Category Archives: Abolition Of Work

Three months of quarantine taught us to live online, so its perhaps unsurprising that it was what we saw online that sent us back onto the streets. On May 25th, the circulation of video footage capturing George Floyds murder by four Minneapolis police officers quickly incited local protests. Three nights later, our feeds streamed with live images of protesters burning Minneapoliss Third Police Precinct. In the course of June, uprisings expanded at unprecedented speed and scalegrowing nationally and then internationally, leaving a series of now iconic images, videos, and exhortations in their wake. Every historic event has its ideal medium of documentationthe novel, the photograph, the televisionand what were witnessing feels like an exceptionally online moment of social unrest.

Indeed, the struggle in the public square has unfolded alongside a takeover of the virtual one. Amid cell-phone footage of protests and toppling statues, the Internet has been further inundated with what we might call activist media. Screenshots of bail-fund donations urging others to match continue to proliferate. Protest guides, generated from years of on-the-ground activist experience, are readily shared over Twitter and Instagram, telling readers how to blur faces in photographs or aid in de-arrests. There are e-mail and phone-call templates, pre-scripted and mass-circulated. Webinars about police abolition now constitute their own subgenre. And city-council meetings, which had already migrated to Zoom because of the pandemic, have come to host the hallowed activist tradition of town-hall agitation. (Well-timed appeals for the police department to suck my dick, it turns out, can be as effective online as off.) As some of Junes uprisings evolve into todays encampments, the long revolutionary summer of 2020made all the longer by quarantinecontinues apace online.

Some of this story may seem familiar. In Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest, from 2017, the sociologist Zeynep Tufekci examined how a digitally networked public sphere had come to shape social movements. Tufekci drew on her own experience of the 2011 Arab uprisings, whose early mobilization of social media set the stage for the protests at Gezi Park, in Istanbul, the Occupy action, in New York City, and the Black Lives Matter movement, in Ferguson. For Tufekci, the use of the Internet linked these various, decentralized uprisings and distinguished them from predecessors such as the nineteen-sixties civil-rights movement. Whereas older movements had to build their organizing capacity first, Tufekci argued, modern networked movements can scale up quickly and take care of all sorts of logistical tasks without building any substantial organizational capacity before the first protest or march.

The speed afforded by such protest is, however, as much its peril as its promise. After a swift expansion, spontaneous movements are often prone to what Tufekci calls tactical freezes. Because they are often leaderless, and can lack both the culture and the infrastructure for making collective decisions, they are left with little room to adjust strategies or negotiate demands. At a more fundamental level, social medias corporate infrastructure makes such movements vulnerable to coptation and censorship. Tufekci is clear-eyed about these pitfalls, even as she rejects the broader criticisms of slacktivism laid out, for example, by Evgeny Morozovs The Net Delusion, from 2011.

Twitter and Tear Gas remains trenchant about how social media can and cannot enact reform. But movements change, as does technology. Since Tufekcis book was published, social media has helped representand, in some cases, helped organizethe Arab Spring 2.0, Frances Yellow Vest movement, Puerto Ricos RickyLeaks, the 2019 Iranian protests, the Hong Kong protests, and what we might call the B.L.M. uprising of 2020. This last event, still ongoing, has evinced a scale, creativity, and endurance that challenges those skeptical of the Internets ability to mediate a movement. As Tufekci notes in her book, the real-world effects of Occupy, the Womens March, and even Ferguson-era B.L.M. were often underwhelming. By contrast, since George Floyds death, cities have cut billions of dollars from police budgets; school districts have severed ties with police; multiple police-reform-and-accountability bills have been introduced in Congress; and cities like Minneapolis have vowed to defund policing. Plenty of work remains, but the link between activism, the Internet, and material action seems to have deepened. Whats changed?

The current uprisings slot neatly into Tufekcis story, with one exception. As the flurry of digital activism continues, there is no sense that this movement is unclear about its aimsabolitionor that it might collapse under a tactical freeze. Instead, the many protest guides, syllabi, Webinars, and the like have made clear both the objectives of abolition and the digital savvy of abolitionists. It is a message so legible that even Fox News grasped it with relative ease. Rachel Kuo, an organizer and scholar of digital activism, told me that this clarity has been shaped partly by organizers who increasingly rely on a combination of digital platforms, whether thats Google Drive, Signal, Messenger, Slack, or other combinations of software, for collaboration, information storage, resource access, and daily communications. The public tends to focus, understandably, on the profusion of hashtags and sleek graphics, but Kuo stressed that it was this back end workan inventory of knowledge, a stronger sense of alliancethat has allowed digital activism to reflect broader concerns and visions around community safety, accessibility, and accountability. The uprisings might have unfolded organically, but what has sustained them is precisely what many prior networked protests lacked: prexisting organizations with specific demands for a better world.

Some of this growth is simply a function of time. It has been seven years since Black Lives Matter was founded. Since then, groups such as the Movement for Black Livesan explicitly abolitionist, anti-capitalist network that includes more than a hundred and fifty organizationshave lent unity and direction to a coalition that was once, perhaps, too diffuse to articulate shared principles. These groups have also become better at using the Internet to frame, formalize, and advance their agenda. As Sarah J. Jackson, Moya Bailey, and Brooke Foucault Welles write in #HashtagActivism, social media provides a digital counterpublic, in which voices excluded from elite media spaces can engage alternative networks of debate. When moments of rupture occur, this counterpublic can more readily make mainstream interventions. Recent discourse about prison and police abolition might be the clearest example of a shift in the Overton window, though Bailey points even to the language that were hearing on television, white supremacy being named for what it is, as unimaginable just a few years ago.

Whats distinct about the current movement is not just the clarity of its messaging, but its ability to convey that message through so much noise. On June 2nd, the music industry launched #BlackoutTuesday, an action against police brutality that involved, among other things, Instagram and Facebook users posting plain black boxes to their accounts. The posts often included the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter; almost immediately, social-media users were inundated with even more posts, which explained why using that hashtag drowned out crucial information about events and resources with a sea of mute boxes. For Meredith Clark, a media-studies professor at the University of Virginia, the response illustrated how the B.L.M. movement had honed its ability to stick to a program, and to correct those who deployed that program navely. In 2014, many people had only a thin sense of how a hashtag could organize actions or establish circles of care. Today, people understand what it means to use a hashtag, Clark told me. They use their own social media in a certain way to essentially quiet background noise and allow those voices that need to connect with each other the space to do so. The #BlackoutTuesday affair exemplified an increasing awareness of how digital tactics have material consequences.

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The Second Act of Social-Media Activism - The New Yorker

Part I: From muscle power to steam power

Conflicts around fundamental issues of energy arent new, they just underline how difficult a transition can be.

Anyone interested in the politics of energy today would do well to study the worlds first energy revolution, one that is often called the age of steam.

What you see is a transition between two forms of what is now called dispatchable energy; that is, energy you can control, rely on and send to places.

There was always non-dispatchable energy, like wind and water, but for many applications and a growing economy this wouldnt suffice.

The original form of dispatchable energy was muscle power, often forced muscle power. But around the second half of the 19th century dispatchable power increasingly looks like steam and coal.

But the transition from reliance on labour intensive muscle power to the steam engine wasnt easy. And with this transition came another social transition that was deeply connected, the abolition of forced muscle power or slavery, and its ugly brother indentured labour.

The large 35 tons steam hammer at the Woolwich arsenal, engraving from The Graphic, 1874, Great ... [+] Britain, 19th century. (Photo by DeAgostini/Getty Images)

As the steam revolution gathers pace, we see numerous attempts at abolishing these types of forced labour; but reforms were to take many years, and many attempts at legislation and numerous uprisings of captives.

It's instructive to understand how one system of dispatchable energy would eventually be replaced by another system, to where we find ourselves today.

A long journey to the new dispatchable

Before 1860, if you wanted to move on land, you took a horse; if you wanted to pump water out of a mine, it would be done by a human with a bucket.

Wind and water did much of the heavy lifting, but sometimes, for properly dispatchable power muscle of both animal and human forms were the only solution.

These of course were powered by carbohydrates, which in turn could be created on farms and plantations which often used forced labour. So the ancient muscle energy paradigm had a certain simplicity.

As the 19th century progressed, movement increasingly could involve steam engines and thermodynamics. Calories for doing mechanical work were more and more likely to come from lumps of coal, and less likely to come from carbohydrate food fed to workers and draught animals.

By 1865, the same year the American Civil War over slavery was drawing to its bloody end, steam traction engines were just starting to replace muscle power on farms.

The problems along the way tell us much about what we can expect from replacing another form of dispatchable energy and trying to create a more modern one.

Lessons for todays energy revolution

In the development of steam, there was a lot of transitional technology and knowledge that had to be acquired first. From Watts first engine that pumped water to Stephensons rocket that moved people, lots of technological inventive steps were required.

The American Civil War and the numerous different acts and amendments that were required to achieve the abolition of slavery showed how reluctant we were to get rid of forced muscle power.

From a 19th Century point of view, getting rid of your coerced muscle workforce, however much it was the right thing to do, was still an act of faith. It was a moral vote, which hoped for a more technologically enabled future. That future was coming, but coming at the same slow pace that slavery was being dismantled.

As we stand on the brink of a new energy revolution, there are many things that would look familiar to our forebears two hundred years ago.

Perhaps most striking, is how difficult and politically charged is the transition, and how polarised are the two standpoints of old and new forms of energy.

Were not fighting a civil war over it yet, but things could hardly get anymore bitter.

In Australia so far, four prime ministers have changed over this fault line in our politics and no doubt there will be many more. There are echoes and parallels in Japan, California and in Poland where the regulator has described the situation as a tragedy.

In Germany, the long running battle between the lignite coal mining interests and renewables goes unabated. It has seen letter bombs sent and the rise of the extreme right wing populist movement, the AFD.

The government has told miners that they are part of an essential service to the state; but at the same time the same government is planning Germanys exit from coal altogether.

Such mixed messages are now typical of the predicament many countries find themselves in.

A lump of coal in Parliament

In Australia, this deeply embedded conflict is just as acute.

When Scott Morrison, the Australian Prime Minister, walked into the Australian Parliament with a lump of coal in his hand, saying theres nothing to fear he was speaking for a huge number of his constituents who also believe that getting rid of coal is reckless.

These people ask why their electricity keeps costing more and more, despite the promises of cheap solar electricity. Pauline Hanson, a veteran outspoken Australian right wing politician also speaks for the same audience.

They dont buy the romance of the renewable, they want the certainty, the dispatchability, of the fossil.

And who can blame them? We never reckoned for electricity prices going to an all time high.

Perhaps most vociferous in their criticism of what are perceived as white elephant projects like Snowy 2.0 is Bruce Mountain, who says it simply fills a gap in the national discourse.

On the other side there are the renewables supporters in all shades, in many parts of Europe and the West, including the more extreme Extinction Rebellion.

They look to the bushfires in Australia and say that our planet is on fire, set alight by the higher temperatures created by the carbon in fossil fuels.

THE HAGUE, NETHERLANDS - JANUARY 16: Members of Extintion Rebellion are preparing for the ... [+] demonstration that will take place in front of the Australian Embassy on January 16, 2020 in The Hague, Netherlands. Extinction Rebellion has demonstrated in front of the Australian embassy in protest of what they consider to be ineffective measures by the Australian government to fight the fires that plague the country.

They block roads and bring cities to a halt. Theirs is a moral crusade and justifies higher prices, extending fuel poverty to the many, and are ready to live with blackouts caused by uncertain amounts of electricity at peak demand times.

Indeed the moral dimension reminds us of the abolitionists fighting slavery.

Are these two sides going to magically heal their rifts and start understanding each other?

Theres no sign of that yet.

More significantly its becoming clear that its not just an ideological conflict.

In a report by McKinsey entitled Germanys energy transition at the crossroads, the consultancy throws a big question mark over the entire project of renewable energy and its integration into the grid.

