Category Archives: Abolition Of Work

Photo: Courtesy of Derecka Purnell

Gunshot wounds. Allergic reactions. Nosebleeds and asthma attacks from unsafe and polluted air. These are just a few of the reasons that Derecka Purnell, an organizer, journalist, and human-rights lawyer currently based in Washington, D.C., used to call the police. Growing up in an underfunded, predominantly Black neighborhood in St. Louis, Missouri, Purnell and others in her community, not having access to other resources, called 911 for almost every issue; police accompanied paramedics or arrived alone. Cops were everywhere and police violence, unavoidable. As a young girl in St. Louis public schools, on-campus police or school resource officers lined the hallways. In high school, Purnell once witnessed an officer break up a fight between two students by punching one boy so hard in the ear that he fell to the floor in pain.

Still, as she entered college, Purnell wasnt ready to imagine a world without police. She had seen and experienced physical and sexual violence throughout much of her life, and the thought of erasing the entity that was purportedly meant to protect her and her loved ones filled her with fear, as it does for so many Americans. It wasnt until Purnell entered law school, when she was in community with other organizers, that police abolition became a more serious idea in her mind. Suddenly, Purnell was asking the probing, critical questions that are typical and often integral to an individuals abolitionist initiation: What would a world without police look like? Is that something we are able to imagine and willing to fight for?

These are the questions that Purnells debut book, Becoming Abolitionists: Police, Protests, and the Pursuit of Freedom (October 5), so artfully grapples with. Through deft historical research, political analysis, and gutting prose, the book uses a variety of approaches part autobiographical, part textbook, part personal musing to map Purnells complex and fulfilling political evolution. The more that I learned and continue to learn about abolition, the more questions I had, Purnell told the Cut. I realized I was part of a broader group of people, particularly activists, who were trying to figure out their own political leanings, and that I wasnt alone in this process of figuring out what it means to be an abolitionist. The tides were changing: Organizers who celebrated George Zimmermans arrest in 2012 were calling for abolishing police in 2020. And though many books had influenced Purnell greatly, she had yet to read one that captured the personal and emotional nuance involved in this massive political shift.I couldnt quite find a specific text that went through the process of embracing abolition, Purnell said. I wrote this one so people could see it was possible.

Statistically, a fair few Americans became police abolitionists or at least warmed up to the idea in the latter half of 2020. According to June 2020 data from FiveThirtyEight, about 31 percent of Americans support the defund the police slogan. Data from Reuters during this same time frame notes that 76 percent of respondents were in support of proposals that moved money from police budgets into local programs for homelessness, mental-health assistance, and domestic violence. Though the defund the police demand certainly gained traction during the Black Lives Matter uprisings in the wake of George Floyds murder, the strength of Purnells work is in her ability to place todays unrest in historical context. Becoming Abolitionists explains how the discipline originated during the 18th century, when enslaved people across the United States fought for their freedom. Slavery ended in 1865, when the 13th Amendment abolished slavery except as a punishment for crime,but we know that the reality is not so clear-cut: Slavery was and still is legal as it is practiced through incarceration (not to mention the other forms slavery takes today, including sex trafficking and the forced indentured servitude of illegal immigrants). As arrest and incarceration rates skyrocket year after year according to recent data from the Sentencing Project, there are currently over 2 million people incarcerated in the U.S., a 500 percent increase over the last 40 years abolitionist organizers continue to demand that we reimagine new methods of public safety. For Purnell, abolition is not just a matter of safety, but one of justice. In her book, she muses on what might have happened if George Floyd had lived.

I often wonder, What if the cop who killed George Floyd had kneeled on Floyds neck for eight minutes and 46 seconds instead of nine minutes? Floyd would have lived to be arrested, prosecuted, and imprisoned for allegedly attempting to use a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill. Is that justice? I did not think so.

Purnell does not offer definitive answers to these questions, or set forth proposals for exactly what this sort of justice would look like, but she does boldly argue that abolition is the best road to reaching it.

Photo: Courtesy of Derecka Purnell

The idea of becoming is a through-line in many contemporary abolitionists work. Throughout much of 2019 and 2020, for example, we were able to watch rapper Nonames public journey from Black capitalism to an embrace of police abolition and other anti-capitalist frameworks. In her recent book, We Do This Til We Free Us, veteran abolitionist thinker and organizer Mariame Kaba also addressed this shift in thinking. Her essay, So Youre Thinking About Becoming an Abolitionist, debunks the common myth that abolition is only concerned with tearing down what exists, and instead posits that a key, overlooked component of police abolition is imagining what can be built. Lets begin our abolitionist journey not with the question, What do we have now and how can we make the world better? Kaba writes. Instead lets ask, What can we imagine for ourselves and the world?

Purnells writing similarly pushes readers to expand their conception of what a police-free world could look like. In 2020, she was part of the #8toabolition campaign, a response to Campaign Zeros #8cantwait campaign, which argued for various police reforms. The #8toabolition campaign was so successful that eventually Shaun King, then considering running for office in Brooklyn and a vocal supporter of #8cantwait, added abolition as one of the goals of his campaign as well. In her regular column for The Guardian, Purnell routinely challenges her readers to expand their views on the role of policing in public safety. In the aftermath of the January 6 riots at the Capitol, Purnell published an essay about how the justice system would have killed or punished protesters if they were Black, a notion that circulated widely on social media and in the press. After Congress passed the George Floyd Act in February, she penned a story insisting that reforms to a violently racist system would not have been enough to save Floyd or many other victims of police violence; instead, we must create an entirely new framework. Pushing her readers to think outside the limitations of our current justice system is important to Purnell, who herself went from skeptic to eventually championing abolition after being encouraged by her peers. I was able to take on more creative, imaginative, radical, and beautiful politics, all because I was pushed by the organizers I studied and shared space with, Purnell said. I was curious, I asked questions. I had heavily unexamined ideas about the world and the police, but those thoughts hadnt been brought to the surface yet; I think a lot of folks are in the same boat.

So how does one become an abolitionist? An open mind is the start, but its certainly not the end. Many texts, such as Angela Daviss Abolition Democracy, aided Purnell on her journey. But study, too, only takes one so far. What happens is theres an attraction to the ability to espouse abolitionist ideas without paying attention to political development, or the work it took for someone to get there, Purnell explains. But it took years for many organizers to move from reforms like we want body cameras and more diverse police to we shouldnt have capitalism or police; these systems are inextricably linked. So Im a bit nervous when people assume they can just read a book or some tweets and then call it a day. More than anything, abolitionists need to belong to a movement, to engage in political struggle.

Even now, Purnell says, her politics are still changing, guided by conversations shes had, struggles shes been in, and constant ideological trial and error. As she acknowledges, The abolitionist politics I have today are not the same as the ones I had ten years ago. Abolition is always a constant state of becoming.

This idea of political evolution a continual becoming can be both comforting and terrifying, particularly in an age where people are constantly and brutally shamed for their past beliefs online. The strength of Purnells writing is in her vulnerability, her refreshing openness about changing her mind.She feels no shame for her past political beliefs, as they shaped her into the empathetic and widely read thinker she is today. They were honest, said Purnell of her older essays, many of which lean more liberal or left of center as opposed to her current fully leftist takes. Everything Ive ever written is honest. I remember after Trayvon Martin was killed I published something on Facebook saying, I hope this doesnt cause more tension between Black people and the police, when I was maybe 21 years old. If people tried to say to me, Well, you werent an abolitionist when you were 21, Id say, Exactly.

Despite an impressive writing and organizing tenure, Purnell still considers herself fairly new to abolition, and writes for folks who feel the same. I write for the abolition-curious, she said, people who maybe arent full-fledged abolitionists but have questions, thoughts, or unexamined ideologies about policing or movements as a whole. I think we should ask those questions together.

What about the rapists?

Its a question Purnell has been faced with countless times, from both conservatives and the abolition-curious alike. If we abolish the police, who will punish the murderers, the rapists, and others committing harm? In her book, Purnell handles these questions with care. Rather than deal in hypotheticals, she sticks to the facts. Of women who have been married, she writes, 10 to 14 percent have been raped at least once by their partner. Of women and girls who report being raped, almost half were asleep or at home at the time, and an overwhelming majority were raped by people they know. Nearly 80 percent of sexual violence by boyfriends, husbands, and ex-husbands is not reported to the police. And when it is reported, the accused rarely face justice: A 2014 report found a minimum of 20,000 untested rape kits across police departments in five U.S. cities alone.

A survivor herself, Purnell understands firsthand that policing is not the way to repair harm and get justice in the aftermath of sexual violence. What about the rapists?, Purnell argues, is the wrong question to ask in the first place. Instead of holding onto a system that aims to punish people after violence has already taken place, we should invest in resources such as affordable housing, quality education, better access to food, and accessible mental-health care that are proven to help prevent criminal violence in the first place. Police abolition, and the redistribution of departments budgets to these essential social goods, is a crucial step in prevention. When people come across police abolition for the first time, they tend to dismiss abolitionists for not caring about neighborhood safety or the victims of violence, Purnell writes. They tend to forget that, often, we are those victims, those survivors of violence, too.

Purnell writes about abolition not as a possibility, but a certainty. It is not a question of if abolition will happen; abolitionism is being practiced every day. The question about total abolition is when. And shes right: As mutual aid proliferates during the pandemic and calls to defund the police or invest in alternative methods of policing crop up in cities across the country, the future Purnell envisions seems to be slowly forming. In her book, Purnell outlines other important steps she thinks we should take, such as universal child care and health care for all who need it measures that would both vastly improve quality of life and stop us from relying on police for things like health or community care.

As time passes, people eventually resist the oppressive conditions they live under because they realize that if they dont, the conditions only get worse, Purnell said. Thats what happened during the slave trade, during the creation of the eight-hour workday, and with many feminist causes. Theres going to be a breaking point. Theres only so much longer we as a society will tolerate police killing three people per day, or having millions of poor Black and brown people incarcerated. The next question we need to collectively ask ourselves is, if we are no longer tolerating what we have now, then what are we committed to building?

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Derecka Purnell Is Speaking to the Abolition Curious - The Cut

Celia Ouellette is the founder and CEO of the Responsible Business Initiative for Justice (RBIJ), an organisation fighting to abolish the death penalty in the United States.

Ahead of World Day to Abolish the Death Penalty on October 10, RBIJ is unveiling the latest batch of over 150 signatories to its Business Leaders Declaration Against the Death Penalty. Launched in May, the declaration has seen rock-star CEOs like Virgins Richard Branson, HuffPosts Arianna Huffington, Galaxy Digitals Mike Novogratz and more vow to use their private-sector power to influence US lawmakers.

Ouellette, who is criss-crossing the country in a drive to abolish capital punishment, has worked in criminal justice reform since 2006. As a criminal defence lawyer advocating for prisoners and negotiating plea deals for those on death row, she says shes had difficult conversations with clients facing very crappy options.

Al Jazeeras Senior Business Producer Radmilla Suleymanova first spoke with Ouelette back in May. She caught up with the activist, who was on the road in Columbus, Ohio more recently to find out whats it like working with Branson, why the death penalty is becoming a conservative cause and the dirty underbelly of capital punishment.

