Category Archives: Abolition Of Work

On January 17, 1977, Gary Gilmore was executed by firing squad, shot through the heart, at Utah State Prison. He was the first person to be executed after the death penalty had been reinstated in the United States in 1976. This year, to mark the 45th anniversary of this execution, which coincided with Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Death Penalty Action and a coalition of death penalty abolitionists gathered in Washington, D.C. calling for an end to the federal death penalty and all executions in the United States.

After a 17-year hiatus, the U.S. resumed federal executions a year and a half ago. Between July 2020 and January 2021, the Trump administration executed 13 people who were on federal death row, a number surpassing the total number of federal executions that had taken place over the preceding 70 years (1949-2019) spanning 11 presidential administrations.

Those who were executed under the Trump administration included: Daniel Lewis Lee, Wesley Ira Purkey, Dustin Lee Honken, Lezmond Mitchell, Keith Nelson, William LeCroy Jr., Christopher Vialva, Orlando Hall, Brandon Bernard, Alfred Bourgeois, Lisa Montgomery, Corey Johnson and Dustin John Higgs. Among this group, considered irredeemable by the U.S. government, was a man living with Alzheimers and schizophrenia; another who was a member of the Navajo Nation and was the only Native American on federal death row; and another who was a former soldier. One of the executed men practiced Messianic Judaism, while another was a practicing Muslim. The only woman who was on federal death row under Trump executed in January 2021 was sexually trafficked by her mother. These sparse details tell us that their existence was not solely defined by the crimes for which they were convicted and ultimately executed, but that each of these individuals has a much fuller story that comprises who they were as human beings. Discounting and ignoring the humanity of those on death row is intrinsic to a system that kills human beings as part of its judicial practice.

As a presidential candidate, Joe Biden had pledged to end the federal death penalty, but the administration seems to have backtracked on that promise. Last July, the Biden administration placed a moratorium on federal executions in order to review the policies the Trump administration enacted to carry out this unprecedented execution spree. Yet Biden has not taken steps to actually end the practice. And while federal executions have been halted for the time being, the Department of Justice has defended and sought the death penalty in the high-profile cases of Dzhokar Tsarnaev and Dylann Roof.

Cases like Roofs and Tsarnaevs are cited by proponents of the death penalty to justify its use. The idea that the death penalty is necessary to punish the worst of the worst those like Roof and Tsarnaev, who commit the most heinous of crimes is one that has been proliferated in the U.S. in defense of a practice that most countries in the world have outlawed.

In my home state of Illinois, where the death penalty was abolished by the state legislature in 2011 because of the sustained efforts of death penalty abolitionists, the case of infamous serial killer John Wayne Gacy was often cited to justify the ongoing use of the death penalty.

Darby Tillis, who along with his codefendant, Perry Cobb, was the first to be exonerated from Illinoiss death row in 1987, was a fiery and outspoken activist against the death penalty until his death in 2014. We had many conversations about his experience on death row, and once, I asked him about John Wayne Gacy, with whom he was incarcerated. His words were telling. He was a quiet man who kept to himself, Tillis told me. When they executed him, we all knew that we would be next.

When the death penalty is sought for people like Gacy or Roof and Tsarnaev, these executions do not take place in a vacuum. By making a monster out of Gacy, it gives the impression that the system works. But what it really does is let the system off the hook for taking the lives of those it deems expendable, said Renaldo Hudson, who survived 37 years of incarceration in Illinois, including 13 on death row.

Girvies Davis was one of those men considered expendable by the state of Illinois. One year after Gacys execution, the state executed Davis, a Black man who was convicted by an all-white jury of killing Charles Biebel, an 89-year-old white man. Scholar-activist Dylan Rodriguez argues that the very logics of the overlapping criminal justice and policing regimes systematically perpetuate racial, sexual, gender, colonial, and class violence through carceral power. Along these lines, it is not surprising that the evidence used to convict Davis was problematic and filled with holes. Prison guards claimed that Davis had passed them a note confessing to Biebels murder while he was incarcerated on another charge. But Davis was functionally illiterate at the time and could not read or write. And, on the night he supposedly passed guards this note, prison logs show that he was signed out of the prison.

Racial bias against defendants of color has always affected who is prosecuted, convicted, sentenced to death and executed. Illinois, now known for its high number of death row exonerations, executed men like Girvies Davis before it abolished the death penalty.

Like Davis, Orlando Hall, who was executed by the federal government during Trumps spree, also faced an all-white jury. In a written testimony of his journey of redemption, he describes his experience:

How did I feel as a black man when I saw my all-white jury? I felt like the thousands before me doomed! I was never under the false illusion that I would receive a fair trial or a jury of my peers. The system is set up to punish people of color, especially poor people of color. I was an uneducated man, functioning illiterate at best, but I also wasnt a fool.

The federal death penalty is not immune from the issues that plagued Illinois. Citing the systemic racism of the death penalty, Rep. Ayanna Pressley, Sen. Dick Durbin, and more than 70 of their colleagues reintroduced the Federal Death Penalty Prohibition Act in 2021. State-sanctioned murder is not justice, and the death penalty, which kills Black and [B]rown people disproportionately, has absolutely no place in our society, Pressley said. Before 2021 came to a close, on December 15, Representatives Pressley and Jamie Raskin wrote a letter to U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland requesting a briefing on the status of the Department of Justices review of the Trump administrations federal death penalty policies and practices, asking whether the Biden administration plans to resume executions and procure the controversial drug pentobarbital sodium for use in those executions.

It remains to be seen what the Biden administration will do in 2022. To hold Biden to his campaign promise to end the federal death penalty, the coalition of activists who gathered in D.C. to mark the 45th anniversary since the first execution in the modern death penalty era voiced their support for the Federal Death Penalty Prohibition Act and held a rally and march at the Capitol calling for a new wave of activism to end the death penalty.

At an indoor rally, activist Art Laffin shared that he sought mercy and compassion toward the mentally ill homeless man who had stabbed his brother multiple times and killed him. He called for our society to provide a continuum of care for all people like him so future tragedies like what happened to my brother wont be repeated again.

A growing number of murder victims loved ones have joined the call to abolish the death penalty, including for people like Timothy McVeigh, who was the first to be executed by the federal government after the death penalty was reinstated in 1988. McVeigh is often cited as an example of someone who deserved the death penalty, with the logic that not punishing him by death would be an affront to all the lives lost in the Oklahoma City bombing.

But Bud Welch, the father of Oklahoma City bombing victim Julie Welch, fought tirelessly to stop McVeighs execution. Welch even met with McVeighs father, Bill, in his Oklahoma City home. In a powerful account of this unique meeting in Grace from the Rubble: Two Fathers Road to Reconciliation After the Oklahoma City Bombing, Jeanne Bishop writes that Bud Welch extended the hand of grace to one who should have been his enemy. That hand was taken in return.

Bishop, who is a public defender, knows the power of this kind of grace because she extended the same to her sisters killer. These death penalty abolitionists hold that state-sanctioned murder cannot be justified even in the least sympathetic cases. What their examples show is that vengeance and punishment do not have to be our societys response to even the most heinous acts of violence.

Meanwhile, in Illinois where the death penalty was abolished, over 5,000 people are facing life sentences or de-facto life sentences of 40 years or more, according to Parole Illinois. Not unlike their predecessors on death row, they face an in-house death sentence. Increasingly, those advocating for the abolition of the death penalty are calling for an end to harsh sentencing and an end to death by incarceration (life without parole).

Perhaps Renaldo Hudson, now the education director for the Illinois Prison Project and a visual artist whose work will be shown at an upcoming exhibition at the University of Chicago, sums it up best with his words: Society loses its moral grounds when we stoop to the actions of the most broken people to punish those who hurt people. The state of Illinois decided that there was nothing redeemable about me. But Im living proof that hurt people not only hurt people we can heal.

Read more:

Its Time for Biden to Fulfill His Pledge to End the Federal Death Penalty - Truthout

BALLSTON SPA A review of the struggles and successes of African-Americans in Saratoga Countyas of the mid-20th century is the subject of a Black History Month exhibit at the Brookside Museum, 6 Charlton St.

The free exhibit will run Saturdays and Sundays from noon to 4 p.m. beginning Feb. 6.The exhibit will be on display through February. Donations are encouraged, with proceeds used for museum upkeep and public programming.

The exhibit by the Saratoga County History Center is in partnership with the Saratoga County History Roundtable. Its titled Black Experiences in Saratoga County, 1750-1950.

The exhibit is a product of research by a team of local historians brought together by the history center, including: Jim Richmond, head of the Saratoga County History Roundtable; Saratoga County Historian Lauren Roberts; Anne Clothier of the Saratoga County History Center; Maryann Fitzgerald, Saratoga Springs historian; Kendall Hicks, Exalted Ruler of the Frederick Allen Elks Lodge of Saratoga Springs; and Lorie Wies of the Saratoga Springs Public Library.

