Category Archives: Abolition Of Work

When 16-year-old Julius Tate, Jr. was killed during a SWAT raid by undercover Columbus police officers in December of 2018, citizens swiftly gathered to protest the unjust killing of a child. One year later, during an anniversary vigil mourning Tates loss, Ingrid Raphal, co-creator of No Evil Eye and Film Futura, and Melissa Gira Grant, a New York-based reporter covering police brutality, came together to co-direct and collaborate on They Wont Call It Murder, a documentary short from Field of Vision that captures the enduring grief and activism that surviving families of police violence undertake. The film, embedded above, makes its online premiere today.

The film recounts Tates unjust killing alongside three other victims who recently died at the hands of police in Columbus, Ohio: Henry Green, Tyre King and Donna Dalton. It also chronicles the fight for accountability that the families of the deceased doggedly continue. Though the films title refers to the fact that at the time of filming, it had been more than 20 years since a Columbus cop was charged with murder, the doc itself probes into the politics of what it looks like when justice is finally served. In Daltons case, the officer who killed her broke that 20-year streak and was actually charged with murdera victory that the filmmakers (and Daltons own sister) owe to the fact that she was a white woman murdered by a Black man.

They Wont Call It Murder surveys the horrific reality of the state-sanctioned execution of marginalized civilians, insisting that the wrongful extinguishing of life cannot be rectified by any financial settlement or prison sentence. In documenting the sinister reality of this epidemic as it pertains to Columbus, the filmmakers highlight the ubiquity of these senseless killings across the country.

Filmmaker spoke to co-directors Raphal and Grant via email about their documentary short, touching on their individual connections to the city of Columbus, how they ensured the comfort of the mourning families involved and the oft-inconsistent definition of accountability.

Filmmaker: What individually inspired each of you to participate in this project, and what did you all take away from this collaborative effort?

Raphal: The film takes place in Columbus, Ohio, a city whose legacy with impunity toward police killings perfectly befits the name it bears: Columbus, Christopher Columbus.

I was living in Columbus, Ohio during the murders of Henry Green, Tyre King, Julius Tate Jr. and Donna Dalton (the victims highlighted in the film) and many others in the surrounding Columbus area, witnessing the anger and grief of the families at protests, and supported organizers efforts to rally the Columbus residents. [That] would later inform how They Wont Call It Murder would act as a container for these collective experiences.

After leaving the city in 2019 due to a lack of work opportunities, an opportunity to co-direct a film building off of Melissas extensive reporting on the citys history of police killings with impunity sparked my interest, and I thought about the countless other victims I had heard of while living in Columbus and thought, Nows the time to let their stories known beyond the borders of this city. It all unfolded from there.

The process of making this film was difficult, yet it was rewarded by acts of care, diligence, and trust. Making a film that asks participants, or subjects, to recount memories and moments of deep grief requires all of the ingredients that make a sustainable, and gratifying, relationship work: warmth, love, trust, safety, laughter, consent and more. Though you find these emotions through the film, they are bounded by realities of distrust, lack of safety and accountability from the city and local police department.

As a crew, we needed to make sure that we offered acts of care before and after each interview, that we obtained consent to film at vigils and provided support when families returned to the sites where their son or sister were killed. This taught me that the camera can be an extension of the self, not a barrier between yourself and the participant. When you enter someones home with all of this gear and theyre already wary of local news crews who disregarded their stories, you have to work really hard to not recreate that. And we did, we were attentive to each participants tempos and reluctancy. Because when we finished filming, their lives and grieving process continued: This is a humbling reminder that, as a first-time filmmaker, I will carry with me and embed into my continuing practice.

Grant: Four years ago, I met Bobbie McCalla, after a Columbus police officer shot and killed her sister Donna Dalton. I had been reporting on police violence for several years at that point. But that story was my introduction to the Columbus police departmentthe undercover officers, the pattern of killings.

That was 2018. By then, after the killing of Mike Brown in Ferguson and Eric Garner in New York, there was little expectation that prosecutors would charge a police officer with murder in such a case. Cops and prosecutors truly work the same side. When we started making this film, no Columbus police officer who killed a community member while on duty had been charged with murder since 1996.

The prosecutor in Columbus who would be responsible for these cases said something I couldnt stop thinking about, and I probably wrote it into every story I did back then: he said that nine times out of 10, when asking a grand jury to consider charging a police officer with murder, that his office didnt think a crime was committed. Rarely do they dispute that a police officer killed someone. Whats disputed is if it is a murder. So the press wont use the word murder. But in my conversations with families, they almost always use that word. And while they arent waiting for a grand jury or a prosecutor to affirm that something wrong was done, when they are denied that, it compounds the wrong. Their understanding of justice, to me, felt more expansive than I could address in a piece of print journalism.

Collaborating on this film felt like a first step towards doing that more complex story some justice, to work with people who shared that respect for the families experience and knowledge of the criminal legal system, who valued them as experts, and who didnt want to further compound what they had lost as we told this story together.

Filmmaker: They Wont Call It Murderaddresses that there is an overarching epidemic of law enforcement murdering Black and Brown people with virtually no consequence. The film, however, focuses on this injustice solely in the state of Ohio, namely Columbus. What made you want to focus on this crisis as it pertains to this specific corner of America?

Raphal: I was once told that Ohio is the heartbeat of the United States; situated at the center of it, considered a fly-over state, discarded and ignored, though many legendary people were shaped by its landscape and quietnessto name a favorite, Toni Morrison. Its a state that gets made fun of (understandably so) and though some stereotypes are true (corn fields, Buckeyes-craze, Hell Is Real banners, quietness), this is somewhere I chose to live after college and got to witness its history of violence with impunity.

As documentarians, I strongly believe that we can only give stories their due justice when we are directly connected to the people, themes or arcs that we aim to center. It provides you with a sensibility and accountability to the stories, people and landscape that a non-connected outsider couldnt tap into. This film is something I could give back to the people and community in Columbus that fostered and shaped meand show viewers that though the film focuses on Columbus, Ohio, this is an all-American story and reality.

Grant: Each of us had a connection to Ohio before collaborating on this film, either living there or having family there or both. And we got to see multiple sides of Columbus, from the winter of 2019 to the summer of 2020, to see how it contained that legacy of violence and that community we saw come together in the streets. It was about place but also about the passage of time, how this pattern of violence goes on, too, beyond the close of the film.

Its not a pattern unique to Columbus or to Ohio. These killings could have, and have, happened in so many communities. And no community is representative of another. But grounding the story in one community, and how they had navigated common obstacles with the same police and prosecutors, was important to us. To focus on the way police killings shaped this community, the way people responded here, let us look at police killings differently: not as isolated incidents, but as a pattern of violence that can suffuse a place and define who belongs there and whose life matters there.

Filmmaker: Furthermore, how did you get connected with the films subjects, and what felt vital to highlight when it came to each familys individual story?

Raphal: Relationship-building, organizing and trust led us to our participants: Adrienne Hood, Dearrea and Malika King, Jamita and Maryam Malone and Bobbi McCalla. Local organizers who had established relationships with our highlighted families vetted myself and Melissa, which allowed us to document their stories in a trusting and candid environment.

We spoke to each family separately. Malika King, the mother of Tyre King, surprised us on set at her mothers home and, after questioning our motives, trusted us to participate in the film. The vigil for the one-year anniversary of Julius Tate Jr.s killing was occurring while we were in town filming. At the last minute, the family agreed for us to film and thats how we got connected to his mother Jamita Malone. Bobbi McCalla, Donna Daltons sister, was in community with Melissa through her reporting work and Adrienne Hood, mother of Henry Green, was committed to speak publicly about her sons murder and introduced us to Malika and Dearrea King.

Grant: Pretty quickly we realized that Ms. Hood had done the work of reaching out to families after she heard the news about any police killing in the community, and had been building a relationship with them, offering support if they wanted it, and were able to benefit from that work.

As we got to know each family on our own, through calls and spending time with them at home (before COVID), we started to see certain common experiences they shared, like the very specific way detectives handled them at the hospital, how police informed them and how little they told them, while at the same time sharing much more information with the press. Where they differ is when we got into the question of what justice meant to themlike if a prosecution was accountability, or if police could be held accountable at all. And some of their takes on that question also shifted over the course of our knowing them, from the months before COVID to the months after the 2020 uprisings.

Filmmaker: The landscape of Ohio itself is, of course, heavily featured in the film. It certainly provides a harrowing point of reference for the violent crimes committed here by police, but also offers moments of aesthetic beauty that are compelling (and somewhat hopeful) in their own right. How did you go about framing the films location, and what felt particularly important to capture or convey about this place?

Raphal: When I lived in Columbus, I relied heavily on the bus to get around. This allowed me to discover many parts of the city through the seat of a passenger. I noticed the distinctive characteristics of each neighborhood, each divided by a highway or train tracks. A quintessential American city with rust-belt remnants and few downtown skyscrapers. We mimicked this POV with the camera and drove through streets surrounding the areas where each victim was killedpicking out routes and sceneries that showed the most recognizable landscapes, houses, graffiti, horizon of that area. When we premiered the film in Columbus, Ohio at the Unorthodocs Film Festival, I received feedback that folks appreciated that we showed each neighborhood, which meant we succeeded in capturing the citys essence.

A memorable moment was waking up before sunrise with our crew and capturing the downtown skyline at the brink of dawn while staking out on a parking lot. It was the first time I witnessed the citys skyscrapers glisten against the waking sun. It was a cold morning and though the view was beautiful, we were grounded in the fact that those buildings host the same individuals responsible for not prosecuting or indicting police officers.

Filmmaker:The one white victim of police violence that you spotlight, Donna Dalton, is unique in that the Black officer who killed her was charged with murder, unlike the officers who killed Black victims Henry Bub Green, Tyr King and Julius Tate, Jr. What discussions do you hope this film prompts about the systems relative inability to provide justice?

Grant: Its a huge question the film cant fully addressbut if we start from the position that you cannot separate the function of policing from anti-Black racism, which is where we as filmmakers did start, then you see how a system shaped by white supremacy will define accountability based on white supremacy. You cant assume what people even mean by accountability in this system, what justice means. The criminal legal system and the media have a lot of power to define those things for the community; we resisted that, or we tried to.

Its absolutely significant that at first, the story police and some media told about Donnas killing was of a good cop defending himself in a vice operation gone wrong. Over time, as more and more facts about the officer who killed her came to light, including the racism reported by others within the Columbus Division of Police, the story shifted. What made it easier for people to see a Black officer as a criminal is intimately connected with what makes it easier for people to see a white woman as a victim, and whats common across every story in the film is the way people killed by police are dehumanized and even blamed for their own deaths. They are denied their victimhood. For me, justice has to include breaking with those racist ideas about who is worthy of our protectionbeginning at the beginning, not the end, of a life.

Raphal: What kind of justice can truly be served when someones life has been taken? The film explores what the families consider to be justice, and they each have different answers. Their ideal of justice and accountability range from death penalty, imprisonment, an entirely new system, accomplices to receive carceral punishment, to sentiments that resemble abolition. It begins a conversation around the possibilities of justice that lean on what we know: the judiciary system. We rely on it to enact, and create the rules for, some sort of accountability, built on white-supremacist ideals which means it will fail to protect the needs and interests of oppressed peoples. From this perspective, when police officers act as extensions of power for the state, it is difficult to envision that the state would hold itself (through its judiciary system) accountable to the fullest extent which, to me, means the ending of police killings overall. For all of the families in the film, they have yet to receive any form of justiceas defined by themselves and the system. I would love to start a conversation around how justice could be being able to live your life with abundance and safety because we dont have Tyre King, Julius Tate Jr., Henry Green or Donna Dalton to tell their stories.

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Cops and Prosecutors Truly Work the Same Side: Ingrid Raphal and Melissa Gira Grant on their FOV Doc They Wont Call It Murder - Filmmaker Magazine

The 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) may be resurrected, but opposition is coming from an unusual place. After years of minimal constructive input, the UN International Atomic Energy Administration (IAEA) has suddenly found a voice that of its Director General, Raphael Grossi, who insists Iranian nuclear weapons work be fully revealed and inspections not be paused, and thus abandoned, as Iran presently insists.

Grossi and the IAEA are concerned by the presence of unexplained uranium particles in Iranian facilities built and operated for the 1989 AMAD nuclear weapons program. The program, ostensibly ended in 2003, has long been thought to have continued with both overt and covert nuclear activities, a theory given weight by documents smuggled out of Iran by Israel in 2018. In June 2022, the IAEA reported on the uranium particles and admonished Iran which responded by turning off IAEA cameras inside the facilities.

The IAEAs concern is welcome, late and mild as it is.

Supporters of a new JCPOA admit the Iranian position is problematic. The UN arms embargo on Iran expired in 2020, the snapback sanctions provision expires in 2025, and all restrictions expire in 2030. But, they argue, the US then would be no worse off with the JCPOA than without it, as Iran would have the ability to quickly produce enough nuclear weapons fuel for a nuclear warhead with or without the deal.

Thus, they argue, the US has nothing to lose and it just might be that in the intervening eight years, the Iranian economic sanctions, having expired, would lead to Tehran become more integrated into the world economy with more butter rather than more guns guiding the Iranian leadership. [The same strategy that thought Chinas accession to international institutions and trade with the US would result in the peaceful rise of Chinese power.]

The IAEA concerns cannot be easily dismissed. Built into JCPOA II is the idea that key deficiencies in the original must be corrected. Longer and stronger, President Joe Biden said. The foremost concern is precisely the investigation of prior nuclear activity, on which the IAEA is now insisting, and which Tehran is demanding to be terminated. Without a definitive baseline, how would the US know the status of Irans nuclear ambitions and whether we are being snookered? That is precisely what we did not know the first time.

Iran is also massively non-compliant with both the 1969 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and the comprehensive safeguards agreement under which Iran was required to disavow nuclear weapons capability. The JCPOA was necessary in fact because Iran was already in serious violation of its NPT legal obligations and was feared sprinting toward a nuclear weapon.

In addition, Iran received a singular dispensation to continue its nuclear fuel enrichment when Secretary Kerry announced Iran had a right to enrich. No other country could do that, says Mathew Kroenig of the Atlantic Council, adding that the Republic of Korea, for example, has a robust nuclear energy industry, but does not produce its own nuclear fuel.

This was a top requirement of Eisenhowers Atoms for Peace framework, to keep nuclear energy programs sharply distinct and away from any nuclear weapons capability. The NPT declares a right to research but not an explicit right to enrich and certainly not outside the legal requirements of the NPT and additional safeguard agreements.

The proposed nuclear deal does not move Iran further away from nuclear fuel enrichment, but in fact closer. Iran demands that it be allowed to not only produce nuclear enriched material, but to so with more advanced centrifuges, which could lead to an industrial strength nuclear program capable of building nuclear weapons.

Although the JCPOA II will not strengthen the original framework, Iran still gets complete up front sanctions relief rather than over time pegging such relief to Iran achieving certain milestones.