*This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Radmilla Suleymanova:Whats new? Why are you in Columbus, Ohio?

Celia Ouellette:Im in Ohio and then heading to Utah because they have two big state campaigns. Both Republican governors have said that they would sign abolition bills. Although states with a Republican governor have abolished the death penalty, like New Hampshire, the governor has always vetoed. So these would be the first Republican governors to sign bills.

RS:Thats interesting. How did abolition of the death penalty become a conservative cause?

CO: The death penalty is a human issue. Conservatives are humans. And in terms of conservative values, the Pope has said that the death penalty is against Catholic teaching. The cost of the death penalty and what government should be paying for is another question for conservatives, and then you layer in the fact that we have and are sending innocent people to death row.

The conservative movement to support or even lead on abolishing the death penalty has gone from not opposing death penalty bills to supporting death penalty bills to leading death penalty bills.

RS:How is it working with Richard Branson?

CO: Its interesting because somebody like Richard Branson, you know hes sort of this famously hippie-like CEO, but actually, I think he has that overlap with a lot of the more conservative libertarian-leaning business leaders. They meet on things like the death penalty, criminal justice reform, even drug policy on what the scope of government reach should be. Richards personally done a lot of work on this campaign. Hes not just kind of a nominal figurehead. Hes put a lot of time into talking to people, calling people, telling them about the campaign. He genuinely has his heart in this.

RS: Whats next for RBIJ in the coming year?

CO: I would love to return in 2022 on the 10th of October with 250 businesses or 300 business leaders signed on. And what were going to do at the request of the business leaders is shift to supporting them and getting involved in campaigns in America and around the world. I think that [US] President [Joe] Biden will be hearing from business leaders about why he should clear the federal death row rather than just impose a moratorium during his tenure as president.

RS:Whats the process of working with the businesses like?

CO: We sign them up to the declaration and then we have a conversation with each of them one on one, asking them what is it that you want to do, where do you see your role playing out whether its more press, using your voice on media platforms, or getting involved behind the scenes and using that leverage and social capital.

RS: And how is that making a difference on the ground, exactly?

CO: Well, in addition to victim voices, conservative voices, faith leaders, [and] leaders of communities of colour, were getting to a place where legislators considering abolition bills are having to weigh the fact that executions are not good for business.

RS:Is business really putting its money where its mouth is?

CO: Are businesses going to pull out of investment in states, for example, if they use executions and are they going to prioritise states that dont use executions? To be honest, leaders do want to know which states are the worst offenders in terms of where executions are happening.

Of course, businesses are going to still see their responsibility to those that they employ. But they are going to use their political pressure. Theyre saying, If we can lobby for ourselves, for our own interest then we ought to be lobbying for good. I wouldnt rule out companies making big moves. Investment firms and fund managers are interested in talking to us right now about how to move capital flows in a way that is restorative and not harmful.

RS:How could it be harmful?

CO: Its tricky because the states that are using executions the most and sentencing people to death are the ones that have the longest history with lynchings and marginalising communities of colour. So you cant penalise individual communities; you must focus the pressure on government leaders that can create change. It cant just be pressure on a business to pull out of investment or choose to move somewhere else. I dont think that alone is the measure of success. Its a question that we get asked a lot, and the answer is its more complicated than just refusing to invest in a particular place.

RS: Whats been the biggest lesson in the first roll-out of the campaign back in May?

CO: I think we learned that if you create the platform for businesses to be involved, they will come in droves. The appetite for being meaningfully involved in social and racial justice issues is huge. And if you provide a clear pathway to do that in a way thats authentic, its like pushing on open doors.

But we also learned that as a non-profit organisation, we are confined by the capacity of our fundraising ability. So if you shoot for the moon you might catch it, but you also need a staff of 100 coordinating the efforts. Ive been working on death penalty cases in some of the hardest parts of America, so this is a wonderful problem to have.

RS:What do you remember most from that time?

CO: I remember talking to one of my clients and him just being like, Why are my options so crappy? Hed been facing the death penalty. He was the lookout guy on a drug deal gone bad being charged with capital murder under a felony murder rule.

RS:What were his options?

CO:Wed negotiated a 20-year term plea deal for him, which honestly is the best that Ive ever done on a death penalty case in my career. This is the dirty underbelly of the death penalty. We hear about people on death row, we hear about people exonerated, but what we dont capture is the thousands of young Black men that get indicted on death charges, and end up pleading.

RS:Whats that conversation like?

CO: When youre a defence lawyer and youve sat with a client, and the roll-of-the-dice option is that they get executed, its a whole different conversation. Its hard to underestimate how much of a pump to mass incarceration the death penalty is in America. Youre just putting people into prison for their whole lives because youre indicting them on a capital murder charge. So from the outset, if they go to trial, the death penalty is on the table.

RS:Are all the people facing the death penalty convicted of murder?

CO: In America, you can only get the death penalty for a homicide, but under the felony murder rule, if theres a crime that takes place as a felony, like a robbery, and somebody gets killed during that robbery, it doesnt matter if you did not intend to kill, attempt to kill anyone, carried the weapon or even know that somebody had a murder weapon at the scene, everybody involved in that felony is eligible for the death penalty.

RS:Do you see that changing?

CO:To me, it feels inevitable that the death penalty will be over in the US. I mean weve had nearly a state a year for the last 15 years. Virginia was a big win. Virginia is the first southern state to abolish it. It has the bloodiest history.

RS:Whats been a big personal moment for you?

OC:I think for me its all for that moment that I talk to my clients and theyre like Why are my options so crappy? and I say, Im sorry I cant do anything about it and now its like no, actually I can do something about it. And that day when all those emails saying Arianna Huffington is in, Sheryl Sandberg (of Facebook) is in, thats the day where I was like, oh my gosh, Im doing something, this is happening. Weve got 150 of the most visible names in business saying, were not kicking the can down the road, were not avoiding the issue. And you want to get back to that client and be like, I did a thing to make the 2.0 version of your options less crappy.

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What does it take to get CEOs to stand against the death penalty? - Al Jazeera English

LETTER | Oct 3, 2021 marks the first anniversary when Pope Francis and Catholics worldwide adopted the position for the total abolition of the death penalty.

The Popes call included the abolition of "extrajudicial or extralegal executions, which are homicides deliberately committed by certain states and by their agents".

These are "often passed off as clashes with criminals or presented as the unintended consequences of the reasonable, necessary and proportionate use of force in applying the law".

It also took the position that "A life sentence is a secret death penalty".

Pope Franciss Encyclical Letter Fratelli Tutti (On Fraternity And Social Friendship) issued on Oct 3, 2020 was a call to all people of goodwill, not just Christians.

The call was "to work not only for the abolition of the death penalty, legal or illegal, in all its forms, but also to work for the improvement of prison conditions, out of respect for the human dignity of persons deprived of their freedom."

This position is consistent with the common values and principles in most religions and cultures.

The inalienable dignity of every human being ought to be recognised and respected.

"The firm rejection of the death penalty shows to what extent it is possible to recognise the inalienable dignity of every human being and to accept that he or she has a place in this universe.

"Forgiveness and reconciliation are central themes in Christianity and, in various ways, in other religions.

"Fear and resentment can easily lead to viewing punishment in a vindictive and even cruel way, rather than as part of a process of healing and reintegration into society."

Nowadays, in some political sectors and certain media, public and private violence and revenge are incited, not only against those responsible for committing crimes, but also against those suspected, whether proven or not, of breaking the law.

"There is at times a tendency to deliberately fabricate enemies: stereotyped figures who represent all the characteristics that society perceives or interprets as threatening.

"The mechanisms that form these images are the same that allowed the spread of racist ideas in their time

"This has made all the more dangerous the growing practice in some countries of resorting to preventive custody, imprisonment without trial, and especially the death penalty.

In the modern world, "it is impossible to imagine that states today have no other means than capital punishment to protect the lives of other people from the unjust aggressor".

Malaysians Against Death Penalty and Torture (Madpet) reiterates our call for Malaysia to not just abolish the death penalty in law, but also put an end to extrajudicial killings, preventive detention, and also life imprisonment.

While crimes ought to be punished, we must recognise repentance, forgiveness, rehabilitation, reintegration into society, and human dignity as important principles in sentencing.

In respecting the human person and human dignity, Madpet reiterates the calls for improving Malaysian lock-ups, detention facilities, and prison conditions to come on par with the best international standards.

The views expressed here are those of the author/contributor and do not necessarily represent the views of Malaysiakini.

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LETTER | Good people of all faiths, call for death penalty abolition - Malaysiakini

Tom Marshall, a professional restorer of photographs in the United Kingdom, took on the task of coloring a series of images from the 19th century, taken during the last years of slavery in the United States, as well as portraits of some of its protagonists. that managed to survive into old age, already at the beginning of the 20th century. In the framework of Black History Month in the United Kingdom, the Daily Mail newspaper shared his work this week.

The original images, obtained from the digitized collection of the US Library of Congress, reveal the horrors faced by those who lived through that time. They show the conditions in which the black population was forced to work and the marks left on many of them by the punishments and mistreatment they had to endure before the abolition of slavery in that country in 1865. I have colored these photos as a means to share some of the stories of those photographed, assures on his website the artist.

One of the photos, from 1862, shows a group of freed slaves on a yam plantation in South Carolina, and was taken by Henry P. Moore, a native of New Hampshire who traveled there to document the Civil War. Many of the people who achieved their freedom returned to work as day laborers, but for the most part they refused to grow cotton again and opted for the planting of corn, potatoes and vegetables.

Marshall colored a photograph from 1863, titled The Whipped Back, one of the most famous of that period and one of the first to serve abolitionists in their campaign against slavery. The man portrayed was a runaway slave named Gordon and also known as whipped Peter, and shows his back with terrible scars, the result of the merciless lashes inflicted by his owners.

McPherson & Oliver photographed two unidentified runaway slaves in Baton Rouge, dressed in tattered clothing. The exact date is unknown, but it is estimated that it was achieved sometime during the Civil War (1861-1865).

In 1864, photographer George N. Barnard captured the facade of an African slave auction house, known as Auction & Negro Sales and located on Whitehall Street (Atlanta, Georgia). Individuals put up for sale were prodded and forced to open their mouths to potential buyers. The auctioneer decided the initial bidding price, which was always higher for young slaves than for the elderly, the too young or the sick.

In April 1937, the former slave Georgia Flournoy was photographed in front of her house, as part of an interview. He said that he was over 90 years old and that his mother died during childbirth. She had worked as a nanny and was not allowed to socialize with any of the other enslaved people on the plantation.

In another photograph, from the early 1800s, an Alabama museum clerk is seen wearing an iron contraption used by slaveholders to prevent their slaves from escaping. It was a frame, placed around the neck and attached to the waist, which included a bell to sound if the slave tried to run away to escape.