It says Germany is in trouble on all three major counts: Energy security, price and of course, emissions targets. Germanys situation was summed up by Die Welt as disastrous.

In the second of this multi-part blog, well look at why this fault line is so difficult to overcome, and why so often it results in waste. Well see how its born of a new technological system thats being honed as we speak, one that is both audacious and innovative and some would say inevitable at the same time.

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What The Struggles Of The Past Teach Us About Our Next Energy System - Forbes

Before COVID-19 struck, the city of Windsor, Ont. was looking forward to itsbiggest Emancipation Day celebrations in recent years on Aug. 1. And, thanks to the efforts of local history buffs, it was well on its way to bringing back an event that recalled the days when Windsor attracted famous civil rights activists and Motown stars to celebrate the anniversary of the abolition of slavery in most of the British colonies in 1834.

The history and recent revival of Windsors Emancipation Day is being closely followed by Tonya Sutherland, who graduated from the University of Toronto with a masters degree in museum studies this year. Building on research for her 2018 capstone project,Sutherland and two other women from the Toronto area retired teacher Catherine MacDonald and actor and producer Audra Gray sought to bring this chapter of Black Canadian history to a wider audience.

In the 1950s and early1960s, hundreds of thousands of people would arrive in Windsor for the multi-day festivities that took place the first weekend in August. They heard from figures like Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, Adam Clayton Powell Jr. and Eleanor Roosevelt and watched the Supremes, Stevie Wonder and the Temptations,whocrossed the Detroit River to perform at Windsors Jackson Park. But by the late 1960s, Windsors Emancipation Day festivities had begun to lose steam.

These celebrations were some of the biggest in North America, but they didnt remain in peoples consciousness, says Sutherland. Its a bit of a shame how theyve been mostly forgotten.

But efforts are underwayto make Emancipation Day a big deal again. When Windsors Emancipation Day Committee announced it was cancelling this years events, it also said it was planning for an significant event in2021.

In the meantime, the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto will mark Emancipation Day with a special ROM Connects talk moderated by Sutherland on Aug.5, which follows an earlier talk given this month.

Working under the umbrella of the Jackson Park Project, named for the park where the Emancipation Day celebrations were held in Windsor, Sutherlands goal is to create a digital archive of historical material.

As for Sutherlands partners in the project, MacDonald is aiming to createeducational resources for use in classrooms that would be hosted by the digital archive while Gray wants to produce a drama television series based on the annual festivities as well as a documentary. The documentarywould chronicle both the teams behind-the-scenes journey and a proposal before Parliament to formally recognize Emancipation Day nationally (Ontario officiallyrecognized the day in 2008).

Audra was watching TV one day and came across this documentary, The Greatest Freedom Show on Earth. It was a larger history of Emancipation Day, somewhat focused on Windsor, but with a broader view, says Sutherland. She wondered why she had never heard of it.

Thinking it a story worth dramatizing, Gray linked up with MacDonald, her former teacher who was also interested in Canadas Black history. MacDonalds husband mentioned the project to his co-worker, Sutherlands father, who in turn told his daughter about it.

I tend to get really invested in the personal element of history, says Sutherland who alsoearned an undergraduate degree in English and history from U of T in 2016. That interest caused her friends to suggest she might want to check out the Faculty of Informations museum studies program. The idea resonated with Sutherland, who had also been inspired watching the TV programMysteries at the Museum.

During their first research trip to Windsor in 2018, Sutherland, MacDonald and Gray spent a week researching and filming. Irene Moore Davis, president of the Essex County Black Historical Research Society, shared a wealth of information with the visitors. While we say this is a history thats not known to a broader audience, people from Windsor whose families were involved are very aware, says Sutherland. Irene has been really key to our project because she has quite a large collection of family history including boxes of documents. Her family was very involved in Emancipation Day.

While in Windsor, Sutherland visited the University of Windsor archives, looked at hundreds of photographsand examined the programs printed annually, which typically included a letter from the mayor of Windsor and sometimes featured messages from prominent speakers. From magazines, you could see who was buying ad space and supporting the celebrations, she says, adding that the documents helped with her primary research.

Sutherlanddigitized the materials as part of her capstone project with the goal of creating a permanent digital archive. Ive learned all the things that go into creating an archive and a digital archive, she says. The more I learn, the more it teaches me what I dont know.

That also goes for Black Canadian history, says Sutherland, who adds that Canadians often dont know what became of the people who arrived in places like Windsor via the Underground Railroad. Was everything amazing? Did they face racism and struggle?

The holes in our knowledge speak to a larger unknowing, she says. This whole thing has been extremely eye-opening to me.

MacDonald says the history of Windsors Emancipation Day is a perfect subject for teaching because it is so multi-faceted. Its the story of Canada and the Black diaspora. Its the story of English and French, and the story of Canada and the U.S. Its the story of two cities.

Black families were often divided between Detroit and Windsor with cousins walking across the frozen Detroit River in winter and holding large family get-togethers at Emancipation Day events in the summer. A Detroit historian, Kimberly Simmons, has spent more than a decade trying to get the Detroit River declared a UNESCO World Heritage site for the role it played in the underground railroad.

Meanwhile Sutherland, MacDonald and Gray continue to move forward on their Windsor projects. The teaser for Grays documentary debuted last summer at Emancipation Day. MacDonald is working with local Black educators, members of Windsors Black historical society and the Ontario Black History Society to produce lesson plans. And Sutherland has produced a digital archive feasibility report as her capstone project in museum studies.

In some ways, the work they are doing emulates that done almost a century ago by Windsor citizens. In 1932, they, too, decided that they wanted to build up their small Emancipation Day celebrations into a much bigger event and eventually turned their vision into reality.

Despite COVID-19, the work behind the scenes on bringing Emancipation Day to a wider audiencecontinues. Were now trying to seek out and establish viable and more stable sources of funding, Sutherland says.

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U of T alumna aims to bring the history of Emancipation Day, on Aug. 1, to a wider audience - News@UofT

By Marc Levy Sunday, August 2, 2020A spread from the magazine Freedom School with art by Latisha Wade and PD Klein.

Heres a gift for a time cultural opportunities feel exhausted and the latest Netflix offering feels meaningless: A free, 100-page, sumptuously produced magazine full of voices and images most of us have never encountered or considered, with (as editors and graduate students Najha Zigbi-Johnson and Lesedi Graveline say in a foreword) poems, essays and short stories, photos, paintings and other visuals grounded in themes of afro-futurism, ecology, community, lineage and ancestors, abolition, embodiment and pleasure, art and movement.

The magazine, an often surreal and playful piece of art called Freedom School, became available online July 17 at freedomschool-litmag.com.

Thumb through its pages the format allows the reader to mimic actual page turning for a richer experience than a traditional website for a melding of words and images from people who are under-heard, and in many cases previously never heard. Thats on purpose: The editors goal is to be democratizing in a way that makes the magazines birthplace at the Harvard Divinity School even more surprising.

So Los Angeles-based filmmaker, architect and artist Kordae Jatafa Henry is interviewed in Freedom School (talking about how he connects his work to traditional African dance and ritual, as well as about how George Floyd and Breonna Taylor makes him think about the future). But theres also work by Aliyah Blackmore, whose mix of poetry, art and essay on themes of ancestry and queer black identity called Why Do You Wake Before the Sun? appears because Graveline knows them Graveline went to school with them.

Harvard produces publications that dont usually reflect the work of community advocates and leaders of people who dont go to places like Harvard. It was really important for us that we pulled from communities beyond Harvard and reflect an array of identities and experiences, Zigbi-Johnson said last week, as the editors sat for an interview by phone. (Some comments have been edited and condensed.) For us this publication is very much its own commentary on the limitations of academic scholarship.

Surprise again, then, to hear how Freedom School came about from within Americas most hallowed ivory towers: A class itself called Freedom School: A Seminar on Theory and Practice for Black Studies in the United States that Zigbi-Johnson created, pitched and got funded with doctoral student and Black Lives Matter leader Karlene Griffiths Sekou. It was a wholly student-led class focused on black thought and imagination that was made open to people from outside Harvard. (Assistant professor of African American religions Todne Thomas midwifed the idea.) This course came to be because of the lack of resources for particularly black students at Harvard who wanted to apply their studies in practical ways, Zigbi-Johnson said. One of the projects the class decided to do was the magazine.

With designers Giovanna Araujo and Chindo Nkenke-Smith, the editors began thinking last fall about Freedom School as a publication, though work began in earnest in March, after coronavirus arrived and was essentially done entirely via Zoom video conference.

There was a learning curve, Graveline said, but the reception to the final product has been encouraging from the halls of Harvard to among hometown audiences. I really didnt think that members of my community in little Auburn, Massachusetts, which is a very small, Central Massachusetts town, would necessarily want to read something like this theyre not even close to being proximate to black radical scholarship or thought, Graveline said. The fact that they could engage with this was really moving for me, because that was our goal.

To have my neighbors read it and say, I love that poem by Arianna Monet, the way shes talking about black women is so beautiful I love that, Graveline said.

People also want printed editions of the magazine, but those mass copies dont exist. Part of what we wanted for this magazine is that it would be free for everyone, and that there would be no limit to accessing it. Thats largely why its online right now, Graveline said, describing also the pleasure of watching word spread through social media in communities representing an eclectic list of contributors.

Another democratizing element of the publication is the several love letters Graveline delights in seeing scattered through Freedom School, which address their authors origins. (For Graveline, a grandmother and great-grandmother in Botswana, who I dont think would be mentioned in a Harvard publication for any reason its just so beautiful to see where people come from.)

Its important to highlight that we didnt do all this by ourselves. We are a part of a collective, Graveline said. We would not be here without our communities, without our ancestors. And we are doing this for those who will come after us.

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Editors opened the doors to Freedom School, then even wider as magazine of black thought - Cambridge Day

SALT LAKE CITY The Black Lives Matter movement has drawn tens of millions into the streets to participate in protests taking place every day since May. The #BlackLivesMatter hashtag has been used by millions of social media users to call attention to cases of police brutality since 2013, and hundreds of groups bearing the name have materialized in nearly every major city in the United States. But if you look for a headquarters, a national spokesperson or a unified mission for the cause, you wont find anything.

The decentralized nature of Black Lives Matter has caused confusion over what it actually stands for, said Stefahn Rich, 30, the owner of Stefs Place, a barbershop in Salt Lake City.

Theres this misconception that its a particular organization, said Rich. Or, it gets portrayed as a cause of a small group of people, when its all of these communities, all of these people and organizations fighting together.

Customers at Stefs Place who donate $100 to Black Lives Matter receive a $150 gift card to use toward haircuts, shaves and other services. But since there is no centralized Black Lives Matter organization, Rich lets patrons choose between three institutions that accept donations: Utahs chapter of the ACLU, the NAACP legal defense fund and Campaign Zero, a nonprofit dedicated to ending police violence.

To me, it means they support the movement that Black lives actually do matter and they are very much endangered and threatened, not just by police and government, but every day by people around them, said Rich.

Some recoil from Black Lives Matter because Patrisse Cullors, one of the women credited with starting the movement, described herself and her co-founders as trained Marxists. Others are apprehensive about the stance on the family held by one of the most visible organizations, the Black Lives Matter Global Network. Their website, BlackLivesMatter.com, says they are queer-affirming and seek to disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement. Still others think they cant say they support Black Lives Matter unless they agree with abolishing the police.

But according to Alvin Tillery, professor of political science and director of the Center for the Study of Diversity and Democracy at Northwestern University, none of these ideas are foundational to the movement as a whole. With hundreds of locally organized groups, the movement does not have a singular identity, and there are no solutions to discrimination and policing that everyone agrees on, he said.

That fractured nature can make it difficult for media to represent the movement in an authentic way. While journalists tend to look for a spokesperson, a website and a number to contact, many of the grassroots groups organizing demonstrations have none of the above.

