Category Archives: Abolition Of Work

The Future isMs.is an ongoing series of news reports by young feminists. This seriesis made possible by a grant fromSayItForward.orgin support of teen journalists and the series editor, Katina Paron.

Sarvani Kunapareddys dream of going into the medical field after college was halted by the green card backlog.

The 17-year-old, alongside one million other immigrants, awaits for permanent residency from a lagging, 1990s-established quota system that leaves immigrants with advanced degrees in limbo for 151 years, according to the CATO Institute. A Senate bill could relocate unallocated visas towards health care workers, but teens like Kunapareddywho are under their parents statusare plagued with doubled tuition fees and ineligibility for financial aid because they are considered international students in college applications.

Its not just me, but theres so many people in this boat. Id say just people arent talking about it though, Kunapareddy said. Its not the front cover kind of thing.

Before COVID-19 occupied headlines, 100,000 letters were sent to Congress by the Skilled Immigrants in America (SIIA). As an SIIA advocate, Kunapareddy empowered her peers to write letters detailing the unfairness of the immigration system.

As a result, Utah Sen. Mike Lee introduced the Fairness for High Skilled Act in 2019. The proposed bill would abolish the per-country cap for employment-based categories and increase the per-country cap for family-sponsored immigration.

While it does not increase the amount of immigrants allowed in the country, the abolition of the per-country limit will provide a more fair opportunity for the immigrants affected by the backlog.

Here atMs., our team is continuing to report throughthis global health crisisdoing what we can to keep you informed andup-to-date on some of the most underreported issues of thispandemic.Weask that you consider supporting our work to bring you substantive, uniquereportingwe cant do it without you. Support our independent reporting and truth-telling for as little as $5 per month.

Through advocacy, Kunapareddy takes any opportunity to educate. In February 2018, Kunapareddy traveled to St. Louis to meet with then-state Senator Claire McCaskill, propelled by her data that captured how the backlog disadvantages skilled workers and students like her.

I try to stay cool-headed and remember that you cant control what other people think; you can only control what your actions are, she said.

She models herself after her mother, Krishna, an independent advocate who immigrated alone from India in 2006 for her masters degree in urban planning at University of Texas at Arlington, obtaining an H-1B visa, rather than a dependent on her husbands. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services states about 80 percent of H-1B holders are male.

She said it is difficult for backlogged families to advocate for their unstable residency status.

Even though there are people going through the issue, they dont want to accept it, Krishna said.

As a green card applicant under her parents, Kunapareddy is forced to reapply as an adult in four years if her parents are still stuck in the backlog. If she doesnt, she could face deportation.

Some people have been denied visas and stuck outside the country separated from their families, said Brent Renison, an immigration lawyer based out of Portland, Ore.

SIIA advocate, Prasenjit Shil, worries after he obtains residency, his nine-year-old son will face his own complications.

The way math stacks up, looks like Im not gonna get my green card until my son becomes 21 years old, Shil said.

Once a medical school hopeful, Kunapareddy set her eyes on computer science instead. University of Missouri-Kansas City, which used to be her college of interest, does not admit international students into their M.D. program.

Even people who are affected are like Oh its not a big deal, But in the end, its a very big deal, Kunapareddy said. Its going to affect how you live your life.

The Future is Ms. is committed to amplifying the voices of young women everywhere. Share one of your own stories about your path to empowerment at SayItForward.org.

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Teens Demand Action for Immigrants Halted by Green Card Backlog - Ms. Magazine

You are trapped in a net cast by a white man reeking of rum and smoke, and then dragged miles to the coast. You are processed, bound into chains, and led to vast wooden ships. You are packed into the hold and spend months on the ocean. You have little to eat, little to drink, little air to breathe. All around you there is coughing and fever. On deck, they make you dance to keep your muscles taut, to preserve your price at the market. If you resist, they will beat you; if you die, they will throw you overboard.

In time, you see land. You are paraded on the dockside, prodded and inspected. They feel your arms; they look at your teeth. One man says Yes. You are loaded on to a cart and driven over rough land along dirt tracks until you arrive at a house and fields. You suffer searing pain as a burning iron pushes into your skin. You are taken to a shed and thrown to the floor. You collapse and sleep, but the sun rises and then you work. You have not done this work before, but if you do it badly, they will whip you. If you complain, they will whip you again. If you refuse to work, or you fight back, they will kill you in front of the others. So, you work.

This was the life to which British planters and merchants subjected millions of African people from the late 16th century to the 1830s. These are the truths of slavery within the British empire. And yet, as Nicholas Rogers shows in his micro-history, Britons were capable of even worse.

The antagonist of Rogerss tale is John Kimber, a veteran of the slave trade who in 1791 skippered the Recovery, a near-200-ton ship, from Bristol to the slaving coast of west Africa. Kimbers first major crime on this voyage came at New Calabar in the Niger Delta. On finding that the locals would not provide him with either slaves or water, Kimber and his fellow British captains two more from Bristol, three from Liverpool bombarded the town. As Rogers tells us, the British sailors believed that a good volley of cannonballs would resolve outstanding contracts and force down the price of slaves. This prediction proved correct.

Back in London, the news of the attack caught the attention of the group of philanthropists who, since 1787, had been campaigning for the abolition of the trade that Kimber practised, under the political leadership of William Wilberforce. For Wilberforce, Kimbers actions were nothing more than bloody and inhuman butchery. It was during his brief investigation of the New Calabar outrage that Wilberforce learned of the murder onboard the Recovery that dominates Rogerss book.

It is trite to describe life on a slave ship as hell; as the historian Marcus Rediker has put it, there is no way to quantify horror. Even so, Rogers gives vital, awful details of the conditions that prevailed on British slave ships. There was piss and shit and blood, and plenty else besides. John Newton, the clergyman who wrote Amazing Grace and a former, repentant slave trader, recalled that when the women and girls are taken on board a ship, naked, trembling, terrified they are exposed to the wanton rudeness of white savages. He lamented how one of his sailors had seduced a slave down into the room and lay with her brutelike in view of the whole quarter deck. The former slave merchant and adventurer Olaudah Equiano had also witnessed sailors gratify[ing] their brutal passions with females not 10 years old.

