Daily Archives: June 26, 2022

This past week, a structure being installed smack center in Columbus Park stopped pedestrians in their tracks, curious about what was going up. Shown in the photo above, as a work still in process, is Mind Forged Manacles/Manacle Forged Minds by Fred Wilson, an acclaimed artist whose work has exhibited in museums around the world. The stunning, thought-provoking sculpture will be completed by Tuesday, when More Artand theDowntown Brooklyn + Dumbo Art Fundwill host an opening reception on the plaza between Johnson and Montague Sts. The reception will feature a live music performance by Daniel Carter and Ayumi Ishito, along with opening remarks.

Fred Wilson was on site during the weeks installation of his first public art work and shared, Its been a long time coming. Ive been interested in doing decorative ironwork and Ive also been thinking about what ironwork is intended for, which is for the containment of people and also for keeping people out. This is the perfect public space for it. This particular spot is great because people are relaxed and in the mood to take it all in. These are real New Yorkers who are asking questions, and are interested and curious. Im thrilled about this work being in Brooklyn, where so many people come from everywhere and are making it happen and making it work.

Artist Fred Wilson at Columbus Park

More Arton the work:

The use of ornamental gates and fences serves as a metaphor for security and gated communities, insecurity, the incarceration of Black men, the detainment of illegal immigrants, policing, and William Blakes concept of Mind Forgd Manacles self-created barriers to personal and societal growth and freedom, built by fear, division and perceptions of difference. These gates, whether they are to keep others out or keep someone in, act as reflections on the separation of people, both physically and mentally.

Mind Forged Manacles/Manacle Forged Minds, while not strictly site-specific, creates, connects and amplifies a conversation about the sculpture and the monuments and buildings around it that currently reside in Columbus Park. The viewer is encouraged to be site conscious when looking at the work and its location, as it is positioned between a sculpture of Henry Ward Beecher a 19th century Congregationalist clergyman known for his support of the abolition of slavery and the statue of Columbus, as well as the Kings County Supreme Court building exploring issues of justice, freedom, slavery and mass incarceration.

The sculpture will be on view through June 27, 2023. See more works by Fred Wilson on thePace Gallery website.

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Renowned Artist Fred Wilson's Sculpture Installed at Columbus Park, Opening Reception on Tuesday, June 28 at 6:00 pm - Brooklyn Heights Blog

SALEM, MA The Remond Family of Salem will be honored for its activism and efforts toward women's suffrage with a marker along the National Votes for Women Trail.

The marker will be unveiled at Hamilton Hall on Chestnut Street during a Thursday ceremony at 2 p.m. and become the second of five trail markers statewide this spring and summer.

The Remond Family was committed to the abolition of slavery, women's suffrage movement, and the desegregation of schools in Salem.

"The Remond Family made Hamilton Hall their home and place of business, a site where visionaries would flock to attend large events and where the Remond children would learn the principles of social justice," State Rep. Paul Tucker (D-Salem) said. "In the spirit of the Remond Family, let us all stand together against threats to civil liberties, and work together to ensure women's rights and voting rights for all citizens."

Parents John Remond, a lifelong member of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, and Nancy Lenox Remond served as caretakers of Hamilton Hall at the turn of the 19th century, where they also ran their catering business. Well-respected throughout Salem for their culinary skills, hospitality, business acumen, and social advocacy, they raised their eight children to fight for their rights and the rights of others.

Their son, Charles Lenox Remond, their eldest child, was among the first Black abolitionist lecturers and staunchly supportive of women's right to join the fight.

Charles Remond gave anti-slavery speeches throughout the U.S. and abroad, sometimes with his sister, Sarah. She was a stalwart member of the Salem Female Anti-Slavery Society, the New England Anti-Slavery Society, and the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society.

"We're excited to celebrate the extraordinary legacy of the Remond Family at Hamilton Hall with this marker, which will also help educate the Salem community and visitors about the vital role they served in the progress of our country's history," said Michael Selbst, President of The Board of Directors for Hamilton Hall. "As advocates for human rights, the Remonds remind us all to stand up and raise our voices today for those experiencing discrimination."

The Remond Family marker is the second of five Massachusetts markers that will be unveiled: Maria Baldwin (Cambridge); Anne L. Page (Danvers); Remond Family (Salem); Sojourner Truth (Northampton); and Sarah E. Wall (Worcester).

