Category Archives: Abolition Of Work

During its annual meeting earlier this month, the voting members of the Southern Baptist Convention known as messengers passed a resolution calling for the immediate abolition of abortion without exception or compromise.

The affirmative vote for the boldly worded resolution came after messengers had already voted in favor of a similar motion stating the conventions opposition to abortion as well as its support for the Hyde Amendment, which bars the use of federal taxpayer dollars for abortions, according to Baptist News Global.

[B]ecause abolishing abortion is a Great Commission issue, we must call upon governing authorities at all levels to repent and obey everything that [Christ] has commanded, exhorting them to bear fruit in keeping with repentance by faithfully executing their responsibilities as Gods servants of justice, and working with all urgency to enact legislation using the full weight of their office to interpose on behalf of the preborn, abolishing abortion immediately, without exception or compromise, the resolution states in its conclusion.

It references the following Scripture passages:

For John had been saying to Herod, It is not lawful for you to have your brothers wife. Mark 6:18

Then Jesus came to them and said, All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore, go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age. Matthew 28:18-20

For the one in authority is Gods servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for rulers do not bear the sword for no reason. They are Gods servants, agents of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer. This is why you pay taxes, for the authorities are Gods servants, who give their full time to governing. Romans 13:4,6

Tom Ascol, pastor of Grace Baptist Church in Cape Coral, Florida, has been one of the staunchest supporters of the resolution.

In a blog post at Founders Ministries, a group he leads, Ascol explained the resolution was slated to have been presented at the 2020 SBC meeting. That event, though, was canceled due to the pandemic.

It is time for Southern Baptists to repent of their complicity in searing the conscience of a nation that has yet to cease the slaughter of unborn innocents, he wrote. [S]outhern Baptist churches and leaders do not have to wait to take stronger actions to abolish abortion from our nations land.

The complicity to which Ascol was referring dates back to 1971 and 1974 when the SBC passed and then reaffirmed, respectively, its Resolution on Abortion.

That motion called for Southern Baptists to work for legislation that will allow the possibility of abortion under such conditions as rape, incest, clear evidence of severe fetal deformity, and carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother.

The SBC has passed more than 27 resolutions on abortion since then. Since the 1980s, all such resolutions have been pro-life in nature, though none have been as strongly worded as the one agreed upon last week.

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Ascols brother, William, who pastors Bethel Baptist Church in Owasso, Oklahoma, led the charge to approve the resolution, telling messengers that the Bible tells us to rescue those who are being taken away to death.

During his presentation in support of the motion, the Oklahoma preacher introduced a woman who regrets her decision to have an abortion. He said she now lives with the trauma and the scar that she murdered her own children, but has since found forgiveness from God.

Can we not rise and stop the Holocaust? Ascol asked.

There were some, however, who while they are pro-life opposed the resolution, arguing it was too harshly worded.

Alan Branch, a professor Christian ethics at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, said he didnt favor the resolution because it advocates a particular political strategy and could ostracize godly politicians who are working within the political system to make gains for the pro-life movement, but would be unable to turn the tide entirely.

This is a poorly worded resolution, he said. I thought about trying to amend it, but, as a seminary professor, it would take me too many hours to straighten it out here on the floor.

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Similarly, Josh Wester, director of research for the SBCs Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, which is staunchly pro-life, took issue with some of the language in the abolition resolution.

This resolution, while it is aimed in absolutely the right direction, is the wrong resolution, he said, noting the SBC is known to be resolutely against abortion already, describing the procedure as a heinous evil, a grievous sin.

Read this article:

Southern Baptist Convention Calls for 'Immediate Abolition of Abortion Without Exception or Compromise' - Faithwire

A memorial was held in New Yorks Washington Square Park for Dominique Lucious, a transgender woman murdered in Springfield, Mo. on April 14. This year is on pace to be the deadliest for trans and gender-nonconforming people in the United States. (AP photo by John Lamparski/NurPhoto)

While the American public may have a broader understanding of the experiences of people who are transgender, non-binary and gender-nonconforming, violence against these communities in the form of killings and prejudiced American policy has continued to rise.