Kimbers victim in this case was a girl only slightly older. Since her enslavement and imprisonment on the Recovery, the girl had been raped, brutalised and inflicted with a severe case of gonorrhoea; of course, the blame for the spread of the disease was attached to the African women on board, not to the British sailors. When the girl would not dance with the other enslaved Africans, Kimber flogged her daily with whips and ropes. Soon, she was struggling to walk, suffering from a crooked knee. This presented Kimber with a problem: if the girl was infirm, she would fetch a much lower price when the ship docked at Grenada.

Kimbers solution was atrocious even by slaving standards. From the mizzen-mast of the ship he strung the girl up by her bad leg, then her other leg, and then by her arms. In each position he whipped her. The ordeal lasted half an hour, after which the girl crawled to the hatch, fell down the stairs into the hold, collapsed, convulsed and died. The bitch is sulky, Kimber concluded. There is no record of her name, her story, or her family; accordingly, and disturbingly, she is referred to as No-name throughout this book.

After denouncing Kimber in parliament, Wilberforce quickly brought charges of murder before the High Court of Admiralty, which was the only place to try a man for alleged crimes committed on the high seas. It is the result of this trial and its aftermath, rather than Kimbers brutality, that say most about Britains historical attitude towards slavery.

With the slaveholding West India Interest mustering an array of witnesses who spoke to Kimbers supposedly good character, the judge, Sir James Marriott, simply stopped the trial and directed the jury to find the accused not guilty. Even more perversely, Marriott immediately charged the prosecutions witnesses, two members of Kimbers crew who had testified against the captain, with perjury: one of them was convicted and sentenced to transportation.

As for Kimber, he tried to sue Wilberforce for damages but contented himself with lurking menacingly outside the abolitionists London home; only the intervention of the Earl of Sheffield put an end to the stalking. Growling, Kimber returned to the slave trade.

How could the British judicial system acquit a man of such crimes? How far did Kimbers monstrosity characterise British traders overall? Indeed, if Britain was the liberal bastion of abolitionism and philanthropy that is often imagined, how could such a killing not have caused a greater furore?

As ever, context is everything. The Haitian revolution had begun in 1791, jeopardising the future of slave colonies across the Caribbean; by the next year, the French Terror was in train; and the slave trade was still a vital artery running through the core of the British empire. To chastise Kimber and to prosecute men of his ilk was considered dangerous commercially, politically and strategically. These were the same concerns that would forestall abolition until 1807.

This was the cold and callous pragmatism that informed so much of British imperial policy; there was no room for sentiment here, and this is the world that Rogers exposes in recounting the death of a teenage girl. It is this history and not the triumphalist accounts of abolition and later emancipation that we must heed; it is this history that reveals the darker, shameful, but essential truths of our imperial past.

Michael Taylors The Interest: How the British Establishment Resisted the Abolition of Slavery will be published by Bodley Head in November. Murder on the Middle Passage is published by Boydell & Brewer (16.99).

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Murder on the Middle Passage by Nicholas Rogers review slavery and the British empire - The Guardian

Featured photo: Activist Brittany Battle speaks at a Triad Abolition Project and Unity Coalition event. (photo by Michaela Ratliff)

Brittany Battles parents still laugh about the time she led a walk-out in her eighth grade class.

I felt like my teacher was being unjust, so I inspired my classmates to walk out of this mans class, Battle says in an interview.

She has had an eye towards social justice for as long as she can remember, aligning herself with Black Lives Matter Winston-Salem shortly after moving there last year. Her involvement with the activist group recently drew her to John Nevilles case.

I cant breathe, inmate John Neville repeatedly told Forsyth County detention officers as they placed him in a prone restraint. He would later die from a brain injury caused by the restraint. Many people were outraged that the Dec. 4, 2019 death was not made public until July 8, 2020, when Forsyth County District Attorney Jim ONeill announced five detention officers and a nurse were being charged with involuntary manslaughter for the death of Neville in a press conference.

Black Lives Matter Winston-Salem called an emergency meeting and then gathered outside of the Forsyth County Law Enforcement Detention Center that same day to protest the lack of timely communication to the public and the case of police brutality. The crowd of protesters erupted into cries of, Let them go! as five protesters were arrested for leaving the sidewalk and walking into the street. Battle was one of them.

She expressed that law enforcement held positive attitudes during the local protests for the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, saying that they rode bikes alongside them and blocked off streets for their safety.

Oh, those are bad cops in Louisville, those are bad cops in Minneapolis, she predicted the police said then. But when we start talking about bad cops in Winston-Salem and Forsyth county, the light is shone in their own house. They didnt like that.

They came out there with zip ties, she recalls. They came out there with an LRAD, which is a long-range acoustic device. Its frequently used against protesters. It can make them deaf or hard of hearing. Its supposed to be inconspicuous because people think its a speaker. They admitted it was an LRAD in the paperwork of one of my comrades who was arrested. They said they warned us via LRAD not to be in the street..

And yet, Battle remained fearless.

Theres no way in hell Im gonna let them intimidate me, she says.

Battle felt her arrest was intentional, saying police targeted those they recognized from being organizers of protests in the city. The drive to continue fighting even harder for social justice after her arrest wasnt the only thing she left the protest with. She now flaunts a black splint on her right wrist as a result of the recent arrest as she waits for her follow up appointment with an orthopedic surgeon to examine the extent of her injury.

After I got released, I went to the ER first for the wrist injury they did to me, she said, and then I went right to an organizing meeting after that. There was no stopping.

In addition to amplifying the actions of Black Lives Matter Winston-Salem, Battle is affiliated with the Triad Abolition Project, a newly-formed grassroots collective of people interested in sharing ideas and resources about abolishing the carceral system, as well as educating others about the meaning of abolition. The Triad Abolition Project, in partnership with the Unity Coalition, another newly formed group in Winston-Salem with similar objectives, organized Occupy the Block Winston-Salem, an ongoing peaceful resistance in Bailey Park which started on July 15. The group intends to hold a protest every day until the four main demands of the Triad Abolition Project are met which include: responding to all questions posed by the Triad Abolition Project and the Unity Coalition, banning the use of prone restraint on any civilian, incarcerated or not, sick or not, notifying the public of any death involving an officer or deputy immediately, and dismissing all charges against protestors from July 8th and 9th arrests.

An activist on the streets and in the classroom, Battle is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at Wake Forest University. She earned her masters in African-American studies from Temple University in 2012, and her PhD in Sociology from Rutgers University New Brunswick in 2019. She finds it difficult to balance her time between teaching and fighting racial injustice as her activism tends to infiltrate her classroom.

