Category Archives: Abolition Of Work

Anthropologist and committed anarchist David Graeber may be best known as afounder of Occupy Wall Street (a reputation he worked hard to disavow, always instead deferring to the collective decision-making process), but his true legacy is likely his academicwork.

A star in the field of anthropology, Graeber was abruptly dismissed by Yale in 2005 after teaching for 17years (likely, Graeber suspected, because of his politics). Graeber wrote paradigm-upending works like 2011s Debt: The First 5,000 Years, which took fundamental issue with Adam Smith. In recounting how cultures have cycled through credit, money and gift economies, the book calls into question the inevitabilityand iron gripof todays capitalism. Indeed, in aMay 2018 interview with In These Times associate editor Dayton Martindale about Graebers 2018 book, Bullshit Jobs, Graeber said the inanity of much of todays work suggests capitalism was rapidly transforming into something that might not even be capitalism though it might be just asbad.

That book tour would be Graebers last. He died unexpectedly, in September 2020, of pancreatitis. He was 59. Just three weeks prior, Graeber had announced to archaeologist David Wengrow that their book, which theyd been cowriting for adecade, was complete. The Dawn of Everything: ANew History of Humanity released fall 2021 and quickly hit the New York Times bestseller list. Its thesisthat freedom and democracy are not, in fact, the new and exclusive invention of European settler-colonialistsinspired such grand headlines as, What If Everything You Learned About Human History IsWrong?

In These Times spoke with Wengrow, aprofessor at the University College of Londons Institute of Archaeology, about how one backs up such claims, why it would have been rather nice to live in fourth-century Mexico and what he wants people to remember about his collaborator and friend, DavidGraeber.

Jessica Stites: The Dawn of Everything offers anew, rich, varied history of progressive ideas popping up in all sorts of societies. You talk about social housing, for example, which In These Times tends to depict as an early 20th-century innovation. How can you say, Yes, what were seeing in the year 300in Mesoamerica is socialhousing?

David Wengrow: One might assume the idea of social housinga little bit like the abolition of slaveryis an idea that took an enormous amount of time before anybody could conceive of doing it and arose from moral and ethical concerns in very recent European cultural media. But neither is true. We have examples in the book not just of social housing but of non-agricultural groups adopting and then abolishingslavery.

If you pick up astandard book about the Maya and the Aztec, youre going to see pyramids and carvings of kings doing nasty things to their enemies and their subjects. But aconsensus is now forming that this very important early city of 100,000, Teotihuacn, goes another way around the years 250300. They effectively close down what is called the Temple of the Feathered Serpent and stop erecting grand monuments. This is acomplex, multi-ethnic, polyglot settlement with communities coming into the city and founding neighborhoods, from Chiapas or the Gulf Coast or even as far as the Maya lowlands. Around that time, all of the resources and labor of the citizens gets redirected outward into the construction of these apartment blocks laid out in avery highly planned grid across the city. When archaeologists started investigating these buildings, they called them palaces because they are justbeautiful.

JS: As Iread that part Iremember thinking, I wouldnt mind living inone.

DW: It was rather nice. Theres always acentral courtyard. And then there are homes for asmall number of nuclear families. So you might end up with 150 people living privately but around this shared space, with very nice drainage facilities, plastered walls, often beautifully decorated with murals (which today end up in art galleries), and so on. And theyre just single story. Something that to our eyes looks like arather nice villa. And the whole city gets covered in these. The apartments seem to have afairly standard plan, but each one is also abit quirky. So were not talking about some kind of top-down standard. Its something much more humane, in away.

Clearly there were differences of wealth within the citysome are considerably larger and nice. But none of them match the criteria for anything like apalace or an elite dwelling. The whole thing is very, very different from that standard picture of an ancient Mesoamericantown.

And so the archaeologists either had to conclude that everyone lived in apalace or nobody lived in apalace. Either everybody was aking, or nobody was aking.

The answer must be along the lines that this community very self-consciously channeled resources to provide what today would be regarded as areally excellent standard of living on urbanscale.

It is sometimes suggested that this is awild anomaly and that the longer-term history of the region follows the more typical pattern of hierarchy, inequality, monarchy. But theres actually avery wide variety of political systems in these Mesoamerican cities: Some have awhole bunch of kings on location; some are more pyramid-like; nearly all seem to have these powerful neighborhood councils with afair degree of autonomy, which actually continue into the Spanish colonial era, as barrios.

And then theres this fascinating case of acity-state calledTlaxcala.

JS: That was my favorite section of the book! With the ritually abusedpoliticians.

DW: Yes. Tlaxcala is the city where Corts found 20,000 warrior allies to go to Tenochtitlan to overthrow Montezuma and the Aztec Triple Alliance. He couldnt possibly have succeeded without theirhelp.

The standard history tends to tell the story of guns, germs and steel, that the Europeans show up and all the natives are supposedly dazzled by the gunpowder, the metal weapons, the strange animals that they called deer because they had never seen ahorse. And they go, Will you please tell us what todo?

But there are letters from Corts to the king of Spain where he describes Tlaxcala. And hes very explicit, because hes been running around the Americas finding kings everywhere and trying to get them on his side. This is someone who knows aking when he meets one. And he explains that he cant find one in this place. And every time he tries to get them to make adecision, they kick him out for weeks at atime while they deliberate. He says its more like one of these Mediterranean republics, like Venice orPisa.

Then David Graeber and Istumbled upon areally remarkable source, written in the 16th century by aSpanish scholar, Francisco Cervantes de Salazar. He was funded by the colonial government in Mexico, shortly after the conquest, to interview what would have been the children or the grandchildren of the leading figures in Tlaxcala. It contains actual records of the debates in the council about whether to get into cahoots with the Spaniards. Some of its very funnyobservations about Europeans being dirty and unhygienic, obsessed with gold. Theyve got these dreadful animals that are going to eat everything if we let them in. These people were way ahead of anyone in Spain at the time in terms of things we regard as progressive politics today. They had afully functional, developed system of politicalrepresentation.

And they had ways of ensuring politicians did not vaunt their own egos. Another source, Friar Toribio of Benavente, describes the process of joining the Tlaxcala council. You go through this really quite horrific period of self-starvation and bloodletting and torture, all these very trying rituals. It begins with being abused in the town square. Everyone comes out and abuses you. The whole thing is designed to flatten the ego, so that you become acivil servant in the true sense of somebody in service of the population. Its exactly the opposite of what we expect politicians to benow.

JS: That part gave me fantasies of putting Donald Trump in thesquare.

DW: Its like agovernment where everybody was Tony Benn. Can youimagine?

JS: Another big theme of the book is how much Indigenous North America influenced the European Enlightenmentanother fact written out ofhistory.

DW: There was avery developed tradition of participatory democracy and debate that is widely remarked upon by European observers. The Jesuit missionaries, for example, were horrified by the Iroquois and Algonquian peoples they encountered. These are people who dont give or take orders, and that was adeep problem for the Jesuits. Because if youre trying to Christianize people, you traditionally begin with the Ten Commandments. Now, how do you explain the Ten Commandments to people who dont takeorders?

Europeans described these societies as free which wasnt acompliment, but was meant as rather awful, almost animalistic. Another thing that scandalized the Jesuits is that they had no courts of law, no prisons. But the Europeans admitted their crime rates were significantlylower.

JS: The book is abig sweeping history of the type that people love to try to poke holes in. What reception is it getting in thefield?

DW: The book will be scrutinized. And were often way outside our comfort zones. But interestingly, at Davids insistence, we published some of the core arguments in very well-respected, international, peer-reviewed journals. Weve been out there giving talks, getting feedback, getting criticism, responding to criticism. Some of its verygratifying.

A piece came out in the Journal of Human Evolution in 2019 subtitled, Foragers do not live in small-scale societies. And it references our firstpiece.

Im seeing areceptivity to not only our work, but awhole body of research. Ithink that is going to produce something of aparadigm shift in the next few decades. There is going to be more attentiveness to the sophistication of Indigenous political systems, which will also mean going back to literature thats been sidelined over the past 20 or 30years, including by researchers who are themselves of Indigenous descent, which we draw attention to in thebook.

At the very least Ihope the book can make it abit harder for people to keep repeating bad history, this idea that freedom and democracy only come as part of apackage with colonialism andgenocide.

JS: What do you think of the popular reception so far? Do you think David would have beenpleased?

DW: Ithink he would have been quite gratified that the reception is, on the whole, very positive. Isense some reviewers might have been expecting amore political or politicized tract, something we deliberately stepped away fromand actually David was the one pulling back. Reviewers want to talk about Occupy and about Davids politics, and you can find those things in the book, but thats not the kind of book it is. Its abook for everybody. Its not abook for aparticular constituency.

JS: You have abeautiful introduction about how your voice and Davids voice sort of melded in the course of this 10-year collaboration. Is there anything you want to share abouthim?

DW: Iwas out for acoffee with Astra Taylor this morning, talking about David, and one thing came to my mind that was very unusual about him. Im not an activist, but if Ifeel strongly, Ill join amarch occasionally. Ithink David was exceptional in the sense that, in all the years that Iknew him, he was involved in so many different causes and movementsExtinction Rebellion, global justice, the Labour Party at some stage and never once do Irecall him even trying to hold me to his standards or being critical that Iwasnt joining some action. Ithink thats an exceptional character trait, which is lacking in many people who are politically active. Theres amoral judgment, you must, you should. David wasnt really likethat.

And Ithink thats one of the reasons why he was able to talk to such abroad constituency of people. And it was part of this underlying commitment to socialfreedoms.

See original here:

David Graeber Is Gone, But He's Still Changing How We See History - In These Times

The headteacher of a Worcestershire independent school is calling for the abolition of compulsory handwritten tests in GCSE and A-level exams.

Handwriting has largely disappeared everywhere except for school, making it seem very antiquated still to be going into an exam room with a pen and paper, said Malvern College head, Keith Metcalfe.

Allowing typed papers to be used instead would improve fairness and accessibility for all, he added.

His words echo arguments from the British Dyslexia Association that exams should switch to a digital format. While autistic children are able to ask for use of a word processor, the National Autistic Society is calling for the overhaul of a process involving advance online applications and written evidence.

The time is ripe for a change to take place across the board, argues Metcalfe.

A series of national lockdowns has seen the education sector adapting to online learning and more modern teaching practises, he said.

As a whole, it has stepped up to this challenge and found a way of using the best that technology has to offer to reach children and maintain their learning in most trying circumstances.

As we use technology, we write less, welose writing speed and legibility, and it becomes tiring; we are not able toexpressideasso quickly or effectively key elements of success in exams.

Modern education includes a focus on technology, and yet to do this appears to harm our pupils performance in exams where handwritten answers are required.

The headteacher stressed that he is only advocating dropping the use of handwriting in exams, not from education altogether. His own teaching, he outlined, saw pupils type their work during classroom hours but handwrite their homework.

We need to equip children with the skills they will need for the world they will enter after they leave school, he said.

That doesnt mean handwriting is not important or that we want to see it as a lost art, but it has already become less relevant in terms of careers, both now and in the future.

I am sure good schools will continue to have an important focus on handwriting,but simply to do this in orderto prepare pupils for examsseems a little backward.

Read more:Independent schools group launches online tutoring service

More:

Headteacher calls for handwritten exams to be dropped - Independent Education Today

A YOUNG RICHARD PRYOR sits inside a dark, nondescript bar.California is a weird state,he says,because they have laws for pedestrians you know, like, you cross thestreet they have laws for pedestrians, but they dont have laws for people at night when cops accidentally shoot people.Looking just past the camera, the comedian then plainly asks:How do you accidentally shoot someone six times in the chest? To which his familiar barrel-chested but tight-lipped impersonation of a white police officer appeals,Well, my gun fell and just went crazy,andasmall group of people laugh off-screen. Working out new material, Pryor isnt so much sculpting a joke in this moment as he is extracting it from 100 years of civic ruination.

X.

In 1968, the Motion Picture Association of America established a new film classification system thatintroduced the censorious and sensational X rating. That same year, in the wake of riots and uprisings across more than 100 US cities, white middle-class psychiatrists trading on racist tropes of sexual menace begandiagnosing Black radicals with a form of paranoid schizophrenia they called protest psychosis. Three years later, when MelvinVanPeebleswrote, directed, and (with a young Earth, Wind & Fire) scoredSweet SweetbacksBaadasssssSong about a male sex-performer-turned-revolutionary set in Watts,LosAngeles theartistforwent MPAA approval, opting instead to self-classify his film: Rated X by an All-White Jury. His critique, though aimed at the movie industry, likewise adjudged these psychiatrists busy pathologizing Civil Rights movement rhetoric, Black Power militancy, and the primitive art they claimed induced paranoid delusionsenfleshedin hostileBlack bodies.