Furthermore, left by the wayside and kicked down the road would be discussion on limits on Irans ballistic missile capability, now the most robust in all the Middle East, as well as information about its rocket production and exports.

With sanctions gone, Irans multi-billion-dollar state sponsored terrorism empire, including the IRGC, Hezbollah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the Houthis gets a huge cash infusion, especially rockets and missiles, as the end of economic sanctions on Iran is reported by 2030 to be worth one trillion dollars.

The most often mentioned alternative is for the US to eliminate much of the nuclear infrastructure in Iran by militarily taking out what is referenced as four key nuclear buildings. Or for Israel to do the dirty work.

The threat of force from Israel, not the US would appear to be the hidden hand. And that hand may not comeonlyin the form of aerial attacks, which would likely cause the greatest collateral damage. There is possibility of special operations, including cyber or attacks on peripheral systems power plants, water cooling or air purification systems for underground bunkers.

Opponents warn that Iran would subsequently launch a retaliatory terror war against the United States or Israel, and given the size of Iran, it is assumed a military conflict could very well expand and last decades, not unlike the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq.

According to many supporters of JCPOA II, Iran sees it as an issue of national pride and prestige, and a right to enrich. It is assumed not to be about actually using the capability. For them, giving Iran MORE nuclear capability is prelude to Tehrans agreement to eventually have LESS nuclear technology or even NO nuclear technology.

Ironically, this is what Director Grossi objects to: the UN is being asked to support JCPOA II that bribes Iran to maintainthe fictionof being supportive of abolition even as the deal expands Irans possession of nuclear weapons technology.

While nuclear abolition is indeed called for by the original 1969 NPT, that goal is explicitly paired with conventional disarmament. No US President would have supported an agreement whose goal left untouched the huge Soviet conventional forces advantage in Central Europe whilefirstgetting rid of US nuclear weapons, which represented the military umbrella over NATO, or the deterrent hammer the US kept in Europe to forestall a Soviet tank army invasion through the Fulda Gap.

Although the dominant narrative today is that any military option is off the table, in reality, diplomacy without the threat of force is what former Senator Malcolm Wallop called prayer or as Henry Kissinger explained is without effect.

Without the threat of nuclear weapons, the US could simply not have stopped Soviet aggression.

But didnt President Reagan propose that all nuclear weapons be eliminated? No, he did not. Reagan at Reykjavk sought to eliminate fast-flyers or land and sea based intercontinental ballistic missiles, not the flexible strategic bombers, nor the tens of thousands of theater and medium range nuclear forces that were difficult to identify.

Reagans key purpose was to eliminate the forces that would enable the Soviets to try a pre-emptive disarming strike, what the former President termed in 1979 as the window of vulnerability which the massive Soviet nuclear buildup created.

To close that window, Reagan adopted a strategy of reductions in nuclear weapons, especially first strike weapons, modernization of the US nuclear deterrent, and deploying missile defenses.

Reductions under INF and START I proceeded, but the Russian Duma opposed banning multiple warhead ICBMs (MIRVs) as called for under START II, a clue to why abolition will never be accepted by Moscow.

As General Brent Scowcroft once explained, heavy ICBMs are the coin of the realm for the Russians. In 1999, the Duma rejected START II and instead adopted a massive nuclear modernization plan put together by none other than Vladimir Putin, then Secretary of the Security Council. When he became President, he put the plan into place to where now over 90% of the proposed modernization is completed.

Key to understanding what Russia is up to (and by reference Iran) is to understand what purpose nuclear weapons serve. Nuclear weapons are weapons of coercion and blackmail, securing for Moscow (or Iran) the standing down of US and NATO (and Israeli) forces in the face of Russian (or Iranian) military aggression.

Today, Moscow is developing multiple nuclear weapons systems of very low-yield and high accuracy. Moscow definitely believes in nuclear war fighting despite contrary phrases of restraint sometimes spoken by Mr. Putin but overwhelmed by the some nearly forty explicit nuclear threats by Russian officials to the US since the March invasion of Ukraine.

Iran is no different than Russia. The mullahs and Putin are on the same page but with different timetables.

Iran wants to hide, not advertise, its nuclear ambitions by getting an IAEA clean bill of health or a nuclear good housekeeping certificate. With such a piece of paper, Tehran thinks it can eliminate the economic sanctions it now faces.

In short, pretend to be for abolition.

But with a new deal, there will be a sharp surge in Iranian revolutionary Guard Corp (IRGC) cash with which to expand and arm its Shia empire which now includes Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen, even as it seeks to further partner with Moscow and Beijing to achieve its hegemonic goals.

Any new agreement that does not take these factors into account will fail to stop Irans eventual sprint to a nuclear bomb. The US thus faces a dilemma: to accept a weaker and shorter agreement now, which goes against the original goals set, or hold out for something stronger and better.

Logic tells you that a new deal is going to be weaker than the original as some restrictions imposed have already or are soon expiring. Technologically Iran starts in a much better position today than in 2015 when the JCPOA sunset provisions were originally adopted. Iran has since developed a fleet of advanced centrifuges and modified cascades able to produce high enriched uranium, indispensable technologies giving confidence to some Iranian officials to recently advertiseinadvertently its nuclear weapons capabilities.

Any new deal that requires the IAEA to close or delay its investigations into previous Iranian nuclear related activities, would demand, as in the Wizard of Oz, that Toto pay no attention to the Iran man behind the nuclear curtain.

Peter Huessy is President of Geo-Strategic Analysis and Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute. Shoshana Bryen is Senior Director of The Jewish Policy Center and Editor of inFOCUS Quarterly.

See the article here:

The Iran Man Behind the Nuclear Curtain Jewish Policy Center - Jewish Policy Center

Illustration: Philip Burke

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One day in 2006, Dorothy Roberts went in for a conference with her youngest sons teacher. The boy, said the teacher, had too many unexplained absences from his public kindergarten in Evanston, Illinois, most egregiously missing the classs Thanksgiving activities. All the other children made Indian headbands out of paper and feathers, the teacher chided, according to Roberts. Before I could respond, the teacher gave me a strict warning: If your son continues to miss school, Im going to call a truancy officer to visit your home.

Robertss son, her fourth child, had actually been accompanying his mother a law professor and public intellectual who has helped provide the theoretical and historical backbone of the reproductive-justice movement to a lecture she was giving in England. Five years earlier, Roberts had published the first of two books arguing that what she calls family policing, more commonly known as the child-welfare system, singles out Black mothers for investigation, sanction, and separation. At their next meeting, Roberts told me, the teachers suspicion, even contempt, had disappeared: She must have looked me up and seen that I was a Northwestern professor.

Roberts tells this story in a book she published in the spring, Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Familiesand How Abolition Can Build a Safer World; she recognizes that her class and education prevented further inquiry into her son missing school. I dont think I deserved any special treatment, she told me recently. I see it as the disparaging of Black mothers who dont have the credentials I have.

In the country that leads the world in revoking parental rights, the odds of a Black child being forcibly separated from their parents and placed in foster care before turning 18 is more than one in ten, mirroring our racially skewed record on incarceration. Only 16 percent of children enter foster care because they were physically or sexually abused, Roberts writes in Torn Apart. What the system calls neglect most often stems from poverty: living in dilapidated or overcrowded housing, missing school, wearing dirty clothes, going hungry, or being left at home alone, she writes. Robertss sincere provocation is to call for that system to be thrown out entirely.

The post-Roe era has made Robertss work grimly essential as both prophecy and cautionary tale. In these early days, directing outrage to the obvious horrors has been easy: the bleeding women with wanted pregnancies who arent dying fast enough to meet an infinitesimal legal exception; the inarguably victimized pregnant child with ever fewer places to turn for an abortion. These are catastrophes only the most monstrous excuse, and they make for uncomplicated pro-choice talking points. I call it poster-child feminism, says Loretta Ross, the organizer and foremother of reproductive justice.

By contrast, Robertss work, in Torn Apart and in her canonical 1997 book, Killing the Black Body, staked the theories of reproductive justice on the experiences of people whom mainstream institutions and figures, including liberals, long ago abandoned drug users accused of birthing crack babies; welfare recipients targeted for forcible sterilization; teenagers given long-term contraception without their clear consent. Robertss work demands us to extend imaginative and political sympathies to the reproductive autonomy of some of the most disdained members of society, who are overwhelmingly Black and poor women, in part because they are the ones who will bear the heaviest burden of criminalization. Indeed, they already have.

When I went to see Roberts at the University of Pennsylvania, where she now teaches law, sociology, and Africana studies, less than two weeks after Roes demise, she told me that early in her career she often had to explain to her colleagues what these drug users had to do with reproductive freedom or constitutional rights. Roberts responded that they were being punished not for using drugs but for their decision to stay pregnant, enacting fetal personhood via the war on drugs. That was with a floor set by Roe, which sometimes provided a defense in these prosecutions; without it, child endangerment can begin at conception. By dint of geography, poverty, race, or class, or all of the above, todays patient denied an abortion, or prosecuted for having one outside the law, is likely to be tomorrows target for a child-welfare investigation.

In person, Roberts is wiry and energetic, and disarmingly accessible. She describes herself as very mild-mannered. On at least three different occasions people who know her, either personally or by reputation, remarked to me how young Roberts is and were surprised to learn she is 66. Its not unusual for an academic to say they want to inspire movements, but to an extent more sweeping and durable than most, Roberts has accomplished that. Ross credits Roberts with adding theory to our practice and assigns excerpts of Killing the Black Body, which she refers to simply as KBB, to her students.

A quarter-century after its publication, organizations like the Mississippi Reproductive Freedom Fund and Medical Students for Choice give it to new hires at headquarters or outright require them to read it. A work of stunning historical and analytical breadth, it traces the state-sanctioned, often violent regulation of Black womens reproduction, including but far beyond the ability to refuse motherhood. In contrast to the account of American womens increasing control over their reproductive decisions, centered on the right to an abortion, Roberts wrote back then, this book describes a long experience of dehumanizing attempts to control Black womens reproductive lives.

The books framing reconciles policies that curb Black and low-income parenthood with ones that force pregnancy and childbirth. The objective of reproductive control has never been primarily to reduce the numbers of Black children born into the world, Roberts writes. (She quotes Thomas Jefferson writing to his plantation manager in 1820, I consider a woman who brings a child every two years as more profitable than the best man on the farm.) Instead, such control perpetuates the view that racial inequality is caused by Black people themselves and not by an unjust social order, she argues.

Failing to advocate for the most disfavored, Roberts says now, weakened the mainstream reproductive-rights movement. It allowed the right to expand the protection of the fetus and criminalize pregnancy more broadly. The surveillance and policing of Black mothers whether for drug use, purported neglect, or just having too many children has already provided a ready blueprint for enforcing the current abortion bans, down to the hospitals calling the cops. We can see how these policies, fueled by vilified stereotypes about Black mothers, are tested on Black mothers first, she tells me. And then they expand.

Roberts at the University of Pennsylvania in July. Photo: Jasmine Clarke

Growing up in Chicagos Hyde Park in the 1960s, Roberts had a sense of her father interviewing interracial couples, who became her parents friends and whose children became her friends. One parent was her piano teacher; another was the plumber. Her own father was an anthropologist, the inspiration for her desire to be a professor, and a white man who spent much of his life writing a never-published book on interracial marriage. Her mother had been a research assistant on the project, mainly interviewing the women in hundreds of couples.

Shed thought her fathers interest in the subject was sparked by meeting her Jamaican-born mother, at the time one of his students at Roosevelt University in Chicago. Ten years ago, as Roberts packed up her home in Evanston to move to Philadelphia, she came across boxes of files in her basement that had belonged to her late father, which told a slightly different story. Her fathers intellectual passion had actually begun as far back as his time as a 22-year-old masters student at the University of Chicago, in 1937.

Dorothy was the firstborn, a studious child. He liked to pull me aside and talk to me about his work, she recalls. He would try to convince me that interracial marriage was the answer to Americas race problem. I can remember him as a little girl telling me this. And he also liked to think of me and my sisters as I hate to say this, because it sounds terrible but as proof. She was idealistic even as an elementary-school student, going to activist meetings and passing out pamphlets for Eugene McCarthys campaign. I can remember being proud of walking down the street with my parents, she says. She believed then that her very existence, flanked by white father and Black mother, sent a message: Look, we could all get along, you know? But that was when I was little.

Her father clearly agreed. In the boxes Roberts found a file on herself, indexed with a dedicated number and containing some of her student papers. I can recall my mother saying sarcastically, Dont you know, were part of his research, she said. Shes been thinking a lot about her mother lately, how rare it was that a Black woman at mid-century would pursue a doctorate, but also how her mothers ambitions transferred to her children after leaving the program to care for them, and to her husband, whom she pushed to write the book. Roberts recently remembered that along with the nicknames her mother had for her Firstie, Gift from God, Ray of Sunshine she would also say, Youre my Ph.D.

Her father died in 2002 never having finished the manuscript. (Simon & Schuster demanded back its advance, in the low thousands.) Roberts, now on sabbatical, has decided to write her own book, a memoir that draws on his research but also critiques his premise. By the time she got to college, at Yale, Roberts didnt even want people to know her fathers race. I had this idea that if people knew my father was white, somehow that would diminish my identity as a Black woman, she tells me. Many years later, writing her 2011 book Fatal Invention, which took on genetic myths of race, finally helped her fully reconcile it. I realized that your ancestry doesnt determine your identity, she says. Still, she hasnt wavered in her skepticism of her fathers Utopian vision: Ive been much more convinced that there has to be radical change in America before there can be any possibility of interracial intimacy that could be seen as contesting white supremacy.

With her parents at Harvard Law School graduation in 1980.

At Harvard Law School, while taking antitrust with Stephen Breyer, Roberts started noticing a tall, well-built man around campus. He was a doctoral candidate in education 13 years her senior. Coltrane Chimurenga, the name he had chosen for himself, had taught at the College of Struggle in California and could expound on politics for hours. At the time, there were only two Black professors at Harvard Law, including Derrick Bell, a progenitor of critical race theory. Chimurenga had brought to Cambridge his prodigious library of Frantz Fanon and W.E.B. DuBois and Maos Little Red Book, books Roberts read as they grew closer. Chim, as she called him, would come to refer to Roberts as Shona, and after the two married, they named their first son after the anti-colonial author Amlcar Cabral.

After graduation, Roberts clerked for civil-rights icon Constance Baker Motley, the first Black woman to serve as a federal judge. Roberts had hoped for stirring civil-rights cases, but the southern district of New Yorks docket was heavy with business and finance. One case involving minors who wanted to marry against their guardians wishes, including a pregnant teen, came close to her imaginings. Roberts drafted an opinion proclaiming a right to marry under the 14th Amendment. Judge Motley pragmatically told her such an argument would be instantly overruled by the appeals court, and decided the opposite way. She felt a lot of pressure to be seen as a legitimate judge who understood and followed the law, Roberts says now. Because she was viewed as radical by the right wing. Motley was right about the appeals court, which affirmed her decision.