This year is on track to be the deadliest on record in America, with 29 trans and gender-nonconforming people killed. At this time in 2020, which was a record-breaking year for such killings, 13 had been reported, according to the Human Rights Campaign. Though recently proposed legislation, like the LGBTQ Essential Data Act, aims to combat that violence by better tracking those deaths, more than 100 anti-trans bills have meanwhile been proposed this year the most in U.S. history by conservative lawmakers. Thirteen of those bills have passed.

UC Berkeley Associate Professor Eric Stanley (Photo courtesy of UC Berkeley Othering and Belonging Institute)

We dont want more data. We want less deaths, said Eric Stanley, an associate professor in gender and womens studies at UC Berkeley. Trans people are positioned in relation to a normative culture that is both fascinated and repelled by us. Its not usually, I hate you, get away. Its more often, I hate you. Come really close so I can terrorize you.

The culture war has landed on trans communities, and that violence is specifically brutal and very corporal, added Stanley.

An expert in queer and trans social movements, Stanley has organized and advocated for transgender rights in the Bay Area for decades. Their book, Atmospheres of Violence comes out this fall and delves into the contradictions and central role of racialized and gendered violence in the United States.

Stanley spoke with Berkeley News about the impact that racist and colonial institutions have had on transgender communities, and how the public can move forward with structural and transformational change.

Eric Stanley: There could be an increase in reporting, or other factors. But what we do know is that every year since they started recording murders of trans people, weve seen an increase.

But the way I think we should frame it is one person murdered is one person too many.

Were currently in this time of LGBT formal equality. The troubled language of full citizenship is used to make it seem like transgender communities are no longer living through contiguous harm. Yet, at this same time, along with the waves of anti-trans legislation, we still see these vicious attacks.

Paying attention to this violence forces that narrative of progress back. We are in a very different space than the one that the dominant culture wants us to believe were in.

We have to remember that these beautiful people were stolen from their lives much too early, and that is a loss for us all. We must also be clear that Black, brown and Indigenous trans women continue to be hyper-impacted by these and other forms of violence. But this is not to say that people remain singularly abject; these same communities are organizing to end the deadly world and create one where we might survive.

So, anti-trans violence is always racialized within the idiom of gender. And thats important to remember.

A majority of the victims in anti-trans violence and killings are Black and Latinx women. Stanley says Black trans people are also hyper-incarcerated in relation to white trans people. (Flickr photo by Victoria Pickering)

Structuring forces like anti-Blackness and colonialism produce trans as an understandable form of identity, and at the same time, it remains a place of refuge. So, of course, white trans people who are otherwise well-resourced are going to experience anti-trans violence in different, and less intense, ways.

In terms of incarceration, Black trans people are hyper-incarcerated in relation to white trans people, because white people are incarcerated less than Black people. And so, those same legacies of slavery and anti-Blackness that constitute policing continue within marginalized communities.

It also seems important to note that the demands to abolish the police sparked by the concentrated police killings of Black people that built momentum in the streets last summer have seemingly been flipped upside down. We are now living in the nightmare world where, once again, increased policing is being sold as a racial justice project. And were seeing the same thing with gender and sexuality as people argue for more police to protect trans people.

But we know thats antithetical and would disproportionately harm Black and/or trans communities.

We dont want more data. We want less deaths.

Sometimes data can be useful, so Im not suggesting otherwise. But I think its fetishized in a way where people believe the truth lies in the data, when the truth actually lies in peoples lived realities.

Lawmakers will create the architecture to house data, but not the housing for low-income trans people.

I would caution against this singular approach. For example, people demand the end of policing, but then are only offered the promise of more data.

I think lawmakers will create the architecture to house data, but not the housing for low-income trans people. I say this in an attempt to restage the question of violence, to ask where it begins and ends, and to continue to ask what people need to thrive.

What we are building is a movement against the structures that push people toward harm, versus just counting them after the fact.