Revolutionary and reactionary, exploitative and anti-bourgeois, pornographic and avant-garde,Sweetbackhas long been credited as a progenitor of the 1970s blaxploitation film cycle, even if resemblance among the action movies born of Sweetbacks popularity and financial success was at times merely nominal. Van Peebless picaresque caper unfolds in the form of a vaudevillian mash-up of burlesque performances, gospel numbers, live sex shows, funk music, psychedelic visuals, and flamboyant agitprop aimed at American jurisprudence. Two LAPD detectives show up at a brothel to enlist Sweetback as an extra for a police lineup; in transit, the cops arrest and brutally attack a young revolutionary named Mu-Mu; Sweetback intervenes, beats the cops, and flees, endlessly running through the city. The remainder of the story moves with the perpetual motion of fugitive cartography, to borrow words from Michael B. Gillespies recent Criterion essay, mapping Los Angeles with a renegade fury. All the while, stylized expressions of schizophrenic symptomatology and paranoia converge throughout Sweetbacks protracted fugue state, as it were.

In recent years, film historians and scholars have begun reappraisingSweetbacks Black vernacular style with respect to the L.A. Rebellion film movement, as well as European New Wave cinemas influence on Van Peebles while working in France during the late 1960s. Indeed, Van Peebless first film,The Story of a Three-Day Pass(1967), explored ideas of DuBoisiandouble consciousness rendered through playful formal inventiveness suffused with psychosexual melodrama. Upon news that the filmmaker, musician, composer, novelist, playwright, painter, and actor had passed away in New York City at 89 years old this past September, a virtual funeral procession followed, paying respects to the artist and his singular body of work. On her recently launched Black Film Archive, a momentous living register of Black films made from 1915 to 1979, Maya Cade created the sites first comprehensive directors page in honor of Van Peebles. And just days after his death, the Criterion Collection issued the Melvin Van Peebles: Essential Filmsboxset, adding the artist to its recently curated Black Lives collection online.

This celebrated reupholstering of Van Peebless movies exemplifies ongoing critical negotiations surrounding race, genre, politics, and prestige in film historiography (that Nicholas Forster has previously written about forLARB). Van Peebless music, equally illustrative of the political energies that Black musicians brought to the American film enterprise particularly the stunning heterodoxy ofSweetbacks soundtrack as well as its complex relationship to the movies Rated X status similarly warrants this attention.

Sweetbacks music, which was also released as a highly successful soundtrack album on Stax Records, fused traditional Black diasporic styles with newer electroacoustic composition techniques often used to signify paranoid ideation. The films scattershot uses of tape loops, repetitive melodic fragments, discordant intrusions of dialogue, voice-doubling effects, and asynchronous audiovisual editing can together be heard as signifying, or at least suggesting, dissociative auditory hallucinations. Historically, these paranoiac recording techniques are more commonly attributed to vaunted works of musiqueconcrteand West Coast minimalism coming from places like the San Francisco Tape Music Center. Yet such accounts often conspicuously ignore nonwhite artists like Van Peebles, in part because they also elide less reputable art forms, particularly adult movie production, in which some avant-garde composers got their commercial starts. Van Peebless sound work carries with it traces of this coterminous relationship between experimental electronic music and adults only entertainment.

In 1968, Van Peebles released his debut album,Brer Soul, made up of nine erotic, tragicomic soliloquies he recorded live with a small jazz combo just off 42ndStreet in Manhattans red-light district. It was here the artist developed his titular alter ego, an unruly voice that sounds as much likeDick Gregoryand Rudy Ray Moore as it does The Watts Prophets and Gil Scott-Heron. This trickster character soon aurally appeared on the soundtrack for the directors second film, Watermelon Man (1970) also composed by Van Peebles which even credits Brer Soul as the voice of the films music, further fusing the artist and his alter ego.WhenVanPeeblesstepped intoSweetbacks starring role, he was simply completing the mischievous trinity of performer, protagonist, and acousmatic provocateur.

This figuration proved integral toSweetbacks aesthetic radicalism, which officials condemned as a symptom of protest psychosis with long-lasting punitive and lethal effects. I should restate that a central contention of psychiatrists Walter Bromberg and Franck Simon, who introduced the term protest psychosis in theArchives of General Psychiatry in 1968, was that the art and rhetoric of Back liberation literally caused delusions, hallucinations, and violent projections in Black men. Rehearsing the fundamentals of scientific racism with loud classist overtones, this diagnosis echoed previous pseudoscience, such as 19th-century physician Samuel Cartwrights claim that enslaved Africans fleeing captivity did so because they suffered from a specific form of mental illness he called drapetomania (or, essentially, runaway madness). Theorized as a specifically Black form of schizophrenia, it also espoused the more sweeping suppositions of social degeneracy peddled by the American eugenics movement.

Furthermore, as scholars like psychiatristJonathan Metzland media historianJeffrey Sconcehave written, when treatments for mental illness adopted increasingly severe punitive measures during the 1960s and 70s, the psychiatric language of schizophrenia soon coursing through American media and entertainment became a complex metaphor for race and violence. Incidentally, both authors draw attention to an infamous 1974 print ad for the neuroleptic anti-psychotic medicationHaldol that featured an illustration of a menacing, fist-wielding Black man who, Metzl and Sconce also aver, unmistakablyresembles James Brown dressed in flashy raiment against a vague, fiery urban setting. (It is worth pointing out that Brown had scored two blaxploitation hits just the year before:Black CaesarandSlaughters Big Rip-Off.)

By that same token, associations between blackness, madness, and violence, in Metzls words, functioned as forms of black autobiography long before they became tools of white projective identification. A well-known precedent comes from Mamie Smiths 1920 coded protest song Crazy Blues, recorded in response to a particularly violent summer of white supremacist attacks on Black communities, police brutality, and subsequent riots in over three dozen US cities, from Harlem, New York, to Elaine, Arkansas. Almost a century later, when his 2015 albumTo Pimp a Butterflyhelped give sound to theoriginationof the Black Lives Matter movement, Kendrick Lamars The Blacker the Berry could waive Smiths coded language: Burn, baby, burn / Thats all Iwannasee [] They may say I suffer from schizophrenia orsomethin / But homie, you made me.And Christopher St. Johns 1972 film,Top of the Heap, a deeply experimental work releasedin the wake ofSweetbackandShaft, was quickly (andcontroversially) packaged in the emerging blaxploitation style with the tagline: His rage was the illness of the times!Sweetbackis animated by this historically specific dialecticaltensionbetween different cultural forms of paranoid expression and racist evolutionary theories of mental illness.

In a 1966The New York Timesop-ed titled A Journeyintothe Mind of Watts,ThomasPynchon who would soon become the literary Saint Dymphna of 70s paranoia wrote, Far from a sickness, violence may be an attempt to communicate. He then cited conversations with Watts community members about their memories of the previous summer, likening the uprising to creative improvisationin loose musical terms: [T]hrough much of the rioting seemed to run, they say, a remarkable empathy, or whatever it is that jazz musicians feel on certain nights. Indeed, this notion of collaboration was in large part why Lerone Bennett Jr., executive editor ofEbonymagazine whenSweetbackcame out, denounced the film, arguing that its hip emphasis on individual acts at the expense of collective action harkened back to the pre-Watts days of unorganized political struggle.

While reviewingSweetbackfor TheNew York Times,critic Clayton Riley similarly discussed politicalradicalismand jazz in loose psychiatric terms. What constantly captures the attention here, he wrote, is the madness of Van Peebles as an artist [who] possesses the kind of singular sense of purpose, the sort of outlaw consciousness that must have driven the energies of Americas premier creative psychotic, Charlie Parker. After citing the countrys racial terrors and the saxophonists beautifully unbalanced brain, respectively, as impetus and accelerant for the most righteous music this nation has ever heard, Riley then declared: Van Peebles utilizes that same kind of functional insanity.

XX.

The X rating was not merely a scarlet letter of obscenity. An insignia ofillicitness, it also represented marketing potential for so-calleddeviantart and entertainment. After 1968, producers of adults only movies began proudly touting their wares as X-rated. Soon, other types of artists, especially comedians, likewise adopted this new brand of solicitation. For example, Rudy Ray Moores 1970 party record,Eat Out More Often where his toasting pimp persona and eventual blaxploitationhero,Dolemite, first materialized read, Rated XX For Strictly Mature Audience, in bold typeface across the LPs front cover. In enterprising fashion, Van Peebles similarly courted the X ratings transgressive properties when he brokered a distribution deal with Cinematic Industries, an independent company that specialized in pornographic films, exhibitedSweetbackin adult theaters alongside first-run cinemas, and, in addition to the movie and its soundtrack album, published a manifesto-inflected production diary all of which bore the aforementioned Rated X by an All-White Jury seal.

But titillation was not Van Peebless only move. At the time ofSweetbacks production, the countervailing forces of economic disenfranchisement, urban riots, and white flight all exacerbated by repeated calls for law and order central to Nixons 1968 presidential campaign had further compounded structural forms of historical paranoia that extended from post-slavery terror rooted in African American trauma on one hand and white fears ofmiscegenationon the other.Sweetbacks stylistic blend of urban noir, fugitive slave narratives, and the Black Stud stereotype refracted this particular confluence of paranoias, the X rating further signifying Van Peebless explicit engagement with formerly codified prohibitions against sex on-screen.

Early in the film, we see a bohemian sex show at the brothel where Sweetback works, a scene tinged with magical realism yet undergirded by miscegenations very real historical proscription. After Sweetback strips down to his signature derby, the shows emcee presents an invitation to the crowd: As a special added attraction, if one of you young ladies would like to step up and trythis gentleman. But when a young white woman rises to remove her dress, the brothels manager, standing wide-eyed behind twovoyeuristiccops, emphatically shakes his head no. The visual punch line lands because the films audience knows the setup. As Linda Williams writes in herspectacularbookScreening Sex, Taboos of interracial sex [in American cinema] grew out of an American history that has covertly permitted white men sexual access to black women and violently forbidden black and brown men access to white women.

Nevertheless, Van Peebles later presentsspectatorshipwith a provocative reversal of this taboo in the films most elaborate set piece where, to escape the threat of an all-white motorcycle gang, Sweetback has to win a fucking duel by delivering a noisy orgasm to the gangs female leader. (A year later, the groundbreaking hardcore filmBehind the Green Doorwill go all the way by presenting Marilyn Chambers and Johnnie Keyes in a fully explicit interracial sex number, albeit one with asquickyrepresentation of primitivist hypersexuality.)

On one level, this scenes complicated spectacle of sex and violence loosely positions Sweetbackwithin the late-1960s rush of fast-and-furious biker films like Born Losers,The Glory Stompers, andHells Angels 69, produced byexploitationpowerhouse AIP. Yet, as a revenge fantasy, the particularities of the scene inevitably invoke the death of Meredith Hunter at the Altamont Free Concert in 1969, where he was stabbed to death by Hells Angel member AlanPassaroduring aRolling Stones performance.Infamously documented in the concert filmGimmeShelter, shaky footage ofPassaro stabbing Hunter was repeatedly shownas evidenceat the ensuing criminal trial.In January 1971, whileproduction began onSweetback, the Hells Angelwas acquitted of murder charges on grounds of self-defense.

Thistragiccorrelationfurther draws attention to the fact that, stylistically and politically,Sweetbacktapped into the eras countercultural psychedelic paranoia that, intertwined with the affective experiences of hallucinogenic drugs, can likewise be historically read throughthe psychotomimetic prism of LSDs early relationship to clinical treatments of mental illness and its subsequent use by the CIA as a clandestine tool for amplifying paranoid states a.k.a. mindfucking.

Many of the extended montages that show Sweetback running down streets, over bridges, through miles of concrete tributaries and spillways, along railroad tracks, and eventually into the Southern California desert toward Mexico, are shot through with what Van Peebles described in the films screenplay as spooky psychedelia, involving split-screen images, jumpy superimpositions, and lurid solarization effects. During these dizzying barrages of visual editing, one of the soundtracks hardest hitting funk rock numbers, Come On Feet, repeatedly plays, with the songs jaunty rhythm section, jagged electric guitar work, and fitful brass punctuations propellingSweetbackalong. All the while, Van Peebles sing-shouts, Come on, feet / Cruise for me / Come on, legs / Come on run / Come on, feet / Do your thing.

Sweetbacks imperative to move his feet seems to citea popular vaudeville refrain uttered by countless Black and blackface performers, particularly comediansMantan Moreland and Lincoln Perry. While its placement over a lively backbeat also recalls the story told in Blind Lemon Jeffersons 1927 blues rag, Hot Dogs, wherein the songs dancing narrator sings about having his legs broken by a cop busting up a juke joint: Everybody got away but me / My oldfeetsfailed on me then / But yououghtasee emnow. Theres a similar levity to ComeOnFeet the first time we hear it inSweetback. However, when the song repeats during increasingly frenetic sequences (evoking the McLuhan-chicfreakoutmontages of Roger Cormans 1967 filmThe Trip), where phantasmagoric images flash, cut, and conjure on-screen, this potential comedic valence is exchanged for feverish apprehension.