Motleys compromises didnt appeal to Roberts Ive always wanted to be unconstrained in my vision and my advocacy but her next gig was as a litigation associate at the white-shoe law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison. (Chimurenga, she says, knew it paid the bills.) In 1982, pregnant with Amilcar, she was told at the firm that no one had ever heard of an associate being pregnant, but managed to cobble together some decent maternity leave anyway. Over those six years, she gave birth to three children at home: in a rented brownstone on South Oxford Street in Fort Greene; in an apartment in Jackson Heights; in a house she bought in Hempstead, on Long Island, respectively. Today, she isnt sure if she already knew what would become a core part of her research, that hospitals themselves could be a deadly threat to pregnant Black women, or if it was just that Chimurenga had introduced her to the home-birth midwives, who were Puerto Rican, very political, revolutionary.

One evening in October 1984, Roberts was at home with her 2-year-old and her 3-month-old when the phone rang. The FBI and the NYPDs joint counterterrorism task force, she was told, was waiting at her door. Placing the toddler in the crib and hoisting the baby on her hip, she opened the door to what felt like dozens of armed officers, who began to interrogate her and ransack the apartment. Chimurenga, accused of being a terrorist ringleader of what came to be called the New York 8, was arrested later that night. They later learned that for nine months, a surveillance operation engaging up to 100 agents a day had been tracking him and his fellow activists. All this came as a shock to Roberts, she says now: I knew he was involved in political activism. I knew he opposed the NYPD. He had stood up to them. I knew that they didnt like him.

For months, Chimurenga remained in Metropolitan Correctional Center, one of the first people to be so detained under a provision of a new terrorism law. The prosecutor, a 40-year-old hotshot named Rudolph Giuliani, charged the eight, largely under racketeering statutes, of conspiring to use murder, kidnapping, and arson to rob an armored truck and free two prisoners who had famously been convicted of robbing a Brinks truck. He faced a possible 20-year sentence.

Robertss parents showed up to help, and Paul, Weiss stuck by her, even offering a pro bono criminal attorney. She needed one: Like several other spouses of the charged, she refused a subpoena to testify before the grand jury. Unlike the others, though, she managed to escape detention. Her fancy lawyer helped, as did the surveillance records showing she essentially did nothing but work at the firm, take care of their kids, and go to church. (At 19, Roberts had become a deeply religious Christian, and she still reads the Bible and prays daily.) The contrasts between the charges against Chimurenga, his Harvard pedigree, and his corporate-lawyer wife werent lost on the press. He was photographed and interviewed at MCC by this magazine and appeared on the front page of The Village Voice.

Her attorney told Roberts to keep a low profile, but she decided to speak at a rally and allow her and her kids faces to appear on fliers in support of the New York 8. She believed they were being targeted for their political activism for Black liberation. We didnt always see eye to eye, we didnt work within the same political movements, she says of her former husband, but we supported each others work.

Giuliani was unable to make the most serious charges stick, and in 1985 the New York 8 were convicted only of illegal weapons possession or false-identification charges and sentenced to community service and probation. Chimurenga remained active in left-wing politics; according to his obituary in the Amsterdam News, he approached a police officer who came to his organizations headquarters and was pointing his AR-15 at him, ordered him to put that fing gun down, grabbed the barrel and forced the weapon down. (Roberts and Chimurenga divorced a few years before he died of cancer, in 2019, and she has since remarried.)

Roberts seldom talks about all this; some of it, she tells me, she had never discussed with anyone. A few years ago, at a conference at Harvard, she was asked how she became a prison abolitionist. It occurred to me at that point that part of it was having a husband in jail and having police invade my home, she says. The months they spent apart, the prospect of the days turning into decades, of raising small children alone, were their own form of family separation. Oddly, she says, I havent really thought about that personal experience as much as Ive thought about other peoples personal experiences.

In 1987, Roberts read about the Angela Carder case. A working-class white woman in Maryland, Carder had struggled with cancer for most of her life. At 27 years old and 26 weeks pregnant, she lay intubated and sedated at George Washington University Medical Center, which went to court on behalf of Carders fetus. They wanted emergency permission to perform a Cesarean that Carders parents said their daughter wouldnt have wanted; later, Carder, drifting in and out of consciousness, gave conflicting answers about her desires. Judge Emmet Sullivan ordered the surgery: The court is of the view that the fetus should be given the opportunity to live. The baby lived less than two hours; Carder died after two days.

To Roberts, still at the firm, it was a turning point. When I read that, I thought, My goodness, if youre pregnant, they can kill you, Roberts tells me. I swear, I said, I have to work on this. Carder, Roberts understood, had lost the rights to her own body simply by being pregnant. I also had the sense, Roberts adds, that if they would do that to her, what would they do to a Black woman?

She soon found a job teaching at Rutgers Law in Newark, and the family moved to Montclair, New Jersey. By then, panic over so-called crack babies being born to addicted mothers was suffusing newspaper headlines and lurid television shows, along with a thirst for prosecuting women who used drugs during pregnancy. I immediately thought, I bet these are Black women who are being punished, Roberts says. She called the ACLU, whose thenstaff attorney, Lynn Paltrow, represented the Carder family against GW. The case, Paltrow said at the time, sent a message to women that the state can control and monitor every aspect of their lives, like prenatal police patrols. (Paltrow went on to found the National Advocates for Pregnant Women, which has been at the forefront of defending criminalized pregnant people.) The ACLU was also tracking all the cases of pregnant women being prosecuted for drug use, though not their races. Roberts called all the defense lawyers and learned that almost 80 percent of the defendants were Black.

The frame, Roberts thought, had to be pushed even further. I wanted to write about how racism turned this public-health issue into a crime, she recalls, and also the significance of that for how we think about reproductive freedom, that its not just a question of gender and sexism and misogyny. Some senior faculty members warned her that it wasnt the kind of topic that would establish her in legal academia, and that she was better off waiting until she had tenure, but she ignored them. In 1991, the Harvard Law Review published Punishing Drug Addicts Who Have Babies: Women of Color, Equality, and the Right of Privacy. Her conversations with Paltrow had helped Roberts distill her own thinking that the crime these women were being targeted for was not using drugs, but being, and staying, pregnant. I sometimes felt like we were the only two people in America who understood that punishing people for being pregnant was just as important as punishing people for having abortions, that they were connected, Roberts says. Any conduct or omission that could be seen as risky to a fetus, or a potential fetus, can be criminalized.

At Paul, Weiss, shed gotten used to writing on long yellow legal pads, and she remembers pulling over her car on the side of the road around that time to begin writing down the connections that rushed into her brain. The prosecutions, yes, but also welfare reform; sterilization abuse; Norplant, a new-birth control method then being touted as a solution to poverty without much consideration of side effects or informed consent. Slavery. That foment became Killing the Black Body, which instantly electrified not only organizers in the field but also a generation of legal thinkers. Dorothy is like a Harriet Tubman of law, says her friend and fellow law professor Michele Goodwin. She opened the gates for so many others, including myself.

Roberts managed to prove her senior colleagues wrong by getting those invitations to visit, and then teach, at prestigious law schools after all. (She had gotten in the habit of taking her kids along everywhere, including conferences one in the carrier, one in the stroller, and so on.) Even with the gates creaking open, the reception could be begrudging. At Stanford, where she was a visiting professor early in her career, in 1998, a (white, male) student had read a newspaper throughout her family-law class. Only a dozen years earlier, Stanford Law students had begun skipping a required constitutional-law class taught by another visitor, Derrick Bell, and ended up creating a public lecture series taught by other faculty members to replace it. At that point, Stanford had only ever had two Black tenured members, and the administration later apologized for going along with the lecture series. Roberts has a policy against cold-calling the Paper Chasestyle surprise Socratic method still popular with many law professors instead pre-assigning students to answer questions on specific days. The newspaper-reading student was unprepared anyway, and Roberts said something lightly mocking in response. The class laughed. Afterwards, the student indignantly told her she had humiliated him and that he would tell his father to no longer donate to Stanford. At Northwestern, where she taught for 14 years and held a named chair, a (white, male) student had once raised his hand during her criminal-law lecture and declared that what she said had been refuted by Wikipedia. In fact, Roberts says, he had misunderstood Wikipedia.

While teaching at Northwestern, Roberts remembers, she spoke at a Planned Parenthood event in Washington, D.C., and criticized the notion that birth control was a way out of poverty. Hands went up, saying that I was unfairly judging Margaret Sanger. And I remember an elderly white woman coming up to me and trying to justify the thinking of even eugenic policies. She is still seeing versions of that neo-Malthusianism around the Dobbs decision. Its true that Dobbs is going to intensify poverty, she said. Its going to intensify maternal mortality and infant mortality. But thats different from saying abortion is the solution to childhood poverty, or birth control is the answer to teenagers dropping out of high school because the problem is structural racism. The problem is structural income inequality. The problem is racial capitalism.

Among the arguments of reproductive-justice activists is the inadequacy of the doctrine of privacy, and the related, market-oriented language of choice, however poll-tested to appeal to white moderates. It lives on, including in the speech by Joe Biden the day Roe was shredded. Whether or not a better argument could have swayed the dogged ideologues of judicial conservatism, privacy alone could not save Roe.

Its so obvious that focusing on the ability to make private choices was a losing strategy. It was just thrown out, dismissed by the stroke of a pen, you know? Roberts had told me in the courtyard. That doesnt mean the idea of freedom that underlies it and actually should have been recognized as the essence of the 14th Amendment isnt important. We should support a human right to autonomy over our bodies. But we have to have a society where thats possible.

For all of her critiques of historically white reproductive-rights organizations, Roberts had no time for the Dobbs concurrence by Clarence Thomas, which had explicitly linked abortion rights with racism. Its a false retelling of history because abortion was not an instrument of eugenicists; sterilization was, Roberts explains. And abortion is a means of reproductive freedom. Whereas coerced sterilization is a means of population control. But the neglect of allies, she argues, had given Thomas a soft underbelly to attack. If reproductive justice were at the forefront from the very beginning, there is no way today people would accept Clarence Thomass argument, she says. It would be blatantly ridiculous.

There had been time to add a question to the final exam of her reproductive-justice class about Justice Amy Coney Barretts comments at the Dobbs oral argument that the opportunity to drop a newborn at a so-called Safe Havens might offset the harms of banning abortion. Roberts was furious at Barretts, and later Alitos, hand-waving over the violation of forced pregnancy and birth, but she also saw the connections to Torn Apart. If the presumed anonymity of safe havens was breached, as it has been, you could be subject to a child-protection investigation. Lets say you have other children, and you drop this child off, and thats considered child neglect, she said. Even if there is some protection against prosecution for dropping the baby off. That doesnt mean that it couldnt trigger a child-welfare investigation, unless thats explicitly written into the law.

After Shattered Bonds came out, Roberts agreed to try to be part of the solution, this time on the governments side. She accepted a spot on a task force as part of a settlement against Washington States child-welfare department. For nine years, there were action steps and benchmarks and dozens of meetings with administrators and attorneys at a hotel across from the SeaTac airport, Roberts writes in Torn Apart. There were anti-racist trainings for caseworkers and lawyers and judges and administrators. But we were unable to fix the long list of deficiencies that harmed children placed in the states custody. For the 20th anniversary of Shattered Bonds, she initially considered writing a new foreword, then decided she needed to start over with a bolder call: We must abandon the fools errand of tinkering with a system designed to tear families apart.

The racial-justice protests that crescendoed in 2020, with their calls to defund the police, enthralled Roberts, but they also worried her, because one of the proposed alternatives to policing was to transfer resources to the same agencies she wanted to dismantle. What resonated more showed up late that year, as a small group of New York City activists began blanketing the streets with posters and billboards. One read, Some Cops Are Called Caseworkers.

Roberts points out that family-services caseworkers are able to flout due process in a way police arent supposed to for example, searching a home without a warrant and sometimes the cops come along for their turn in the name of child protection. To people accustomed to thinking of child-welfare investigations as being about protecting kids from violent homes, Roberts has this rejoinder: The majority of substantiated complaints are not of abuse but of neglect. Rather than operating as a defense against a neglect charge, she writes in Torn Apart, poverty works as an enhancement of parental culpability.

Roberts argues that the system is swamped with neglect complaints that actually stretch caseworkers too thin to find children in actual danger. Meanwhile, women in domestic-violence situations fear asking for help lest they be blamed for putting their kids in a violent situation and separated from them. She tells the story of New Yorker Angeline Montauban, who worked up the courage to call the Safe Horizons hotline about her partners violence toward her; the revelation that they had a 2-year-old soon led to an ACS caseworker knocking at their door, despite no evidence he had harmed his son. Because Montauban filed for an order of protection against her partner but wanted her son to keep seeing his father, Roberts writes, her toddler was placed in a series of foster homes for five years. Foster and group homes, meanwhile, are notoriously sites of abuse themselves.

The group behind those billboards had another slogan that stayed with Roberts: They Separate Children at the Border of Harlem Too. I did 1,000 for each borough, Joyce McMillan, founder of the nascent advocacy group JMAC for Families, tells me. (Almost. I didnt do Staten Island because no one has time to go to Staten Island.) McMillan can recite by heart the names of New York politicians who showed up to rally against the Trump administrations separation of families at the border. For years, she had been trying to get their ears on behalf of parents impacted by New Yorks Administration for Childrens Services, or ACS. There was no outrage for the children that were removed from their own community domestically, she says. You cant even get their legislative directors.

A few years ago, McMillan asked Roberts if she would come speak about her work to parents who were fighting the system. My observation is that shes always willing to show up, McMillan says.

This past July, Roberts showed up again for McMillan, this time on Zoom. It was the third permutation of McMillans HEAL program, a 12-week workshop to help these mothers the session I attended was all mothers process what they had experienced and then train them for activism and talking to the media. JMAC for Families has been lobbying for New York State to pass a package of legislation that includes ending anonymous reporting of child-welfare complaints (though keeping them confidential) and Miranda rights for parents being visited by caseworkers.

The instructor began with an ice breaker. If youre writing a book about your life, what would you call it? And what would you want readers to take away from it? The titles seemed to come easily to the women. Im A Survivor, chiefly about putting your faith in God. She Moved On, with the lesson being life is difficult but you dont dwell, and I Wont Give Up and Reborn and Battling a Broken System. Knockout, its author said, would be about my life, but I would also write about knowing your rights. ACS Took My Childhood and Now Theyre Taking My Children needed no explanation. McMillans was Catapulted, because ACS wanted her to be a victim and instead she became a monster for change.

After the instructor led a guided meditation, Roberts began speaking. People sometimes listen to lawyers in ways they dont listen to other people, she explained, and it helps to have a book. The history of forced separation of Black families during slavery was a crucial parallel, Roberts told the HEAL participants, but so was what came after the dismantling of reconstruction a so-called apprenticeship system. White people would petition to say that Black children were being neglected, she said, and family-court judges would declare these children neglected and order them to be apprenticed out to white people, who sometimes are the very same people who had enslaved them prior. Tens of thousands of Black children were put back to work under the authority of former white enslavers in the South.