Its never just one thing. Its always a constellation of systems that are rubbing up against each other. Its racial capitalism. Its the ongoing impact of settler colonialism and imperialism. Its also the institutions of policing, imprisonment and deportation. These are all different forms of domination situated together that produce this atmosphere of violence.

So, in responding to these murders, we need to be thinking about all of those things, all the time. That is hard and doesnt make for a very good mainstream news story: They want a single bad person, not a whole deadly system.

But most forms of anti-trans violence are specifically brutal. Theyre also very corporal. Trans people are positioned in relation to a normative culture that is both fascinated and repelled by us. Its not usually, I hate you, get away. Its more often, I hate you. Come really close so I can terrorize you.

Trans people are positioned in relation to a normative culture that is both fascinated and repelled by us.

We see this in the ways trans people are produced as props in the latest culture war.

These anti-trans bills are rooted in an obsession with the idea of trans peoples bodies. The politicians authoring these bills are saying, Let me study you, produce you as a singular object outside of yourself, so that I cannot just terrorize you, but produce your life as terror. This is, as I explore in my book, the other side of assimilation.

But, I mean, compared to 20 years ago, people have a broader understanding and lexicon of trans, non-binary and gender-nonconforming people. So, there is that. And we are seeing more media visibility, but the violence is still increasing.

So, then, what is the relationship between visibility and violence?

Some people argue that visibility can, unfortunately, create access for people to commit more harm. But thats not exactly what Im saying.

I would want to caution against that perspective because it can place the blame of anti-trans violence on trans people.

The point that I want to underscore about visibility is that it does not self-evidently produce material changes. The story that the dominant culture tells us is that rights and visibility will offer a more livable life. But its really much more nuanced than that.

And its not to say that visual and material cultures are separate. They are tightly bound. But what Im always pushing for are structural, which is also to say epistemic, changes, including the redistribution of resources and the return of stolen lands. I think that we sometimes lose track of that.

Within all this sorrow, there is also the intense creativity and shattering beauty of trans life.

Moments where people find ways to resist and strategize for living against the parameters of what was offered to them. Those things are really important to hold onto because this all can feel overwhelming.

Miss Major (Griffin-Gracey) has been active in revolutionary struggles for the last 50 years, and she continues to transform possibilities. She is a friend and a family member that I have learned a lot from. And the kind of space that she makes for so many other people is really powerful.

Shes somebody that gives me hope, or as close as I can get to it.

Well-known Bay Area trans women activist Miss Major was featured during a recent San Francisco Pride Parade. (Photo by Quinn Dombrowski/flikr)

I think there are multiple ways to get involved. But it is important to approach the work through an understanding that the binary gender system is a product of colonialism. And that trans does not only name an identity, it is also an analytic.

If youre interested in supporting trans liberation, then figure out who is organizing against the street sweeps of homeless people living in Berkeley and join them. Thats a trans issue. Housing, access to health care, prison abolition, defending the West Berkeley Shellmound. Those are all trans issues, not only because they impact trans people, but also because trans people are there fighting back.

Working toward another world is our only way out. Attempting to reform a system, like the prison industrial complex, will not eliminate its violent foundations. Reforms, as insurgents remind us, actually make the system bigger, make the system much deadlier, make the system more racist, more classist and ableist.

You cant reform a system that is built on slavery, on Indigenous genocide, on transphobia, and through all forms of degradation we have to abolish it.

So, we also cant lose sight of the radical transformation that we want and need, our collective life depends on it.

Continue reading here:

Why is anti-trans violence on the rise in America? - UC Berkeley

Minnesotas Healthy Start Act gives incarcerated people who are pregnant or who give birth during their sentences the option to receive pre- and post-natal care in community-based prison alternatives. Pictured: A still from the film Tutwiler, which tells the story of pregnant women incarcerated at the Julia Tutwiler Prison for Women in Wetumpka, Ala. (Elaine McMillion Sheldon /PBS)

In July, Minnesota will make history as the first state in the U.S. to implement legislation that ends the practice of separating incarcerated parents from their newborns. Signed into law in May, the Healthy Start Act provides the option for incarcerated people who are pregnant or who give birth during their sentences to receive pre- and post-natal care in community-based prison alternatives.

