Daily Archives: March 18, 2022

ILO/TEMPO GENEVA (ILO News) The Governing Body of the International Labour Organization (ILO) has taken an important step towards the possible inclusion of occupational safety and health as a fundamental principle and right at work.

It agreed that the matter will be further discussed at the 110th International Labour Conference, in June 2022.

If adopted, the proposed amendment would indicate that all ILO Member States would have an obligation to respect and promote safe and healthy working conditions in the same manner and with the same level of commitment as the four principles currently covered by the ILO Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work.

These existing categories are freedom of association and the effective recognition of the right to collective bargaining, the elimination of forced or compulsory labour, the abolition of child labour, and the elimination of discrimination in respect of employment and occupation.

Adopted in 1998, the ILO Declaration commits Member States to respect and promote these fundamental principles and rights at work whether or not they have ratified the relevant Conventions.

The decision of the Governing Body is in line with the commitments made in the ILO Centenary Declaration for the Future of Work, adopted in 2019 to promote a human-centred approach to the future of work.

Excerpt from:

ILO Governing Body agrees on key occupational safety and health discussion at International Labour Conference 2022 - ILO

We are advocates of the abolition of war, we do not want war; but war can only be abolished through war, and in order to get rid of the gun, it is necessary to take up the gun.

That is not a summary of popular attitudes to war in Ukraine. It is a quotation from Mao Tse Tungs Problems of War and Strategy, published in 1938.

While few would state it as baldly as Mao Tse Tung, the vicious attacks on Ukraine have made many believe he may not be wrong.

Putin will understand nothing except greater force, the argument runs. If he is not defeated by military force, he may become embroiled in a war of attrition that he cannot win, an ongoing insurgency like the one that eventually forced the Soviets out of Afghanistan in 1989.

Either way, in the short or long term, meeting violence with violence is perceived as the only possible solution. That may or may not be correct in the case of Ukraine but we should at least be open to the possibility that non-violent resistance is not unrealistic, naive or useless.

Erica Chenoweth, now a Harvard professor, was sceptical about non-violence, too. In the early 2000s, her research had been on terrorism. Her belief was that only violent force achieved major political or social change.

At an academic workshop organised by the International Center of Nonviolent Conflict (ICNC) she encountered many case studies of successful non-violent protest, including people power in the Philippines, which ended Ferdinand Marcos 20-year dictatorship.

A researcher at ICNC, Maria Stephan, challenged Chenoweth to work with her on systematically analysing the data on non-violent resistance, in order to move beyond just anecdotal evidence.

For two years, the women collected data on both violent and non-violent strategies, eventually settling on 323 examples from 1900 to 2006.

Counter-intuitively, their research showed that in the aggregate, non-violent campaigns were twice as successful, with 53 per cent of non-violent movements succeeding in their aims versus 26 per cent of violent campaigns. These campaigns also did far less damage to society.

Their 2008 book, now considered a classic, Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict, also explains that non-violent resistance is not a panacea and is not without cost. Nonetheless, further research shows that even after apparent failure, countries with non-violent campaigns were about 10 times more likely to transition to democracies within a five-year period than countries in which there were violent campaigns. This may be because non-violent campaigns attract, on average, four times as many participants.

Chenoweths later research shows that it takes about 3.5 per cent of the population to participate actively in campaigns to ensure serious change. In 2015, 25 per cent of Ukrainians favoured non-violent resistance, compared with 26 per cent who favoured violence.

Every major world religion has a strand within its tradition of non-violence. Mohandas Gandhi lived Hindu principles such as ahimsa, that is, not causing harm to living beings.

Gandhi, in turn, greatly influenced Dr Martin Luther King, Jr, the Baptist minister who took seriously Jesuss injunction to bring peace, not a sword. Dorothy Day lived her Catholic faith in a radical fashion, jailed time and time again for resistance to the Vietnam War.