In the question-and-answer session, the participants talked about their kids in foster care being put on medications without their consent, about their experiences with domestic violence and the shelter system. They talked about how the government could give families direct support without increasing surveillance, if it was even possible, and the self-perpetuating system of the algorithm designed to identify risks. McMillan pointed out that children in Brooklyn get ticketed for riding bikes on the sidewalk, which kids in the suburbs do all the time, and theyre not treated as criminals. She said, They try to make us think that we are stupid when we point out how ridiculous the system is.

One of the women offered the send-off: Thank you for sharing space with us, queen. Roberts replied, Thank you. All of you are queens.

Dismantling the child-welfare system sounds improbable and politically toxic. But Roberts points out in Torn Apart that its already been done. When enforcement in New York City was vastly curtailed by early COVID shutdowns in 2020, it was briefly replaced by a combination of mutual aid and government support, including a series of direct payments. Its hard to know exactly what happened behind closed doors, but heres one empirical measure. Law professor Anna Arons crunched the numbers and found that ACS investigations related to child fatalitieswhich were required despite the lockdowndropped by 25 percent between February 2019 and June 2019 and the same period in 2020.

The night she visited the summit, Roberts had arrived a little late from another meeting, and though shes writing a memoir, the icebreaker flustered her. It would have something about gratitude and hope in it, she managed. But I cant come up that quickly with a good title. And what would I want readers to take away from it? I would want readers to take away something about being hopeful despite how distressing the world seems to be, and take away something joyful from it.

Id been surprised, when we spoke in Philly, to hear her talk so much about hope. I havent seen such hope and excitement around organizing since I was a little girl in Hyde Park in the 1960s, she said. Im seeing it in uprisings, around the country after George Floyd was murdered, Im seeing it in this family movement to abolish family policing. But the backlash has been so fierce, I said: to racial-justice movements, to reproductive freedom in all forms, and it seemed that the people who had once marched felt demoralized and disconnected. Theres always a backlash, Roberts replied. Theres a backlash because you did something powerful that requires a backlash.

When we talked after the visit to HEAL, I noticed Roberts bristled a little when I referred to her as having done research about the lives of these women, going back to meeting with Black mothers in a Chicago basement in 2000 for Shattered Bonds. The term research felt to her too clinical, too detached. Those meetings are part of why I became an abolitionist, she corrected. They didnt just affect me in terms of collecting empirical data. They affected my political aims and desires.

This wasnt theoretical for McMillan, either. In 1999, she had been working in the banking industry and had just had a baby when an anonymous tip and a positive drug test wrested away her two young children for two years. McMillan says her drug use was recreational at the time, but that the ordeal eventually pushed her into addiction and homelessness. She lost her house, her car, her job. They literally destroyed my life, she says. It took a good public defender and a year of being substance-free to get her children back, and much longer to process the damage done by the separation. McMillan had trouble finding a therapist who didnt feel like another cop. But in therapy, her younger daughter talked about the vivid memory she had that McMillan had been the one to steal her from her real mother her foster mother.

McMillan remembers how she felt when she first encountered Robertss work. It was reading Killing the Black Body, and then Shattered Bonds, around 2015. It was a truth I didnt have language for, she says. It was a truth that I had lived in the shelter. I saw someone spoke about it. And someone put a name to it. And someone said, I see it too.

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Dorothy Roberts Tried to Warn Us - New York Magazine

The scene on this watercooler, a couple in fancy dress with a hog below, is often interpreted as a slave wedding, and is a rare figural depiction of Black life and regional traditions in Edgefield stoneware, write Spinozzi and Hughes. Detail, watercooler by an unrecorded potter, probably Thomas M. Chandler Jr (1810-1854), Phoenix Stone Ware Factory, Old Edgefield District, S.C., circa 1840. Alkaline-glazed stoneware with iron and kaolin slip, height 31 inches. Collection of the High Museum of Art (1996.132). Photo by Michael McKelvey / Courtesy of the High Museum of Art.

By Laura Beach

NEW YORK CITY On view from September 9 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (MMA) and traveling thereafter, Hear Me Now: The Black Potters of Old Edgefield, South Carolina has long been anticipated by Americana enthusiasts. Though in some respects narrowly focused and physically not large it numbers 65 objects, including five fragments and seven works by contemporary artists the show and its accompanying catalog are monumental, representing a fundamental shift in approach to a complicated group of African American-made objects and a milestone acknowledgment of the soft bigotry of past oversight by the nations foremost art museum.

What defines this revisionist history is the project teams insistence that a chorus of voices other than its own be heard. In collaboration with Ethan W. Lasser, chairman of the Art of the Americas department at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA), and Jason R. Young, associate professor of history at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MMA associate curator Adrienne Spinozzi has crafted a presentation that is nuanced and provocative, with a call-and-response cadence reminiscent of an African American spiritual.

Over the past 150 years, Edgefield stoneware has gone from a sturdy standard of the Southern kitchen and pantry to museum trophy and rarified collectors item. Spurred by institutional bidding, the market reached spectacular new heights in 2021 when Crocker Farm auctioned a large, inscribed jar by Edgefields poet laureate, the enslaved potter David Drake, for $1.56 million, a world record for American pottery at auction. As contemporary Black artists and intellectuals engaged with the wares, it became clear that the Edgefield story needed retelling.

Roughly 160 miles east of Atlanta and encompassing portions of five counties, the Old Edgefield District, as it was designated between 1785 to 1865, supported at least 12 pottery sites between 1815 and the 1890s. Recent archaeological excavations confirm the scale of the operations, which shipped wares up to 150 miles in all directions and collectively exemplified industrial slavery, an understudied dimension of the antebellum Southern economy.

Detail of board tracking known face vessels, begun in 2018 by Katherine C. Hughes and Adrienne Spinozzi. Spinozzis team confirmed nearly 180 extant Edgefield face vessels made by and for enslaved potters. The form appeared in Edgefield in the 1850s, coinciding with an influx of captives from Africa. Image courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art, Eileen Travell photo.

Having discovered kaolin in the region, Dr Abner Landrum (1785-1859) is recognized as the first in the United States to make alkaline-glazed stoneware, doing so at his Pottersville Stoneware Manufactory. Other manufacturers, from the Harvey & Reuben Drake Factory (1828-32) to the Thomas M. Chandler Pottery (1850-52) and the Miles Mill Pottery (1867-85), followed.

Enslaved African Americans, who by 1830 formed a majority of the regions population, operated but did not own the businesses. Skilled craftspeople, they produced quantities of utilitarian stoneware bowls, churns, pitchers, cups, crocks and jugs plus monumental food-storage jars and, uniquely, watercoolers with capacities of up to 40 gallons. Scholars, among them recently the collectors Corbett E. Toussaint and April L. Hynes, have worked to identify individual potters and their descendants by name, a task made difficult by slaverys systemic repression of Black identity and accomplishment. The names stamped and incised on most Edgefield stoneware belong to owners of the potteries, not makers.

Our hope is that as technology progresses, we will be able to build on the genealogical and archeological work underway, as well as other methodologies for doing this research, says Spinozzi, whose team gleaned subtle clues to authorship in the form of makers marks, symbols, handprints and decoration.

The Civil War marked the beginning of the end of the industry. Some newly freed craftspeople went to work for their former enslavers, others among them John Chandler, who migrated to Guadalupe County, Texas, where he was part of the Durham-Chandler-Wilson Pottery moved west to establish businesses of their own. Though collectors have been gathering specimens, particularly face vessels, for more than a century, much Edgefield pottery has likely not survived, the organizers say.

The poem on this jar Daves most significant literary contribution illuminates the potters own experience but also transcends it, writes Adrienne Spinozzi. Storage jar by Dave (later recorded as David Drake, b circa 1801-d 1870s), Stony Bluff Manufactory (circa 1848-67), Old Edgefield District, S.C., 1857, alkaline-glazed stoneware, height 19 inches. Collection of Greenville County Museum of Art.

Installed in Gallery 955 of the Mets Robert Lehman Wing, Here Me Now touches briefly on Native American ceramic traditions in pre-contact western South Carolina before focusing on several distinct groups of Edgefield pottery: utilitarian wares, some with figural decoration; face vessels, most by unidentified craftspeople; and signed, dated and inscribed vessels by David Drake. Sprinkled throughout the gallery and offering evidence of Edgefields continuing influence are a handful of ceramics, drawings and mixed-media pieces, some sumptuous in scale, by contemporary Black artists. Innovatively, exhibition labels and the museums audio guide feature the voices of eight experts of varied perspective.

Given their visceral appeal, it is perhaps not surprising that jugs and jars with hand-modeled facial features in the past called grotesques, voodoo jugs and, derogatively, monkey jugs were among the first examples of Edgefield pottery sought by curio collectors, notably snowbird visitors to nearby Aiken, S.C., and institutions, beginning with the Charleston Museum in 1902.

Spinozzis team confirmed roughly 180 extant Edgefield face vessels, made by and for enslaved potters, and apparently not originally for sale. According to the researchers, the form appeared in Edgefield in the 1850s, coinciding with an influx of captives who brought with them African cultural and spiritual traditions. Surveying the literature, co-organizer Young speculates that the vessels may have been intended as whimsies, as receptacles for water or alcoholic spirits, or perhaps even for use in burial or funerary rituals.

Displayed together on one wall, the face vessels make a striking presentation. Spinozzi notes, We thought it was important to show them together so visitors would have insight into some of the stylistic decisions made by the potters. Weve identified roughly ten different groupings with common characteristics, reflecting either individual makers or groups of makers, and the exhibition presents some of these groups. More face vessels are coming to light, but we still feel we are in the beginning stages of our research.

The exhibition opens with a reference to the Native American clay tradition that existed in the Carolinas prior to settlement by European and African Americans. Attributed to the Woodland culture, circa 1500, this bowl by an unrecorded potter is the earliest work in the exhibition. Earthenware, height 15 inches. South Carolina State Museum, Columbia, S.C. (SC80.15.368). Image courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art, Eileen Travell photo.

Greeting visitors at the exhibitions entrance are 12 vessels by the enslaved potter who sometimes signed his pieces Dave, and who upon emancipation took the surname of one of his former enslavers, Drake. Spinozzi notes, Each vessel is in its own case and is meant to be viewed in the round. Its a powerful installation. Among Daves 50 largest pots are works extraordinary in their scale, wit and radical assertion of free expression. Signed and inscribed with short verses, dates or both, they resonate in our compulsively communicative age.

Dave was born around 1801 and died in the 1870s. Beginning in the 1820s, he likely made thousands of vessels, most of which were relatively nondescript commercial pieces. His first signed pieces of the early 1830s coincided with South Carolinas furious attempt to preempt the anticipated end of the legal Atlantic slave trade by increasing its importation of slaves and forbidding literacy among African Americans.

How Dave learned to read and write remains a mystery. Harvard professor and catalog contributor Vincent Brown speculates that it may relate to enslaver Harvey Drakes business partner, Abner Landrum, and his newspaper, the Edgefield Hive. Daves talent appears to have insulated him against reproach, though scholars question whether he lost his leg in an accident, as went the official account, or whether he was maimed as punishment, a not unusual occurrence among the enslaved.

Here Me Now offers a compendium of Daves known verses. Inscribed in flowing hand by Dave, then working for the Drake & Rhodes Factory (1832-36), the first script appears on a two-handled jar dated June 12, 1834. It reads simply Concatination, a word meaning a linked series of things or events. Here the words use is obscure, other than to suggest the potters access to penmanship guides prior to South Carolinas passing of more punitive antiliteracy codes in December 1834. Daves last known inscribed and dated jar of May 3, 1862, calls on sinners to repent, a message that may have abolitionist overtones.

Artist Adebunmi Gbadebo (b 1992) forges a physical connection with the plantation home of her ancestors in K.S., a sculpture of 2021. True Blue Plantation cemetery soil and human locs from Aaron Wilson Watson, Kelsey Jackson and Cheryl Person; length 22 inches. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; courtesy of the artist and Claire Oliver Gallery, New York; Aaron Wilson Watson photo.

The most compelling of Daves works is a 19-inch-tall jar, ovoid in shape, with tiny, ear-like handles and warm, brown color. Signed and dated August 16, 1857, its rhymed inscription asks deferentially, I wonder where is all my relation/ Friendship to all and every nation, a reference, perhaps, to the sale of Daves family to a planter 500 miles distant. These 13 words are among the most powerful and emotive in the history of American letters, write essayists Michael J. Bramwell, the MFAs newly named Linde curator of folk and self-taught art, and exhibition co-curator Lasser, who rank Dave with Frederick Douglass and other great voices of the abolition movement.

Cited throughout the catalog text, Chipstone Foundation deserves special mention for raising awareness of Edgefield pottery in general and Dave in particular. In partnership with the Wunsch Americana Foundation, the Milwaukee-based organization underwrote a think tank at the Met in 2016 with an eye toward stimulating dialogue about new approaches to museum display and interpretation in the American arts and material culture. The Chipstone journal Ceramics in America has led the way with studies considering African American influences in ceramics. Moreover, it was Lasser, then Chipstones curator, who introduced Dave to the contemporary art field with the 2010 Milwaukee Art Museum exhibition To Speculate Darkly: Theaster Gates and Dave the Potter. Lasser later advocated for inclusion of a contemporary component in Here Me Now.

Chipstone Foundations executive director and chief curator Jon Prown asks, Thinking critically, one key question regarding Hear Me Now is how meaningfully it shifts the field forward and builds upon previous studies of the topic by opening new interpretive pathways. Does the initiative expand the range of historical narratives we pursue as curators and historians? Does this research substantively change how we think about our historical and material past? When it comes to museum-based projects such as this one, our curatorial efforts in the American decorative arts world need to walk-the-walk. That is the great hope we all have for the collaborative Met/MFA Boston project.

Hear Me Now draws arresting parallels between Edgefield pottery and contemporary work by artists such as Gates (b 1973), who has called David Drake one of the most important craft figures in American history, and Simone Leigh (b 1967), winner of a Golden Lion award at the 2022 Venice Biennale.

Archaeological evidence suggests this face jug may have been made at Miles Mill Pottery (1867-85), opened by Lewis J. Miles after emancipation and following the closing of his nearby Stony Bluff Manufactory. Face jug by unrecorded Old Edgefield District potter, 1867-85, alkaline-glazed stoneware with kaolin, height 8 inches. Hudgins Family Collection, New York. Image courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art, Eileen Travell photo.

Opposite the face vessels in the present display is Large Jug by Leigh. The 62-inch-tall stoneware sculpture calls to mind in form and proportion, if not scale, the nearby harvest face vessel of circa 1850-80, acquired by the Met in 2017 and so-called because of its horizontal handle. There the likeness ends. Glazed white, Large Jug is embellished in high relief with elements resembling cowrie shells or perhaps human anatomy. Leigh included a closely related piece in her Biennale presentation, citing artistic traditions of Africa and the African diaspora as influences and noting her sustained interest in issues surrounding Black femininity.

Spinozzi says, We were thrilled when Simone joined our project during its planning stage. We shared with her photographs of our face-vessel board, the harvest face vessel and James A. Palmers stereograph from his 1882 series Aiken and Vicinity, which features an almost identical face vessel. Its fascinating to see how Simone engaged with the material.