Currently, incarcerated people in Minnesotalike many other states in the U.S.return to prison only two to three days after giving birth. Pregnancy itself brings an onslaught of harm and potential human rights violations for incarcerated people: shackling during childbirth; coerced cesarean sections and non-consensual sterilization; the unwanted presence of prison guards in an intimate space. The trauma of childbirth is then exacerbated by the near-immediate separation of the incarcerated mother and their newborn.

I kept thinking, the whole time I was in prison, is my baby going to know who I am. Is my baby going to remember me? said Jennifer Brown, a Minnesotan woman who was four months pregnant when she was incarcerated for a first-time probation violation. In March of 2020, she gave birth to her son Elijah while in prison. Forty-eight hours after giving birth to him, I had to pass him over to people I didnt even know.

Normally, with an incarcerated client, that postpartum visit is emotional, Raelene Baker, program director of the Minnesota Prison Doula Project, told Ms. You go into the prison and theyre lactating for the baby that they dont have with them.

The experience Baker explains was the reality for 278 pregnant people in Minnesota who were sentenced to serve time in prison between 2013 and 2020. This bill is an incredible opportunity to disrupt cycles of trauma, said state Representative Jamie Becker-Finn, who played a leading role in the passage of the legislation.

The Healthy Start Act is a monumental first step in securing birth justice for incarcerated parents. For Bakerwho has been working as a doula in the Minneapolis area since 2004the law will significantly impact the operation of her organization, the Minnesota Prison Doula Project. The doulas at the organization provide emotional, physical and informational support to pregnant and postpartum incarcerated parents.

Instead of going to a birth with two corrections officers and a looming separation, we will be able to help them welcome their baby with a partner with them if they choose, or other family members, because they will be able to welcome their baby with more choice. That will look a lot different, Becker-Finn told Ms.

While there has been much deserved celebration over the Healthy Start Act, doulas and organizers advise close watch of the bills implementation. The idea of it sounds really good. Im curious to see how the execution will happen, because its allowing the commissioner to make each individual determination, said Baker. So it could look different for every personthey could be going to treatment, they could be going home, they could be on confinement.

Similar organizations to the Minnesota Prison Doula Project exist across the United States working to secure legal and human rights for incarcerated pregnant people. Marianne Bullock, the founder of the Prison Birth Project in Western Massachusettsin existence from 2008 to 2018shared a similar sentiment to Baker: This is a start. For sure, this is a great start. The implementation of this is what actually matters.

For those who want to see similar legislation to the Healthy Start Act in their states, the most important piece of advice: Center those directly affected.

Listen to incarcerated people and what they need, because what they need might not be what youre necessarily thinking about, said Baker.

Bullock emphasized a similar note: If you dont have people directly affected doing this work, sharing their stories on their own terms, you know, its going to take you a lot longerand its going to be a lot less impactful.

Looking towards a future without birth behind bars, abolition emerges as a long-term goal among those with direct experience working with incarcerated parents.

I wish our work towards changing policies were more in-line with dismantling criminal systems and shrinking carceral systems, Bullock said. I think the policies we need now are ones that no longer rely on caging, surveilling and controlling people to solve problems.

Reforming prisons most often results in more prisons and more control, so I am hesitant to say this legislation is a step in the right direction. And, I never want to say my value of abolition is more important than a mother being with her baby, today.

Bullock encourages readers to hold two things at once: celebrating the Healthy Start Act for how it will materially improve the lives of incarcerated pregnant people, while acknowledging it is our job to always look towards how we can further create the conditions for true justice.