Another photo of Russel Lee shows a former slave named Willis Winn holding a horn that slaves were called to work with every day. Winn claimed to be 116 years old when he was portrayed, in 1939. According to him, at the time when he had an owner, he and his companions slept on grass mats, full of bed bugs. I still sleep on a grass mattress, because I cant rest on cotton and feather beds, he said at the time.

It is estimated that between the 16th and 19th centuries, about 12.5 million Africans they were captured, kidnapped and transferred in ships to America, North and South and the Caribbean. In 1790 there were about 700,000 slaves in the United States, which was equivalent to about 18% of its total population at that time. By 1860, five years before the abolition of slavery, there were almost four million registered slaves by their owners throughout the country.

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PHOTOS: They color stark and shocking images of slavery in the United States. - Market Research Telecast

Cunning better than strong is a Jamaican proverb; a message of survival and resistance that urges us to use our brain rather than our brawn to overcome oppressors. Its a proverb that is encapsulated by the Jamaican trickster folk hero Anansi.

Anansi is of West African origin and became central to the oral tradition of the enslaved in the Caribbean. When caught in a terrible situation, Anansi would find his way out through intelligence, disguise, subterfuge and wit.

These tactics of survival and resistance were used by Black abolitionists Ellen and William Craft and Henry Box Brown. Disguise and performance were central to their escape from enslavement, political activism and appeal to white audiences. Black abolitionists shared their experiences of enslavement to change the hearts and minds of everyday people on both sides of the Atlantic. However, their work is often obscured in the national narrative of Britains role in slavery.

Since the abolition of the slave trade on March 25 1807, the historical narrative has focussed on Britains role in abolition rather than on the depth of Britains involvement in the slave trade and plantation slavery. The work of famous white abolitionists has long been applauded and highlighted, in particular that of social reformer William Wilberforce.

Yorkshire was at the heart of the abolitionist movement in the UK, but this focus on Wilberforce and his white peers has also meant that many prominent Black abolitionists that visited the county, lecturing and staging anti-slavery performances, have been long overlooked.

Ellen and William Craft were born into slavery in Georgia in the south of the US. They married and, fearing that they would be separated from one another and their future children would be sold into slavery, planned a daring escape in 1848.

As a result of the rape of her mother by a white slave master, Ellen was light-skinned and able to pass for white. Their plan involved Ellen posing as a man and William acting as her faithful manservant. Ellen would cut her hair and wear mens clothes and, in this disguise, they would head north to the free states via steamboat and train.

Ellen couldnt write, as slaves werent taught to, so she bandaged her hand to avoid being asked to sign her name. They knew if they were caught, they would be tortured and separated. The plan worked, with Ellen sitting in the whites only carriage of a train, undetected.

The Crafts settled in Boston until the passing of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, which gave slave owners the power to travel from the south and recapture slaves who had escaped north. American abolitionists helped the Crafts to raise enough money to flee to the relative safety of the UK. There, they created a stage performance to shine a spotlight on the terrors of enslavement.

As researcher Hannah-Rose Murray explains in the excellent Africans in Yorkshire project, Ellen Craft became a celebrity at anti-slavery meetings because of her pale skin and because both she and William carefully constructed their performances for the British stage:

Ellen would remain silent on stage, as Black women were not expected to speak in public, and William would describe their escape and the brutality of enslavement.

British audiences were fascinated by Ellens pale skin and aghast that she could have once been a slave.

The Crafts learned to read and write, spent over two decades educating the public about slavery and published their autobiography. They returned to America in 1868 and opened a school for Black children in Georgia.

Their story is being told today by Leeds-based performer and historian Joe Williams in his play, Meet the Crafts. Ellen and William Craft, he explains, were recorded in the 1851 Leeds Census and registered as staying in the house of abolitionist Wilson Armistead. In the section for occupation, they are registered as fugitives from slavery in America.

Another incredible story of escape through disguise and subterfuge is that of Henry Box Brown, who was born a slave in Richmond, Virginia, in 1816.

He returned from work one day in 1849 to find that his wife and children had been sold. He decided to orchestrate an unbelievably risky escape, a year after the Crafts carried out their own.

Brown paid for a box to be made, measuring 1m by 1m and 0.6m wide. He squeezed himself in and posted himself from Virginia in the south to Philadelphia in the free north. Holes were made in the box so he could breathe, he had some water and biscuits for the journey and was transported via wagon, boat and train. The journey took 72 hours and abolitionists in Philadelphia describe how when they opened the box, Brown clambered out and sung a freedom hymn: he was finally free.

However, like the Crafts, the passing of the Fugitive Slave Act forced Brown to leave for the UK. In England, Brown toured the country, performing his escape, as well as drawing from Harriet Beecher Stowes famous anti-slavery novel Uncle Toms Cabin (1852) to create a panorama of enslavement on stage. Brown toured Yorkshire and performed in the Music Hall in Hull.

Brown was a born showman. A central part of his act was emerging from the original box in which he had travelled to freedom. He was also known to walk the streets of English towns dressed in traditional African clothing, styling himself as an African prince.

He published the first edition of his autobiography in 1849. After marrying an English woman, he returned to America in 1875 and continued performing until his death in 1897.

The stories of the Crafts and Henry Box Brown are examples of people using their intelligence and creativity, as the Caribbean slave trickster hero Anansi would, to survive the most appalling circumstances.

They are key to our understanding of the history of enslavement. Slaves were not passive victims they were integral to the political processes of abolition in the UK and put their intellectual, creative and artistic weight behind the movement.

In Yorkshire, performers and artists like Joe Williams are carrying that legacy forward through their work. And in doing so they are making a much-needed intervention into our well-worn, Wilberforce-centric abolitionist narratives.

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Remembering the Black abolitionists of slavery in Yorkshire - The Conversation UK

Illustration by Joe Ciardiello.

Before he became a celebrated author and the founding father and first prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago, Eric Eustace Williams was an adroit footballer. At his high school, Queens Royal College, he was a fierce competitor, which likely led to an injury that left him deaf in his right ear. Yet as Williamss profile as a scholar and national leader rose, so did the attempts by his critics to turn his athleticism against him. An expert dribbler known for prancing downfield with the ball kissing one foot, then the other, Williams was now accused by his political detractors of not being a team player. Driven by his desire to play to the galleryor so it was saidhe proved to be uninterested in whether his team (or his nation, not to mention the erstwhile British Commonwealth) was victorious. Books in Review

What his critics described as a weakness, though, was also a strength: His willingness to go it alone on the field probably contributed to his willingness to break from the historiographic pack during his tenure at Oxford University, and it also led him to chart his own political course. Williams, after all, often had good reason not to trust his political teammates, particularly those with close ties to London. Moreover, he was convinced that a good politician should play to the gallery: Ultimately, he was a public representative. And this single-minded determination to score even if it meant circumventing his teammates, instilled in him a critical mindset, one that helped define both his scholarshipin particular his groundbreaking Capitalism and Slaveryand his work as a politician and an intellectual, though admittedly this trait proved to be more effective at Oxford and Howard University than during his political career, which coincided with the bruising battles of the Cold War.

A new edition of Capitalism and Slavery, published by the University of North Carolina Press with a foreword by the economist William Darity, reminds us in particular of Williamss independent political and intellectual spirit and how his scholarship upended the historiographical consensus on slavery and abolition. Above all else, in this relatively slender volume, Williams asserted the primacy of the enslaved themselves in breaking the chains that bound them, putting their experiences at the center of his research. Controversially, he also placed slavery at the heart of the rise of capitalism and the British Empire, which carried profound implications for its successor, the United States. The same holds true for his devaluation of the humanitarianism of white abolitionists and their allies as a spur for ending slavery. In many ways, the book augured his determination as a political actor as well: Williams the academic striker sped downfield far ahead of the rest and scored an impressive goal for the oppressed while irking opponents and would-be teammates alike. But his subsequent career as a politician also came as a surprise: Despite his own radical commitments as a historian, as a politician Williams broke in significant ways from many of his anti-colonial peers. For both reasons of his own making and reasons related to leading a small island nation in the United States self-proclaimed backyard, Williams as prime minister was hardly seen as an avatar of radicalism.

Eric Williams was born in 1911 in Port-of-Spain, the capital of Trinidad and Tobago, then a financially depressed British colony. His father was far from wealthy, receiving only a primary education before becoming a civil service clerk at the tender age of 17. In his affecting autobiography, Williams describes his mothers contribution to the family budget by baking bread and cakes for sale. She was a descendant of an old French Creole family, with the lighter skin hue to prove it.

Despite his humble origins, the studious and disciplined Williams won a prized academic scholarship at the age of 11, putting him on track to become a coloured Englishman, he noted ruefully. His arrival at Oxford in 1931again on a scholarshipseemingly confirmed this future. There he mingled in a progressive milieu that included the founder of modern Kenya, Jomo Kenyatta, and the self-exiled African American socialist Paul Robeson. It was at Oxford that Williams wrote The Economic Aspect of the Abolition of the West Indian Slave Trade and Slavery, which was later transformed into the book at hand. In both works, but in the book more decisively, Williams punctured the then-reigning notion that abolitionism had been driven by humanitarianisman idea that conveniently kept Europeans and Euro-Americans at the core of this epochal development. Instead Williams stressed African agency and resistance, which in turn drove Londons financial calculations. He accomplished this monumental task in less than 200 pages of text, making the response that followed even more noteworthy. Extraordinarily, entire volumes have been devoted to weighing his conclusions in this one book.Fall Books

It would not be an exaggeration, then, to say that when Williams published Capitalism and Slavery in 1944, it ignited a firestorm of applause and fury alike. His late biographer, Colin Palmer, observed that reviewers of African descent uniformly praised the work, while those who claimed European heritage were much less enthusiastic and more divided in their reception. One well-known scholar of the latter persuasion assailed the Negro nationalism that Williams espoused in it. Nonetheless, Capitalism and Slavery has become arguably the most academically influential work on slavery written to date. It has sold tens of thousands of copieswith no end in sightand has been translated into numerous European languages as well as Japanese and Korean. The book continues to inform debates on the extent to which capitalism was shaped by the enslavement of Africans, not to mention the extent to which these enslaved workers struck the firstand most decisiveblow against their inhumane bondage.

Proceeding chronologically from 1492 to the eve of the US Civil War, Williams grounded his narrative in parliamentary debates, merchants papers, documents from Whitehall, memoirs, and abolitionist renderings, recording the actions of the oppressed as they were reflected in these primary sources. The book has three central theses that have captured the attention of generations of readers and historians. The first was Williamss almost offhand assertion that slavery had produced racism, not vice versa: Slavery was not born of racism, he contended, but rather, racism was the consequence of slavery. To begin with, unfree labor in the New World was brown, white, black and yellow; Catholic, Protestant and pagan, with various circumstances combining to promote the use of enslaved African labor. For example, escape was easy for the white servant; less easy for the Negro, who was conspicuous by his color and featuresand, Williams added, the Negro slave was cheaper. But it was in North America most dramatically that slavery became encoded with race and thus, through its contorted rationalizations, ended up producing a new culture of racism. Current Issue

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This thesis was provocative for several reasons, but perhaps most of all because it implied that once the material roots of slavery had been ripped up, the modern world would finally witness the progressive erosion of anti-Black politics and culture. This optimistic view was echoed by the late Howard University classicist Frank Snowden in his trailblazing book Before Color Prejudice: The Ancient View of Blacks. Of course, sterner critics could well contend that such optimism was misplaced, that it misjudged the extent to which many post-slavery societies had been poisoned at the root. But this sunnier view of post-slavery societies was spawned in part by the proliferation of anti-colonial and antiJim Crow activism in the 1940s and 50s.