Their collective research and wealth of knowledge will be shared on several panels and display cases with artifacts relative to Black life in Saratoga County during those 200 years.

We go back to the pre-Revolutionary War era when there were enslaved Blacks in Saratoga County, Richmond said in an interview Wednesday. We have information on some of the early experiences that they had, including being bought and sold, and the fact that they would often run away from their owners.

By 1790, there were more than 300 enslaved Blacks living in the county, Richmond said.

And then, we move on and talk about the Antebellum period from 1800 to the Civil War, and we focus on some of the more uplifting experiences that Blacks had in the county during this time, when it was still prejudiced and everything else, the historian said.

The exhibit includes sections about free Black entrepreneurs in the pre-Civil War era, as well as the Underground Railroad.

One of the interesting aspects that I didnt know until I got involved in this, Richmond said, was the support for abolition in the county was very diverse between the countryside and the city of Saratoga Springs.

Rural areas were much more in favor of abolition and supported noteworthy visitors such as Frederick Douglass for talks, Richmond said.

Saratoga Springs was a bit different because it had a resort area they were encouraging people from the South to patronize, Richmond said.

They were a little more reticent to support abolition, he said.

The exhibit will also give examples of free Blacks and their work in the hotel industry in Saratoga Springs.

We highlight a couple of people that were very successful businessmen in the Black community and the mixed race community, Richmond said. They were supported by the community and there was a transition in the late 1800s to more support for Blacks.

The team of historians is finalizing research into the 20th century, with a focus on the community life of Blacks in the area, specifically focused on Saratoga Springs nightclubs and social societies such as the Elks lodge.

The Saratoga County History Center has previously offered content on different Black experiences in Saratoga County spanning 200 years, but it was never before pulled together for a cohesive story, Richmond said.

Richmond co-wrote a book about the history of the town of Milton, which includes the village of Ballston Spa, and it contains a chapter on the experience of Black people in the Ballston Spa area.

The author had also conducted talks for the Saratoga Springs Public Library, prior to the COVID pandemic.

In parallel, Wies and Julie OConnor, an Albany-based historian, are planning a Feb. 19 museum presentation about the Lattimore family, one of the first Black families of Moreau.

Considering the wealth of knowledge, Richmond said, We thought that we should develop our material a little further, into small exhibits.

Michael Landis, the history centers communications director, said the Black History Month exhibit tries to provide material people havent already seen before.

After the exhibit runs its course at Brookside Museum, the panels will be distributed to smaller historical societies throughout the county, Landis said.

Its going to go mobile, and that way the work gets more attention in the long run, rather than just for people who can make it to Brookside, Landis said.

I really hope that this is going to be the first step in a larger process of including people of color in our work, said Landis, adding the center recently launched a diversity, equity and inclusion initiative.

Contact reporter Brian Lee at[emailprotected]or 518-419-9766.

Categories: News, Saratoga County

Continued here:

Local historians to tell story of the Black experience in Saratoga County, spanning 200 years The Daily Gazette - The Daily Gazette

Jack Rakove, William Robertson Coe Professor of History and American Studies and professor of political science, emeritus, at Stanford University, is a leading scholar of the American Revolution and the framing of the Constitution, whose books include the Pulitzer Prize-winning Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution, and Revolutionaries: A New History of the Invention of America. He recently spoke to the World Socialist Web Site about his work, the controversy surrounding the 1619 Project and trends in American history writing.

Tom Mackaman: Could you tell us something about your background, intellectual development, and your work?

Jack Rakove: I was born in Chicago. Im one day older than the Marshall Plan, which means everybody knows my birthday is June 4, 1947. My father was Milton Rakove, [1] who was a well-known professor of political science, who taught mostly at what eventually became the University of Illinois Chicago. He went to college at Roosevelt University thanks to the GI Bill. He went on to the University of Chicago but had to drop out for a few years to make a living. He went back in 1954 when we moved from the west side of Chicago down to Hyde Park, near the University of Chicago. He was a student of Hans Morgenthau, [2] and was very close to Morgenthau, who lived about a block and a half away. From kindergarten to eighth grade, I went to five different public schools. When I finished the last year of Chicago public schools, my dad wanted me to go to Evanston High School, which was then one of the elite public high schools in the country.

I went on to Haverford College, and spent my junior year abroad at the University of Edinburgh, which was actually quite an interesting year, intellectually. There were a bunch of faculty at Edinburgh with ties to the journal History and Theory; they taught a course on the Theory and History of History so they got me thinking about philosophy of history questions, and not historiography in the narrow sense, but history as an analytical discipline. Are there covering laws in history for example? I think this is actually significant these days because I think few historians think deeply about issues of causation. As my mentor Bernard Bailyn argued, many of these philosophical and epistemological questions are not particularly interesting for what he called working historians when they set out to solve particular problems, what Bailyn called anomalies. But when one is thinking about a big problem like the origins of revolutions, including our own, causal explanations do become important. In general, the social scientists work much harder on this than historians do, but there are times when trying to think as they do is helpful.

Anyhow, from my undergraduate years at Haverford and Edinburgh I went on to grad school at Harvard in 1969, delayed by four months of active duty at Fort Knox and another half year working for the ACLU in Chicago. My undergraduate mentor, Wallace MacCaffrey, [3] was actually very close friends with Bernard Bailyn, but I was not an early Americanist when I started out. I had a general interest in the relationships between politics and political ideas. I came from a political household. I mentioned my fathers friendship with Hans Morgenthau, but in the early 60s he got politically active. He became a speechwriter for Chuck Percy, [4] who was a liberal Illinois Republican who chaired the partys platform committee in 1960, ran for governor in 1964, and became a senator. But my father was kind of a classic New Deal Democrat. We were just conventional liberal Democrats, and with the Goldwater boom, he wound up working instead for Otto Kerner, [5] who became governor, and then a federal judge.

So at the start I was interested in 20th century politics. But I was advised to take Bud Bailyns seminar, and that was transformative, just because Bailyn was far and away the most interesting person to work with.

TM: Tell us about Bailyns seminar.

JR: It wasnt about American history per se. For example, he had us read a book by E. H. Carr [6]you probably know the book, called The Romantic Exiles, which is about Alexander Herzen and his friends who were Russian migrs.

TM: Its interesting that Bailyn would assign that.

JR: Well, thats because the Early American History seminar had nothing to do with early American history. We read all sorts of things. We read Lord Dennings report on the Profumo scandal, which in Bailyns seminar had to do with the use of adjectives. We read David Cecils Melbourne, because of his use of transitional sentences. It all came down to the question of how it is you frame a narrative where you have lots of people doing lots of different things.

I became interested in Sam Adams, [7] whom I like to call Americas Trotsky. At lunch one day, Bailyn said to me that if one could figure out what Samuel Adams is up to, you could explain 30 percent of the revolution. So, I started thinking about his career. Of course, Sam Adams spent a lot of time in the Continental Congress, and I started thinking of the Massachusetts delegation to the Continental Congress, and that it might be interesting to look at that group to try to think about how politics changed over time after the revolution. There really wasnt a good history on this subject. The historian who edited the original version of whats called Letters of Members of the Continental Congress, eight volumes published between 1921-36, Edmund Cody Burnett, had written the narrative history but it had no analytical or interpretive aspect.

One of the things we learned from Bailyn was to ask the question, how do you define a good analytical problem? There had been this presupposition among the neo-Progressives [8] that, in viewing the Continental Congress you would see radicals and conservativesor radicals, moderates and conservativeskind of battling for power. One historian, James Henderson, came out with a roll call analysis based on party politics in the Continental Congress. But I had a very different understanding of how the Congress worked. You are dealing with a revolutionary body whose members came and went. I mean, they came and went with such frequency that they barely knew one another. The idea that you had some embedded struggle for power just struck me as being wrong-headed.

One of the first things Bailyn did with me in his seminar was to give me as a topic the early uses of the Federalist Papers. I have been working on that text ever since. It is an old-fashioned topic in some ways, but, as I like to say, my epitaph should read, He tried to make the old history respectable again. I am not a great innovator methodologically. I just happen to think I have learned how to ask better questions. I see questions that other people have strangely neglected, for example, the history of the concept of Constitutional original meanings.

TM: If you had to recommend one of your books, that best sums up what you have done in your career

JR: I have three big books and a variety of lesser books. My eighth book, on the free exercise of religion, was just published, [9] and Im working on a ninth. Original Meanings is obviously my best-known book, and my most important book. For Original Meanings it helps to be invested in some of the big debates about Constitutional interpretation, and especially to know something about originalism. The original idea for that book emerged out of a long article I wrote on the Treaty Clause back in the early 1980s, but I had first started thinking about the subject a decade earlier, mostly in conjunction with the Nixon impeachment and the adoption of the War Powers Resolution. Because people were asking, How did the Framers think about the question? I started thinking that is an interesting question. Those were historical questions. So I set out to figure out a serious historical method to address them, which is what Original Meanings does.

