end, with order restored by, say, a marriage, the means of its telling injects doubt into that resolution: The bride is still a boy. Theres spectatorial pleasurewhich riled the Puritansin holding two things in the mind at the same time.

It is this capacious incitement of the imagination, more than an Enlightenment idea of the plays universality, that has kept them so vital and volatile for centuries. And that, along with Shakespeares tendency to use stories of the past to address issues of his present, have left them open to radical possibilities today. Both of these expansive factors scale up the simple but all-important fact that these are plays: a dialectical form in which characters with a range of conflicting views gain our empathy, even our identification.

If conservatives are losing the tug-of-war that Shapiro chronicles so nimbly, its because the playsespecially in productionresist the constricting closure the right insists on, while more diverse Americans are laying claim to them. Senator Cotton may be trying to deny federal funding to any school that teaches the 1619 Project, but he blithely misses the progressive potential of the one author named as part of the common core: Shakespeare.

See more here:

Shakespeares Contentious Conversation With America - The Nation

Sandy Hudson is a co-founder of Black Lives Matter Toronto (BLM-TO) and a bestselling author and public intellectual who is currently living in Los Angeles. Ravyn Wngz is a Black Renaissance Movement storyteller and thought leader who was born in Bermuda, grew up in Atlanta and now lives in Toronto, where she is on BLM-TOs steering committee. The two spoke on Nov. 8 via Zoom about their hopes for next year.

Sandy Hudson: Here we are at the close of 2020, which I think is going to be one of those years that is talked about for a long, long time, kind of like how we talk about 1968. It has been an exhausting year, a bizarre year, and its been a very generative year. I look back at all the things we did together this year, working through Black Lives Matter, and its a mix of feelings, you knowIm disappointed, Im really sad and devastated, and Im also really encouraged and really inspired, as I always am by Black people and what we manage to do.

Ravyn Wngz: Its got me thinking a lot about what next year is going to look like. I used to say that Black Lives Matter Toronto, specifically, were like the great historians. But I think I was wrong in that assessment. I think its more like were futurists [looks exhausted]. When you think of next year, what are you hoping the conversations will be like?

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S.H.: From the beginning of Black Lives Matter, we have been shifting where the public is able to have conversations. Back in 2014, people didnt have an understanding of anti-Blackness as a specific manifestation of racism. We shifted that conversation. And 2016 was really when we started to push the defund the police message. Now were in a place where its much more acceptable to have a conversation about defunding the police and even police abolition. Next year, I dont want to be having any more debates about police. I want it to be understood in society that, you know what? We have let this st go on for far too long and the cost is far too high.

R.W.: Right. And now we have Joe Biden with the most votes in history for a U.S. president. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. And 75 million people voted for him. But 72 million voted for Trump.

S.H.: [Nodding] Awkward.

R.W.: Right?! Weve spent so much time trying to appeal to the humanity of the people who voted on that red side, who stand in solidarity with white supremacy, for the sake of their own selfishness. But it didnt matter. I feel like theres so much attention on unity and coming together, but its an illusion, its always been. I dont think people are being honest enough about how they actually feel, what they truly believe in. I think people are aware of what they feel like theyre supposed to say in public, but behind closed doors they vote for white supremacy and work to uphold it. I want new conversations about building, reimagining what care looks like, what justice feels like. I dont want to get lost in the conversations of distractions, like, How do we keep ourselves safe if the police are defunded? Or the idea that reform is the only way forward, there are just a few bad apples, its capital over people and prisons are an answer to public safety.

S.H.: Folks in power say, Well, you want to defund the police. What exactly is the system going to look like once thats done? Where is the plan that you have built out and costed? Go do your homework, and then maybe Ill talk to you. These politicians, these folks in power, they are paid to figure this stuff out. Theres a whole bureaucracy. There are people who have whole jobs dedicated to building a better society. Look, when COVID came down, the government came up with all of these different programs to help businesses, like the Canada Wage Subsidy. Do you think they went to Amazon and said, Hey, can you just go cost it all out? Can you cost it all out for us and come up with the plan and exactly what it needs to look like before were able to do anything to take care of the economy and how its going to impact the richest of the rich? Did they do that? No, they didnt. I dont want that any longer to be a part of the conversation. As activists, as members of the community that are being negatively affected, were pointing it out, and were saying, This is bad. So, go forth and build, people whose job it is to do that.

RELATED:I believed that I could never be a representative of Black liberation

R.W.: There are so many people who have worked to shift the way we talk about Blackness, about Black womaness, about the fullness of Black community and Black families. And I want next year to be this unfolding of all of the potential thats right here in Canada. The positive thing we saw in the States was that activism works. Coalition worked, on-the-ground worked, door-to-door knocking worked, all of that actually worked to get this man out of office. Well see how that goes. But, hopefully, there is more trust, more faith in this way of organizing. We still need to be marching. We still need to do rallies. We still need to shut stuff down. We still need to do our sit-ins. We still need to write our op-eds, our blogs, our articles, our books. And really start to shift education systems.

S.H.: How do you feel about politicians and police chiefs who might kneel at rallies? We see that all over the place. I feel like people think that they can just be against racism. Like, Hey, I am not racist, and I will prove it by showing you my Black friend, and going to this rally and kneeling, and then going home and checking off my checklist of things I need to do to prove that I dont hate Black people today. Oh, that makes me sick. What do you think?

R.W.: It makes me sick. It makes me frustrated. Im tired of it. I want it to end. I want us to call it out in really particular ways and for those politicians to really think about what theyre actually doing. You cant backseat-drive activism. So youre going to kneel when we watched a Black man die that way, and you think thats something that we want to see? You cant even bring yourself to understand that seeing a police officer in the same position that took a mans life [pauses] is something that wouldnt make us feel like you were in solidarity with us. Like, you are protesting yourself? What you need to do is go back to your office and protest whats going on there. I think it all needs a redo. Its like when you said some time ago, we need a radical commitment to conflict. Thats 2021.

S.H.: Well, heres what Im confident of. Heres what I know is going to happen. We will take care of ourselves.