These are what might be called principled activists, people who operate out of an ethical framework that also includes making your enemy better through forgiveness and dialogue. But, as Sharon Erickson Nepstad points out in her book, Non-Violent Struggle Theories, Strategies and Dynamics, the majority of those who embrace non-violent struggle are not so much principled as pragmatic; they do it because it works.

Academic Gene Sharpe, whose pragmatism has led him to be dubbed everything from the Machiavelli of non-violence to the Clausewitz of unarmed revolution, shares this view. Unlike Gandhi, King and Day, Sharpe does not believe you need to reform or love your enemies. You just have to force them to stop doing evil things. He catalogued 198 ways to achieve this.

Think of Denmark, where almost none of the countrys 8,000 Jews were apprehended by Nazis due to non-violent organising, or the 10,000 Norwegian teachers supported by 100,000 parents who prevented the Nazification of Norways schools.

People have been loud in their praise, not just of president Zelenskiy, but of ordinary Ukrainian citizens arming themselves and taking to the streets to defend themselves.

There is a right to defend oneself against unjust aggression. The Ukrainians have shown extraordinary bravery. The media, however, do not celebrate or highlight to the same degree the non-violent actions of so many Ukrainians such as standing in the path of tanks, with no weapon except courage.

Mao Tse Tung missed something vital when he said that power came from the barrel of a gun. It also comes from ordinary people banding together to resist evil, even at great cost to themselves.

That is why those of us who propose non-military solutions should be willing to shoulder some of the biting pain, including real financial hardship as fuel and commodity prices soar. Otherwise, we can have no credibility regarding our claims to care what happens in Ukraine.

Go here to read the rest:

Non-violence is not naive, unrealistic or useless - The Irish Times

As a young girl growing up in Northern California, Ashley Rubin dutifully said her prayers each night before going to sleep. She routinely included what she now sees as a strange request: that all bad people go to prison.

Heres this 8-year-old child who is not really old enough to understand the significance of any of this but knows that sending people to prison is just what we do, says Rubin, whos now a sociologist specializing in US prison history at the University of Hawaii at Mnoa. The idea of punishing criminals with time in prison is so ingrained in our culture, she says, that most people assume that prisons have always existed.

But they havent. For most of Western history, long-term incarceration wasnt used as punishment, and many countries even had rules against it, Rubin tells Knowable. The idea of confining people for long periods of time as punishment was really quite revolutionary. Her research involves combing archives for records, letters and other documents on the early history of prisons, and along with other scholars she argues that prisons as we now know them first arose in the nascent United States, shortly after the Revolutionary War. (Jails, used for short-term confinement, have a much longer history in Europe and around the world.)

Prisons were controversial from the start, and over the last 230 years the public conversation about them in the United States has taken many turns. At first, Rubin says, they were billed as a humanitarian achievement a more effective and more humane way to punish criminals than corporal and capital punishment. But their purported goals have shifted with time, with varying degrees of emphasis placed on protecting the public by taking criminals out of circulation, punishing them for their crimes, rehabilitating them into better citizens and serving as a deterrent to other would-be lawbreakers.

When prisons fail to rehabilitate criminals or reduce crime, or when they end up costing more than the public wants to pay, conversation tends to be about that particular issue and not about the inherent limitations of prisons as institutions, says Rubin: Im not an abolitionist, but I cant look at the history of prisons and not think, why are we still using them?

Rubin thinks we have unrealistic expectations when it comes to prisons, expecting them to do too many and often contradictory things. She spoke with Knowable about the early history of prisons and how it could inform current discussions about prison reform. This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Werent people getting locked up way before the late 1700s? Ive seen it in movies!

Yes, but those were jails, not prisons. There were, for example, workhouses in England and the Netherlands in the 16th century that held a big mix of people, including vagrants, debtors and prostitutes. Even orphans in some cases. People who had done minor things or hadnt necessarily been convicted of a crime, or were being held awaiting trial, or until they paid a fine or for other administrative purposes. Some scholars have argued that those were the first prisons, but in my view they were more similar to what we would call a jail today. Jail is basically a short-term holding cell, not a place of punishment, and weve had that throughout history.