Williamss second thesis hasnt stirred as much controversy, but it also exerted an enormous influence on the scholarship to come: He insisted that slavery fueled British industrial development, and therefore that slavery was the foundation not only of British capitalism but of capitalism as a whole. To prove this claim, Williams cited the many British mercantilists who themselves knew that slavery and the slave trade (not to mention the transportation of settlers) relied on a complex economic system, one that included shipbuilding and shackles to restrain the enslaved, along with firearms, textiles, and rummanufacturing, in short. Sugar and tobacco, then cotton, were ferociously profitable, adding mightily to Londons coffers, which meant more ships and firearms, in a circle devoid of virtue. Assuredly, the immense wealth generated by slavery and the slave tradethe latter, at times, bringing a 1,700 percent profitprovided rocket fuel to boost the takeoff of capitalism itself.

If Williamss first thesis has been critiqued by subsequent historians and scholars, who have found its apparent optimism about the ability to uproot racism misguided, his second has been largely embraced and bolstered by subsequent scholars, including Walter Rodney in How Europe Underdeveloped Africa and Joseph Inikori in Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England.

The latter, in fact, goes farther than Williams does. Inikori argues that before the advent of the slave trade, Englands West Yorkshire, the West Midlands, and South Lancashire were poorer regions; but buoyed by slaverys economic stimulus, they became wealthy and industrialized. Similarly, in the period from 1650 to 1850, the Americas were effectively an extension of Africa itself in terms of exports, buoying the former to the detriment of the latter. More polemically, Rodney portrays Africa and Europe on a veritable seesaw, with one declining as the other rises, the two processes intrinsically united in a manner that echoes Williams.

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The scholarship that followed Williamss book also pointed to something that Williams missed in his account of the entwined nature of capitalism and slavery: The intense feudal religiosity that characterized Spain, Protestant Englands inquisitorial Catholic foe, began to yield in favor of a similarly intense racismalbeit shaped and formed by religion, just as racial slavery shaped and formed capitalism. As the historian Donald Matthews suggested in his book At the Altar of Lynching, this ultimate Jim Crow expression of hateoften featuring the immolation of the cross, if not of the victimized himselfwas also a kind of religious sacrament as well as a holdover from a previous epoch in Englands history, in which Queen Mary I (also known as Bloody Mary) burned Protestant foes at the stake during her tumultuous and brief 16th-century reign. In the bumpy transition from feudalism to capitalism, there is a perverse devolutionary logic embedded in the shift from torching presumed heretics to torching actual Africans.

Nonetheless, Williamss most disputed thesis was his downgrading of the heroic role of the British abolitionists. In his telling of their story, he argued that naked economic self-interest, more than morality or humanitarianism, drove Englands retreat from the slave trade in 1807 and its barring of slavery in 1833. Like The New York Times 1619 Project, this part of Williamss argument pricked a sensitive nerve in the nations self-conception. In 2007, on the 200th anniversary of the official banning of human trafficking from Africa, the British prime minister and the monarch presided over a commemoration that sought to foreground Britains abolitionism, not its central role in the muck of slaverys repulsiveness. Instead of focusing on the United Kingdom as a primary beneficiary of the enslavement of Africans, they refashioned their once formidable empire as the very embodiment of abolitionism.

This sleight-of-hand at once evaded the continuing legacy of slaverys barbarity and undermined the question of reparations for the countrys crimes against humanity. The evasion eventually led one Black Britisher to argue that the plight of descendants of the enslaved in the UK was reminiscent of the movie The Truman Show, where you know something is not right but nobody wants to admit it.

When it comes to Britains subjects in North America, Williams shows how 1776 led to a disruption of the profitable chain of enrichment that linked the 13 colonies and the British Caribbean. The resulting republic, he said, diminished the number of slaves in the empire and made abolition easierwhich is difficult to refute, though Williams curiously omitted the salient fact that the republic swiftly supplanted the monarchy as the kingpin of the African slave trade. Williams also illustrated how, in this void, the unpatriotic settlers who had broken from the British Empire were busily developing ties with the French Caribbean, heightening the profitabilityand the exploitationof those enslaved in what became Haiti. It was a process that would backfire spectacularly with the transformative revolution sparked in 1791; indeed, this was the revolution that led to abolition. (This thesis was explored in even greater depth in The Black Jacobins, by Williamss frequent political sparring partner and fellow Trinidadian, C.L.R. James.)

Despite the convincing evidence that Williams deploys to make his case, this particular thesis is still routinely ignored by many contemporary historians, who argue that the abolitionist movement was ignited instead by the rebellion of 1776 and its purportedly liberatory message, often citing Vermonts abolition decree in 1777. But as the unjustly neglected historian Harvey Amani Whitfield observes in The Problem of Slavery in Early Vermont, the language of this measure was sufficiently porous that even the family of settler hero Ethan Allen was implicated in the odiousness of enslavement. (More to the point, the decree could easily be seen as a cynically opportunistic last-ditch attempt to appeal to Africans who were already defecting to the Union Jack.)

In Capitalism and Slavery, Williams also stressed the agency of the enslaved and their role in abolishing slaverythe most dynamic and powerful force, he argued, and one that has been studiously ignored. Early on, Williams demonstrated, the enslaved sought to abolish slavery through insurrection, murder, poisonings, arsonindolence, sabotage and revolt was his descriptor of these actionsand he charts how these acts of militant resistance made their way back to London as well, where many took note and realized that lives and, more importantly, investments could be jeopardized. Every white slave owner in Jamaica, Cuba or Texas, Williams wrote, lived in dread of another Toussaint LOuverture, the true founder of revolutionary Haiti and the grandest abolitionist of all. Rather than accede to this emancipation from below, the British government, prodded by British abolitionists, opted for emancipation from above.

Williamss masterwork is so rich with ideas and historical insights that it still speaks to todays historiography, but in ways that have seemingly eluded many contemporary practitioners. For example, in his focus on Englands so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688which unleashed a devastating era of free trade in Africans, as merchants descended on the beleaguered continent with the maniacal energy of crazed bees, manacling Africans and shipping them in breathtaking numbers to a cruel fateWilliams anticipated the illuminating contribution of the British historian William Pettigrew in his insightful Freedoms Debt.

Part of the problem is that todays historians are so siloed, narrowly focused on an era, such as 1750-83 or 1850-65, that they remain oblivious to preceding eventseven ones as momentous as 1688, 1776s true precursor. These scholars mimic the uncomprehending jury in the 1992 trial of the Los Angeles police officers whose vicious beating of Rodney King was captured on tape. Instead of allowing the tape to unfold seamlessly from beginning to end, sly defense attorneys exposed the jury to mere fragments and convinced its members that the disconnected episodes hardly amounted to a crime.

Indeed, just as slavery drove 1688, it assuredly compelled Texass secession from Mexico in 1836 and thenfinallythe failure of 1861. And yes, along with the Royal Proclamation of 1763, which sought to restrain real estate speculators (including George Washington) from moving westward to seize Indigenous land, forcing London to expend blood and treasure, slavery was at the heart of 1776. As with many earthshaking events, the lust for land and enslaved labor drove the founding of the republic.

Williams also anticipated one of the more important scholarly interventions of recent decades: He offered an early account of the construction of whiteness, a subject written about in the enlightening work of David Roediger and Nell Irvin Painter, among others. The slave trade, Williams argued, had become necessary to almost every nation in Europe. As a result, a new identity politics of whitenessmilitarized and monetizedhad to emerge in order to justify the subjugation of continents and peoples and the gargantuan transfer of wealth to London, Paris, Copenhagen, Lisbon, Madrid, Amsterdam, and Washington. No insult to Brussels intended, but the formation of the United States was little more than a bloodier precursor of the European Union, manifested on an alien continent with a more coercive regime.

Inevitably, this cash machine of enslavement and the way it racialized humanity did not disappear when slavery itself was finally abolished. The legacy of racism persisted in Jim Crow, then in outrageously disparate health outcomes and the carceral system. There is no more illustrative example than the hellhole that is Angola State Penitentiary in Louisiana, which inelegantly carries the name of the region in Africa that produced a disproportionate share of the US enslavedand thus todays imprisoned.

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Unfortunately, all of the jousting that Williams had to do with the mainstream of British and US historiography, which tended to downplay slave resistance while failing to think critically about capitalism as a system, prevented him from forging a larger political framework in the book that would have strengthened its historical insights. Encountering his discussion of the still-astonishing influx of enslaved Africans into Brazil in the 1840s, the uncareful reader could easily conclude that British nationals were largely responsibleand not US citizens. Perhaps understandably, Williams, who languished under the British Empires lash for decades, directed his ire toward London more than any other placemuch in the way that James, his fellow countryman, focused intently on Londons malign role in subjugating revolutionary Haiti and hardly engaged with Washingtons.

Ironically, when he finally entered politics, Williamswho had so successfully broken from the pack on the soccer field and in his scholarshipmanaged to achieve only lesser results. Although Karl Marx, in Chapter 31 of the first volume of Capital, prefigured him in treating slavery in the Americas as essential to the rise of British industry, Williams was no Marxisteven if many of his peers in the Pan-African movement were decidedly of the socialist persuasion. This was true not only of James but of another Trinidadian, Claudia Jones, a former US Communist Party leader who was deported to London and became a stalwart of Black Britain (though she is better known today as a foremother of intersectionality). Jones was part of a circle that included Nelson Mandela and his successor, Thabo Mbeki, both of whom had been leading members of the South African Communist Party, as well as the similarly oriented founding fathers of postcolonial Africa: Ghanas Kwame Nkrumah; Angolas Agostinho Neto; Mozambiques Samora Machel; Guinea-Bissaus Amilcar Cabral. All of these leaders were more than willing to receive aid from Moscow in order to combat their North Atlantic foes. Nonetheless, both Williams and those to his left still tended to see 1776 as the start of an incomplete revolution.

On this, there is much to dispute, and one might start by comparing the outcome of 1776 to the 1948 implantation of apartheid in another USA: the then Union of South Africa. Apartheid was founded with the central goal of uplifting the Afrikaner poor (akin to the American dream) while grinding Africans into neo-slavery (they objected strenuously, as did their counterparts in 1776). Decades earlier, the Afrikaners, who were the descendants of Dutch immigrants, had fought a putatively anti-colonial war against London, then sought to gobble up the land of their sprawling neighbor, todays Namibia, not far from the size territorially of California and Texas combined, just as the Cherokee Nation was expropriated by Washington. Thus, as with 1776, the launch of apartheid South Africa could be deemed an incomplete revolution that somehow forgot to include the African majorityor was this exclusion and exploitation central to such a draconian intervention?

