Category Archives: Abolition Of Work

Abortion Funds Are Preparing For a Storm. To Help, Get in Where You Fit in. – Truthout

Posted: June 18, 2022 at 1:47 am

Abortion rights demonstrators march into downtown following a rally in Union Park on May 14, 2022, in Chicago, Illinois.Scott Olson / Getty Images

We have to be thinking and dreaming and planning really expansively because when Roe falls, band-aid solutions are not going to be enough, says Meghan Daniel, a support coordinator with the Chicago Abortion Fund. In this episode of Movement Memos, Daniel and host Kelly Hayes talk about the end of Roe, abolishing police and prisons and how funding abortions builds power.

Music by Son Monarcas, Pulsed & Imprismed

Note: This a rush transcript and has been lightly edited for clarity. Copy may not be in its final form.

Kelly Hayes: Welcome to Movement Memos, a Truthout podcast about organizing, solidarity and the work of making change. Im your host, writer and organizer Kelly Hayes. Today, we are talking about how the Chicago Abortion Fund is gearing up for the end of Roe and how prison and police abolition intersect with the fight for reproductive justice. We will be hearing from Meghan Daniel, who is a support coordinator with the Chicago Abortion Fund, or CAF for short. CAF provides financial, logistical, and emotional support to people seeking abortion care throughout Illinois and the Midwest. Laws restricting abortion access in red states have made Chicago a crucial hub for abortion care in the midwest. Those laws have also led to an increased demand for the assistance of groups like the Chicago Abortion Fund. In the first three months of 2022, over 80% of abortion seekers who contacted the Chicago Abortion Fund were living outside the state of Illinois. That out-of-state demand is expected to continue to surge after the fall of Roe. Receiving hundreds of calls per month, CAF is presently on a years-long streak of helping every caller.

For the unacquainted, abortion funds are local, autonomous organizations that provide resources and build power for cultural and political change. After the Hyde Amendment ensured financial barriers to abortion access for impoverished people by banning the use of federal healthcare funds to pay for abortion care, abortion funds began to emerge to help impoverished abortion seekers pay for their procedures. In addition to paying for procedures, some funds provide practical support, including transportation, child care expenses, lodging, translation services, abortion doulas, and more. Black and brown people have been disproportionately impacted by the Hyde Amendment, and were largely left behind by mainstream feminist organizations, which failed to make ending the Hyde Amendment a priority.

The National Network of Abortion Funds, or NAF, has 90 grassroots member groups that received over 200,000 requests for assistance in 2019. The funds directly supported 62,933 abortion seekers in 2019. When laws attacking abortion access dominate the news cycle, some abortion funds may see an influx of cash. But the need still greatly exceeds what is being donated, and in a post-Roe U.S., requests for assistance are expected to surge further, as pregnant people in red states attempt to travel to places like Chicago, where they can legally receive care.

United by a national network, these groups operate independently, across varying cultural and political geographies. Here in Chicago, I have been in the streets protesting alongside members of the Chicago Abortion Fund and the abortion fund Midwest Access Coalition many times often at actions waged in response to police killings. Ive also been known to hit up CAFs annual bowl-a-thon, even though I dont bowl. As abortion funds around the country work to scale up their operations, Meghan and I talked about the end of Roe; why transphobia, prisons and police violence are reproductive justice issues; and how funding abortions builds power.

Meghan Daniel, in addition to being a support coordinator with the Chicago Abortion Fund, is also a PhD candidate in Sociology at University of Illinois Chicago, where she teaches, writes, and conducts research about reproductive justice, social movements and state violence.

Meghan Daniel: So my name is Meghan. I use she and her pronouns. I am one of two support coordinators at the Chicago Abortion Fund, and I work in a team of four full-time staff at Chicago Abortion Fund or CAF as we like to call it. We also have a few part-time folks and a really amazing team of volunteer case managers. There are upwards of 20 folks who donate their time and love and wisdom to supporting people who call our helpline in need of support for abortions. Chicago Abortion Fund provides financial, logistical, and sometimes emotional support to people seeking abortions in Chicago, in Illinois, the Midwest, and really nationwide.

Chicago Abortion Fund was founded in the mid-1980s, by a group of people that came together to meet this need, and I came across some numbers that are pretty astonishing. So in our first full year of serving callers, October 1986 to November 1987, we got calls from 106 people who needed financial support for their abortion care, and we were able to fund 33 of them. And thats awesome. And in the almost 40 years, since weve opened our doors, the landscape of abortion access has shifted and barriers have multiplied, and weve really scaled up to meet the need. So in the first four months of this year alone, January through April, we received calls from 2,000 people, 2,000, and these callers came from 33 states. So roughly 30% were calling from Missouri where folks have been living in a so-called post-Roe reality for quite some time now. 20% of these calls came from Indiana where the cost of an abortion in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy is nearly $900, and 15 percent from our home state of Illinois, where though Medicaid does cover abortion services at no cost and legislation posits that all private Illinois insurance must cover abortion care, all pregnant people dont fit neatly into these insurance categories and costs still run really high.

Chicago is going to remain an important hub. Illinois is going to remain an important hub because Illinois is one of the states in the U.S. where abortion access will remain protected when Roe falls. In previous years with the passage of the Reproductive Health Act, weve repealed the so-called trigger ban on abortion so that when Roe v. Wade gets overturned at the federal level, abortion will remain legal in Illinois. So well see these trends continuing, and by these trends I mean people from out of state calling, people traveling to Illinois in increasing numbers. And so Illinois, like many other states in the U.S. with either protected or expanded access to abortion care, will remain an important place for people to get the care that they need and deserve.

KH: The Chicago Abortion Fund has been on a roll, in terms of not having to turn anyone away, but like abortion funds across the country, they are currently preparing for a storm.

MD: Post-Roe I think that we will continue to see an influx in callers. I think that we can expect those numbers to grow exponentially, and I think that the barriers those people are facing are going to multiply. Were talking people coming from rural areas in states with low access, were talking people having to take multiple days off work.

Were already coordinating things like childcare, ride shares, hotels, sometimes flights, stipends for food. At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, which is ongoing, of course, we initiated what we call mini-grants, which are direct payments to folks in the amount of $50; no questions asked. If it seems like they need them and theyre struggling with their lights getting shut off, or just needing a little something extra, we send that to folks and thats something were really proud of. The intersections of economic precarity and access to health care being very difficult are very real for our callers, and we anticipate this to grow as the cost incurred by people seeking abortion care grow as well.

Having to travel multiple days to get health care from states with low access or from states with 24- or 48-hour mandatory wait periods, its a lot to coordinate. We have been expecting this for a long time. Its something that people inside of repro have been struggling with. It feels like youre trying to warn people about something they may not be as alarmed about. You know its real, you know its coming because youre living in it and perhaps they dont want to see it, or theyre not seeing it, but the writings been on the wall so to speak for years now. So weve been deepening our partnerships with funds in the Midwest and across the country with funds in Nebraska, with funds in Wisconsin, because many of our callers are calling us from there.

Abortion funds just deserve so much more than what we currently have, so as a staffed fund, this is painfully clear and were interested in continuing to support other volunteer-led funds with intake, with data and with our best organizational practices so that they can get access to the resources that they need and deserve too. Were not trying to be like the midwest abortion fund. We want to work in solidarity and link arms with our sibling funds with whom we cant do this work without. We do it in a constellation of other sibling funds of independent clinics, of bigger networked clinics, of providers, of practical support organizations, doulas, midwives of other mutual aid organizations. And deepening those partnerships in the coming weeks and months is going to be so important. Were going to need each other more than ever.

Illinois protected access is not enough, we need expanded access. So weve been talking to elected officials and agitating for more protection and expansion of abortion care and engaging with and growing our base to support that work. We also expect that You know, we see this in cycles, right? With the passage of Senate Bill 8 in Texas, there was an influx in people wanting to get involved and thats amazing. And with the leaked Supreme Court opinion in May, theres an influx of people who want to get involved. We want to engage that base to put pressure on our elected officials in Illinois to agitate for expanded abortion access. So in California, for example, theres a bill that passed the house and crossed over to the Senate that would protect anyone who helps someone have an abortion by prohibiting California courts from taking up any cases based on out of state laws. These are just examples of the sort of creative legislation that people are coming up with to protect each other, and I think that matters.

And were using this moment to preach a pro-abortion gospel, so to speak. So we are in the majority; two thirds of people in the U.S. want Roe upheld, and were not going to see that happen, but we cant be quiet about it. We need to name abortion explicitly and we have to have conversations with our people. We have supported a hundred percent of our callers since July 2019, and we want to keep that going. We dont want to go back to listening to voicemails, logging those voicemails, doing all of that data intake and not being able to support any single one of those people. Its a horrible feeling to not be able to meet that need, and I am remaining very disciplined in my hope that we wont have to.

KH: I am so glad Meghan brought up the need for legislation to protect pregnant people, and people who miscarry or abort, even in blue states. As we recently saw in California, with the attempted prosecution of two women who experienced stillbirths, people are still at-risk of being criminalized for pregnancy outcomes in blue states. What can we do about that? Well, there is a piece of model legislation, written by the Public Leadership Institute called The Pregnant Womens Dignity Act, and while I would obviously prefer a trans-inclusive title, the gist of this bill is that it would protect people who experience the loss of a pregnancy from criminal investigation. We need some version of this bill passed in every possible state. Because right now, we have states declaring themselves welcoming states for abortion seekers where residents can still be investigated and criminalized for their pregnancy outcomes, if they are suspected of managing their own abortion. We also have prosecutors in conservative counties in blue states who are going to want to get in on the criminalization of pregnancy, and will look for any legal avenue to do so. If states want to declare themselves safe havens for abortion, then they need to decriminalize pregnancy entirely. In my opinion, the fact that we even have to talk about decriminalizing pregnancy is a strong argument for prison and police abolition. Laws that offer abortion funds and residents in blue states some legal insulation, when helping abortion seekers in red states that are implementing aiding and abetting laws could also prove important.