R.W.: Always.

S.H.: Lets look at what we did in Toronto this year. How many people did we help with our COVID relief fund? Where the government failed in getting money out to people who desperately needed it in Black communities, we had a lot of people donate to this fund [and] we were able to get money and food directly to families that needed it. Im so confident that we will continue to take care of each other.

R.W.: Theres so much knowledge from our histories, that if we allowed ourselves to learn it, to understand itI mean, before colonizationthen we could really rebuild and restrategize ways of care, ways of community accountability, raise this level of humanity, acknowledgement of humanity. And then also get more people involved.

S.H.: I hear you. We need to build more power and we need to increase political education. Im looking forward to resourcing as much as possible and building the strength of Black activists across the country. I think that we need to connect more. You know, there were over 70 protests across Canada.

READ:We must defund the police. It is the only option.

R.W.: You know what? I am hopeful. Im hopeful that Black people will actually start to see the power that they have and will utilize that to help liberate each other. Im excited about 2021. We have to reckon with every part of who we are, how we are engaging with the land, with each other.

S.H.: I dont want to have to force anyonewhether its media or politicians or any other actor or anyone with powerto reckon with the truth. I dont want that any longer. This is the weekend where the results have been announced of the United States presidential election. Were having a lot of conversations where people are like, The American people have chosen unity. And the American people have chosen to build. The American people have chosen . . . And Im just like, thats not whats happened. Actually, people came out to vote against Trump, and a lot of people came out to support the type of white supremacist manifestation of politics that Trump represents, that [Jair] Bolsonaro, that [Narendra] Modi represents. This is a global issue. And we have that element happening here in Canada, too. And I want us to be able to face those things and have conversations about it so that were not stunned, shocked, surprised, every single time something happens. Lets actually work on prevention. Lets actually work on dealing with these problems before they manifest in deaths for Black people. Thats what I want to manifest: courage and truth for 2021.

R.W.: Hundred per cent.

This interview appears in print in the January 2021 issue of Macleans magazine with the headline, Courage and truth. Subscribe to the monthly print magazine here.

Excerpt from:

Courage and truth: What Sandy Hudson and Ravyn Wngz hope to see in 2021 - Maclean's

media release: The history of race-based slavery in America reveals the complicity of its core institutionsincluding its Churches and most prominent ministers. Yet, the history of the making of race in America remains unacknowledged, leaving us with a bevy questions: Why does race matter? Why is there such tension, division and disparities among racial groups in the United States of America, especially among white and Black Americans? How and why did Blackness and slavery become synonymous? How and why did a nation founded upon liberty and freedom perpetuate human bondage? What are the legacies of race-based slavery in America? These are a few of the questions Dr. Christy Clark-Pujara will explore in her presentation. Opportunities for question and answer will follow the presentation.

Resources recommended by Dr. Clark-Pujara

Christy Clark-Pujara is an Associate Professor of History in the Department Afro-American Studies and Department of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison; she is also the Director of Graduate Studies for the Department of Afro-American Studies. She received her B.A. in History and Social Science from the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota and her M.A. and PhD in History from the University of IowaIowa City. Her research focuses on the experiences of black people in British and French North America in the 17th, 18th and early 19th centuries. She is particularly interested in retrieving the hidden and unexplored histories of African Americans in areas that historians have not sufficiently examinedsmall towns and cities in the North and Midwest.She contends that the full dimensions of the African American and American experience cannot be appreciated without reference to how black people managed their lives in places where they were few. An absence of a large black populace did not mean that ideas of blackness were not central to the social, political, and economic development of these places.

Her first book Dark Work: The Business of Slavery in Rhode Island (NYU Press, 2016), examines how the business of slaveryeconomic activity that was directly related to the maintenance of slaveholding in the Americas, specifically the buying and selling of people, food, and goodsshaped the experience of slavery, the process of emancipation, and the realities of black freedom in Rhode Island from the colonial period through the American Civil War. Her current book project, Black on the Midwestern Frontier: From Slavery to Suffrage in the Wisconsin Territory, 17251868, examines how the practice of race-based slavery, black settlement, and debates over abolition and black rights shaped white-black race relations in the Midwest. Clark-Pujara is the author of several journal articles, most recently In Need of Care: African American Families Transform the Providence Association for the Benefit of Colored Orphans during the Final Collapse of Slavery, 1839-1846, Journal of Family History (September 2019).

Clark-Pujara was recently awarded the UW-Madison Vilas Faculty Early Career Investigator Award and the UW-Madison Outstanding Woman of Color Award 2020, Outstanding Woman of Color in Education Award, and the Feminist Scholars Fellowship from the UW-Madison Center for Research on Gender and Women in 2019 and the Honored Instructor Award from University Housing in 2020.

Edgewood College Religious Studies Department

First Baptist Church, Lafayette

First Unitarian Society, Madison, WI

First United Methodist Church, Madison, WI

North Shore Baptist Church, Chicago, IL

Orchard Ridge United Church of Christ, Madison, WI

Wisconsin Council of Churches

Wisconsin Faith Voices for Justice

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ONLINE: Complicity in the Making of Race-Based Slavery: From Roger Williams to the Cotton Kingdom - Isthmus

On October 22, 2018 at 9:55 p.m., 21-year old Lauren McCluskey was found dead inside the back of a car in the parking lot next to her University of Utah campus dormitory. She had been shot seven times.

That afternoon, Laurens ex-boyfriend Melvin Rowland had waited for Lauren in her resident hall for several hours. She was on the phone with her mother at 8:20 p.m. when Rowland confronted McCluskey, violently dragged her across the parking lot in front of her dorm, causing her to drop her phone and belongings. At 8:23 p.m. Matt McCluskey, Laurens father, alerted campus security that his daughter was in danger. It was too late.