If you think of prison in the way we use the word today, that idea is pretty new. I would define it as a place designated for punishment of people who have been convicted of typically serious offenses, and their punishment is long-term confinement, usually more than a year.

Before prisons existed, how were criminals punished?

In England and colonial America, the primary form of punishment was capital punishment. Pretty much everything was a capital offense, including moral offenses like adultery and religious offenses like breaking the Sabbath. Authorities might let it slide the first time, and they handed out a lot of pardons to prevent the system from killing everybody.

Over time, that softened so that less serious offenses were typically punished with corporal punishment like whipping or branding, usually on the cheek or hand. Or, to show how close you came to getting executed, you would be sentenced to spend an hour standing on the scaffold where they hanged people with the noose around your neck. In the 16th and 17th century, banishment was also a punishment. In the 18th century, fines were also widely used, often in combination with corporal punishment.

When and where did the first prisons arise?

The first actual prison is the Massachusetts state prison that opened in 1785, just after the American Revolution. Then came Connecticut in 1790 and Pennsylvania in 1794. Those are the first three state prisons in the world.

What was the rationale that led to their founding?

I would say the most immediate reason was that in the view of social reformers, politicians and other influential people at the time, the existing punishments just werent working to deter crime. Capital and corporal punishment were also seen as inhumane, but I would say deterrence was the main reason. A big concern at the time was that the existing punishments were actually causing more crime. The fear was that people would go to an execution and get blood lust and want to go kill people themselves. Prison advocates argued that people would hear scary stories about prisons, and the thought of being locked away from friends and families would terrify them into never committing a crime.

Simultaneously, there was this movement to reform jails because the conditions were just terrible, grotesque even. There was a lot of fighting and corruption, and they were hotspots for disease. Those ideas kind of came together the desire for a new type of punishment, and the need to reform the jails and paved the way for prisons as we now know them.

Was rehabilitation ever part of the goal?

That was another part of it. Prison advocates also thought that incarceration would be good because it would remove people from their bad environments. If you have a family thats not treating you well, or youve run away from an apprenticeship and fallen in with people who are a bad influence and you have access to alcohol, the idea was that they just needed to remove you from that environment and put you into a good, clean, moral environment.

All the early prisons, for over a century, involved hard labor. They thought, Criminals are lazy, so lets teach them discipline and put them to work. But there was also a little bit of recognition that people just hadnt been trained in a particular vocation, so they needed to be trained to do the work. There were additional educational and religious overtones. So, if people were illiterate, they were taught to write, and they were given moral guidance, which oftentimes was religious.

Was there much public debate about prisons in those early days?

Oh, yeah. There was a huge debate that went on from the 1780s into the 1820s. The original question was: Should we have capital and corporal punishment, or should we have prisons? You had pro-capital punishment people arguing that prison wasnt harsh enough, and you had pro-prison people arguing that prison was more severe than capital punishment and that its better in that way.

But at the same time the prison advocates were kind of speaking out of both sides of their mouths, trying to convince others that prison wasnt torture and to combat the common refrain that humans are social creatures, and you cant deprive them of social intercourse. That was a major concern what happens when you put human beings in long-term captivity.

How long were sentences in the early days of prisons?

They typically were about a couple years. The average wasnt that different from today, interestingly enough, except that there werent very long sentences or life sentences. The longest sentences would be like eight to 12 years in the early days.

How did solitary confinement begin?

The first prisons were mostly dormitory-like facilities. They were cleaner and better run than the jails had been, so they were much better at reducing disease. But by the 1800s or 1810s, people were starting to become concerned that putting prisoners together was allowing them to infect each other with their criminality that people would go to prison and become savvier in their criminality. In the first generation of prisons, solitary confinement was sometimes used as punishment, but at the beginning of discussions about the second generation of prisons, many wanted to use solitary confinement for all prisoners.