This crisis is largely being presented to people as though there are states where abortion is safe and states where it is not. But even with Roe intact, a map of so-called abortion deserts in the U.S., created by Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health in 2018, revealed a bleak picture. The color-coded maps that depict what states are most likely to allow or restrict abortion post Roe do not capture the actual availability of abortion care within blue states. As Robin Marty wrote in The New Handbook for a Post-Roe America, when clinics and providers are mapped, most of America is a spotted wasteland where pregnant people live over a hundred miles from care and thats now, prior to the fall of Roe. For this and many other reasons, even within blue states, people will sometimes opt to self manage their own abortions. Others will simply be accused of doing so, whether they have or not, because pregnancy outcomes are being surveilled, and profiling will come into play. We know this is happening and that it has happened, and if we say we are going to defend reproductive autonomy, we have to fight to protect everyone.

When a swath of near total abortion bans passed in 2019, CAF was among the groups my collective worked with to organize a reproductive justice rally in Chicago. The rally had a major online fundraising component, as we were trying to direct money to abortion funds in states affected by the bans. That rally included chants like, All genders, all voices, our bodies, our choices, to emphasize the inextricable connection between abortion rights and all trans health care rights. We also held our ground that day against right-wing protesters. I have been thinking about that action lately, and all the values it tied together, and how desperately those values are needed in this moment. Because, as we have covered in recent episodes of the show, the fight against transphobia and the struggle against white supremacy cannot be divided from the struggle for abortion rights.

MD: The struggle against white supremacy and transphobia shows up in our work every day. At CAF we work towards abortion access from a reproductive justice model and reproductive justice is not interchangeable with abortion access. Its not interchangeable with reproductive rights or with reproductive health. Reproductive justice is a very specific framework and theory and praxis that was founded by Black and African American women, a group of 12 people here in Chicago in 1994 and it encompasses the right to have children, the right to not have children and the right to parent and care for our families in safety and with dignity. So its very broad and its a very deliberately laid out framework and theory.

So its fundamentally about whether you as an individual or the state has control over your body or your destiny, your family, your community, these bills are all connected. So the history of fighting for reproductive justice is essentially the history of fighting against anti-Blackness and xenophobia and settler colonial violence. So in order to have the right to care for our families in safety and in dignity, these structures of violence cant exist. So day after day, were seeing transphobic bills roll out across U.S. states, around girls sports, for example; that would deputize everyday people to subject young folks to invasive and medically unnecessary pelvic exams, for example, tantamount to sexual assault in order to ensure that only cis girls are allowed to play girls sports. And were involving multiple social systems here: schools, health care, the family in what amounts to the sexual assaults of young people.

And this is fundamentally a reproductive justice issue, and we do not need a dissertation to understand why, right? And the deputizing of everyday concerned citizens in these efforts should ring the same alarm bells for us as the bounty hunter provisions in the Texas Senate Bill 8 and its copycat bills do. And this isnt to mention other transphobic legislation that makes hormones difficult or impossible to access for trans folks of all ages. Again, its about bodily autonomy, about creating and caring for the families that we want and deserve. Queer children deserve to be protected and we deserve to see our elders grow up. And we know that because of how different forms of oppression intersect, that people of color, especially Black folks, are going to be most impacted by these types of bounty hunter legislations, right?

We have seen, and we can talk about this when we talk about criminalization, we have seen how invitations to become bounty hunters most adversely impact people of color, right? And we dont have to do mental backflips to try to get inside their head or ask ourselves, How can they be doing this if they know women and girls, or if they care about women and girls? Right? I think its well intentioned and I think folks are really trying, but white supremacy is what ties all of these strategies together for the right. It is what allows them to justify the control of particular peoples bodies, of particular peoples reproductive and sexual health, and its what allows the right to control how particular people create and care for their families, and whether particular people are separated from their children or whether particular people are caged. Thats how they make sense of their strategy.

In our daily work, were very deliberate in our language. We say abortion, and we say pregnant people. We ask people what their pronouns are, we dont assume. We dont use euphemisms like a womans right to choose because thats not what were talking about. And we know that the framework of choice is overly individualistic anyway, right? We refuse to leave our trans and non-binary and queer siblings behind. Were not going to do that. Additionally, we see over and over again, that white supremacy creates multiple barriers for Black women, especially.

If folks have not listened to the Movement Memos episode with Dr. Dorothy Roberts, she lays this out exquisitely and all of her research and all of her books do as well, right? That white supremacy creates structural barriers, anti-Blackness specifically. And that pregnancy and reproductive healthcare are particularly dangerous for Black women. This shows up in our work every day and we see the barriers that people are facing in pregnancy, unwanted pregnancy, right? And its our job to fill that gap in care, to fill that gap in resources and connect them to the abortion care that they need and that they deserve, and to make sure that its a good experience when they get there.

KH: At that reproductive justice action in 2019, that I mentioned earlier, we actually used some coathanger imagery in our signage and props. It made sense at the time, but if we organized the action today, we would not use that same imagery, because we are now in a moment when we are desperately trying to get the word out to people that, even after Roe falls, there will be medically safe options outside the law. For now, at least, there are many trustworthy online sources of information for people who want to self-manage their own abortions, and there are already people working in their communities to assist people who are managing their abortions outside the medical system, on their own terms. But the threat of criminalization hangs heavy.

Even with Roe intact, we have seen the criminalization of pregnancy fall most heavily upon Black and Indigenous women and people of color. State Supreme Courts in Alabama and South Carolina have ruled that a persons substance use during pregnancy constitutes criminal child abuse. Several states have also created child welfare laws that make prenatal drug exposure grounds for terminating parental rights because of child abuse or neglect. Such penalties have been disproportionately applied to Black women, whose demonization during the crack epidemic of the 1980s was leveraged to pass such laws. As Dr. Dorothy Roberts explained in a previous episode of Movement Memos, the criminalization of pregnancy as we know it today evolved from this framework of demonizing Black mothers who had used substances while pregnant.

In 2018, 19-year old Brittney Poolaw was convicted of manslaughter in Oklahoma after having a miscarriage. When she was questioned by police at the hospital, Poolaw, who is a member of the Comanche Nation, admitted she had recently used methamphetamine and marijuana. At trial, a medical expert testified that Poolaws drug use may not have resulted in her miscarriage, but the jury was unmoved and convicted Poolaw in less than three hours. She was sentenced to four years in prison.

Many people are familiar with the case of Purvi Patel, a South Asian American woman who was sentenced to 20 years for feticide and child neglect in Indiana before her conviction was overturned. Patels pregnancy ended outside of a medical setting and she was accused of self-managing an abortion. By the time the court downgraded the charges against her, Patel had already served a year and a half in the Indiana Womens Prison. Feticide laws ostensibly exist so that people who commit violence against pregnant people can be charged with the death of the fetus. Patel was the first woman charged in the U.S. under a feticide law, but it appears likely that she will be the first of many. While investigating, police questioned Patel about the ethnicity of the fetuss father, believing that because she was an Indian woman, Patel might want to abort a baby conceived with someone of another race. This kind of profiling and surveillance provides a snapshot of what to expect from the state as it polices and surveills miscarriages in a post-Roe United States.

In the 1980s, laws criminalizing drug use during pregnancy led many pregnant people to forgo necessary medical treatment. The same should be expected in the new age of surveilled miscarriages in red states after the fall of Roe.

Given the role of criminalization in this moment, I was eager to hear Meghans thoughts on how the fight for abortion rights connects with the struggle for prison and police abolition.

MD: Prison and police abolition is integral to our fight for abortion rights and specifically integral to our fights for abortion justice and reproductive justice. Criminalization, especially criminalization of people of color and Black people in particular is the foundation upon which the right hopes to control peoples reproductive outcomes. So the hyperfocus and hyper-criminalization of Black womens pregnancies. And again, Dr. Dorothy Roberts speaks to this, whether conduct during pregnancy or miscarriage or still birth, criminalizing pregnancies for Black women is widespread and has deep historical roots.

Beyond the criminalization of pregnancy outcomes, whether they be miscarriages, whether they be still births, whether its the criminalization of abortion, we can think about prisons and policing themselves as reproductive justice issues. Incarcerated people who are pregnant may be outright denied access to abortion or pressured by guards and jailers into getting abortions if their pregnancy is the result of assault. Roth and others have done incredible work on this really important research, documenting these horrific practices inside. So there are tremendous medical needs for people who are incarcerated: substandard prenatal care, abortion restrictions and bans, coerced birth control and shackling during childbirth, even though this has been specifically outlawed in many places. So we can think of incarceration itself as a reproductive justice issue.

Now, if were talking about somebody who is on electronic monitoring or EM, lets picture them in a state where theres a 48-hour mandatory wait period, or a 24-hour mandatory wait period, that means they have to leave the house twice, right? And getting clearance to leave the house is such a bureaucratic nightmare and thats part of it. Its part of the punishment. Additionally, anti-choice protestors outside of clinics create massive, massive disturbances and people will say, Well, oh, cant the police be there? And the police and the anti-choice protestors are some of the same folks. The Venn diagram is almost a circle. We can think of policing as a reproductive justice issue as well. We have had folks stopped by the police in Chicago on their way to get abortion care, harassed by the police in Chicago. There have been multiple studies about policing influencing poor reproductive health outcomes, especially, especially for Black women and Black pregnant people.

We can think about what it takes to cross state borders for pregnant people to access abortion care, we need to be thinking about warrants. We need to be thinking about the fact that somebodys support person might not be able to cross state boundaries because of being criminalized. The pregnant person might not be able to because of being criminalized, and then where does that leave us? Right? So when we are thinking about abortion access, it might feel overwhelming, but we have to be thinking and dreaming and planning really, really, really expansively. We have to be doing what prison and police abolitionist thinking encourages us to do. We need to be thinking about building a new world entirely because when Roe falls, band-aid solutions are not going to be enough. We need to be thinking about building something better in its place, because a lot of people are going to be left behind otherwise.

When we think very critically about criminalization and policing and prison, we need to keep our focus laser focused on the social structures that criminalize people and the lack of resources that make people more susceptible to criminalization.