Its too late now, too: Rowland killed himself hours after McCluskeys death and the man who loaned Rowland the gun he used was sentenced to three years in prison. But in the two years since McCluskeys tragic death, details have emerged about McCluskeys attempts to get protection from University police as she grew increasingly afraid of her stalker ex-boyfriend. Her pleas for help were ignored. McCluskeys family sued the university in federal court and in June, 2020, filed a second lawsuit, contending that, just weeks before she was murdered, a police officer in whom Lauren McCluskey had confided she feared for her life shared nude photographs she had given him with officers not involved in the matter.

When Lauren McCluskey decided to attend the University of Utah, she was recruited to become a member of the Womens Track & Field Team. She was a Washington State Champion in the high jump and ranked 10th in the heptathlon at the USATF Outdoor Junior Championshipsshe had several other colleges and scholarships to choose from. Lauren was a star athlete from when she was a youth, climbing trees at the age of two, says her mother, Jill McCluskey who, along with her husband Matt, is a member of the faculty at the University of Washington.

McCluskeys teachers, coaches and teammates had a high respect and regard for her as a multi-event athlete, for maintaining a high GPA and as a person, She was someone who really cared about other people and her friendships. Somewhat an introvert, if you got to know her you quickly found out that she was full of things to say, and genuinely cared about other people, says her mother. Beyond athletics, she enjoyed karaoke singing and dancing with her closest friends. While attending the U, Lauren belonged to the Capital Church in downtown SLC, and would invite others to come along, encouraging them to sing.

She had lived in Salt Lake City a few years when she met Melvin Rowland at a popular downtown bar where Rowland was working as a bouncer. He told her that he was in the military and trained as a security officer, and afterwards they met up a few times. It wasnt long before she discovered the truth: Rowland was on parole and on the sexual offender list. She confronted Rowland face to face in her dorm room, he owned up, and McCluskey formally ended their relationship.

But she continued to receive messages and threats from Rowland. His friends posted about his suicidewhich was fakeon social media and blamed McCluskey as the cause. Rowland made frequent attempts (sometimes successful) to visit her at her university dorm. At one point, he demanded $1,000 from her to prevent him from posting explicit photos of the two of them. As Rowlands actions escalated, McCluskey began voicing concerns to her immediate family and closest friends. Because Rowland was a con and highly manipulative, things were difficult to discernshe didnt always believe he was a threat, or that her life was in danger, and she wished to take care of the situation by herself. But as friends can attest, she was growing more and more concerned and even frightened by his actions toward her.

Officer Miguel Deras presented her case to campus police on October 12, 2018, to report she was being harassed. On October 13, 2018, she reported extortion. The police, including Officer Deras, never investigated her claims. At some point, Deras called her with a strange request. He asked her to hand over some questionable and explicit photos mentioned in the case. As we now know, Deras downloaded those pictures onto his personal phone and was overheard boasting to colleagues, remarking about her looks and being cute.

Looking back, its easy to see many points where McCluskeys murder could have been prevented. Her mother Jill McCluskey says, The officers never checked Laurens killers offender status. After the police took her statement, they could have easily found out that Rowland was on parole and put him in jail right then. I just wish a responsible adult would have listened and believed. Rowland was on parole and could have been taken into custody. On October 19, 2018, McCluskey emailed detective Kayla Dallof with Rowlands offender information. Dallof did not read the email until after Lauren was killed. According to Laurens friend Shelby Gonzalez, On Thursday before we lost Lauren she asked me to come to the library to meet her because she needed help. She said the police didnt believe her about her scary ex and she didnt know what to do.

It turns out that McCluskey was victimized not just by her killer. Lax dormitory security and a macho culture of minimizing coeds complaints also contributed to her death. McCluskey says, The U has never admitted that Laurens death could have been prevented, or apologized or taken responsibility for their failures. Its hard for them to change if they dont acknowledge their failures, and that has to happen going forward.

Too late for McCluskey, changes are coming about, somewhat ironically in a year when campus population and social interactions will drastically decrease due to the coronovirus.

Following McCluskeys murder, teammate and friend Brooke Martin was in shock. But as time went by, she noticed that little or nothing was changing in campus safety or policy. Martin created a mural in McCluskeys honor, and helped build a student-led coalition called UnsafeU. Since their first public protest on the first anniversary of McCluskeys death, UnsafeU has been gathering and sharing stories of other mishandled cases. Martin says, Students are demonstrating with their voices and standing up for whats right and not forgetting, and not accepting the empty words or quick Bandaids from a system thats completely broken, says Martin.

Many professors at the U and around the country are posting Laurens Promise on their course syllabus, I will listen and believe you if someone is threatening you. laurenmccluskey.org

Utah State Senator Jani Iwamoto has a long-standing interest in dealing with public safety issues and sexual assault. Since McCluskeys murder many college students have contacted her wanting to talk about campus safety and problems like assault, domestic and dating violence and stalking. She says, I am inspired by their activism, as many students have continued to express that they dont feel safe and demand real change in their places of higher learning. We need safeguards in place to help our students. Senator Iwamoto was the Chief Sponsor of S.B. 134, signed by Governor Herbert on May 19, 2019, a bill which outlines requirements and responsibilities for campus safety and requires institutions to share this information with the Legislature every year, to assess and find out whats working and whats not.

Senator Iwamoto says,Laurens death, her pleas for help, of course, her tragic death does not go away, and nothing is going to work unless we have some real change with the police and policy, and that the students believe in it, because now there isnt trust at all in them. Seamless communication is also important for the victims, because its hard enough to navigate where to go and what to do when they are going through an experience. Senator Iwamoto also sponsored this years S.B. Bill 80 which focuses more specifically on communication between law enforcement, students, campus police dispatch and departments.

Laurens kindness, positive attitude, and work ethic were always on display regardless of the people she was with or activities she was involved in as a student-athlete at the U. Its simply who she was. She was always present and in the moment with her teammates and friends. That is more difficult than we all realize in todays world. Yet she did it with ease and grace on a regular basis with everyone she knew. KYLE KEPLER, U OF U TRACK AND FIELD COACH

As a Communications major, Lauren was enrolled at the U in Professor Dan Clarks Advanced Public Speaking class. Her final exam was a student presentation called the Last LectureIf you had only one hour left to live, what would you say? Lauren was the first to volunteer. While soft spoken, she delivered her speech in a profound way, Clark says. She shared her stories about being on the track team, the thrill of victory as well as her injuries and enduring disappointment and physical pain. Her message was one of keeping hope alive, that overcoming obstacles is part of life, and that practicing self-love is the way for you to fully love others.