The fact that the movement has no leader could ultimately be its downfall, said Tillery. But in many ways, its a strength. Because there is no centralized leadership, there is a place within the movement for everyone who believes there is a problem with race and policing no matter their own race, age or political party, Tillery said.

If you support Black Lives Matter, it means you understand theres a need for police reform, that you recognize there are systemic inequalities around race, and you support any range of solutions, from diversity training, to defunding, to abolition.

Three women, Alicia Garza, Opal Tometi and Patrisse Cullors, are responsible for coining the phrase Black Lives Matter and mobilizing demonstrators following the 2013 acquittal of the man who killed Trayvon Martin. According to USA Today, Cullors created the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag after Garza first used the phrase in a Facebook post.

The hashtag has been instrumental in raising awareness and spreading information, said Simon Howard, a professor of psychology at Marquette University in Milwaukee who specializes in prejudice and discrimination.

Its basically cyberactivism. Everyone can play a role because not everyone feels comfortable protesting or being in the streets, said Howard. Its not the end all, but we see how monumental it is when people all over the world are tweeting #BlackLivesMatter and protesting anti-Black police violence in counties like South Africa and France.

Cullors and her co-founders wanted the movement to be decentralized so that people would be motivated to step up locally to fight for change in their own communities, Howard said. But the lack of formal structure makes it difficult to find reliable information about the movement as a whole because each community leader may have a different point of view.

BlackLivesMatter.org is a WordPress site with links to a handful of articles and a couple tweets. Many news sources reference BlackLivesMatter.com, the website for a group called the Black Lives Matter Global Network, which is not a formal nonprofit. Registered 501(c)(3) Thousand Currents partners with the organization to provide the legal and administrative framework to enable BLM to fulfill its mission, according to its website.

The Black Lives Matter Global Network did not respond to the Deseret News requests for comment.

While the Black Lives Matter Global Network has 16 affiliate chapters in cities such as Boston, Chicago and Los Angeles, there are hundreds of other local Black Lives Matters groups across the country that dont associate with the network, including several Utah-based Black Lives Matter chapters.

The leaders of several Black Lives Matter groups in Utah say they are frustrated that most people assume there is a single organization. While Lex Scott, the founder of Black Lives Matter Utah, works closely with the leaders of Northern Utah and Southern Utah chapters, a different group called Black Lives Matter Salt Lake City has separated themselves from Scott and the events she leads.

Ashley Finley, one of the founding members of Black Lives Matter Salt Lake City, said she used to organize with Scotts group, but she saw a need in the community for a chapter that would call for the eventual abolition of police as well as focus more on queer and trans-affirming work. She and her fellow organizers started the group in June and their Instagram page already has more than 12,000 followers. However, Finley said the main thing that distinguishes her group from others in Utah is that they intend to join the Global Network.

Blackness is not a monolith, neither is activism, said Finley. If one group doesnt fit your personal ideals, there are many different groups you can explore.

Scott said she doesnt want to bash the Global Network. She acknowledges they have done good things, but she doesnt think she should have to report to their authority.

I feel more comfortable running independently because I have control over what our chapter does, said Scott, who made it clear that her group has no political affiliations, is not involved in advocacy related to family structures and does not promote any kind of economic theory, such as Marxism.

We may have some different ideals that dont necessarily match with them. That doesnt make them bad people, but we have some different ideologies.

Jacarri Kelley, who lives in Roy, runs the Northern Utah chapter of Black Lives Matter and does not affiliate with the Global Network either. Kelley said there is a lot of confusion about the name, but she has chosen to stick with it because the message of Black Lives Matter is powerful.

I cant stand how people are using the movement now, how theyre using Black Lives Matter when they are looting or destroying public property, said Kelley. At the end of the day, we shouldnt have to change the name. For Black people, its empowering. Whenever I have a youth event and they say, Black Lives Matter, just seeing the pride in their eyes, thats what I live for.

Howard believes that misconceptions about the movement ultimately stem from a lack of information.

People are fearful of Black Lives Matter, largely because of the word Black, said Howard. In an American context, the word Black typically has a negative connotation, like when someone says Black music or Black neighborhoods, Howard said.

If Im ignorant, if I dont know or have knowledge about a particular person or organization, whats filling those gaps is the negative stereotypes associated with blackness, said Howard.

The Black Lives Matter Foundation, created by R. Ray Barnes, a 67-year-old music producer who lives in Santa Clarita, California, has been another flashpoint for controversy surrounding the Black Lives Matter name. Barnes started the foundation 2015, after his wifes ex-husband was killed by Los Angeles police. He said that the foundation has raised a few hundred thousand dollars over the past five years, and its main activity has been supporting and telling the stories of Black veterans through the Peaceful Warriors Foundation. Recently, Barnes independent foundation has made headlines because corporate donors have allegedly confused it with the Black Lives Matter Global Network, which also calls itself Black Lives Matter Foundation, Inc. on its website, even though Barnes owns all URLs related to the name.

Barnes said he is cooperating with the Charitable Trust of California on an investigation to sort out discrepancies. In addition, Barnes said he has received cease and desist orders from the states of New York and Florida, despite his claims that he has never solicited donations in those states.

Its a whole lot of confusion, said Barnes.

While Barnes said the ultimate goal for his foundation is to help create unity between the police and the community, he has no connection with any other Black Lives Matter groups. He does not organize marches, and he does not agree with defunding the police. While he expressed frustration over the confusion between his organization and others, he said there is not necessarily any animosity between them.

To be in a feud, you have to be in touch with someone. Ive never spoken with anyone from those organizations, said Barnes.

Tillery said splintering is normal in a movement. Black Lives Matter can be compared to other social movements seen in the U.S. and Europe since the 1980s, like the Green Power movement and Occupy Wall Street, which also had a horizontal membership and leadership structure, he said. These movements stand in contrast to the African American civil rights movement, which was led by people like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Without a central figure who can act as a strong negotiator, its hard to create lasting change on a national level, Tillery said.

Im worried that were going to have this mass wave of protests and a lot of people who want to make reforms, but no one with the moral authority to carry this movement to victory, said Tillery. Theres all of these steps beyond getting people to go and march and demand the arrest of officers, and it doesnt seem like BLM has that stuff figured out. And thats very consistent with other movements.

At the same time, Tillery is impressed by the sheer number of people, especially millennials and members of Generation Z, that the Black Lives Matter movement has mobilized.

This is an exciting time in America, said Tillery. Theres tremendous opportunity, but movements are messy.

Rich agrees that this is an exciting time for the country. He says his barbershop is a place of community and conversation, and over the past few months, hes had many opportunities to discuss racial issues with his customers.

Theres not really a cut and dry way around it. People just need to keep fighting, keep their foot on the gas said Rich. Everybody has a different opinion and different outcomes that they would like to see, but I dont think that that detracts from the movement.

Continued here:

Black Lives Matter: Making sense of the hashtag, movement and protests - Deseret News

It is now just over 10 years since the shock news of the abolition of the UK Film Council (UKFC) by David Camerons coalition government. Earlier this week,Screen looked at the events surrounding the abolition and the fallout from it, and asked senior UKFC executives and board members how effectively they believe the British Film Institute which inherited key UKFC functions and 44 staff roles in April 2011 was able to fill the void that was created. Now, we consider the achievements of the UKFC, and the degree to which it succeeded at achieving its original aims.

The Film Council (later UK Film Council) was created in 2000 after Culture Secretary Chris Smith commissioned a comprehensive review of film policy, A Bigger Picture, and as a consequence of lobbying efforts by David (later Lord) Puttnam and Lord Attenborough.

With the report recommending consolidation of government film bodies, Smith asked Alan Parker, then chair of the British Film Institute (BFI), to chair the new organisation, with Stewart Till president of international at Polygram Filmed Entertainment from 1992-1999 and president of Universal International Pictures in 1999-2000 as deputy chair. BFI director John Woodward was appointed CEO.

The Film Council absorbed the British Film Commission, and the filmmaking activities of both British Screen and the BFI Production Board. It also took over the granting of Lottery money for film from the Arts Council including for the three franchises that had been awarded at Cannes 1997 to funnel 90m of Lottery money into film, which were Duncan Kenworthy and Andrew Macdonalds DNA; Pathe, in alliance with an array of producers including Thin Man and Fragile Films; and the Film Consortium, which combined Scala, Skreba, Parallax and Greenpoint with Virgin Cinemas and Carlton Film Distributors.

Paul Trijbits (head of UKFC New Cinema Fund, 2000-2006): You need to always look at it from the lens as to: what was there before? The Arts Council distributing lottery money for film, nobody thought that was a good idea. The only people who thought that was a brilliant idea were the three that got the Lottery franchises. Everybody knew it was a disaster.

Having the British Film Commission in a crummy office in Baker Street, and British Screen somewhere else it worked in a sort of British way, but it wasnt very cohesive. Most other countries had one national agency for film, and it always would encompass exhibition, cultural activity, education, strategy, production, development and distribution. [Bringing the functions together] felt at the time the right thing to do.

Robert Jones (head of UKFC Premiere Fund, 2000-2005): Its important to remember that period, because that was one of the primary reasons that the Film Council was formed because of the massive negative publicity on use of Lottery money by the likes of the Daily Mail, around the fact that money was going into films that just werent being seen.

The Film Council came into being amidst a lot of enthusiastic ambition, but also managed to disaffect a lot of people who they were effectively replacing. A lot of people werent happy about the demise of British Screen. A lot of people at the BFI were not happy that this seemingly Blairite New Labour quango was being formed.

Carol Comley (head of strategic development, UKFC and BFI, 2000-2020): From my perspective, the UK desperately needed a body such as the Film Council. It was very different from the BFI, where I had worked before. But it was a difference that was needed in order to achieve the objectives for a vibrant culture and competitive industry.

If youre organisationally not weighted down by history, what may be termed encumbrance of all sorts, and if youve got a government or a set of political arrangements that are going to help you fly your kite, then organisationally you have the best possible prospects for success enabling the Film Council to positively reposition UK film internationally.

Vince Holden (head of production finance, UK Film Council, 2000-2011): When I took over the Arts Council portfolio, its projected recoupment rate was 10%. They invested about 42m over the years, and they were targeting a 10% return. I brought in a royalty analyst and money chaser to aggressively chase revenues, and we got their final return up to 21%.

The [Arts Council] franchises were a fricking mess when we took them over. We took a projected 15-18% return, and converted it into a 40% return. That rigorous policing of the franchise deals, getting better terms, policing royalty statements, auditing distributors, got 8m-plus over and above what they were earning before we joined.

Lottery money was on the decline virtually from the day I walked through the door, every year. Which is why the drive to try and make sure that I uncovered every stone, and got back as much money from our investments to make up the gap, was important.

Paul Trijbits: One of the things we did, we pulled out the Arts Council application form, which ran to 40 pages and was asking all those questions of everybody about every bit of the Lotteries Act they needed to adhere to, if they were so lucky to get the money. Well, hold on, all those obligations only apply if youre a recipient of the money. The first stage is a creative assessment. That meant that the application form went down from 40 pages to four pages, and we could turn stuff around much quicker. To me, that demonstrates the can-do mentality, the professional-input mentality of what we were asked to do at that time.

Will Evans (UKFC director of business affairs, 2002-2011): I was very nervous about accepting the job because, having been in the private sector for 22 years and not being the most patient person, I thought, God, this is the public sector, its going to be like the gas board. I thought it would be forms in triplicate. I was massively surprised that it wasnt like that at all. It was a very fast-moving organisation. It wasnt bureaucratic. It was a smallish organisation, probably 90 people top to bottom at its height.

Stewart Till (deputy chair of UKFC board 2000-2004, then chairman 2004-2009): For the board, we wanted to get the creme de la creme of the British film industry, we wanted to represent all sectors. So there was quite an aggressive search and hire for the board. In terms of executives, the philosophy was, Its the public sector, but intervening in a commercial marketplace.