And when we do that, it frees us from these awful perceptions that blame people for their own incarceration, that blame people for ending up in cages. And It frees us from this invitation to categorize people into good people and bad people. It frees us from this moral binary that I think ultimately is so useless. And when we can imagine ourselves in solidarity with folks who are incarcerated, we can do really good work. We can be more strategic. I think we can build better movements, we can build stronger movements and our analyses will be sharper. On a less theoretical level and a more material level, we can get people free, and thats the most important thing.

For people who are newly activated, newly energized, or perhaps reactivated and re-energized in the wake of Roe v. Wade being overturned, I say welcome. Were so glad youre here. And we need you. I think everybody has something to offer, and doing a scan of what your skills are and how that matches to the needs of collectives and organizations that are already doing work to make abortions more accessible for people in your community is the best way to get started. I think doing a bit of research to see whats already being done and then figuring out how you fit into that is the way to go. My mentor and friend, Sekila Enzenga, always says, Get in where you fit in. And I think thats a really sound piece of advice.

There are so many ways to help with organizing and to help with this type of work. Not all of it is glamorous, not all of it is fun. Some of it can be crunching numbers. Some of it can be transcribing a really beautiful virtual event. Some of it, yes, can be helping to organize the marshals at a protest or a march in your local city or town at the behest of an organization who needs your help. For those who are really interested in direct service work, something I wish I knew earlier is that it can be really hard.

There is a lot that abortion funders and people working with these collectives can address. Abortion funds work magic. I mean, we just do: financial support, logistical support, getting people from A to B. And there are so many things going on in peoples lives that we, even as an organization, even in a beautiful network of funds and clinics, practical support providers, with all of the connections that we as individuals bring to this work cannot solve. And that is crushing. Sometimes you will feel crushed under the weight of systemic oppression and thats part of the work.

KH: One thing Meghan and other organizers have strongly cautioned people against in this moment is the reinvention of wheels. Before you consider starting anything new, please do a solid search for people and groups who might already be addressing the need you are concerned with. Because they are probably out there, and this kind of support work requires a lot of training and preparation. There are major safety concerns to navigate, and there are also many essential lessons that organizers have learned along the way, in their years, or even decades of doing this work.

MD: For people who are newly activated, newly energized, or perhaps reactivated and re-energized in the wake of Roe v. Wade being overturned, I say welcome. Were so glad youre here. And we need you. I think everybody has something to offer, and doing a scan of what your skills are and how that matches to the needs of collectives and organizations that are already doing work to make abortions more accessible for people in your community is the best way to get started. My mentor and friend, Sekile Nzinga, always says, Get in where you fit in. And I think thats a really sound piece of advice.

There are so many ways to help with organizing and to help with this type of work. Not all of it is glamorous, not all of it is fun. Some of it can be crunching numbers. Some of it can be transcribing a really beautiful virtual event. Some of it can be helping to organize the marshals at a protest or a march in your local city or town at the behest of an organization who needs your help. For those who are really interested in direct service work, something I wish I knew earlier is that it can be really hard.

When Trump got elected, we saw these so-called anti-networks popping up. In our movement, we knew immediately that these were pretty dangerous. I want folks to know that you need a lot of training and expertise to do direct service with people who are seeking abortion care. And I would say you probably need even more to be running that kind of practical support network to be hosting people in your home or to be starting your own organization. So get in where you fit in is again, the sound piece of advice that I keep coming back to. But everybody has skills that they can offer and if its not within an organization, then there are some really great low-lift individual ways that people can get involved. You can become a monthly donor to your local abortion fund. And when I say any amount matters, I do really mean any amount. You can give $5 a month to your local abortion fund. That goes much further than giving to a big national organization.

We work in partnership with some of these organizations and they do excellent work in clinics, and we appreciate them so much, and your donation to your local abortion fund will go much further by way of getting direct support to people needing abortion access. If a monthly donation just isnt it for you right now, you can have a heart to heart conversation with somebody in your life about abortion. You can say the word abortion when you have that conversation. I think people may not realize how important this is: Ask folks in your lives if anyone they know has had an abortion.

Ive had really beautiful conversations with my family members about whether or not grandmas or great aunts have had abortions. And Ive learned that they had, but it was always in secret, right? It was very hush hush. And this work has cracked open a lot of really beautiful conversations with loved ones for me that just never would have happened and has shifted them in ways that I had never expected. And its because I was encouraged and supported by people in our network to have those conversations. And that peer-to-peer work and connecting with us or connecting with your local fund for resources about having those conversations is I think more powerful than people realize.

KH: Despite being uplifted and even celebrated in some circles, abortion funds remain seriously underfunded.

MD: Abortion funds are still seriously underfunded compared to large national organizations, when we look at the funding landscapes of major grants making organizations. When we look at the breakdown from major grant making organizations in the reproductive rights, health and justice landscape, abortion funds receive just 3% of that funding.

This is really important because the direct service budget of abortion funds is quite large proportional to their organizational funding needs. So weve gotten 2000 calls in the first four months of 2022, weve called all of those people back. Our average pledge or grant to a caller for their abortion care is about $160, $175 right now. They could be as little as $100 and they could go all the way up to $2,000. So that funding is needed and that funding goes directly to our callers. Funding abortion funds, equipping abortion funds with the financial material resources to do this work will help us scale up to meet the growing need that were going to see in the next weeks and months to come. Weve already seen a huge influx of calls in the past year. I gave you a quick statistic about what we funded in 1986 and what were funding now. So 33 calls versus 2000 calls and thats a huge jump.

But in 2019, we were getting just under 200 calls the whole year and funding just under 200 people the whole year, and now were getting 2000 calls in four months. So this influx began as barriers were starting to stack up for people, before the overturn of Roe v. Wade became imminent. And thats exactly what the right has designed for us to be the reality for pregnant people across the U.S. And so abortion funds need material resources so that we can scale up, so that we can have staff to do this work, so that we can spread out the number of calls, so that we dont have people who are burned out, so that we can invest in the leadership and wisdom of people who have had abortions to do this work of Black and Brown people to lead our funds and make sure that this work is sustainable for the folks who are doing it.

KH: This is a tense and angry time for a lot of us. I know Im fucking furious. Every day, I take in the news, and I process the trajectory we are on, and I feel like I could punch a hole in the wall. But, as talking with Meghan reminded me, our anger is not our greatest strength right now. Dont get me wrong, our anger has power and I plan to put mine to use. But we are going to need so much more than anger to get through this. To protect and defend each other, to fight for reproductive justice and the world that we deserve, we are going to need to double down on our relationships, and we are going to have to care for each other.

MD: I think in the coming weeks and months, there will be a lot of fear and a lot of sadness and a lot of anger, but that wont sustain us. I think what will sustain us is our hope and is our love for each other. What will sustain us is our commitment to our callers. What will sustain us is our commitment to reproductive justice and our commitment to eradicating criminalization, to fighting against white supremacy. Loving each other and holding each other close will be what gets us through these moments. We need each other and we cant do this alone.

That means all of us individually can be thinking about how to love each other, how to appreciate each other, how to hold each other close. And it means as an organization, were always aware that we dont do this work alone either. Its made possible by all of the incredible sibling funds we have in the Midwest and nationwide, all of our clinic partners who are opening up extra days already to meet the growing need for their influx of patients, the amazing doulas and midwives who do abortion care work, people who provide practical support. All of us and all of the people who love on us so that we can show up to do this work, have to keep hopeful and grounded that the wisdom and love that we have cultivated together will get us through because it has to. And having each other and relying on each other has to be our fuel because the fear and the anger and the resentment is only going to get us so far. I think the hope and the love has to be what gets us the rest of the way.

KH: The hope and the love have to be what gets us the rest of the way. I could not agree more. There are so many ways we can show up for each other in that spirit right now, and I really encourage folks to do so. I also encourage everyone to have conversations, not only about abortion, but about the prison-industrial complex and its many tentacles. Talk about what pregnant people are going to be up against in 2022, given that the surveillance state extends into schools, hospitals and interpersonal communications. We live in an age when texts about being surprised, scared or unhappy about being pregnant could become evidence in a criminal case, as could the information in our period tracker apps. Purvi Patels doctors helped the police criminalize her. That is the world we live in now and we have to talk about it.

Many people have never really imagined themselves as being subject to the criminal system, or even begun to process what that would mean, if they have considered it. For this reason, that system, and its expansive reach, can become invisible to them. But its time to see the unseen. Its time to make connections and understand what were really up against. Because the prison-industrial complex is the beast the Republicans would feed us to, and its ongoing fortification and expansion is a bipartisan project. But we have the power to organize against that monstrosity and compromise its reach. We have the power to organize for abortion rights and reproducive justice. We have power. And we have each other. So lets do what we can, when we can, to get each other through these times.

I am so grateful to Meghan Daniel for talking with me about the Chicago Abortion Fund and the powerful work that they are doing. You can learn more about their work at chicagoabortionfund.org. You can also check out the show notes of this episode on our website for more resources about funding abortion, self-managed abortion and how you can take action. I also want to thank our listeners for joining us today, and remember, our best defense against cynicism is to do good, and to remember, that the good we do matters. Until next time, Ill see you in the streets.

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Yes on 3: Bipartisan coalition seeks to remove slavery from TN Constitution – WKRN News 2

Posted: at 1:47 am

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WKRN) A new effort to remove slavery conditions from the Tennessee State Constitution is making headway on Capitol Hill in coordination with the celebration of Juneteenth.

A bipartisan coalition consisting of advocacy groups, pastors, elected officials and more has set to pass Amendment 3 later this year, which would officially ban the practice of slavery in the state of Tennessee.

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Currently, the state Constitution allows for slavery as punishment for a crime, much like the United States Constitution.

Article I, Section 33 of the 1870 Tennessee Constitution, reads: That slavery and involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime, whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, are forever prohibited in this State.

The amendment, which passed the Tennessee Senate in March and the House in May 2021, proposes removing that language entirely and replacing it with a new section:

Slavery and involuntary servitude are forever prohibited. Nothing in this section shall prohibit an inmate from working when the inmate has been duly convicted of a crime.

Constitutional amendments require a referendum vote of the entire state if passed by the Tennessee General Assembly. The question will appear on the November general election ballot later this year.

The campaign to vote Yes on 3 is led by Director Kathy Chambers, who shared she was proud to lead the charge on the amendment.