Over two years have passed since Lauren was found dead in the back of a car outside her campus dorm. There is still so much to be done, her friend Brooke Martin says. Justice needs to be served and our demands need to be metno student should ever be worried about being killed on campus.

And Laurens story continues and gains momentum. On the first anniversary of her murder, led by a student organization called UnsafeU, 100 students walked out of their classes to protest how the university handled the Lauren McCluskey case, the misconduct of university police and other concerns reported by women.

And September 3rd of the 2020-21 academic year started with another large on-campus rally from UnsafeU demanding the resignation of President Ruth Watkins for withholding evidence in this and other cases and calling for the abolition of the UUPD.

For more city life, click here.

Excerpt from:

Lauren McCluskey: The Tragic and Unnecessary Tale Salt Lake Magazine - Salt Lake Magazine

(CNN) Congressional Democrats want to amend a section of the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery, to end what they refer to as another form of slavery forced prison labor.

Sen. Jeff Merkley of Oregon and Rep. William Lacy Clay of Missouri introduced a joint resolution this week that would remove the 13th Amendments punishment clause, or language that excepted convicted prisoners from the ban on slavery and involuntary servitude.

Our Abolition Amendment seeks to finish the job that President Lincoln started by ending the punishment clause in the 13th Amendment to eliminate the dehumanizing and discriminatory forced labor of prisoners for profit that has been used to drive the over-incarceration of African Americans since the end of the Civil War, Clay said in a statement.

When it was ratified in 1865, the 13th Amendment made slavery illegal except as punishment for a crime of which one has been convicted, the amendments text reads.

The Abolition Amendment would strike that clause from the 13th Amendment and end forced labor among prisoners, the congressmen said. Work programs for prisoners would continue on a voluntary basis.

Avi Soifer, a professor and former Dean of the University of Hawaii at Manoas Richardson School of Law, told CNN that its unlikely that efforts to amend the constitutional amendment will succeed.

It may be more beneficial to institute partial remedies, he said, like the federal statute that outlaws voluntary and involuntary peonage, a type of servitude by which people who owe debts work until those debts are paid.

It thus could have immediate relevance in efforts to address the terrible ways that we now treat prisoners and those jailed because they are unable to make bail, said Soifer, a 13th Amendment expert.

Merkley and Clay, in their release, call the punishment clause in the 13th Amendment indisputably racist in origin and in impact.

Because the South relied on slave labor for its economy in the 19th century, that line in the amendment was used as a loophole to continue the forced labor of Black Americans who were imprisoned, according to the non-profit Equal Justice Initiative, which works to end mass incarceration.

The punishment clause led to higher rates of arrests among Black Americans throughout the Jim Crow era to the War on Drugs in the 1980s, the congressmen said in the release, by effectively creating a financial incentive for mass incarceration renting forced labor of disproportionately Black prisoners.

Prison labor is a lucrative industry. NPR reported in July that as of the last federal count in 2005, over 1.5 million prisoners were working. UNICOR, a federal prison labor program, generates over $500 million in revenue every year, NPR reported.

But the practice exploits prison laborers, its opponents say. Many states, mostly in the South, dont pay inmates for working regular prison jobs, according to the Prison Policy institute, and the high end of their wages for regular prison jobs rarely exceed $1.

Sens. Bernie Sanders and Ed Markey, among others, have cosponsored the amendment, which has earned the support of social justice organizations like Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and Color of Change.

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Democratic lawmakers introduce a resolution to amend the 13th Amendment to end forced prison labor - KSL NewsRadio

The oppressive Kafala system has been so detested by overseas Filipino workers in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia that when the Saudi government recently announced its abolition, OFWs were euphoric about it. In text messages, in posts on social media, in phone calls and in letters, Saudi OFWs congratulated one another for a hard-won victory even as they conveyed the festive air to their loved ones in the Philippines.

The Kafala system has been the one single fetter that placed foreign workers in Saudi Arabia under the total mercy of their employees. Under the system, workers are bound to surrender their travel documents to their employers immediately upon start of their employment. This arrangement has given employers a wide leeway of oppressive control over workers because no matter what the employers do to them, they cannot complain, much less run away. The scheme has given rise to such extreme cases as maltreatments, severe physical harm, rape and even murder.

On March 14 next year, the Kafala system will be a thing of the past. That is when the Saudi government will start implementing its abolition.

I have a daughter, a nurse, working in a hospital in Riyadh who at various times in the past urged me to take up the cause of the Saudi OFWs. She has been telling me that as a nurse, she experiences none of the constrictions suffered by most Filipino workers in the KSA, but she has been worrying about the plight of lowly employees like domestic helpers and construction workers, and she has been asking me if I could do something about it.I would much like to help certainly, but who am I to do it?

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) accounts for one of the most numerous overseas Filipino workers in the Middle East, counting 865,121 by Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) figures as of December 2019. My daughter has been one among them since 2012, when she began working as a private nurse to the grandchild of a Princess of Saudi Arabia.

She stayed in the job for two years, after which she returned to the Philippines to gain experience in hospital work, and with this stint for a period of two years done, she returned to Saudi to work in a hospital in Riyadh; of late, she has transferred employment there without much ado.

Anyway, my daughters urgings finally prompted me to do some inquiry, which disclosed that the Philippine government had been concerned about the Kafala system and had been taking steps to solve the problem without much fanfare. That was enough assurance to me at least that my daughters worries were being addressed.

In 2017, during the tenure of Taguig Rep. Alan Peter Cayetano as secretary of Foreign Affairs, he took the cudgels for the Saudi OFWs in their struggle against the Kafala system. He brought the issue before international fora, particularly the United Nations, advocating for the systems abolition.