For general readers, Revolutionaries, [10] which came out in 2010, may be a better book. The idea there was to write a narrative history of the American Revolution, with biographically themed chapters, which is also an idea that came out of Bailyns seminars. The first chapter is on Adams and the moderates, which actually ties in with the 1619 Project controversy, there is one on Washington, one on George Mason and Constitution making, one on Henry and John Laurens, the South Carolinians, and then there is a chapter on the diplomats, John Jay, Franklin, and Adams overseas. The final third of the book deals with Jefferson, Madisonwho is my main manand Hamilton.

TM: In an email you pointed out that we are coming up on the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution, and that called to mind that some of these anniversaries have come in explosive times. The 100th anniversary came in 1876, a decade after the Civil War and in the middle of a huge depression, and on the cusp of the great strike of 1877; and then at the 200th anniversary, that comes right after Vietnam and Watergate and within the crisis of the 1970s. But now as we approach the 250th, there is the question as to whether democracy will survive, coming after the January 6, 2021 sacking of the Capitol by Trumps fascist supporters, and the mass death caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. It is difficult to overstate the dimensions of the crisis.

JR: I am trying to write a political history of the Constitution to the present. Recent events have actually made this a problematic exercise. I keep telling friends that as an author, you never know exactly how a book is going to end until you finally end it, but usually you know what the conclusion is going to be. But I no longer know what the conclusion will be since who now knows what the fate of our constitutional system will be?

But I have a more general theory on the way we remember the Revolution, which has two aspects. The lesser aspect asks, why are all the great historical movies about the Civil War, and none of them about the Revolution? The problem with the Revolution is that, unless you take the politics, political ideas, seriously, it is hard to dramatize. It is very difficult to do; in fact, probably impossible.

We have this pretentious term for the Revolution, the Founding. But the Revolution has indeed served as a vehicle for national unity in a way that the Civil War, rightly or wrongly, cannot or has not. Even today, over 150 years after its conclusion, the Civil War remains the source of division. We do have the removal of the Confederate memorials and the renaming of army bases. That is probably two steps forward. But then we have a resurgent white nationalism which is rooted in deeply racist attitudes. I think of January 6 and that guy carrying the Confederate flag inside the Capitol as a symbolically horrifying moment.

It is not a profound observation on my part but it does seem to me that the Revolution has long remained a point of unification. The Declaration, the Constitutionwhere would we be without them? We speak sometimes of Reconstruction after the Civil War as a second founding, but nobody thinks it ended well, much less that it set the right course in Southern culture.

TM: I agree with you that it has been hard for Hollywood to imagine the American Revolution as a revolution, or in fact to imagine it at all. But this gets me to another question. I suppose you could say that the difficulty in appreciating the American Revolution has, so to speak, been there from the beginning. I think of the correspondence between Adams and Jefferson, where Jefferson asks Adams what was this revolution to which they staked our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor, and Adams writes back that the war was no part of the Revolution. It was only an effect and consequence of a change in the minds of the people during the imperial crisis. Im sympathetic to that interpretation. But let me ask you: what was the American Revolution, and why is it so hard to fathom it as a revolution?

JR: I have written about this in different places. Keith Baker and Dan Edelstein, two of my colleagues, edited a book called Scripting Revolutions. Revolutions have their own scripts, you know. So, they asked me to participate and I did. Mine is called Constitutionalism: The Happiest Revolutionary Script.

new wsws title from Mehring Books

The New York Times 1619 Project and the Racialist Falsification of History

A left-wing, socialist critique of the 1619 Project with essays, lectures, and interviews with leading historians of American history.

It is an open question. Does the American Revolution fit the revolutionary story or not? You have the problem of declaring independence in 1776, and then forming a truly national polity in 1787. How do you get from the one to the other? Those are two interesting questions in themselves. If you are a political historian, you have to explain why certain political actions were taken at particular moments in time.

Of course, a lot depends on how you define revolution. In one sense the explanatory problems you are going to solve do not really depend on whether or not you have a general theory of revolution. Having one may help you, it may inspire you, but in the end, as a historian you focus on specific problems, those things Bailyn called anomalies. We had a 50th anniversary conference, actually at Yale of all places, on the Ideological Origins. [11] There is an issue of the New England Quarterly dedicated to it. The first essay is Bailyns, with his reflections on how the book was written, and the next essay is mine, called Ideas, Ideology, and the Anomalous Problem of Revolutionary Causation.

TM: You mentioned it before, and we will need to turn to the 1619 Project, whose central claim was that the American Revolution was launched to defend slavery. That assertion has drawn support from a few historians, most notably Woody Holton, who has placed overriding emphasis on the Dunmore Proclamation.

JR: My response to Woody Holton is that the basic story that gets you to 1776 is British provocation and American reaction. Americans never, even on their more radical daysthey are not out there fomenting incidents trying to force the British to drive the Americans into revolt. There is a letter from Samuel Adams I love quoting, from April 30, 1776, in which he says, We cannot make events. Our business is wisely to improve them.

The Americans do mobilize, and as Pauline Maiers first book [12] points out, they do have a whole ideology of resistance. And not just ideology, but this whole kind of strategy about what acts they are justified in doing. I think it has been a weakness in American scholarship, including Woody Holtons, but not only Woodys, to not appreciate the fact that the British provide the engine driving all this. Americans see themselves as reacting. I think when you get to 1770, most American leaders hope, think, may even have expected, that the British, having gone through these two big crises over the Stamp Act and the Townshend Duties, will say, okay this policy is not working. I think Franklin or Cushing [13] says, lets just let all these issues lie asleep or fall asleep.

That is why Bailyns book on Hutchinson is so important, [14] because events then take place in Massachusetts where things spin out of control. When the Patriots dumped the tea into the harbor, the British government decided it had to make an example of Massachusetts to discourage the others. The government makes that decision in 1774, and it produces a political disaster. Punishing Massachusetts is what creates what Americans called the common cause. But then the British doubled down on this strategy in April 1775. And they immediately wind up with two military defeats. [15] So at that point the British should have recognized that the underlying assumptions of their strategy were mistaken. But they dont, and then we get the Dunmore Proclamation in November, 1775. Even if the Dunmore Proclamation matters, the basic logic of the decision emerged out of the same failed strategy that had already produced the war. I wrote on this in one of my first articles. [16]

My basic argument is that once you get to the summer of 1775, once the Second Continental Congress convenes on May 10, they actually did have a big debate on their objectives: What is our policy now? Do we need to rethink our objectives? And people like Dickinson [17] and the other moderates say, maybe we should do more to encourage conciliation. But in the end, they dont alter anything. They said maybe we should send a delegation to London, but they didnt. They said maybe we should alter our terms, but they didnt. They do send another petition, the Olive Branch Petition. It doesnt change anything. The British are in the same position. So once you get to the mid-to-late summer of 1775, both sides are committed to ultimatums presented to the other side. The American moderates, people like John Jaywho is very active though still a very young manJames Duane, Robert Morris, Gouverneur Morris, James Wilson and a couple other names I am probably leaving outthese moderates are desperately hoping that the British will send a peace commission over and it will have actual authority to negotiate.

That doesnt happen. What does happen is the British pass the Prohibitory Act, which makes all American commerce subject to confiscation. They declare the Americans to be traitors. The king starts negotiating treaties with the various German states, the Hanoverians and others, to start bringing Hessiansthat is, hiring mercenary armies.

The question became, are we going to have negotiations, or are we going to continue to escalate this confrontation? Dunmores Proclamation just fits inside that story. Its not that it is a fresh grievance, in itself, that ratchets up what is at stakemuch less that Americans have to go to war to defend slavery against a non-existent threat. Its one thing to encourage slave uprising as part of war, to encourage runaway slaves. Its another to say you are actually going to have emancipation under the British Empire. I mean its complete and utter nonsense.

TM: Which raises the question of British slavery in the Caribbean

JR: You might read a book by a historian named Michael Taylor called The Interest. [18] It is about abolition in the West Indies. One of the interesting things about this book is that it shows that what makes the passage of British abolition possible when it was ratified in 1832, and enacted in 1833, is really the first Reform Act. I have been discussing with a couple of my English historian colleagues about the attack on the old representational system of Parliamentwith rotten boroughs and pocket boroughs [19] and so onhow this pivots, or depends upon, the American Revolution and the whole debate over representation that it entailed. But what makes the passage of emancipation possible in the West Indies is actually the political reforms that start significantly affecting English politics with the first Reform Act, because they really break up the sugar interest. Thats why Taylor calls the book The Interest. The sugar riches remained a formidable force in British politics until the Reform Act began shifting the whole calculus of parliamentary governance.