Paul Trijbits: Having a leader like Alan [Parker] was brilliant because it was somebody, even if you might not have agreed, at least you knew he did it with chutzpah and style and conviction. And the board was extraordinary: people I could call upon were the likes of Tim Bevan [Working Title], Nigel Green [Entertainment Film Distributors], Paul Webster [Film4]. That initial board was a really positive, proactive, smart group of people who had genuinely nothing but the best interest at heart for the British film industry.

The board never interfered with any of the decisions about individual projects. The people you might expect to be most sceptical about some of the things that we did, that were right on the edge of what a feature film might be, were the most supportive.

I particularly reference Bloody Sunday, which was one of the first decisions we made. It was a film made for ITV, a TV movie, and made by not a new director, Paul Greengrass, who had already made one or two feature films before and vowed not to do it again. It was quite clearly a film with a point of view, and all of a sudden this NGPB this non-government public body was making a film that was going to cause some ruckus.

When the UK Film Council was set up, it was decided to have separate funds for development (led from 2000-2007 by Jenny Borgars, then by Tanya Seghatchian) and two for production. This three-fund system Premiere (10m annually), New Cinema (5m) and Development (5m) was abandoned in 2009 with the creation of the unified Film Fund (15m).

Will Evans: I think there was a school of thought at the Film Council that it might not be a good idea to have one person in charge of such a large sum of money. If you find the right person to be in charge of a lot of money, then I think its fine. So, for example, Im a massive fan of [the BFIs] Ben Roberts. I think he walks on water. He showed its possible to have one person in charge of a lot of money if you get the right person.

Sally Caplan (head of UKFC Premiere Fund, 2005-2010): I think that it was a good thing to have both the New Cinema Fund, focusing on newer talent, and the Premiere Fund looking after ostensibly more commercial, bigger-budget projects. There was some fluidity between the two funds, which was good, and both funds were trying to promote gender equality and diversity and inclusion.

Paul Greengrasss directing career arguably faltered after his first two films until the New Cinema Fund backed Bloody Sunday from which there has been no looking back. Kevin Macdonalds career was [pushed forward] as a director off the back of the UKFCs support for Touching The Void. Lynne Ramsay was launched with Ratcatcher and Sarah Gavron with Brick Lane. I guess my departments biggest success was backing The Kings Speech when other funding bodies turned it down which extraordinarily was the first film that Iain Canning produced. Not a bad way to start.

Robert Jones: The flip side of that is youre getting hundreds and thousands of applications every year and you can only say yes to less than 1%. So youre doubtless going to piss a lot of people off Which I managed to do, Im not happy to say, but it was inevitable.

Jack Arbuthnott (UK Film Council Development Fund executive, 2006-2008): Every script that was sent to the Development Fund was sent out for external coverage, and someone would write this very stern report, and obviously most of the stuff youre getting is not deemed to be worth supporting.

A meeting was held where we looked at the report, and maybe at the script itself, and then a very offensive letter was sent to the applicant, explaining to them why their script wasnt commercial based on some choice extracts of the coverage.It seemed to me it was a system to generate needless contempt from the applicant. And so one of the things that Tanya introduced was a more evasive [approach] it just didnt piss people off in the same way.

One of the problems that the Development Fund had was it set itself up to be this arbiter of commercial viability. Ironically, it demonstrated absolutely no ability to do that over its lifetime. But even if it had, its just a very obnoxious role to be in.

The recoupment targets for the Film Councils two production funds quickly became a bone of contention with producers, whose scripts were being rejected on the basis that the completed films were not deemed likely to meet the targets. Producers also found the commercial terms offered by the UKFC to be ungenerous, and there was inevitable jealousy of well-paid fund heads such as Jones and Trijbits, who were both former producers.

Vince Holden: John [Woodward] initially suggested a 100% recoupment target. I said, If thats what you want to do, I can do it. But its not really going to stimulate anything. Its just going to replace banks with cheaper funding, which is not really what we should be doing. So we set a target 50% recoupment for the Premiere Fund, 25% recoupment for the New Cinema Fund and I basically policed it. It was my job to make sure that those guys hit their targets in a very soft kind of way.

That credit committee sat religiously, every Wednesday morning at 10am. We had a pile of thinned-down applications that we all wanted to do, and it was kind of like a greenlight process. And thats where the arguments came The arguments over Mike Leigh, I cant tell you. We backed him three times. My argument was, why when we add up all these territories that Mike Leigh films sell for, are we all of a sudden making a film for twice that amount? Its disproportionate. Mike Leigh should be making a film for a budget that the commercial market can actually stand. I mention Mike Leigh because I love him to bits.

In the end, across the Premiere Fund, New Cinema Fund and Tanyas Film Fund, we hit 40%, which Im happy with. Overall, 132m was spent and 40% came in. You can do the maths, thats a lot of money that came in and was recycled.

Rebecca OBrien (UK Film Council board member, 2006-2011; producer): What we fought for was a tiny share of any of the money that came back in if your film was successful, and that was the big battle that I was involved in: for producers to get a share of revenue so that they could support themselves, rather than always being dependent on beneficence from the Film Council.

There was also this feeling at the Film Council that producers were useless that they really werent very good at their job and that they all needed hands holding. So there was an awful lot of infrastructure at the Film Council, with a lot of employees.

For producers, there was a lot of mistrust of the Film Council and a lot of misunderstanding as to what on earth they were doing, and the feeling that they just didnt get what producers did. There was definitely the feeling that if you got one of those jobs, you didnt have to be a producer anymore. Especially when you have producers earning a tiny bit of development money trying to get projects off the ground.

The UKFCs position on both recoupment targets and sharing equity with producers did change over time.

Will Evans: PACT were repeatedly saying to the Film Council, We believe that the amount of the UK tax credit in each British producers film should be a recoupable sum for that producer on that film. In the end, the UK Film Council said, OK, we will support the notion of this producer equity entitlement equal to the amount of the tax credit, provided that all the other financiers public and commercial in the particular film are prepared to allow it. And in 2010, the UKFC was successful in persuading BBC Films and Film4 to both take the same position.

At the beginning, it was very difficult to get commercial companies to agree to it because they would say, Hang on a minute, you want to dilute my return, and the answers no. But as the years went on, and when we transferred over to the BFI, it became a more accepted position in the industry.

In the early days, the Film Council used to give back to the producer on each of their films 5% of the Film Councils revenue recoupment just a small notional sum. It wasnt able to give any more than that because, in effect, its state aid.

PACT said producers want more than 5%. So the Film Council then went to Brussels and asked if it was possible to increase the percentage, and approval was given to increase it to 25% of the Film Councils income until they were 50% recouped, and 50% of the Film Councils income until full recoupment. This gives a blended percentage of 37.5% of the BFIs recoupment income, and that still stands today. Its called the BFI Producer Corridor and it goes into a lockbox administered by the BFI for the benefit of the UK producer, director and writer, subject to certain restrictions.

In April 2011, the BFI took the same position that had previously been adopted by the Film Council: you can either have the Producer Equity Entitlement or you can have the BFI Producer Corridor, you cant have them both. BBC Films took the same view at the time regarding its own producer corridor. In the last seven years, of the three principal public funders, the BFI allows you to have both of these things but they go into a lockbox to be administered by the BFI.

In 2002, the UKFC recruited former Film4 deputy chief executive and head of distribution Pete Buckingham to head up a new distribution and exhibition department, which introduced innovations including the P&A Fund (to help distributors reach bigger audiences for specialised films) and the 12m digital screen network (which helped 240 cinemas digitise their screens, in return for a commitment to show a wider range of titles).

Carol Comley: If innovation is doing things differently, looking to the future, then Pete Buckingham was the person that best represents that side of the Film Councils way of thinking. The fund heads, for example Tanya, Paul and Robert, at different moments were all very strategic. They were strategic in terms of creative production, whereas Pete was the one alongside John who always took a 360-degree approach who considered both supply- and importantly demand-side challenges.

Pete Buckingham (head of distribution and exhibition, UK Film Council, 2002-2011): We wanted to get more and more people watching a wider range of films across the UK and enjoying them. And the question is, Well, what is it we want to do to try and achieve that?

We decided that we were not going to subsidise [distribution of] films that were core films to a core audience. We were looking for those kind of middle-ground films that had a chance of reaching out to wider audiences. The film needs to have a shot, in our opinion, at reaching 1m box office. Now, that is just unheard of; back then, in 2002, it was a stretch target.

So thats what we launched, not without some criticism, most notably from [Artificial Eye co-founder] Andi Engel. We were not going to give money to people who had pure arthouse films for pure arthouse release, that was not part of our equation.

To the UKFC, it didnt matter if the distributor was a Hollywood studio the investment decision was about the film, and whether matching funds could help it reach a wider audience.

Pete Buckingham: That was an ongoing problem. People were very upset about that. It was too easy to target and say, Well, 20th Century Fox have got money for that. And yet they were perfect partners to achieve our strategic objective, which was to get more and more people used to watching a wider range of films across the UK.

The majority of people we worked with were independents because they had these movies, but we would inevitably tend to work with the people with bigger pockets [such as Lionsgate, Pathe, Studiocanal and Momentum] because they would have the wherewithal and the ambition. They were more able to take the risk, and were prepared to have a go.

Vince Holden: The digital screen network that Pete did I mean, just a brilliant idea. That was commercial meeting government meeting brains, and pushed us on disproportionately in the digital exhibition world.

Pete Buckingham: We thought it would be an amazing thing to have, lets say, 200-odd cinemas across the UK of all types, which will now have a programming commitment to for want of a better word specialised films. That worked. If you look back at those numbers, the numbers are very big. Subtitled films and difficult, specialised films got a wider range and people went to them.

All we were trying to do was give confidence: that actually when the heroin is withdrawn, you dont revert back to [how it was before]. The new normal could appear and people would operate in that normal. The problem is I dont think that happened. There are market forces, changes of business structures and philosophies.

I feel sad because for about five or six years, we had all the chains really engaged in successfully building people to watch these films in places theyd never really get a chance to see them. It just slipped back. There was a short period of time when things did look like they might be changing. But then it just fell back to worse than it ever was.

Following recommendations contained in the Film in England report, nine regional screen agencies for England were created from 2001 onwards. In summer 2010, the new Coalition Government announced the abolition of the regional development agencies, which had provided substantial funding to the regional screen agencies. With no replacement funding available, Creative England stepped into the vacuum with some support from the BFI. Meanwhile, in 2004, the UKFC invited bids for what became known as development franchises, or super slates, which required successful applicants to create strategic partnerships. We want distribution and sales to be involved in development from the get-go, said Jenny Borgars at the time of announcement.

Rebecca OBrien: That was a good thing about the Film Council: there was definitely a real effort to push film industrially all over the country. The problem was the influence was always top down. They were prescribing what people should do in the industry, rather than listening and watching what people wanted to do in their own areas. It was very prescriptive, and it was very top down.

Paul Trijbits: One of the challenges you face is that as time goes on, different priorities get set: the endless shifting from national to regional and back, and where should the decision-making lie, and how to push it out, and then end up with all those regional screen organisations, which were costing too much money. And then it was seen that that wasnt the right way. In the end, it doesnt feel like youve made a lot of progress.

Jack Arbuthnott: The super slates were a big deal, very ill-fated, and also probably quite exposing. It was stated to say: companies will perform better if theyre forced to work together as bigger entities, therefore to get this money you have to pitch as a consortium. But the consortiums didnt seem to particularly work. Its a difficult thing to do right because most of the things youre going to support are not going to work, so how one is covered for that is really important.

Paul Trijbits: I think organisations that do well seem to have a six-, seven-year period when things go very well. And then I think you end up with something that already looks a bit like decline, often not recognised by the people in it, and that you are probably not able to innovate.

I can certainly tell you that when I left after six years, I had lost some of the more risk-taking boldness that the funds certainly displayed at the beginning. That is an absolutely normal human trait. Because if you know something is good but painful, the second or third time, you might remember and say, Lets not do that.