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Ending Birth Behind Bars: Minnesota's Healthy Start Act and Where We Go From Here - Ms. Magazine

Good spake from Newton Emerson which (like Brian Feeneys piece on Wednesday) highlights another trapdoor in its rejectionist rhetoric around the Protocol

The cynically engineered electoral competition between Sinn Fin and the DUP ratcheted their votes up together, then down together as despairing voters deserted them in the Alliance surge, until the implosion of the DUP over Brexit suddenly left Sinn Fin polling 9 percentage points ahead.

This is the safety margin for the nationalist electorate the extent to which Sinn Fin can be punished for failure without putting unionists back in the lead. Although republicans will never adopt the SDLP slogan of making Northern Ireland work, they have been given a tremendous incentive to make Stormont work.

Beyond Conor Murphy and Gerry Kelly, Sinn Fin has drifted into controlled co-option of loyal but relatively unknown junior figures. That safety margin may allow a slowly expanding SDLP to build on its gains from December 2019.

Regarding the DUP, Newton notes that its previous out and out oppositional rhetoric is changing almost before our eyes

How do you make the protocol work, then go to the polls telling people this is their chance to scrap it?

Semantic distinctions are being carefully noted. Calling for the protocols abolition is hopeless belligerence. Sounding just tough enough, while welcoming whatever compromise might be offered, is the only way forward.

In his leadership campaign against Poots last month, Donaldson vowed to vigorously oppose the protocol both in principle and in practice and to boycott North-South institutions even if this threatened to collapse devolution.

This week, on becoming DUP leader, he said I will play my part to bring stability if the UK and EU recognise and deal with the flaws in the protocol.

Thats pretty much now where everyone else is (and where Arlene was in the first couple of weeks in January). Its fate lies in the willingness (or otherwise) to put his trust in the hands of the British Prime Minister and the joint committee.

Mick is founding editor of Slugger. He has written papers on the impacts of the Internet on politics and the wider media and is a regular guest and speaking events across Ireland, the UK and Europe. Twitter: @MickFealty

See original here:

If the UK and EU recognise and deal with the flaws in the protocol - Slugger O'Toole

The Supreme Court has disappointed again.

While not interfering with the bail granted to the three student activists Natasha Narwal, Devangana Kalita and Asif Iqbal Tanha in the Delhi riots and conspiracy case, it has, vide its order of June 18, 2021, effectively stayed the Delhi high court order on Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act.

To my mind, the court had no option but to confirm the bail for to do otherwise would have been to legitimise the lawlessness of the state and to throw all legal principles to the winds.

But it has undone this good work by once again adopting a balancing act (becoming all too familiar now) to keep the executive in good humour, by decreeing that the Delhi high court decision of June 15, 2021 cannot be quoted as a precedent for other UAPA cases. This is as perplexing as it is unfortunate.

Also read: Delhi HC Verdict Granting Bail To UAPA-Accused Student Activists Is Entirely Logical

The court has given no reason for the virtual stay, other than to express surprise that the bail order is of 100 pages, and that it has pan-India implications.

The surprise we can live with (nothing surprises us any more) but the pan-India part is more difficult to swallow. And this is the reason: UAPA is a pan-India legislation so obviously any judgment on it will have pan-India implications too. Which is a very good thing: for far too long have our courts avoided questioning the draconian and unconstitutional provisions of this law. If one high court has finally done so, its judicial impact should be felt all over the country.

Why is the apex court so uncomfortable with this?

The Supreme Courts order is also self contradictory. By confirming bail to the three accused it implicitly accepted the rationale and reasoning of the Delhi high court order which resulted in the decision to grant them bail. But by staying the order and deciding to examine its correctness it seems to be suggesting that it is not sure of its legality.

This is a legally untenable position, and shows a certain waffling on the part of the honourable judges, and also perhaps a desire to accommodate the sudden panic in the Union home ministry and Delhi police.

Legal luminaries can argue about all this till Uttar Pradesh chief minister Adityanaths cows come home. I am no luminary but I do know a few adages, one of them being: War is too important to be left to generals.