For his part, Williams the politician was forced to reckon with many of these knotty matters, in particular as they pertained to the purposefully incomplete process of decolonization and the rise of new forms of empire. As prime minister, in order to court the United States favor, he was derelict in extending solidarity to its antagonists in Cuba and neighboring Guyana, where Cheddi Jagan would be joined by Jamaicas Michael Manley in seeking to pursue a noncapitalist path to independence.

Williamss tenure as prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago extended for nearly two decades, from 1962 to 1981. But the presence of oil on the archipelago attracted the most vulturous wing of capital, further limiting his aspirations. As in Guyana, tensions between the various sectors of the working classone with roots in Africa, the other in British Indiawere not conducive to anti-imperialist unity, hampering Williamss ability to forge a sturdy base. Incongruously, though he did as much as any individual to assert the primacy of enslaved Africans in modern history, he ran afoul of the Black Power movement in his homeland, whichnot altogether inaccuratelyfound him too compliant in dealing with the intrusive imperial presence in Trinidad. Yet despite being hampered by a divided working class and a proliferating Black Power movement that often regarded him with contempt, Williams was able to hang on to office, though he lacked the political strength to solve the persistent problems of poverty and underdevelopment.

The scholar whose X-ray vision detected the role of enslaved people in the innards of capitalism and empire was seemingly felled by both when the moment to confront their toxic legacy arrived. Even so, the failings of Williams the politico should not be used to vitiate the insights of Williams the scholar. As slavery-infused capitalism continues to run amok, we must, like an expert diagnostician, finally develop an adequate history that can drive a comprehensive prescription for our ills.

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Eric Williams and the Tangled History of Capitalism and Slavery - The Nation

GUEST OPINION: Artificial intelligence, or AI, seems to be the buzzing topic these days. Most businesses are calling it a standard operating procedure whilst most of the employees on the ground are drowning in fear of robots taking over their jobs and eventually, the entire world. The media hasnt quite made it easier to understand; the information out there is broad and varied. However, while no one can foresee exactly how AI will progress in the future, current trends and advances present a very different picture of how AI will become a part of our everyday life.

Lets start off by demystifying the subject.

According to Britannica, artificial intelligence is defined as "the capacity of a digital computer or computer-controlled robot to execute activities typically associated with intelligent beings.

Generally, AI is the catchall term we use for any advancements in computing, systems, and technology that allow computer programs to perform tasks or solve problems that require the kind of reasoning we associate with our human intelligence, including learning from previous processes.

In truth, AI is already at work all around us, influencing everything from our Google search results to our chances of finding romantic love online to the way we buy. If you click on this IGA specials link, youll experience what is called image-based targeted advertising. Big supermarkets like IGA, Aldi, Woolworths etc., also use shopper customisation, and warehouse and inventory automation among other things. This is AI at work.

The usage of AI in various corporate areas has increased by 270 per centin the past four years. In 2015, only ten per cent of businesses said they were using artificial intelligence technology or planned to do so in the near future. By 2019, the percentage had risen to 37%, indicating that more than one-third of businesses are either utilising or planning to use artificial intelligence.

Photo by Andy Kelly on Unsplash

To assuage some of your worries, robots are unlikely to take all our jobs in the near future. However, right now, the main concern is with traditional industries with plant workers, packers and machine operators, especially in industries like coal mining. As per estimates from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 36% of Australian occupations are at risk of becoming automated.

The workaround suggested is upskilling. Affected workers will need to have their roles upskilled to replace their regular tasks which are easily done by machines. This would ensure that people could perform non-routine activities that could not be automated. There is also the option to change jobs; some industries will not be as hard hit as others. The best prospects currently lie in teaching and health.

Image by Matthew Henry from Burst

Rather than encouraging the abolition of human labour though, take AI is transforming the way people work in organisations by making operations more efficient, facilitating better decision-making, and freeing up staff from certain responsibilities. Job responsibilities are changing, as are the skills that are most in-demand.

A recent study of trends shows that AI will continue to drive tremendous innovation, which will fuel many existing businesses and have the potential to establish many new ones, resulting in the creation of additional employment. Improving internal corporate procedures is a benefit on par with improving goods and services for AI adopters. Companies all over the world are rapidly recognising the importance of developing strong AI capabilities in order to remain competitive.

Many company executives are concerned about cybersecurity, especially given the significant increase in cybersecurity incidents in 2020. During the Covid19 pandemic, hackers targeted those who worked from home, as well as less protected technical equipment and Wi-Fi networks. In cybersecurity, AI and machine learning will be important technologies for detecting and forecasting attacks. Given its ability to handle massive quantities of data and anticipate and detect fraud, AI will also be a critical tool for financial security.

The potential benefits of using AI in medicine are currently being considered. The medical industry contains a large quantity of data that may be used to develop healthcare-related prediction models. In some diagnostic situations, AI has been proven to be more successful than physicians.

Photo by Bermix Studio on Unsplash

With the introduction of autonomous cars and autonomous navigation, we can already see how AI is affecting the world of transportation and autos. AI will also have a significant influence on production, especially within the automobile industry.

AI will continue to play a critical role in every aspect of e-commerce, from user experience to marketing to fulfilment and distribution. We should anticipate AI to continue to drive e-commerce through chatbots, shopper customisation, targeted advertising, warehouse and inventory management, among other things.

We conclude in this article that current worries about AI causing mass unemployment are unlikely to materialize. Instead, we are of the opinion that, like all past labour-saving technologies, AI will promote the emergence of new industries, resulting in the creation of new employment than the technology eliminates. However, we believe that the Australian government and other sectors of society must play an important role in easing this transition, particularly for those whose old employment has been disrupted and who are having difficulty finding new jobs.

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AI is influencing the future of work and life: How big is the risk? - iTWire

Images by PABLO DELCAN; Illustrated by JUSTIN METZ

When Casey Llewellyn was a teenager in Boston, her mother came to her with some startling news: She said our family had money and I would never have to work in my life if I didnt want to. That was extremely terrifying. Llewellyn, a 37-year-old playwright, says shed always known her family was well-offbut not like that. Of course I knew we had money, she tells me. We went on vacations to Europe and ski trips. But my politics at that time were like, Fuck the man. And then, suddenly, it was like, Oh, my God, Im the man.

Llewellyns mother, Amelie Ratliff, a longtime philanthropist, had actually been trying to start a conversation with her daughter about redistributing wealthsomething Ratliff herself has been passionate about since she was young. Growing up in Alabama in the 1960s, says Ratliff, 71, the contradictions of what I was learning in churchDo unto others as you would have them do unto youand what I was seeing in the world were stark, and so I looked for other ways of exploring those contradictions. Ratliffs familys money came from financial services, mortgage banking, and real estate. But she says that when she considered the true basis of their wealth, she saw it as a result of systemic and horrific discrimination, with land acquired from the elimination and removal of Indigenous folks and the labor of enslaved Africans. And so, she explains, as soon as I got money, I began distributing it.

My mother is very much the reason Im in this work, says Llewellyn, referring to her own philanthropy. She gave me access to my [inheritance] when I was 18 and recommended I reach out to Resource Generationa nonprofit organization founded in 1997 under the name Comfort Zone (it changed its name in 2000), which encourages people ages 18 to 35 to donate a large portion of their wealth to progressive causes. Since then, Llewellyn, who now lives in New York, says she has given away all but roughly 10 percent of her wealth to a variety of organizations dedicated to social justice and climate collapse. I dont think Im a rich person anymore, and it feels much better. I think its very hard to have money in an ethical way.

Casey and I are allies in our work, Ratliff says. She pushes me. Ive gone past where my parents werein terms of how much she gives awayand shes gone beyond where her mother is. Every wealthy person has to ask, How much is enough? How much do I really need, and how much do I want to make available more broadly?

A wave of radical giving is underway. The mammoth donations of philanthropic heavyweights like MacKenzie Scott and Melinda French Gates are only the most visible examples of affluent people trying to address Americas outrageous problem of economic inequality and change the way giving gets done. In a viral Medium post this past June, Scott wrote of her humbling belief that it would be better if disproportionate wealth were not concentrated in a small number of hands, and that the solutions are best designed and implemented by others. Those others are often the recipients of financial grants whose voices have not always been heard.

Llewellyn explains, Thats the structural change I think were going for: giving the power to the people with the expertise and the knowledge, the grassroots organizers and community organizers; giving power to communities that are trying to transform things for themselves.

Once upon a time, rich women did charity work as a way to gain social cachet (and, of course, some still do); organizing a fundraising gala was an opportunity to wear a designer gown and get your name in the society pages. That way of doing things never appealed to Susan Pritzker, 73. It always made me super uncomfortable, she says. The rubber-chicken dinners with a bunch of fancy people listening to somebody at the pulpit saying, You donors are so fabulous. It was very social. It was also transactional. What I was building was my Rolodex, and I could get a lot of people into those rooms because I could afford to go to everybody elses parties.

In 1969, Pritzker, then Susan Stowell, married Nicholas Pritzker, a member of the family that started Hyatt Hotels Corporation. (Today he is an independent venture entrepreneur.) I married into money, so I came into my philanthropy with this sense of, Well, its not really mine, says Pritzker, who lives in San Francisco.

Why doesnt everyone just put on jeans and T-shirts and get together and write letters? Regan Pritzker recalls thinking.For the price of the gown, the gala, and the dinner, why dont we just move the money to the organization?

She was all the more uneasy with how the grantees in traditional charity situations were often treated; sometimes they would get paraded across the stage as exhibits. I would always try to avoid doing that because I knew it was wrong. She couldnt stand it when grantees in turn seemed uncomfortable in their interactions with donors, to whom they seemed to feel they were expected to be deferential. Thats why Im really excited to have found out how to move toward something more empowering to both sides, Pritzker says. Really, truly, it all boils down to being constantly aware of where the power dynamic is sitting and asking, Is it in the right balance?

Since 2019, Pritzker has been on the board of Solidaire Network, one of the charitable organizations that has emerged in the two decades since the founding of Resource Generation. Solidaires purpose is to encourage wealthy people to not only donate their money but also change the system that unfairly gives them more of it. (Ratliff and Llewellyn have been members since 2015.)

Conceived in 2012 after the Occupy Wall Street movement started a national conversation about economic inequality, Solidaire was officially launched in 2013 by a group of activists and philanthropists including Leah Hunt-Hendrix, a granddaughter of the late Texas oil tycoon H.L. Hunt and the organizations first executive director. Today, the group has 244 members, 77 of whom are institutional members or have family foundations of their own. (Ratliff and Llewellyn, for example, sit on the board of the Ratliff Charitable Foundation, and in 2002 Pritzker and her husband and their four children founded the Libra Foundation.) This year, MacKenzie Scott donated $10 million to the organization. Solidaire operates out of 11 regional hubs, serving communities across the country. Solidaire is a network of donors who are committed to racial justice, to averting the climate crisis, and to making sure that were building a future thats democratic, multiracial, feminist, and pluralistic, says Rajasvini Bhansali, 46, the groups executive director since 2018. By becoming a Solidaire member, people consent to being in a collective project that liberates wealth and funds social movements, grassroots organizing, and what it will take to build a progressive force in the United States thats lasting and not dependent on electoral cycles.