In a lot of ways the 1619 ProjectI think their position on the Dunmore Proclamation and independence being over defending slaveryI think its completely nuts. Its easily falsifiable, including owing to the fact that British emancipation in the West Indies takes another 50 years. Dunmore is trying to govern Virginia from a ship cruising up and down the Chesapeake.

TM: Perhaps this takes us to some of the work you have done on ideology and interest in history. We could consider that from the vantage point of the Constitutional Convention, as it pertains to the question of slavery. There has been a lot of literature on that that has been coming out. What do you make of it?

JR: Chapter four of Original Meanings addresses this. There are two big, quote-unquote, compromises over representation: the misnamed Connecticut compromise, which I think did not have that much to do with Connecticut to begin with, and then the one over the three-fifths clause. [20] The Connecticut compromise over the Senate was not a compromise in the proper sense of the term. In the crucial vote of July 16, 1787, one side won and the other lost. The final vote was five states to four, with Massachusetts dividedand had the Bay State actually voted, it still would have been a tie. The Federalists started calling this a compromise only later, not because they supported it in principle, but simply because they wanted the Constitution ratified.

The real compromise is the one over slavery, in that it was a compromise and was understood as such in its time. There was some serious discussion of it. The theoretical definition of representation that the framers used is that it is a substitute for whats become physically impossible. The people, collectively, cannot deliberate. So, representation is a substitute for popular deliberation. But slaves would never deliberate under any circumstances. They have no legal, much less civic, identity. So, the idea that that form of property should be represented as property, theoretically, makes no sense. And it is easily attacked. This is a great question to ask students of American history. If you are anti-slavery, which fraction do you prefer: five-fifths, three-fifths, or zero? The genuine anti-slavery position is 0/5, because that will reduce the political influence of the slave states in national governance. So that is the compromise. But the real question is, do you want to have a union with the South or without it?

I think the equal state vote was a disaster then and remains one today. The political theory of the Constitution tacitly or effectively presumes that the size of the populace of a statewhether you live in a large state like California or Texas or an itty-bitty one like North Dakota or Wyomingdefines the interests of voters and legislators. But if you are a thoroughgoing Madisonian, as I am, you know that this factor has no effectnone!on the real interests that define our actual political preferences. That is what the framers were arguing about in Philadelphia, and the Madisonians lost.

Slavery, unfortunately, was an interest demanding explicit recognition and protection. And unlike other kinds of interests, which Madison imagined being scattered across the land, it was geographically concentrated in one region of the country, the South. The Missouri Crisis [21] of 1819-21 became the great disproof of Madisons theory. Jefferson understands this as well, and I am sure they talked about it privately when they visited. And the disproof is this: if you have an interest that is concentrated in one particular region, and not just concentrated, but dominant, you have a problem. Madisons notion of multiplicity of factions presupposes, or assumes, some scattering of interest across the landscape. That is why religion is such a good model for him. Turn Protestants loose to read the Bible, prevent the state from interfering with their opinions or enforcing orthodoxy, and denominations and sects would continue to be fruitful and multiply, to the net advantage of all. But the presence or absence of slavery worked politically in very different ways.

TM: Was it predictable in 1789 that slavery would ultimately ruin the union? Did anyone foresee civil war at the time of the framing of the Constitution?

JR: I am working on this question in my new book. I have spent a lot of time with the 1790 debates over slavery, the ones generated by the two sets of petitions, from Quakers and from the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, which Franklin led. The 1790 debate on slavery in the House goes on much longer than anyone might have expected, given that the Senate never took the petitions seriously in the first place. But the House keeps pushing the issue. Southerners try to shut the debate down, but they cannot. They managed to minimize the resolutions, which the Senate was never going to approve anyway. You do see this escalatory rhetoric on the part of the South Carolinians.

You certainly see it by 1819. I have actually just been reading Rufus Kings [22] letters this morning. King was a major player in the second round of the Missouri controversy. He plays a major role in mobilizing public opinion between the original debate over the Tallmadge amendment, which takes place in late February and very early March 1819. Then the 15th Congress adjourned and the 16th Congress met for the first time in early December, 1819. Remember, a whole year would elapse between the election of a new Congress and their actual assembly, because members had to take time to plan their trip to Washington. You could not just pop into a national airport or whatever. King says very explicitly that the Northwest Ordinance was an ancient settlement in 1787; it had been a compromise then, but not one that the Union had to enforce endlessly.

And then there is the issue of free blacks. And the slaves also pick up information, intelligence, as they are bound to do, about what is going on politically, whether it is in Washington or London, through the rumor mill. Some of this is raised in the work of the recently deceased historian Julius Scott. [23] So southerners were always freely imagining possibilities of slave revolt, and any political discussion of slavery would contribute to that fear. Even during the 1790 debates, one South Carolinian says we should not talk about this because there are a couple of free African Americans up in the gallery right now. If they hear we are discussing this, word will spread and that is going to create trouble.

My late colleague, Don Fehrenbacher, who also came as I do from the Land of Lincoln, has this great line in his Dred Scott book, [24] where he says slavery is a kind of concentrated, testy, aggressive interest, while anti-slavery was a sentiment. Slavery is defensive, it is aggressive, it wants recognition, it bridles at any threat or insult. There are ambiguities in the nature and the depth of what anti-slavery sentiment means right through the antebellum. So, to answer your question, they did not see the threat of civil war, but it was there in some vague sense.

TM: Could you say something about trends in historical writing on the American Revolution and the Constitution?

In Depth

The New York Times 1619 Project

The Times Project is a politically-motivated falsification of history. It presents the origins of the United States entirely through the prism of racial conflict.

JR: You asked about Bailyn and ideas. The neo-progressive historians, and I think Woody Holton is one, or if you read Michael Klarmans book The Framers CoupI have a long review of it in Reviews in American Historythey do not take political ideas very seriously. And sometimes I think they want to conflate ideas with ideals, which are very different. Ideals are to some extent part of civic society. They will call ideas so much philosophical music. They have no capacity to discuss ideas. Bailyn, Gordon Wood, Pauline Maier, and I have taken ideas seriously. To think about how they are generated, and how they are disputed, and which parts matter, and so on. The intellectual and the political sources of modern democratic-republican regimes is itself a significant problem, and you have to take the ideas seriously. People care about them. In my view there are significant developments in the history of constitutional thinking, and constitutional development that emerge from the American Revolution. We do not have to be happy with all the results. The equal state vote is terrible in the Senate, as is its replication in the Electoral College. I think Madison understood this at the time. But their thoughts about everything from equality to constitutional government have significant implications for world history.

Notes:

[1] Milton L. Rakove (19181983), noted political scientist and commentator on Chicago politics.

[2] Hans J. Morgenthau (19041980), German-born legal theorist and founder of the field of international relations, Morgenthau was author of the book Politics Among Nations.

[3] Wallace T. MacCaffrey (19202013), historian of Elizabethan England.

[4] Charles H. Percy (September 27, 1919September 17, 2011), Republican US Senator from Illinois, 19671985.

[5] Otto Kerner Jr. (19081976), Democratic governor of Illinois, 19611968.

[6] E.H. Carr (18921982), British scholar and historian of the Russian Revolution.

[7] Samuel Adams (17221803), leading American Revolutionary War figure from Boston, and a distant cousin of John Adams.

[8] A school of contemporary historical writing, the neo-Progressive historians have carried over from the Progressive historians such as Charles Beard (18741948) an overriding emphasis on immediate material causes in history.

[9] Beyond Belief, Beyond Conscience: The Radical Significance of the Free Exercise of Religion, Oxford, 2020.

[10] Revolutionaries: A New History of the Invention of America, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011.

[11] Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, Belknap Press, 1967.

[12] Pauline S. Maier (19382013), a leading historian of the American Revolution and student of Bailyn. Her first book was From Resistance to Revolution: Colonial Radicals and the Development of American Opposition to Britain, 17651776. Knopf, 1974.

[13] Thomas Cushing (17251788), statesman and merchant from Boston.

[14] The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson, Belknap Press, 1974.

[15] Rakove is referring to the battles fought in Massachusetts in the spring and early summer of 1775, the Battles of Lexington and Concord, on April 19; and Bunker Hill, on June 17.

[16] Jack Rakove, The Decision for American Independence: A Reconstruction, Perspectives in American History, Volume X, 1976, Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History.

[17] John Dickinson (17321808), leading moderate figure of the American Revolution, author of the influential pamphlet Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, published in 1767.

[18] Michael Taylor, The Interest: How the British Establishment Resisted the Abolition of Slavery, Bodley Head, 2020.

[19] Rakove is referring to British constituencies that were depopulated or dominated by large landholders but were still represented in Parliament.