Similarly, I would venture to postulate that Justice is too important to be left to lawyers and judges. For these worthies are the bone crunchers, endlessly chewing on lifeless words, phrases, rulings, ratio decindi and what not. In the process they forget about the flesh and blood of human reality, of the lives being tortured by their unending, academic and arcane arguments. They forget that at the end of the day law and justice are nothing but common sense, and that it is high time they extricated themselves from the thicket of legalese they have lost themselves in, back to the straight, wide path of common law and common sense.

Also read: Five Questions on the Shameful Proceedings Against Natasha Narwal, Devangana Kalita, Asif Iqbal

As the eminent British jurist and writer John Mortimer said: No brilliance is needed in the law, nothing but common sense and relatively clean finger nails.

And it is nothing but common sense which the Delhi high court has displayed in its order, clothed in unassailable legal principles. It is common sense to demand prima facie evidence of wrong doing before locking up someone for years without trial.

It is common sense to distinguish between a common crime and terrorism.

It is common sense to insist that dissent is not sedition.

It is common sense to rule that if an accused cannot be granted a speedy trial then he is entitled to bail, as Justice (retired) Deepak Gupta pointed out in an interview the other day.

It is common sense to declare that the Advisory Board of UAPA cannot be the final word or arbiter of a persons guilt and that the courts are entitled nay, duty bound to look into its decisions.

It is common sense to pronounce that inferences and speculation cannot take the place of hard evidence and proof. What is there to examine in these self-evident truths, as the Supreme Court proposes to do?

Student activists Natasha Narwal, Devangana Kalita and Asif Iqbal Tanha outside Tihar prison, after a court ordered their immediate release in the north-east Delhi riots conspiracy case, in New Delhi, June 17, 2021. Photo: PTI

No matter how you look at the Delhi high court order from a laymans or a legal eagles perspective it fully meets the requirements of both the law and of common sense. The principles and law enunciated by it require no further examination , which is why the Supreme Courts stance on it boggles the mind.

It is high time time our judges took their noses out of their legal tomes and felt the pulse of the people. They should not have an exaggerated sense of their infallibility, should not confuse real justice with their love for didactics, should understand the wishes of the public.

The judiciary would do well to remember that all great legal and social reforms have been driven by the people, not by the courts or governments the suffragette movement for voting rights for women, the anti-slavery campaign, the right to abortion, the acceptance of gay rights, the abolition of apartheid, and the right to privacy. Law and justice follow in the wake of what is right, not the other way around.

And every time our apex court has been insensitive to such deep feelings of the populace it has had to eat its own words and revise its orders very soon. Just in the recent past it has had to quash the infamous ADM Jabalpur order; it had initially set aside the brilliant Delhi high court decision of 2013 on decriminalisation of gay sex but had to revise its position in 2018; in 1962 it had ruled that privacy is not a fundamental right but has since upheld it in a number of judgments; in 1985 it had held that adultery was a crime but just last year it held otherwise.

Also read:State Anxious to Suppress Dissent Says HC, Grants Bail to Natasha Narwal, Devangana Kalita, Asif Iqbal Tanha

I have no doubt at all that in this case also, the Supreme Court will have to ultimately lift the stay: as they say, history doesnt repeat itself, but it rhymes.

A sensitive and responsive judiciary should anticipate, and be one step ahead of social and legal changes and reforms; it should not be merely reactive; it should not live in awe of the executive. This is especially true of the India of today where judges need to step out of their book-lined studies and sterile chambers and smell the stench of repression in the streets, see the accumulating debris of a collapsing criminal justice system.

The need to see the 45 million pending cases, the indiscriminate use of UAPA and sedition laws, the 2% conviction rate in UAPA, the 500,000 incarcerated prisoners of whom 70% are undertrials, the increasing number of people acquitted after years in jail without bail Ilyas and Irfan in Maharashtra have just been found not guilty after spending nine years in jail under terrorism charges, 115 persons have been granted bail in Karnataka, Akhil Gogoi, an MLA in Assam has been acquitted just this week in one of the two UAPA cases lodged against him.