In spring I taught a class, Social Justice in the Social Sciences, she said. We talked about how social justice shows up in social theories, social research methods, and actual activist movements. I teach from a Black feminist perspective. I create syllabi that highlights the voices of Black women and Black queer folks.

She says she values elevating the voices of minorities as she was also a member of the NAACP and the Black Student Union during her undergraduate years.

Outside of activism and teaching, she can be found creating keepsake baby quilts for her friends who are new moms. She also loves to sew and create jewelry. When social-justice work gets to be overwhelming, she escapes to what she calls her happy place the beach. She also values relaxation exercises like meditation and sage burning to stay grounded, activities she incorporated into Occupy the Block.

We have people who will be coming out to lead a yoga session, she says. Every evening we have a vigil. Were out here burning sage and incense and stuff so were really taking the spiritual part of it seriously as well because this is a lot to be out here twelve hours a day. Weve gotta make sure people are taking care of themselves spiritually, mentally, and emotionally.

Battle is okay with the fact that her ultimate vision abolishing the carceral state will likely not happen in her lifetime, but that doesnt mean her efforts towards it will stop.

My real motivation is that my freedom and liberation is tied up in everybody elses, she says. If there are some of us out there that arent free, none of us are. Thats what inspires me to keep doing this type of work.

Learn more about the Triad Abolition Project by visiting their website at triadabolitionproject.org.

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Fearless activist Brittany Battle: Theres no way in hell Im gonna let them intimidate me. - Triad City Beat

The streets are filled with protestors led by the Movement for Black Lives, and their calls for police de-funding, the abolition of the prison-industrial complex, and abolition of the principles of white supremacy in many other institutions and disciplines are spreading like wildfire, empowering people to act in different ways and directions in their immediate surroundings, in their workplaces and in their organizations. Id suggest that this situation as a whole should be viewed not only as the result of actions, but also of inaction in other words, of the potentialities opened up when, due to the pandemic, so many people have found themselves unconstrained by their ordinary positions of productivity.

Over the last few weeks, weve been experiencing something close to a general strike, perhaps the closest we or any of our generation have come to know. This is a radical moment, and at this point in time we should think about the picket line, and act to create it in different areas of activities. Such is the Hippocratic oath for architects not to build prisons, or the Tamara Lanier lawsuit to free the daguerreotype of Renty Taylor, her ancestor (seized from him when he was enslaved) from Harvard University and the Peabody Museum, or the call to stop circulate images of sexual violence against the bodies of their ancestors issued by Cases Rebelles, or the calls to stop circulating the video of the assassination of George Floyd, after millions were already on the streets and their voices demanding in uncompromising way accountability and police abolition had already become the placeholder for evidence that should no longer be posted. Photography though, is not about the world in which people go on strike, photography ought to continue to draw its picket line.

Photographic abolitionist imaginary cannot start or end with photographs of people on the streets. Rather than saying that public demonstrations are the ultimate manifestation of the body politic, we need to remind ourselves that the body politic is always there (even though many of its members are not be recognized as part of it) and it always manifests itself in different ways, many of them distinct from public protest. When its members are not taking to the streets together, the body politic manifests itself through its policed patterns of power relations. In line with the institutionally regulated forms and formations, members of the body politic affirm themselves in the positions that they are socialized or coerced into inhabiting, separated and classified along race, gender and/or class dividing lines, or through what I have called elsewhere the resolution of the suspect, or into the figure of the unmarked Man, the ultimate bearer of rights under the regime of white supremacy. Even in ordinary times, the streets are always filled with people, but their presence is marshaled into prescribed, familiar flows and arrangements. The variety of their assigned positions, constrained by clear rules of mobility and immobility, ensures that the relentless movement of extraction which simultaneously yields accumulation and dispossession, production and consumption will not allow this differential body politic to get out of control. It is this relentless movement of racialized capital that the pandemic has, to an extent, brought to a halt. Just to be clear I want to stress here that a stop has not been put to racism itself, but rather to much of the production and consumption with which it is intertwined. In this space that was open, activities may not resume in the same way to serve the racialized capital.

The pandemic has led to a partial withdrawal from labor. However, in and of itself, the pandemic is not a strike. Being on strike is the imposition of the condition under which the meanings of a cessation of labor that were formerly foreclosed become imaginable again. The policies of lockdown, quarantine and social distancing, when combined with the undeniably insecure working conditions of those defined as essential workers (and who have been required to ignore or break all the rules others has had to follow to protect themselves from the virus) have created conditions similar to those of a strike. Both those who have had to keep working and those who have been forced to stop working are part of a potential general strike. The July 20th Strike for Black Lives is another rehearsal. This mass withdrawal from positions of work is, in itself, a surprising, unfamiliar and radical manifestation of the body politic that should not be dismissed, but rather paired with the presence of the masses on the streets. Once seen in combination with the withdrawal from work, these street mobilizations are no longer just another interval of public protest but, instead, become something greater.

As many have remarked, with the assassination of George Floyd and the disproportionate number of Black Americans killed by the pandemic, racism has been revealed as the meaning of the pandemic. And, no less importantly, the general strike has been revealed as the meaning of the unproductivity of the masses on the streets, dislocated from their usual operative positions in the body politic. It is this pairing that has made it possible for Black Lives Matters abolitionist grammar to be naturalized in the language of millions. This shift has been so sudden that white institutions have felt compelled to issue statements cleansing them of their white-supremacist language of universalism. Make no mistake, these statements are often disingenuous, belated, and insufficient. However, they can serve as important starting points. Once such statements are made public, those who work in these institutions are collectively afforded the power to strike, to push these words beyond the screen and to use them to transform the institution in question. If, when the movement began in 2013, Black Lives Matters abolitionist and reparative grammar was met with attempts to imperially universalize it (all lives matter), the many who follow the movement today understand that this grammar is the picket line that must not be crossed. In other words, the many who are simultaneously outside their ordinary positions as operators of imperial technologies as they protest on the streets are now practicing this abolitionist-reparative grammar as proper grammar. Otherwise, would Minneapolis City Council members have gone beyond calling for individual indictments and police accountability to advocate the total defunding of the citys police department? Would the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone have existed as a police-free neighbourhood where protestors could draft their uncompromising demands to end white supremacist school-to-prison pipelines?