Another crucial piece is the moving K.S., a 2021 work by Adebunmi Gbadebo (b 1992), whose elegantly reductive representation of a human skull joins clay collected at the former True Blue Plantation in Fort Motte, S.C., with locs of Black hair. As Lasser explains, There, at the burial ground for the enslaved, she collects clay for her sculptures, turning the earth that ran through the hands of her ancestors into vessels that commemorate the history of her family.

Spinozzi acknowledges the many difficulties inherent in presenting Edgefield pottery, asking, What does it mean to elevate objects made by forced labor and celebrate them as creative masterworks? How can artistic agency be understood in this context? How can we give space and a voice to these objects and the people who made them? And who is telling these stories?

Detail of a watercooler by an unrecorded potter, probably Thomas M. Chandler Jr (1810-1854), Phoenix Stone Ware Factory, Old Edgefield District, S.C., circa 1840. Alkaline-glazed stoneware with iron and kaolin slip, height 31 inches. Collection of the High Museum of Art (1996.132). Photo by Michael McKelvey / Courtesy of the High Museum of Art.

As incomplete as the Edgefield narrative remains, Hear Me Now is a brave, powerful step toward setting a flawed record straight.

Edited by Adrienne Spinozzi, Hear Me Now: The Black Potter of Old Edgefield, South Carolina was published by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and is distributed by Yale University Press. In addition to Spinozzi, Lasser, Young, Bramwell, Brown and Leigh, its contributors include the Mets former Peggy N. Gerry research scholar Katherine C. Hughes, now a doctoral candidate in public history at Middle Tennessee State University and a curator at the McKissick Museum in South Carolina.

Following its close in New York on February 5, 2023, Here Me Now will travel to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (March 6-July 9, 2023), the University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor (August 26, 2023-January 7, 2024) and the High Museum of Art, Atlanta (February 16-May 12, 2024).

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is at 1000 Fifth Avenue. For information, http://www.metmuseum.org or 212-535-7710.

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Hear Me Now: The Black Potters Of Old Edgefield, South Carolina - Antiques And The Arts Weekly - Antiques and the Arts Online

An old line relayed to me, credited to a former Australian administrator possibly apocryphal but perfectly apt has rattled around my head over the past week as Zimbabwe played their first series in that country for nearly two decades.

The quip goes, when Zimbabwe were granted access to the big kids table where Test cricket is permitted in 1992, he supported this for them in a non-playing sense. Knock yourselves out lads, just not against the big boys.

Well, the Chevrons made the most of playing in the third and final one-dayer of their series on Saturday, knocking off Aaron Finchs side after rolling the hosts for 141 in 31 overs. Thats a team of players with barely any name recognition beyond their homeland denying some of the most feted superstars around; their first international victory against Australia in Australia. Special stuff, made possible thanks to a haul of five for 10 from the leg-spinner Ryan Burl, who last year become famous on Twitter for posting a plea for better boots.

Against the backdrop of well-founded existential fears over the future of the global game, this was a feelgood story for those interested in the growth of the sport in a country that has ridden endless bumps since its golden era at the turn of the century. But that was until taking a closer look at whats ahead. When doing so, it becomes painfully clear the probability of Australia playing Zimbabwe at any time in the future outside major tournaments is next to zero. Why? The abolition of the World Cup Super League.

No judgment if that doesnt mean anything to you the competition, to the extent it is one, has failed to capture the imagination since its initiation in 2020. But what it has done, quietly and successfully, is produce fixtures that otherwise would never have happened Zimbabwes in Australia is a case in point. It bound the five-time world champions to make it work.

The Super League was dreamed up to provide an organising structure for ODIs played by the top 13 nations between World Cups, each playing eight opponents in a three-match series over three years to facilitate qualification for that event. But with the pinnacle 50-over bonanza swelling from 10 to 14 teams in 2027 (a great thing) the International Cricket Council has ditched it, arguing it wont be required because 13 already goes into 14.

The collateral damage smaller, developing nations was clear in the recently released Future Tours Programme. Sure enough, over the scheduled period of five years, Zimbabwe will not enjoy a single match, in any of the three formats, against Australia or England.

Their relationship with the latter who last played Zimbabwe in 2004 is fascinating, chequered and endlessly complicated. Naturally, as a former British colony, theres an ingrained wariness that goes well beyond the field of play. From a cricket perspective, it didnt help that Englands heavy hitters tried their best to ensure Zimbabwe wouldnt graduate to full member status in the 1980s at a time they were recruiting Graeme Hick.

But through the 1990s, Zimbabwe stunned Graham Goochs team at a World Cup and towelled up Mike Athertons three-zip in the ODIs from their first full tour, following the we flippin murdered em draw at Bulawayo.

Then there was the 2003 World Cup, a sequence of events that is barely plausible now when Nasser Hussain nearly quit the captaincy due to the treatment he received when, quite reasonably, he pulled his team from a World Cup fixture as the country spiralled under the murderous Robert Mugabe regime.

Zimbabwe did visit later that year (Jimmy Andersons Test debut) and there was a return to Harare in the next (Kevin Pietersens ODI bow) but the relationship from that point was as good as sunk when Hussain was, in his words, hung out to dry by, well, everyone.

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As Zimbabwes presence diminished in England and Australia, coverage of their journey has been reserved mostly for when theyve lost their way a couple of ICC bans, the latest in 2019 for government meddling, or missing out on qualification for that years World Cup.

But theres a correlation to their improved fortunes since the initiation of the Super League. This year, Zimbabwe won entry to next months T20 World Cup in Australia, their first trip to a major ICC event since 2016. A series win against Bangladesh on the road, a commendable performance against India and now saluting over Australia in Townsville (without their best quick), bolsters the view that green shoots are no illusion.

From an England perspective, the political minefield that denied further engagement through the Mugabe years is no longer after the coup to remove him in 2017. Reluctantly accepting the mens schedule is now inked in to 2027, however, doesnt mean the seeds cant be sown in other ways between times to help get the two teams playing again.

With that, a positive thought before signing off. While it is a further frustration that Zimbabwe were the only full members left out of the first iteration of the womens Future Tours Programme also released in August theyve recently issued their female players full-time contracts. They are late to this party but determined to catch up as quickly as possible. With a touring schedule thats fundamentally less chaotic than the men, this is something that should be facilitated.

In Zimbabwe, theres a commonly used response to adversity: make a plan. The threat posed by the end of the Super League means theyll soon need a new one to keep moving in the right direction. If those running English cricket are interested in being good global citizens through this next challenging period, theres no better time for them to do their bit to help this country make up for so much lost time and commit to charting a course to taking the field alongside them again.

This is an extract from the Guardians weekly cricket email, The Spin. To subscribe, just visit this page and follow the instructions.

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The Spin | Zimbabwe's upset win should spur England to be good global citizens - The Guardian

Like Michael Henderson (The Critics, 2 September), I am disappointed with the BBCs approach to classical music. While it seemed essential to disrupt the weekend schedules to ensure that virtually every moment of the Glastonbury Festival was televised, we have to be satisfied with a meagre selection of the Proms concerts. The fact that many of these are televised on BBC Four, which is to be discontinued as a broadcast channel, bodes ill for future years.

In the past, every Friday evening BBC Four broadcast a classical music-based programme, such as Simon Russell Beales excellent history of sacred music. The channels normal Friday-evening fare now features pop or folk groups and old editions of Top of the Pops. On the news, the recent death of the countrys leading classical composer, Harrison Birtwistle, was hardly mentioned.

The BBCs orchestras contribute much to the cultural life of the country, as do the Proms. It is a pity that the corporation seems so reluctant to share much of this with its viewers. David Kirk, Dunblane, Stirling

As your leader states (A state of emergency, 2 September), the prospects for this next government are bleak if Liz Truss does believe that erroneous thinking on turbo-charging the economy is the way to proceed. Perhaps once she is in office, this politician who has turned and turned again will turn back into a prime minister who knows she must govern for all, and consign her economic and social mantras to the back of her office drawer, where they belong. Judith A Daniels, Cobholm, Norfolk

Your leader says the current circumstances could not be more propitious for a revival of the centre left, but there is plenty of evidence to suggest that Labours standing would be stronger if it adopted a more radical programme. A recent Survation poll, for example, revealed that around two-thirds of Tory voters support state ownership of energy, railways and water. Bernie Evans, Liverpool

Select and enter your email address Morning Call Quick and essential guide to domestic and global politics from the New Statesman's politics team. The Crash A weekly newsletter helping you fit together the pieces of the global economic slowdown. World Review The New Statesmans global affairs newsletter, every Monday and Friday. The New Statesman Daily The best of the New Statesman, delivered to your inbox every weekday morning. Green Times The New Statesmans weekly environment email on the politics, business and culture of the climate and nature crises - in your inbox every Thursday. The Culture Edit Our weekly culture newsletter from books and art to pop culture and memes sent every Friday. Weekly Highlights A weekly round-up of some of the best articles featured in the most recent issue of the New Statesman, sent each Saturday. Ideas and Letters A newsletter showcasing the finest writing from the ideas section and the NS archive, covering political ideas, philosophy, criticism and intellectual history - sent every Wednesday. Events and Offers Sign up to receive information regarding NS events, subscription offers & product updates.

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Andrew Marrs The return of the radical right (2 September) is a forensic analysis of the current political and economic mess and should be required reading for politicians. And while it is ridiculous to imagine that a right-wing Conservative government would take advice from the New Statesman, why not invite a rebuttal of Marr from a member of the Truss tribe? Brent Charlesworth, Lincoln

Philip Collinss article (Politics, 26 August) on the need to replace the GCSE echoes my own experience having just quit after 33 years as an English teacher, largely because of the unfitness of the GCSE to educate our teenagers.

While the GCSE before the 2015 Gove reforms was just about passable as an educational tool, the last seven years have seen an exam that is based on a narrow Gradgrindian concept of learning, which reduces knowledge to a tick-box exercise, and trains students in valueless skills. Tom Barnes, London N19

Rab Butler was a decent man but the 1944 education act he is credited with was mainly the work of James Chuter Ede, later Clement Attlees home secretary. The act aimed to set up a comprehensive schooling system with three streams academic, technical and general with provision for transfer if justified. Of course, with our irredeemable snobbery, in most parts of the UK it became a hierarchy in which academic education was top, technical education was left to wither away and everything else had to be content with the title of modern. Anthony Murray, Kingston upon Thames, Greater London

I was surprised to read Christopher Bowsers assertion (Correspondence, 26 August) that the RMT cannot represent the working class because some of its striking members are among the top third of earners before tax. Being working class doesnt always equate to being poor. If some RMT members earn above average wages, it is because the union has been doing its job. Jane Middleton, Bath

I read Rowan Williamss review of Maurice Glasmans book Blue Labour (The Critics, 2 September) having looked again at William Morriss lecture How Shall We Live Then? (1889), and there are remarkable parallels between Glasmans and Morriss visions. Morris believed that a prodigious and overwhelming change in society was required via the abolition of individual ownership or the monopoly of the means of production, and greater equality for all. He believed that social relations would not be happy unless we all enjoyed the ordinary functions of life, and took part in the full gamut of arts. His free community would require decentralisation, and Morris also saw the need to give up material progress. Roy Darke, Oxford

As a by-product of his excellent review of Maurice Glasmans Blue Labour, Rowan Williams provides a brilliant analogy for the cycles of political debate: a great marine creature stranded on a beach trying to get itself back into the water; heave, flop, lie there for a bit, another heave, another flop. David Murray, Wallington, Surrey

@GemmaHopePolicyGemma Hope, director of policy at the health and welfare charity Leonard CheshireGreat article in @NewStatesman highlighting how the energy crisis is affecting disabled people.How the cost-of-living crisis is pushing disabled people into poverty, Sarah Dawood, 25 August

@MirandaTHolmesRevd Dr Miranda Threlfall-Holmes Good article in @NewStatesman interviewing our curate Louis Johnson about @StBridesLpool and the work of @MicahLiverpool etc here in @LivDiocese.The cost-of-living crisis is tearing community safety nets to shreds, Fergus Butler-Gallie, 29 August

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Letter of the week: The Proms deserve better - The New Statesman

The principle underlying capitalistic society and the principle of love are incompatible.

Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving, 1956

I think that a revolutiona socialist revolutionwill break down the family structure as we know it now. The woman, being freed from her menial position, either as the lowest-paid worker or as household slave, will be out of the home more. The concept of marriage will change, because marriage right now is a kind of slave contract. Probably, in the future, marriage itself, as a contract, will not exist. People will have the freedom to relate to each other as humans, to enjoy each other intellectually, sexually, and whatever else. I dont see where there are any great advantages to the nuclear family at this point.

Denise Oliver, Palante: Voices and Photographs of the Young Lords, 1969-1971

My sister and I grew up in the shadow of our parents divorce. The failure of that marriage, and the resulting financial impact, was our lifes lesson. We understood that wed come from a broken family. The message was clear: dont let divorce happen to you.

We came of age in the 80s and 90s: Nancy Reagans Just Say No to drugs and family values rhetoric, Bill Clintons welfare reform and the defense of marriage. Clintons end of welfare as we know it promoted work and marriage as a solution to poverty (as Sarah Jaffe has noted, the preamble of the 1996 law included Marriage is the foundation of a successful society). The Defense of Marriage Act defined the institution of marriage as a union between a man and a woman and allowed states not to recognize same-sex marriages. By that time, the endless privatization of everyday life and necessary resources that we call neoliberalism, as Yasmin Nair puts it, had come into force.

My mother relied on our neighbors (themselves housewives) and family members for child care and rides to get us to and from public school while she was at work. Even though my mother had a college degree, she had spent ten years as a housewife and thus had a work gap on her rsum which didnt help in finding jobs that paid well. We lived, to borrow a phrase Bernie Sanders uses, paycheck to paycheck. My mother didnt get to do things she enjoyed: stargazing, astronomy, bike riding, or even just exercising. Her days were spent at work, and her evenings and weekends caring for children. It never occurred to me as a child to consider the love or care my mother was not getting while my sister and I were loved and cared for and managed to grow up and go off to college. What conservatives would see as a success story, I see as a kind of tragedy. I wish my mother had been, in the words of family abolitionist and writer Sophie Lewis, less alone, less burdened by caring responsibilities, less trapped.

As a child, I also understood that my family did not measure up to the family. As professor of gender, sexuality, and feminist studies Kathi Weeks has written, the family, characterized by privatized care, the (heterosexual) couple unit, and biologically related kin, is legislatively declared, legally defended, and socially prescribed in the United States. Theres a right way to do family, and a wrong way, as conservatives often tell us.