One of the key aims of the original Film Council was to create a self-sustaining UK film industry. Thanks to the 2007 UK Film Tax Relief, which improved on earlier tax schemes that were open to abuse, a transformation was finally achieved, but indigenous independent production remains selectively supported by public investment, notably the BFI Film Fund, as well as by the tax credit.

Tim Bevan (chair of UK Film Council, 2009-2011): Pre-tax credit, there were all these Mickey Mouse tax schemes and shyster financiers and all the rest of it. And the tax credit and the cleanliness of the tax credit has been way and beyond the backbone of whats gone on in the last decade or so in film in Britain, because its a fantastic scheme that is transparent, is rock solid, everybody can rely on it, and its attracted tens of billions of inward investment because of it.

Robert Jones: It was very important to try and help the UK film businesses become self-sustaining, and that was something that the Film Council failed to do. It was something that we talked about endlessly and tried to think of ways, but it didnt have enough influence and power over the industry as a whole, to change the ecology of the industry in terms of how independent films are financed.

We always held up Jeremy Thomas as the example of a producer who owns a library of his own projects, so has a business that has an asset value and a turnover, whether or not he makes a film every year. Unfortunately, those examples are still very few and far between. Most companies cant do that, and even more so now in the days of Netflix and Apple. Its another way of financing but its essentially working for a studio. You dont own anything.

Jack Arbuthnott: The Film Council had clearer aims [than the BFI does], and aims that were clearer to evaluate. It was very focused on building a sustainable film industry but the trends that determine these things were not within the Film Councils power to alter. So you could very easily say, the Film Council is clearly failing because its not contributing to building a sustainable film industry. The decision to nix it, Im sure, came from how exposed it was.

Vince Holden: On my leaving day, [a colleague] came up to me, and we had had lots of lively discussions over the years about whether government funding or charitable funding should be going into the film industry, and how to make the UK film industry sustainable. She said, So now youre leaving and you dont have to worry about it anymore, how much would it take to make the UK film industry sustainable?

I said, Youre not going to like the answer. She said, Its hundreds of millions, isnt it? And I said, No, its nothing. You take away the subsidy, you wait three or four years. And when theres only three or four producers left, and three or four distributors left, that is sustainable.

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10 years on: The UK Film Council's achievements, missteps and enduring impact - Screen International

Maya Schenwar and Victoria Law have been writing about the shortcomings of prisons for years, but as the pandemic continues, their collaborative effort Prison By Any Other Name questions the inefficacies of the system, with its scant alternatives, providing examples of how these institutions extend the control and surveillance over those who are involved with the criminal justice system. Schenwar talked with Newcity about the impact of alternatives in Chicago as well as nationally, the Chicago Gang Database, sex offender registries, defunding police, removing police stations from schools, and the role of Black women in rethinking prisons. We even talked about how her work is received not just as a family member of a formerly incarcerated sibling, but as a white activist who sometimes engages with predominantly white audiences.

Tell us how you and Victoria started collaborating on Prison by Any Other Name.

Both of us were coming from backgrounds of writing and editing about prison. In addition to all of Vikkis freelance work and my main work with Truthout, Vikki had written a previous book,Resistance Behind Bars, about incarcerated women organizing, and Id written Locked Down, Locked Out, which is primarily about the impact of prison on families and communities. As we interviewed people about incarceration, we became more and more aware that for many people, being released from prison does not mean being freed from the system. These are all extensionsfrom electronic monitoring and house arrest to locked-down drug treatment and psychiatric hospitals to probation and sex-worker rescue programs, not to mention the child welfare system, community policing and all the other ways that police and prisons entangle themselves in homes and communities, systematically targeting Black communities and other communities of color. We were also seeing how these extensions of the system were targeting disabled people, trans people, drug users. These alternative systems were endangering peoples lives and deeply harming marginalized communities. But much of this was not being documented because it doesnt fall into the category of what most people see as prison. Its all part of what Beth Richie calls the prison nationour culture of policing and imprisonment that has very long tentacles. Both Vikki and I also had personal experiences which drove our work. Vikki had been on probation as a teenager. And my sister spent the past fifteen years in and out of jail and prison. During that time, for my sister, being out of prison meant being under heavy surveillance, including probation, monitoring, drug court, and other punitive so-called alternatives. We realized that there was a need for a book tying together all these thingsall these ways that prison extends far beyond prison wallsto show that many popular alternatives to incarceration and policing are simply expansions of the same old oppressive systems.

There are several approaches to the idea of prison abolition and defunding the police throughout the book. Could you talk about the work here in Chicago thats highlighted in the book or that you wish you couldve covered as Black Lives Matter, police brutality, and prisons have taken on even more significance after COVID-19 and the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor?

Yes! Most of the book focuses on whats wrong with many popular reforms to prisons and policing, and how theyre widening the net of who gets policed and punished and surveilled. But in the last chapter, we talk about how things could be different: What does a world look like in which not only police and prisons, but these harmful alternatives, are abolished? We discuss projects around the country that have contributed to this work, and mention some past and current efforts in Chicago that address extensions of the prison-industrial complex, including [the former] We Charge Genocides efforts against community policing, the Just Practice Collaboratives role in training people to facilitate transformative justice processes, the Visible Voices collective that provides a space for formerly incarcerated women, many of whom are still under state surveillance, to tell their stories, the ways in which restorative justice practitioners have worked within Chicago Public Schools to counter the police, how Ujimaa Medics are providing community health care. We highlight efforts happening around the country that provide a glimpse of what the world could look like, beyond the prison nation.

We turned in our final-final manuscript in January after many drafts. After our book went to press, COVID erupted, then the police-perpetrated murders of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd and Tony McDade, and the uprisings followed. Suddenly, abolition was being uttered, if not endorsed, in mainstream circles! Mainstream newspapers were publishing the words of Mariame Kaba. Multiple large cities were committing to seriously reduce police funding, thanks to powerful grassroots organizing. If we were to write the book now, our final chapter would include some of the recent visionary work being done primarily by Black-led abolitionist groups to defund police. This connects deeply with the goal of our book, because the current movement is not saying, defund the police and instead fund electronic monitoring or just switch the money over to community policing. People are saying no, we need healthcare, education, housingactual support and liberation, not punitive, racist, oppressive alternatives. In Chicago, were seeing powerful efforts like the newly formed Black Abolitionist Network, which is calling for a seventy-five percent cut to Chicagos police budget and the investment of that money in real community programs and services, the removal of police from schools, and an end to the gang database, among other demands. And there are many neighborhood-based mutual aid groups that have sprung up during the pandemic, in which neighbors are building connections and figuring out how we can provide for each other, how we can ensure that everyone has housing and food and care. Thats abolitionist work; its building the world we want to live in, wholly outside of policing, surveillance and imprisonment.

The earlier chapters discuss the problems with electronic monitoring. Could you talk about the challenges that families face when a relative is under this sort of surveillance?

I think a lot of times people forget that incarcerationof all types, including electronic monitoring, which scholar-activist James Kilgore and others have termed e-carcerationaffects whole families and communities, in addition to the primary impact on the person whos incarcerated. Electronic shackles amount to home confinement: You cant leave your house without pre-approval. Many things outside of a job and essential medical appointments arent going to be pre-approved. One key impact is on children. One of the people we interviewed who was confined on a monitor for several years talked about how she couldnt take her children to the park, or drop them off at school, or attend their sports games and practices. She had five kids. But she could not participate in whole swaths of her kids lives, particularly as they grew older. We need to think about the impact of that on kids lives. When kids are old enough, they often also begin to worry about the fact that since their parent is shackled with a monitor, that parent is always one step away from jail or prison, because the consequence of violating the monitors strict conditions is often incarceration. In one study, kids expressed fear that their parents would be taken to jail anytime the monitor beeped. Beyond children, family members often become the ones responsible for attending to the basic needs of a person whos shackled with a monitor. When my sister was on electronic monitoring, we were bringing her groceries and other supplies, and checking in constantly because we were worried about what this confinement was going to do to her mental health. Knowing that your family member, who is probably already struggling, risks incarceration if they leave the houseeven for, say, an emergency room visitis terrifying.

Another idea that you mention is Mariame Kaba describing the idea of Somewhere Else as a place that people could find support services as a substitute for prisons that are often vague suggestions or theyre fraught with common shortcomings as institutions. Also, there are many existing alternatives that invade peoples privacy and impede their ability to work. Can we talk about how such existing institutions could become better possibilities?

Yes, Mariame was one of the first people we interviewed and this idea that she mentionedthe Somewhere Elseguided a lot of our work thereafter. The idea is that under the logic of our prison nation, people cannot simply be freed. Instead, they need to be put in some other restrictive, coercive institution, even if that institution purports to help them: a kinder, gentler cage. Electronic monitoringconfining people to their homesis a Somewhere Else. Psychiatric hospitals are a Somewhere Else. Locked-down drug treatment centers are a Somewhere Else. These are still places to put people whove been deemed criminal, to remove them from the larger society. This is why Mariame, and many others, talk about the need to challenge criminalization itself. Get rid of that label and that system. Instead of thinking in terms of Somewhere Else, we need to think about building support for peoples self-determination and expand their options for what kind of support they can get voluntarily. For example, its been shown again and again that forcing people into some treatment (addiction treatment, mental health treatment) does not actually succeed, even by the systems own standards. It doesnt improve peoples lives. Instead, these coercive measures are unethical and often very traumatizing, and sometimes enact the opposite of whats needed. My sister was placed in a mandated drug court program after her last incarceration. She wasnt ready to stop using heroin, but the program forced her into abstinence from the drug, lowering her tolerance and making her more vulnerable. When she left the program, she overdosed and died.

Instead of these harmful and even deadly measures, we need to think about how treatment could be offered on a voluntary basis in ways that account for peoples autonomy. Not everyone wants toor is ready tostop using certain drugs. So, what kinds of harm-reduction measures, such as safe consumption or safe injection sites, can we offer to make survival more possible for people with substance dependencies? How can we decriminalize all drugs so people are not being traumatized further by being trapped in cages? And how can we offer optional support so that people can get medical care and housing and their other needs met, regardless of what drugs theyre using?

Another example: We need to be thinking about what voluntary and non-coercive might mean in terms of mental health treatment. Psychiatric hospitals and court-ordered assisted outpatient programs operate by holding everyone to a certain norm, and medicating them and prescribing certain therapies to try to shape them toward that norm, but not everyone sees the condition theyve been diagnosed with as a problem needing to be eliminated. For example, some people who hear voices and see visions dont want to lose those voices and visions, though some do. How can we develop networks of mutual aid and healing justice that allow people to choose how they live in the world? How can assistance be offered in ways that dont intend to force everyone to align with a certain norm? These are questions we can be asking. We can look to the work of groups like the Fireweed Collective, a mental health education and mutual aid project, for more on this.

Many protests around removing police from schools in Chicago have centered on providing other resources, like school nurses and counselors. I know BYP100 [Black Youth Project 100] and other organizations were demanding mental health care centers on the South Side. I kept thinking about the statistic cited in Prison By Any Other Name where you cited that seventy-five percent of the students arrested by police in schools are Black.

Yes, that seventy-five percent number was from a Project NIA and Loyola University study from a few years back, specifically focused on Chicago, and we see similar patterns in other cities. A 2018 study showed that ninety percent of students arrested in New York schools were Black or Latinx. Like so many of these systems, school policing does not work in the ways that many people assume it does. Theres no research showing that it decreases violence in schools. Thereisplenty of research showing that school policing targets Black students and other students of color and disabled students, and increases the number of students who are arrested and entrapped in the prison cycle.