BLM grammar consists in rejecting the universal political grammar that has, for centuries, normalized crimes against Black people and postponed the ever-pressing abolition of imperial racializing regimes. Abolitionist demands, agendas and imaginaries are neither new nor unprecedented: now, however, they enjoy the status of a general strike that allows them to be uttered as part of the only proper grammar. It is a grammar that enables language to become referential again, to make sense in a world shared by all members of the body politic. With BLM grammar, truth claims are once again possible: for example, that George Floyd is one of many Black people assassinated by police officers, and that the organization that has spawned and nurtured this mass killing for years should be abolished. Also, with BLM grammar, the temporality of truth claims is transformed: events that are described in universal grammar as sporadic, individual killings are recoded in BLM grammar as further episodes of a mass killing. The police assassination of George Floyd is not a dissociated event, but rather an instantiation of forms of violence that are reproduced across time and place, materialized in organizations such as the police and the military, whose shared logic is predicated on the existence of Black suspects whose lives can be snuffed out on the spot. The immediate and uncompromising attacks on public monuments are a symptom of this grammatical change. The toppling of statues of enslavers and colonizers puts a brusque end to exhausting and pointless conversations about what to do with such monuments, conversations that are predetermined by the grammar these monuments themselves impose. Once they come tumbling down, displaying a tiny portion of them for, lets say, educational purposes would require the difficult work of justifying the presentation of such a physical slur in a public space. Such a decision would also necessitate a display that revokes the power of the monument to insult its spectators. What these toppled monuments do, however, is to highlight one urgent question that BLM grammar poses: what are the less visible monuments of the white supremacy that these sculptures celebrate? This is a question Ill return to at the end of this essay.

There is another urgent matter that needs raising. The truth claims and anti-imperial temporality that have become possible once again through BLM grammar and the current general strike are not available everywhere. They are especially hard to pronounce and to hear in countries whose democratic regime is of the apartheid variety. Id like to talk about one such place, Palestine, crushed on a daily basis by the state of Israel. (And, yes, I do insist on referring to Israel as a democratic regime, since our current democracies are nothing to boast about, and are all in some way based on a differential body politic. But this is a topic for another conversation.) A few days after George Floyds execution by police, as large-scale protests started to spread around the world, an Israeli policeman murdered Eyad al-Halaq, a 32-year-old Palestinian man from Wadi al-Joz, Jerusalem. For the Israeli regime, the murder of al-Halaq was a litmus test: would it provoke a response similar in scale to that of the murder of George Floyd? Well, no, it didnt. So it was that Israel obtained yet further confirmation, both local and international, that it could go on brutalizing and extinguishing Palestinian lives as it has done incessantly since 1948, when its regime made disaster was installed. Those small protests that did take place were not seen as arising within the context of 72 years of unceasing struggle, but instead dismissed as a sign that only a few cranks could be bothered to say his name. The conclusion? Another Palestinians life could be taken. And so it was that, just a few weeks later, Ahmed Mustafa Erekat was assassinated at a checkpoint near Jerusalem. Like al-Halaq before him, he was forced to stop at the checkpoint whenever he moved from one point to another. However, on that particular day, he didnt stop properly, according to the apartheid grammar inherent in the Israeli checkpoint system. He was shot several times and then left to die, bleeding out on the road for more than an hour. Israeli hasbara (propaganda) denies the world the chance to hear the names of the Palestinians its soldiers and policemen execute.

In 2015, after the police murder of Michael Brown and the assassination of 2,252 Palestinians in Gaza by Israeli soldiers the previous year, Noura Erakat, a professor of human rights law at Rutgers University, joined with journalist Dena Takruri in an attempt to say their names in solidarity in the video from Ferguson to Gaza and vice versa.

Palestinians and Black Americans shared a common abolitionist grammar and could speak to each other in the same language. As Noura Erakat put it at the time, the point is not to compare oppression [] But the point here is that solidarity is a political decision on how to resist and how to survive in our respective fights for freedom. This week, on Democracy Now!, Noura Erakat spoke as loudly as possible the name of her cousin, Ahmed Mustafa Erekat, whose life was taken by the Israeli regime for its own self-preservation (between the sea and the river), in opposition to the body politic of those it governs half of whom are Palestinians. But even when Erekats name is heard, it is barely associated with the demands to abolish the regime that took his life in one of its routine operations. Unsurprisingly, though, these demands are heard by radical Black leaders who, from the very beginning, made Palestine part of the Black Lives Matter agenda. To understand why BLM grammar is rendered impossible in Israel, it is essential to remember that, under the Israeli regime, Palestinians are murdered not only as individual Palestinians like al-Halaq and Erekat were but also en masse, during countless raids and military campaigns, because they provide the enemy that justifies the Israeli armys very existence.

Consider, too, the inflated police and army budgets, much of which is spent on international propaganda, intimidating and silencing cultural actors and institutions with allegations of antisemitism, and interfering in different countries to promote the introduction of legislation that would make it illegal to say Palestinians names using BLM grammar: in other words, to publicly state that Israels apartheid regime is predicated on the principle that Palestinian lives do not matter. A propaganda that also includes the use of state-funded education that, over the course of 12 years, turns children into soldiers for whom Palestinian lives will not matter. A propaganda that likewise encompasses the hasbara fellowships awarded to students around the world to further the Israeli cause on university campuses internationally, in an attempt to police the discourse there on Israel/Palestine and abort any effort to issue truth claims about Palestine. The recent attack you mentioned on Achille Mbembe in Germany is one of the latest examples of these Israeli-orchestrated attacks on anyone who dares say that Palestinian Lives Matter.

So it is that going on strike requires those who embrace BLM grammar to also find ways to amplify truth claims about Palestine. Outrageously, grotesquely, or tragically, AIPAC (the American Israel Public Affairs Committee) has issued a statement of solidarity with BLM, as if it were not one of the primary pillars of support for the state that is a monument to white Jewish supremacy and that blocks the way to a BLM grammar to establish the picket line that should not be crossed. For abolition to be achieved, people will continue to improvise different forms of going on strike as part of the general abolitionist strike and will continue to find ways to put pressure on institutions not to make an exception of Palestine, to say that All Black Lives Matter. If BLM provides the grammar, then keeping the general strike alive requires the uncompromising use of this grammar in all the professions and trades that people carry on, especially once productive activities resume.