"It is important to recognize that some white women's suffrage groups would not include Black members, and that after the 19th Amendment was ratified in 1920, discriminatory laws continued to restrict voting access for many Americans of color," State Sen. Joan Lovely (D-Salem) said. "The Remond Family had steadfast perseverance, pushing through layers of resistance so their message of social justice could be heard, and it's our duty to honor that legacy."

(Scott Souza is a Patch field editor covering Beverly, Danvers, Marblehead, Peabody, Salem and Swampscott. He can be reached at Scott.Souza@Patch.com. Twitter: @Scott_Souza.)

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Salems Remond Family To Be Honored With Womens Suffrage Marker - Patch

The year before support for prison and police abolition exploded into the mainstream in the summer of 2020, the New York Times Magazine ran a profile of scholar-activist Ruth Wilson Gilmore titled: Is Prison Necessary? Ruth Wilson Gilmore Might Change Your Mind. That is to say, Gilmore has been at the helm of the movement for abolitionand an authoritative critic of racial capitalism, imperialism, and patriarchal oppressionsince long before the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor spurred a global reckoning.

Gilmore, a professor and director of City University of New Yorks Center for Place, Culture, and Politics, learned about organizing and struggle from her parents as a child. It was those early lessons, as well as her education and formal training as a geographer, that have informed her activism, teaching, and the numerous books shes authored or contributed to on building a world beyond prisons, policing, and neoliberal exploitation. Her latest offering? Abolition Geography, a scathing exploration of global systems of oppression through a lens of geography, in which she asserts that freedom and liberation are a physical, tangible placetheyre material conditions, not platitudes and niceties from ultra-rich politicians. The age-old question, of course, is how we get to that physical place.

Freedom is a place means we combine resources, ingenuity, and commitment to produce the conditions in which life is precious for all, Gilmore told Jezebel over Zoom. So, no matter the struggle, freedom is happening somewhere. Through different forces and relations to power, the people are constantly figuring out how to shift, how to build, how to consolidate the capacity for people to flourish, to mobilize our communities, and stay in motion until satisfied.

In a conversation with Jezebel about her new book, Gilmore maps out what a path forward rooted in abolition looks like, and how to get to that physical place of freedom. In the wake of the Uvalde, Texas, shooting and the police failure that enabled it; ahead of a Supreme Court decision expected to reverse Roe v. Wade; and following the chilling backlash against sexual assault survivors we witnessed in the recent Amber Heard-Johnny Depp defamation trial, Gilmore also explains how each of these devastating political moments could be addressed by abolitionist principlesthe place of liberation we collectively build must be safe and nurturing for all.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Ahead of the Supreme Courts looming abortion rights decision, how is the decimation of reproductive rights conjoined with the movement for abolition?

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So, lets stop and think for a second about physical reality, that in our embodiment as living beings, we are space and timeI am, you are, whoever is reading this interview is space and time. Thats a givenwe are not an abstract theory. This dreadful example about Roe is grounded in what that fact consists of socially, spiritually, politically, and viscerally all of those ways. So as Dr. Angela Yvonne Davis teaches us, freedom is a constant struggle, and abolition in that struggle is reproductive justice. These arent separable movements. The capacity to flourish inter-generationallywhether that means to bear children, or not to have children, makes no differencereproductive justice is abolition.

You write about the systematic ways that oppressive systems and institutions are shortening peoples life spans, killing them across lines of race, class, and identity. What can we take away about whose lives are and arent valued in this country? How would abolition address this?

I think the principal takeaway we have right now is that in the U.S., the forces of organized violence, principally the police, are better organized to seize any moment. Police can count on people expecting them to be the solution, and to always be able to demand more resources to fulfill that expectation. And this is the problem. The defund [the police] movement seeks to address this as part of the greater abolition movement, and more broadly, we know about group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.

What we see is that for certain powerful forces in society, some lives dont matter. But most people are not those powerful forces, and their lives matter to themselves and each other, as a starting point.

Whenever it seems like were moving toward liberation on issues of sexual violence, backlash like the Heard and Depp defamation trial throws us back to what feels like square one. Survivors are often used as a counter-argument against abolition. How does abolition build toward a safe place for survivors of sexual violence?