Crystal Laura, a Chicago writer and scholar who we interviewed for our book, wrote a great book called Being Bad about the school-to-prison pipeline. She talks about how all kinds of resources have gone into policing students, essentially creating police stations inside of schools, where students can be bookedand also the morphing of schools into more prison-like institutions in other waysrequiring uniforms and metal detectors, dispensing horrible food, not letting people leave the room even to go to the bathroom. So, what could we do with the resources that go toward school policing and school prisonization, if they were reinvested? Wed need to absolutely increase nurses and counselors and mental health care, as you mentioned, especially given how those resources have been nearly entirely stripped from so many schools and communities. Also, despite Chicago Public Schools constantly mentioning restorative justice as a buzzword, their funding for actual non-punitive restorative justice programs, which eschew police involvement, is meager. And all students should have access to smaller class sizes and recess and arts programs, which are provided as a given at schools filled with middle-class white students. I also think about how the Movement for Black Lives platforms education section called for not only better services, but also good-quality food and recreation and a curriculum that meets students needs both culturally and materially. There are plenty of important places that reallocated money can go, if it doesnt go to police. The calls for CPD out of CPS right now are so essential.

So many Black women are central to shaping the ideas in Prison By Any Other Name. Mariame Kaba, Angela Davis, Beth Richie and Ruth Gilmore among them. Have you found that people respond to you differently as a younger white woman and a journalist? If so, how do other people react to you writing about prisons and other forms of state supervision?

Yeah, in Prison By Any Other Name, Vikki and I wanted to center the words and work of Black women abolitionists because this is where abolitionand so much of the most important work against prisons and policingcomes from. When I wrote my last book and was going around talking about it, I noticed that particularly in predominantly white spaces, people saw me as something of a novelty and were quick to attribute these interesting new ideas to me. This is part of the reason we have like twenty-million citations and so many interviews in Prison By Any Other Namebecause abolition is a collective project with Black feminist roots and roots in incarcerated peoples organizing. We want to make clear that we did not come up with those things ourselves.

Another thing I notice, in terms of reactions, is other white people often respond to me by knowingly saying, But you cant really want to abolish the police, mentioning all the ways in which police supposedly protect communitiesand this goes unsaid, but its usually white communities that theyre talking about. Theres an assumption that I must see the police as a force that actually protects me in some way, when some of the most traumatic experiences of my life have happened because of police and prisons.

In terms of being a journalistIm definitely that, but in addition to my work at Truthout and my writing, Im also an organizer, currently mostly with Love & Protect, a Chicago-based collective that supports women and nonbinary people of color whove been criminalized or harmed by state and interpersonal violence, so Im bringing that work to bear in my writing and speaking. I dont think there should be a hard line between journalism and activism.

Although there has been public discussion about getting rid of the Chicago Gang Database, Prison By Any Other Name also addresses how sex offenders registries are not always effective as a community safeguard. Could you talk about both databases?

Gang databases are part of a whole range of data-driven reforms that are marketed as savvy ways to prevent crime, but actually put targets on peoples backs, particularly Black and Brown people, making people more vulnerable to the police and, very often, officers arent required to provide evidence for designating someone as a gang member. And once people are in the database, whether or not theyre actually in a gangthe database isnt even accurate about thatthey can lose out on jobs, be further subject to immigration enforcement, face worse consequences within the criminal legal system, miss out on educational opportunities. Last year, ninety-five percent of people on the database in Chicago were Black or Latinx.

Even if the databases were entirely accurate, wed have to ask: Why are police recording data on gang membership? Why should gang members have this additional target on their backs? Why do people join gangs in the first placeas New York organizer Josmar Trujillo asks in our book? (He pointsout that although gangs are obviously sometimes involved in violence, they also are places where people organize and build community, often in neighborhoods where few resources or support structures exist.) Here in Chicago, the Erase the Database project, a collaboration between Organized Communities Against Deportations, BYP100 and Mijente, has exposed the racism and cruelty of the database and called for its elimination. The recently formed Black Abolitionist Network is also calling for the elimination of gang databases, including the citys new criminal enterprise database.

Sex offender registries, like gang databases, are not cultivating safety for anyone. Theres no research that sex offender registries do anything to prevent sexual violence. Yet there are around 900,000 people on these registries nationwide. Thats a huge numberand people on the registries are listed publicly, leaving them and their families open to massive stigma and vigilante violence. Meanwhile, harsh conditions are imposed on them, sometimes for life, including residency restrictions that often leave them with very few places theyre allowed to live. Again, theres no evidence this prevents abuse in any way, but it leaves a lot of people unhoused. One woman I interviewed who was on the registry, due to having dated an underage boy when she herself was young, had her children automatically taken away from her and, for a long time, was not even allowed supervised visits with them. Many people are not allowed to use the internet even if their offense had nothing to do with the internet. Jobs are severely limited, too.

Meanwhile, with both the gang database and the sex offender registry, this punitive data collection allows officials to completely sidestep dealing with the actual roots of violence. Obviously, these databases do nothing to address poverty, white supremacy, patriarchy, and so on. Instead, they punish and surveil marginalized people, trapping them in an ever-growing cycle.

You and Victoria talked about the organizations and practices that people are creating in several cities to enact alternatives to prisons via restorative justice and practices from small organizations, but you also talk about challenges that they face. What else would you add to that discussion since the book is already in print and the landscape has shifted so dramatically?

The groups we mentioned in our bookfrom the Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective to the Audre Lorde Projects Safe Outside the System to Creative Interventions Storytelling and Organizing Projectcan provide models for different ways to approach dealing with harm, without prisons or police. And new models are always growingnow we can also look to projects like Los Angeless CAT 911, which is building community alternatives in emergency situations, and the ongoing way that Minneapolis Black Visions Collective has combined calls to dismantle the police with building spaces for healing justice.

Of course, responding to harm is just one aspect of abolition work,as the current defund police movement is reminding us. A large part of it is building up structures of support, from quality health care for all to liberatory education to universal housing, and childcare and robust funding for the arts and youth programs. A large part of it is digging up the roots of these oppressive systemsdismantling white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, ableism and other structures of oppression.

I hope that as some people with political power begin to adopt the language of defunding (and even dismantling!) the police, thanks to the longterm efforts of grassroots groups, these people with political power take the work of organizers to heart. Theres always a risk of powerful people using radical language while maintaining the same old systems. Were seeing some of that play out now, as always. But, of course, those attempts at co-opting language or concepts doesnt diminish the fact that this powerful organizing has been happening for decades. Abolition has always been about challengingstructures of power,and so activists have always known that the abolition of policing and prisons will not come from above. The whole structure of society will need to change, including political hierarchies. That may be daunting, but its also exciting. As Ruth Wilson Gilmore says, Abolition requires that we change one thing: everything.

Newcity Lit Editor Tara Betts is the author of Break the Habit and Arc & Hue. Her interviews and features have appeared in publications such as Hello Giggles, Mosaic Magazine, NYLON, The Source, Sixty Inches from Center, and Poetry magazine. She also hosts author chats at the Seminary Co-Op bookstores in Chicagos Hyde Park neighborhood.

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Writer of the Moment: Maya Schenwar - Newcity Lit

[] The very prosperity that slavery brought to British capital was to eventually make slavery redundant. The capital accumulated throughout slavery led to investments in science, technology and engineering, created the industrial revolution, brought into being productive forces based on machinery, speeded up the process of proletarianisation of the British rural population, changed the social structure of Britain and prepared British capitalism for its task of bringing the whole world into the capitalist market.

In the process slavery became obsolete, an historical anachronism. But not because a system has become historically unnecessary will it fall of its own accord. The slave did not wait for it to fall they battered the slave system with continuous insurrection.

The abolition of slavery did not mean an end to the exploitation of labour; it merely changed its form

The following column on Labour and Emancipation was shared by Gerry Kangalee of the National Workers Union (NWU):

Emancipation Day should be a day of great significance to people of the African Diaspora in the Caribbean. But it should be of significance not only to Africans in the society; but to all peoples who have known the oppression characteristic of European and North American imperialism, which oppressed, dominated, enslaved and eliminated whole peoples, particularly non-white peoples.

But which also constructed an elaborate ideological justification for its brutality toward non-white peoplean ideology, or should I say a demonology of racism, based on the most despicable pseudo-science which reached its highest level in South Africa. It was called apartheid!

Emancipation Day brought an end to 250 years of slavery in the British-controlled Caribbean and opened up a whole new era in Caribbean History, which, instead of leading to the death of racism, only developed and strengthened that ideology with the introduction of Indian indentured labour.

What then is the relationship of emancipation to the labour question?

It is pretty clear that the central question of modern Caribbean History is the question of labour: the need for regimented, captive labour; the shortage of labour; and what Labour (in its personified sense) does, feels and thinks.

The question of Labour is inseparable from the question of the sugar/mono-crop economy, and from the question of immigration into the West Indies, intra-migration within the West Indies and migration from the West Indies.

The fundamental statement about Labour in the Caribbean is that Labour has never had the decisive, dominant say in how the society is to be organised, even though labour is the foundation of the economy. Exploitation and repressioninstead of freedom and powerhave so far been the lot of Labour.

Slavery was about the extreme exploitation of Labour so that Capital could be accumulated and used to colonise the world. The slave as different to the wage slave or modern worker did not sell his labour power for a wage. His labour power was forcibly appropriated.

It was so appropriated that not only did the slaves labour power belong to the slave owner, the slave himself belonged to the slave owner.

The slave was part of capital. And if it is agreed that capital is accumulated or dead labour, then the dominance of capital over labour reached its most barbaric state with the slave systemwhere the living worker/slaves life was absolutely dominated by the frantic scramble of British Capital to accumulate more and more in order to exploit more and more labour so as to accumulate more and more capital in a continually expanding spiral.

There have been many vivid descriptions about the conditions of slaves in the Caribbean, but none more appropriate and gut-wrenching than Kamau Brathwaites poems, All Gods Chillun, contained in his major work The Arrivants:

Boss man rates gain:

I am his living veinof sustenance:his corn, his meat, his grain

Boss man lacks pride:

So hides hisfear of fear and darknessin the whip

Boss man lacks pride:

I am his hideof darkness. Bide

the black times Lord hide

my heart from the lips

that spit

from the hate

that grips

the sweating flesh

the whips

that rip

so wet so red

so fresh!

The quotation brings out two important aspects of slavery. The first deals with the fact that the slave owner was nothing without the slave: the slave owner absolutely depended on the slave in order to survive.

The second is that Labour had to be subject to absolute coercion. Slavery without coercion is a contradiction in terms.

Lets deal with the first aspect: I am his living vein/of sustenance/his corn, his meal, his grain.

What is being said is that capital is nothing without labour. It is precisely in the exploitation of labour that capital grows and assumes absolute dominance over the whole of society.

But if we take a look again at the quote l am his living vein of sustenance, it describes much more than the mode of organisation of labour called slavery. It also describes the relationship between the modern working class and the capitalists.

It is, in fact, a description of the relationship between Capital and Labour. It says that Capital is parasitic; it feeds and grows upon Labour. And, in the process, it emasculates, dominates and alienates Labour which is Capitals living vein of sustenance.

While slavery was abolished, the exploitation of Labour by Capital continues under changed and constantly changing forms. The exploitation of labour during slaverys hey-day could be carried out in no other way than by forcible, physical appropriation and coerciongiven the level of the productive forces and the state of evolution of society and the ideologies and philosophies arising therefrom.

But by the time the slaves were emancipated in the l830s, the British ruling class had gained enough experience in exploiting its own working class to be confident that emancipation would not mean the end of colonial imperialism in the Caribbean, and the domination of Capital over Labour and White over Black.

They also had enough experience to know that if Emancipation did not come from above, it would come from below. And if it did come from below, the status quo would be radically different.

The Haitian Revolution had taught them that the slaves were not going to put up with slavery for much longer and they were determined to be free, whether by petition or by violent means.

Ever since Eric Williams published his book Capitalism and Slavery, reactionary and racist European historians have been forced to recognise that the changing needs of capitalism made the abolition of slavery an historical necessity.