Much water, so to speak, has run under the bridge since then, with Cayetano again completely immersed in politics, regaining his previous post as congressman of Taguig onward to becoming speaker of the House of Representatives. This development has had a way of distracting public attention from the earnest effort he did in trying to solve the problem of OFWs in Saudi Arabia. How many have known, for instance, that he was awarded by President Rodrigo Duterte the Order of Sikatuna with the rank of Datu when he left the DFA in 2018? Much of that award must be owed to his service to OFWs the world over.

Sad that human nature makes you remembered more for one bad talk about you than for the many actual good deeds you have done.

My daughter has not realized it, but her pushing me on the issue of the Kafala system has led me to unearthing things otherwise already archived in peoples memory the increase from P400 million to P1 billion in the allocation for the Assistance to Nationals (ATN) fund; in the Legal Assistance Fund (LAF) from P100 million to P200 million. A source cited 14,995 OFW beneficiaries of the ATN and 685 migrant Filipino workers facing charges receiving assistance through the LAF.

From time to time, we come across news of multitudes of OFWs stranded here and abroad because of typhoons and other natural calamities such as the Covid-19 pandemic. They get substantial relief from the above-cited ATN.

All these are attributed to Cayetano, along with other reforms at the DFA, including the launching of the Passport on Wheels, which hastened the process of passport application, and the opening of consular offices in Ilocos Norte, Isabela, Laguna, Bulacan, Cavite, Rizal, Davao del Norte, Misamis Occidental and Tarlac; the great improvement in the processing of passport applications from 9,500 to 20,000 daily; the increase in passport applicants show-up rate from 65 percent to 95 percent because of the introduction of the e-payment system, thereby curtailing issuance of fake passports; the provision of courtesy lanes for senior citizens, children and persons with disability passport applicants; and the ten-year validity of passports.

In March 2020, the Department of OFW bill authored by Cayetano passed the third and final reading before the House of Representatives. When the Senate passes its counterpart bill, OFWs get to have their own full-ensemble department to attend to all their needs.

A late information just reached me that the International Organization for Migration has lauded the abolition of the Kafala system as a game-changer. It should be, since the labor reforms undertaken by the Saudi Arabian government go a long way in protecting actually not just OFWs but also migrant workers of other nationalities in that country.

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Saudi OFWs get what they want The Manila Times - The Manila Times

President-elect Joe Biden is considering plans for unilateral student debt cancellation. But its not just Biden: 235 organizations across the United States are united in calling for an executive order to erase student debt on day one of his presidency.

The debate now rages between those who believe its impact will be progressive or regressive, whether it will help high-income lawyers or low-income plumbers. But the salience of debt cancellation in the Biden transition makes one thing clear: debtors have arrived as a distinct constituency in American politics.

In the foreword to Cant Pay, Wont Pay: The Case for Economic Disobedience and Debt Abolition, Astra Taylor describes the book as a resource for everyone struggling to build a better world. Coauthored by various members of the Debt Collective founded in 2014 against the backdrop of the Occupy movement Cant Pay, Wont Pay offers a powerful and concise account of finance capitalism and the dynamics of accumulation by dispossession through which mass indebtedness drives insecurity, sustains poverty, and generates massive inequality around the world.

True to its title, the book is also a rousing call to disobey the rentiers, building on the Debt Collectives own experience winning over a billion dollars in debt cancellation and to use this rebellion as a springboard to a new economy based on collective notions of redress and repair.

But the core of Cant Pay, Wont Pay is a radical claim about political identity. In particular, the Debt Collective sets out to convince us that one identity is worth fighting for, organizing around, and forcing to the front of the line: that of the debtor. We see indebtedness as a bond that ties us together across borders, they write, and we must use those bonds to push for a new social contract.

To make this case, the authors of Cant Pay, Wont Pay offer an analogy between the role of the worker in the age of manufacturing and the role of the debtor in the age of financialization namely, as the key source of collective strength, the umbrella identity that can hold together an anti-capitalist coalition.

Imagine teachers, who are often buried in student debt, organizing along with their students for debt cancellation and free education. Imagine nurses organizing alongside their indebted patients for universal health care. Imagine borrowers acting in solidarity with striking workers. Imagine workers of all kinds refusing debts, in connection with a campaign for a federal job guarantee that promises everyone dignified, meaningful, well-paid, and ecologically sustainable work.

The solution? Debtor unions. Taking inspiration from the labor movement, we believe debtors organized in a union can exercise material power over their common circumstances, Astra Taylor writes in the books foreword.

The call for debtor unions marks a critical advance in the legacy of Occupy Wall Street. The dominant identity of the Occupy movement that of the 99 percent promised to congeal the country into one great mass, ready to be mobilized in a New Populist politics. Alas, that populist moment has come and gone. And perhaps good riddance: the identity of the people often obscured more than it revealed.

The identity of the debtor, by contrast, centers the experience of exploitation and just as important identifies the creditor as its antagonistic opposite. This spirit of antagonism arrives not a minute too late. With the 2008 financial crisis fading into distant history, Cant Pay, Wont Pay offers an important reminder that the banks are still, in fact, screwing us harder than ever.

But the simplicity of Cant Pay, Wont Pays core claim about political identity demands closer interrogation: What are we to make of the comparison of the worker and the debtor, of the labor union and the debtors?

The similarities are compelling. Like labor, debt is a fictitious commodity that is controlled by the very few and against the best interest of the very many. And like labor, debt is ultimately owned by the debtor, who in association with fellow debtors can go on strike to reclaim control of their conditions.

Alone, the debtor like the worker is a target of exploitation; together, debtors command great collective power. Never forget: your debt is someone elses asset, the authors write. Bits of our student loan, mortgage, credit card, and auto loan payments are pooled in order to make money for investors around the world. If the financiers of today want to dress themselves up as the capitalists of yesterday buying and trading financial instruments as if they were meat and milk then debtors should dress themselves up as workers, and fight back just the same.