[20] The three-fifths clause, part of Article 1, Section 2, Clause 3 of the Constitution, held that slaves be counted as three-fifths of a person for the purposes of taxation and representation.

[21] Popularly known as the Missouri Compromise, the crisis emerged over Missouris entrance into the union as a slave state.

[22] Rufus King (17551827), Federalist from Massachusetts whose political career lasted from the American Revolution to the 1820s.

[23] Julius Scott (19552021), was author of the The Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution, published in 2018.

[24] Don Fehrenbacher (19201997), his book, The Dred Scott Case: Its Significance in American Law and Politics, 1978, won the 1979 Pulitzer Prize in History.

More:

Historian Jack Rakove on American history writing and the falsifications of the 1619 Project and its defenders - WSWS

When was America born? Youve probably heard the argument between the adherents of 1619 and 1776, but I suggest a different date: 1863. More specifically, Jan. 1, 1863, when Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation.

How could that be the birth of America? On the conventional understanding, the United States had existed for almost a hundred years by that time, with 15 presidents preceding Lincoln.

My answer is that an America existed, to be sure, but not our America. Maybe, as Lincoln claimed in the Gettysburg Address later in 1863, the Declaration of Independence brought forth a new nation in 1776. (Maybe because what the Declaration said it was creating was free and independent States.) But it was not this nation.

Why not? Our America is defined by our Constitution and our adherence to certain principles, perhaps most notably equality. We believe that the government should not discriminate unjustly it should not segregate people by race; it should not enslave them. Those principles are in our Constitution now. But pre-Civil War America did not follow those principles. They were not in its Constitution slavery was. They were not in the Declaration of Independence complaints about slave rebellions were.

What about all men are created equal? As it was understood in Jeffersons time, that phrase meant only that in a world without governments, no one had an obligation to obey anyone else. The Declaration went on to develop a theory about where legitimate political authority came from, and when it could be rejected. It was about relationships within a political community and had nothing to say about how that community should treat outsiders like the people enslaved by the men who signed the Declaration. According to the Supreme Court, under the Founders Constitution, those people could never become American citizens.

How did we start reading the Declaration differently, so that it condemned slavery? Simple: that was the work of abolitionists, not the Founders.

How did we switch from a Constitution that excluded Blacks, even if some states wanted to make them citizens, to one that gave citizenship to anyone born here, even if states wanted to exclude them? That story is more complicated, but it starts with the Emancipation Proclamation.

The story doesnt go quite the way you might think.

We celebrate the proclamation today for making the abolition of slavery one of the Union goals in the Civil War. True, it applied only to rebel areas not under Union control, but when it declared that those people would be forever free it showed that there would be no going back.

The end of slavery is incredibly important its a victory that would be codified in the 13th Amendment, in 1865. But it did not make Black people part of the political community, and it did not change our constitutional order.

More important, more transformative, was what the proclamation said about the formerly enslaved: that they would be received into the armed service of the United States. Military service has always been a path to citizenship, and for the formerly enslaved, it was again.

It is widespread Black citizenship that truly transforms America.

The defeated rebels did not want to accept Blacks as members of their political community. Only the Constitution could make them, and to do that it would have to be amended. The 14th Amendment, proposed in 1866, granted citizenship to everyone born in the United States including at its heart those who had risked their lives to defend the nation. But the former Confederate states rejected it, and there was no way to get the required three-quarters of states to ratify. By 1867, the 14th Amendment appeared to be dead.

Congresss solution was revolution from above. The Reconstruction Acts wiped out the recalcitrant state governments, put the states under military control, and required them to ratify in order to regain their seats in Congress. This shattering of the Founders Constitution Reconstruction is what made our America. We forced the Southern states to remain in the Union, and we remade their societies against their will. That is a rejection of the Declaration, which was about independence and the consent of the governed. It is a new nation.

We celebrate the 14th Amendment today, as we should. It is what protects our right to equality, what gave us landmark decisions like Brown v. Board of Education. But we must not forget that we only got the 14th Amendment because it was necessary to protect the rights of the new Black citizens. And what made Black citizenship inevitable was the military service first announced in the Emancipation Proclamation.

As we celebrate a New Year, with hope that the great American experiment may continue, we must remember how we first started on the path of liberty and equality. A small number of brave men and women risked their lives to fight for the rights we now hold dear not Revolutionaries fighting the British in 1776, but Black Americans fighting Confederates in 1863. That is the moment a nation dedicated to equality was conceived.

Kermit Roosevelt III is a professor of constitutional law at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School and the great-great-grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt. He is author of The Nation that Never Was: Reconstructing Americas Story.

Continued here:

Birth of our America isn't when you think | TheHill - The Hill

There is a long history of right-wing forces fighting against progressive educational curricula. Now, scholars like Robin D. G. Kelley are working to level the playing field against the moneyed political interests behind the attacks.

Invoking Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in mid-December, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announced new legislation that allows parents to sue schools for teaching critical race theory. You think about what MLK stood for. He said he didnt want people judged on the color of their skin, but on the content of their character,said DeSantis, a political ringleader in the latest chapter of the United States culture war. In using a quote from Dr. King to justify an attack on curricula that uplifts racial justice, the Republican governor inadvertently created a strong case for why critical thinking on the history of race and racism in the U.S. is necessary.

History professor Robin D. G. Kelley is all too familiar with the sort of contradictory statements like those DeSantis spouted. Kelley, who is the Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. History at the University of California, Los Angeles, explains that he came into the profession at the height of a battleground over history, in the 1980s, with the war on political correctness. And although hes lived through decades of conservative-led attacks, like those by DeSantis, he describes the 2020s as dangerous times.

Kelley sees right-wing attacks on CRTwhat he considers an umbrella term for the teaching of any kind of revisionist or multicultural historyas a measure of the success communities of color and progressive parents and teachers have had after pushing for years to ensure that educational curricula reflect racially and ethnically diverse classrooms.

The most recent movement for such education can be traced to the Freedom Schools of the 1960s, which, in the words of educators Deborah Menkart and Jenice L. View, were intended to counter the sharecropper education received by so many African Americans and poor whites. In a civil rights history lesson created for Teaching for Change, Menkart and View explained that the education offered in nearly 40 such schools centered on a progressive curriculum designed to prepare disenfranchised African Americans to become active political actors on their own behalf. In 1968, after months of pressure from student activists, San Francisco State University established the first College of Ethnic Studies in the U.S.

A movement to offer ethnic studies courses in public schools, including colleges and universities, has gained traction nationwide. Such education is now standard fare as part of required college courses. California remains on the cutting edge of multicultural education, becoming the first state in the nation, in October 2021, to require high schoolers to enroll in ethnic studies courses in order to graduate.

Leading African American scholar Kimberl Crenshaw, a law professor at UCLA, coined the term critical race theory and co-edited the book of the same name, which published in 1996, to define race as a social construct and provide a framework for understanding the way it shapes public policy. Crenshaw explained in a New York Times article that CRT, originally used by academics and social scientists to analyze educational inequities, is a way of seeing, attending to, accounting for, tracing and analyzing the ways that race is produced the ways that racial inequality is facilitated, and the ways that our history has created these inequalities that now can be almost effortlessly reproduced unless we attend to the existence of these inequalities.

Critical race theory is precisely the sort of nuanced educational lens that Crenshaw, Kelley, and others use in their courses and that has White supremacist forces up in arms. Attacks against CRT are taking the form of multi-pronged legislative restrictions and even bans, as well as firings of teachers accused of teaching biased histories.

Kelley sees conservatives like DeSantis working relentlessly to eliminate any education that actually reckons with the history of American slavery, the genocide of Indigenous peoples and dispossession of their lands, sexism and patriarchy, and gender and gender identity. Reflecting again on the 80s, he says the attacks on ethnic studies, culture, and race didnt only come from the Right. In fact, he says, they also came from liberals, from the Left, and from those saying were not paying enough attention to class [struggles].

Kelley cites classic liberal fatigue against ongoing demands for racial justice, which he encapsulates in responses such as, We already gave you some money, we already gave you this legislation, what else do you want to ask for? Why are you criticizing us?

A case in point about how liberal figures are joining the right-wing war on CRT is a new venture called the University of Austin, Texas, created by a group of public figures led by former New York Times writer Bari Weiss. Weiss, in an op-ed in the Times, cited unpopular ideas, such as Identity politics is a toxic ideology that is tearing American society apart. She expressed dismay that such an opiniongenerally considered a racist oneis shunned by many academics.

To counter what Weiss considers censorship, UATXs founders say they are devoted to the unfettered pursuit of truth and are promoting a curriculum that will include the Forbidden Courses centering on the most provocative questions that often lead to censorship or self-censorship in many universities.