Was that controversial at the time?

There was an epic debate about the humaneness of all this that got going in the 1820s. It focused on two prisons, with different approaches to the problem of how to use solitary confinement and not kill prisoners or make them go insane.

At Auburn State Prison in New York, prisoners worked in a large workshop during the day, but they werent allowed to talk or even look at each other. They were socially but not physically isolated. In the evenings they were confined to tiny individual cells.

In contrast, at Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, prisoners were kept in solitary confinement around the clock, but they had rooms that were big enough for them to work in and access to a small private yard for fresh air. They were allowed to talk with prison staff and receive occasional visits from penal reformers in the local community, but they were not allowed contact with family, friends or other prisoners.

The Auburn system won out. The decision ultimately hinged not on which system was more humane but on the perception that the Auburn system was more cost-effective and profitable. It used smaller cells, which were cheaper to construct, and factory-style labor, which was generally considered more efficient. Auburn wasnt actually more profitable, but people believed it was. By the 1850s every state except for Pennsylvania had adopted the Auburn system. At that point, theres just no more controversy prisons were here to stay.

How would you characterize the public debate over prisons today?

Its a weird time. Its very messy. Were in this moment of transition. On the one hand, activism is big right now there are calls to defund the police, more public talks, big books getting published about abolishing prisons. There are also discussions in mainstream newspapers about how abolition is more complicated than just getting rid of prisons; it requires reimagining society in a way that addresses the major oppressive structures that contribute to criminality and necessitate punishment. Were seeing more people in the mainstream talk about abolition of various criminal justice institutions than I had expected to see in my lifetime.

Ashley Rubin

On the other hand, thats still a small group overall. And were experiencing massive polarization. At the same time that prison abolitionists are making headlines, other folks mostly Trumpian Republicans, but also some self-identified conservative criminologists argue that we need more prisons to keep society safe from violent criminals. Any time theres an increase in crime rates, they see it as evidence that we need more incarceration, rather than looking at what type of crime were talking about and whats really causing it.

How can the history of prisons inform that discussion?

I think the biggest lesson of prison history is how prisons keep failing us and yet we keep using them anyway. Weve always had an overly optimistic idea about what they could accomplish, but we kind of are OK with it when theyre just barely doing what theyre supposed to do, or even when they massively fail.

We keep thinking, We can fix it. We convince ourselves that the problem isnt prisons per se, its the model of prison were using, or the way weve implemented it, or the resources we gave it, or the people who are running it. But we havent looked at the history of prisons and really taken seriously whats causing all these failures. We havent looked at the inherent limitations of prisons and whether they can actually accomplish all the goals we set for them.

We tell people who run prisons to keep their prisoners and staff safe and healthy, but to do it within a budget and certain rules that may not be realistic. For example, we tell people who run prisons to make sure the prison experience is not exactly fun, and maybe to make sure prison feels like punishment, and maybe to rehabilitate them, and definitely to keep prisoners inside so they cant hurt people on the outside. Basically, we tell prisons to do too many things, and its not like we give them all the tools they need to do any of these things.

If we want to make prisons better, we need to think more carefully about what we actually want prisons to do, give consistent messages about that, and stop piling on conflicting goals that make it impossible for prisons to live up to our overly high expectations.

So thats the conversation you think we should be having?

Honestly, I think the conversation we should be having is not one about prisons.

If were talking about prisons as a tool for rehabilitation, you can have the best-designed prison, and it will be virtually meaningless if people released from prison face the types of challenges on the outside that they face now: the inability to receive various kinds of governmental assistance, prohibition from getting certain types of jobs (including jobs they were trained for while in prison), difficulty getting most jobs because of background checks and discrimination against people with criminal records, a slew of fees and fines they still need to pay, not to mention the lack of help finding a place to live and transitioning to the outside world. They have a very tight rope to walk to not return to prison.

If we want to prevent crime and were talking about punishment, were also having the wrong conversation. If deterrence worked well for crime reduction, we would have more evidence that it works, but we only have weak and mixed evidence. If you want to prevent crime, you have to intervene before the crime happens.