With millions on the streets undistracted by the categorical command to produce and consume, those who usually produce photos or ideas which also exist as commodities hold the power to refrain from or refuse to deliver certain goods. And they should, whenever doing so would mean crossing the picket line of All Black Lives Matter grammar. There are many different ways for people to join the strike and render legible the complicity between the white institutions charged with the production of knowledge and culture and the law enforcement regime that has been shaped to protect private property. After all, these institutions are built on the foundations of centuries of primitive accumulation of Black and indigenous land, wealth and stolen labor.

Works of art are the ultimate incarnation of this centuries-old pillaging. To conclude our conversation, lets fire up our imaginations by recalling some recent landmark cases of drawing this picket line, all of which are related to art museums. Firstly, theres the letter written by 100 Whitney Museum workers, who discovered the connection between Warren Kanders, owner of Safariland, a firm whose teargas is instrumental in the violent repression of people across the globe, and their Museum, of which Kanders was a board member (to this day, he remains a funder for and advisor on arts and environmental initiatives at Brown University, where I teach, something that students continue to protest). Then there are the protests and sit-in strikes led by Decolonize This Place, which persisted for months and would not stop until the Whitney respected the picket line. And the work that Forensic Architecture, in collaboration with Praxis Films, pursued with photography in Triple Chaser. Photographs of Safariland teargas canisters were taught to go on strike and to refute the assumption that they represent a decisive moment, and that what they record is only discrete moments, fragments of discrete truths limited to what is captured within their frames. Here they were taught to speak in concert with other photos, to underscore the sense of anti-imperial truth claims. Triple Chaser took part in Kanders toppling, and is also participating in the as-yet unfinished campaign to bring down another white institution the sacred status of secret documents, produced and archived as part of violence and still regarded as a primary source for scholarship seeking to expose imperial violence. In collaboration with with many activists who shared hundreds of photographs from the United States, Turkey, Peru, Iraq, Israel-Palestine, Yemen, Bahrain, Tunisia, Venezuela, Egypt, and Canada, the project assembles a choir of voices to sing out loud a truth claim about the role of museums in reproducing anti-Blackness and anti-Palestinianness.

An earlier version of this text was published in the form of a letter to Carles Guerra at correspondencias.fotocolectania.org.

Ariella Asha AzoulayAriella Asha Azoulay, teaches abolition, political thinking and imperial technologies at Brown University. Her latest book is Potential History Unlearning Imperialism (Verso, 2019).

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On Black Lives Matter's abolitionist grammar, Palestine, and the general strike - Mondoweiss

As the Republican Party of Texas (RPT) online convention was marked by difficulty after difficulty, challenger and former Florida congressman, Allen West, soundly knocked off incumbent James Dickeyand will become the next chairman of the Texas GOP.

West tweeted when the results became clear, I just want to say how truly humbled I am by this honor, and that I will work hard for Texas and Texans. I would like to thank my amazing and dedicated team, as well as an incredible number of supporters. Thank you all! Now the work begins

In concession just after 4:00 a.m. on Monday morning, Dickey posted, It has been an incredible time as Chairman of the Republican Party of Texas. I am so grateful to the amazing supporters who rallied around my campaign.

We are truly a bottom-up Party here in Texas, written in our rules to be that way, allowing our voices to be truly representative of those who make our Party great. I wish Lt. Col. West the very best in this role. Thank you for the honor of serving as your Chair. Lets win in November. May God bless you and May God bless Texas, he concluded, congratulating West.

West teased his run for state GOP chair about a year ago and then made it official a month later. And after activist Amy Hedtke threw her name into contention at the last minute, it became a three-person race.

But in the end, West won rather handily.

During the campaign, he has criticized Dickey for disorganization amongst the party and for overseeing the 2018 midterms in which 12 Texas House seats and three State Senate seats all flipped blue and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) narrowly escaped an insurgent Beto ORourke.

Meanwhile, Dickey touted his fundraising prowess, having raised $8 million ahead of the 2020 general election. He also boasted that the partys program had registered 120,000 new likely GOP voters going into November.

Dickey became chairman in 2017 after appointment by the State Republican Executive Committee (SREC) and then won election for the next term at the 2018 state convention.

But a growing section of the delegates moved against Dickey both out of discontent with how the 2018 elections went and concern over the coming one.

Other contributors included his handling of the Speaker Bonnen-Empower Texans tape fiasco specifically, that he did not come out harder against the Republican speaker for his conduct; his quick denunciation, and call for resignation, of various county GOP chairs who shared a conspiracy theory about George Floyd and the circumstances surrounding his killing at the hands of Minneapolis police; and the Republican legislators failure to accomplish or even attempt to pass party legislative priorities like constitutional carry and the abolition of abortion.

And that was until the tremendous convention disarray was thrown into the mix after Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner canceled the partys contract to use the George R. Brown Convention Center for the in-person event less than a week before it was set to happen.

That sparked a series of legal challenges that ultimately proved mostly fruitless and the convention was held online, with complications abound. West criticized Dickey, calling the event a debacle, and accusing him of disenfranchising delegates. He then called on RPT to postpone the convention until all delegates could be properly credentialed.

At the beginning of proceedings Sunday, the RPT reported about 1,200 of the total near-7,500 registered delegates had not been properly credentialed.

But despite technical problems and issues credentialing delegates, the marquee convention business was completed.

National committee delegates were selected and presidential electors were approved, however, the partys legislative priorities and party planks have yet to be solidified. The general body voted to postpone the non-election items of business to be taken up at a time yet to be determined.

But the most anticipated portion was the chairmans election. That didnt come until the wee hours of Monday morning after tech problems and procedural delays continually pushed back the estimated time of the vote.

Right as the general body was set to go into their Senate District caucuses to vote on the chairman race, Dickey reported a distributed denial of service attack on the partys servers. This further delayed the actions and caused a weary convention body to grow even more irritated after a week of pandemonium.

In a press release, Wests campaign announced his challenge to Texas Democratic Party Chair Gilberto Hinojosa to educate the public on key policy differences between the parties.

West is a former lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army and served as a congressman in Floridas 22nd District.

We need to focus on maintaining the conservative policies that made Texas strong and drive voter outreach across the state, West stated.

Hes got his work to cut out for him. RealClearPolitics polling average show President Trump and Joe Biden in a dead heat, and Texas Democrats are emboldened by their 2018 gains, looking to continue the clawing back of the GOP majority this year, too.