In further intimations of psychedelic delirium, once Sweetback finds himself alone in the desert, we (via his projected subjectivity) hear the intrusion of voices in call-and-response patterns evocative of both gospel music and schizophrenic dissociation. In one instance, while he searches for groundwater to clean a gunshot wound, a chorus of women sing Wade in the Water an African American spiritual popularized by the Fisk Jubilee Singers early in the 20th century along with Sweetback/Brer Soul and a clattering of unruly male voices:

Get my hand on a trigger.Youtalkinrevolution,Sweetback.Wade in the water.Somebodylistento me.If he cant burn you out, hell stomp you out.Godsgonnatrouble the water.He wont waste me.Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine.Tambourine and handclaps.All together:Run,Sweetback! Run,motherfucker.

On theSweetbacksoundtrack album, this particular piece of music also includes the sounds of gunfire, sirens, barking dogs, police blotter, and spliced snippets of dialogue with corrupt cops corrupting so casually that their effortlessness itself sounds sinister (the aural equivalent of a murderous cops hands in his pockets). The track list onSweetbacks original LP sleeve even identifiesseveral of these fervent vocalcollagessimply as Voices.

In his extensive work on race and late-1960s American minimalism specificallyearly tape pieces by composer Steve Reich music theorist Sumanth Gopinath has written how the sonic trope of representing affective states of interiority, paranoia, and even psychosis through manipulations of the voice partly stems from practices in 1940s and 50s film noir. This aesthetic correlation between magnetic tape and mental disturbance then filtered into popular music during the 1960s and 70s. While most readily associated with psychedelic rock, from the Beatles to Jimi Hendrix, we also find a prime example in Curtis Mayfields 1970 hit (Dont Worry) If Theres a Hell Below, Were All Going to Go, where he sings the sardonic line, Nixon talking bout, Dont Worry, with analog tape delay applied to his voice, producing a paranoiac sound that distortedly loops like a siren. (Mayfield would soon record his classic blaxploitation soundtrack Super Fly.)

As if an act of premonition or foreboding or even foretokenparody on Mayfields part, it was only a few months after the release of this song that Nixon installed asound-activated tape recording systeminthe White House in 1971, just before Melvin Van Peebles releasedSweetback. That same year, an underground activist group identified as the CitizensCommission to Investigate the FBI exposed the organizations Counter-Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) that, under the auspices of Director J. Edgar Hoover, spent years targeting, infiltrating, and discrediting a vast range of mostly leftist political liberation movements labeled subversive, including Civil Rights activists, Black Power leaders, and especially the Black Panther Party. And its here that we find one of the more damning and damaging effects perpetrated by the lingering notion ofprotest psychosis: the delegitimization of real paranoia and mentalderangementtriggered by manifest instances ofactualpersecution.

Amid the films transgressive tendencies, entrepreneurial spirt, and occasionally exploitative disposition, a historical counternarrative can be heard in thequixoticsurgeofSweetbacks many voices.

XXX.

In May 2020, after former police officer Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd, protests and riots erupted in my neighborhood. Minneapoliss 3rd Precinct was soon infiltrated by militarized police, the constant air-swept tang of tear gas, and droning helicopters, ticker tape references to the 1960s and 70s appearing all over as automatic shorthand for the moment.The New York Timescultural critic Wesley Morris, in a more patently thoughtful manner, would soon refer to this as The Moment. He meant the singular moment of Floyds death, the subsequent local protests, the bewildering madness of additional police killings, and the allied uprisings in more corners of the planet than seemed fathomable. More concentrically, Morris was also describing the accrual of historic precedence extending backward to the abolition of American slavery in 1865, exactly 100 years before California police officer Lee Minikus pulled over Marquette and Ronald Frye along 116th Street in Watts, Los Angeles. From where Im sitting, the final example worth pointing to here in the wake of Minneapoliss recent rejection of police reform and, thus, civic refusal to reimagine public safety is my first, that of Richard Pryor and his role in the eminent concert film Wattstax.

The summer after Van Peebles releasedSweet SweetbacksBaadasssssSong, Stax Records organized the all-day, $1-per-ticket Wattstax concert inside Los Angeless Memorial Coliseum to commemorate the Watts Rebellion of 1965. The resulting movie features gleaming footage of numerous Stax artists including the Staple Singers (introduced on stage by Van Peebles), Eddie Floyd, Carla Thomas, Albert King, the Bar-Kays, and a roaring nighttime set by Isaac Hayes playing his blaxploitation showstopper Theme from Shaft intercut with smaller musical performances set up around Watts and interviews with local residents. Like an exegete, Pryor appears throughout the film, delivering intimate stand-up inside a dark, nondescript bar. And some of this material would soon wind up on the comedians third comedy LP, That Ns Crazy, also released by Stax the following year.

Running just over half an hour, the record spans topics from education, sex, drugs, poverty, violence, parenting, church, prostitution, gambling, and Dracula, all rendered through Pryors ebullient artistry. The tie that binds? Citizen-sanctioned police brutality: Cops put a hurtin on your ass, man. You know? They really degrade you. White folks dont believe that shit dont believe cops degrade. Ohcome on, those beatings, those people were resisting arrest. Im tired of this harassment of police officers. Because the police live in your neighborhood. See? The records title cites another joke Pryor tells inWattstax, wherein his parents call a Black nationalist in their neighborhood crazy. But the phrases placement on the album cover in quotation marks under Pryors name clearly ascribes the phrase to the performer himself. In his recent book,How to Go Mad without Losing Your Mind,La MarrJurelleBrucedescribes the historical outlaw persona invoked by Pryors album as a highly politicized black vernacular archetype: a folk hero and vicarious insurrectionist for the radically inclined. Ontheback coverofThat Ns Crazy, under nine photographs of Pryor arranged in a large X, it reads: Rated X Uncensored.

Matthew Tchepikova-Treon teaches writing at the University of Minnesota, where he is currently finishing his dissertation on film sound, popular music, and American exploitation cinema during the global political drama of the late Cold War. His work has appeared inJump Cut,FLOW, andThe Soundtrack Album: Listening to Media(eds. Reinsch and Westrup).

Read more from the original source:

A Hymn From the Mouth of Reality: Obscenity, Psychosis, Sweetback - lareviewofbooks

Novembers off year elections revealed that the rollback of wokeness, if not imminent, may be nearer than many had hoped. Voters rejected decisively two of wokenesss core policy components: Defunding the police lost badly in heavily Democratic cities from Seattle to Minneapolis to Buffalo, while Republican Glenn Youngkins vow to curb critical race theory in Virginia schools was central to his surprise win in the blue state.

Extremist political cycles seem to have a natural lifespan. Five years passed between the storming of the Bastille and Thermidorthe arrest of Robespierre by his fellow revolutionaries, fearful that the guillotine would touch them next; another five and a national equilibrium of sorts was restored to France. A similar ten years ensued between years between Maos launching of the Cultural Revolution and the arrest and imprisonment of its major backers by their rivals within Chinas ruling hierarchy. Neither country had meaningful elections, but they did have public opinions, which eventually shifted enough to embolden those in position to challenge the radical wave to step up and assume the risks. If one dates the onset of wokeness from 2014, which saw the sudden explosion of phrases about race, equity, and white supremacy in the prestige media, we are seven years in.

The United States has free elections, a First Amendment, and political norms which remain more or less intact, and wokeness is an ideological movement which has managed to humiliate its victims and get them fired from their jobs, not to kill them. But it is not a stretch to see in it parallels to the totalitarian movements of the past century: the preening self-righteousness of its enforcers; their seeking of forced confessions, depicted as apologies from their victims; the attempted politicization of every aspect of social life, including language; the insistence that the traditional mores of their own country are utterly debased. Never in American history has so much energy been devoted to getting people fired for expressing an opinion.

Wokeness may well advance to the point where many of its goals become as institutionalized and naturally accepted as the abolition of slavery. (Some of the woke elect left style themselves as abolitionists). More likely it will be rolled back, its practitioners and cultural preferences first widely mocked and then ignored, its victims rehabilitated and in some cases honored. November 2 marked the first hint of a real electoral pushback against wokeness; hopefully it will prove as pivotal as the battle of Midway.

***

The origins and nature of the woke revolution have been described extensively if not yet definitively. Yes, it has elements of a new religion; yes, it was made possible by social media, with the potential to organize quickly a Twitter mob; yes, the financial crisis of 2008 and its aftermath pulled the rug out from a generation of debt-ridden recent college graduates while giving business elites incentive to welcome diversions from a more class based leftism.

Within less than a decade a fringe and not especially popular way of thinking and speaking, spawned in the humanities departments of prestigious universities, had become the dominant discourse in all non-explicitly conservative media and, seemingly, the regnant ideology of the nations largest political party. This takeover occurred with stunning speed, while the initial popular resistance to itchiefly the 2016 election of Donald Trumpserved more as an accelerant than a brake. At this writing, wokeness seems entrenched in the media, liberal foundations, and universities, but also in institutions thought of as mainstream and non-political. A top navy admiral touts the work of Ibram Kendi; the American Medical Association officially calls for doctors to work absurd woke phraseology into regular communications with their patients.

The core idea of wokeness is that America and the West are essentially defined by interlocking systems of oppression, the main pillar of which is white supremacy, while secondary but important ones are the privileging of heterosexuality and of men over women. To be woke is to believe that all social life is permeated by these dominations, and that overturning them is a moral imperative. Radical leftists have held views proximate to this for over a century, but their nominal embrace by much of the establishment is a new thing.

For the woke, Americas history of slavery and segregation are at its core, more important than virtually everything else. Wokeness portrays itself as a struggle against whiteness, or white supremacy, rather than against white people themselves, a rhetorical evasion which allows white people to become the main practitioners of woke politics.

With black activism, wokeness has a somewhat contradictory relationship.

On one side it is given to displays of performative submissiveness. While fires from the George Floyd riots were still smoldering, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer led Democratic members of the House and Senate to the halls outside the congressional visitors gallery, where they donned kente cloth and knelt before the cameras; similar, if less striking, quasi-religious enactments continued throughout the summer. A few weeks later the New York Times announced it would henceforth capitalize black when it referred to race (white would remain lowercase) as its standard style, inevitably evoking the Bibles capitalization of pronouns referring to the deity. Virtually every national news organization followed suit.

On the other side of wokeness is a kind of paternalism, which sees black Americans as people without much agency or control over their lives, defined by the past injuries of slavery and segregation and still burdened by chains of structural racism which are seldom specified but so pervasive that standards of achievement and conduct appropriate for other Americans must be suspended for them.

But despite its apparent dominance in corporate media and major institutions, wokeness increasingly resembles what 60s era Maoists called a paper tiger; when confronted directly, as wokeness has seldom been in the past seven years, its popularity and power prove less than meets the eye.

***

The battle over critical race theory in the Virginia gubernatorial election was an early illustration. Its difficult to discern how much critical race theory is being taught in Virginia schools: there are official Virginia state documents which call explicitly for critical race theory to be used in the training of teachers and the make-up of the curriculum; in some districts, CRT inspired consultants were hired to do mandatory teacher training. Materials deployed by these new diversity consultants are full of a bizarre racial essentialism, portraying white people as cruelly individualistic, people of color as warm communalists. Some Virginia parents in comfortable suburban districts were troubled enough by it to turn traditionally sleepy school board meetings into hotbeds of protest.

Curiously, the response by the Terry McAuliffe campaignto charges by his opponent that Democrats were ignoring parents and teaching CRT in schoolswas to claim that there was no critical race theory taught in Virginia schools, that the whole issue was a racist dog whistle cooked up by conservative activist Christopher Rufo and others. This denial was echoed repeatedly by nearly every mainstream media outlet covering the election.

This itself was an interesting tell. Liberals generally have no reluctance to defend their beliefs or policies, whether they be the right to have an abortion, higher taxes on corporations and the rich, or worker and environmental protection laws. But on CRT they mounted no defense, just denial and obfuscation. They would explain, as to a fifth grader, that critical race theory was a high brow discipline sometimes studied in law schools, and is absolutely not something taught to Virginia elementary and high school students. As if they assumed that people wouldnt notice that programs and curricula explicitly grounded in CRT pedagogy, endorsed officially by the nations largest teachers union, was seeping into the schools.

Why did the sophisticated, consultant heavy, and poll savvy McAuliffe campaign lie? The most plausible answer is that it understood that the substance of a critical race theory pedagogy couldnt be defended before voters in a campaign, knew it was extremely unpopular among people of all races, and knew also that it couldnt be disavowed, because powerful constituencies within the Democratic party, especially the National Education Association, were too heavily invested in it. When push came to shove in a tight election, the establishment left wouldnt stand up and fight for woke pedagogy.