Abolition is a practical program of transitional goals, putting those goals into motion. For example, a storytelling organizing project that Mimi Kim and her comrades developed over the years learned from people around the world how we can interrupt interpersonal violence, especially in intimate relations, without dialing up the police. Another resource similar to that is the work that Mariame Kaba and Andrea Ritchie have been putting together, for their project Interrupting Criminalization. So abolition not only says [criminalization] isnt helping us, but what abolition does is also take seriously transitional goals and being present, to find examples of what ordinary people do on their own behalf, to see if more ordinary people can copy those things in their own lives.

The successes of the various stories from these projects, from organizations like INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, is that there are solutions that everyday people can achieve without police if we make the determination to try. And the flip side of that is, the resolution that policing seems to present to people to dial one number, get one result, has not resulted in what it is people want, which is to be free from harm and violencethey make that call after the harm already happened, for people who perpetrated the harm or participated in it to be punished better. That doesnt make us freer.

Abolition Geography offers powerful lines on the limits of representation: [O]ne Black man in the White House and a million Black men in the Big House; two people of color serving life terms on the Supreme Court, and 100,000 serving life terms in federal and state prisons. What do you see as the limits of representation of marginalized people in inherently harmful institutions of powerfor example, Judge Ketanji Brown Jacksons confirmation to the Supreme Court? Can representation be part of a roadmap to liberation, or is it keeping us at a standstill?

For a short time in history, the Supreme Court was slightly open as an arena for realizing certain indisputable opportunities for liberation. In the 20th century, Brown and Roe are two of the major openings. But the Supreme Court, again, is closed to us for now. The success of cases like Brown may not be happening in the upper atmosphere thats the Supreme Court right now, but all of that organizing and power-building is still happening on the ground.All of the organizing that made those particular decisions possible, if not inevitable, is still happening.

If we can study anything from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or the wages for housework campaign, or my mentor, [activist] Margaret Prescod, or the student movements more generally around the worldwe see how people put themselves forward, their energy, and organizational persistence over time, to change everything. There are so many examples of real, on-the-ground change, rather than institutional change, that come to mind. And we live in a period now where people turning their attention to the real is absolutely essential.

The chapters in Abolition Geography that discuss academia, the managerial class, theory, and walk vs. talk in organizing are an important call-in for people with privilege. What does it look like for people with privilege to actively work toward building inclusive spaces, and tear down the institutional structures that have benefited them?

This is my advice for everybody I encounter in academia: I counsel people who work in academia to participate in committees that make decisions, not in committees that produce reports; to form unions, democratize the unions from within; check the conditions of admissions, employment costs, and debtI could talk a hole in your head about how it took less than half a century for post-secondary education in the U.S. to be effectively free, even at expensive elite schools, to becoming the cause of the devastating student debt crisis.

This was a transition. Elite universities used to be practically free, because of laws and other rules governing the nature of scholarships and support that students with needs got. People dont believe that, but it was once like that, and it can be again.

Youve emphasized how hope is extremely valuable currency in the movement toward abolition, which exponentially grew in 2020, but, in the mainstream, has waned in the last two years. As a geographer and abolitionist, if you were charting out a map forward for this movement in the U.S. and around the world, what would it look like?

I certainly know that without optimism of the will, theres no point in botheringechoing the late great Antonio Gramsci. Just lately, of course, the mainstream media in the U.S. has characterized San Francisco prosecutor Chesa Boudins recall as a final blow to the defund movement. But, first of all, they leave out the dismally low voter turnout in San Francisco County, which is indicative of something that probably speaks more to the deepening inequalities of that county than anything else.

Meanwhile, go down south in Los Angeles County, and Eunisses Hernandez is, as of the latest vote count, beating three-term incumbent to City Council District 1 seatthe district in which she was born and raised. Eunisses is an abolitionist, who was a key person in a long, long fight to cancel a multi-billion dollar new jail in LA County, to persuade the LA County Board of Supervisors to set aside significant funds for social services, housing, community improvements. Meanwhile, in the middle of the state of California, in Kings County, which is burdened by two current prisons, the district attorney who had been on a rampage criminalizing women who were struggling with reproductive issues and other vulnerabilities, was run out of office. These things tell us that what were doing is a very long game, with ups and downs. Some of these fights started when Eunisses was in elementary school. It tells us that the spatial, the conditions of struggle, will change, and we must maintain our collective solidarity.

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Ruth Wilson Gilmore Says Freedom Is a Physical PlaceBut Can We Find It? - Jezebel

I was 16 years old, I was white, and I was drunk in the back of a police car. The radio squawked. But I was silent.