I think the right conversation to be having is one about social policies and the things that actually work to prevent crime. Things like education, universal basic income, childcare, shoring up health care, early childhood nutrition all these things that have nothing to do with crime directly, but benefit everyone in society.

Free online event: March 23

Prisons were once considered a sign of progress, a victory for public health that was more humane than disease-ridden, overcrowded jails and the harsh physical punishments meted out on the town green.

Yet today, prisons face a legitimacy crisis, and are considered by many policymakers and reformers as bloated, inhumane institutions.

How did we get here? Whats reasonable to ask of prisons and do they ever work as intended? How is incarceration experienced by those who are imprisoned?

Watch this discussion with a formerly incarcerated writer and a sociologist to learn how the history of prisons can inform our understanding of mass incarceration today. Register now!

10.1146/knowable-031722-1

This article originally appeared in Knowable Magazine, an independent journalistic endeavor from Annual Reviews. Sign up for the newsletter.

More here:

The Invention of Incarceration - JSTOR Daily

Jean-Baptiste Carpeauxs classic marble sculpture Why Born Enslaved! (1868) shows the bust of an unknown Black woman. Tattered clothing exposes a bare breast, and Afro-textured hair frames the womans face. Her nose flares as she looks over her left shoulder in fear, agony, with possibly a mixture of disgust and desired vengeance.

The sculpture is at the center of a new exhibit, Fictions of Emancipation: Carpeaux Recast, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Multiple variations are showcased along with modern takes and reworkings of the piece. Surrounding the sculpture are variations made of terracotta, plaster and paint, and unbaked clayall crafted by Carpeaux. A plaster shell reworking, Negress (2007) by Kara Walker, is perched in a corner.

A contemporary rendition of the sculpture featuring a basketball player in a similar pose, After La Negresse (2006) by Kehinde Wiley, sits near the original. Fixed at the center of the room, the popularity of Why Born Enslaved! is seen with its various spawns circling it. The perimeter of the room is adorned with other pieces of artwork unrelated to Why Born Enslaved!but similar in context.

What the show highlights are a series of profound dislocations of perception: We see right in front of us how 19th century artwork featuring Black subjects by white artists represented and misrepresented those subjects, and then today we see those same subjects re-interpreted, realizing how they were once mistakenly seen, and pondering who they really were.

The exhibit redirects the conversation of tone and purpose of ethnographic 19th century European art. In an effort to correct racial inaccuracies featured in the Mets 150-year existence, current curators and historians attempt to highlight misrepresentations and fallacies of the supposed Black experience that was created by white artists.

Entering the exhibit, I was immediately pulled to a quote printed on a wall by Dr. Fabienne Kanor, a writer, filmmaker, and Pennsylvania State University professor, talking about her childhood in France. She detailed her experience watching La Noiraude, a TV show about a black cow that continuously had bad luck. No matter what, the cow always seemed to run into some sort of obstacle, and Kanor loved it.

Like millions of French people, I listened to the black cows laments, and I laughed. I laughed at her, Kanor said. I laughed to tears until some white schoolmates decided to baptize me La Noiraude. And then the TV screen became a mirror. And I became La Noiraude. And then I became a problem. Representation is not something to be taken lightly. When it is false, it is heavy. It stops us from flying toward our authentic selves.

Allegory of Africa, Frdric-Auguste Bartholdi (French, Colmar 18341904 Paris), modeled ca. 186364

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Moving clockwise around the edge of the room, the artwork starts with Jean-Lon Grmes Bashi-Bazouk (186869), an oil painting of a Black male model costumed in silk fabric to capture the artists idea of a Turkish soldier in the Ottoman Empire. Next comes Charles-Henri-Joseph Cordiers sculpture Woman From the French Colonies (1861). A Black female model is draped in a seemingly luxurious robe to represent a type rather than an accurate portrait. The bust exoticizes the concept of the Black woman as an object and novelty. Even the title demeans her identity.