Woke attitudes about law enforcement fared no better. The aptly named war on cops has been building for years, generating a narrative that most American police departments have been systematically oppressing black people. Its first major significant victory came in New York, with a series of court rulings against the NYPDs policies of proactive policing, sometimes called stop and frisk, in 2013. Stop and frisk had proven enormously successful in getting illegal guns and the criminals wielding them off the street, but the tactic almost invariably targeted young black men.

This made sense to those who believed police should focus their efforts on those neighborhoods plagued by a disproportionate share of illegal gun crime. But by the end of the Bloomberg mayoralty, ending proactive policing had become a liberal cause clbre. The next year, when a black man from Ferguson, Missouri, Michael Brown, was killed while resisting arrest, the anti-police narrative exploded nationally, with major voices in the mainstream media giving oxygen to the idea that the nations police were waging a genocidal war against black people, that calling 911 was an effort to get black people murdered.

It was a lie of coursethe number of unarmed black Americans killed by the police is small, not disproportional to the number of white people killed by the police and infinitesimal in comparison to number of black people killed by black criminals. But the sheer enormity of the lierepeated incessantlymade it a widely accepted fact, if not a true one. If the police were indeed racist murderers as frequently portrayed, defunding police departments made a great deal of sense.

By the summer of 2020, the topic of racist policing dominated the national conversation; and left-wing candidates calling for abolition of police departments began winning democratic primaries. A month after George Floyds murder, Minneapoliss City Council voted by a 9-3 margin to dismantle the police department altogether, replacing it with a social worker agency.

But it did not take long for anti-cop wave to peak. In Minneapolis, as murders surged 50 percent and the number of downtown shootings doubled, city residents mobilized against the City Councils anti-cop campaign. In Dallas, the City Council moved to hire more cops. In New York, progressives were stunned when a former black cop running on a law-and-order platform trounced progressives in the Democratic mayoral primary, while running up impressive margins in black and Latino working class districts. On election day last November, a defund-the-police socialist who had won the Democratic primary in Buffalo lost the general election even though she was the only person on the ballot. In Minneapolis, voters rejected an abolish the police department ballot measure decisively. In very liberal Seattle, an actual Republican won the city attorney race.

A restoration of the kind of policing that cut crime rates so successfully in the 1990s wont come quicklymuch legal damage had been done to inhibit effective policing, while in many cities left-wing district attorneys, elected late in the last decade in low turnout elections and committed to not putting criminals in jail, remain in office. But a 30 percent rise in murders in 2020the largest since records have been kept, and a surge in violent crime in nearly every major city has made defunding the police a non-starter.

These political battles over education and policing plainly originate from Americas long standing racial divisions of black and white. But they are now contested on a very different demographic playing field. After 40 years of historically high levels of immigration, the United States has a far different racial makeup than it did when Martin Luther King was assassinated. An influx of immigrants from Mexico, Latin America, Asia and the Mideast has reduced the white share of the population from over 85 percent to under 65 percent; among school children, Anglo white kids make up less than half.

***

There may be no more broadly accepted assumption about demographics in American politics than that the reduction of the white share of the population favors the left. This was true in the 1960s, when one progressive intellectual famously labeled the white race the cancer of human history. It was central to Jesse Jacksons two presidential bids during the 80s, where he touted a Rainbow Coalition of black, Latino, and progressive white voters. It was a theme of Mike Daviss much-admired-on-the-left 1986 (and recently reissued) book Prisoners of the American Dream which forecast a black and Latino working class, 50 million strong spearheading the triumph over American imperialism. It is true of contemporary left-wing authors enthusing triumphantly over demographic transformation, like Steve Phillips (Brown is the New White), and of liberals like Ruy Teixeira (The Optimistic Leftist). The woke neologism BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) arose to underscore the implicit solidarity of all non-whites, the soon to be demographic majority, against a declining group of conservative white Americans.

This analysis is intuitively persuasive. It was also prominent in paleoconservative circles in the early 1990s; Peter Brimelow at National Review published essays showing the GOP shrinking to national irrelevance by the early middle of this century. To some extent it has been vindicated: California, which launched the political careers of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, has become a reliably one-party state and other states are moving in the same direction. On many issues, the new immigration probably has shifted the United States towards the left; certainly any kind of old fashioned rooted-in-land-and-tradition conservatism, including anything associated with Dixie, now has a smaller demographic base to appeal to.

But this is not the case for the particular issues that emanate from wokeness. To state the obvious, most Asian, Latino, and other non-white immigrants and their children are not that invested in black-white history and the proper negotiation of the historic wrongs white Americans have done to black Americans. The vast majority of them have lived all their American lives in a post-civil rights revolution country, where racial discrimination is carefully monitored and illegal. Their ancestors didnt own slaves, nor fight a war to end slavery. They cant easily be made to feel guilty about the American past, and despite great efforts by university social science departments, it is not so easy to get them to feel aggrieved by it either.

An unforeseen aspect of the wokeness phenomenon is how many new immigrants, or children of new immigrants, are playing critical roles in pushing back against it. Optimistic immigrants are socially conservative arguments have bandied around pro-immigration Republicans for decades (I was never one of them), but no one predicted the polemical vitality and occasional brilliance that would emerge from newer Americans as wokeness pushed into the center of the national agenda. Any list of names will leave out dozens, but those paying attention know that writers and activists as distinct in style and ideology as Andy Ngo, Wesley Yang, Zaid Jilani, Harmeet Dhillon, Sohrab Ahmari, and Melissa Chento pick a half dozen at randomare not only important in the pushback against wokeness, but that their arrival at the battlefield was an absolutely necessary reinforcement. Of course one could point to comparable numbers of woke leftists of recent immigrant background, but compared to their conservative counterparts they dont seem important or agenda setting to a movement emotionally centered on black and white Americans.

Indeed, if one wanted to design a movement explicitly to alienate Asian Americans, it would be hard to improve on the wokes agenda on law enforcement and schools. Some consequences of the war on cops and so-called over-incarceration were predictable: Police would retreat from proactive policing, and crime would rise. But no one foresaw that this would produce a surge in crime against Asians. The mainstream media took great pains to obfuscate the most salient aspects of this trend. Stories about it invariably mentioned former President Trumps depiction of Covid-19 as the China virus so as to imply without saying that the hate crime perpetrators were white Trump supporters. Always highlighted was the horrific case of the white man who murdered several Asian massage parlor workers and others of different races on a killing spree apparently prompted by feelings of sexual guilt. But the reality is that what is experienced by many as an open season on vulnerable Asian Americans in our cities is driven by the same group that commits most American street crime.

One must assume Asian Americans know this. Last summers New York Times Magazine story about the murder of a Thai grandfather in San Francisco quoted his son-in-law, who had begun attending anti-Asian-hate rallies in the Bay Area and asking how many people there had been pushed or spat on, and by whom. Yes, many, was the response, always by a black person. This Times piece acknowledged, with seeming reluctance, that hate crimes against Asians were more likely to be committed by non-white people. A former Oakland police captain relates that suspects in anti-Asian hate crimes are almost exclusively black. In New York City, black people are six times more likely to commits hate crimes than white people, and comprise half the suspects in anti-Asian attacks. In the all too common videos of such attacks that show up on social media, the perpetrators are almost always black.

The tensions between the groups have roots which have not been systematically explored, but were evident as early as the racially incendiary 1990 boycott of Korean grocery stores in Brooklyn and the 1992 Los Angeles riots. Of course, all ethnic and racial groups suffer from rising crime, and those in black neighborhoods are numerically most victimized by it. But in the past year of racial reckoning, the surge in anti-Asian hate crimes does, to say the least, complicate the woke narrative of an ascendant Rainbow coalition struggling to overcome white supremacy.

***

Everyone opposes hate crimes, and it requires some deductive reasoning to connect liberal campaigns against proactive policing, bail reform to keep suspects out of incarceration, progressive district attorneys determined to reduce the number of black Americans jailed for minor offenses, and the broader war on cops, to the surge in criminal attacks on vulnerable citizens.

The education issue is far more direct. For years, progressive educators have railed against standardized tests as barriers to racial equity. They have won some stunning recent victories: The University of California has ceased using the SAT as means for sorting applicants, and hundreds of other colleges have followed suit.

The SAT has not been discredited as a metric for determining the likelihood of a student succeeding academically; for that it has no equal. Its problem is a political one: Standardized test results reveal with considerable precision how much of a leg up is given to black students in college admissions competition over white and especially Asian students. The frequent result is a mismatch between student and institution where black students have less developed academic skills than their classmates, with many pooling in the bottom of the class. Some of the most notorious instances of woke cancel culture deployed against truthful speech have occurred when professors who had noticed and lamented these facts were hunted down by leftist students and subsequently dismissed from their jobs.

But in terms of potential to spark a widespread disaffection, the five decades long dispute over affirmative action in college admissions will pale next to the battles over the use of standardized tests for granting admission to academically selective high schools and curricula. In the past year of racial reckoning, the use of student standardized test scores for admission has been dropped or rolled back in Lowell High School in San Francisco, the Boston Latin School, and Thomas Jefferson High school in northern Virginia. Outgoing New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio sought unsuccessfully to have the tests banned entirely for its top schools, the storied Stuyvesant and Bronx High School of Science, and is still maneuvering to reduce the percentage of students admitted to those schools by exam only. His rationale is that they arent sufficiently diverseat this point more Asians pass the exams than other groups and black students do so at comparatively low rates.

Not surprisingly, Asian parents from New York to California have begun to mobilize politically and legally to combat what is quite plainly an effort to tilt a level playing field against their children. (In San Francisco their pressure has at least temporarily kept in place the exam as criterion for admission to Lowell.) In picking a fight against the exam high schools, Democratic politicians following the woke playbook have chosen to attack an institution vitally important to one of the countrys most dynamic and academically successful immigrant groups. For the first time since the passage of the 1965 Immigration Act, grassroots organizations of Asian parents are at odds with Democratic politicians.

Wai Wah Chin, president of the Chinese American Citizens Alliance, observes (in an interview on Glenn Lourys podcast) that De Blasio and other Democrats pitch their campaign against the high performance schools in the language of representation, claiming that the student bodies of Bronx Science and Stuyvesant are not representative of New York. (Former New York schools chancellor Richard Carranza had gone further, warning Asian parents to back down with the menacing formulation that no ethnic group owns admission to these schools.) In response, Chin makes the necessary point: The kids who pass the rigorous math and verbal exams are not representing anyone but themselves. They have studied as individuals and take the exam as individuals, representing not a community but their own efforts. She adds that the students family or community might feel pride in their accomplishment; one could add that all Americans might feel proud of these incredibly successful schools. Graduates of Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, and Brooklyn Tech have won an extraordinary 14 Nobel Prizes in the sciences, more than many countries. Wai Wah Chins assertion stands directly against the racial essentialism that lies at the core of wokeness.

The issue is broader than the select exam schools which admit the cream of the student crop. There is a nationwide movement to eliminate tracking of students by ability. California, following San Franciscos lead, is eliminating the teaching of algebra to eighth graders, which means far fewer public school students will have the opportunity to take calculus in high school. This will narrow the pipeline of students who might go on to pursue STEM majors in college and in their careers. The rationale for such changes is always the woke watchword equity, followed by lamentations that white and Asian students are overrepresented in advanced math courses. But of course parents of bright students want their kids to be challenged in school, and inevitably America as a whole will suffer if they are not. As one California math teacher put it, I feel so bad for these students. We are cutting the legs of the students to make them equal to those who are not doing well in math.

But if recent social history shows anything, it is that parents will fight harder over the education of their children than almost any issue. All over the country, parent groups are mobilizingAsian parent groups often in the lead. As school questions emerge as hot button political issues, it will become apparent that the woke project of dumbing down schools to promote equity will fare no better than defunding the police.

***

The most widely noted defection from the anti-whiteness coalition comes from Latinos, emerging as the second largest demographic group in the country. Long viewed as the bedrock of any leftist Rainbow Coalition, there were certainly enough visible left-wing Latinos in academia to give this a certain plausibility. But its not turning out that way. Latinos remain a largely Democratic constituency, voting roughly 60 percent for Biden over Donald Trump. But this is a 16 percent drop from Hillary Clintons 2016 levels, a remarkable shift.

Polling shows Hispanics lukewarm towards the Black Lives Matter movement, favoring it at lower rates than whites did (the question was posed at a time when support for BLM was assumed to be the only possible opinion for decent people). Latinos oppose reparations and defunding the police, core components of the woke agenda, by more than 2-1 margins. As Ruy Teixeira, a long time proponent of the view that Hispanic immigration was a key to solid Democratic majorities, recently put it, clearly this constituency does not harbor particularly radical views on the nature of American society and its supposed intrinsic racism and white supremacy. Others noted that Hispanics are now jailed at lower rates than white Americans, and are increasingly employed in law enforcement.