I had spent the rainy day with a couple buddies drinking beer and that afternoon, when the car in front of me stopped at a yellow light, my car didn't, and I crashed into it.

The driver of that car was an elderly Black man. He didn't seem to be hurt, but my old Volkswagen bug was wrapped around his bumper, and the sheriff's deputy knew I had been drinking. I was in big trouble.

Then, the driver's window of the sheriff's car darkened with the shadow of someone standing there, rapping against the glass. It was my grandfather, who asked for a moment alone with the deputy, whom he knew. A few minutes later, the deputy said he would write up the accident as driving too fast for conditions.

My grandfather was not unique in possessing the power he had as a wealthy, white man in Greenville, South Carolina. We called it the Good Ole Boy System, but it was, in fact, a web of white men looking out for each other. Nor was that system unique to Greenville. Though my family had nowhere near as much money or power as the Murdough family in Beaufort County, SC, the viral unraveling of the impunity surrounding that family's viral saga makes it clear how smoothly the system functioned up to a certain point in other times and places.

In that moment, I didn't think of myself as a racist. I wasn't actively trying to harm the Black driver. I held no personal animus against him and yet I was participating in white supremacy. All it required was my silence and my feigned ignorance and I was happy to oblige. I didn't like talking about my whiteness but I was happy to partake of its privileges. But that moment stuck with me, because I couldn't help but realize that race played a significant role in the way an encounter played out.

* * *

I didn't like talking about my whiteness but I was happy to partake of its privileges.

From the earliest days of the Carolina colony until well after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, white South Carolinians openly espoused white supremacy and obsessed over their whiteness and the privileges attendant upon it. Even into the 1960s when my parents were teenagers, every public door they walked through was labeled "white."

The apartheid segregation of the South ended after the upheavals following the passage of the Civil Rights Act, but a new strategy of whiteness emerged. In order to preserve as much white power as possible, white people essentially agreed not to talk about whiteness anymore.

RELATED:White America's "hidden wound" threatens to destroy the country and not for the first time

Lee Atwater, a South Carolina native and Republican strategist, explained in a 1981 interview, how open discussions of white power got coded into more abstract, systemic principles.

"'We want to cut this,' is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than" chanting the N-word, he said.

In other words, if you didn't talk about whiteness the privileges that had been amassed for white people over centuries could not be criticized or dismantled and could continue to exercise its racial hierarchy, unremarked upon.

I was born in the 1970s and for most of my life, the primary experience of whiteness was not having to think about race at all.

* * *

Numerous scholars, including Nell Irvin Painter and Ibram X. Kendi, have shown that there is no idea of whiteness without white supremacy. Whiteness was a conspiracy to value European descent, codified in part by skin color, but also according to the stringent "one drop" rule which even the Nazis found extreme, into a system of power and subjugation.

Of the British colonies that later became the United States, Carolina was at the forefront of crafting and legislating this hierarchy. By 1708 a short time after some of my ancestors first arrived there the colony was majority African and the Anglo minority set up increasingly stringent definitions of the "races" and their duties, freedoms, and responsibilities.

For most of my life, the primary experience of whiteness was not having to think about race at all.

The Negro Code of 1740, which was passed into law after a rebellion of enslaved Africans around Stono Creek, solidified and exported to the rest of the slave states the fabricated hierarchy based on race, with an even more rigidly totalitarian system where the small minority used extreme violence to extract absolute value and exert absolute control over the majority population.

The Negro Code was also a white code, legislating the way that white men must act in relation to those they enslaved, fining whites for "failing to whip unruly slaves," as scholar Peter Wood puts it in his book Black Majority.

Similarly, the colony fined any plantation that did not have at least one white for every ten enslaved people--and used the fines to strengthen the slave patrols, to which many have traced the origins of our modern police forces. From the very creation of whiteness, whites have been worried about some "great replacement," which could justify extreme violence.

In effect, the "slave codes" of South Carolina created a system of law which, to borrow a phrase from Frank Wilhoit, was intended to bind Black people without protecting them and protect white people without binding them (except when they threatened white rule as a whole).

RELATED:The Black Codes never went away they just became the "Black Tax"

Despite some advances in the way the culture views the plight of those enslaved on the concentration camp plantation sites in recent years, white people have done very little to ask what living amidst such horror did to our ancestors on a moral and psychological level--and how much of that they passed on to us.