Critical differences between the worker and the debtor, however, sometimes strain the comparison. Consider the two dominant sources of household debt in the United States: the mortgage and the student loan. In both cases homeownership and university education the origins of debt accumulation appear as a secondary, rather than primary site of exploitation, less born of the imperative to survive than the aspiration to climb.

The creditor class, in other words, preys on dreams of upward mobility. Students and homeowners are drowning in debt, but is their debt merely a symptom of the liberal market economics, or the disease itself?

Considerations of debts origin raise questions about its distribution. The crisis of debt is hardly confined to working people; on the contrary, it is corporate debt that has seen the largest expansion over the last half-century. The authors attempt to work around the question of distribution by pointing to the double standard that applies to the management of debt across classes. At the very top of the wealth pyramid, the rules that keep the little people in line dont apply.

In the book, debt often becomes exploitative debt, or unjust debt, suggesting boundaries around the debtor identity that are never openly or conclusively drawn. Who can be a member of the debtor union? How capacious is this identity? Whom does it exclude?

These are fundamental criteria on which to evaluate Cant Pay, Wont Pays core claim about the utility of the debtor identity criteria that invite further comparison. Consider another identity that has become increasingly central to the politics of liberal market capitalism: that of the consumer.

Consumers, like debtors, are treated as solitary units with individual preferences, needs, and tastes. Consumers, like debtors, hold tremendous collective power to shape the production process in capitalist economies. And consumers, like debtors, can realize that power and strike against corporations to demand better conditions for themselves and for the factory workers on the other side of the supply chain.

Yet calls to rally around the consumer identity often yield skepticism, if not condemnation. Why? Possibly because the identity of the consumer lumps together groups that otherwise lock horns in class war. The same might well be said of the worker identity, which presupposes shared interests between all wage earners, regardless of occupation or income.

And the same still holds true in the case of the debtor. The authors see this as a strength: Mass indebtedness is a social condition that lays the groundwork for the kind of cross-class, multiracial coalition we desperately need to actually target capitalism. Others might question the prospects of a cross-class alliance dismantling a system that is premised on cross-class domination.

I suspect, however, that the more fundamental objection to the consumer is not its class composition, but the horizon of its ambition. Every political identity contains not only an analysis of the present, but a proposal for the future. The worker identity for better or for worse binds us to our productive capacity, and sets a utopian horizon on this basis: a future where we decide democratically what we want to produce, and own the fruit of that productive process. The consumer identity, by contrast, promises only a tweaked status quo. It is an identity so bound to capitalism that even a militant consumer movement would only serve to confuse our sense of worth with our capacity to buy.

What about the debtor? What is the vision of the future that is contained in this identity? And what is the horizon of possibility set out in Cant Pay, Wont Pay? Here, the book finds its true strength, because against its title the Debt Collective goes far beyond a call for disobedience, or debt forgiveness.

Instead, the authors advocate a radical form of debt abolition, which they define not only in the negative sense a world without but also in the positive sense, a world with social housing, health care, education, art, and meaningful work, and a life free from state violence and material want.

There is some conceptual slippage here. Debt abolition does not really mean the abolition of debt, but a world without exploitative debt contracts. Critics of the late David Graebers Debt: The First 5,000 Years will find similar fault in Cant Pay, Wont Pays slide into Manichean thinking, in which debt becomes something bad to be abolished, rather than something neutral that can be made bad under specific circumstances.

There is a fine line between considering forms of money or credit as expressing our social relations, and producing them, the Aufheben collective wrote in a withering review of Graebers Debt years ago. Cant Pay, Wont Pay will find similar criticism among a certain section of the political economy commentariat.

Luckily, the book really isnt for them. Cant Pay, Wont Pay is less about the mechanics of finance than their meaning in the lives of billions of people around the world. And it is from this focus on personal meaning that the book derives its political power, plucking an identity that is associated with so much shame and silent suffering, and charging it with a new collective power to throw sand in the gears of capitalism.

It is all too easy to imagine that the identity of the worker is inbuilt, an eternal companion to the productive process. But this identity took centuries of thinking, writing, organizing, and fighting to come to the fore and it has powered movements for justice, peace, and prosperity ever since.

Perhaps the debtor can do the same today, linking so many struggles against exploitation in a common identity, and powering our fight for a future based on mutual care and reparative public goods. Because, as the Debt Collectives Cant Pay, Wont Pay reminds us, you are not a loan, and together, we own the bank.

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Are Debtors the New Workers of the World? - Jacobin magazine

In this Dec. 11, 2007, file photo, members of the Maricopa County DUI chain gang are escorted to a work assignment in Phoenix. National lawmakers have introduced a joint resolution aimed at striking language from the U.S. Constitution that enshrines a form of slavery in Americas foundational documents. Many Americans will recognize modern-day prison labor as chain gangs deployed from prison facilities for agricultural and infrastructure work. | Matt York / AP

NEW YORK (AP)National lawmakers introduced a joint resolution Wednesday aimed at striking language from the U.S. Constitution that enshrines a form of slavery in Americas foundational documents.

The resolution, spearheaded and supported by Democratic members of the House and Senate, would amend the 13th Amendments ban on chattel enslavement to expressly prohibit involuntary servitude as a punishment for crime. As ratified, the original amendment has permitted exploitation of labor by convicted felons for over 155 years since the abolition of slavery.

The 13th Amendment continued the process of a white power class gravely mistreating Black Americans, creating generations of poverty, the breakup of families, and this wave of mass incarceration that we still wrestle with today, Sen. Jeff Merkley of Oregon told The Associated Press ahead of the resolutions introduction.

A House version is led by outgoing Rep. William Lacy Clay, of St. Louis, who said the amendment seeks to finish the job that President (Abraham) Lincoln started.

It would eliminate the dehumanizing and discriminatory forced labor of prisoners for profit that has been used to drive the over-incarceration of African Americans since the end of the Civil War, Clay said.

In the Senate, the resolution has Sens. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, Ed Markey of Massachusetts, and Chris Van Hollen of Maryland signed on as co-sponsors. This change to the 13th Amendment will finally, fully rid our nation of a form of legalized slavery, Van Hollen said in an emailed statement.