As if to underscore Kelleys warning about liberals joining the right-wing culture war, the nascent universitys board of advisors includes figures like Lawrence Summers, former U.S. treasury secretary and former President Barack Obamas economic adviser, who is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the left-leaning Center for American Progress.

Kelley sees a difference between earlier battles over political correctness and those centered on CRT today. The Right has far more political weapons. They are actually engaged in a kind of McCarthyite attack on school teachers, the academy, on students, on families, and passing legislation on whats called critical race theory, he says.

Right-wing narratives have cast the backlash against CRT as a grassroots effort led by parents concerned about bias in their childrens education. But secretive and powerful moneyed interests are at work behind the scenes. The watchdog group Open Secrets recently exposed how right-wing organizations, like the Concord Fund, are part of a network of established dark money groups funded by secret donors stoking the purportedly organic anti-CRT sentiment.

Additionally, CNBC reporter Brian Schwartz exposed how business executives and wealthy Republican donors helped fund attacks on CRT and that it is expected to be a centerpiece of the GOPs campaign ahead of the 2022 midterm elections.

In contrast to the politically formidable and well-funded forces arrayed in opposition to CRT, the Marguerite Casey Foundation each year gives out unrestricted funds to prominent thinkers, like Kelley, to counter the limited financial resources and research constraints frequently faced by scholars whose work supports social movements.

The Foundation chose six scholars whom it describes as doing leading research in critical fields. Those include abolition and Black, Latino, feminist, queer, radical, and anti-colonialist studies, which are precisely the fields that are anathema to anti-CRT forces.

Kelley, who was named one of the foundations 2021 Freedom Scholars, agrees that such funding can help level the playing field for academics working to expand educational curricula that challenge White supremacist and patriarchal histories.

Going beyond defensive countermeasures against the right-wing attacks on CRT, such awards can help fund the study of histories of social justice movements that are thriving. Were beginning to break through the narrative of civil rights begets Black Power, [which] begets radical feminism, says Kelley, citing grassroots change-making groups that have been active over the past 50 years through today and that have not gotten enough attention, such as the Third World Womens Alliance, the Boggs Center, the Combahee River Collective, The Red Nation, and INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence. Just in the last two decades, were seeing so many amazing movements whose history is being written as we speak, says Kelley.

He is heartened by what he calls new scholarship that is thinking transnationally, thinking globally, and moving away from a focus on mostly [White] male leadership and thinkers, giving way instead to the political and intellectual work of those who have a different vision of the future.

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How Scholars Are Countering Well-Funded Attacks on Critical Race Theory - YES! Magazine

Full Surrogacy Now:Feminism Against Familyby sophie lewisverso, 224 pages, $26.95

In our dyspeptic online discourse, its relatively easy to write something that you know will tickle the outrage glands of your intended audience. From that perspective, youd think reading Sophie Lewiss Full Surrogacy Now for Americas foremost journal of religion and public life might be an easy gig.

A truly egalitarian feminism, Lewis argues, must extend the feminist challenge to sex stereotypes all the way to the origins of life itself. As long as we believe theres a special bond between women, gestation, and the desire to care for the resulting baby, the sexes can never be exactly equal. So all these must be eliminated. Doing this, she suggests, will open a space for new, communitarian forms of family unconstrained by gender, embodiment, or oppressive bourgeois norms.

From even the most milquetoast Christian perspective, this argument violates so many foundational beliefs that it would be a straightforward matter to whip my esteemed readers into righteous rage. But Full Surrogacy Now merits more considered engagement than this, for it offers an insight into a worldview that today boasts considerable cultural cachet.

Imagine, if you will, that your intellectual tradition and social circle all believe human nature to be fake news: a mystification wielded cynically to naturalize systems of oppression. Imagine you see all cultural, social, physiological, and historical patterns as prima facie evidence of this apparatus, entrenched and bedded in through the ages via economic, political, and physical violence.

If you believed that, you might wonder: Given that this is all contingent, could we not do better? Could we imagine a kinder human society, freed from the monstrous, unnecessary weight of so-called human nature and the oppressive systems it naturalizes? Could we but achieve this, life might blossom into a polyphony of free-flourishing new forms.

These premises, or something very like them, underpin much progressive thought today. Full Surrogacy Now is no exception, situating itself in a tradition of cyborg feminism dating back to the dawn of our current age of reliable mass medical intervention in fertility, with the arrival of the contraceptive pill and legal abortion.

Lewis draws on Shulamith Firestone, whose Dialectic of Sex (1970) envisaged women liberated from reproduction by mechanical gestation and socialized child-rearing. She explores Firestones legacy in the work of Donna Haraway, whose Cyborg Manifesto (1985) calls for human/machine hybrid visions of personhood and feminist liberation to meet the digital age. Lewis develops this techno-optimist strand of feminism, in which medical advances are envisaged as capable of freeing all humansbut especially womenfrom those inconvenient constraints of embodiment that hold us back.

Lewiss argument is not that we should embrace surrogacy as practiced under capitalism. Rather, she draws on Firestone and Haraway to argue that technology enables us to seize not just the means of production but also of reproduction, for a radical liberatory program. And the way to do so is by treating the surrogate as the central figure in reproduction, thus shifting pregnancy from the pre-political to the sphere of work. For if all gestation, not just that of surrogacy, is work, then it has no inherent or immoveable gender and thus paves the way for a final, radical uncoupling of biological sex and social gender.

With the link between gestation and womanhood dispatched, it becomes easier to denature the supposedly equally pre-political bonds of family. This is an essential project, as Lewis sees it, for Lewis stands here in the Marxian tradition of family abolition, arguing that communist struggle begins, quite literally, at home.

The claims made upon us by the supposedly pre-political affinities of family are, from this viewpoint, a core part of the systems of oppression that keep us down. The very idea of instinctive or given love is not natural but only appears so, to the advantage of capital, and of white bourgeois capitalist women, and to the detriment of everyone else.

In search of a love that transcends exclusionary affinities, she argues for liquefaction even of those affections and loyalties that are grounded in blood kinshipor, as she puts it, capitalisms incentivization of propertarian, dyadic modes of doing family. This can, in her view, be achieved by centering the provisional, de-gendered, denatured, often marginalized or otherwise ambiguous surrogate gestator. This achieved, we can dismantle the stratified, commodified, cis-normative, neo-colonial apparatus of bourgeois reproduction, in favor of gestational communism: a world where babies are not the particular obligation of family units, but universally thought of as anybody and everybodys responsibility.

A pivotal illustration of how certain Lewis is of the rightness of this task comes in an anecdote, where she recounts asking her father as a child whether hed still love her if she turned out to be the milkmans progeny. She fully expected him to say Of course, but received instead stony, awkward silence. Lewis recounts being so devastated by what this implied that for the rest of the drive, I could not speak. Implicitly, the instinctive, unconditional love of a parent for his or her genetic children is reframed as something capricious, exclusionary, and unjust.

Instead of being the foundation for life in common, to Lewis the embodied, particular solidarity of family replicates in microcosm the loyaltiesand bordersof a nation. And if global justice demands that national borders be dismantled, so too the borders of the family must fall. She thus begins from a relatively familiar feminist call to revalue care, as a form of resistance to neoliberal capitalism, only to reframe all forms of care as in a sense forms of surrogacy.

For Lewis, this metaphor of surrogate care should embrace what we have in common across not just biological but political borders, and then return the dream of borderlessness to the intimate domain of family as a solvent. She cites her own friendship networks as a model for what might come to being in the wake of this shift: a polymaternally held warmth of aspirationally universal queer love, populated by beautiful mutants hell-bent on regeneration, not self-replication.

Where babies are still created, it would be via queerer, more comradely modes of reproduction than the bourgeois familythough this vision gives little attention to what any ensuing children might themselves want or need. She notes only that there is no evidence that a childhood spent out of proximity from the womb one originated from correlates with unhappiness. This may be so, though she offers no reference. But the question is less which womb gestated a baby than it is the potential dissonance between her hopeful vision of gestational communism and the elsewhere well-documented infant instinct to form an attachment to a primary caregiver and vice versa.

The most fully realized historical attempt at gestational communism to date was probably the Israeli kibbutzim, many of which raised children in separate childrens houses. The last of these closed in 1997, under the instigation of mothers whod grown up in those conditions and refused to let their babies experience the same. In other words: The principal obstacle to gestational communism is particularistic love, an emotion grounded in the attachment instinct observed not just in humans, but numerous other species as well.

Lewis has no children nor plans to have any, and states cheerfully that she is not really thinking of children. But never mind the evidence on infant attachment; theres no such thing as human nature, and we can thus safely assume that there exist no infant developmental needs that arent reducible to the cumulative weight of patriarchal and capitalist ideology.