With no downtime, Wests new job starts today with a clear mission: win in November.

Disclosure: Unlike almost every other media outlet, The Texan is not beholden to any special interests, does not apply for any type of state or federal funding, and relies exclusively on its readers for financial support. If youd like to become one of the people were financially accountable to, click here to subscribe.

A free bi-weekly commentary on current events by Konni Burton.

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Allen West Wins Election for Texas GOP Chair - The Texan

Mayor Ted Wheeler released 19-point action plan last week as part of his promise to reform the Portland Police Bureau in the wake of ongoing protests against police brutality. Local activists and community watchdogs say the proposal doesnt go nearly far enough.

In this June 4, 2019, file photo, Portland Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty spoke as several hundred people gathered in Director Park in Portland, Ore., at a rally in support of a climate change lawsuit. City commissioners in Portland voted Wednesday, June 17, 2020 to cut nearly $16 million from the Portland Police Bureau's budget in response to concerns about police brutality and racial injustice. The cuts are part of a city budget approved by the commissioners by a 3-1 vote in a contentious meeting. (Dave Killen/The Oregonian via AP, File)Wheelers Action Plan to Increase Police Accountability and Reinvest in Black and Brown Communities includes the dissolution of PPB's Transit Division, its Gun Violence Reduction Team and its school resource officer program, and initially suggested redirecting $7 million from the PPBs $244 million budget to unspecified programs benefiting communities of color. On Wednesday, the Portland City Council voted 3-1 to cut almost $16 million from the police budget, with Commissioner Chloe Eudaly arguing the cuts werent deep enough and voting no. The amount falls far short of the $50 million cut that groups like Unite Oregon and the Portland African American Leadership Forum have demanded.

The Portland Committee on Community-Engaged Policing, a court-ordered advisory board that recently voted for partial defunding of the PPB, voiced similar concerns for what members viewed as the plans limited scope.

"The $7 million dollars Mayor Wheeler has proposed cutting from PPB represents just 3% of their budget, Elliott Young of the PCCEP told The Skanner, clarifying that he was expressing his personal views.

PCCEP's recommendation to 'defund the police and refund the community' is a call for a substantive shift in resources.

"While I applaud the elimination of the GVRT, transit officers and SROs, the (proposed) cut represents incremental change in a moment when we need transformational change."

We have to understand that what were talking about is decades and decades of billions and billions of dollars being poured into the system of policing, at the expense of community investments, Mohamed Shehk, National Media and Communications Director for Critical Resistance, told The Skanner.

The proposed budget for Portland police outpaces the next largest expenditure by over $100 million.

Locally and nationwide, many activists have called not for reform, but for a complete disbanding of the police -- an idea that is gaining traction.

I think its important to just keep reframing conversations about reforms into a more abolitionist view, so that we dont get stuck in the cycle that weve seen over and over again for the past decades -- that reform doesnt actually work, Olivia Hasencamp of Care Not Cops told The Skanner. Its not actually effective in making any real change, because the police are only accountable to upholding power dynamics through violence.

In an open letter to the city, county and Metro, Care Not Cops and Critical Resistance joined 19 other organizations in calling for a moratorium on arrests and "quality of life policing activity" during the pandemic. Such organizations are increasingly pushing the public to have more political imagination.

We dont actually have to look very far to see what a community without policing looks like, Shehk said.

You just have to look to Beverly Hills or any elite, affluent, primarily White neighborhood in this country, and youll see that the police dont actually have much of a presence there. The reason for that is because in those communities, they have sufficient and meaningful investments in things like education, housing, health care, social services. Peoples needs are met. Its where we have drastic social, economic and racial inequities that police are then used as a solution to those problems, when in reality they end up reproducing the problems themselves.

Shehk added that the governments botched response to the COVID-19 pandemic had added an urgency to what has been an ongoing movement.

The prioritization of funding for policing and other systems of state violence, which led to the killing of George Floyd, is the same prioritization that has left our healthcare system completely underfunded and under-equipped to respond to covid-19, he said. Its a moment where were seeing that communities do not have access to proper health care, while the system of policing is extremely well funded.

Others criticized the mayors plan as rushed and vague.

This document raises more questions than it answers, Young said during a PCCEP listening session hosted by video chat Sunday evening.

Wheeler came up with this literally overnight. But I would also note that some of the things in here are not clear that theyre actually reforms: ban chokeholds. According to the current chief of police, chokeholds have been banned for a very long time, and it concerns me that the mayor wouldnt know that.

Oregon State Senator Lew Frederick speaks on the Zoom callSen. Lew Frederick (D-Portland), also on the call, said that during the special session at the end of this month, a new legislative package would be introduced at the state level to address urgent concerns about policing.

Thats my plan: To be able to be a support system, and create a new atmosphere, a new concept of how were dealing with public safety generally, and how were dealing with a switch from a law enforcement approach of policing to a peace officer approach to policing, Frederick said.

Candace Avalos, acting chair of the Citizen Review Committee, responded to the mayors assertion that current police oversight systems lack teeth. Avalos agreed that the CRC didnt, but added that it does serve as an appeals board and policy advisory committee.

I think the (Police Review Board) could benefit from a merge with the CRC, Avalos said.

Instead of having an appeals board of citizens, we could just have more citizens on the PRB, because right now police officers outweigh citizens in those decisions.

While the mayor and City Council scramble to respond to increasing calls for systemic overhauls, advocates say the changes have been a long time coming.

This moment is really a reflection of years and years of organizations working on and demanding the abolition of policing and building relationships and practices, so that when the protests erupted in Minneapolis, there was a whole history of work and organizing and relationships and thought that had been developed that communities can point to when saying, We want to defund and abolish the police, Shehk said.

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Mayor's Police Reform Plan Criticized by Activists, Policy Panel - The Skanner

As stipulated by the Minsk agreements, Ukraine's sovereignty in the Russian-occupied territories of Donbas must be restored, and this includes the abolition of Russian legislation, the tax system, and currency introduced there.

"We continue our efforts to resolve and mitigate the severe security, socio-economic and humanitarian consequences of the ongoing Russian aggression. Ukraine's sovereignty over the Russian-occupied Donbas must be restored. This was the goal of all three Minsk agreements approved by Ukraine, Russia, and the international community in 2014 and 2015. Russian legislation, the tax system and the currency, which have been illegally introduced by the Russian side since then, must be repealed," Permanent Representative of Ukraine to the International Organizations in Vienna Yevhenii Tsymbaliuk said during an online meeting of the OSCE Permanent Council on Thursday, June 18, an Ukrinform correspondent reported.