The grandfather who got me out of my bind was not the product of slavers. He grew up poor in a mill village on the outskirts of town for which he was derided as a "linthead," as the mill-workers were derogatorily called. Nevertheless, he had been white in a Jim Crow regime during America's post-war boom and he had made the most of it. The deed to the house he bought in 1947 contained a racial covenant.

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By the 1980s, he seemed to know every cop, judge, and lawyer in town. He was always helping friends and family members "fix" a ticket or get into somewhere free. In many ways, his greatest joy came in the demonstration of his white male privilege. It formed his idea of his place in the world and that place went back to the "slave codes."

If we want to deal with racism, we need to deal with whiteness.

The logic established by those laws have informed the ways white people move about the world. When I crashed my car, the deputy, my grandfather, and I were all ensuring that the law protected me without binding me, while it bound the Black driver without protecting him. Just as our skin is the place where our body intersects with the world, our whiteness is where our experience of the world is shaped by power. That power is now mostly invisible, but when it is thwarted, it erupts as violence.

RELATED:Mitch McConnell's moment of truth: For many whites, Black people aren't real "Americans"

In 2015 a young white man who had been radicalized by white supremacist websites, drove to Charleston, which had been the heart of the totalitarian slave regime that dominated South Carolina for centuries, and murdered nine parishioners in a church at the heart of the city's Black community, in the name of whiteness.

When I read about these murders, I felt like I could finally see how whiteness worked. Everything I had repressed, the shame and ignominy, the miasma of whiteness had returned in the form of fury. In that moment, I realized that whiteness was something that must be reckoned with.

If we want to deal with racism, we need to deal with whiteness.

* * *

Whiteness only exists as a way to exercise power. It is part of America's conspiratorial agreement on what matters and what counts as success, including the color of our skin. And like most conspiracies, it contains elements of both silence and violence, which work together and feed into each other.

We can't be "colorblind" or "post-racial" and simply ignore the power structures we have inherited without participating in the conspiracy. We have to dismantle them.

The backlash against "CRT" and the 1619 Project have shown how powerful it can be simply to name whiteness and outline the way it uses power. The fact that so many prominent white people are scared of discussions of whiteness shows the value of the conversations.

White people are not being replaced. But whiteness needs to be abolished.

We can't legislate the conversation away. Anti-CRT laws and bills banning books will push the discussions of whiteness back underground where kids like Dylann Roof or Payton Gendron, who allegedly killed 10 Black shoppers at a grocery store in Buffalo last month, will find hundreds of sites ready to play on their confusion and turn them from silence to violence.

We can't pretend to be perfect, condemning others as if racism hasn't affected our thinking. We need to be open about our own mistakes, we need to seek to repair, we need to address and confront the horrors that have created our history and our psyches.

RELATED:White men as victims: America's most dangerous fantasy

White people are not being replaced. But whiteness needs to be abolished. In the same way that prison abolition involves a grand reconsideration of categories and priorities, the abolition of whiteness will not happen overnight. But we need to work toward it, even though we will sometimes be wrong. We need to acknowledge what whiteness does and what it has done in our own lives; we need to begin the process of reparations; and we need to fight against our own power, as white people.

This should feel liberatory. We can struggle to be free from a system of brutality that relies on our complicity. It is not about feeling guilty for the past, but rather eradicating its effects on our own actions.

I know that part of my character was formed in my acquiescence to an obvious injustice on the day of the crash and I know that I am worse off for it. And though I have no way to find the driver I crashed into and though that is far from the worst thing I've done I know that I didn't have to personally be around in "slavery times," as I've heard my family call it, to owe some reparations.

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We need to talk about whiteness and then we need to dismantle it - Salon

The first meeting of parties to the U.N. nuclear weapons ban treaty held in Vienna has closed after adopting a statement aimed at achieving the abolition of nuclear arms. In the declaration, the parties expressed strong concern over nuclear powers and those under the U.S. "nuclear umbrella" continuing their dependence on nuclear deterrence and failing to work on reducing that dependence. The nuclear-armed states and Japan must take this seriously.

The meeting was held amid Russia's ongoing invasion of Ukraine. With Russian President Vladimir Putin's hint that he may use nuclear arms in mind, the declaration stated that the parties "condemn unequivocally any and all nuclear threats."