Few discern specific issues for the shift, though it is unlikely that woke efforts to neuter the Spanish language with terms like Latinx have attracted more Latinos and Latinas to the Democrats. Might the trend continue towards transforming Hispanics into a group politically analogous to Reagan Democratsthat is, a formerly Democratic working- and middle-class constituency that now votes GOP? It seems improbable, but no one predicted that a candidate could be as tough on border enforcement as Donald Trump and experience a dramatic gain in Latino votes.

The fundamental political error of wokeness lies in its judgement about how popular a movement based on anti-whiteness is likely to be in a nation increasingly less European in ancestry. Immigrants have come to America for many reasons, but a hatred of white supremacy is probably nowhere near the top for the vast majority. One could easily surmise that many of them are motivated by appreciation of the very qualities wokeness either deplores or works to undermine: law and order, careers open to talents, advanced levels of science and technologyand the legal and cultural structures that make those things possible.

A passage from David Reiffs book on Los Angeles from more than three decades ago comes to mind: In the coda of one chapter, Rieff describes a billboard for a Mexican beer, then visible in nearly every Mexican town, which touts the product as a high class blonde, double meaning very much intended. It played on aspiration, the kind that prompted men from Mexican small towns to decamp for Mexico City, or ultimately to Los Angeles, the greatest blonde of all.

One of the more provocative interpretations of the origins of the relatively new movement to bring critical race theory into the teaching of elementary and high school students was suggested, almost as an aside, by Wesley Yang. Sometime in the late 2000s or early 2010s, the left looked at Latino immigration and realized that a considerable degree of assimilation was actually happening: that the Latino working class was not drinking in the vaguely Marxist ideologies incubating in university ethnic studies departments, and that there was actually a possibilityperceived by the left as a dangerthat just as (according to ethnic studies phraseology popular on the left) Irish and Italian immigrants had been allowed to become white, the same thing was happening to non-European immigrants as well. Critical race theory thus developed as a kind of reaction, to indoctrinate school-aged children of the new immigration into a kind of racial essentialism, to deflect them from an assimilationist path.

Yangs suggestion would correlate with Eric Kaufmanns argument in Whiteshift, a detailed and comprehensive study of demographic transformations and evolving racial attitudes likely to occur in the West. Intermarriage rates between white Americans and new immigrants or their children are fairly high, and over time the boundaries of whiteness will expandAmerican and other Western majorities wont be exclusively white any longer, but they will have some connection to white ancestry; they will acknowledge and feel cultural ties to the traditional heroes of their nations. This may be an overly optimistic view, but recent American elections do nothing to contradict it.

***

What does that mean for the trajectory of wokeness? If one is inclined towards optimism, one can see signs that the movement has already peaked. Clearly the national conversation is not where it was in the summer of 2020. Andrew Sullivan wrote recently how he was cheered by the HBO mini-series The White Lotus, in which the obvious villains were two highly privileged very woke college students. A similar point could be made about The Chair, a miniseries about an Asian-American woman (starring and co-produced by Sandra Oh) assuming the English department chairmanship of a Williams or Amherst type college; there too the villains are Red Guard type students who concoct spurious accusations of Nazism against an undisciplined professor, who is portrayed sympathetically. Would either have been aired last year? The New York Times, having last year pushed out Bari Weiss and James Bennet to appease woke staffers, suddenly found the will to give a small slot in its opinion page roster to John McWhorter, author of a brilliant book hostile to wokeness.

It can be notoriously difficult to read accurately the tenor of ones own times. Historians can point to many private letters of learned people written well before the darkest nights of communism and Nazism, assuring one another that the worst was certainly over and things would soon improve. Still, it strikes me that Americas liberal elite is beginning to find wokeness a bit embarrassing. What does the president of Yale really think about his diversity deans publicly threatening a law student for sending an email that used the phrase trap house?

The actual number of the woke remains smallperhaps 6 percent of the population, according to Pew surveys of American political attitudes. It is educated, it is mostly white, it is heavily concentrated in the media and universities. But it isnt powerful enough to control the country if majorities are mobilized to resist it.

Overcoming wokeness will require real political will and courage, as well as legislation. At some point there will need to be a successful legal challenge to the idea that disparate income and disproportionate racial outcomes by themselves constitute sufficient evidence of racial discrimination, but that too is in the realm of the possible. As voters from New York City to Buffalo to Seattle showed without ambiguity, when wokeness is on the ballot and opposed vigorously, it loses. In activism and voting patterns, Americas most rapidly growing demographic groups are largely showing themselves indifferent or actively hostile to woke policies. If the tide is indeed turning, in a few years wokeness will be more mocked than celebrated. If not, Americas long reign as a relatively successful country will end.

Go here to see the original:

Is Wokeness Almost Over? - The American Conservative

There are many reasons, some of them mentioned in the first two parts of my series on the religious implications of the 2020 Census, to think that immigrants could be the future ground troops of right-wing American politics. Many global Protestants want to make the Bibleand their conservative interpretations of itthe official law of the land. Some support Trump-like strongmen like Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil or Vladimir Putin in Russia. According to Southern Baptist leader Richard Land, immigrants are social conservatives, hard-wired to be pro-family, religious and entrepreneurial. Stumping in the early 2010s for Marco Rubio, Land described the young senator from Florida as the face of a new conservative coalition. He continued, Let the Democrats be the party of dependency and ever lower expectations. The Republicans will be the party of aspiration and opportunityand who better to lead the way than the son of Cuban immigrants? As their own spiritual practices intensify in strange and hedonistic land that is not yet fully their own, immigrants sometimes subscribe to a nostalgic history of a Christian America now become a New Rome. Like the American religious right, they mourn an apparent loss of national Christian devotion.

Most evangelicals of color, however, take issue with at least some planks of the religious rights platform. Al Padilla, who was the director of Gordon-Conwells CUME, says that the migrant workers and poor laborers who fill immigrant churches are very concerned about how the church should act in the public square, and they are progressive in social and urban issues. Immigrants, after all, often occupy a similarly marginalized space as American racial minorities. After episodes of police brutality in the 2010s, one church leader in Miami contended that he could no longer afford to stand by while Africans are murdered and assaulted by police. African immigrants, writes scholar Jacob Olupona, have no choice but to engage in discourse about ethnicity and racism because these issues impinge upon their daily lives. Immigrants may hold to the conservative theology of many evangelical churches, but they are nonetheless subjected to the whiteness embedded in American social and economic arrangements. According to sociologist Janelle Wong, this helps explain why only 25 percent of Latino evangelicals voted for Trump and Republican House members in 2016.

Immigrants who criticize libertarian arrangements often frame their activism in terms of the least of these. While many articulate belief in the American ideal of self-sufficiency and hard work, they also question whether the free market is an economic panacea. According to researchers with the polling agency Latino Decisions, Minority citizens prefer a more energetic government, by large and statistically significant margins. Even Latinos in the Assemblies of God, a denomination whose North American adherents largely hold to a right-wing politics, support health care reform, back increasing the minimum wage, and tend to vote Democratic. Eighty percent of global evangelicalscompared to 56 percent of their American counterpartssay that the government has a responsibility to help the very poor who cannot take care of themselves. Those include inmates on death row. In the mid-2010s church-going Latinos helped overturn the death penalty in Nebraska. Comprising about ten percent of the states population (but likely to reach 25 percent by 2030), they lobbied legislators to override the governors veto of the abolition bill. The National Latino Evangelical Coalition assisted their efforts, declaring that capital punishment was systemically flawed. Founder Gabriel Salguero explained, All life is precious. Were pro-life: womb to the tomb. On issues ranging from capital punishment to welfare, immigrant religion holds the potential to reinvigorate an evangelical left that has languished since the 1970s.

Christian immigrants are most likely to move the dial on immigration reform. Political scientist Amy Black notes that whites who worship with immigrants are much less likely to view immigrants as a threat. One study in California demonstrated that conservative Christians who tutored undocumented immigrants began to think of illegal aliens as not so alien. Immigration reform became less of an abstract issue and more of an opportunity to keep families together. In the mid-2010s some white evangelicals joined with immigrants to mobilize against Arizonas SB 2017, one of the most restrictive immigration bills in the country, as well as Trumps announced plan to phase out the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. This resistance surfaced with the most vigor in cities such as Boston and Phoenix, and some began to use strategies of nonviolent civil disobedience. They participated in prayer vigils, fasting campaigns, marches, boycotts, and other actions that drew from Cesar Chavez, Martin Luther King, Jr., and other civil rights leaders. As one politico in Boston put it, The Latino vote is a beast waiting to be unleashed. Boston pastor Roberto Miranda describes the ten million Latino Protestants in the United States as a sleeping giant.

Sounding simultaneously right-wing and progressive, Christian immigrant populations do not fit Americas rigid two-party system. Were the quintessential swing voter, said Salguero in 2016. Were religious, so people assume were conservative and Republican. But were Latino, so people assume were liberal and Democrat. In fact, the electoral history of Latino evanglicos swings back and forth. In 1976 most voted for Jimmy Carter, a Democrat. In the 1980s the Republican Ronald Reagan made inroads with Latino voters by introducing an amnesty bill. In 1988 and 1992 George H.W. Bush and in 1996 Bob Dole did little courting of Latinos. Consequently, they helped Democrat Bill Clinton win both elections by fairly wide margins. George W. Bush, showcasing Latinas in his own family, did much better in 2000 and 2004. In 2008 Latinos voted for Obama, though political vacillation persisted through his presidency. After dozens of face-to-face meetings with Samuel Rodriguez, Jesse Miranda, and Noel Castellenos, Obama often followed their advice on public policy issues such as immigration, health care, and job creation. They grew disenchanted with the president, however, because of his failure to pass immigration reform and to support traditional marriage. They too questioned the religious rights commitment to the death penalty, a laissez-faire capitalism that leaves the poor vulnerable, superpatriotic interventionism, and a xenophobic, build-a-wall mentality. It is a wound I carry, says Roberto Miranda about his collaborations with conservative whites who are anti-immigration.

Defying Republican and Democratic orthodoxies, Majority World immigrants offer new approaches. In an era of entrenched polarization, the many white evangelicals who disliked both Trump and Biden may find idiosyncratic political views from abroad more appealing. Trinity Evangelical Divinity Schools Peter Cha contends, My Anglo evangelical students are more and more willing to hear their brothers and sisters who come from other racial backgroundsthey learn why they choose to vote in certain ways. Indeed, the future of evangelical politics depends on new strategies. In the 2010s, aggrieved and embattled white evangelical Protestants, whose median age is 55, declined from 23 percent to seventeen percentof Americans. More broadly, white Christians now comprise less than half of the population. By contrast, religious people of color are on the rise. Sixty percent of the worlds Christians now live outside the North Atlantic region, and the United States continues to be transformed by the Immigration Act of 1965. These demographic shifts are not yet reflected in the electorate, but fifty years from now historians may judge the religious right, in its tight coupling of theological, social, and political conservatism, to be the outlier.

Obstacles remain. The rise of Trumpand his popularity among anti-immigration evangelicals such as Jerry Falwell, Jr., Franklin Graham, and James Dobsonsuggested the limits of the new multiculturalism. Many whites do not interact with immigrants and consequently are less shaped by their supernaturalism, progressive social stances, and passion for immigration reform. Moreover, those who do attempt cross-cultural relationships are hampered by stark cultural differences. To the frustration of immigrant pastors, white visitors to their churches seem endlessly fascinated by African accents but struggle to grasp the substance of the preaching. For their part, many African immigrants avoid using African-American cultural markers because they fear that assimilation will result in racism against them. Moreover, immigrants who do join multicultural congregations often labor to establish an identity unless they speak in the voice of the white majority. Such congregations typically succeed, note sociologists Gerardo Marti and Michael Emerson, when they maintain a code of silence about race, which is seen as a disruptive subject. When such conversations do occur, multiculturalism must be framed in terms of mission work, of creating a community together, or of a miracle motif in which relationships are transformed through individual conversion.

Nor has the rise of non-white populations yet translated to political clout on a national level. Though most Latino and Asian-American evangelicals are less conservative on almost every issue besides abortion, writes sociologist Janelle Wong, they are concentrated outside of swing states, have lower levels of political participation than white evangelicals, and are less likely to be targeted by political campaigns. The future of multiculturalism may be bright, but at present Majority World Christianity, still constrained by white culture and organizing principles, is hardly driving religious and political life in America.

And yet their numbers are large and growing. The recent religious story of Boston, which I described in my first post in this series, is instructive nonetheless. In the face of xenophobia, cultural differences, and power differentials, religious immigrants offer different narratives to a postmodern West mired in a spiritual malaise, yet still haunted by a desire for transcendence. Park Streets steeple still stands, but it looks much less imposing now. It is dwarfed physically by secular commercial towersand eclipsed ecclesiastically by hundreds of immigrant churches. Spiritual and civic renewal have not materialized in the way that Billy Graham imagined during his 1950 revival when over 50,000 people packed Boston Common. In the 1950s, immigrants were a geographically distant curiosity. Now, Africans and Asians and Latin Americans, writes Jehu Hanciles, are a distinct, sizable presence within and impinging on the same social space. Increasingly, this is an intentionally aggressive move. The Cornerstone Miracle Center, located on the corner of Shawmut and Lenox in the South End, was assembled in Nigeria and exported to the world, says Enoch Adeboye. Lion of Judah, just blocks away, ministers to hundreds of Bostons homeless, and it is courted by powerful local politicians. Though still limited, the influence of multiethnic American evangelicalism has grown remarkably since 1965.