These works are incredibly beautiful, in terms of their materiality and their artistic bravura, Fictions of Emancipation co-curator Elyse Nelson told The Daily Beast. But underlining them is something incredibly harmful as well. I think its really important for us to have more honest, clarifying conversations around what underpins those works.

Representations are charged, co-curator Wendy Walters explained. They are used in context. In some ways, its about getting a stronger sense of understanding about how representation is used before one evaluates it, as opposed to just seeing it be present because of the novelty of it or the unusualness of it and assuming that its good.

The exhibit dives into racial tropes enveloped in classic pieces of art that were considered groundbreaking and socially enlightening during the time of their creation. Signs throughout the exhibit explain that artists of the period created fantasy portraits of colonized subjects.

White artists wanted to tell the stories of Black people how they viewed Black people. Black artists were far and few in-between during the years after slavery was abolished in European colonies, so storylines relied on white artists trying to explain a livelihood from the outside looking in. In turn, Black modelswho financially struggledwere hired to convey the message white artists wanted to tell. Their Blackness was exploited as forms of propaganda.

The ways in which we have presented these works of art and displayed them to the public for a century have been acts of white supremacy. This exhibition seeks to address that critically.

Elyse Nelson

At what point do you move on from this narrative? Why rehash this predatory, racist history? Nelson said. Why continue to tell the story that Black communities are so familiar with? And the truth is that I feel that the Met cannot move beyond it until its done the work of addressing its own institutional colonialism. The ways in which we have presented these works of art and displayed them to the public for a century have been acts of white supremacy. This exhibition seeks to address that critically.

Nelson and Walters acknowledged that they were unsure of the reason why there was an influx of emancipation art after slavery in the Western Hemisphere was abolished. It was a time when places that once held enslaved Africans were no longer the focus and a new wave of colonization in North Africa and Southeast Asia became the trend. The white elite wanted to show how socially progressive they were and would commission artists to create pieces for their liking.

Maybe it was a sense of nostalgia or white guilt. Regardless, those classic sculptures and paintings demonstrated something to the public that wasnt real. Being Black was synonymous with the term slave and inferiority.

There were remnants in the exhibit that reminded me of my childhood. Just like the passage from Kanor, I had a realization of cartoons Id watch that made me feel uncomfortable, as if I was witnessing something forbidden and dark.

Coming across the Allegories of the Four Parts of the World (1730-32) by Johann Justin Preissler, I saw four types of women who were deemed to be representations of the global quadrants. The European woman was adorned with a crown and fully clothed. The Native and African women were undressed and surrounded by wild animals to indicate a level of savagery.

Tunes from syndicated 1950 and 60s-era Merrie Melodies rang in my head when a cartoon would feature a story in the jungle and what was considered standard exotic music would heavily play in the forefront. Wild tribal members would yell and jab their spears at whoever was seen as an intruder. The intruder would be afraid of the tribe whoof coursewere cannibals and practiced some heathen primal religion.

(L) Print of a Free Man, Louis Darcis (French, died 1801), 1794, (R) Print of a Free Woman, Louis Darcis (French, died 1801), 1794

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Then, there was a pair of illustrations by Louis Darcis: Print of a Free Man (Moi Libre Aussi) (1794) and Print of a Free Woman (Moi Libre Aussi) (1794). A Black man and Black woman with over-emphasized bulbous lips and large eyes making a plea for their humanity. It simply reminded me of the banned cartoons I found online after I became olderand other cartoons I watched as a kid that were never deemed offensive enough to be taken out of circulation.

Stereotypes. I think that notion of humans as typological categories still exists, Nelson said. Its so hurtful that we view people as types rather than as individual humans. For me, thats the danger.

At the heart of the exhibit is Why Born Enslaved! I stared at the sculpture of the woman, trying to understand what the model felt at the time she posed for Carpeaux. Did she realize the extent of which her image would carry, that her story would be misconstrued as a tale of triumph rather than a white artist exploiting her Blackness for his own artistic motives?