Lewis is a skilled, mercurial, and often witty prose stylist. Taken on its own terms, Full Surrogacy Now is an elegant and well-written text. And if you believe theres no such thing as human nature, its vision for family life is a logical extension of egalitarian ideals into new territory.

The principal obstacle to her utopia is the danger that human nature might not be a self-serving invention of white cisheteropatriarchy after all, but an irreducible fact of our existence. And if, in fact, human nature does exist, Lewiss book is to be condemned for the idealistic coloration it affords what would then be a vision straight out of a horror movie: the technologically-enabled push to demolish all bonds of given, unconditional loveeven of a mother for her baby.

Doing so in the name of freedom and desire, with no regard for what that baby might need, would be to frame a dog-eat-dog world of selfishness, force, loneliness, and caprice as one of infinite richness, possibility, and satisfaction. As with the free-market optimists of the 1980s and 1990s, this vision ignores the role played by norms, constraints, and givens in shielding the weakest among us from predation by the strong. Its utopian sleight of hand is thus profoundly neoliberal in spirit.

This neoliberal drive for deregulation of human nature is already at work today, in pursuit of a world in which all biological givens and relationships are opt-in, and none ever command special loyalty. Marriages may be dissolved if they are merely boring; bodies may be remodeled at will; parents have no special duty to or authority over their children. In this world the only argument against commercial surrogacy is a critique of capitalism, and infants can safely be entrusted to a string of faceless caregivers without harming their development. Underpinning all this is a vision of human biology as radically plastic, where all of us are hybridized blends of human and machine. I leave it to the reader to decide whether or not this is utopian.

Mary Harrington is a columnist atUnHerd.

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Return of the Cyborgs | Mary Harrington - First Things

Most Rev. John C. Wester, Archbishop of Santa speaks at a virtual press conference Tuesday morning. Screenshot/Los Alamos Reporter

BY MAIRE ONEILLmaire@losalamosreporter.com

Archbishop John C. Wester early this morning released his pastoral letter Living in the Light of Christs Peace: A Conversation Toward Nuclear Disarmament and later held a livestreamed press conference to discuss the letters contents.

During the press conference Archbishop Wester said for him personally the time is now for his letter because when he came to the Archdiocese of Santa Fe, he saw right away the disparity here and the challenge we have as New Mexicans.

Here is where the nuclear arms race in many ways began the manufacture of nuclear armaments and having been in Japan and seeing the devastation that was caused by them. I think theres that sense and again its such an important topic that we really cant dally, he said. The Los Alamos National Labs are beginning already to take in money from the federal government to build these new pit cores for the nuclear bombs and theyre just expanding now and several of the offices have opened up in Santa Fe.

Archbishop Wester said he felt there was an urgency brought by Pope Franciss talk in Hiroshima about nuclear weapons and because of the expansion of the work being done at LANL right now.

I think its extremely timely. I think its clear that were all entering into a new, second arms race that is far more dangerous than the first, really, and with far more devastating consequences. Its clearly that the machinery for perpetuating this whole nuclear arms race is moving on. Clearly the tensions internationally with Russia, China and other nations, the possibility of terrorist attacks, rogue use of the bombs, these things are all imminent, he said.

Its one of those things we dont think about because the nuclear armaments are hidden. Theyre all in big bunkers and underground and we dont see them ever, but theyre there and theyre very real. I think the urgency is clear. We need to initiate the conversation now, Archbishop Wester said.

In his summary of the pastoral letter, he recalls traveling to Japan and visiting Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 2017.

It was a somber, sobering experience as I realized that on August 6, 1945, humanity crossed the line into the darkness of the nuclear age. Historically, the Archdiocese of Santa Fe has been part of a peace initiative, one that would help make sure these weapons would never be used again. I believe it is time to rejuvenate that peace work. he said.

We need to sustain a serious conversation in New Mexico and across the nation about universal, verifiable nuclear disarmament. We can no longer deny or ignore the dangerous predicament we have created for ourselves with a new nuclear arms race, one that is arguably more dangerous than the past Cold War., Archbishop Wester continued. In the face of increasing threats from Russia, China, and elsewhere, I point out that a nuclear arms race is inherently self-perpetuating, a vicious spiral that prompts progressively destabilizing actions and reactions by all parties, including our own country. We need nuclear arms control, not an escalating nuclear arms race.

He said the Archdiocese of Santa Fe has a special role to play in advocating for nuclear disarmament given the presence of the Los Alamos and Sandia nuclear weapons laboratories and the nations largest repository of nuclear weapons at the Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque.

At the same time, we need to encourage life-affirming jobs for New Mexicans in cleanup, nonproliferation programs, and addressing climate change. Pope Francis has made clear statements about the immorality of possessing nuclear weapons, moving the Church from past conditional acceptance of deterrence to the moral imperative of abolition. Instead of just a few hundred nuclear weapons for just deterrence, we have thousands for nuclear warfighting that could destroy Gods creation on earth. Moreover, we are robbing from the poor and needy with current plans to spend at least $1.7 trillion to modernize our nuclear weapons and keep them forever, Archbishop Wester said.

He noted that the Catholic Church has a long history of speaking out against nuclear weapons.

The Vatican was the first nation state to sign and ratify the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. As Pope Francis declared, We must never grow weary of working to support the principal international legal instruments of nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation, including the Treaty on the prohibition of nuclear weapons. It is the duty of the Archdiocese of Santa Fe, the birthplace of nuclear weapons, to support that Treaty while working toward universal, verifiable nuclear disarmament, Archbishop Wester said.

The Archbishops press conference may be viewed at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHS2C1wIBeQ

The pastoral letter in its entirety may be read at: https://archdiosf.org/documents/2022/1/220111_ABW_Pastoral_Letter_LivingintheLightofChristsPeace_Official_a.pdf

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Archbishop Wester Says Urgency Of Nuclear Disarmament Conversation Is Clear - Los Alamos Reporter

A first edition of Phillis Wheatley's Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773), written while the poet was enslaved to John Wheatley of Boston. The book has a brown leather cover, the original Morocco spine label and a frontispiece featuring a portrait of Phillis by Scipio Morehead.

Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture; background: VL1 / Shutterstock

Before Phillis Wheatleypublished her renowned collection Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral in 1773, shed had to withstand an interrogation by 18 men deemed the most respectable characters in Boston. Their task was to determine whether an enslaved girl, estimated to be about 18 or 19 years old at the time, had in fact written the poems herself, given widespread disbelief that a person like herAfrican, Black, female, youngcould deliver such exquisite words. She passed the inspection with flying colors, the historian and literary critic Henry Louis Gates Jr. says in his 2003 book The Trials of Phillis Wheatley.

Born in present-day Senegal and Gambia and sold from there into bondage, Phillis arrived in the Boston docks in July 1761, likely 7 or 8 years old. The slave ship that brought her was the Phillis, which became her first name. As was the standard at the time, her surname was taken from her enslaver, a wealthy Boston merchant named John Wheatley, who intended Phillis to serve his wife, Susanna.

The young girl showed remarkable intellectual promise, and the Wheatleys provided her with instruction in several languages. She became proficient in the traditional Greek and Latin texts by age 12 and fell in love with the English poet Alexander Pope, modeling her own work after his. At just 13, she became the first published African American poet whenRhode Islands Newport Mercury paper ran her poem about a near-shipwreck in 1767 (Did Fear and Danger so perplex your Mind / As made you fearful of the Whistling Wind?).

As Phillis prominence grewher 1770 elegy for the Englishman George Whitefield, the influential early Methodist, was first published and sold by the Boston-born printer Ezekiel Russellthe Wheatleys sought a publisher for an anthology of her work. Yet Susanna Wheatley received no responses when she ran advertisements in the Boston papers in 1772, so the family pursued publishing options in Britain.

Phillis had accompanied John and Susannas son, Nathaniel, to London in 1771, where shed encountered a series of impressive English patrons who took an interest in her work. Among them was Selina Hastings, Countess of Huntingdon, who supported abolition and was a patron of Rev. Whitefield, whom Wheatley had eulogized. The countess solicited the London publisher Archibald Bell to review the rest of the poets work. Bell said he would publish Wheatley but required proof that shed written the poems herself. Thus, when she and Nathaniel returned to Boston, Wheatley faced her literary trial before those 18 arbiters, chosen for their status as gentlemen. Their attestation of the poems authenticity was included in the book, published nearly 11 months after the inquiry.

Likely under pressure from the poets wealthy English patrons, following the books publication, John Wheatley emancipated her. She sought to make a living through her writing, but the Revolutionary War intervened, diverting some of her patrons resources elsewhere. But her 1773 collection has continued to fascinate and delight successive generations with its themes of faith and salvation, wisdom and ignorance, enslavement and freedom. The poet Kevin Young, director of the Smithsonians National Museum of African American History and Culture, says Wheatleys poems demonstrate that she was deeply attuned to the concerns of her day, often using allegory from her classics training, yet with a perspective inseparable from her African heritage and her experiences as a Black woman.