I am honored to be leading a non-partisan coalition to finally address this overlooked part of our State Constitution, she said. This campaign is not about right and left, its about right and wrong. Slavery has no business anywhere in our state, especially in our highest governing document.

In order to vote on the amendment, Tennessee voters must also cast a ballot for governor, according to Chambers.

Were going to lead this campaign and educate voters on what the amendment will do and how they can make their vote count this November, she said. That begins today by letting voters know that they must also vote in the governors election to ensure their yes vote for Amendment 3 counts. Vote your conscience or write in the name of your choice just make sure you dont skip it!

Theeda Murphy, an organizer of the effort, celebrated the momentum the amendment is gaining.

On this Freedom Day, Tennesseans are celebrating the opportunity to finally finish the work of emancipation, she said. We can eliminate the last vestiges of slavery from our state constitution by voting Yes on 3 this November.

The resolution allowing the issue to be placed on the November ballot passed the legislature with overwhelming bipartisan support, according to the campaign. Of 132 members in the General Assembly, only six opposed it.

The measure has received support from faith leaders as well as elected officials. Greeneville pastor Dr. Kenneth Saunders considered the measure a human rights issue.

As a believer in Jesus of Nazareth, and as an Episcopal priest, I made vows to uphold these ideals in my life, he said. So, it bothers me to the core of who I am as a child of God to know that slavery still exists in whatever form in this country and in this state. To consider another human being a slave is very much a human rights issue.

Our state and federal constitutions arent just our primary and most important governing documents, said coalition leader Jeannie Alexander, they are moral documents. As long as the stain of slavery remains in either of these constitutions we can never have a truly or just moral society. This November, Tennessee voters have the chance to do something right, to do something good and to finally finish the job of abolition. I am proud the state of Tennessee will lead the way toward freedom.

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Yes on 3: Bipartisan coalition seeks to remove slavery from TN Constitution - WKRN News 2

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Boston’s Colonial Universities Grab Land for Profit, War, and Medical Apartheid – CounterPunch

Posted: at 1:47 am

Allston hates Harvard. Source: Shin Eun-jung, Vertia$: Harvards Hidden History (2015).

Universities on Turtle Island, as la papersonwrites, are land-grabbing, land-transmogrifying, land-capitalizing machines. Indigenous land theft, and profits from slavery, enabled these universities to be built in the first place and theystill collect profitsfrom stolen lands.[1]

With this accumulated capital, major US universities have become colonial real estate agents. Harvard University, notably, ownsland all over the world from vineyards in Washington state to farmlands in Brazil, South Africa, New Zealand, andRomania.[2]Harvards land-grabbing machine has harmed Indigenous communities,poisoning their water and cropsin Brazil, anddenying access to burial sites and pasture landin South Africa.

In the Boston area, too, Harvard and other universities grab land and put it to work for private profit, war, and perpetuation of medical apartheid. These land grabs increase property values and rents, fuel the displacement and ethnic cleansing of local communities, and make it harder for grassroots organizations to survive in the city.

Universities take control of city politics and grab land

Today, Greater Bostons major universities control many expensive land parcels (Figure 1). As of 2021, the estimated total market value of Harvards lands and buildings in Massachusetts comes to a staggering $9.8 billion. Harvard is followed by MIT, whose lands and buildings are valued at $6.7 billion, and Boston University ($2.7 billion).[3]In Cambridge alone,Harvard owns190 tax-exempt acres, while MIT owns over 150. These massive footprints are the spoils of an 80-year expansion strategy. Harvard and MIT have built up large land banks[4] property holdings so vast that universities policies can harm entire communities.

Figure 1: University land grabs. Land holdings of Boston-area universities (as of 2021) with the most highly valued properties (data from MassGIS).

To gain control of the land, universities have helped rewrite the rules ofCambridges government. Key to this was the implementation of Plan E: an anti-democratic system in which a small number of city councilors are elected from across the entire city, and where the financial power to implement council decisions is held by an unelected city manager. Plan E replaced the more decentralized ward-based system that, despite its problems, arguably kept powerful entities like Harvard from expanding into new areas. The brainchild of Harvard academics, Plan E enabled the university to expand by pushing its favored candidates into city council.[5]Although Plan E was met with fierce opposition by local groups who denounced it as fascistic in the late 1930s, it was eventually adopted in 1940.[6]

Universities used the new rules to push racist slum clearance policies. At the end of WWII, Cambridge was a working-class, immigrant city: it was still home to factories, organized labor, and racially integrated neighborhoods, despite theredlining of its historically Black neighborhoods. As the war ended, however, universities seized the opportunity to turn what they saw as slums into research and development centers for the reconfigured war industry. Harvards push for urban removal (urban renewal) was also motivated by a nakedly racist white fear of the surrounding communities, with one Harvard student claiming the university was in the position of a man about to be eaten by cannibals.[7]In 1956, Cambridges unelected city manager (empowered under Plan E) appointed Jos Luis Sert, dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD), as chair of its planning board to steer urban renewal in the city.[8]Collaborating with municipal offices filled with their alumni, MIT and Harvards urban planning departments advocated bulldozing entire neighborhoods, especially majority Black and Brown neighborhoods. These neighborhoods were replaced by developments like Kendall Square that house the companies and academics working for the US war machine, with Pentagon sponsorship.[9]

As universities expanded, the influx of students and faculty put pressure on surrounding neighborhoods. Between 1960 and 1970, the student populations of Harvard and MIT increased by 35%, and by 1968, 4,000 units of Cambridge housing were occupied by Harvard faculty, staff, and students, with another 2,000 occupied by MIT students and staff.[10]Over the same decade, Harvard bought 834 Cambridge housing units and tore down 172. One frontline of the offensive was Riverside, a small neighborhood between Harvards campus and Central Square, threatened for destruction under the Inner Belt plan.[11]Since Riversides school population was 50.5%non-white, replacing the school building to expand student capacity was rationalized as a way to restore racial balance.[12]The architecture firm of the Harvard GSD dean, Sert, Jackson & Associates, drew up plans that required demolishing the surrounding homes. At a public meeting, residents voiced their outrage: As far as were concerned, we wont be here to enjoy a new school, said David Bailey. Lucille Crayton questioned where people whose homes were taken would go: It looks like theyd let us stay there. Theres only a few colored left, she said, adding Im fighting to the end.[13]By the time the new school opened in 1976 as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. School, 30 families had been displaced.

Anti-displacement groups working in coordination with student activists also pressured Harvard to halt the evictions caused by its expansion. In 1970, 300 community members and students disrupted Harvards graduation ceremonies to demand the last open space on the Charles River waterfront, the Treeland Bindery site in Riverside, be reserved for 100 low-income housing units. Under pressure, Harvard bought an alternate site for 32 low-income townhouses. As local politician and Riverside resident Saundra Graham put it, We successfully stopped Harvard from buying up the whole community they only got half of it.[14]

Since then, universities have continued to accumulate properties by playing the real estate market. They buy housing for their faculty, students, and staff, which drives up home prices and rents which in turn boosts the value of universities real estate holdings. In the 1970s and 80s, Harvard Real Estate Inc. ramped up its approach, seeking to buy any properties available at a reasonable price, and introducing an option plan for faculty homebuyers under whichHarvard retained the right to buy upon resale.[15]As landlords, Harvard and MIT often bypassed rent control when it existed, and pushed hard for its abolition in the later ballot fight.[16]

By the 1990s, these university-backed ethnic cleansing programs had filled Harvards surrounding neighborhoods with affluent white residents who were no longer happy with university expansion so the cityenacted policies to limit it. But since Cambridge rent control was abolished in 1995 through the actions of the militant landlord groupSmall Property Owners Association (SPOA), Harvard and MITs leverage has only increased. Today, the land-grabbing machine continues to work at full speedacross the river inAllston.

University expansion fuels the currenthousing crisis in Cambridgeand continues toethnically cleanseworking-class communities. Meanwhile, these universitieseconomics departmentsand housing research centers produce the propaganda that helped make rent control ataboo termamong the political class, even asrents have risen by 30% in Cambridgebetween 2021 and 2022 alone.[17]This ideological consensus helps universities grow their real estate empires.

When universities are powerful landlords, who gets space and what is it used for?

Real estate for war and medical apartheid

Living up to its nicknamePentagon East,MIT leases buildings to weapons developers and war profiteers. MIT leases space toBoeing(Figure 2), a company that provides the Israeli state with missiles, fighter jets, and helicopters, and also servicesImmigration and Customs Enforcement(ICE).

Figure 2: MIT deals land for war and medical apartheid. A subset of MITs real estate relationships and partnerships with pharma, weapons developers, and computing corporations in Kendall Square, Cambridge. MIT parcels as of 2021 shown in green (data from MassGIS).

MIT has also built a joint laboratory withIBM, a company that has helped racist regimes keep records from the US to the German Nazis and the South African apartheid government. The Hollerith machine, a mechanical tabulator developed in the 19th century that was core to IBMs founding, offered a way torecord peoples race and sexon a large scale for purposes of criminalization. The company has continued to develop tools of repression with more sophisticated computers. IBM helped develop COPLINK, a platform used by police departments across the US to share and analyze records. In Massachusetts,as many as 25 police departmentsautomatically feed most of their data from arrests, complaints, and citations to interviews with police officers into COPLINK. IBM also services Israelspopulation registry, which the Israeli state uses to issue ID cards. The registry supports a colonial divide-and-conquer strategy in which Palestinians are differentially oppressed by Israel based on where they reside (e.g., Palestinians with Israeli citizenship versus Palestinian non-citizens living in East Jerusalem), a distinction which is tracked using IBMs tools.