Courtesy of Susan Pritzker

My politics at that time were like, Fuck the man. says Casey Llewellyn. And then, suddenly, it was like, Oh, my God, Im the man.

Most of our members have an understanding that the wealth that they have inherited wasnt just about their merit, says Bhansali, who started out as a community organizer after studying astrophysics at the University of California, Berkeley. Much of that wealth comes from a long history of exploitation that took for granted the labor of Black bodies and stolen Indigenous lands. Theres an understanding that its their job as donors to actually liberate this wealth in the service of social justice.

Instead of having donors control how funds get distributed, Solidaire calls upon its grantees to direct the course of change. For example, its Movement Infrastructure Fund is guided by strategic direction from our advisory committee, made up of movement organizers, says Bilen Mesfin Packwood, a spokeswoman for Solidaire and the founder and CEO of Change Consulting. The Black Liberation Pooled Fund is guided by our Movement Oversight Committee, also made up of longtime organizers working toward Black liberation, Mesfin Packwood says. Most of our staff has a background in grassroots organizing. We bring that experience and analysis to our work.

On an annual basis, Solidaire moves about $20 million through its three pooled funds, while its members collectively donate approximately $100 million more on their own. Our 10-year goal is to move a billion dollars to social justice, says Bhansali.

One notable recipient of Solidaires support has been the Movement for Black Lives. The groups annual budget was still relatively modest when it began partnering with Solidaire in 2014. Now theyre one of the most significant change organizations in this country, Bhansali says. Theyve become an umbrella organization thats essentially changing the narrative, changing how we think about anti-Blackness in this country. Without their consistent effort at the national scale, which Solidaire played a part in helping grow, we wouldnt be in the moment we find ourselves in. As incomplete as the work still is, its a pretty significant win of accompanying a movement from early days.

Regan Pritzker remembers the days when her mother, Susan, would be working on invitation lists and the invitations to charity events had to look a certain way. My moms not a fancy, formal person by any stretch, she says. Shes the one who would always be in jeans and a T-shirt, but she would participate in organizing these types of galas.

Regan, now 49, recalls thinking, even as a child, Why doesnt everyone just put on jeans and T-shirts and get together and write letters? I was like, I dont understand; for the price of the gown, the gala, and the dinner, why dont we just move the money to the organization? That really resonated for my mother too, but she was working inside of what was happening at the time. Its just the way things were doneand, of course, it still does happen. Ive been really heartened to see how its evolving, though theres still so much work to do. A former elementary-school teacher and cochair of the Libra Foundation board, Regan says she found out about Solidaire in 2017 from Leah Hunt-Hendrix. We went for a walk and she told me a bit about the history of the group, she says. Regan was moved because of the responsive nature of the work and the thinking around how people with access to wealth can lean in to philanthropy in ways that are not perpetuating some of the same patterns of donor-centered giving.

The influence Susan had on Regan as a philanthropist now came full circle when Regan introduced her mother to Solidaire. I immediately felt this sense of This is what Ive been looking for, says Susan.

Solidaires emphasis on promoting the agency of the people who are on the front lines doing the work of organizing was important to Regan from the beginning. She says that after joining the group, she became more educated on how she could help shift the paradigm of giving.

Its been essential for me to be in relationships with people who are willing to speak more honestly to me about my wealth, she says, who say things to me like, Im not trying to give you a hard time, but were not going to let you off the hook either, and you need to step up. Dont just write a check and go away. Get into the work with us, jump in and help us, and dont let it come from your ego; let it come from your commitment to this vision of a transformed society where all people have enough and we can live in a right relationship with the planet.

Theyre not just telling me, Youre amazing, she adds.

Regan confesses to feeling some discomfort at even talking about her involvement as a donor. I think my role is important, and I take it seriously, but I dont think of myself as the spokesperson for the work, she says. The way society still sees the donor as the celebrity in the story and centers the donor instead of centering the work and the good teams of people that make it possible has got to change. The fact that Im even having this conversation with you, I find ironic, because I do the least of all the people who work on all the different projects I support.

Inspired in part by Solidaire, Regan and her husband, Chris Olin, launched the Kataly Foundation in 2020 with the mission of working toward a world in which Black and brown people have the resources, power, and agency to execute their own visions for justice, well-being, and shared prosperity within their communities. Nwamaka Agbo, Katalys CEO, says the organization began with seed money of $445 million and was founded intentionally as a spend-out foundationwhich means that we will be giving away more of our assets than our endowment earns, which allows us to actually divest our assets out of Wall Street and strategically reinvest them into Black, Indigenous, and community- of-color projects that build community.

Agbo, 37, who comes from a background that includes organizing, says Katalys founders have been true to their goal of letting organizers take the lead. As the board members of Kataly, she says, Regan, Chris, and Susan have done a really excellent job of leaning in to their commitment of decentering themselves out of the decision-making that happens around our grants and out of the day-to-day operations of the foundation, so that those of us who come from social movements who are now running the foundation are able to make decisions that are deeply values-aligned and supporting social movements.

The way society still sees the donor as the celebrity in the story and centers the donor instead of centering the work and the good teams of people that make it possible has got to change, says Regan Pritzker.

The mothers and daughters I spoke with all said they get back more from their giving than they ever give away. A lot of my life has been spent moving in these donor organizing spaces because I felt as I did, my own humanity was returned to me, says Llewellyn.

For me, says Susan Pritzker, to narrow my focus and to now be supporting BIPOC-led movement organizations is like a dream come true. Its exactly where I want to be. Solidaire-type grant-making is still a tiny piece of the pie, she adds, but its grown so dramatically, and the interest feels explosive. I think its in part because of the sense of solidarity, if you will, thats created among the donor community. Resource Generation was the first to hit on thisthis sense [among some wealthy people] of Oh, my God, am I the only person going through this, wanting to do good things with my money without feeling icky? For me, its very hard to sit with privilege and wealth and not feel a little tainted by it. Llewellyn agrees: The negative emotional impact of having money is real, she says. Having wealth has damaged usdamaged our resilience, our sense of self-worth. Having things you feel you dont deservebecause everyone deserves everything equallycan affect your sense of worth. Its like, we feel fucked up, she goes on. And a lot of it, in my understanding, has to do with the isolating nature of wealth.

To address the discomfort of sitting with wealth and wanting to liberate it into the world, Solidaire offers donors training on transforming philanthropy, how to have hard conversations with family members, unearthing family stories of wealth accumulationwhich includes uncomfortable truths about the ways families became well-offdonor organizing around taxation, and talking with your family about abolition and defunding the police, says Mesfin Packwood.

But beyond the problem of economic inequality, Llewellyn adds, Theres the reality of where we are with climate collapse. We have to figure out ways to sustain the environmentwhich also involves finding ways for people to use their expertise, which I feel is what giving to social-justice movements is all about. Its supporting people with the expertise to solve the problems that are keeping us all up at night.

The goal is based in the knowledge that our liberation is completely connected, Llewellyn says. That we are completely interdependent with each other and with the earth.

Images by PABLO DELCAN; Illustrated by JUSTIN METZ

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U.S. cities are deeply segregated, often with streets or highways separating higher-income predominantly White neighborhoods from lower-income predominantly Black ones. This is not an accident of history, but rather a geographical modern-day manifestation of age-old institutions such as slavery and Jim Crow segregation.

In her new book,White Space, Black Hood: Opportunity Hoarding and Segregation in the Age of Inequality, author Sheryll Cashin explores the deliberate design elements of racial segregation within cities like Baltimore, Chicago, Louisville, Cleveland, and St. Louis, where predominantly Black neighborhoods are marked by lower income levels, poorer quality education, lower access to employment, greater violence, and more racist policing.

American caste now exists at the intersection of race, economic status, and geography, writes Cashin, who teaches Constitutional Law, Race and American Law at the Georgetown University School of Law. Furthermore, It thrives on certain cultural assumptionsthat affluent space is earned and hood living is the deserved consequence of individual behavior.

Cashins analysis of what she calls a system of residential caste, includes how educational disparities arise between White and Black neighborhoods and are reproduced across generations via opportunity hoarding. She also shows how disparate policing in neighborhoods is a product of stereotype-driven surveillance of Black people in the United States. And, she explains that the truly disadvantaged descendants of slaves are Black Americans stuck in neighborhoods that higher-income Blacks have fled.

Once the deliberate design elements of racially divided neighborhoods are clearly identified, the solutions to abolishing residential caste also become apparent, Cashin says. For example, to counter disinvestment in predominantly Black areas, cities need to undertake reinvestment, and Cashin shares examples of cities where such approaches have been applied and found success.

Cashin recently spoke withYES!about her bookWhite Space, Black Hoodand how historical patterns that emerged from slavery persist in the geographies of modern American cities.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Sonali Kolhatkar: In examining the history of racial segregation in housing, why do you begin your book in Baltimore?

Sheryll Cashin: Baltimore had one of the largest populations of free Black people in the antebellum period, and not surprisingly the descendants of those folks stayed around. In the book, I go through all of the historical eras in Baltimore from the turn of the 20th century right through to today.

In the beginning, African Americans werent segregated in the city. In the late 1800s up until 1905 or 1910, Black women could go to stores and try on clothes, try on hats, they could eat where they wanted to. And, with the onset of the 1910s as the Great Migration began, about 6 million African Americans left the South for places farther north and west.

The primary response to the great migrants, wherever they landed in large numbers, was to attempt to residentially contain them in their own neighborhoods and then redline those neighborhoodscut them off from the largest wealth building programs sponsored by the federal governmentand cut them off from financing. Baltimore endured all of these things.

Moving forward to today, Baltimore endured urban renewal, so-called Negro removal. It endured the federal policy of separate but equal public housing, disinvestment, and the tearing up of neighborhoods through the interstate highway program. There were multiple decades of trauma and disinvestment and also over-investment in majority White neighborhoods. More recently, Baltimore had been in the news withthe Black Lives Matter uprisings after the tragic death of Freddie Gray.

The overall argument of my book is that we have a system of residential caste where we over-invest in affluent White space and disinvest in, contain, and prey on people in poor, Black neighborhoods. And Baltimore is a very good example of that.

Watch an excerpt of Sheryll Cashins interviewhere.

Maryland had a long-planned light rail line called theRed Linethat was going to connect historically defunded and marginalized Black neighborhoods in East and West Baltimore to job-rich centers. As soon as Republican Gov. Larry Hogan took office, he canceled the Red Line. But he didnt cancel the Purple Line for the affluent suburbs of Baltimore and Washington. So, Baltimore had all the markers of residential caste.

The living patterns for everyone in this country have been shaped by the decision in the first half of the 20th century to contain then Negroes and to construct White space apart from them. We live with those structures to this day.