She often embodies...these female gods and muses she invokes, Young says, referring to Wheatleys use of Greek mythological imagery. Shes also protesting in many ways. When shes talking about Prometheus chained to the rock, shes thinking about bondage. Shes thinking about creativity in bondage and the fire of existence. As she writes in one poem:

Imagination! who can sing thy force?Or who describe the swiftness of thy course?

Currently on view at NMAAHC, a much-loved edition of Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, with its brown leather cover and the occasional ink stain, reminds us why Wheatleys words have persevered. The remainder of her life was undoubtedly tragicwithout sponsors, she was unable to publish a proposed second anthology, and she lost multiple children in infancy after her marriage to John Peters, a free Black man. By her death in 1784 at just 31, she was impoverished and largely forgotten. Still, it remains deeply inspirational that, as Young says, Wheatley wrote her way into freedom.

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When the late Rhodri Morgan, as Labours First Minister of Wales, said that there was clear red water between his administration and the Blair government in Westminster, he was attempting to put distance between the two countries and governments, denoting that they were both separate and different: Wales government was to the left of Labours in London and more in favour of devolution. Another significant aspect of this distancing was from New Labours spin. Morgan wanted Welsh Labour to be seen as more honest.

Ironically, however, clear red water has become yet another spun line a phrase used as part of a wider strategy to give the impression of a red, radical, redistributive government in Wales, pursuing policies that are markedly different to the ones pursued by the true blue Tories in London.

The essays in The Welsh Way forensically blow these myths apart. They make the case that the government in Wales led by Labour for more than 20 years since the Senedds inception in 1999 has pursued a neoliberal agenda designed to preserve the status quo. Its radical rhetoric, in the words of the late Ceri Evans, one of the socialists to whom this book is dedicated, has been gutted of all content.

The Welsh Way is a collection of 23 essays on neoliberalism and devolution and an interview with Cardiffs community youth project Butetown Matters. The essays take on and turn around the accepted view that the Welsh government is challenging neoliberalism. The actions and words of Welsh ministers are scrutinised and the prevailing or accepted wisdom is shown to be based on classic spin.

Spin works and its worked for Welsh Labour. Labours persistent success can partly be attributed to the way it has woven the idea of Wales political distinctiveness into its own mythology of Welshness, say the books authors. Yet radical rhetoric at the macro level set out in documents, speeches and social media, and recirculated by an attenuated news media is useless when its not accompanied by the political will or the competence to turn their rhetoric into reality.

In her chapter on feminism, Mabli Siriol Jones points to the 2018 declaration that the Welsh government is a feminist government. Yet Wales still has way too high levels of child and womens poverty, and 20 years of devolved policy on gender equality has prioritised recognition over redistribution. Jones shows how the Welsh governments childcare policies have discriminated against the poorest women, a point echoed by Catrin Ashton in her chapter on working mothers.

Sam Parry looks at Welsh underdevelopment and concludes that the Welsh governments economic policy shows astounding continuity with the Thatcher era. In his chapter on nuclear colonialism, Robat Idris outlines how the Welsh political establishment has shown itself to be in thrall to multinational corporations, subject to the economic whim of Westminster. And Calvin Jones states that the exploitation of the natural environment for little gain is a notable characteristic of Wales.

Dan Evans shows how, in education, the Welsh government initially pursued a raft of progressive changes. They abolished league tables, learned from Finland and introduced the foundation phase for early-years education, established a childrens commissioner, resisted free schools and academies, and introduced numerous initiatives aimed at the most deprived pupils.

But this good work was undone with a change of minister, who brought back league tables alongside literacy and numeracy tests in a new obsession to climb the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) rankings. To what end? PISA measures how pupils are doing as an indication of economic performance. Joe Healys essay on higher education outlines the desperation for higher education institutions to reach the market, using the startling example of Swansea University being signed as the official shirt sponsor for Swansea City Football Club.

Several of the authors highlight the yawning gap between rhetoric on further devolution and the lack of any action to make such an outcome likely, which allows politicians to complain about things that they in fact have the power to change. Huw Williams points to broadcasting as an example: After years of ignoring calls for the devolution of broadcasting, the complaints about the difficulty in engaging the Welsh public in Welsh terms during the pandemic are on par with the well-worn tactics of Labour politicians campaigning against NHS closures in Wales. Indeed, the Welsh Labour government brought forward plans to close hospital A&E departments while Labour politicians stood on picket lines and addressed rallies attacking the health boards implementing government policy.

Georgia Burdett notes that, in Wales, spending per head on social protection was 13 per cent higher than the [UK] national average and so it is hugely significant who controls it. Yet the Welsh Labour government is content for the Tories in Westminster to continue to do so.

Chapters on policing and the prison service by Mike Harrison and Polly Manning hammer home the same point. Manning says: When faced with criticism of the high rates of incarceration, appalling prison conditions and failures in rehabilitation that have accumulated under their watch, the Welsh government has hit back with their familiar excuse But X isnt devolved. Both authors make the point that if devolved, spending could be reallocated to the causes of crime to prevent it, instead of spending more and more on the institutions that deal with the aftermath of crime the police and prisons. Manning puts a strong case for the abolition of prisons.

This book, as Welsh actor and activist Michael Sheen says in the foreword, is filled with essays that are attempting to expand the parameters of discourse around what can and cannot be said about the current state of Wales and its direction of travel. He says we need more forums for this kind of discourse. Thank God for those that do exist and let us continue to do all we can to protect and support them and endeavour to create more. Sheen is advocating the building of a movement to dismantle Welsh neoliberalism, and this humanist says Amen to that.

Leanne Wood served as leader of Plaid Cymru from 2012 to 2018, and was a Member of the Senedd from 2003 to 2021. The Welsh Way: Essays on Neoliberalism and Devolution is out now from Parthian Books

This article first appeared in issue #234, Technocapitalism. Subscribe today to get your copy and support fearless, independent media.

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Review: The Welsh Way: Essays on Neoliberalism and Devolution - Red Pepper

The decision by a jury in Bristol to acquit the Colston Four of criminal damage, following their role in the toppling of a statue of the slave trader Edward Colston in June 2020, is a welcome sign that Britain is changing. In the 17th century Colston was one of Britains wealthiest slave traders. It speaks volumes about what Bristols Victorian civic leaders valued when they decided to erect a monument to Colston in 1895, almost a century after the slave trade was abolished (decades before slavery itself). Just 12 years earlier, a second statue of William Wilberforce, who campaigned for slaverys abolition, was erected in his home city of Hull. Yet in the south-western English port, whose wealth was built on the flesh trade, it was seen as fit to honour Colston with a monument, and a plaque describing him as virtuous and wise.

The prosecution should never have been brought, and perhaps would not have been had the home secretary, Priti Patel, and other ministers, been less vociferous in their condemnations of the protests, which culminated in Colstons statue being dumped in the harbour. It is far from clear that this use of the states resources was in the public interest. Six other activists were dealt with via a restorative justice route, including voluntary work.

Objections to the Colston statue, which occupied a prominent position in Bristols centre, were longstanding, and part of a wider, local movement to remove tributes to the slave trader from the city (including the renaming of its main concert hall). That feelings among a section of the public finally boiled over was because of the passionate objections to racial injustice aroused by the Black Lives Matter demonstrations following the murder, less than two weeks earlier, of George Floyd.

The verdict is not, as one of the defendants herself pointed out, a green light to start pulling down all the statues in the UK. Colston was a particular person. His monument belongs to a specific time and place and is now in a Bristol museum, thus demolishing the idea that taking it down was an effort to erase the past. What the jurys decision shows is that members of the public are more than willing to think about the messages embedded in our built environment, including monuments so many of them Victorian. They accepted the defences case that it was the presence of the statue, and failure to update the plaque, that constituted a moral if not a legal offence.

Reckoning with the past is difficult. Britain was once an empire that governed vast areas of the world. Astonishing levels of greed and cruelty are part of our history, along with a religiously motivated civilising mission that sought to export Christianity across the globe. Everyone who cares about knowledge should support efforts to increase public understanding of all this. In organisations across the country, including the National Trust, good work is being done.

Yet up to now, the government has set its face against anything that might make heritage less celebratory, condemning as woke all attempts to place artefacts such as those that fill British country houses (and city squares) in a broader context. Its repressive police bill seeks to increase prison sentences dramatically for those convicted of criminal damage (at present, the maximum for causing damage worth less than 5,000 is three months).

Statues are symbols, and tackling racism requires more than moving them. But acknowledging historic injustices is part of building a more equal society today. Rather than complaining about the way in which the law has been applied, as some ministers have done, the government as a whole should think again. Britain is better off without Bristols monument to Colston.

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