Before the publication of that book, Eurocentric history had postulated that it was the agitation of the so-called humanitarians, the Wilberforces and the Clarksons, that led to Emancipation.

Today, it is generally accepted that it was the changing needs of capitalist, political economy which gave rise to Wilberforce and Clarkson. The humanitarians did not agitate for emancipation because they were against the brutalisation of Africans by Europeans or against mans inhumanity to man.

They recognised that for capitalist economy to stand, pre-dominant remnants of pre-capitalist social formations had to be dealt with; and that slavery as a form of labour organisation was much more wasteful and expensive than the new powerful and gigantic forces of production brought into being by the then ongoing industrial revolution.

The spokesmen of the British Bourgeoisie knew that for British capitalism to really create and dominate the world market, preferential treatment for West Indian sugar had to go, colonial monopolies had to go.

In British capitalisms development into capitalist imperialism, free trade was an absolute necessity. The West Indian plantocracy was naturally opposed to free trade. They had to be dealt with. They were dealt with by the method of destroying the basis of their power: slavery!

The American bourgeoisie had to go to war 25 years later with the American slave plantocracy in order to clear the way for the expansion and development of American Capitalism. This is pretty much accepted today by right wing historians.

What is frantically hidden is that while it was recognised that the abolition of slavery was a historical necessity for the further expansion of capitalism, the political realisation of that goal did not depend on intellectual understanding, but on the outcome of the clash of class interests both within the UK and in its colonies.

The argument about whether slavery should be abolished or when slavery should be abolished could have gone on for another generation. The decisive push toward Emancipation came from the movement of the slaves themselves.

The objective laws of capitalist development can only operate and be discerned in the subjective activity and struggles of the contending class forces in capitalist society.

The intervention of the slaves settled all debate and pushed the ruling classes to hasten the end of slavery. If they had not, the slaves inevitably would have. This perspective is useful in understanding the forces that led to the end of apartheid in South Africa.

The opening shot in the drama of the slaves intervention began in 1791 with the great Haitian Revolution which began only two years after the French Revolution. The significant thing about the revolution in Haiti is not so much that the slaves revolted. Slaves had always revolted.

The fundamental dynamic of West Indian history is to be found in the spiral of repression and resistance that continues to this day. The significance of the Haitian Revolution is that it succeeded; and in succeeding, opened a thirst for and an ideology of liberation that spread throughout the Caribbean.

The Haitian Revolution shattered, at least from an historical point of view, the myth of the docile negro; the myth of the intellectually, physically and morally inferior African.

The myth led to British philosopher David Hume, saying: I am apt to suspect the Negroes to be naturally inferior to the Whites. The myth led the third President of the USA Thomas Jefferson, who made so much noise about the rights of man to say: I advance it therefore as a suspicion only that the blacks are inferior to the whites in the endowment both of body and mind.

After the Haitian revolution, only pseudo-scientists and dishonest intellectuals like Trollope and Froudewho was so devastatingly dealt with by John Jacob Thomas, the Afro-Trinidadian linguist and educator in his book FROUDACITY, published in the 1880scould still argue with equanimity that Blacks were an inferior people.

What the revolution in Haiti did was to spawn a series of never ending revolts throughout the Caribbean that convinced the colonial authorities that it was time for slavery to go.

In the words of one historian: Economic change, the decline of the monopolists, the development of capitalism had now reached their completion in the determination of the slaves themselves to be free.

Lets sum up what led to emancipation. In the late 15th and early 16th century, the West Indies became the sugar pots of Britain and Western Europe. Sugar was produced by slave labour which was procured on the coasts of West Africain the process destroying many societies and civilisations which were as developed as those of Western Europe.

The trade in slaves, the production of sugar by slave labour and the trade in sugar gave rise to astronomical profits for British capitalists. So invaluable were the West Indian sugar islands to mid-eighteenth century Europe that at the end of the seven years war between Britain and France in 1763, which Britain won, the French were quite content to let the British keep Canada in exchange for Guadeloupe.

The very prosperity that slavery brought to British capital was to eventually make slavery redundant.

The capital accumulated throughout slavery led to investments in science, technology and engineering, created the machine-based industrial revolution, speeded up the process of proletarianisation of the British rural population, changed the social structure of Britain and prepared British capitalism for its task of bringing the whole world into the capitalist market.

In the process slavery became obsoletean historical anachronism.

But not because a system has become historically unnecessary means it will fall of its own accord. The slave did not wait for it to fall; they battered the slave system with continuous insurrection.

The British Government took readings and instituted Emancipation from above rather than afford more Haitis in the Caribbean. That is how Emancipation came about.

What we must now look at are its lessons. The abolition of slavery did not mean an end to the exploitation of labour; it merely changed its form. When the masses revolted, Emancipation was conceded, but the plantation system survivedand indeed expanded on the basis of indentured labour, which carried forced labour into the twentieth century.

Emancipation did not remove colonialism, did not put power in the hands of the working people. In l937, when the wage slaves revolted, the colonial authorities conceded limited rights to the people; but the cause of the revolt, the exploitation of labour by capital, continued.

When the people of the Caribbean demanded independence and control over their destinies after the Second World War, we were diverted with political independence under the rule of middle-class professionals who implicitly supported capitalism.

When, in 1970, the working people demanded economic independence, an end to racism and power to the people, the ruling classes in T&T, who are allied with international capitalism, gave us localisation and state capitalism. The exploitation of Labour by Capital remains.

Emancipation, while carrying society to a more advanced level, did not solve the basic contradiction of West Indian history: the capital-labour contradiction. It simply placed it on a new footing.

The resolution of that contradiction lies solely in the hands of the modern working class. That is our historic mission.

Let us make haste and complete the unfinished revolution that our ancestors began.

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Kangalee: Why capitalism is the new slavery; and emancipation revolution remains unfinished - Wired868

Professor Linda WynnPhoto: Eric England

From its launch in the mid-1800s, the womens suffrage movement was fraught with challenges and controversy, as most pivotal moments in history often are. But with Harry Burns tie-breaking vote, cast on Aug. 18, 1920, none of those troubles mattered anymore at least not to many of the women whod finally witnessed their wildest dreams made manifest. Indeed, while awash in the victorious glow of the franchise, those women mostly white used their pens to draft a version of womens history that was formed in their own image. In the process, they erased the Black women who made it all possible.

Professor Linda Wynn of Fisk University has worked tirelessly to tell the stories of too many Black women whose efforts were directly responsible for the 19th Amendments ratification, but whose names have been largely lost to time. For those women, gaining the right to vote wasnt about wresting independence from an abusive husband or an overbearing father. It was a small but mighty step toward equality for the entire Black race, the opportunity to advocate for neglected Black children and marginalized Black men men who were still struggling to cast their own ballots. In a phone call with the Scene, Wynn discussed the complicated but constructive relationship between Black and white suffragists. In so doing, she also reminds us of the dangers in whitewashing history.

Initially, the suffrage movement was closely linked to the abolition of slavery. Can you talk about the link between Black rights and womens rights?

When you look at social movements, what you find is that womens movements generally come after social movements pushed forth by, and for, African Americans. You have the abolitionist movement, that starts around the 1830s, maybe just a little bit before. Then you have a womens movement that starts, and you can look at Seneca Falls in 1848. If you look at the modern civil rights movement what comes after the modern civil rights movement? The womens movement. And I think you can probably even take that into the present day. Everybody thinks Black Lives Matter started last year, or the year before. But it started a little bit before the #MeToo movement.

I think [the womens suffrage movement followed the abolition movement] because women were second-class citizens too. They were going to bat for another suppressed group, and they realized, Well, Im just as suppressed as they are. So they decided, Im out here fighting for that cause, but Im suppressed, so Im going to fight for womens rights too.

But there were white women who didnt agree with the 15th Amendment because it gave Black men the right to vote before the white women received it.

Yes. That is the amendment that, as you said, splintered Black women and white women or further enhanced the dissent. For example, I think Susan B. Anthony made the statement, I would cut off my right arm, this right arm of mine, before I will answer the ballot for the Negro and not for the woman.

As they moved toward the first part of the 20th century, white women were trying to gain the right to vote, and they would have been looking at Southern states remember, most of the Southern states had not voted to ratify the 19th Amendment. So in order for them to get those states on board, they had to sort of follow the principles of the lost cause; they had to look at the South and its ubiquitous racial climate. And it became a big problem.

So how did it happen that Tennessee a Southern, former slave-holding state became the last state to ratify the 19th Amendment?

It was a quid pro quo. Suffragists wanted as many people as possible to support the amendment, and there was a fairly large contingent of Blacks in Nashville who were for it.

Youve got the womens clubs for example, the National Association of Colored Women was formed in 1896 by Mary Church Terrell, a native Tennessean, and the organizations first convention was held in Nashville. You have Fisk University; you have Tennessee State; you have Meharry; and you have a well-rounded Black middle class. Booker T. Washington spent a lot of time here because he was friends with [Black politician and civil rights activist] J.C. Napier. By 1904 you had [One Cent Savings Bank], a Black-owned bank that is still the oldest Black bank in the nation. So you have all of these coalitions being built in Nashville. Then there was [educator and activist] Frankie Pierce and [physician] Dr. Mattie Coleman, who registered 2,500 Black women to vote [in the 1919 municipal election].

White women were not unaware of what was going on in the Black community, and they realized that they needed the organizational skills of Black women. They knew they had an interest, those women had an interest, and maybe those interests were one and the same. So while we may not affiliate socially, we can work together politically because we have the same goal.

Right. And the interests of Black women extended beyond the right to vote.

What Coleman and Pierce really wanted was a vocational school for delinquent girls. Prior to them having the vocational schools, Black girls that got into trouble were basically thrown in jails with adults. So that was the deal that they struck with the white women.

If you look at that 1920 convention [the first of the Tennessee League of Women Voters, held in May], Pierce used that opportunity to lay out her vision for linking women together across racial lines. When she spoke, the question was, What will the Negro woman do with the vote? And she gave them a very clear and concise answer. She said, Yes, were going to work with you, and we will stand by you, white women. Were going to make you proud of us; were going to help you help us and yourself.

Do you think that the school took precedence over the vote since in many areas, especially in the South restrictions like literacy tests made both the 15th and 19th amendments largely theoretical for Black voters?

I dont think the school took precedence over the right to vote. I think that was the deal that Coleman and Pierce were making. I think oftentimes we dont realize, as a populace, that your vote is your voice in terms of policy. Those who you send to state legislatures, to the U.S. Senate, to the U.S. House of Representatives, and to local offices enact the laws that ultimately become policy. I think Coleman and Pierce understood that, and I think they were looking at potential policy. They knew that if they wanted a school and a state department of child welfare, that had to come through a legislative process. So Pierce was telling white women what [she and Dr. Coleman] wanted. We will help you [gain the right to vote] if you will help us do that.

Black women were so critical to the ratification of the 19th Amendment, but their stories have been largely forgotten. Why is it important, 100 years later, that people fully understand their role?

When you look at those who were doing the writing about the suffrage movement, especially from an academic point of view, it was basically white writers. And Im going to say what I say to my students sometimes: White folks dont have to stop and think about you. They dont think about whether somebody else was involved. Theyre busy trying to narrate their story from their perspective, and their perspective is very narrow. They dont know the conversation Black parents have to have with their children about what to do if the police stop you. Whites dont say to their children, If you go in the store, dont put your hands on anything that youre not going to buy, because the floor walker will say youre stealing. Thats what I mean when I say they dont think about you. They have the privilege of not thinking about you. So I think its important to know about the involvement of Black women simply because Black women were involved.

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Black Women Played a Pivotal Role in the Suffrage Movement - Nashville Scene

This story is part of The Confederate Reckoning, a collaborative project of USA TODAY Network newsrooms across the South to examine the legacy of the Confederacy and its influence on systemic racism today.

The white men stand, immortalized in metal and stone, in parks, public squares and the halls of government.