Of the 65 parties to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, 49 countries and regions participated in their first meeting. Another 34 states took part as observers. The nine countries with nuclear weapons including the United States, Russia and China have not joined the treaty, and some even asked their allies not to participate in the meeting as observers.

-- It's time nuclear-weapon states learn to compromise

The nuclear weapons ban treaty came about in the first place against the backdrop of sluggish disarmament progress by the nuclear powers. While the Conference on Disarmament headquartered in Geneva and led by nuclear-weapon states has fulfilled its role in creating the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) and the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT), it hasn't produced obvious results in recent years.

Meanwhile, the NPT framework has been fraying at the edges for years, and the parties failed to adopt a final declaration during the 2015 review conference. The CTBT, on the other hand, hasn't even taken effect because the U.S. and other countries have failed to ratify it.

With China's rise, nuclear disarmament negotiations between the U.S. and Russia have stalled, resulting in the expiration of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty.

The five nuclear powers -- the U.S., Russia, China, the U.K. and France -- need to reflect on how they have neglected their arms reduction responsibilities while enjoying their privileged positions, and should meet non-nuclear states halfway.

The deterrence theory held by the nuclear-armed states is premised on the logic that if one party tries to use a nuclear weapon, it must expect a nuclear attack by the other party, and so each party holds back.

However, as the U.S. and Russia are developing more "useable" low-yield nuclear warheads and the possibility of terrorist groups getting their hands on nuclear technology is increasing, the true efficacy of nuclear deterrence is in question.

Furthermore, the International Court of Justice has ruled that any threat to use nuclear weapons violates international humanitarian law. The deterrence theory cannot serve as an excuse to turn one's back on the nuclear weapons ban treaty.

The position taken by Japan, the only country in the world to have been attacked with nuclear bombs in war, was also called into question. The country did not join the Vienna meeting as an observer despite calls from signatories and peace organizations. Japan maintains that any framework without nuclear-weapon states' participation is ineffective.

On the contrary, NATO member states Germany, Norway, Belgium and the Netherlands that are also, just like Japan, under the U.S. nuclear umbrella took part in the meeting. While delegates from Germany and the Netherlands explained their positions, with the former saying that the treaty "would collide with our membership in NATO," these countries' presence showed that they believe ties with non-nuclear states are important.

-- Japan abandoned its role as a "bridge"

Nuclear abolition is Japan's goal, too. At the same time, the country, surrounded by nuclear-armed states China, Russia and North Korea, is faced with a severe security environment, and it has no choice but to rely on the U.S. nuclear umbrella.

It is precisely because Japan is under these circumstances that many hoped Tokyo would bridge the divide between nuclear and non-nuclear states. Japan's choice to opt out of the Vienna meeting was nothing short of an abandonment of this role, and it is extremely regrettable.

Meanwhile, efforts to set up an intermediary role for discussions with nuclear powers were agreed upon during the nuclear weapons ban treaty meeting, and the establishment of officers in charge of seeking cooperation with the NPT signatories was included in its action plan.

It is true that if the NPT -- signed by most countries including nuclear powers -- does not function properly, nuclear disarmament will not progress. Rather than seeing the nuclear weapons ban treaty as a rival framework, nuclear states must have the wisdom to use it for arms reduction.

Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida is scheduled to attend the NPT review conference in August, and has also decided to hold next year's Group of Seven summit in Hiroshima. The next nuclear weapons ban treaty meeting is slated for November-December 2023. If Kishida is serious about working on nuclear arms issues, he has a responsibility to have Japan participate in next year's treaty meeting as an observer.

Former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and others coauthored a 2008 article in an American newspaper describing a path towards a world without nuclear weapons. In it they wrote: "... the goal of a world free of nuclear weapons is like the top of a very tall mountain. From the vantage point of our troubled world today, we can't even see the top of the mountain ... We must chart a course to higher ground where the mountaintop becomes more visible."

The nuclear weapons ban treaty should be developed as one of the hiking paths to that higher ground, and used as an opportunity for the international community to work together towards the mountain's peak: nuclear abolition.

Continued here:

Editorial: Nuclear ban treaty a chance for world to strive for disarmament - The Mainichi - The Mainichi

Civil and reproductive rights groups say the Supreme Court's decision to overturn Roe v. Wade is yet another attack on communities of color which will leave millions of Black and brown women without access to abortion care.