Tsymbaliuk noted that the Ukrainian delegation stressed during the Trilateral Contact Group meeting on June 15 the need for full restoration of Ukrainian legislation in the temporarily occupied territories of Donetsk and Luhansk regions of Ukraine, restoration of taxation and settlement systems within the Ukrainian legal framework.

"It is necessary to conduct an inventory of state-owned and private property in the temporarily occupied territories of Donbas. We are talking about enterprises of all forms of ownership, including branches of banking institutions, which were expropriated by Russia. The Ukrainian delegation also insisted during the meeting on ensuring the work of Ukrainian mobile communications operators in these territories, emphasizing that it is primarily about meeting humanitarian needs," the Permanent Representative of Ukraine to the International Organizations in Vienna said.

Currently, there are no signs that Russia is ready to end the conflict it started in February 2014, the Ukrainian diplomat stressed. In addition, the Kremlin regime continues to destroy the long-term prospects for the future reintegration of Ukraine's temporarily occupied territories, strengthening their social, economic, and legal ties with the Russian Federation.

The so-called passportization of Ukrainian citizens in Donbas and Crimea is one of the most dangerous forms of this policy. The forced imposition of Russian citizenship in the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine is not only a gross violation of Ukrainian and international law but also an unacceptable element of pressure on local residents, Tsymbaliuk noted.

He added that the Ukrainian side also condemned the recent statement by the Russian occupation administration about the participation of residents of the occupied areas of Donetsk and Luhansk regions who have illegally issued Russian passports in the vote on amendments to the Russian Constitution. This is nothing more than complete contempt for sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine. We are grateful to the participating states that pursue a policy of non-recognition of such Russian passports, and call on other countries to do the same," Tsymbaliuk said.

It is known that the Russian occupation administration in Donbas implements the norms of the legislation of the Russian Federation in the controlled territories, has introduced the Russian tax system and currency. In addition, Russia illegally issues passports to the residents of the occupied Donbas, claiming that up to 800,000 Russian passports could be issued to Ukrainians in Donbas by the end of the year.

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Ukraine at OSCE calls for abolition of Russian laws, taxes and currency in Donbas - Ukrinform. Ukraine and world news

How will the abolition of the Department for International Development (DFID) and new UK foreign policy direction impact the UKs infrastructure exports? Tom Cargill considers the potential opportunities for UK companies.

Given our focus on driving UK exports of infrastructure, capacity building and international development, British Expertise International (BEI) and our members engage extensively with relevant departments in the UK government. As a result, we have both a stake and some depth of experience in current discussions around the future of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), Department for International Development (DFID) and Department for International Trade (DIT).

In fact, at BEI we have increasingly found ourselves at the core of wider discussions around the future of UK trade, development and influence. Not only is infrastructure recognised now by HMG as central to the UKs future growth and prosperity, its also seen as essential to our security and influence globally, as well as to international development objectives. A recent study by DIT established there are around 25 separate infrastructure export related initiatives underway across different parts of government. This speaks to the growing recognition of a key export sector. Yet few of these initiatives were found to be coordinated or strategically linked, demonstrating the need for a far more joined-up approach.

Catalysing and supporting a more joined-up, focussed and effective UK effort around infrastructure exports has taken a renewed urgency for BEI in recent months. The change of direction heralded by Brexit has placed a new emphasis on driving exports to the emerging markets of Asia, Africa, Middle East and Latin America where BEI has a particular focus. Climate change has also brought a renewed focus on the need to promote resilient and sustainable infrastructure globally, with UK expertise central to delivery.

The Covid-19 crisis has placed further weight on the role of government in driving export recovery and growth, but we had already been forming ever closer working relationships with counterparts in DIT, DFID, FCO and the Cabinet Office as we began to lay the groundwork for a new strategic foreign policy direction with large scale infrastructure development and government-to-government engagement playing an enhanced role.

Now BEI has revitalised and initiated additional streams of activity. We have used our position on the Board of Infrastructure Exports: UK, the government/industry body established to boost UK infrastructure exports, to reform, refocus and prioritise activity in support of infrastructure export wins. We have also established a number of working groups of members to drive forward an export agenda which better serves the UK supply chain. In addition, we are revitalising UK efforts to catalyse a sustainable financial model for delivery of large-scale infrastructure projects globally - with a defined, differentiated and communicated UK offer on global infrastructure at its heart.

Like many others, we are finding that moving our events online has actually increased our reach and relevance and despite, or perhaps because of, the challenging circumstances our membership is growing again. It has also enabled us to undertake more comprehensive monitoring of the changing export environment through the crisis, for example by hosting events with all relevant Her Majestys trade commissioners, who are responsible for coordinating trade efforts across key global regions.

Next month we will be drilling down further by hosting 14 panels combining the views of around 60 UK Heads of Mission on the market opportunities in the countries to which they are posted. All of this amounts to an important evolution of our mission. With additional online tools, materials and initiatives, BEI will be relaunching early in the autumn to reflect this new phase in our development. Core to all of this are partnerships with our members, but also with other organisations that share a common interest in supporting the strength and vitality of the UKs infrastructure industry. We will all need to pull together to recover and rebuild over coming months and years.

The merger of DFID and FCO into a new department the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Department, may signal a welcome level of coordination, particularly, as has been mooted, if the Department for International Trade is also brought into some degree of greater coordination. Outside government, we will also need to work together to inform government policy in support of the UKs wider growth and success, with infrastructure growth, both at home and abroad, playing a central role.

Tom Cargill is the CEO of British Expertise International.

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How will DFID's abolition impact UK infrastructure exports? - Infrastructure Intelligence

My childhood experience of police was defined by the absence of it. Growing up white in Lynnhurst, I rarely saw police cars. I never thought about police they didnt make me feel particularly safe or particularly afraid. This experience is shared by most people who grew up in neighborhoods like mine. It was only when I moved into other neighborhoods, built community with people of different backgrounds and experiences and continued to educate myself that I realized my experience was a stark contrast to that of members of other communities.