We all need familiessometimes more than onein order to survive. In a society built around scarcityof educational opportunities and jobs, healthcare, housing, and even the prospect of a dignified retirementa desire for coupledom and family makes sense. As M.E. OBrien, a writer who focuses on gender freedom and communist theory, puts it, theres a strong material logic to the couple form. If you find the right person, youre going to be okay. But beyond material considerations, even wealthy pop stars want the one and the family. John Mayer, the singer-songwriter and guitarist who rose to fame in the early 2000s, has been singing about serial monogamy for over 20 years and makes clear in his music (and in interviews) that he wants to get married and have children, a house, and a home life (things that have eluded him thus far). Pop star Adele has admitted that she was obsessed with the nuclear family my whole life because I never came from one. She got divorced a few years agoI was just embarrassed I didnt make my marriage workand said in an interview with Mayer that marriage had given her the safest feeling shed ever had.

The psychologist Erich Fromm wrote in his 1956 book The Art of Loving that In the United States to a vast extent, people are in search of romantic love, of the personal experience of love that should lead to marriage. But, according to Fromm, capitalist societies had commodified human relations, particularly the search for spouses, to the detriment of humans. He wrote about the marriage market of his time, in which people looked for the best deal of personality packages. We now have online dating, which ultimately turns dating into a market (you must pay for access to that market) where people and their profiles are like items on a menu to choose from. For Fromm, love was a way of being, an orientation, not primarily an attachment to another person or the possession of a certain status (a marriage and family). And yet, he argued, we spend so much time searching for someone to love rather than cultivating the art of loving as a practice involving the active concern for the life and the growth of that which we love.

What this has to do with the family is that we have substituted rigid notions of family structure (and family values) for the practice of loving. What is the family but a set of norms around gender, sexuality, household labor, and the pooling of resources for economic survival? We only need families because our society is organized in such a way as to make atomized families the main unit responsible for our survival in an increasingly unequal society with limited social safety nets. Yet, marriage and the nuclear family are but one way we human beings can organize ourselves. They are not inevitable, universal, or timeless despite all the cultural and political signals we get that suggest they are.1

To critique the family, then, is to level a critique of the conditions of a capitalist society that makes the nuclear family our main source of support and survival and that uses the family as a weapon to discipline or stigmatize those that dont comply with traditional family structures or norms around gender and sexuality. In this sense, the family is, in OBriens words, an obstacle to human freedom. The family must be abolished, which means a breaking open of the family to free and unleash whats good in it and to generalize that into the social body as a whole. To make the necessary forms of care available to everyone unconditionally.

As Nair has argued:

We, culture at large and/or the state, need to recognize different forms of relationships. By that, we dont mean to be prescriptive about what creates a family but to demand that the state not determine whether we live or die based on what kinds of families or kinship groups we inhabit.

Everyone can support family abolition, even those who feel there is nothing wrong with their family. Family abolition is not about breaking up individual families but about radically changing the society that makes the family structure necessary, about creating a society in which everyone is cared for. We canand mustimagine and create better ways to live and to love each other.

We are often told by conservatives that the traditional family is the bedrock of a moral society. As Sarah Jones writes in Dissent,

Marriage is a conservative institution, a way for class to reproduce itself. It is the foundation for the little platoonsfamily, church, and community. To conservatives, marriage will cure poverty and childhood trauma and gun violence. But they long specifically for so-called traditional families, with a breadwinning father and a stay-at-home mother.

Take this family values passage from the 1976 Republican Party platform:

Families must continue to be the foundation of our nation. Familiesnot government programsare the best way to make sure our children are properly nurtured, our elderly are cared for, our cultural and spiritual heritages are perpetuated, our laws are observed and our values are preserved. [I]t is imperative that our governments programs, actions, officials, and social welfare institutions must never be allowed to jeopardize the family. We fear the government may be powerful enough to destroy our families; we know that it is not powerful enough to replace them.

The platform goes on to explain how the tax code, the estate tax (to minimize disruption of already bereaved families), and welfare stipulations encouraging marriage were to be designed with the preservation of the family in mind. Government policies still confer financial benefits to married people compared to singles. From 2001- 2014 the federal government spent nearly $800 million on marriage promotion programs, often targeting poor people of color for relationship counseling. These programs have been largely ineffective in achieving stated goals. As recently as 2021, the government maintained Healthy Marriage and Responsible Fatherhood program funding; its website claims that children do best when raised by two married biological parents, a longtime claim of social conservatives which has been refuted by recent research and which ignores the fact that many cultures practice communal child rearing, also called alloparenting. Despite such public policy, marriage rates in the U.S. are now at a 20-year low.

The right-wing, Christian family values agenda picked up influence in the 1970s, according to historian Anthea Butler. In White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America, Butler explains how the Moral Majority, formed in 1979 by evangelical leaders, explicitly teamed with Republican Party politics and political action to re-create this great nation according to white, Christian standards. Around the sametime, offshoot organizations such as American Family Association, Focus on the Family, and the Family Research Council began lobbying government on evangelical concerns about the family, marriage, abortion, and education. An underlying message of these groups, she argues, was that sexual immorality, including race mixing, would be its [Americas] downfall. Butler also argues that evangelicalism is no longer simply a religious movement but rather a nationalistic political movement whose purpose is to support the hegemony of white Christian men over and against the flourishing of others. Evangelicals tend to vote in large numbers for right-wing politicians, including Donald J. Trump, who, as an accused sexual predator who has endorsed calling his daughter Ivanka a piece of ass, represents the opposite of family values.

The 1976 platform seems quaint compared to GOP Florida Sen. Rick Scotts chilling manifesto, An 11 Point Plan to Rescue America, released earlier this year. Decrying the militant lefts plan to change or destroy things like the nuclear family, gender, [and] traditional morality, Scott elaborates:

We will protect, defend, and promote the American Family at all costs. The nuclear family is crucial to civilization, it is Gods design for humanity, and it must be protected and celebrated. To say otherwise is to deny science.

While Republicans are the most rabidly in favor of the heterosexual marriage-based family, both Republicans and Democrats use rhetoric around the family to appeal to voters, sometimes as part of the ongoing culture wars. Conservatives invoke family values to oppose everything from abortion, feminism, pornography, comprehensive sex education, and divorce to homosexuality, rights for trans people, same-sex marriage, critical race theory, and Black Lives Matter. Democrats often refer to families in the context of work: working families, a phrase frequently used by Bernie Sanders, or, as noted in the 2020 DNC platform: Enacting Robust Work-Family Policies, in which the Democrats claim to support 12 weeks of paid family and medical leave for all workers and family units. (Not only have the Democrats failed to pass such a policy, were left to wonder what a family unit is defined as.) As Lewis has argued, to attack the family is unthinkable in our current politics. Nowhere on the party-political spectrum can one find proposals to dethrone the family, hasten its demise, or even decenter it in policy.

While conservatives are preoccupied with the family as a force for moral good, they are not as attentive to the ways in which the family harms people. As Lewis pointed out, feminist writer Madeline Lane-McKinley predicted early in 2020 that the pandemic would expose the dark underbelly of family and home life:

Households are capitalisms pressure cookers. This crisis will see a surge in houseworkcleaning, cooking, caretaking, but also child abuse, molestation, intimate partner rape, psychological torture, and more. Not a time to forget to abolish the family.

Indeed, there has been a significant rise in domestic violence worldwide since the start of the pandemic. Lewis has pointed out that the vast majority of queerphobic and sexualized violence takes place within the family. According to a 2019 Congressional Research Service report on homeless youth, LGBTQ youth face increased risk of homelessness, often because they are forced out of their homes due to negative reactions from family when they come out. As journalist Rachel Louise Snyder wrote in her 2019 book No Visible Bruises: What We Dont Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us, domestic violence is responsible for 50 percent of cases of homelessness for women and is the third leading cause of homelessness in the U.S. Thus, Snyder writes, the private violence within families has vastly public consequences.

For many, family violence often has lasting effects. Sociologist Jennifer M. Silva interviewed 100 young working class adults (defined as adults whose fathers had not obtained a bachelors degree) for her 2013 book Coming up Short: Working-Class Adulthood in an Age of Uncertainty. Silva noted that for many of the respondents in her book, hurtful and agonizing betrayals within the family lie at the root of their personal demons. The adults in Silvas cohort spent tremendous amounts of energy, sometimes unsuccessfully, trying to heal themselves from their family traumas.

As Nicole Sussner Rodgers and Julie Kohler write in The Nation, for the Right, the battle may be about the uterus, but the war is for the future of the family. Indeed, we are often told that the traditional family is in crisis. David Brooks 2020 Atlantic article, The Nuclear Family was a Mistake, argues that a lack of extended family (he laments the rise of single-parent and chaotic families) has increased inequality in our society. Popular books by academics also note the decline of the traditional family, or a family values-based way of life, arguing that non-traditional family structures are implicated in troubling social phenomena such as inequality and deaths of despair. Sociologist Robert D. Putman describes the opportunity gap between children born to parents with and without a college degree in his 2015 book Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis, noting different family structures (among other characteristics) between the educated and uneducated. Economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton describe deaths from suicide, alcoholism, and drug overdoses among the white working class in their 2020 book Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism. Case and Deaton come to ominous conclusions. A lack of family values can be, in their view, an important part of a pathway to despair. And while the authors admit that the impacts of lifestyle choices do not have easily quantifiable values, the books heavy moralizing on such matters (for instance, the error unmarried women make in having children) is hard to ignore; the effect is to de-emphasize the importance of systemic policies that can be legislated, such as improved wages and working conditions, universal health care, free college, public housing, and universal child care and pre-K.

Conservatives are right that the family is in crisisto the extent that crisis means that the structures of peoples lives (their marital status, their living arrangements, their decisions regarding reproduction) often reflect their overall level of economic security (or lack thereof ). The traditional family has become unattainable for many, especially the working class. As Silva writes:

Traditional markers of adulthoodleaving home, completing school, establishing financial independence, marriage, and childbearinghave become strikingly delayed or even foregone in the latter half of the twentieth century, particularly for the working class.

She notes that the majority of her respondents dealt with unstable and low-paying service jobs, credit card debt, family dissolution, and illness and work-related disabilities, domestic violence, and constant financial stress. In her study sample, respondents were haunted by an idealized working-class life of the past: of marriage, gendered norms (male breadwinner, female homemaker), home ownership, and having children. But for most, the overall instability of their lives precluded any chance of achieving this kind of life. This is a point that Putnam also concedes: Unemployment, underemployment, and poor economic prospects discourage and undermine stable relationshipsthat is the nearly universal finding of many studies, both qualitative and quantitative, he writes in Our Kids.

The family is in crisis, yet the family is so traditional. How can it be both?

The story of the traditional family is, like most myths, a mixture of truth and fantasy. As marriage historian Stephanie Coontz writes in The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap, Like most visions of a golden age, the traditional family evaporates on closer examination. It is an ahistorical amalgam of structures, values, and behaviors that never coexisted in the same time and place. Nonetheless, what we think of as the traditional family with heterosexual couple, male breadwinner, female housewife, and children became possible due to the convergence of multiple factors in the early and mid 20th century.

The workers movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, bolstered by unions, led to improved wages; the male breadwinner family was promoted as a desirable feature of (white) working-class life. The Depression era saw a disruption of the family, as massive unemployment and destitution led to homelessness. People sought refuge in shantytowns called Hoovervilles or moved in with others when possible. Children were unable to attend school; women turned to sex work; there was the sense that the family was broken. The New Deal response led the state to be more actively involved in the family, as this was the period which gave us Social Security and Aid to Dependent Children, among other programs. In Work Wont Love You Back, Sarah Jaffe writes that the New Deal period in the U.S.

gave us the thing we think of as the traditional family: the suburban two point five-kid picket-fence white nuclear household, June Cleaver mom at home making dinner in high heels and waiting for her husband to come home from his eight-hour day in his five-day workweek.

Putnam notes that around the mid 20th century, the male breadwinner nuclear family became common.

But since the 70s, a number of changes (including the stagnation or decrease of working-class wages and the shifting of gender roles, with women entering the workforce and obtaining higher education) have brought about the collapse of the family and a diversification of structures. OBrien writes:

The male-breadwinner family form is no longer characteristic of any sector of society, and has lost its social hegemony due to the convergence of several simultaneous trends. In its place, weve seen the dramatic and steady growth of dual-wage earner households, of people choosing not to partner or marry, of atomized and fragmented family structures. These dynamics have produced a heterogeneous array of family forms in working-class life.

In Our Kids, Putnam describes what he calls a two-tier family system of the U.S., which he says has predominated for the last 30 or so years (recall that the book was written in 2015). He breaks up society broadly into thirds: upper third is college educated, middle third has some post-secondary education, and bottom third has no more than a high school diploma. For the upper third, college-educated of society, theres the neo-traditional model in which the educated tend to marry each other and both spouses work; these families can afford to pay for labor and childcare that was traditionally carried out by a housewife. For the lower third of society, there are blended families, in which adults tend not to marry and tend to have children with multiple partners, sometimes called fragile families, a phrase Putnam attributes to the late sociologist Sara McLanahan. Much is made of these structures and how the children of the neo-traditional model enjoy better life outcomes than those unfortunate to be raised in the lower model. Putnam is careful to acknowledge that correlation is not causation. But there is an underlying assumption in his book: namely, that if we could make the lower third more like the upper third, more children could do better in life. The tendency is to think of family structure as something that needs fixing instead of simply giving care to everyone. (When I read about researchers discovering things that tend to be correlated with good outcomes for people (multiple parental incomes, education, stable housing, and so forth), I wonder why the argument isnt just to give people those things. Its like seeing someone floundering in water and refusing to throw them a life jacket or buoy.)

Rather than think of the collapse of the traditional family as a sign of moral degeneration of the citizenry, though, we ought to think of it as the inevitable fate of an institution that was never natural or stable to begin with.

Academic and political commentator Irami Osei-Frimpong recently argued (in the context of the Supreme Court leak about overturning Roe v. Wade) that much of the U.S. culture wars, including the question of abortion, boils down to a question of Who Gets to Have Sex? and under what conditions. The who can refer to race, gender, sexual orientation, class, or employment or marital status. The conditions can refer to what sex is for: Pleasure? Procreation? Exchange of money? Something else? The typical narrative on the Right is that heterosexual, marriage-based, procreative sex is legitimate, and behavior different from this is to be dismissed (and even outlawed) as an abomination. Sen. Rick Scott claims this narrative is based on science. But he is mixing value judgments with scientific facts. Science provides tools and observations we can use to understand the world but doesnt constitute a value system for those observations.

Scott claims that science is the basis of the family as Gods design for humanity and that science dictates strict gender binaries of male and female (implied as the basis of the pair bond). Facts are facts, the earth is round, the sun is hot, there are two genders to say otherwise is to deny science. When Scott conflates his values with other documented facts about the universe, he isnt just co-opting the vocabulary of liberal wokeness (Listen to the scientists, per President Biden). His argument goes much deeper. Hes promoting the family almost as if it were human nature.2

A simple consideration of other cultures different from our own provides examples of human behavior that do not adhere to Scotts story about the purpose of sex and marriage. One example comes from David Graebers Debt: The First 5,000 Years. In the book, Graeber cited anthropological observations of barter ceremonies between groups of neighboring people. In Australia, the Gunwinggu people were noted to carry out a barter ceremony called dzamalag. These elaborate ritualsthe one Graeber cited happened in the 1940sinvolved singing, dancing, and sex between members of the different groups, even individuals who were noted to be married. (Their idea of marriage must have been different from our own.) The Mosuo people in China, as another example, are a matriarchal society in which women have a great degree of sexual freedom:

Men and women practise what is known as a walking marriagean elegant term for what are essentially furtive, nocturnal hook-ups with lovers known as axia. A mans hat hung on the door handle of a womans quarters is a sign to other men not to enter. These range from one-night stands to regular encounters that deepen into exclusive, life-long partnershipsand may or may not end in pregnancy. But couples never live together, and no one says, I do.