Kolhatkar: The word caste as a descriptor for racial discrimination in the United States became more popular after Isabel Wilkerson published her bestselling bookCaste: The Origins of our Discontents. Why do you also use that term to describe residential segregation in your book?

Cashin: I say residential caste. Isabel Wilkerson, as you know, writes about a social caste system and compares the United States to India and to Nazi Germany.I intentionally use the word because so many people have been reading her book.

In pre-civil rights America, we had a caste system based on race. Large numbers of African Americans were trapped in the system of Jim Crow where if you were Black you were excluded from a lot of opportunities and a lot of public and private amenities.

Today, we have a system of residential caste. In the metropolitan regions, where large numbers of great migrants landed, we have affluent White space and high-poverty Black neighborhoods. Those types of neighborhoods have persisted and their boundaries have hardened.

The chief mechanism for producing racial inequality in the United States today is geography. Everybody who gets in their car and drives in this country is aware that we have communities of abundance and communities of great need often in the very same metropolitan area or city, sometimes right across a dividing line from each other. People know about this, and they make decisions about where to live based on this. One stark example isDelmar Boulevardin St. Louis.

So, geography is central to ideas about who is worthy and deserving of public and private investment and who is not. Its the chief mechanism both of social distancing but also for making decisions about where public and private investment is focused.

Kolhatkar: On the issue of education, because public schooling is funded by neighborhood-based taxation, has the residential caste system reproduced educational segregation?

Cashin: Schools are actually even more segregated than neighborhoods, and now weve largely returned to neighborhood school assignment. The Supreme Court and the Judiciary have given up on policing and mandating school desegregation. So, the country has rapidly resegregated its schools since the late 1980s, and if schools largely are based on neighborhoods where you live, it just replicates the segregation on the ground.

The average existence for a White child in public school today is one where most of her peers are White and middle class. Its the same with Asian students. Meanwhile the average existence for a Black or Latinx public school child is the oppositeone where the majority of their peers are minority and more than half of their peers are poor.

The No. 1 predictor of the performance of a school is the socioeconomic background of the kids in the school. Thats not a reflection on them as individuals. Its a reflection on the mean truth that in this country we invest less in the public schools that Black and Latinx kids are assigned to.

I cite astudyin the book showing that we spend $23 billion more in majority-White school districts annually than in other school districts with the same numbers of children that are majority non-White. This is partly because we have chosen to finance public education based on property taxes. For children of color who lose the neighborhood lottery, its not fair to them.

Only a small percentage of people in any given metropolitan area can afford to buy their way into affluent White space. And affluent White space is actually cross-subsidized through gas taxes, income taxes, and other fees by all the people who live elsewhere. So schooling is very much tied to neighborhood segregation.

In this country, we put more resources and excellent teachers into affluent schools, and we put fewer resources and less experienced teachers in disadvantaged spaces. Our competitors inOECD[Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development] countries do the exact opposite.

Kolhatkar: Lets talk about policing. How has the system of residential caste been linked to racist policing and lower income neighborhoods of color being viewed as high crime areas?

Cashin: Social science research showsand I cite it ad nauseum in the book in my chapter called Surveillancethat people who live in poor and majority-Black neighborhoods are much more subject to arrest, detention, violence by police, and excessive use of force by police. And often it can be for nonviolent, fairly ordinary behavior.

The practice of Stop and Frisk ensnared a lot of young Black people, particularly Black men, who could be standing on the street with their bike and be detained just because they were there.

I also cite the example ofGeorge Floydand his awful slow execution in Minneapolis because people are so familiar with it, and I include a map which shows where the Black people are concentrated in the city. Floyd died in a neighborhood that was due south of some of the Blackest and poorest neighborhoods on the southside.

The New York Timespublished data where they geographically mapped police use of force in Minneapolis andsurprise, surprisethe use of tasers and chokeholds was found to be concentrated in the majority-Black, poor neighborhoods on the southside. Meanwhile, people living in the White affluent southwest quadrant and the White working-class northeast quadrant, dont receive this kind of excessive force.

Police use force against Black people in Minneapolis at seven times the rate of Whites. Its a very common disparity replicated in almost every city where theres a critical mass of Black people.

I call the people who are trapped in high poverty hoods, the true descendants of American slavery.

Kolhatkar: You have a chapter in your book on undoing the damage of the residential caste system entitled Abolition and Repair. The word abolition, outside of its historical context has more recently been used to discuss abolishing the carceral system and policing in general. What doyou mean when you use the term abolition?

Cashin:The beauty of acknowledging and understanding the system of residential caste is that once you understand it, you have a logical mechanism for repair. So, abolition means dismantling processes but it also means building up new, humane processes. I take pains to identify three pillars that we have to dismantle: boundary maintenance, stereotype-driven surveillance, and opportunity hoarding.

On the first pillar, we have to invest in Black neighborhoods rather than disinvesting. We have to engage in inclusion rather than boundary maintenance.

One example of this is Minneapolis. What the city did to atone for its sins of constructing with great intention very separate and unequal neighborhoods, was to become one of the first cities in the country to abandon its single families zoning laws. This means no longer insulating single-family neighborhoods from multifamily housing, apartments, duplexes, four-plexes, and denser living. This is an example of inclusion rather than boundary maintenance.

On the second pillar of stereotype-driven surveillance, when you change the lens by which you see Black people, free yourself from your own bias and see them as potential assets, it frees you up to innovate. And rather than be tugged in the direction of harmful policies based on dog-whistling racist politics, you might find solutions that cost less and actually work.

One example is Richmond, Californiaspeacemaker fellowshipsas a solution to gun violence. In Richmond, troubled young men who were getting involved in gun violence or at risk of doing so, were seen through a lens of love and as the most powerful potential change agents to disrupt and break the cycle of gun violence.They were given an 18-month fellowship that offered them a lot of the resources and care that affluent kids get every day from their parents.

Another example is Chicago, which spent $851 million over four years to incarcerate people in inner cities.Meanwhile, theCrime Lab at the University of Chicagofound that you can reduce gun violence arrests by 43% just by pairing teens in the most violent poor neighborhoods with a mentor and giving them a summer job.

The third pillar, on dismantling opportunity hoarding, is to transfer assets to support descendants and respected community institutions. If you really want to see transformation in high poverty Black neighborhoods, ask them what they need to prosper, and really listen to their answers. You might be surprised at what you find.

I am a big believer in instituting regular neighborhood analysis: Seattle, Minneapolis, and Baltimore are three cities I know of that have started paying attention to where city dollarsparticularly city development dollarsare going. In Chicago, they found that they were spending three times as much money in majority-White neighborhoods than in majority-Black ones. So, you have to regularly engage in a racial equity analysis and use that to influence your budgeting.

Milwaukee is going through a budgeting process like that and not surprisingly, where do you get the money? Its by channeling some, but not all, money from law enforcement. Weve over-invested in police, and its not working.You have to improve your politics by allowing citizens, particularly in historically marginalized neighborhoods, to be part of a citizen budgeting process where they can identify what they really need. Thats what transformation and abolition reconstruction would look like.

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On America's residential caste systemand how to abolish it - NationofChange

It was acool Friday in Minneapolis, made cooler by the shadows of the skyscrapers towering over Peoples Plaza. In the brick-lined courtyard between the Hennepin County Government Center and Minneapolis City Hall on September 17, the Yes 4Minneapolis campaign and its allies held arally whose purpose had come undone the daybefore.

Yes 4Minneapolis is working to amend the Minneapolis City Charter by removing amandate for amayor-controlled police department with acertain number of officers per resident (0.0017, to be exact). In its place, the amendment establishes aDepartment of Public Safety under the joint control of the mayor and the 13-member Minneapolis CityCouncil.

The radical restructuring would allow for future revisions. The new department could be led by acivilian and could easily redirect funds from armed officers to alternative responders, such as social workers. It would also be subject to more democratic control: the City Council represents amore diverse constituency than the mayor, who is primarily elected by wealthier, whiter parts of thecity.

For the better part of ayear, the campaign has been scrambling to respond to aslew of cheap shots from the opposition, aloose coalition of liberal politicians, the police chief and nonprofit and business leaders. The most recent curveball was alast-minute lawsuit that alleged the amendment question, which will be on the ballot in November, should be thrown out because of so-called misleading language.

On September 14, adistrict judge ruled to disallow the ballot question. On September 15, Yes 4Minneapolis converted aplanned get-out-the-vote rally to ademand-the-vote rally, where they would take the fight to the streets, Yes 4Minneapolis communications director JaNa Bates said. On September 16, the Minnesota Supreme Court overturned the earlier ruling. By September 17, the rally was back to its original purpose and had lost the momentum that could have carried people to thestreets.

A shifting purpose wasnt the rallys only problem. The event was held at Peoples Plaza to take advantage of the stately, copper-roofed Minneapolis City Hall as the backdrop. Periodically, however, trains blasted past, which would have drowned out the speakers had they not already been drowned out by the plazas fountains. According to Bates, the police had nixed the generator needed to power asound system. Instead, speakers used acheap microphone that barely carried sound unless it was held against theirlips.

The rally felt like adistillation of the campaigns general problemscomplication after complication, wrapped up with much confusion. The opposition, meanwhile, has kept the campaignoff-balance.

One poll shows 49% support for the amendment to 41% opposed it. Amonth before the election, doorknockers suggest the split is eventighter.

The Black Lives Matter movement began as asocial media hashtag in 2013in the wake of George Zimmermans acquittal in the extra-judicial killing of Trayvon Martin. Committed activists grew the campaign into anationwide Movement for Black Lives network grounded in an argument for policeabolition.

Policing in the United States, abolitionists argue, is built on the institution of slavery and the genocide of Native Americans. These atrocities are the foundation of policing. Its architecture is heavily influenced by JimCrow.

Meanwhile, the scope of policing continues to expand. For example, in the past four decades, police budgets have ballooned while mental healthcare budgets have shrunkand police have had to absorb the mission of mental health practitioners. Police abolitionists argue that policing cannot competently do everything demanded of it and cannot be reformed away from its core mission of using racialized violence to protect the interests of the wealthy, as one Minneapolis abolitionist organization, MPD150,writes.

Instead, the Movement for Black Lives calls for reimagining public safety, with mental health experts, school counselors, trauma-informed interventionists and restorative justice programs taking the place of the police, as well as funds for education, jobs, clean air, auniversal basic income and other supports for communities historically stripped ofresources.

In the Twin Cities, Black Visions Collective has been doing that long-term abolitionist work. The group shut down akey transit line in 2018 during Super Bowl LII in aprotest for Black lives, and in 2019, with allied group Reclaim the Block, got $242,000 shifted out of the $193 million police budget to fund the Office of ViolencePrevention.

Then, on May 25, 2020, Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd. The city became the epicenter of afiery global protest movement, which also became (by some counts) the largest in U.S.history.

We never thought 2020 would happen the way it did, says Kandace Montgomery, Black Visions co-executive director. Changing the [city] charter was something that we had predicted for afew years down the road, like 2023. But the opportunity presenteditself.

Black Visions and Reclaim the Block moved quickly to pressure the city council for action. Two weeks after Floyds murder, aveto-proof majority of nine councilmembers publicly pledged to defund and dismantle the police department. Minneapolis seemed poised to become atest case ofabolition.