The sculpture was originally titled La Negresse, a degrading term simply meaning Black woman. The model/subject is so far removed from being human that her Blacknessand sexual objectivityis singular enough to be its own artistic subject.

Over time, the sculpture has gained recognition and grown in fame. It has been featured in an Ivy Park ad with Beyonc; Janet Jackson has a copy of the mold in her home. At one point, Why Born Enslaved! was heralded as racial progress for including subjects of Black people, especially Black women. But the tone and context of the artwork has to be considered; theres more to it than filling a void.

Instead, it creates a misrepresentation that Black people could feel only one emotion, that they had no concept of joy because of bondage, that they were not complex human beings with variety. However, Black people are dynamic like any other group and deserve accurate portraits to convey their real lives.

Black audiences see the same bait and switch in pop culture today. ABC is infamous for creating shows about Black people but for white viewers. Its as if its a disguise for diversitywhen in reality its a level of Blackness that will keep white people comfortable. Black stories on film tend to focus on slavery or the Civil Rights movement. They have come to be known as Black trauma porn where Black stories can only be accepted when the performers are playing enslaved people or fighting through Jim Crow.

Abolitionist Jug, ca. 1820

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Help received a wave of criticism from Black readers and viewers due to its white-savior complex. The Black women who worked as maids throughout the Mississippi town had no concept of happiness without the white protagonist. Though stories need to be told for historical context, other Black narratives need to be shared for more accurate and modern portrayals.

I think that theres a challenge with works that are supposed to fill in for a lack of representation, Walters said. It makes it seem like that work has already been done, [like] we dont need any more representation because it already exists. Thats an issue in terms of what images or what works get reported and what gets made in the present tense.

Though the Met works to initiate conversations about representation and changing how classic works are viewed, Black people still are not totally in control of their narrative. During the press opening, a vast majority of the audience who attended the exhibit were white. Though its making an effort to fix the kink in the chain, the industry is still like a bastardized form of telephone where the story gets misconstrued farther and farther down the line.

We wanted to create different levels of opportunity for people to respond to the works put forward, Walters explained. Along with the exhibit, the curators organized a display where people could write their thoughts on the meanings of representation, abolition, legacy, and central Black figures in art.

Some people cant stand these works. Some people adore them. Some people are ambivalent about them. Theres not a single response from Black audiences that were anticipating.

Wendy Walters

One person wrote that the legacy of Black art is the lack of humanization. Another said that abolition is about breaking chains, while another wrote that it is rewriting the historical canon to prioritize and uplift Black voices, dismantling ever-present systems of systemic racism. Voices of power was noted as the key force in who narrated history.

We put this forward as a way to say this is a complicated set of works, Walters continued. We want you to look at them and we want to know what you think about them. Some people cant stand these works. Some people adore them. Some people are ambivalent about them. Theres not a single response from Black audiences that were anticipating. We want to make a place for that multiplicity response because thats what people do. People respond in multiplicities.

I think that this work had to be done because these works are already in view at the Met, and theyve never been critically addressed, Nelson said. We talked about it as maybe a pivot point. Lets address it and then let our audience and the community tell us how to move forward. Lets learn from it.

Read more:

The Met Museum Asks: How Can Black-Themed Art Be Freed from the White Gaze? - The Daily Beast

ST. LOUISWhat is the delay in closing the Workhouse? moderator Maquis Govan asks Mayor Tishaura Jones at avirtual town hall on re-envisioning public safety February8.

The event was co-organized by Action St. Louis, an affiliate of the Movement for Black Lives. The groups 5014 arm, Action St. Louis Power Project, endorsed Jones during her 2021 mayoral run. The Rev. Michelle Higgins opened the event by thanking Jones warmly for valuing and loving the constituents of this city in this way: taking the time to listen to our questionsdirectly.