Despite sobering sociological data on the decline of organized religion, Bostons immigrants predict more growth. Roberto Miranda, impatient with the notion of a quiet revival, goes even further. Amidst forecasts that the United States will become a majority-minority nation by 2045, he wants something louder, bigger, more spontaneous, and more visibly led by the Holy Spirit and Latinos. White evangelicals in 1950or 1965could not have imagined such a colorful future. Some still cant.

See the original post:

The 2020 Census, Immigration, and Evangelical Politics | David Swartz - Patheos

After a Gold Coast man who bludgeoned his teenage girlfriend to death escaped a murder charge by arguing he had been provoked by her tales of infidelity, the Queensland government decided to step in.

Other than in exceptional or extreme cases you cant rely on words, or conduct that consists substantially of words, the states then attorney general, Cameron Dick, said in 2011.

We need a change to the law just because you say something it doesnt mean that you should be killed.

A decade later, another Queensland man, Arona Peniamina, also convinced a jury his spouses suspected infidelity had provoked him into ending her life in a jealous rage. The governments reforms had not prevented him from successfully arguing he was guilty of manslaughter, rather than murder, because he had been provoked.

As had occurred more than a decade earlier, convincing a jury he had been provoked meant Peniamina would therefore be subjected to a lesser sentence.

As the Queensland supreme court judge Peter Davis noted, Peniamina had spent the days leading up to his wifes death investigating her contact with another man.

Peniaminas case led to more questions about how the Queensland justice system was failing women, and another review of the law as it relates to the use of provocation as a defence in murder cases.

Peniamina successfully argued that the suspicion of infidelity provoked him to start assaulting his wife, Sandra Peniamina, and that he was further provoked when she picked up a knife to defend herself.

There are instances where this would help those who were provoked and were protecting themselves, Sandras sister, Carnetra Potter, who is now looking after the couples four young sons, told the Courier Mail.

But it in this case did not work in our favour. I believe the [law] should be looked at as a whole.

The attorney general, Shannon Fentiman, agreed, saying the wide-ranging work being done by the states womens safety and justice taskforce would include an examination of the defence of provocation in domestic, family and sexual violence cases. The taskforce did not respond to a request for comment about when the review could be completed.

Sign up to receive the top stories from Guardian Australia every morning

Queensland remains one of the few Australian jurisdictions which allows a partial defence of provocation, allowing the crime of murder to be reduced to manslaughter.

As the New South Wales court of criminal appeal justice Anthony Johnson said in April, the partial defence has attracted criticism, leading to review and reform during the past two decades.

It had been abolished in Victoria, Tasmania, Western Australia and most recently in South Australia, Johnson said. The ACT and Northern Territory have restricted the use of provocation as a defence but not abolished it entirely.

Johnsons comments were made as he denied the leave to appeal application of Warren Francis Rogers, who attempted to argue extreme provocation was a factor when he used a pillow to smother his wife of 40 years, Anne Rogers, to death. As he later explained to his son-in-law, Rogers killed her after a fight started because of he was upset by a non-sexual relationship she had with another man.

Im not a bad person, I just snapped, you know? Rogers said.

I just snapped she pushed me too far.

While Rogers application was rejected, and NSW does not allow the partial defence of provocation, its unique model is considered problematic by some experts.

Thank you for your feedback.

The NSW laws, enacted in 2014, include a partial defence of extreme provocation. The laws were designed to significantly reduce the number of cases under which provocation could be argued, but leave it open as a defence for cases that met a four-staged test, to ensure that victims of prolonged family violence, for example, could use it as a defence should they kill their abusive spouse.

Provocation can be considered in sentencing if a person is found guilty of murder.

The government is satisfied that the bill strikes a careful and appropriate balance between restricting the defence and leaving it available for victims of extreme provocation, including victims of long-term abuse who kill their abuser, the then NSW attorney general, Brad Hazzard, said in introducing the bill.

A select committee was established in parliament to examine the laws after the case of Chamanjot Singh, who stood trial for murder after cutting his wifes throat.

Singh claimed during his trial that his wife, Manpreet Kaur, provoked him by telling him she had never loved him and was in love with someone else, and threatening him with deportation.

He said he lost self-control and should not be found guilty of murder but of manslaughter, and the jury agreed.

In her 2017 research, Dr Kate Fitz-Gibbon, an associate professor at Monash University, found that in the decade before the reforms were introduced, there were 20 convictions finalised in the NSW supreme court for manslaughter by reason of provocation. The majority of these cases involved intimate partner homicide motivated by relationship separation or infidelity, she found.

Fitz-Gibbon found that the NSW reforms would eliminate many of these scenarios of what she called jealous man provocation.

She told Guardian Australia that the Peniamina case was a clear reminder of why the partial defence should be scrapped, as, by its nature, it operated to facilitate victim blaming narratives.

We have seen time and time again throughout Australian criminal law history that the partial defence has been successfully utilised by men who have killed their female intimate partners to avoid full accountability for their lethal actions.

It would be naive to think that the abolition of the partial defence of provocation is the entire solution.

We must continue to challenge cultures within our legal system that allow for the proliferation of gendered narratives whereby women are ultimately blamed for their own deaths.

She said that some Australian jurisdictions were currently progressing reforms that would better ensure men who committed fatal intimate partner violence they are held to account. But that did not mean that such offences should be subject to mandatory sentences, as these measures meant men who often raise provocation to mitigate their sentences.

The partial defence of provocation must be abolished in every Australian state and territory, it has no place in our legal system.

Continued here:

Jealous man provocation: the fresh Australian bid to end legal defence used by men who kill their partners - The Guardian

Honors and awards | UW Notebook

December 6, 2021

Anglica Chzaro

Anglica Chzaro, assistant professor of law, has been named a Freedom Scholar by the Marguerite Casey Foundation and Group Health Foundation.

The honor, announced Dec. 6, recognizes six researchers around the country who focus on racial, social and economic justice. Each honoree receives a $250,000 unrestricted grant, to be distributed over two years.

This is the second year of the Freedom Scholars program. Last year, Megan Ming Francis, a UW associate professor of political science, received one of the inaugural awards.

Chzaro specializes in immigration law at the UW, where she has also taught Critical Race Theory, legal ethics, poverty law, and abolition and the law since 2013. She is also an organizer with Decriminalize Seattle and Solidarity Budget and has been actively involved with efforts to end both youth incarceration in King County and immigrant detention in Washington State.

Im so grateful for this support, which comes at a crucial time for me, opening up possibilities for deepening and supporting the social movements that mean so much to me, she said.

Chzaro intends to use her award to expand her organizing and research around abolition, participatory budgeting, and immigrant justice, with a focus on shrinking the criminal legal systems footprint.

Its about questioning inevitability, and introducing possibility. Were asking, why are we doing this? Is this system working, who is it working for, and what should be changed?

The Marguerite Casey Foundation, which seeks to empower marginalized communities, and the Group Health Foundation, which focuses on health equity, created the Freedom Scholars program to recognize scholars who provide critical data, analysis, and ideas to movements working to shift the balance of power in society.

These scholars bold ideas and visionary leadership are critical to the modern liberation movements that our society desperately needs, said Carmen Rojas, president and CEO of the Marguerite Casey Foundation. Universities today are functioning more and more like corporations, and too many scholars working at the frontier of their fields do not have true academic freedom if they do not have greater financial freedom specifically, the freedom to pursue the work that scholars know will be most useful for the greatest possible good.

Group Health Foundation CEO Nichole June Maher said, Freedom Scholars are leaders and thinkers who materialize huge ideas that deserve national recognition and concrete financial support. We fully believe in the reimagined future that movements for justice are working for. We are honored to fund these scholars whose work supports and illuminates a path forward.

The $1.5 million initiatives other recipients are faculty in the humanities and social sciences at American University, UCLA, the University of Chicago, The Ohio State University and Tufts University.

See the original post here:

UW Law's Anglica Chzaro named one of six 'Freedom Scholars' for work on immigration, abolition - UW News

Ian Partman strode into the headquarters of WSN, his steps imbued with purpose. The first thing I noticed when I saw him wasnt the headphones dangling around his neck or the shock of blond hair that crowned his head, but rather his calming presence. He greeted me with a handshake, and I felt welcome in a way that is rare within a school known for fostering feelings of isolation. Beneath Partmans peaceful exterior, though, lies a fiery passion for social change.

Partmans activism started well before he enrolled in the Gallatin School of Individualized Studies last year. Immediately after former President Trumps inauguration, he organized a walkout at his high school in Washington, D.C., leading a group of students to the White House and the Capitol to protest the administration. As he stood among the crowd of thousands, he was struck by the capacity of collective action. However, he knew that more long-term organizing was necessary to stand up to an administration that routinely attacked the rights of Americans on the grounds of gender and sexuality.

Theres some way that we could organize it better or more profoundly, he recalls thinking. I wanted to continue the vigor and the fire of my peers to advocate for other causes.

And so he was called to action. He formed Ignite Collective in the spring of 2017 to organize mutual aid and direct actions to combat police violence in his hometown an issue that disproportionately impacts Black and queer people. He continues to lead the organization today.

As a full-time college student pursuing a rigorous concentration in literature, art-making, and histories of catastrophe, crisis and disaster, he somehow manages to lead and advocate for change through several organizing groups.

I think that a large part of my drive towards making this world a better place is driven by a frustration with the status quo, he said. But in the context of my personal experience, Im a Black, queer man who grew up in Washington, D.C., which is a political nexus, but also a policing nexus.

He spoke of his personal experiences of feeling targeted by the police, and how he witnessed violence as he was growing up. But rather than feeling dejected, he is enlivened with a passion to create a better, more life-affirming world for Black and queer people.

Recently, Partman received the Gallatin Global Fellowship in Human Rights, a year-long program that supports students working for human rights organizations. He has spent the last six months working for the New York wing of Survived & Punished, an organization that seeks to release victims of sexual violence who were imprisoned for defending themselves against their abusers. He helped commute the sentences of six people during his time at the organization. Such work is essential to create a world where victims of sexual violence who are disproportionately Black, queer and transgender, are treated with the respect and kindness that they deserve. Partman hopes to meet the people that he helped free from New Yorks prisons as soon as he can.

The communities that he fights for have had their survival criminalized for centuries. Whether by means of poverty, police brutality, or legislation that makes it a crime to use a bathroom that comports with ones gender identity, so many facets of our society have denied people the basic dignity of inclusion.

So trusting and steadfast in himself, Ian constantly reminds me not to limit myself by fear: fear of persistence, fear of perception, fear of oneself, Julian Hammond Santander, Partmans close friend and WSNs UTA Exposures Editor, said. Go out and get what you want is something Ian has said to me.

In addition to Partmans direct action and community organizing, he is engaged in research that traces how the 13th Amendment has led to the justification of certain forms of slavery. The 13th Amendment was passed in the wake of the Civil War in an effort to abolish chattel slavery. However, it permits involuntary servitude to be used as a punishment for a crime.

The United States has one of the highest incarceration rates in the world, with over 2 million people in jail and 5 million people under some form of government supervision. 38% of the incarcerated population is Black, even though they compromise only 14.6% of the national population. These prisoners are often conscripted into involuntary work and receive an average pay of just $0.93 a day.

Later in our conversation, Partman noted that the 13th Amendment has been used to criminalize child slavery, wage slavery and forms of feminized slavery like sex trafficking. He sees immense possibility to remake the country in a kinder and more compassionate image one where the scourge of racism and bigotry is eliminated through the abolition of our current incarceration system.

Partman plans to pursue a career in human rights law after he graduates, a natural continuation of the organizing work that hes done to secure the rights of the Black and queer communities. He is insistent that the impending climate catastrophe will not deter him in his goals to explore more of the world. As he continues organizing for a better tomorrow, he is chronicling his experience growing up as a Black and queer kid in a book with the hopes of motivating people to find a common cause within his story.

But this is not to say this all came without effort, Hammond Santander said of Partman. I feel lucky to consider him family. Ian will change the world. He will expand the minds of many and lead the charge for the future we want and deserve to see. This is something I havent said directly to Ian, but have said many times about him, so hell have to read it here.

As our conversation drew to a close, I asked what initially drew him into his active involvement. Millions of people witness and endure the suffering that he has, but very few dedicate their lives to leading movements that seek to undo systemic national ailments. He credits his inspiration to the first time he got an iPhone.