Also consider that in Islam, the second most practiced faith in the world, there exists a temporary marriage of varying lengths called a mutah. While it is not practiced uniformly and has been likened by some within the faith to a form of prostitution because it involves the payment of money to the woman, the fact that this arrangement could be considered legitimate reveals how arbitrary (and culturally determined) our sexual mores can be. Just as we can observe a range of sexual and social behaviors among humans, sanctioned (or not) by religion or culture, it turns out that the U.S family as we know it also arose from specific historical conditions.

The nuclear family as promoted by the state has been imposed upon non-white and immigrant populations since colonial times. Consider the case of Native Americans. As Stephanie Coontz explains in The Way We Never Were, colonialists

forced Native American extended families off their collective property and onto single-family plots. They made Indian men the public representatives of families, ignoring the traditional role of women in community leadership, and placed Indian children in boarding schools to eradicate traditional Native American values.

Discoveries of mass graves at sites of these boarding schools reveal just one aspect of the larger genocide of Native people (survivors also recall rampant sexual abuse by Catholic officials at these religious schools).

Professor of Native studies Kim TallBear explains further that settler sexuality rested on notions of binary sexes, hetero-normativity, and sexual monogamy. Quoting Cree-Mtis feminist Kim Anderson in Making Kin Not Population, TallBear writes,

One of the biggest targets of colonialism was the Indigenous family in which women had occupied positions of authority and controlled property. The colonial state targeted womens power, tying land tenure rights to heterosexual, one-on-one, lifelong marriages, thus tying womens economic well being to men who legally controlled the property. Indeed, women themselves became property.

TallBear describes Native genders and sexual relationships as more fluid than that of the settlersespecially the rigid notion of monogamy, which she says can be considered a form of hoarding another persons body. Caretaking and domestic duties, she notes, were also carried out more diffusely, among extended kinship relationships. Thus, the idea of a single mother is nonsensical.

African American families have faced family-related oppression since the days of slavery. Most obviously, kidnapping African people to work in bondage was a form of destruction to those societies; slave families were routinely separated at the auction block. Once freed from slavery, Black people were forced into tenant sharecropping under the white backlash to Reconstruction which gave us Jim Crow. Sharecropping conditions favored marriage; at the same time, the workers movement gains of the early 20th century were denied to Black people; the New Deal also excluded domestic and agricultural workers, sectors where Black workers were concentrated. Thus, the male-breadwinner wage was largely inaccessible to Black men and families.

The Black family has been and continues to be pathologized and directly targeted by policy. The oft-mentioned Moynihan Report of 1965 (The Negro Family: The Case for National Action), which blamed Black mothers for the disintegration of the Black family and linked Black family demise to the urban unrest of the period, was used to justify the burgeoning war on crime that targeted neighborhoods of color. In Our Kids, Putnam admits that there are three policy choices that probably did contribute to [the] family breakdown that his book is concerned with: the war on drugs, three strikes sentencing, and the sharp increase in incarceration. This is a profound admission that I wish intellectuals across the political spectrumconservatives in particularwould engage with. To acknowledge that law and order policies, which are accepted by liberals and conservatives alike, are deleterious to families would be quite an admission indeed.

For a society so concerned about the family, the U.S. has traumatized the most vulnerable members of the familychildrenas a matter of official policy. As professor of law and sociology Dorothy Roberts has written:

Since its inception, the United States has wielded child removal to terrorize, control, and disintegrate racialized population: enslaved African families, emancipated Black children held captive as apprentices by their former enslavers, Indigenous children kidnapped and confined to boarding schools under a federal campaign of tribal decimation, and European immigrant children swept up from urban slums by elite charities and put to work on distant farms.

Finally, the state of U.S. children needs to be mentioned. Our child poverty rate is higher than many peer nations; social mobility has decreased; more than 140,000 U.S. children have been orphaned due to loss of caregivers from COVID; and a shortage of infant formula drags on (Pete Buttigieg matter-of-factly said that our capitalist economy doesnt make baby formula). Finally, the cruel family separations at the U.S.-Mexico border are also a reminder that the integrity of those families does not matter to the state. The U.S. does not seem to act like a society that cares enough about all children and their families.

In To Abolish the Family: The Working-Class Family and Gender Liberation in Capitalist Development, OBrien explains that the Left has long critiqued the traditional family, from Marx and Engels, who saw the family as a key part of the bourgeois social and economic order (particularly via inheritance), to 19th century utopian socialists and the anti-capitalist feminists and queer radicals of the 1970s. Central to the leftist critique is the fact that the family is an institution that has been critical to the functioning of capitalism. Workers have to be fed, clothed, housed, and taken care of, and the household is the site where this care (and sexual reproduction, or the creation of new workers) takes place. Labor is gendered in the household, with women often doing unpaid work. The family also enables people who dont or cant workinfants and children, the elderly, and the disabled and unemployedto receive care. The family is where we are supposed to get all the emotional and physical care we need. The family is where we are made dependent on a wage laborerand disciplined in terms of gender roles and expression.

While liberal feminists wanted women to get out of the house and to secure equality in the workplace, radical feminists saw husbands as bosses in their own right. Radicals of the late 60s and 70s sought the abolition of the male-breadwinner, heterosexual nuclear family form as a means towards full sexual and gender freedom. But over time, feminists began to favor diversity of family form, which remains the dominant feminist approach to the politics of the family since the 1990s, writes Weeks. Yet diversification and representationmaking capitalist institutions (marriage, the military, politics) more friendly and inclusive to racial and ethnic minorities, LGBTQ people, or others who have been marginalizedare not radical. A radical leftist vision is one that seeks to dismantle or transform these institutions entirely, including the family.

As Weeks points out, popular leftist policy proposals around health insurance and wages could decrease our dependence on the family structure. These policies would compensate for injustices exacerbated by the family or obviate the need for the family altogether: policies like Medicare for All, free college and student debt cancellation, universal basic income (UBI), and a $25 minimum wage, just to name a few. With Medicare for All, healthcare benefits would not be tied to marital status; young people wouldnt get kicked off their parents insurance at a certain age. With free college, theres no need to take on mountains of debt to get a college degree, or to depend on parents who might be unwilling or unable to fill out financial aid forms or contribute to the cost of education. With UBI and higher wages, people do not have to stay dependent upon other wage earners or the living arrangements sometimes dictated by those relationships. These policies increase human freedom and thus our freedom from the confines of the family structure.

And yet, as Weeks explains, family abolition is more than a series of policies. Its a political project to create an entirely different society in which everyones needs are met. In Communizing Care, OBrien describes post-revolutionary, communist arrangements in which people care for each other in larger structures loosely based on the phalansteries conceived of by the utopianist Charles Fourier (the phalansteries were to rescue people from what Fourier saw as the dreadfulness of married life). These are not counterculture communes that exist within capitalism but true post-capitalist structures in which groups of a couple hundred people or so are in charge of taking care of everyone in the group and coordinating with other communes the production and distribution of goods and services that people need to live.

Whats especially notable about OBriens vision of the phalansteries is that there is a concern for everyones well-being, sexual needs as collective concerns, as well as attention and sensitivity to vulnerable people, to biological variation [what] we now define as disability, neurodivergence, or mental illness. While people would be free to form their own kinship units, including with biological relatives, the family as it is known would not form any kind of economic unit as in current life. We can imagine communal parenting, freedom of expression for sexuality and gender, and relationships not based on economic coercion.

The roots of such structures can be seen in the caring communities that pop up in protest movements such as Occupy Wall Street in 2011 or Standing Rock, the Indigenous-led protest movement against the Dakota Access Pipeline, or DAPL, north of the Standing Rock Indian Reservation, in 2016. (OBrien describes such protest kitchens as part of insurrections as key features of family abolition.) In Our History is the Future, Native writer Nick Estes describes camp life at the site of #NoDAPL:

The main camp was a fully functioning city. There was no running water, but the Cannon Ball Community Center opened its doors for showers. There was no electricity, but Prairie Knights Casino, the tribal casino two miles up the road, had Wi-Fi. And there were no flushable toilets, but Standing Rock paid for porta potties. Where physical infrastructure lacked, an infrastructure of Indigenous resistance and caretaking of relations proliferatedof living and being in community according to Indigenous valueswhich for the most part kept people safe and warm. The main kitchen served three hot meals a day. (At its height there were about thirteen free camp kitchens and a half dozen medic tents.) Elders and children ate first, following a meal prayer. If there were guests they ate first. The donations tent was well stocked with sleeping bags, blankets, tents, socks, gloves, hats, boots, and so forth. Everyone was fed and clothed. Everyone had a place. At camp check-in, bodies were needed to cook, dig compost holes, chop wood, take care of children, give rides to Walmart, among other tasks. Many quit their jobs, instead making it their full-time work to cook and to keep others warm and safe.

The camp included a day school for children as well as direct action training. (And to be clear, family abolition is not about idealizing makeshift camp structures of survival or about making our living conditions less comfortable than we might imagine. The camps illustrate the how and the why of family abolition, not the end goals for the material circumstances of our lives.)

In August 2020, the Intercepted podcast Escape from the Nuclear Family featured a story about a group of people weathering the pandemic in Oakland, California. Four families had lived together for 15 years in a democratic community with friends. They talked about how their communal life enabled them to deal with the stress of the pandemic.

Its a lifesaver, you know, to have other people you know and trust and who care about you and care about your children being a part of your life. We need each other to be our best selves because its not as simple as an act of will. And so having that extra support around parenting and even just coordinating knowing that theres always people around and that my kids feel comfortable and safe. Thats hugely important and it creates an enormous amount of resilience in our ability to navigate disturbances, whether theyre small or big.

A policy change we can make now is to build public housing designed with social interactions in mind instead of more unaffordable single-family homes.

Transitioning from isolated units to communal living environments will be challenging; humans are complex and conflict-prone. A post-nuclear family society does not portend freedom from conflict or bad behavior; people could still harm each other. But it does mean people have the opportunity to change their surroundings if their relationships are not working out and would have more support instead of isolation within an abusive environment. The goal is also freedom from the economic constraints under capitalism that make conflict and violence a routine part of human interactions, whether within families or on the streets or in our jobs.

Humans are social creatures, and we evolved to cooperate with others for our survival. We face an epidemic of loneliness and deaths of despair in our society. As people who make it to old age live longer, we will need more care, not less. We need more community and more support, not less.

We also need the state to stop tying peoples relationship choices to taxes and to stop promoting one way (marriage) to bond with another person.

In todays language of the family, were to have it all: work-life balance. Were to work full time and (if we can afford it) hire other women to clean the house, do laundry, and care for children or other family members. As many on the Left have pointed out, society will pay people (often women, and often not much) to take care of children or the elderlyas long as those children and elderly are somebody elses family members. In reality, society should collectively pay for the care of people of all ages no matter who does the caring. Perhaps the most important point of family abolition is the idea of creating a society rooted in love for everyone, not just ones genetic kin. To love everyone means to be actively concerned with their care and growth, as Fromm put it. We should want care for everyone. As Lewis argues:

When you love someone, it simply makes no sense to endorse a social technology that isolates them; privatizes their lifeworld, arbitrarily assigns their dwelling-place, class, and very identity in law; and drastically circumscribes their sphere of intimate, interdependent ties.

The institution of the familyand those who defend itcontinues to limit our freedom, as current developments around gender, reproduction, and sexuality show. The federal right to an abortion has been overturned, and we are in the midst of a moral panic as the right promotes false narratives about drag queens and transgender people as sexual predators.

As Robin D. G. Kelley explains in Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, freedom and love are revolutionary ideas, and we need both to imagine a better world. To imagine a society free from the oppression of the family, we need to imagine an expansion of love, not a contraction of it. An inclusivity of love for everyone, not the stifling exclusivity imposed by the family.

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Why We Should Abolish the Family Current Affairs - Current Affairs

unsplash / maria oswalt

On the Need for Honest Abolitionists.

Throughout my work of abolition, Ive committed to standing with those that nobody else will. The ones who have no remorse. The ones who wish they could kill again. The ones that you would never want to meet on the street. While such statements are not true of all of the guys I work with, they are true of some of them.

I do not believe in progress without truth. If we are going to move forward as an abolition movement, we must tell the truth. Unfortunately, I dont believe that we currently know how. For far too long, we have told partial truths. We constantly speak of the need to recognize the humanity of folks on death rowbut we fail to speak of the many evil things that they have doneand in the process we dehumanize them by not giving them the chance to repent. It seems that we would rather look past such things. Then, we are amazed when society cant see the humanity of these folks when they are about to be executedthey cant see the humanity because we havent showed it to themwe have tried to sell the public a story of humanity that is partial, incomplete and ultimately false. There can be no truth without truth. We will never be successful until we completely lean into the complexity of our cause. Our work has to begin in evil and end in salvationif we dont deal with the evil then we can never find the salvationbut too often we want to start in salvationwhich is why people most often think that were nuts. Its strangebut I have no doubt that more people are being executed because we spend all of our time trying to humanize/rationalize folk on death rowinstead of leaning into the complexities of evil and telling the truth.

Let me make it plain, some of the people that I have worked with on various death rows are not people I would ever want to live next door to my family under any circumstanceor for that matter even meet on the street. Why are we scared to make such a statement? These folks are not worthlessthey have valuebut theyre not angelsmany are from ittheyre humansand by making them out to be angelswe are dehumanizing them. The zealous efforts of the movement to humanize has led to dehumanizationto creating fables when we need the truth. People need to hear about those who have no remorsethose who wish they could kill againthose you would never meet on the streetbecause if we can save those we can save them allbut we have to tell the truth. What they did is indispensably important to what they can be. What we have done is indispensably important to what we can become. We are all a part of all that we have met. Indeed, truth is the only path to real humanizationour collective salvation.

Amen.

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On the Need for Honest Abolitionists. | Jeff Hood - Patheos

Opponents of the new constitution cheer in the streets of Santiago, Chile, on Sunday night after results showed voters rejected a proposed new constitution. Matias Basualdo/AP hide caption

Opponents of the new constitution cheer in the streets of Santiago, Chile, on Sunday night after results showed voters rejected a proposed new constitution.

Chile spent the past two years writing a progressive new constitution, but the document was so soundly spurned by voters on Sunday that the result was clear less than two hours after the polls closed.

Nearly 62% of Chileans rejected the draft Magna Carta that was designed to replace the current one written during the country's military dictatorship while just 38% voted to accept it, according to official returns.