Constitutional amendments are rare and require approval by two-thirds of the House and Senate, as well as ratification by three-quarters of state legislatures. Should the proposal fail to move out of committee in the remaining weeks of the current Congress, Merkley said he hoped to revive it next year.

The effort has been endorsed by more than a dozen human rights and social justice organizations, including The Sentencing Project, the Anti-Recidivism Coalition, and Color of Change.

It is long past time that Congress excise this language from the U.S. Constitution which should begin to put an end to the abusive practices derived from it, said Laura Pitter, deputy director of the U.S. program at Human Rights Watch, which also endorsed the amendment.

The proposed amendment comes nearly one month after voters in Nebraska and Utah approved initiatives amending their state constitutions to remove language that allows slavery and involuntary servitude as criminal punishments. In 2018, Colorado was among the first U.S. states to remove such language by ballot measure.

Although nearly half of state constitutions do not mention human bondage or prison labor as punishment, just over 20 states still include such clauses in governing documents that date back to the 19th century abolition of slavery.

In Merkleys Oregon, voters in 2002 approved the elimination of constitutional language that prohibited Black Americans from living in the state unless they were enslaved.

He said the movement toward a federal amendment is kind of saying to the world, lets not forget this big piece of injustice thats sitting squarely in the middle of our Constitution, as we wrestle with criminal justice reform.

Many Americans will recognize modern-day prison labor as chain gangs deployed from prison facilities for agricultural and infrastructure work. The prevalence of prison labor has been largely accepted as a means for promoting rehabilitation, teaching trade skills, and reducing idleness among prisoners.

But the practice has a much darker history. Following the abolition of slavery, Southern states that lost the literal backbone of their economies began criminalizing formerly enslaved Black men and women for offenses as petty as vagrancy or having unkempt children.

This allowed legal re-enslavement of African Americans, who were no longer seen as sympathetic victims of inhumane bondage, said Michele Goodwin, a constitutional law professor at the University of California, Irvine.

These people became criminals, and it became very difficult for many abolitionists to use the same kinds of emotional messaging about the humanity of these individuals, Goodwin said.

Today, incarcerated workers, many of them making pennies on the dollar, work in plants, manufacturing clothing, assembling furniture, and even battling wildfires across the U.S., much of it to the benefit of large corporations, governments, and communities where theyve historically been unwelcome upon release.

Researchers have estimated the minimum annual value of prison labor commodities at $2 billion, derived largely through a system of convict leasing that leaves these workers without the legal protections and benefits that Americans are otherwise entitled to.

And while prison work is largely optional for the 2.2 million individuals incarcerated in the U.S., its a grave mistake to disassociate their labor from the original intent of the penal system, Goodwin said.

Your freedom has been taken awaythats the punishment that society has assigned, she said. The punishment is not that you do slave work, that is unpaid labor or barely paid labor.

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Amending the 13th Amendment: Lawmakers aim to end legalized prison slavery - People's World

Amid the brunchtime clatter of a busy south London cafe, Alex Wheatle is talking about how, lately, he has been considering 1970s pop culture and the way it has shaped and warped his perception of self. I grew up with Tarzan on TV; Tarzan beating up all the black guys he came across and being able to talk to the animals while the black people couldnt, he says. And I hate to admit it, but when I was 10 or 11, I actually cheered for Tarzan when he was fighting with a so-called savage. It was only later that I thought: I think Ive got that wrong.

In many ways, Wheatles 20-year writing career has been about correcting that wrong. Because if the focus of the authors extraordinary early years was on mistruths around his heritage about its history, its value, its implicit inferiority to a loin-clothed white saviour then the intervening period has been all about creating the depictions of nuanced black heroism he was denied as a child.

He did it with Brixton Rock, the 1999 debut that introduced readers to troubled care-system kid Brenton Brown and the signature crackle of Wheatles streetwise prose. He did it with Crongton Knights, the 2016 Guardian childrens fiction prize winner that rendered council estate turf wars with wit, care and profundity. And now in a landmark period of his career that happens to coincide with a Steve McQueen film about his life he has done it again with Cane Warriors: a taut, urgent new young adult novel set within the real-life slave uprising that took place on a Jamaican plantation in 1760.

At first glance, the story told through the eyes of Moa, a 14-year-old enlisted in a brutal rebellion led by a fellow slave known as Tacky feels like a departure for Wheatle. Back-ripper-wielding overseers and rural cane fields are a world away from the modern, multicultural cityscapes and wry socio-realism that have long been his hallmark. But as Wheatle, now 57, sees it, Moas story tallies with his personal history. The first stirrings of his interest in writing came while he was serving a four-month prison sentence for his role in the 1981 Brixton riots, when his cellmate handed him a dog-eared copy of The Black Jacobins, CLR Jamess seminal account of Toussaint LOuvertures 18th-century slave revolt and the resultant Haitian revolution. That changed everything for me, he says, pouring more tea from his pot. Because, up to that point, Id only seen black people as victims or subservient. To actually read a text where there was an incredible black hero really opened up my eyes to the world. It led me to search for other black heroic texts, because Id been denied them all those years. So I do feel, with Cane Warriors, that Ive come full circle.

Reading CLRJames in prison changed Wheatles life: Up to then, Id only seen black people asvictims or subservient

Which is not to say that the books route to publication was straightforward he tells me his previous publishers werent too excited about Cane Warriors. But Wheatle, who first learned about the bloody revolt on a trip to Jamaica with his father, would not be denied. And soon he was sifting through historical records that gave him the spine of a story. Hard facts were difficult to establish, he says. But there was definitely a slave uprising that happened on Easter Sunday in 1760, started by this guy Tacky, who was rumoured to be an African prince. I knew that [the slaves] killed the overseers and the masters at the plantations, they marched to [coastal garrison] Fort Haldane, sacked that and got 40 guns and the gunpowder.