Since the ruling became public Friday, leaders of Black, Latino, Asian American and Native American groups have condemned the court's decision. Their communities would be among the hardest hit by abortion restrictions, leaders say, due to myriad issues, including existing health care access disparities, financial hardship and a long history of criminalization.

"We are not surprised. The courts have never served our communities," said Lupe M. Rodrguez, executive director of the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Justice. "Once again, the Supreme Court has gone against the will of the people."

Their comments came as protests erupted across the country and several states prepared to quickly implement their abortion "trigger" laws, created to ban abortion if Roe v. Wade fell.

In many states, Black and Latino women receive abortions at higher rates than White women, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which collects data from state health agencies.

The overturning of Roe v. Wade underscores the economic hardships and maternal health crisis Black and brown women face, with many advocates saying forced pregnancies would only worsen their outcomes. For example, Black women are three times more likely than White women to die of pregnancy-related complications. Abortion rights leaders also worry poor Black and Latino women will not have the money to travel out of state for an abortion.

Poor women of all races are impacted

The Guttmacher Institute, a research group supporting abortion rights, says poor or low-income woman represent 75% of abortion patients.

CNN senior political analyst Nia-Malika Henderson said one of the main reasons why women choose to get an abortion is because they cannot support a child financially.

As abortion rights are determined by each state, the question is whether state officials will expand the social safety net for women who are forced to carry their babies to term.

"They will have to get all sorts of medical care. Will there be paid family leave at these jobs? We know this is going to fall disproportionately on women who are poor of all races; White, Black, Latino, Asian," Henderson said. "They can't afford to go to another state where they can get an abortion."

Isra Pananon Weeks, interim executive director and chief of staff of the National Asian Pacific American Women's Forum, said many Asian American and Pacific Islander women work in low-wage, front-line service jobs with no health insurance or paid medical leave.

Abortion care is "riddled with language barriers, cultural stigmas, and low rates of insurance coverage among our most vulnerable community members" and traveling and getting an abortion was already "difficult if not impossible," Weeks said.

"Gutting Roe cuts off access to abortion care and puts the well-being and financial stability for millions of AAPI women and families at tremendous risk," Weeks said.

'We need to fight back'

Black-led social justice groups said the gutting of Roe v. Wade is just the latest example of lawmakers stripping their rights.

The NAACP released a statement with one leader saying the Supreme Court decision sets the country back to a "dangerous era where basic constitutional rights only exist for a select few."

Portia White, policy and legislative affairs vice president for the NAACP, likened the abortion ruling to lawmakers suppressing the Black vote.

"They've stripped away our right to vote, and now women have lost their right to their own body. What's next?" White said. "We cannot allow our future to rest in the hands of those determined to crush every bit of it. We need to fight back."

White said the NAACP will be mobilizing voters for the "most critical midterm election America has ever faced" in November.

Movement for Black Lives leaders said the Supreme Court move is "another affront to Black lives in this country with those in power continuously proving that they do not care about the health and well-being of Black people."

"As a Black liberation movement guided by Black feminist values and a commitment to abolition, we see the fall of Roe for what it is: another avenue for the state to criminalize, surveil and harm the most vulnerable among us," the group said in a statement.

Reproductive rights advocates from the Latino community also rejected the decision.

UnidosUS president Janet Murgua said the Latino community already knows what it feels like to have their rights taken away and have ordinary activity criminalized. Murgua said advocates are concerned abortion bans will make poor women and women of color more vulnerable to being prosecuted and penalized.

"As a civil rights organization, we believe we must side with protecting women's rights, and not with a process thateviscerates them," she said. "A majority of women -- and a majority of Latinas -- want the freedom to make their own decisions regarding their health and well-being, and believe these decisions should be a private matter betweenthemand their health care provider."

The Native American community will also suffer without abortion access, advocates say.

Crystal Echo Hawk, founder and executive director of IllumiNative, said Native American women and girls will face an increase in violence because they may be forced to stay in a bad relationship with an abusive partner or trafficker if they are pregnant.

"Reproductive rights and systemic violence are intrinsically linked, and Black, Indigenous, and people of color women, transgender, nonbinary and Two-Spirit persons already face some of the highest rates of sexual violence and maternal death," Echo Hawk said. "Access to abortion and reproductive care is foundational to safety and well-being. This is a matter of life or death for many in Native communities."

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'We are not surprised': Women of color say the courts have never served their communities - The Philadelphia Tribune