When Trayvon Martin was killed on Feb. 26, 2012, I was 10 years old, he said. I didnt own a phone. And I remember hearing, watching on the TV and I saw this future in which I walked outside and I took the wrong corner, I was wearing the wrong clothes. And that was my future.

The summer that I got my first phone was the summer of the trial, he added. And I remember when Trayvons killer was acquitted. I just went to Instagram and I remember seeing all of these different posts and information about protests. This digital world of activism inspired me. As I got older, I became invested in activism as an idea and as a communicative tool to interact with people who wanted to make this world a better place.

Partmans work didnt start with leading a thousand-person march or a mass campaign against a bigoted politician. His work started by logging on and tuning in. If youre interested in bringing about a better world with Partman, you ought to do the same.

Contact Kevin Kurian at [emailprotected]

See the original post:

Ian Partman on revolution, abolition and activist scholarship - NYU Washington Square News

Katherine Harveys new book, The Fires of Lust: Sex in the Middle Ages, includes some astonishing material. One example is the story of a 15th-century Perugian woman, whose listed crimes included making a love potion from semen, her own menstrual blood, and a powerful herb which she harvested on a Thursday before sunrise while mouthing incantations.

Yet although medieval society presumably consisted largely of people with unremarkable sex lives, happily married couples and successfully celibate priests, the author points out, such people do not tend to make much of an impression on the historical record. Much banal, everyday sex simply leaves no traces.

This is only one of the major problems faced by academics working on the history and sociology of sex. Many of the sourcesthat do exist moralising sermons, medical records, police reports and pornography come with pretty clear agendas. Even in more private communications, people are often boastful, coy or evasive about their sex lives, or put other obstacles in the way of researchers. The diaries of the Yorkshire landowner Anne Lister (1791-1840), which offer one of the most vivid and detailed pictures of lesbian life before the 20thcentury, are a striking case in point.

They may now be the subject of the acclaimed 2019 BBC-HBO dramatisation Gentleman Jack, but grappling with their 5 million words proved a huge undertaking for researchers Helena Whitbread and Jill Liddington, on whose work the series is based. Listers handwriting was difficult enough to decipher even when she was writing in standard English. The substantial sections written in a code that used Greek and algebraic symbols added a whole new level of difficulty.

Another problem for researchers inthis field is that those whowork on sexual topics often encounter hostility and resistance. When Jessica Simpson, now a lecturer in sociology at the University of Greenwich, wanted to investigate students involved in the adult entertainment industry, some universities responded by saying none of their students would be sex workers so I was wasting my time and should try a post-92 university, she recently told this magazine. Other institutions claimed that flyers Simpson had printed to help recruit research subjects would have the potential to cause offence to other students opposed to the sex industry, and some [universities] said they felt it could be seen as endorsing students who did this job.

Male ethnographers who join gangs, take drugs and get into fights seem to attract little comment, but a female researcher who briefly went underground as a sex phone operator, according to a 2016 paper in Criminal Justice Studies, was ostracized by her male and female colleagues alike.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, peer reaction is even more of a problem for those investigating more unusual areas of sexuality. An interest in foot fetishism, water sports or the more extreme forms of sadomasochism may well attract amusement, discomfort or disgust even among people whose official view is that consenting adults can do whatever they want and those researching such topics can experience a kind of guilt by association.

Joanna Bourke, professor of history at Birkbeck, University of London, has made a career writing about difficult subjects. Although this often puzzles or disturbs people, she says, her 2020 book,Loving Animals: On Bestiality, Zoophilia and Post-Human Love, definitely aroused an additional level of discomfort...I have found it interesting that when I was writing about killing, dismemberment, militarism, rapists etc, no one for a moment thought that I was a participant in these activities; but merely mentioning B/Z [bestiality and zoophilia] seems to make a minority wonder about my sexual orientation! The only time where the historian-I and the identity-me have been conflated like this has been in my work on rape, but that is because of musings that I might be a victim.

This suspicion that Bourke might be somehow involved in B/Z contributes to the discomfort that colleagues feel in talking to her about her work, she believes because it blurs some interpersonal boundaries. The same level of discomfort is not in evidence when people talk to me about, for example, killing, because we are on the same page; they would probably feel very differently talking about killing to a mass murderer.

Sex is always going to be a very charged subject, isnt it? reflects Kate Lister, a lecturer at Leeds Trinity University. Its not like studying the history of railway rivets. Its always going to be quite an emotive thing, and how people respond will vary wildly...There is research showing that anyone who studies sex does experience discrimination and stigma just because of the slight awkwardness of the subjectA lot of sex academics deal with that awkwardness, and the fact that people can make jokes, by becoming incredibly academic, almost dry about it. With writers such as Michel Foucault, writing about sex becomes incredibly theoretical.

This may be understandable, but it also means that academic writing about sex can feel as if it is missing the point, leaving it to novelists to tryto convey the many ways that sex can be tender, exciting, disturbing or ridiculous. Lister has decided instead to have fun with it and play a bit with the uncomfortableness surrounding sex.

Although she has produced her share of peer-reviewed publications and spent time digging around in archives to create a timeline of sex work in Leeds for Basis(an organisationthat supports sex workers in the city), she also puts out intriguing historical titbits on her Whores of Yore Twitter feed. In addition, she has written two books for a general audience, A Curious History of Sex and, published in October, Harlots, Whores & Hackabouts: A History of Sex for Sale.

Though largely and openly works of compilation, and so not subject to peer review, these books do draw on primary research, notably when dealing with the Victorian period, and A Curious History,crowdfunded through Unbound, was submitted as an impact case study to the research excellence framework. All the copies of the paperback piled up in British bookshops over the summer suggest that sex sells, though Lister donated half the profits to Basis.

That bookincludes some sharp polemics, notably about the taboos around menstruation and the way douching products are advertised to women as a route to dainty genitalia. But most of the book is an eye-popping survey of the many weird and wonderful things people have got up to. One researcher, it explains, listed 547 different paraphiliac sexual interests and noted that like allergies, sexual arousal may occur from anything under the sun, including the sun.

Amid such boundless possibilities, Lister has chosen to highlight subjects that are close to my heart, deeply emotive subjects and subjects that made me laugh (such as orgasming on a bicycle), as well as subjects that provide valuable context for issues today. It is hard not to be intrigued, for example, by the story of the feminist blogger who used the yeast from a thrush infection to bake sourdough bread (a recipe, we are informed, that never really caught on). And, in the light of todays debates about consent, what are we to make of the extraordinary 1837 British legal judgment that if a man attempts to kiss a woman against her will, she has a perfect right to bite his nose off?

As an example of how peer-reviewed sex research can have real-world impact, Lister cites a 2017 University of Minnesota analysis of 1,269 studies of manual virginity testing, which concluded that it was not a useful clinical tool, and can be physically, psychologically, and socially devastating to the examinee. From a human rights perspective, [it constitutes] a form of sexual assault. The cause was taken up the following year by the World Health Organisation.

It is a clich that academics cannot resist pointing out where we need more research. A Curious History of Sex mentions in passing that there have been hardly any scientific studies of sex dolls and their owners (though it is hard to imagine many such owners queuing up to be interviewed). More significantly, it suggests that the issue of women buying sex is still a taboo and under-researched subject, somethingthat both reflects and reinforces certain common assumptions: The narrative of the sexually exploited prostituted woman dominates the rhetoric of those who would abolish sex work. No space is given to discussing the men who sell sex or the women who buy it...[as in the past] the abolitionists and those who want to rescue sex workers will disregard that which challenges the narrative of the abused victim.

Here, of course, Lister is stepping into some very contentious areas. Her Twitter feed, according to her book, attracts most comment when she discusses pubic hair. More serious attacks, however, reflect her views on other topics.

Id always considered myself a proper, card-carrying feminist, she reflects. But when I started researching and writing about sex, I suddenly realised there were a lot of feminists who dont like me. It forced me to really think about my position. Occasionally, people on social media send me things because they think Im a horrendous, awful person but thats OK, its an emotive subject.

This is presumably because many feminists would simply like to see an end to both pornography and sex work, even if they disagree about how this can be achieved. For instance, there isnt much reason to think that throwing sex workers and their clients in jail will eventually lead to the end of sex work. (It certainly hasnt done so yet), writes Amia Srinivasan, Chichele professor of social and political theory at All Souls College, Oxford, in her recent book The Right to Sex. There is, though, every reason to think that decriminalisation makes life better for the women who sell sex. From this perspective, to choose criminalisation is to choose the certain immiseration of actual women as a putative means to the notional liberation of all women.

Similar questions apply in relation to pornography, where attempts to censor it invariably harm the women who financially depend on it the most and have also, in practice, led to bans on websites such as those encouraging sex positivity, sex education and queer platforms.

Lister, by contrast, avoids these debates but also attracts criticism by taking a relatively positive and liberal attitude to both pornography and sex work even though she recognises that there are abuses and people get hurt.

On pornography, though she flags up major ethical issues when content is uploaded without consent, she still has got nothing against anyone who gets enjoyment from watching other people have sex or who enjoys pornography. (Her book also points to the fact that attitudes to the clitoris and female pleasure in 18th-century pornography are far more celebratory than what one finds in the writings of the scalpel-wielding physicians of the time.)

As for sex work, Lister points to another challenge for researchers, namely that there has been a big pushback among sex workers about academics researching them, as with the disabled community in the 1980s. Nevertheless, she regards it as vital to write about them from a position of first-hand knowledge: If you are researching a particular demographic, especially a marginalised demographic, at any point in history and you are not engaging with that community today, then what the hell are you doing? Why are you writing about a group of people when you have no connection with them whatever? Speaking with sex workers will radically change your view. Its difficult to maintain the view that someone is being horrendously exploited when they are sat in front of you going, No, Im not!

We can see something of how this plays out in Listers lavishly illustrated new history of sex for sale, Harlots, Whores & Hackabouts. In the introduction, she argues that throughout history authorities have fretted about how to best deal with those who want to buy or sell sex, moving through various stages of repression, toleration, legalization, control, moral outrage and abolition, before circling back again. History is littered with various efforts to prevent sexual exploitation by abolishing sex work. None of them have worked.

Furthermore, sex workers, like everybody else, are deserving of rights and respect, of being genuinely heard and seen, rather than stereotyped and silenced. Lister therefore urges us to move beyond the fantasy and instead to look, listen and learn. This sounds both sensible and humane, but it also proves pretty challenging in a historical account. The book includes plenty about what moralists, medics, law enforcement agencies and what we can only call satisfied customers had to say about sex workers, but the voices of sex workers themselves are largely absent.

The illustrations include pictures of police raids, sex workers looking bored or morose, French women whose heads were shaved for horizontal collaboration with the Germans during the wartime occupation, lurid posters warning about sexually transmitted diseases and even medical illustrations of syphilitic ulcers. But they are greatly outnumbered by fabulous paintings, drawings and sculptures, some by very famous artists, of courtesans, royal mistresses and performers everywhere from ancient Greece to the floating world of Edo [1603 to 1868] Japan not to mention a French brothel so elaborately luxurious that it won a design prize at the 1900 World Fair.

Reviewers have argued that the result ends up sanitising or even glamorising the realities of sex work. Lister responds that she has included pictures of people who really were selling sex. Its not for us to say, You need to look more abused, more horrified than you are...Its not a question of ignoring the abuses but of bringing in a variety of experience, because its equally as dangerous to be pushing this narrative that its always abusive, always awful, always terrible.

And this leads to the final question about researching the history of sex. Doesnt it inevitably lead you into some pretty dark places?

Yes, agrees Lister, I dont think you can study the history of sex and not run into some pretty nasty things. There are harrowing things, children sold in brothels for the chance of a better life. Thats heartbreaking; that stays with you.Then there are the online punter sites, where clients go and review sex workers, which are generally a cesspit of awfulness and misogyny. Some sex workers really value those reviews because they can use them in their online advertising [but] some absolutely hate them. You cant always believe what these people are writing a bunch of lonely old men talking crap on their own on a computer. I wouldnt recommend the punter sites.

Yet even here Lister takes the robust view that she doesnt really care about what the clients have got to say, I care about the sex workers. If you are constantly centring what some dickhead client has said in an effort to abolish and criminalise everything, I dont think thats very helpful.

Original post:

The joy (and frustration) of sex research - Times Higher Education (THE)

ST. LOUIS Against their wills, Thomas and Mary Brown, Moses and Nancy Queen, and Isaac and Susan Hawkins were taken from a White Marsh, Maryland, plantation in 1823, forced to leave their families and children 800 miles behind to help the Jesuits in their founding of the Missouri Mission.

Enslaved people were essential to what Jesuit institutions in St. Louis would become. The Jesuits moved another 16 to 18 enslaved people to St. Louis from Maryland in 1829, the same year the Society of Jesus took over St. Louis College, known today as St. Louis University.

Nearly 200 years later, descendants of people the Jesuits enslaved are learning and reclaiming the stories of their ancestors and pushing the institutions around them to tell a complete story, one that includes their families and the harm that was done.