As well as the unflinching, crisply relayed nature of its violence, one of the most striking things about Cane Warriors is the specificity of its language. Moa and his fellow slaves talk, in pungent patois, of falling eye-water and bruk-outs; of the will of West African Akan gods, where the tragedy of a fellow slaves death is compounded by the hard work of having to dig their pit. Even with a necessarily limited descriptive palette, Wheatle paints with trademark vividness. And the inflection point between African and Caribbean cultures that Cane Warriors documents is wholly deliberate.

On the first page, the difficulty for me was I had to make a decision about how my characters were going to speak, he explains. Were they going to speak in a Jamaican vernacular? Would that be influenced by something from Akan or Ghanaian culture? I had to make a choice and I thought, do you know what, aspects of the book need to show that they are a people who came from Ghana. I have to honour that. But in the everyday speech, I wanted to honour the Jamaicanness of them. I wanted the world to know that these characters, these warriors, these rebels, were Jamaican.

In light of the debates around British historical figures with links to slavery, and amid calls to give Black British history a more meaningful place on the curriculum, Cane Warriors serves an especially resonant educational purpose in 2020. Again, this is by design. It goes back to [Nigerian writer] Chinua Achebe saying that the lion never gets to tell the tale of the hunt, Wheatle says. I want to turn the eyes of young students to this part of British history that for me is so important and so necessary. Because were a diverse country now. And when I was at school, maybe my attention span wasnt the best, but to a certain extent I got bored of Henry VIII and his six wives and agricultural crop rotation. I said, Where am I in this? Where are all my ancestors?

In a forceful afterword, Wheatle makes the case for slavery reparations, citing the 20m reimbursement sum that was pledged to slave owners by the British government after slavery was made illegal in 1833. And, particularly after this summer of protest, Wheatle wants to explain the vital role slave rebellion leaders like Tacky played in clearing the path to abolition. The slavers were losing money because of the revolts, he says. It disrupted them in a massive way, so I can imagine them thinking, Is it really worth it? The uprisings had a massive impact. Cane Warriors hopefully helps address that. It wasnt just some kindly white saviour in the House of Commons saying, Slavery has got to end. It wasnt ever as simple as that.

Its fair to say that Wheatles current standing a quietly formidable authority on Black history, with an MBE awarded in 2008 for services to literature stands in contrast to his early days. Wheatles Jamaican mother was already married with four children when she met his father in London; she returned home after Wheatles birth, while his father, a Jamaican-born teacher, struggled to cope as a single parent. Wheatle grew up in Shirley Oaks, a notorious Croydon childrens home; just this summer, an independent inquiry heard evidence of how its residents had endured sustained physical, sexual and racial abuse, with 48 deaths occurring over a 20-year period.

Wheatle has spoken previously of the dehumanising treatment he experienced there (in a 2014 newspaper column, he related that his first memories are of getting beaten up with wooden hairbrushes, belts and hard-soled shoes) and his personal history of care home trauma and the salvation he later found as a teenager on the fringes of Brixtons reggae sound system scene reverberate throughout his work. Today, when asked how he has seemingly emerged unscathed from such a painful start, he notes that appearances can be deceiving.

I have my flaws, he says. I have my nightmarish moments where sometimes my past comes back and hits me when Im not expecting it. But thats OK. It doesnt make me weak. It makes me more empathetic with people who go through those experiences. And it helps my writing when Im creating characters who experience stress and trauma.

This winter more people will become acquainted with his story thanks to Small Axe, Steve McQueens blockbuster film anthology about the West Indian experience in the UK between the late 1960s and mid 1980s. Wheatle was already part of the writers room for the project in 2016 (Im not sure if Steve remembers how much I was shaking in the interview, he laughs) when a story focused on a young black man going through institutions was suggested. And one of the fellow writers said, Alex, how about you? I was a bit overwhelmed, and then Steve said, Alex are you holding out on me?

The next day he brought in copies of his case file from Lambeth council and, soon the film, titled Alex Wheatle, charting his journey from Shirley Oaks to the Brixton uprising, prison and beyond, was born. McQueen even offered him the opportunity to write it but, understandably, the author felt too close to it.

When we speak, Wheatle is yet to see a finished version of the film. But he had multiple meetings with Sheyi Cole, the actor playing his younger self (I taught him how to skank, which Im sure will be appearing on YouTube soon, he jokes), visited the set and got to enjoy another full circle moment, courtesy of the fact that his son one of his three adult children worked on the Small Axe production design team. He called me and said, Dad, Im prepping your bedroom for younger Alex, which is fucked up, says Wheatle, chuckling.

After some false dawns with adaptations of his books throughout his career (East of Acre Lane, which depicted the Brixton uprising, was optioned by the BBC in 2001), the experience on Small Axe has given him a taste for screenwriting and adaptation. Its something I want to develop slowly, he says. Because I loved the collaboration and I loved the writers room.

For now, though, hes waiting out the pandemic, pondering a possible move out of London and publishing another young adult novel: The Humiliations of Welton Blake, a ribald comedy of errors that bloomed directly from needing to laugh after Cane Warriors. This shouldnt be construed as him being done with historical narratives however long-held plans to write about Caribbean migration to Panama and subsequently what happened with other slave revolts are taking shape.

Does Wheatle feel any apprehension about telling slave stories that, by their very nature, necessitate a degree of black suffering, trauma and torture? There was a certain hesitation because I kind of expected certain commentators to say, Oh, do we have to face this again? he says. But sometimes we have to bring it back to the birth of our pain. No one complains when someone comes up with another narrative of Queen Elizabeth I. No one complains when those tales are reprised and retold, so why does it make certain people feel uncomfortable when I write about what happened to my ancestors? We have, thankfully, come a long way from Tarzans chest-beating colonialism. But Wheatle intends, with typical vigour and compassion, to remind us of how far we still have to go.

Cane Warriors is published by Anderson Press (10.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Small Axe: Alex Wheatle will be broadcast on BBC One on Sunday 6 December

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Alex Wheatle: I have nightmarish moments where my past comes back and hits me - The Guardian