Statues of prominent figures in the Confederacy are a common sight in the South. But the visibility of their monuments often belie the way their lives and legacies are obscured by myth.

Like other symbols of the Confederacy, such memorials have been defended for generations as pieces of Southern heritage, or simply uncontroversial artifacts of history. But for many people, they are ever-present reminders of racial discrimination and violent oppression that has never gone away.

The removal of statues of Confederate leaders as well as those of others who promoted or profited from slavery and racism has become a focal point of calls for a true confrontation with racial inequality in the United States. As part of that conversation,USA TODAY Network newsrooms across the South are taking a critical look at several such figures to understand who they were and what they believed.

***

For more than four decades, a bronzesculpture of thebust of Confederate Lt. Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest has been featured prominently in the Tennessee state Capitol.

A statue portraying Forrest was one of three removed in Memphis in late 2017 afterthe city found a loopholeto legally take down the monument that residents widely agreed should not stand in a public park.

But as the fate of the Capitol bust hangs in the balance pending a state commission meeting later this year and after years of debate among Black and white lawmakers, and Democratsand Republicans who was Forrest and why is he so controversial more than 150 years after the Civil War?

Among the most notorious parts of Forrest's legacy is his reported involvement leading Confederate soldiers in the West Tennessee Battle of Fort Pillow in April 1864, which has commonly become known as a massacre of surrendered Union troops, many of whom were Black.

Primary documents from a variety of sources refute argumentsmade by some Forrest apologists including some who have raised the possibility during conversations at the legislature about the bronze bust and Forrest's legacy that he was not responsible for the mass killings at Fort Pillow.

"We've been going through these excuses for Bedford Forrest for the longest while, and none of them are holding up under scrutiny," said Richard Blackett, a history professor at Vanderbilt University.

In 1868, Forrest gave an interview with a Cincinnati Commercial reporter that was widely published in newspapers around the country. In the interview, he said the Ku Klux Klan had "no doubt" been a benefit in Tennessee. While he denied being an official member, he said he was part of the organization "in sympathy," and later when Forrest testified before Congress about the KKK he eventually disclosed that he was familiar with rituals and practices.

Repeatedly in the 1868 interview, Forrest tried to suggest that he had more disdain for white Radical Republicans and Northerners trying to infiltrate Southern politics than he did African Americans, but he still remained fiercely opposed at that point to Blacks gaining the right to vote or having equal standing in society.

"I am opposed to it under any and all circumstances," Forrest said.

"And here I want you to understand distinctly I am not an enemy to the negro.We want him here among us; he is the only laboring class we have."

***

Jefferson Davis was a man of many words. He literally wrote volumes during his lifetime and spent the last decade of his life writing about the history of the Confederacyandan in-depth analysis of the Civil War.

But Davis (1808-1889) most notably is known for his role withthe Confederate States of America, of which he was named its first and only president.

Susannah Ural,professor of history and co-director of the Dale Center for the Study of War and Society at the University of Southern Mississippi, said Davis seemed to be a natural choice for president of the Confederacy.

Although he did not support secession, he felt duty-bound to represent his state, which voted to secede, and the new government to which he was appointed president. However, he also believed secession was a right afforded tothe states.

Davis wrote in his book,"The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government," that slavery "was not the cause of the war, but an incident."

In his preface to the bookhe said,"the States had never surrendered their sovereignty," and that states should be allowed to make their own decisions regarding slavery.

Davis saidthe federal government was usurping its authority by forcing unwanted laws on the states, first and foremost the abolition of slavery, which was an integral part of the Southern states' agricultural economy.

"(Slavery is) the primary cause, but it's not the only cause," Ural said. "When you talk about states' rights, when you talk about what powers the federal government should have versus state authority, one of the centralissues to states' rightswas the right to slavery."

However, she said, determining the Civil War happened because of slavery isn't entirely accurate.

"There's never one cause ofa war, and things thatmotivatepeople to fight in a war change over the course of time," she said. "To boil the Civil War down to slavery is problematic, but the bigger problem was that for decades, we just kind of pushed slavery aside and didn't really talk about it."

***

Even in his last days, Robert E. Lee, the Confederate general, had already become a myth a myth that gave a defeated South something to cling to; a means of understanding its defeat.

In 1865, Lee surrendered to Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Courthouse in Virginia. His exploits during the war and his canonization by defeated Southerners have rendered him among the most famous losers in military history.

To Emory Thomas, who wrote "Robert E. Lee: A Biography,"published in 1995, historical evidence shows Lee was a man who lived by a strict moral code, a sense of honor and duty; a great soldier and engineer who rose to the challenges he faced.

He was also a slave-owner and a white supremacist. While Lee believed slavery was morally wrong, he did not believe the abolition of it should come through the works of man, but, instead, the will of God.

In an interview, Thomas referenced a famous letter Lee wrote about slavery in 1857. In it, Lee distilled his views as a slave owner on race.

"In this enlightened age, there are few I believe, but what will acknowledge, that slavery as an institution, is a moral & political evil in any Country. It is useless to expatiate on its disadvantages. I think it, however, a greater evil to the white man than to the black race," Lee wrote. "The blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, socially & physically. The painful discipline they are undergoing, is necessary for their instruction as a race, & I hope will prepare & lead them to better things. How long their subjugation may be necessary is known & ordered by a wise Merciful Providence. Their emancipation will sooner result from the mild & melting influence of Christianity, than the storms & tempests of fiery Controversy."

In that letter, and other moments throughout his life, including testimony before Congress after the Civil War, Lee displayed views on race that Thomas described as compatible with social Darwinism a worldview that arose later in the 19th century and early 20th that Western governments, particularly that of the U.S., used to justify colonization, war and imperialism.

In 1862, he wouldfree his father-in-law's slaves, as required by the man's will, a matter of weeks before the Emancipation Proclamation took effect.

"He anticipated social Darwinism In the evolutionary pyramid of human beings, I think he saw white folks like himself at the top. And African Americans somewhere down the ranks, above American Indians whom he really thought were dreadful," Thomas said.

***

Known as the "Boy Hero of the Confederacy," Sam Davis' story was resurrected from obscurity in the late 1800s by journalist Archibald Cunningham, founder of the Confederate Veteran magazine. There are monuments erected in Sam Davis'honor. His boyhood home is on the National Register of Historic Places and operates as a museum.

Barely 21 in 1863, Davis was hanged for his refusal to give Union Army Gen. Grenville Dodge the names of Confederate spies. "I would rather die a thousand deaths than betray a friend," Davis said moments before he was hanged on the Public Square in Pulaski, Tennessee.

Davis wasnt a boy, but a young man whose bravery is immortalized as a symbol of the Confederacy and the Lost Cause, said Brenden Martin, a Middle Tennessee State University history professor. The underpinning of the Lost Cause was that the Confederacy was "right all along" and had a right to secede from the United States.

"All youve got to do is look at the (Confederate) Articles of Secession. The people who brought about the secession (from the United States) made it clear it was about preserving the institution of slavery," Martin said.

Slavery was the backbone of the Southern economy, Martin said.

And the Davisfamily plantation was steeped in that economy.

Data from the American Battlefield Trust notes that Charles and Jane Davis, Sam Davis' parents, originally owned a830-acre plantation located in Smyrna. By 1860, there were 51 enslaved people owned by the Davis family. Sam Davis also had his own slave, named Coleman Davis,who was gifted to him when he was a boy.

***

Anarcha was at least 17 when the doctor started experimenting on her. The year before, she suffered terrible complications during a 72-hour labor that opened a hole between her bladder and vagina and left her incontinent.

The man who held Anarcha in bondage outside Montgomery sent her to Dr. J. Marion Sims sometime in 1845. She was one of at least seven enslaved women sent to Sims by white slaveholders. They had the same condition as Anarcha, known as a vesicovaginal fistula.

Sims wanted to find a way to address it. From 1845 to 1849, the enslaved women became experiments.

By Sims own account, Anarcha underwent 30 operations as Sims tried different approaches to repairing the fistula.

These women could not say no. Neither Sims nor the white men who held them against their will showed interest in their opinions. Deirdre Cooper Owens, a professor of medical history at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and author of "Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology," said if the women protested, they "could get beaten, or they could get ignored."

Anesthesia, Cooper Owens said, was not in wide use at this time.

Despite that, a statue of Sims unveiled in 1939 remains on the grounds of the Alabama Capitol in Montgomery. A bust of Sims also stands in Columbia, South Carolina. New York City officials removed a statue of Sims in Manhattan in 2018.

***

Andrew Johnson considered himselfa champion of the common man but only when those common men were white.

The 17th president of the United Stateswas a common man himself. Born into poverty in 1808, he escaped indentured servitude in North Carolinabefore moving to Greeneville, Tennessee, where he worked as a tailor,owned slaves and launched his political career as a Democrat.

When President Abraham Lincoln died from an assassin's bullet just six weeks after Johnson took office, a fractured countryfound its stubborn new president lacked Lincoln's ability to navigate theend of the Civil War with nuance and sensitivity.

Although Johnson had helped Lincoln end slavery across the land, he nowclashed with the Republican-controlled Congress by planting himself firmly in the way of rights for newly freed slaves. He soon grew widelyunpopular and became the first president ever to be impeached.

Johnson believed in what's called "herrenvolk democracy" the idea that the lowest white man in the social hierarchy should beabove the highest Black man, said Aaron Astor, ahistory professor at Maryville College who researches the Civil War-era South.

In 1860, the year before the Civil War broke out, Johnson said white Southernersfelt so threatened by the prospectof Black freedom that poor men would unite withslave ownersto exterminateslaves rather than see them freed.

***

Albert Pike is a name well-known in Arkansas history as both a Civil War general of Native American troops and a newspaper editor.

Although Pike was known nationally after the Civil War for his involvement with the Freemasons, he gained national attention again on June 19, 2020, when a statue dedicated to him in Washington, D.C.,was toppled by a group of Black Lives Matter demonstrators. The monument to Pike was the only one of a Confederate Civil War general in the District of Columbia.

Pike was a Boston transplant to Arkansas who initially resisted secession, but followed the lead of his fellow Arkansans in fully supporting the Confederacy and even servedas an appointed brigadier general in at least one battle in Arkansas.

By the end of his life, Pike had risen among the highest ranks of the Freemasons.

Before the Civil War, he had moved from the Fort Smith area to Little Rock to pursue a career as a journalist. He eventually became editor and owner of The Advocate where he reported on the Supreme Court of Arkansas.

When the Civil War broke out in 1861, Pike was called up to be a brigadier general over a troop made up of several Native American Tribes. He was cited as being an advocate for Native Americans and the wrongs they suffered at the hands of the white man.

When it came to African Americans, however, Pikes view of slavery was one that claimed it was a "necessary evil." He claimed that slaves would not be able to hold any other job and that they were treated well by their masters. He even admitted to having his own slave for "necessary" work.

***

Gen. Alfred Mouton has become one of Acadianas most polarizing historical figures. His statue, standing on city property in the heart of downtown Lafayette, has been the focus of public outcry, protest and legal battles for decades.

As support is increasing to remove the statue, most of the controversy over Mouton has focused on the fact that he owned Black peopleas slaves and fought for white supremacy during the Deep South's most oppressive era.

While Mouton is hailed by some as a hero from Lafayette's oldest family who fought to defend his hometown from Union forces during the Civil War, the famous son of former Gov. Alexandre Mouton helped wage another civil war here.

Mouton, along with his father, trained the "Vigilante Committee" in Lafayette Parish, a group that would carry out their own form of violent justice against Black residentsthrough whippings, expulsions and lynchings.

From the late 1850s to the beginning of the Civil War in 1861, Mouton-backed vigilantes fought against other groups in Lafayette Parish's own civil war.

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This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Confederate monuments: What the men honored by statues did and believed

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Confederate monuments: What the men honored by statues did and believed - Gadsden Times