Along with war, MIT also allocates space to the companies that sustain medical apartheid, such asPfizer,Novartis, andTakeda(which bought the Cambridge-based biotech Millennium Pharmaceuticals). During the Covid pandemic, Pfizer cut a deal with the Israeli state: the company provided vaccines for distribution to Israeli citizens (at the expense of Palestinians) in exchange for medical data. Novartis fights to keep drug prices high and to block the production of more affordable generics in the Global South. In 2013, for example,Novartisfought in Indias courts for the right to charge exorbitant prices for Gleevec, a cancer drug.Takedasimilarly charges exorbitant fees for cancer drugs while flexing legal muscle toblock production of cheaper generics. Like Pfizer and Novartis,Takedas expansion, which residents have tried to stop, contributes to the ethnic cleansing of Cambridges communities. Harvard has followed a similar strategy when expanding into Allston, where it has built biomedical research facilities geared towardsprivatizationand the creation ofstartup companies against residents will.[18]

Replacing the resistance

For the colonial university, Cambridge is a success story: if you visit today, youll find a booming industry that works for capital and empire, built on the ruins of displaced communities. Youll see pharmaceutical companies, computing corporations, weapons developers, and secretive weapons research labs such asDraper Laboratory. But what existed before this landscape was reorganized by the land-grabbing machine?

Cambridge was once home to a third of all organizing spaces in Greater Boston, according to local historian Tim Devin who documented a range of mutual aid groups, radical feminist organizations, and tenants unions working in the city in the 1970s. Part of the force of these groups was their visibility, Devin writes inMapping Out Utopia, both in the media, and in the physical space of the city. The physical visibility of storefront organizing spaces depended upon the cheap rent that existed in Cambridge at that time cheap rent which was made possible by priorracist redlining and organized abandonmentthat had devalued real estate in Cambridges historically Black and immigrant neighborhoods. As universities expanded into these neighborhoods and displaced their residents, rents increased and many radical groups couldnt afford to stay.

Figure 3: Harvard Square, then and now. Left: Tim Devins map of community organizations in Harvard Square in the 1970s (source: Mapping Out Utopia).

The groups mapped by Devin have been progressively replaced (Figure 3). The landlords of Sanctuary (74 Mt. Auburn St), a shelter and provider of counseling services for people experiencing homelessness, sold the building to Harvard in 1974, who terminated the lease; today it houses the Harvard Office for the Arts. A feminist cooperative daycare (46 Oxford St) survived a move into a Harvard-owned building only to become a $2,780/month daycare serving Harvard parents. Other Ways, an alternative school at 5 Story St, was swallowed up by Harvards campus. Organizations not directly replaced by universities were destroyed by their effects on the real estate market. In 2015, a triple-decker at 186 Hampshire St that lefty landowners had been renting affordably to radical groups for 40 years was seized by the city for back taxes (for most other landlords, rising property values are enough to kill low rent).[19]

Occupation of a Harvard University building on Memorial Drive, March 1971.

Some organizations held on through struggle, like theCambridge Womens Center, which in 1971 raised money to buy their current space through a 10-dayoccupation of a Harvard building(888 Memorial Drive) that demanded a Womens Center and more low-income housing. But most oppositional spaces from that period are either gone or transformed into liberalNGOs.

Beyond Cambridge, in those parts of Greater Boston that havent been as thoroughly cleansed, the struggle to stay continues.

Colonizing Boston in the service of the US war machine

By reshaping city politics, universities have directly contributed to the whitening of the city. But even when universities arent directing displacement, their colonial presence sets the stage for it. The resulting increases in property values further enrich the universities as landowners, and enable them to take more resources for war and medical apartheid. Universities colonization of Roxbury illustrates this racist feedback loop and its connections to US imperialism.

Protest sign against BUs bioterror lab that emphasizes link between bioweapons and environmental racism.

In the early 2000s, Boston University decided to establish a government-funded bioweapons lab called NEIDL (National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories) on Albany Street in the South End, at the edge of Roxbury (Figure 4), against the residents will. NEIDL cultivates dangerous air-borne pathogens, including Ebola, smallpox, and anthrax all to enhance the harm capacities of the US war machine. Pathogens and epidemics have long been weaponized by empires for use against colonized peoples and as weapons of counterinsurgency. The US government has grown its biological weapons research since World War II, and has a record of experimenting with bioweapons in urban areas without residents consent, especially in Black communities and other communities of color.[20]

Figure 4: Universities grab land and create private wealth amidst displacement and ethnic cleansing. Universities land parcels are color-coded (Boston Universitys parcels in orange), black dots indicate eviction filings filed between 2015-2022, and blue dots indicate police stations (data from MassCourts and MassGIS; note location of Boston Police Department Headquarters). Eviction filings are certainly an underestimate of the number of actual evictions, which often take place informally through intimidation, coercion, and/or punitive rent hikes, without leaving a legal record.

Continuing this pattern, the state chose to build one of its most dangerous biolabs in Roxbury. Roxburys predominantly Black residents were already suffering from displacement, criminalization, and organized abandonment under racial capitalism. As George Lipsitz writes inHow Racism Takes Place, living in segregated inner-city neighborhoods imposes the equivalent of a racial tax on people of color a racial tax that manifests in literal harm to the health and well being of Black bodies.

Some of the citys most polluting facilities have been imposed on Roxbury, including power stations, high-traffic bus stations, junkyards, and waste incinerators.[21]The areas residents lack access to health care and nourishing foods, and parts of Roxbury have the shortestlife expectancyin the city (59 years), dramatically lower than that of the wealthy Back Bay area (92 years) which is half a mile away. Roxbury is also where the forces of ethnic cleansing and displacement are most intense. The Boston Housing Authority and real estate companies have been evicting residents in Roxbury at far higher rates than in Cambridge and Somerville (Figure 4).

By fueling displacement and pursuing biowarfare, universities and their corporate-state partners negate efforts to build life-affirming communities. This negation is covered up with propaganda. NEIDL is presented as a public health lab that will develop treatments for infectious diseases, and which is entirely safe. Yet NEIDL is sponsored by the very entities that block affordable access to medicines and vaccines, such as theGates Foundation(which also supports bioweapons development) and pharmaceutical companies likeMerckandTakeda, and by the US war machine that sucks resources away from communities and pollutes the earth.

Roxbury residents saw through the lies, and tried to stop Boston Universitys bioterror lab.

Community resistance to the colonial university

As soon as plans for Boston Universitys bioterror lab became known, Roxbury residents organized against it.Stop the BU Biolab, a coalition of Roxbury residents and allies, fought against the lab because of the health and environmental dangers the facility brings, and because of the inherent harm of putting bioweapons in the hands of the state. Chuck Turner, then a Boston city councilor backed by Roxbury residents, repeatedly tried to get the cityto ban the lab. The community managed to delay NEIDLs opening by nearly a decade, until the National Institutes of Health ruled that the lab poses no substantial risks despite the history of accidents in Boston Universitys facilities and other bioweapons labs.

Community protests against BUs bioterror lab (photographs from 2005-2007).

Even some local politicians voiced opposition: at a2005 protestagainst NEIDL, then Boston city council member Tito Jackson said, Our community will no longer get dumped on. We have an expressway, we have all the traffic that occurs in a city in that area, and we also have a prison. We do not need ebola, or whatever other airborne or non-airborne agents in our community. Organizers have since continued to warn about NEIDLs harms. As Klare X. AllentoldBostons WBUR radio station in 2012, NEIDL has failed to address basic questions about the facility, such as How are we going to be safe? How are we going to eat? How will we be notified [in case of an accident]? Will there be an alarm? How is it going to be transported? What neighborhoods is it going through?

Roxbury resident and organizer Klare X. Allen speaking at a2006 protestagainst BUs bioterror lab.

The resistance persists today, as NEIDL continues its secretive operations. The lab has started working with SARS-Cov-2 in recent years, and as expected, it has had a series ofdangerous accidentsthat even made it into NEIDLs sanitized reports.

Boston University, meanwhile, continues to accumulate wealth. Down the street from NEIDL, on 700 Albany Street, the university has a set of campus buildings that the state of Massachusetts values at over $96 million and that sit on land valued at ~$21 million (as of 2021). Northeastern University also holds expensive real estate in the area (Figure 4). Private wealth is thus being created amidst evictions, criminalization, and organized abandonment by the state. The university drives this violence, both directly through policy (as we have seen) and more indirectly. The accumulation of property invites morepolicing to protect that property; more policing brings more criminalization and evictions of the undesirable residents; evictions clear the way for real estate developers to serve the growing population of university professionals; this population invites more accumulation of property and hence more policing, and the cycle continues.

Yet history shows that this colonial loop can be disrupted. The universitys land-grabbing machine has been challenged at every stage by the organized efforts of the people it seeks to exploit, push out, and harm. We can fight this machine by building local community power, and connecting our struggle for health, housing, and liberation with the struggle against imperialism and war.

Everyone You Know Is a Believer – The Gospel Coalition

Posted: at 1:47 am

Of course, you know I could never share your faith. So wrote a friend of mine in a letter. She felt it was constitutionally impossible for her to believe. Many of my friends feel the same; perhaps yours are similar. They think theyre not people of faith and that Christians are.

Its a way of thinking thats as popular as it is preposterous. But really, it is wildly preposterous. Because Im a believer and Im a skepticit just depends what things Im being asked to believe (or doubt). At the same time my friend is a believer (about certain things), and shes a skeptic (about others). We are all living by faithall of us, all the timeso its really important to examine such beliefs.

Sometimes I classify our faith positions in terms of day-to-day beliefs and deepest beliefs. Day-to-day beliefs are ones we exercise all the time. Theyre our moral assumptions about what makes the world go round, what makes people tick, what makes society work. We rarely examine these beliefs and we almost never seek to prove or justify them; they are simply the air we breathe.

Im a believer and Im a skepticit just depends what things Im being asked to believe (or doubt).

These beliefs include things like people have intrinsic value, a society should be judged by the way it treats its weakest members, might does not make right, everyone should be free to make their own decisions in the world, the arc of history is long but it bends toward justice, and so on.

What youll notice about these day-to-day beliefs is how commonly theyre held. I believe them, my friends believe them, it seems as if most people in the modern world believe them. So really, were incredibly united by faith, wouldnt you say? Except that we havent discussed our deepest beliefsour metaphysical and religious views about the fundamental nature of reality. At that level a great chasm opens up.

For atheist Richard Dawkins, the universe appears at bottom [to contain] no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference. For Moses, on the other hand, underneath are the everlasting arms (Deut. 33:27). So take your pickunderneath there are uncaring, brute forces or an eternal God with outstretched arms of love. Which is it? The clash of beliefs at the deepest level seems irreconcilable.