I believe souls cant rest until fundamental wrongs are done right, said Rashonda Alexander, one of the descendants.

I believe souls cant rest until fundamental wrongs are done right, said Rashonda Alexander, one of the descendants.

Alexander is a descendant of Jack and Sally Queen, who were a part of that second group that relocated to St. Louis. Up until 2020, Alexander, like many Black Americans, was not able to trace her family earlier than a certain point in time.

I kept hitting a brick wall with my great-great-grandfather, she said. After years of searching, a visit from a stranger would bring her many of the answers she was seeking.

A reporter knocked on my door, at the house, and he said, I believe that you are a descendant of persons owned by the Jesuits.

For Alexander, this revelation inspired more investigation. She not only now knew she was a descendant of enslaved people owned by Jesuits; she also had to reckon with her own history as a 2002 graduate of St. Louis University which benefited from owning human chattel, including her ancestors.

I attended the university my ancestors built for free, said Alexander, who also identifies as a cradle catholic, essentially meaning she had practiced the Catholic faith since birth. I kept thinking, Are we walking on their bones?, Are we walking on their blood?, Did I walk past somewhere where they were beaten?

Across the country, other people have come to discover and question the churchs role in their families stories, as the Society of Jesus, a Roman Catholic order of priests and brothers, and affiliated organizations inside and outside of St. Louis have started to examine its history more closely.

Some institutions have launched research initiatives to explore their beginnings more deeply, while others have created foundations to further the work. Still, some descendants say, there is more work to be done; acknowledgement is only the beginning.

This contract lists the names of the first six enslaved people moved from White Marsh, Maryland to Missouri. Photo via Jesuit Archives & Research Center.

There is a long history of Jesuits around the world owning slaves, according to Fr. Jeffrey Harrison, SJ, the project coordinator for the Slavery, History, Memory and Reconciliation Project in St. Louis, a research initiative involving the Jesuit Conference of Canada and the United States, St. Louis University and the St. Louis African American History and Genealogy Society. Its a practice that predates both Americas independence in 1776 and the first record of slavery in the territories in 1619, according to Jesuit archivists.

Almost from the beginning we engaged in some forms of human slavery, Harrison said.

Ignatius Loyola founded the society, which would come to be known as the Jesuits, in 1540, when Pope Paul III officially approved the organization. In the United States, Jesuits went on to own slaves in Missouri, Alabama, Kentucky, Louisiana, Kansas, Illinois, Pennsylvania and Maryland until slavery was ruled unconstitutional in 1865, according to their own records. Institutions of higher education benefited from slave labor those that exist today, including St. Louis University, Georgetown University and Spring Hill College, as well as others that have since closed their doors. But Harrison said the quest to uncover ones history is not just happening in St. Louis, it is an experience shared by descendants across the country.

In Maryland, Robin Proudie said she remembers how she felt the day she found out her lineage was intertwined with the Jesuits. Her notice came in the form of a letter.

The Society of Jesus explained to me that through research that they found that I am a descendant of Henrietta Mills, she said.

Details about Henrietta Mills life can be pieced together through records from the Jesuit Archives, housed in a building in the Central West End neighborhood in St. Louis. They show Mills was 16 when she married 20-year-old Charles Chauvin on June 28, 1860. On the same sheet of paper as her and her husbands names are listed another four words: slave of St Louis University.

Robin Proudie visited St. Louis University s current campus in November of 2021. Courtesy photo.

Mills and her husband went on to have 10 children between 1860 and 1884, and became godparents to three more. When the Civil War erupted, Charles was drafted into the U.S. Colored Infantry. His name today is listed at the African American Civil War Memorial in Washington D.C., correcting a history that ignored the heroic role of 209,145 US Colored Troops in ending slavery and keeping America united under one flag, as the memorials website states.

Proudie, originally from St. Louis, moved to Maryland later in life, not knowing she was moving to the state from which her ancestors were forcibly driven nearly two centuries ago. That piece of paper sparked a yearning to find out more and eventually Proudie would not only go on to find more information about Henrietta Mills but also her brothers and sisters and siblings and mother and grandparents. In the process she met other descendants like Alexander, whom she now affectionately calls cousin.

Its been a joy to see, you know, that we share this history, she said.

For researchers, pinpointing a solid total number of the people the order enslaved is difficult. Sacramental records held by the Jesuits, however, help provide a snapshot for certain areas. In 2016, the New York Times spotlighted Georgetown Universitys links to enslaved people including, according to a 1938 bill of sale, the sale of 272 enslaved people to stay afloat.

In St. Louis, weve come up with a number of about 200 over time that were either directly owned, rented or hired, Harrison said in reference to the number of people the Jesuits owned between 1823 and the end of slavery in St. Louis.

These records include documentation of marriages, baptisms and deaths, creating a bit of a giant jigsaw puzzle that you have to try to match up Harrison said. These records helped break through the 1870 brick wall, which refers to the difficulty that comes with tracing the lineage of African American families preceding the abolition of slavery; the 1870 census is the first census to list the names of African Americans alongside the rest of the population, and is for many it is the first official notation of surnames for formerly enslaved people.

Peter Hawkins was the first child born to an enslaved couple in the Missouri Mission. Photo via Jesuit Archives & Research Center.

Bursting through that brick wall filled in a lot of gaps for Rashonda Alexanders family. Over the years she said her family has always been asked both why they were raised in the Catholic faith and also how they got to St. Louis. Now, she finally has answers.

We were brought forth from up north by the Jesuits, she said. So all of it was connecting dots and it was really inspiring.

Recognizing history

Tracking down descendants of those the Society of Jesus enslaved is an endeavor carried out by organizations across the country including the Descendants, Truth & Reconciliation Foundation, a nonprofit that works to mitigate the dehumanizing impact of racism on our human family while dismantling the continuing legacy of slavery in America through truth, racial healing and transformation, according to its website. Its founding partners consist of both descendants of enslaved people the Jesuits owned at Georgetown University and members of the Jesuits, including former president of the Jesuit Conference of Canada and the United States, Fr. Tim Kesicki, SJ and current executive director, Campaign for Descendants Truth and Reconciliation Trust and Foundation.

This is much bigger than Georgetown University, Kesicki said.

Joe Stewart, a founding member of the foundation and a descendant of enslaved people owned by Georgetown, said this is the reason this story must continue to be told. When this first broke in the New York Times, there was no mention of the descendants who were in the St. Louis area and we later became aware of that, Stewart said, referring to media coverage of Georgetowns sale of enslaved people.

The foundation, as Stewart described, has a goal to be transformative in its quest to engage in our work of racial healing in America.

It has no geographic boundaries. It has ancestry connections. And thats the only connection, not by boundaries, not by geography, but by blood line to those people thatve been identified as ancestors of those enslaved by the Jesuits, he said.

Amplifying the stories of descendants across the country and specifically in St. Louis is something Robin Proudie said is at the core of all of her work since learning of her lineage. In early November she returned to St. Louis, where she took a tour of St. Louis University. She could feel the presence of her ancestors, she said.

Treasury entry listing some of the names of the people the Jesuits enslaved in Missouri, including Jack and Sally Queen. Photo via Jesuit Archives & Research Center.

It just made me feel proud and it made me feel angry because theyre not acknowledged, you know, theyre like nameless souls, she said.

Proudie said that mix of feelings is what drives her and her family to not only keep digging but also to demand the story be told in full.

We want to ensure that every student that walks through those doors understands that the education that theyre getting came off the backs of our ancestors, she said.

Still, she says, the work cant end with acknowledgement though she believes a formal apology is due. Reconciliation for her looks like, as she puts it, reparative justice. I want to honor and commemorate my ancestors for the forced labor that helped to build and sustain these institutions, I want them to be recognized.

For that to happen, she says, there would need to be first commemoration and honor, then education and then third, repairing the damage done to my bloodline, to my family to help close the racial wealth gap.

She said part of that does include compensation and further economic empowerment. To move the mission forward, Proudie said she and other St. Louis descendants meet regularly in what they call the Descendants of the St. Louis University Enslaved.

We have several initiatives that were going to ask people to support us in and bring this history to the public for generations to come, she said.

Say their names

Part of Proudies work is making sure the stories of the enslaved are never forgotten, an effort also shared by Dr. Katrina Thompson Moore, an associate professor in the departments of history and the department of African American studies St. Louis University.

A lot of older works showed slavery as this paternalistic loving institution and it wasnt until you have more diverse, more Black people doing research and more people saying, hey, we simply cant be true, said Moore, who is also the undergraduate director of the history department.

Moore was part of early conversations between St. Louis University and the Jesuit Archives, which are separate entities, about how to move forward in acknowledging Jesuit involvement in slavery and further, how St. Louis University benefited from it. For her, the intention had to go beyond just dialogue.

This is my objective personally as a historian, first, as a Black person whos a descendant of slaves. If I had known anyones name that survived the middle passage and lived through those tumultuous times for generations, Im going to say their name, she said. Im going to tell their stories, no matter if its just one or two sentences of their story and the fact that were walking the grounds that we wouldnt be walking if it hadnt been for all these contributions.

Im going to say their names, Im going to tell their stories, Dr. Katrina Thompson Moore said.

To help ensure the contributions and the memory of enslaved people would not be lost, this year Moore coordinated a teacher training workshop for high school teachers of the Jesuit of the Sacred Heart throughout the United States. It is a combination of history, English, religion teachers and administrators sitting through five week sessions on everything from the Jesuits role in slavery to anti-racist bias training, something Thompson said is essential.

Its important to say their names, its important to tell the students stories, to let the students know the complexity of this state that they live in and that St. Louis University, the school theyve chosen, the school that we say men and women for others, has a complicated history, she said.

Exploring and putting the pieces together to craft and reconstruct these stories has been at the forefront of much of Harrisons work as well as all those who are involved in the Slavery, History, Memory and Reconciliation Project. In one story, for example, Harrison helped to piece together the story of a woman named Matilda Tyler.

Engraving depicting the St. Louis University location in Downtown St. Louis. Photo via Jesuit Archives & Research Center.

This is a woman who we think was as a young girl in that second group of people who were forced to come to St. Louis in 1829 and at some point she married a man named George, Harrison said.

According to Jesuit records, Matilda was first forced to work at the Jesuits farm in Florissant, a city in modern day St. Louis County. She was later sent to St. Louis College, which would later become todays St. Louis University. She and George had a number of children.

She earned the money to buy herself and her youngest son, Charles, out of slavery and then worked for another almost 20 years to buy the rest of her sons out of slavery, Harrison said.

Matilda paid $300 in total for her and her youngest sons freedom which would total to around $9,000 to $10,000 today, as noted in an 1847 entry in the Province Treasury ledger.

She earned what would today be tens of thousands of dollars to buy her family out of slavery and not only that, but she lived until 1900 and her son Charles, the youngest one, became a fairly prominent politician here in St. Louis, Harrison said.

For Rashonda Alexander, the gravity of learning the names of ones ancestors, individuals who survived the atrocity that was slavery, is profound.

I got chills when she said their names, she said.

But for Alexander saying their names is two-fold, not only amplifying the names of the enslaved but also calling attention to the names who did the enslaving, something also listed in a list of demands from St. Louis University students in September 2020. At the time students spoke out after someone defaced a memorial for Breonna Taylor on campus. The students then asked for Dubourg Hall, Frost Campus and Verhaegen Hall specifically to be renamed, among other requests.

An early depiction of the St. Louis University in its original location in downtown St. Louis. Photo via Jesuit Archives & Research Center.

I want a lot of truth to be told, not just at the university but for the university in particular, take the names down of the enslavers and put the names up of the enslaved and tell the story, she said.

This fall, St. Louis University promoted its African American Studies program to full department status, an action that had been years in the making, said Christopher Tinson, department chair of the African American Studies Program at the university. It was also a part of a 2020 list of demands from students as an action to help sustain success with adequate and financial resources.

Since the 1970s weve been an institute, a contract major, and then a program with a major and minor. It has taken the university 40-plus years to acknowledge the importance of our work as an independent department with the ability to attract, recruit, hire, and tenure our own faculty members. Since 2000, weve graduated over 80 students with a major in African American Studies, he said.

He went on to say recent events, such as George Floyds murder, reignited the fight for the department again and this time there was positive energy and alignment between the president, provosts, and academic deans that frankly hadnt been there before now. He added they are building new courses and working to make sure students know all the department offers sooner rather than later.

This kind of work, descendants say, will need to continue.

Some of our brothers and sisters will never have the opportunity to know the names, the places, the locations of their ancestors, Proudie explained.

With each discovery comes a new opportunity, she said. I just want the public to know that and I also want them to know that all we want is to be acknowledged, so be prepared.

This story has been updated to clarify Fr. Tim Kesicki, SJs new title.

Read more from the original source:

At least 200 people were enslaved by the Jesuits in St. Louis. Descendants are now telling their stories - PBS NewsHour