For the last several years, I have been organizing with a local collective, MPD150, that advocates for police abolition. In contrast to those who advocate for reforming police departments, abolitionists believe that policing is inherently flawed and must be replaced with other public safety institutions. After the brutal killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police on Memorial Day and the uprisings that followed, America is in a process of collectively examining its relationship to policing. Almost all of Minneapolis agrees that police departments are responsible for systemic racist violence and wants change, but the question remains: What does that change look like?

I joined MPD150 after several years of organizing around policing, beginning after the police murders of Jamar Clark and Philando Castile. I participated in the black youth-led occupations of the 4th Precinct Station and the St. Paul governors mansion. These occupations drew new public attention to police violence and led to a series of systemic responses: an unprecedented large-scale investigation into Jamar Clarks case and body camera policies that were touted as major reforms. Philando Castiles killers trial marked the first time in Minnesota history that a police officer was criminally prosecuted for killing a community member. But though they were novel, these actions did little to curb police violence in Minneapolis. The officers who killed Jamar Clark were never charged and are still on the Minneapolis police force today. The body camera legislation was full of loopholes allowing officers to avoid filming. The officer who killed Philando Castile was acquitted of all charges despite a $3 million settlement paid to the Castile family in a wrongful death lawsuit. According to the Star Tribune, Minneapolis police killed more community members last year than any year in the last two decades.

In these few years, the MPD has shown its reform-proof nature, remaining essentially unchanged despite the intensity of public outrage and action. Disenchanted by the ineffectiveness of those reforms, I was drawn toward the abolitionist perspective of MPD150 because it demanded the deeper, structural change Minneapolis and our country clearly need.

MPD150s work has been to locate police violence within a historical context, advocate for police abolition, provide resources for people to envision what will come next and provide ideas about how to get involved. Our central work has been publishing Enough is Enough: a 150-year performance review of the Minneapolis Police Department. This report is available in print and audio forms on our website, mpd150.com, alongside a wealth of other resources for people looking to learn about abolitionism.

Two key findings of the MPD150 report are worth emphasizing here. First, the report demonstrates that, from its inception five years after the U.S. Dakota War solidified the violent expulsion of the Dakota people from their ancestral homeland, the police department has consistently been an instrument of violence against black, indigenous and people of color (BIPOC) and against poor people. Second, the report illuminates how the cycle of failed police reform has spanned the last 60 years.

For generations, the cycle has continued. Police commit an act of violence. There is public outrage. There are reforms or actions taken to placate that outrage. Those reforms are either proven ineffective or undermined. And the cycle continues as the violence continues.

As abolitionists, we want to break this cycle.

We want more than a public repudiation of an officers behavior. We want more than a few murderous cops prosecuted and convicted as if their racism does not run through the veins of the entire police body. We recognize that killings of BIPOC people are only the most egregious examples of police violence and that people are abused, intimidated, jailed and fined by police in this city every day. We want this entire system torn up from the roots and we want to plant something new that truly keeps our people safe.

I want to encourage the people of Southwest Minneapolis, particularly the majority of us who are white and middle class, to use this moment for deep reflection and action. Most of us grew up perceiving the police as an organization that promoted public safety. When the police show up, it is usually because we called them there, and we can usually expect the police to treat us with respect. But that has never been true for communities of color, poor or houseless people, and other communities who the police have harmed instead of protecting.

As people with the privilege of choosing whether and how to engage with the police, it is important that we push ourselves to uproot the oppressive systems both in our own bodies and minds and on a systemic level. We are in a pivotal moment in time and space right now where we have the possibility to make deep and lasting change so that future generations can know life without police violence. Our city council has committed to dismantling the police department, but we need to make sure this vision does not get watered down, replaced with reforms or that the institutions that replace the police department do not replicate its oppressions. This fight is just beginning, and we need to stay in it for the duration.

When I talk to people about police abolition, many agree with the ideas but struggle to make the leap to imagining a police-free future. I have had the same struggle. Having spent my whole life in policed cities, it is a challenge to imagine something different. But while it may be challenging, abolitionists believe this imagination and collective creation is the necessary and urgent work to be done.

A core abolitionist principle is that the best way to increase public safety is to meet peoples basic needs rather than policing them. Growing up in well-resourced and barely policed Lynnhurst, I saw that a world without police is possible. The task now is to provide these resources to all of our communities while dismantling the systems that harm them and replacing them with alternative public safety institutions. I have seen these systems come to life in places when people come together to support each other in the absence of police at the 4th Precinct occupation, at Standing Rock and all across Minneapolis as people have spontaneously organized relief and community defense efforts over the last several weeks.

From these experiences, I have developed a deep faith that abolition is not only possible but is the only viable way forward. Please check out our website and the websites of our partner organizations, Reclaim the Block and Black Visions, for ideas on how you can be part of building our police-free future in Minneapolis.

Peter VanKoughnett is an organizer with MPD150, a group founded in 2016 with the aim of working towards a police-free Minneapolis.

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The time to abolish the Minneapolis Police Department is now - Southwest Journal

Dara Khosrowshahi, CEO of Uber, appears on CNBC's Squawk Box at the 2020 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on Jan,. 22nd, 2020.

Adam Galici | CNBC

Uber will honor Juneteenth and elections days around the world as company holidays, CEO Dara Khosrowshahi announced Wednesday.

"To embrace the meaning of #Juneteenth this year, we're making it a paid day off. We encourage employees to spend it in a way that allows them to stand up against racism, whether that's by learning, participating in a community action, or reflecting on how to make change,"Khosrowshahi said on Twitter.

"But I strongly believe that lasting change really happens at the ballot box. That's why we are making election days around the world an @Uber company holiday from now on," he added.

In the United States, Election Day takes place on a Tuesday in November, making it difficult for some people to get to the ballot box because they have to work.

Uber's announcement is the latest effort among tech companies to support and honor the Black community. Twitter and Square CEO Jack Dorseyannounced last week that Juneteenth would become a company holiday.

Juneteenthcelebrates the end of slavery in the United States. A combination of the words June and nineteenth, the holiday commemorates when an U.S. army general informed enslaved African Americans in Galveston, Texas on June 19, 1865 that the Civil War had ended and they were free.

The Confederate army had surrendered two months earlier in April and President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation more than two years prior, but the abolition of slavery was not enforced in remote Texas until much later.

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Uber is making Juneteenth and election days around the world company holidays - CNBC