Given this immense difference, its completely understandable why my friend would consider herself incapable of my kind of faith. The gulf between blind, pitiless indifference and the everlasting arms of love appears unbridgeable. But maybe we need to reframe things. Instead of focusing on the chasm between those two deepest beliefs, why dont we focus on a different disparity? Because the really unbridgeable chasm is the one that exists within our atheist friends. Consider the following clashes:

My friends believe the second half of all these statements, passionately. As do I. And these dearest intuitions shape us at every levelindeed we stake our lives on such beliefs (as unprovable as they are). We are all persons of faith. But the real inconsistency to point out is not the inconsistency between the atheists deepest beliefs and the Christians. The starkest contradiction is among the atheists own beliefsthe gulf between their dearest intuitions and their deepest beliefs.

In my book The Air We Breathe, I take seven of our dearest intuitions and show how theyve become commonplace:

The Air We Breathe explores each of these values in the context of the Christian story, taking the reader from Genesis to George Floyd. We begin in the Old Testament, continue in the New, then chart the early churchs growth, then medieval Christendom, the scientific evolution, the abolition of the slave trade, and on through World War II and the civil rights movement into the present day.

The starkest contradiction is among the atheists own beliefsthe gulf between their dearest intuitions and their deepest beliefs.

At each juncture we see that the dearest intuitions we hold are not at all obvious, natural, or universal. These values are largely unknown to pre- and non-Christian cultures. Each of these beliefs has come specifically through the Jesus revolution (a.k.a. Christianity) and they make little sense apart from it.

When were tempted to focus on the clash between believers and unbelievers, we should think again. Everyone is a believer. And there can be surprising agreement on the dearest beliefs we holdsuch unprovable values have, through the Christian revolution, become the air we breathe. But we need to go further. As we press into those heartfelt beliefs, we see the most urgent clash to resolve is really the one that exists within the non-Christian. The beliefs our friends cherish (even while claiming to be unbelievers) are unfounded apart from Jesus Christ. He alone is a solid foundation. All other ground is sinking sand.

This article is adapted from Glen Scriveners The Air We Breathe (The Good Book Company, 2022) and was published in partnership with The Good Book Company.

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Everyone You Know Is a Believer - The Gospel Coalition

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NHRC asks gov’t to make IDs, passports affordable to Gambians – The Point – The Point

Posted: at 1:47 am

This call by the rights commission came years after an intense debate across the country, following the introduction of the new ECOWAS Identity Card, whose total transaction costs up to 500 dalasis.

"Section 26 and 39 of the 1997 Constitution protects political rights and the rights to vote and be registered respectively. To fulfill these rights, the Independent Electoral Commission oversaw successful voter registration, political campaign and elections in December 2021," NHRC stated in its 2021 State of Human Rights Report.

"The issuance of attestation proving Gambian nationality and citizenship by Alkalolu and the authority to do so culminated in accusations and the counter accusations between sympathizers of different political parties as they accused each other of using influence over the Alkalolu to register unqualified individuals to boost the numerical advantage of registered followers."

NHRC also observed that the authority of the Mayoress of Banjul to issue an attestation to potential voters was also questioned and eventually challenged before the courts.

The court held that the Mayoress does not have the authority to issue attestations for voter registration. There were also instances where the NHRC observed that some individuals were denied registration because their Gambian nationality was not verified, thus raising the need for the government to work on regularising the naturalisation procedure for qualified individuals and issuing national documents to citizens.

The Commission, however, stated that despite these underlining issues, the process were hailed for being fair, transparent and in-line with international standards.

The Commission has also asked government to enhance access to immigration services for citizens to acquire their required national documents and to also make the issuance of birth certificates compulsory upon birth at all health centres.

The NHRC has also thought it wise that The Gambia government should conduct adequate sensitisation on importance of birth registration, issuance of birth certificates, age for voter registration and citizenship requirements across the country, especially in rural communities.

The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which Gambia ratified in 1979, prohibits restrictions on freedom of expression on national security grounds unless they are provided by law, strictly construed, and necessary and proportionate to address a legitimate threat. Such laws cannot put the right itself in jeopardy.

The sedition law, it observed, is a contentious law that civil liberties activists, human rights lawyers and journalists have questioned.

The global movement has been overwhelmingly anti-sedition with different countries either easing the law or simply getting rid of it. Many democratic countries, including the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, Canada, Ghana, Nigeria and Uganda, have held sedition law as undemocratic, undesirable and unnecessary.

The predominant argument for the abolition of sedition has been the protection of freedom of speech. The potential misuse of sedition laws to further political agendas is also a factor.

On July 27, 2001, Ghanas parliament unanimously repealed the Criminal Libel and Seditious Laws, which had been used to incarcerate a number of journalists in the past. The repeal follows the passage of the Criminal Code (Repeal of the Criminal and Seditious Laws Amendment Bill) Act 2001 by a unanimous vote in the House.

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NHRC asks gov't to make IDs, passports affordable to Gambians - The Point - The Point

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Statement by Secretary Walsh on the International Labor Organization’s recognition of occupational safety, health as a fundamental right – US…

Posted: June 11, 2022 at 1:03 am

WASHINGTON U.S. Secretary of Labor Marty Walsh issued the following statement after the International Labor Organization today recognized occupational safety and health as a Fundamental Principle and Right at Work:

The U.S. Department of Labor commends the International Labor Organization for recognizing for the first time the right to a safe and healthy working environment in the framework of the ILOs Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work at the 2022 International Labor Conference.

Every day, millions of workers around the world face dangerous or unhealthy working conditions. Across the world, the ILO estimates that more than 2.3 million women and men die each year because of work-related accidents and diseases.

Some workers are not aware of their rights because their employers fail to provide that information or they did not present it in a language understood by the workers. Others are afraid to speak up because of their immigration status or for fear of losing their jobs, and still others live in places that lack the necessary institutions to protect their rights or that fail to enforce them.

The ILOs 1998 Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work established an international consensus on the core body of labor rights in four categories: freedom of association and collective bargaining; the elimination of forced or compulsory labor; the effective abolition of child labor; and the elimination of discrimination in respect of employment and occupation.

Todays approval of an amendment to the 1998 declaration now includes: a safe and healthy working environment. Though non-binding, the 1998 declaration is the most widely cited ILO instrument. This recognition will have tremendous benefit for the safety and health of workers everywhere.

The U.S. Department of Labor will continue to work at home and abroad to ensure that all workers have the right to a safe and healthy working environment.

Learn more about the departments international work.

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Statement by Secretary Walsh on the International Labor Organization's recognition of occupational safety, health as a fundamental right - US...

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Beyond white guys in hardhats: Kim Kelly on labor’s hidden history of diversity – Facing South

Posted: at 1:03 am

Workers at Warrior Met Coal in Alabama recently marked more than 400 days on strike the longest in the state's history. As the Alabama miners continue to hold the line, Starbucks employees recently won union elections in that state as well as Louisiana, Tennessee, and Texas.

These brave workers Black and white and Latino and Asian;women, men, and nonbinary people are carrying on a centuries-long history of labor organizing in the South. But many of the oft-told stories of successful organizing efforts in the region and the nation at large have either been relegated to obscure academic texts or center the struggles of white men.

In "Fight Like Hell: The Untold History of American Labor,"labor reporter Kim Kelly rectifies this marginalization with accounts of how Black workers wielded the power of collectivized labor to organize in the Reconstruction-era South and beyond. Kelly is a freelance reporter based in Philadelphia who has written for the Washington Post, The Baffler, and The New Republic, and pens a labor column for Teen Vogue.

As Kelly recounts, after the Civil War freed Black people sought opportunities to work and own property alongside their white counterparts. But Southern state legislatures, seeking to extend the oppression of Black people, passed a series of laws known as "Black Codes"that among other things limited the rights of Black workers. In South Carolina, for example, Black workers were forced to enter into contracts with white landowners that labeled them as "servants"and required them to work and reside on the property of their "masters."These labor contracts criminalized communication among and movement of workers. Violations often meant forfeiture of wages and sometimes carried a jail sentence.

This system of slavery by another name gave way to a practice known as convict leasing, where people imprisoned under laws specifically designed to target Black people were then leased to local industrialists or farmers and forced to work under harsh conditions without pay. Widely practiced in Southern Appalachia, convict leasing generated millions of dollars for the U.S. economy during the 19th century through activities including coal and salt mining. It was only through the organizing of Black mine workers that the practice received national attention and was eventually abolished, first in Tennessee, then Georgia. Alabama abolished it much later.

Following the Civil War, many Black women took up domestic labor, including laundry work. In 1866 a group of Black laundry workers in the Mississippi capital launched a massive strike after city officials dismissed their appeal for fair wages. At the time, their plight was overshadowed by that of white millworkers in the North, though they drew support from the region's abolitionists. The workers eventually founded Mississippi's first trade union, the Washerwomen of Jackson. Soon after, Black-led labor organizing spread throughout the South, from the formation of the Colored National Labor Union in 1869 to the Great Strike of 1877, which started in West Virginia and eventually spread to other states including Mississippi, where many strike leaders were Black railroad and dock workers married to members of Washerwomen of Jackson.

One year after the Jackson strike, Congress passed the Peonage Abolition Act, outlawing debt slavery like that experienced by so many Black workers after the Civil War. However, Black sharecroppers in Arkansas still found themselves unfairly indebted to white land owners. These sharecroppers returned from fighting in World War I to form the Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America (PFHUA) with the aim of negotiating fairer settlements with landlords. But the union's attempt to organize resulted in the kidnapping of the union president's son, who was assaulted, labeled a "labor agitator,"and jailed.

Over the next two days, a mob of white civilians, police, and military servicemen unleashed violence on union members and the wider community of Elaine, culminating in the deaths of at least 100 Black people and the jailing of an additional 285. The event became known as the Elaine Massacre, which is still commemorated today. Though the union dissolved, a dozen Black members known as the Elaine 12 were convicted for their alleged roles in the massacre and later exonerated after a 1923 landmark Supreme Court case, Moore v. Dempsey, forever changed the way courts interpret due process. Not long after, A. Philip Randolph began organizing the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the first Black-led union to successfully negotiate a contract with a major corporation and receive a charter from the American Federation of Labor. Its motto was "Fight or Be Slaves."