Now, activists want clarification on when the mayor will fulfill her campaign promise to close the St. Louis Medium Security Institution, more commonly known as the Workhouse, which activists have been trying to shut down foryears.

The jail itself opened in 1966, but its nickname and legacy is areference to the 1840s, when St. Louis sent manacled scofflaws to work off debt 10hours at atime in arock quarry. Since the Workhouse opened, its been followed by areputation for human rights violations and poor conditions, including pests, mold, lack of heat and poor medicalattention.

In 2017, avideo of people screaming inside the Workhouse circulated online. At the time, the jail did not have air conditioners; the temperature inside hit 115 degrees. In 2018, momentum from the resulting protests led Action St. Louis, with legal advocacy group ArchCity Defenders, to launch the Close the Workhouse campaign.

Action St. Louis formed after the 2014 Ferguson uprising and has been primarily focused on organizing street uprisings into long-term issue campaigns. Alongside other local and national groups, for example, it succeeded in 2018in ousting county prosecutor Bob McCulloch, who had declined to press charges in the police killing of Michael Brown in2014.

Issue campaigns dont have the same timeline as electoral campaigns, says Kayla Reed, the groups co-founder and executive director. It may take several years to get something like [Close the Workhouse] done, but its been worth the investment.

A 2018 report from the Close the Workhouse campaign found up to 95 percent of people were held in the Workhouse because they couldnt pay pre-trial bonds. And, in acity whose population is 50 percent Black, almost 90 percent of the people held wereBlack.

In July 2020, the Board of Aldermen voted to close the Workhouse, and the campaign declared victorybut the jail remained open because, the city said, moving people to another jail would cause Covid-19overcrowding.

When former city treasurer Tishaura Jones announced her second bid for mayor, in November 2020, her platform called for the full closure of the Workhouse, which she had advocated since 2016and Action St. Louis made arare foray into electoral politics by endorsing Jones.

Paid and volunteer canvassers with Action St. Louis Power Project knocked on more than 60,000 doors, and Jones won by 4% to become the citys first Black woman mayor.

On Jones first full day in office, April 21, 2021, she filed abudget proposal to close the Workhouse. By June 2021, most of the Workhouses detainees had been moved to St. Louis other jail, the City Justice Centerbut the Workhouse remains open, though only the jails most recent addition, known as the CJCAnnex.

To the question Govan posed at the virtual town hall, submitted by audience member Janice Banks, Jones reassured the audience that the Workhouse as everybody knows it is closed and the 23 people held at the Annex would be transferred as soon as repairs were completed at the City Justice Center, potentially by the end of February.

The Annex remainsopen.

The town hall was designed in part to get Tishaura on public record saying when shes going to close the Workhouse, give us atimeline, says Jae Shepherd, abolition organizer for Action St. Louis. Shepherd sees aneed for more forums with elected officials. The town hall was the first Action St. Louis has organized, and it drew more than 180 people with more than 150 questions. At adebriefing aweek later, some attendees felt the mayor hadnt made clear commitments and wanted follow-through on two things: First, reforming the citys new Cops and Clinicians program, designed to send social workers alongside police officers on mental health calls, to be able to send clinicians alone. Second, to end no-knock warrants and raids.

We had folks whose loved ones were killed from ano-knock raid, Shepherd says. [Jones] has the power to do amoratorium.

Action St. Louis is converting the feedback from the debriefing into alist of questions and demands to send toJones.

Its really important for voters to understand that elected officials work for them, and that they can ask questions between elections, Reed says. We shouldnt only engage with our elected officials during [get-out-the-vote] cycles. For us, it was important that elected officials keep their promises, remain accountable to their base around their campaign commitments and work in deep collaboration with organizations that are seeking to build transformative policies for ourcommunity.

Reed adds that the win is not the candidate getting into office, but the moment where the candidate is in office and meets thedemand.

Read the original here:

St. Louis's Movement-Backed Mayor Promised to Close an Infamous Jail. What's the Hold Up? - In These Times