By December 2020, the council had been all butthwarted.

An initiative by the council to dismantle the police department was blocked from the November 2020 ballot by the Charter Commission, ajudicially appointed board. The council pivoted to cut the departments budgetbut agroup of Minneapolis residents swarmed the budget hearings in opposition in late 2020. Two councilmembers who had pledged to defund then voted to maintain the police staffing level, effectively thwarting the budgetcut.

Later, it would be revealed that the leader of the grassroots pro-police effort, Bill Rodriguez, was actually apublic relations consultant from the suburbs who had lied repeatedly about living in Minneapolis. Rodriguez was supported by an economic development consultant named Eric Won, who holds amayoral appointment on acity budget advisory committee. Together, according to emails obtained from the city, the two men offered to use Wons influence to support business development in Councilmember Alondra Canos ward shortly before she voted to keep police staffing at its currentlevel.

The same tranche of emails shows Won and Rodriguez also coordinated with Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, Police Chief Medaria Arradondo and agroup of well-connected business and conservative community leaders, politicos andnonprofits.

This work grew into the coalition opposing the amendment change, composed of several interestgroups.

The business and corporate interests were primarily represented by the Minneapolis Downtown Council, which sees the police department as necessary to keep downtown profitable. Real estate developers represent another significant part of the coalition, joined by the North Central States Regional Council ofCarpenters.

Don and Sondra Samuels, leaders of anti-poverty nonprofits and two of the three plaintiffs in the lawsuit that temporarily threw out the ballot question, are the most visible of the centrist-leaning community and faith leaders. Members of this faction, mostly from North Minneapolis (a historically Black part of the city, due to alegacy of redlining), have been working for decades to incrementally reform the police department; they fear asweeping reorganization of public safety could undo their efforts. They have aclose relationship with Arradondo, aself-described Northside baby who also worked there as abeat officer.

The old guard of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party (the DFL is Minnesotas Democratic Party, due to afluke of history), mainly former city officials, represents another part of this coalition. They generally oppose comprehensive public safety reform in alignment with centrist Dems nationwide, including President Joe Biden, partly out of fear the GOP will use it as awedge issue againstthem.

The last group, of course, is the police themselves. Arradondo has spoken out against the amendment, though the police union has remained quiet on the issue after becoming aflashpoint in the summer 2020protests.

The mayor sits at the center. Frey signaled his broader political ambition in 2019 after aTwitter spat with former President Donald Trump. If re-elected in November, Frey will be mayor until 2025, leaving him free to run for governor or Congress in 2026. He may see this moment as an opportunity to build aconstituency for astate or nationalrun.

Minneapolis has become a microcosm of the national opposition to the defund and abolish movement, with conservatives, wealthy interests and center-liberals driven by concern for neighbors, fear for property and an eye to their own political fortunes.

Of course, the factions are not clear-cut. Don Samuels is aformer DFL city councilmember, and about half of the board of directors of Sondra Samuels nonprofit are corporate executives, consultants orlawyers.

We did not go into this fight delusional, says Yes 4Minneapoliss Bates. [We knew] we were coming up against the Police Federation, big corporate lobbyists and corporate developers, as well as the current mayoral apparatus. They have been leveraging every bit of money and power againstus.

In short, Minneapolis has become amicrocosm of the national opposition to the defund and abolish movement, with conservatives, wealthy interests and center-liberals driven by concern for neighbors, fear for property and an eye to their own politicalfortunes.

The summer 2020 protest movement kindled ageneral openness to the question of defunding police (and the question of what investments can truly reduce crime), with some polls showing 41% support for shifting money from police departments into violence prevention initiatives. But as protests waned, the status quo reasserted itself. Trump and other Republican leaders used the movement to stoke fear, police unions threatened doom, Democratic mayors balked at budget cuts and the Democratic National Committee ran from defund.

In Minneapolis, after the Charter Commission blocked the first amendment attempt, activists decided to get the question on the ballot themselves. [We] felt really clear that we needed to build areally robust coalition and afull campaign to get this thing on the ballot, says Black Visions Kandace Montgomery. And then get 50% plus 1of the people in Minneapolis to vote forit.

The plan sounded simple enough. What the amendment should actually say was morecomplicated.

Black Visions and Reclaim the Block sit on the radical end of avibrant ecosystem of left-wing activism in the Twin Cities. Organizations range from TakeAction Minnesota, an advocacy group aligned with progressive Dems, to such openly socialist organizations as the base-building renters rights group Inquilinxs Unidxs por Justicia (United Renters for Justice). (Full disclosure: My wife, Jennifer Arnold, is executive director of Inquilinxs Unidxs, amember of Yes 4Minneapolis.)

Black Visions had astrong roster of potential allies willing to talk police overhaul, but between fall 2020 and summer 2021, its coalition was slowed by aneed to get in alignment, says Bates. The key divide was over the long-term vision of public safety: abolition orreform.

Montgomery argues for the abolition of policingan institution grounded in racismin favor of acompletely different model of community investment. When communities are well-resourced, theyre at their safest, shesays.

More reform-minded coalition members believe instead that police are necessary, but the notoriously violent Minneapolis Police Department needs to be replaced with somethingnew.

The well-funded opposition, meanwhile, has built its campaign on spreading confusion about the amendment itself. For months, it has insisted the amendment would get rid of the police or the police chief. And Bates says those tacticsworked.

The lies and different disinformation initially did what it was created to doto throw us off of our square and create confusion, Batessays.

Legal battles further muddied the waters. The opposition has brought three related lawsuits to date. The first was against the city to demand it hire more police officers (as mandated by the City Charter). The judge ruled in itsfavor.

The second lawsuit targeted the original ballot question language, and the judge ruled in its favor, too. During Rosh Hashanah, the judge gave councilmembers (several of whom are Jewish) mere hours to revise the wording, lest it get tossed off theballot.

The third lawsuit is the one that temporarily knocked the amendment off theballot.

MJ Carpio (left) talks with DeCourcy Squire about volunteering for the Yes 4 Minneapolis campaign at the Vote #YesOn2 Rally for Safety and Democracy on September 17. Henry Pan

Yes 4Minneapolis brought its own suit, too, challenging the wording of an explanatory note that would have accompanied the ballot question. The judge ruled in its favor, saying the note read like a warninglabel.

We were trying to get in alignment while also facing absurd lawsuits, while also trying to land ballot language, Bates says. Some of your usual campaign activities had to bedelayed.

Yes 4Minneapolis collected 20,000 signatures for apetition in April to secure the ballot question, then focused on internal organizing through August. Thanks in part to that work, Bates says the coalition reached an understanding: Reformers and abolitionists agree the status quo isntworking.

Meanwhile, the opposition continues to promote disinformation, falsely claiming in glossy mailers that the amendment would eliminate the widely popular police chief, Arradondo, for example. Some of the attempts have backfired, however, such as amailer that implied Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison opposed the amendment. In response, Ellison publicly announced hissupport.

Yes 4Minneapolis has done doorknocks, phone banks and information sessions, but much of their staff time has been spent just making sure core supporters understand the amendment, Bates says. They are only now starting to focus on the generalelectorate.

As of July 27, Yes 4Minneapolis had more than $475,000, according to the most recent campaign finance filings. But it had spent just $6,200 on Facebook ads, compared to the oppositions $47,000, as of September 27. (Neither side had paid for Googleads.)

Well be on alot of different platforms to engage different constituencies in the coming weeks, Corenia Smith, campaign director for Yes 4Minneapolis, told In These Times inmid-September.

Its been really nice when we have conversations on the doors and we can correct [misinformation], Smith says. People just saying, like, Oh, I totally thought it was this [other thing].

Despite the slow start, Yes 4Minneapolis has some advantages, first and foremost being its coalition members, including Black Visions, TakeAction Minnesota (which has spearheaded dozens of campaigns since 2006, from school tax levies to opposing voter ID laws) and Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 26 (with more than 8,000 members). Many of the groups are electoral campaign veterans and base-building organizations that have also engaged voters on the issue for months. TakeAction has been doing phone banking since March and doorknocking since the end of July, according to Katie Blanchard, TakeAction movement-building director. Black Visions has been doing doorknocks since the end of July, according to Montgomery. Every coalition partner has been doing something in the field, shesays.

Yes 4Minneapolis is finding it can flip some no voters simply by explaining what the amendment actually does. Its been really nice when we have conversations on the doors and we can correct [misinformation], Smith says. People just saying, like, Oh, Itotally thought it was this [otherthing].

That point of distinction actually leads to another, potentially huge, advantage. In its hubris, the opposition chose for its main slogan, a both/and approachas in, both reform and policewhich is what the ballot question is actually about. So if Yes 4Minneapolis can get its message out, the opposition has nowhere to pivot. Even Mayor Frey has announced his support for aDepartment of Public Safety, though he opposes using an amendment to createit.

In another recent development, Bates came on in July to co-lead the campaign with Smith. Aformer nurse, Smith had just afew months of organizing experience when she was hired in Februarya deliberate move by the campaign to cut against a history of not trusting community members, not trusting Black folks, not trusting women to lead and not supporting them, Batesexplains.

Bates adds five years of experience as communications director for Isaiah, afaith-based racial and economic justice group. The campaign is also bringing on veteran politico Javier Morillo, former president of SEIU Local 26, as apolitical advisor.

Twenty minutes into the rally on that cool day in September, things were already languishing. There were maybe 100 attendees, almost exclusively staff of member organizations, volunteers andpress.

Bates took the final slot. She set aside the cheap microphone and held up abullhorn, opening with achant: We are here. We wont leave. Well have acity where we canbreathe.

She praised the rallygoers for their hard work. She recounted the campaign, blow by blow. She criticized what she called undemocratic attempts to prevent the vote. She encouraged people to do more volunteer work. And then she closed with anotherchant.

JaNa Bates, a leader in the Yes 4 Minneapolis campaign, addresses the Vote #YesOn2 Rally for Safety and Democracy on September 17. Henry Pan

Her 10-minute speech was longer than it needed to be, but Bates understood the opportunity. Where other speakers addressed the press, perhaps hoping the journos would carry some nugget of narrative back to the electorate, Bates spoke to the people who hadcome.

The Yes 4Minneapolis campaign has been off to aslow start for many reasons, and the final vote is anyones guess. Avolunteer named Jesse Mortenson, who has done adozen doorknocks and phone banks, thinks its going to be tight. About athird of people are ready for change, Mortenson says. About athird feel that something is wrong, but arent sure this is the right thing todo.

And the lastthird?

Twenty percent of Minneapolis votes Republican, so thats most of that number, Mortensonsays.

If Bates continues to take amore prominent role, if volunteers keep turning out, if experienced allies continue their support and if the opposition doesnt find anew way to sink thingsthen the campaign might just scramble into aclear lead. Thats alot of ifs, but the campaign is in abetter position than it was at the beginning ofsummer.

Meanwhile, Minneapolis remains the closest city in the nation to reinventing public safety from the bottomup.

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