This interview has been edited for clarity.

Who are some of the people who have been left out of the conversation about labor in the United States?

The book focuses specifically on women, Black, Indigenous, Latino, Asian Pacific Islander workers, disabled workers, queer and trans workers, immigrant workers, workers whose labor has been criminalized like sex workers, or people in prison. Those are all people and groups whose stories have been documented and preserved by academics and historians and contemporary journalists at the time, but those histories aren't necessarily made available or accessible to most of us. There's a lot of really incredible academic writing and research that's kind of locked away in these archives or only available in academic presses, and a lot of folks that are are interested in or would be interested in this history don't have anywhere where to look. I wanted this book to weave together different stories and characters and moments to show not only has labor history always been intersectional, inclusive, and diverse, but it's really those workers who typically have been the most vulnerable, the most marginalized, who fought the hardest.

How has this helped to shape or maybe warp the image of America's working class?

There is this enduring avatar of what a working-class person looks like, or what a union worker looks like. And it invariably ends up being someone like my dad, like a white guy in a hard hat with dirt on his hands, who has dodgy political opinions and is not interested in the radical or even progressive aspects of labor history. That's not to say that those folks aren't a part of the movement. They've always been here, they raised me, they're important too. But that's not the whole story. Even just in stark, modern terms, the most common union worker you'll come across is a Black woman who works in health care. The typical union worker right now is not a guy like my dad. Given how union density has fallen and how work itself has changed, that old stereotype just isn't going tocut it anymore. And I think it's really important to show that every type of person has been part of this movement and done incredible things. And there's no reason why we can't do it again.

I think it's really important to show that every type of person has been part of this movement and done incredible things. And there's no reason why we can't do it again.

A few chapters of the book focus on Black domestic workers I'm thinking specifically of the Washerwomen of Jackson, Mississippi. How does their legacy endure today?

Domestic workers face this conundrum where the actual labor they perform, whether it's caring for children or elders, whether it's cleaning, whether it's just maintaining the home there's been this pervasive image throughout history that that's not even work. That's just what certain people are supposed to do. Why would we pay you for that? Whether, you know, it's been discussed in context of the Wages for Housework campaign, or just the way that domestic workers were left out of major labor legislation, and still are. There are so many people in this country, so many workers, who not only are fighting for decent wages or protection on the job they are fighting just to be recognized as workers. This is something that we've seen throughout decades and centuries and are still seeing now.

Several of the organized movements in the book began down South, then made their way up North, which is sort of the opposite of how stories about labor are often presented. How does a movement travel from, say, South Carolina to Pennsylvania?

Even before technology was part of the equation, it came down to networks, right? Building networks of solidarity,staying connected with activists across state lines and building a real community of workers and organizers. One of my favorite examples of Southern workers innovating, and coming up with new ways to use new technologies to their advantage, was during the Great Textile Workers Strike in 1934. There was this massive textile workers strike going on, and at one point workers formed these things they called "flying squadrons."They use this new shiny technology as a way to spread the news of the strike and connect with workers and get them to join in. These flying squadrons were just made up of automobiles. That was a new thing back then that was before we had Twitter, before we had Discord. That revolutionized the way that people were able to connect to the news of strikes and labor unrest.

How has the history of slavery, forced labor, and Jim Crow in the South shaped the labor movement?

There's this tendency to sort of silo off specific historical moments or movements for justice as their own thing, whether it's like, you know, the disability rights movement, or the civil rights movement. Those have always intersected with the labor movement and the history of slavery in the South that was labor, it was forced labor. It's something that you can trace direct lines from, from slavery to convict leasing to incarcerated workers in prisons across the country. Everything's connected and builds on something that people before have struggled against. Every fight we're dealing with right now, someone was already doing that 100, 200, 400 years ago.

The book notes that Black women were mine workers as early as 1821, centuries before the white woman who is actually credited for being the first woman to work in the mines. How does writing enslaved people out of the labor movement in this way make building power more difficult?

I don't think you can really understand the labor movement as it stands now, or how it got here, or the mistakes it's made, or the successes that it has notched, without understanding the impact of slavery and the impact of forced labor. So many firsts in this country didn't ask to be first, and a lot of their names are lost to history. When I was researching the chapter on mining, I couldn't find any names [of enslaved people] or any of their voices. It kind of broke my heart because they're pioneers. They're labor heroes, too.

In the book you talk about the practice of convict leasing and how it was widely practiced in Appalachian states after, and in Alabama's case before, the Civil War. How has this practice shaped current systems of incarceration, and what role has abolition played in the labor movement?

We're a few decades removed from that particular historical moment. But there are still people in prisons who are seeing their labor sold to companies and seeing those companies and the U.S. government profit enormously off of their labor. They don't have a choice, they're not able to push back against their boss, they can't clock out. They have no rights as workers. In North Carolina I researched the prisoners' labor union movement there in the '70s there's one specific Supreme Court decision that jumped out at me as a catalyst that kneecapped the nascent prisoner labor union movement when it was really just picking up steam.

In 1977, the Supreme Court ruled in the Jones v. North Carolina Prisoners Labor Union case that incarcerated workers don't have a right to join the union or to organize a union. Even though they're workers and even though they're enduring those material conditions, they are not allowed. I think we've really seen the impacts of that four decades later. But of course, people in prison have continued to organize; incarcerated workers have continued to strike and resist and rebel. It's interesting to think about how the labor movement intersects with abolitionist movements because I think and hope a lot of us within the two movements are committed to actually getting people free and to understanding and emphasizing that intersection between incarcerated workers and labor. Again, it's all connected.

And one thing that complicates that in an interesting and really enduringly frustrating way is the fact that cops, police, they are ostensibly part of the movement, right? They have their "unions,"hard air quotes around them, but still, they have unions. Their collective bargaining agreements have arguably a hell of a lot more power than a lot of other unions that represent actual workers in this country. Something we saw pop up gave me a lot of hope, at least momentarily. I think it was like 2020 that we saw this little movement, the no cop unions movement. I was involved in that, trying to call on the AFL-CIO to disaffiliate a police union. Union members and leaders were pushing pretty publicly, saying hey, these are the people who are murdering and caging and oppressing our fellow union members, our fellow workers they should not be part of this federation. It was interesting seeing how much pushback it got.

The end of the book brings us to the present moment of the ongoing Warrior Met Coal strike in Alabama. From your view, how does this strike reflect the efforts to organize labor in the South that you researched for the book?

One thing that was really fun about putting this book together, and especially the way that I structured the chapters, is that I wanted to make it very, very clear how much current struggles were connected to things that happened in the past. Every chapter starts with something a little further back in the mists of time, whether it's, you know, 19th century, 20th century. And then I wanted to show something very current at the end. So much progress has happened in between, but so many people have been left out. Even though that's not the rosiest view, it's true. And I think it's important to show that, whether you're a coal miner in the 1800s or 2021 going to war against a coal boss who is trying to prevent you from organizing, everything old is new again. Putting a more inspiring positive spin on it, so many of the ways that workers won in the past, we're seeing that happen again.

I love it and I didn't put it in the book because it happened after I turned it in of course, but after the [Amazon] labor union won their their union recognition battle in Staten Island, I was reading about it from other really great journalists who have covered it the whole time, like Luis Feliz Leon, Lauren Gurley, Maximillian Alvarez. Organizers Chris Smalls, Derek Palmer, Angelica Maldonado the tactics they used, whether it was ensuring that people spoke the workers'languages, making sure people felt heard, having barbecues, having jollof rice, showing that they appreciated the culture of the people and saw them as humans, not just robots the way that Amazon did, that took me right back to 1946, the Great Sugar Strike in Hawaii. In order to organize workers, get them ready to strike, and make sure that the white sugar plantation bosses couldn't break them the way they had before by dividing different types of workers, their union at the time, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, pulled together different groups of workers and they had translators, they had meetings where everybody was conversing, they shared food, they built strike kitchens. There was so much of that interpersonal solidarity building. And they won. So many of the tactics that today's organizers are using, even if they don't necessarily know it, are echoing what folks in the past have done to win against their version of Jeff Bezos.

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Beyond white guys in hardhats: Kim Kelly on labor's hidden history of diversity - Facing South

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Malaysia: Move to abolish mandatory death penalty is ‘welcome step’ in right direction – Amnesty International

Posted: at 1:03 am

Responding to the announcement that Malaysias Cabinet has decided to work towards abolishing the mandatory death penalty, Amnesty International Malaysias Executive Director Katrina Jorene Maliamauv said:

We applaud the governments decision to abolish the mandatory death penalty and to grant judges discretion in sentencing. Its a welcome step in the right direction, and we urge it to go further and work towards full abolition of this cruel punishment.

The government should table the necessary amendments in Parliament without delay and establish a full review of all cases involving the mandatory death penalty with a view to commuting these sentences.

We have seen and documented time and time again how the use of mandatory sentencing has disproportionately harmed the most marginalized and disenfranchised members of society, how the death penalty itself has not served as a unique deterrent to crime, and how its continued use has stifled the necessary and visionary work towards enabling fair justice and addressing issues at the root causes.

The death penalty is also cruel, inhumane and a violation of the right to life. But todays announcement by the government shows that human rights change is possible, and that the global trend towards abolition remains unstoppable. Malaysias decision should also set an example for other countries in the region.

Background:

On 10 June 2022, the Minister in the Prime Ministers Department (Parliament and Law) Wan Junaidi Tuanku Jaafar said that the government has agreed to abolish the mandatory death penalty. The Cabinet decision was reached after a presentation of a report by the Special Committee to Review Alternative Sentences to the Mandatory Death Penalty.

Currently, 11 offences carry the mandatory death penalty in Malaysia, including for drug-related offences, which make up the majority of death penalty cases. The decision by the Cabinet would give judges discretion in sentencing. These amendments would still need to be tabled and passed in Parliament before they take effect.

The Cabinet decision includes calls for further studies to develop proposals for substitute punishments for 11 offences which carry the mandatory death penalty.