Although nearly every public opinion survey suggested the draft constitution was in trouble, Sunday's results were shockingly lopsided and a huge blow for President Gabriel Boric, a leftist elected last year largely on his pledge to shepherd through passage of a new constitution.

"As president I receive this message with a lot of humility," Boric, who is 36 and is Latin America's youngest president, said in a TV address Sunday night. "You have to listen to the voice of the people."

News that the "rejection" vote had prevailed sparked celebrations in Santiago, the capital, where lines of drivers honked their car horns and people gathered outside to chant and toast victory.

"We're happy because, really, we all want a new constitution, but one that is done right and this one didn't fulfill the expectations of the majority," Lorena Cornejo, 34, told the Associated Press, as she waved a Chilean flag. "Now we have to work for a new one that unites us. This one didn't represent us and that was clear in the vote."

In a traditionally conservative country married couples couldn't get divorced in Chile until 2004 many voters considered the new constitution too liberal. It was written by an elected special assembly dominated by leftists and progressives while only about one-third of the 155 delegates were conservatives.

The text called for legalized abortion, gender parity in government offices, the abolition of Chile's senate and the establishment of autonomous Indigenous territories. It included vast new protections for the environment that, according to critics, could have put the brakes on the country's lucrative copper mining industry. It also called for universal health care and the right to decent housing, education and pensions, which would have required steep tax increases.

People line up to vote on a proposed new constitution in Santiago on Sunday. Matias Basualdo/AP hide caption

People line up to vote on a proposed new constitution in Santiago on Sunday.

"We don't have the financial capacity to pay for all of these things," said Mitzi Rojas, an architect in Santiago who voted against the constitution.

The effort to remake Chile's governing guidelines stems from a deep political crisis. For decades the country was viewed as an economic powerhouse and a Latin American success story. But frustration over inequality and the high cost of health care, education and public transportation sparked violent protests in 2019 that nearly brought down Chile's right-wing government.

To address protesters' concerns and convince them to call off their demonstrations, Boric who was then an opposition congressman helped cut a deal to begin the long, complicated process of writing a new constitution.

The current one was written in 1980 under dictator Augusto Pinochet, who ruled Chile for 17 years and calls for private sector involvement in education, pensions and health care. Democracy was restored in 1990. But even though most nations that undergo momentous political transformations write new constitutions to reflect these new realities, Chile never got around to it.

"The original sin of the current constitution is that it was written during the dictatorship," said Rodrigo Espinoza, a political science professor at Diego Portales University in Santiago. "It has gone through reforms but is still seen as illegitimate."

In a 2020 referendum nearly 80% of Chileans voted to draft a new one.

However, experts say the best constitutions are usually short and to the point. By contrast, the document produced by Chile's special assembly was a confusing collection of 388 articles, said Claudio Fuentes, a Santiago political analyst. Another problem, he said, was a vast disinformation campaign that spread lies including claims that under the new constitution the government would disarm the police and confiscate people's homes.

Boric acknowledged these problems in his TV address but he also vowed to lead a new constitutional rewrite process.

"I commit to put my all my energies into building a new constitutional process alongside congress and civil society," said Boric, who plans to meet with the heads of political parties and both houses of congress on Monday.

Boric added that whoever drafts the next version whether its Congress or a special assembly they will have to produce a constitution that unites Chileans rather than divides them.

See more here:

Chile rejects a progressive constitution with big changes - NPR

At the New York Women's House of Detention, three inmates stare out the windows, 1941. (Photo by Irving Haberman / IH Images / Getty Images)

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Hugh Ryan became interested in the Womens House of Detention while writing his first book, When Brooklyn Was Queer. The prison, which operated on Greenwich Avenue in New York Citys Greenwich Village from 1931 to 1971, kept coming up in his research: a queer woman who had passed through it, a relationship that had started inside its walls. But it was a historical tour of the Village with Stonewall veteran Jay Toole, who did several stints in the House of D, that was revelatory for Ryan.1

Jay said, I do these tours because young people have forgotten, he recalled. And I thought, Thats my job as a historianto find the people in my community who say, Im being forgotten about, and to uplift their stories.2

Now, with The Womens House of Detention: A Queer History of a Forgotten Prison, Ryan has done just that. The book is an exhaustively researched history of the prison, beginning with its predecessor, the Womens Court, and continuing through its demolition in 1974. Along the way, we encounter figures from the familiar (Angela Davis) to the anonymous (Charlotte B.) in an engaging story that presents a compelling argument for a queer politics of abolition.3

In a recent conversation, Ryan and I talked about abolitionism, solidarity across liberation movements in the 1960s, and the unique role of queerness in historical analysis. This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.4

Naomi Gordon-Loebl5

Naomi Gordon-Loebl: Talk to me about what your research process was like for this book. 6

Hugh Ryan: My first year was spent asking, Where are the stories as close as possible to the point of view of the women and trans folks who were incarcerated? I didnt want to tell the story from the point of view of the prison, because it would be a terrible story and it would be fake.7 Current Issue

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So I thought, There are two ways you end up in the archive. Either you have power, so your stuff is preserved. Orsomeone else has power over you. You become the raw material for their archive. When prisons do that, they reduce people down to fungible numbers. I needed to move away from that kind of power over to a power over that was at least somewhat more interested in the lives and voices of these people. And thats when I hit on social workers. At the time, there was an intimate connection between social workers working with incarcerated women (or people seen as women) and queerness. Queerness was a reason you could be arrested, or it could develop in you in prison; or being too butch could ensure that you would never be a wife or a maidthe only two jobs women could haveand you would go to prison for stealing, or something like that. So I knew that social workers were talking about the issues I needed to be talking about.8

I found this collection at the New York Public Library called The Womens Prison Association. Every box was under lock and key, and no one had ever looked at them. I reached out to the WPA, and they said yes immediately. But they said, We dont think youre going to find the information youre looking for. We dont think we were thinking about queer issues in the 30s and 40s.9

But they absolutely were. Within two hours of getting into the case files, I found one of the essential stories from the book. The story of Charlotte B. was one of the first files I came across. It was hundreds of pages long, and it followed her for decades.10

NGL: Wow, that must have been such a lightning-strike moment there. 11

HR: I shrieked in the archives!12

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NGL: Could you tell me about how abolition influenced your writing of the book? 13

HR: When I came to this book, I was not a fan of prisonsI probably would have said they were broken and needed to be fixed. But in doing the research and seeing the consistency with which the same problems came up over and over again, it became clear that prisons did not solve anything. No one involved seemed to think they would solve anything. And it didnt matter if it was a liberal administration or a conservative administrationthe only reform that ever happened was more money for human cages, bigger prisons farther away.14

And when I grappled with that, I had to turn to abolitionists. I read folks who were incarcerated in the House of D, like Angela Davis, but also modern abolitionists like Mariame Kaba. Once you disconnect from the idea that prisons are about justice or rehabilitation, you start to see what they really do and how they really function. And the only people who had a sensible, working understanding of that were abolitionistslargely Black women who were from communities that were over-policed and over-incarcerated. Not entirely, but largely. So I had to learn from that, and to see that this was not about15

a broken system; this was about a marvelously efficient system that was doing exactly what it was supposed to do.16

Prisons remain resistant to reform because they dont do what we think they do. They warehouse all the people we have abandoned with our broken safety net, our broken insurance system, our broken health care system, our broken education systemall of the places that abandon people. Our stateinstead of supporting people, or giving them safety nets, or supporting interventions that would allow them to stand on their feetfunds prisons to gobble them up. Thats the only way that prisons make any sense.17

I just didnt understand that. And Im a little ashamed of that. I should have been listening to more people. I should have known more. It took seeing the consistency of it in the record for decades to drive it home to me. And then engaging with abolitionist thought and abolitionist organizations helped sharpen my thinking.18

NGL: Whats great about the framing of the book as an abolitionist text is that it offers some suggestions for moving forwardnot just in terms of the politics around incarceration, but also queer politics. 19

HR: When we think about the fact that 40 percent of the people incarcerated in womens facilities today identify as LGBTQ, but we dont have laws that are focused on, for example, the arrest of lesbians, that tells us that the system is doing something that has nothing to do with justice or the law. Thats why the framing for the book is abolition. Abolition allowed me to see a more useful rubric for the queer movement that emphasizes care and bodily autonomy. Those are things that I can organize around as a queer personnot just Can I, as a gay man, get married? when marriage is an unequal institution that our government shouldnt be funding. Of course, I want that written inequality in the law destroyed, but Im more interested in a broader, deeper sense of equality that helps the community as a whole.20

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NGL: One of the things that the book explores is this fascinating duality: On the one hand, prisons are sites of oppression, dehumanization, violenceand at the same time, the Womens House of D was a space of queer community, connectiona hub for the Village in some ways. 21

HR: You know Allan Brubs book, Coming Out Under Fire? He talks about how World War II created the idea of homosexuality. Homosexuality existed, obviously, but it was explained to everyone who entered the service: They measured you, they tested you, and they told you about homosexuality. They defined it as this awful thingbut then people had their own experiences.22

The prison, particularly the House of D, does that for folks who have been arrested and incarcerated. In the earliest files, from the 1930s and 40s, many of these people came in saying, I knew about my desire. I knew, as Charlotte says, that women looked up to me like they would a dazzling football hero. But they didnt know the word homosexual, and they didnt know to feel some kind of way about it. And the prison did that for them.23

And then during the 50s and 60s, when bars were being shut down, the police were raiding private parties, and you could get arrested or beaten up on the streetthe one place the government was supporting as a site of queerness was the House of D, because they were arresting all the lesbians and trans guys and nonbinary folks and putting them there. They created that community, and that community then recreated the Village. Its foundational to the identity of the Village and to why the Village is the lesbian neighborhood in New York that it is.24

NGL: Language about the identities of folks in the past has become so politicized; theres so much litigation of what the specific identity was of such-and-such a historical queer person. And to me, those conversations miss the pointwere projecting language onto the past. I really admire the way you handle these questions in the book.25

HR: I get very frustrated when someone tries to boil this down to Was X person in the past a lesbian, or were they trans? Because in their time period, they had their own words for themselves. In a Victorian society, there was no conception of a sexual orientation. When we project one identity into the past, we project our whole world.26

I think that, often, what people are trying to do when they project these identities backward is to claim the past. But I dont think we need to do that to claim the past. Im not an identitarian in my history. Id much rather use a materialist basis that says, These practices are non-gender-normative for their time period. These practices are indicative of homoeroticism. These practices are indicative of queerness.27

Queerness, for me, functions a little differently from the rest of these words. The reason I use queer historically, as opposed to lesbian or gay or bisexual or trans, is that queer doesnt conjure up a specific typology of sexual or gender identity. Instead, queer indexes your sexual identity or gender identity in the hierarchy of your time period. So a queer person is one who is marginalized because of their gender or sexual identity. Its the marginalization that is the through linethe marginalization based on sex, based on the body, based on erotics.28

NGL: What Im interested in, as a queer person myself, is finding points of connection historically: Knowing that someone almost a century ago had a similar feeling to me, even if they would have described it in different words, is really moving. Im way more interested in those connections than I am in litigating what it would have been called. 29

HR: I always go back to the 19th-century invert model. The concept of the invert collapses and condenses our ideas today of being homosexual, being trans, and being intersex. It was assumed it was part of your body. In Victorian times, men were expected to spend all their time with men, express their love for other men, sleep in the same bed, etc. The same was true for women. All of these homosocial behaviors made homosexuality invisible, both to the world and to homosexuals themselves, largely. They understood that some people might be receptive or not. But they didnt think of themselves as a different kind of person.30

But inverts were a whole other class. An invert in todays time might identify as an effeminate gay man, or they might identify as a trans woman. Those are two groups that we think of today as being in different categories and which have different concerns. But we go back to the 19th century, and that was one group with one set of concerns. This bright line of sexual orientation that we think is the primary indicator of desire didnt matter all that much back then.31

Thats a different world, and thats powerful: It says that the whole world could be different in fundamental ways. Im not looking back on the past and saying, These fucking idiots, they didnt understand what sexual orientation wasthey were actually gay! Instead Im saying, Here are the concepts you lived in the world with; heres how you organized yourself. Its a different model. Its not wrong or right; its just different.32

Instead of flat containers, Im more interested in pathways. I think that a lot of the folks who might fit inside the circle of gay, for instance, are traveling on different paths. The behavior that our culture thinks matters is the same, but why it is being expressed, how we arrived at this state, how we think about the worldthats different for different groups inside this gay umbrella. The more we can allow ourselves to imagine that to be true for people in the past, the more we can start to imagine it for ourselves as well.33

NGL: The point is not to collapse difference, obviously. Its just to say that identity is specific to our time, to our culture. Even the very idea of personal identity is really a modern concept. 34

HR: Weve gotten very confused, I think, where we think identity is real. Like, its not real, but its true. Its like saying, Im a Democrat. Theres not a thing in nature that we can point to that is called a Democrat. And you and I might use that word and mean totally different things. Its a useful organizing principle and allows us to see certain things the same way from a distance. But you get up close, and its very different for everyone inside that container.35

I think we need to allow ourselves more thinking that way around gender and sexual orientation. But were so caught up in this [notion of] Im born this way. You have to give me rights, because I couldnt be something better. Which makes me want to vomit. I dont care if you were born this way or if you chose to be this wayits your right to be this way. It should not be this biological essentialism. But we are very essentialist about identities, and we police the boundaries of them. Because our rights are based on saying, I was born like this. I have no choice. And I just dont find that kind of thinking to be very helpful.36

NGL: Tell me about something that surprised you in your writing of the book. 37

HR: One thing that was flooring for me was to see how closely interconnected the Black Panther Party and the Gay Liberation Front were through specifically the House of D. Not just the larger, general organizational connections, but Afeni Shakur and Joan Bird being there on the night of Stonewall. The Gay Liberation Front being founded to support the Black Panthers, who were in the prison at that moment. The fact that the Gay Liberation Fronts first protest was outside the prison. We never talk about that!38

When Huey P. Newton got out of jail and came to New York, he met with reporters in Jane Fondas apartment. And Afeni Shakur called the Gay Liberation Front and said, Send people over here so that we can meet afterwards and talk about our concernsso that we can work together. Its so clear that these folks saw the interconnections between queer oppression, Black oppression, Latino oppression. All of these things flow through the prison-industrial complex, and that was spoken about openly. And thats why I think groups like the Gay Liberation Front and the Black Panthers had a real vision for transforming society. They werent looking at siloed identities; they were looking at the ways in which all of us were being oppressed by these systems.39

I kind of knew that, to a degree, or wanted that to be true, to a degree. But Id also spent years hearing stuff like, Those 60s and 70s liberationiststhey matter, but they were dumb and privileged in a lot of ways. Its another way in which we dont empathize with people of the past. We look down on those activists; we judge them by the things that we see them getting wrong. And they were getting those things wrong! We have to learn from those things. But we also need to give them the space to have gotten things right, to have things to teach us. To be full humans who make mistakes and also do some good.40

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Where Solidarity, Abolition, and Queer History Meet - The Nation