According to a Parliamentary written reply in February 2022, there are currently 1,341 people on death row in Malaysia, with 905 of the cases involving mandatory death sentences for drug trafficking.

Amnesty International opposes the death penalty in all cases without exception, regardless of the nature or circumstances of the crime, the guilt, innocence or other characteristics of the offender or the method used by the state to carry out the execution.

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Malaysia: Move to abolish mandatory death penalty is 'welcome step' in right direction - Amnesty International

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Juneteenth beyond a day off: How to celebrate year-round – HR Dive

Posted: at 1:03 am

For better and for worse, best practices for celebrating Juneteenth at work are top of mind.

In 2021, many employers attempted to make good on previous promises of antiracism and cultural inclusion by making this holiday celebrating slaverys abolition a paid day off see Workday, Twitter, Uber and Lyft even before President Joe Biden made Juneteenth a federal holiday on June 18 last year. African Americans have been celebrating the holiday since June 19, 1865, when Union soldiers belatedly arrived in Galveston, Texas to let Black residents of Texas know they were no longer enslaved.

As non-Black Americans start to embrace Juneteenth, companies are looking for ways to celebrate that dont cause harm or outrage (read: a pint of red velvet ice cream and a paltry striped napkin set).

Cracking down on cultural appropriation and investing in company-wide education around racial inequity can create a solid foundation. But DEI leads can keep the spirit of Juneteenth alive, year-round, by examining and auditing current talent acquisition practices for racial equity, experts told HR Dive.

Juneteenth should be about educating and supporting, and making sure that you are part of the progress, because there's still so much work to be done, Kimberly Lee Minor, Bandiers chief commercial officer and president, told HR Dive in an interview. And making sure that people of color Black people, specifically are represented across the ranks in whatever industry we're in.

Optional Caption

vgajic via Getty Images

For example, like many fashion retail companies, Minor said, Bandier greatly lacked diversity when she joined 18 months prior. Leadership tapped Minor to speak with leaders about Juneteenth and fill in cultural gaps. Because of the antiracism conversations that were kindled two years ago, more little-known Black history came to light. Those who did know, Minor said, didnt gain that knowledge from K-12 social studies classes. That history lesson came from Black parents or was unearthed in college.Building on the work of summer 2020,Minors goals arent just about making Bandier more multicultural. She also wants her workplace to be supportive of its growing, diverse community.

Kimberly Lee Minor, president and chief commercial officer at Bandier

Along with giving employees the day off, Minor said the athleisure brand celebrates mainly in how HR builds out its team. She juxtaposes this approach against Walmarts Juneteenth recent controversy.

Retailers can be the worst. I've been in this industry for so long. They can just be the worst because they see a marketing or merchandising opportunity at every turn, Minor said of the ice cream debacle.

It's not like every Black person on the 19th of June has a cookout like I've never been to a Juneteenth cookout. I've been to cultural celebrations, she said. What would make you think that you should make money off of those people who are celebrating their legal freedom?

Optional Caption

damircudic via Getty Images

Malia Lazu, a lecturer in Technological Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Strategic Management at MITs Sloan School of Management, said that Juneteenth is becoming a tentpole for corporations to market their equity missions to a Black audience. While the ice cream was laugh-worthy, she explained over the phone to HR Dive, its indicative of a Juneteenth growing pain: with more awareness of the holiday comes more performative allyship.

If anyone had asked Black people how they would like corporations to respond, I don't think a Juneteenth holiday would have been the first thing, she continued. Now, from her perspective, Black people are forced to operate within and around that framework. Juneteenth doesn't help corporations take diverse hiring slates more seriously, Lazu continued. The Juneteenth holiday doesn't provide a third party outside audit of DEI efforts.

Malia Lazu, lecturer at MIT Sloan School of Management and founder & CEO of The Urban Labs

Throughout her conversation with HR Dive, Minor expressed her belief that companies should seek to make their Juneteenth acknowledgements more expansive. It's not just on June 19. Great, it's a national holiday, she said dryly. So you'll give your employees a day off. But make a commitment to it every day.

Lazu also echoed Minor, emphasizing that companies should continue to have historical discussions around the holidays origins and give people a day off. But really do something structural and make that the day you move the needle around DEI in your company. Because Juneteenth is a really sacred holiday for a lot of Black people. Its what we did for our freedom.

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Thin-skinned blue line: Police fight against defunding, showing their true colours – The Conversation

Posted: at 1:03 am

Since the police killing of George Floyd in May 2020 and the subsequent mass mobilizations for police defunding and abolition, the defund movement has continued to organize.

Has this work had an impact in Canada? Have there been successful challenges to reducing Canadian police budgets?

The answer is complicated and depends on how you define success.

Some argue the mobilization and movement-building that has transpired people brought together in campaigns for police abolition that reimagine community safety is a huge success in and of itself. Abolition has entered the public consciousness like never before.

Dozens of books have been published by academics, lawyers and activists, building on the work of Black feminists in the United States and Canada who have long argued police perpetuate rather than reduce violence in our society.

There have been some modest successes in defunding police.

In Edmonton, city council voted to cut the 2022 police budget increase by $10.9 million and reallocate the money to social services.

In Halifax, a subcommittee of the Halifax Board of Police Commissioners has tabled a detailed and carefully researched report to city council on how the local police force could be gradually detasked and defunded.

When one looks further, however, what becomes apparent is a serious and growing counter-campaign. Its perhaps the strongest indication of the movements success at undermining the sanctity of police budgets until now.

Police have fought vigorously against the defund movement through threats and false conceits of impending violence if budgets are cut. They are co-opting calls for community safety, branding themselves as protectors in need of continuing or increased resources. They position themselves as innocent heroes under attack, and discredit those who critique them.

One strategy police use is an offensive and personal tactic of removing people from positions of influence if they support police defunding.

When Winnipeg City Coun. Sherri Rollins critiqued police racism in March 2020, an informal complaint was lodged against her by the police board alleging she lacked compliance with the citys respectful workplace policies.

Similarly, in July 2020, another Winnipeg city councillor, Vivian Santos, discussed defunding and was ousted from the police board. Police removed her on alleged security grounds when background checks turned up a friend with a criminal record.

Scare tactics are another strategy.

According to their own data, only eight to 10 per cent of calls to police involve violence. Despite acknowledging that a large proportion of the calls they receive might be better managed by other kinds of workers, police maintain that reducing officers would be nave and undermine community safety.

But which community is the police keeping safe? Instead of diverting funding to organizations with expertise in gender-based violence, anti-racism measures and mental health, police are demanding and receiving record funds to triage these programs themselves.

The Waterloo Region Police recently got a $12.3-million boost to run mental-health interventions while community organizations are starved through austerity and struggle to keep their doors open.

In Hamilton, Ont., activists from the Defund the Police Hamilton Coalition supported homeless people who were harassed daily by police and eventually violently evicted from their encampments.

The coalition demanded city council reallocate resources from police towards permanent housing, prioritizing the needs of the community over criminalizing homeless people. The organizations antidote to scare tactics is to focus on prevention and the fight to protect people over property.

Police suggest ostensible reforms, such as unconscious bias training and body cameras, as a promise to change the culture of policing. As criminologists have noted, such reforms increase police funding without demonstrable change, sidestepping the reality that policing is inherently violent.

With growing attention to their record of extra-judicial killings, systemic racism and harassment in their own forces and their failure to address gender-based violence, police are on the defence.

Take, for example, the aggressive response to criticism from police unions. The police brass may have to mince their words when responding to politicians and the public, but police unions often reveal their true colours.

In June 2020, the Regina Police Association defended a tweet suggesting that its cultural unit, which works with Indigenous people, would be the first to go should the police be defunded. Choose wisely, it threatened.

Also in June 2020, the Edmonton police chief similarly stated that defunding would harm diversity initiatives within policing. This threat to the employment of Black and Indigenous officers positioned the police as a benevolent force in the struggle for racial justice, obfuscating the colonial foundation and systemic racism of policing.

Yet the charge in Canada to defund the police is being led by Black and Indigenous leaders and is explicitly focused on racial injustice in the criminal justice system.

The lack of success in police defunding is a sign of how vigorously police are fighting back, not a sign of a waning movement.

Over the past two years, police chiefs, police representatives and police unions have mobilized the public resources they have to fight against the defund movement. But an Ipsos poll found 50 per cent of Canadians under the age of 38 are interested in police defunding and abolition.

Defunding the police is not radical or irrational, contrary to what police might have the public believe.

What is radical and irrational is continuing to spend 15 to 30 per cent of municipal budgets on public policing. What is radical and irrational is continuing to use criminalization and criminal law to deal with social issues and interpersonal harms when we know that a punitive, carceral approach does not decrease harm or lead to more safety in our neighbourhhoods.

Instead, citizens need to think openly about ways to address harms in our communities and neighbourhoods and to reallocate funds from bloated police budgets to housing, mental health, addiction, employment, counselling, anti-violence education and more. Then we might truly live in a healthier, safer world.

At a time when many people are struggling to make ends meet, we must not let police tantrums get in the way of real safety and a fair share of resources for community and social development. Nor can we accept the criminalization of poverty and inequality, which is the current alibi for how public police and the whole penal system stays in business.

Thin-skinned blue line: Police fight against defunding, showing their true colours - The Conversation

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Category Archives: Abolition Of Work

Abortion Funds Are Preparing For a Storm. To Help, Get in Where You Fit in. – Truthout

Yes on 3: Bipartisan coalition seeks to remove slavery from TN Constitution – WKRN News 2

Boston’s Colonial Universities Grab Land for Profit, War, and Medical Apartheid – CounterPunch

Everyone You Know Is a Believer – The Gospel Coalition

NHRC asks gov’t to make IDs, passports affordable to Gambians – The Point – The Point

Statement by Secretary Walsh on the International Labor Organization’s recognition of occupational safety, health as a fundamental right – US…

Beyond white guys in hardhats: Kim Kelly on labor’s hidden history of diversity – Facing South

Malaysia: Move to abolish mandatory death penalty is ‘welcome step’ in right direction – Amnesty International

Juneteenth beyond a day off: How to celebrate year-round – HR Dive

Thin-skinned blue line: Police fight against defunding, showing their true colours – The Conversation

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