The increasing number of acquittals and bails in UAPA demonstrate vociferously the illegal manner in which such cases are fabricated simply to incarcerate those activists whom the government finds inconvenient. The Delhi high court order goes a long way to stem this rot, and by staying it the apex court has undermined not only the sanctity of the high court but also the expectations of the citizens. All without citing any cogent reason for doing so.

I sometimes wonder: what will it take for our superior courts to grasp the fact that in their obsession with technicalities and legalese, they are smothering the real spirit and essence of justice common sense and compassion.

Is it that they feel that they themselves are immune from the state sponsored savagery being inflicted on the common public outside their sanitised ivory towers? Was Benjamin Franklin right, after all, when he said: Justice will not be served until those who are unaffected are as outraged as those who are?

Its time to be outraged, my lords.

Avay Shukla is a retired IAS officer. A version of this article appeared on his blog and has been edited by The Wire for style.

The rest is here:

In Questioning Activists' Bail Order, the SC Has Smothered Justice With Legalese - The Wire

Once again, the international community commemorates the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture in the last week of June.

A global phenomenon, torture prompted the international community to adopt the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhumane or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CAT).

It entered into force 34 years ago on June 26, 1987. With 171 state parties and 81 signatories, the treaty has successfully garnered universal ratification. But has it resulted in universal implementation?

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As a member of the Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition, I have interacted with many victims of torture who lived to tell their stories.

My husband, Edsil Bacalso, is one of them. Taken by seven armed men and forced inside a red car with no license plate, he was taken to Camp Lapulapu in Cebu City where he was interrogated day and night for his alleged involvement in the Communist Party of the Philippines.

Later transferred to a safe house owned by a former general, he was deprived of food, water and sleep and stripped naked with his feet and neck tied like a pig.

He was forced to sign a document stating that he was the finance officer of the National Democratic Front in Central Visayas. He and another disappeared were ordered to dig their own graves. The other person escaped when the guards were drunk and informed me of my husbands whereabouts.

Knowing that the other person had escaped and fearing that he would testify, the military released my husband in a cemetery near his parents house. This happened two months after our marriage in 1988.

In faraway Argentina, a former Society of the Divine Wordpriest, Patrick Rice, was made to disappear on Oct. 11, 1976, at the height of the dictatorship.

He was taken to the Naval School of the Mechanics (ESMA)in Buenos Aires where he was brutally tortured. To get a glimpse of his torture, one can read an excerpt of his testimony in Case 2450 of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, to wit:

They took me inside a building and put on more handcuffs, chaining me to the wall at floor level with my arms outstretched They began to interrogate me, accusing me of collaborating with the terrorists, and asking me about people involved with these groups ... I explained to them that I was a priest, that I did my pastoral work there, but that I spent most of the day working on a construction project on the Avenida La Plata/Estados Unidos, and that I didn't know anything about what they were taking about. One of them then told me to lie down (my handcuffed hands were behind my back). As soon as I got into this position, one of those who had been sitting at the side began to beat me all over my body and to put something hard like a pistol against me, and so on. I asked them who they were to be treating me this way, and they told me that they were the Triple A. Then they told me that they were going to wash out my mouth, and one grabbed hold of my head and nose and they began to pour water into my mouth from a hose or a kettle until they choked me

With international pressure, Patrick was freed but deported. He later returned to Argentina and spent the rest of his life working with families of victims of enforced disappearances until his untimely death in 2010.

I visited the torture chambers of the former ESMA that witnessed the torture of Argentinas desaparecidos, or disappeared, during the dictatorship. The basement was the place where pregnant victims were made to deliver their babies and drink the colostrum before being taken away by helicopter to be thrown into the ocean.

A decade after Patricks death, Fatima Rice Cabrera, a church worker who was tortured with him and who later became his wife, testified in court.She recognized one of six perpetrators on trial, Guglielminetti Raul. The six were convicted:Raul was sentenced for reclusion perpetua,Gallone Carlos received 25 years house arrest,Comesana Eduardo got house arrest for life, while Grosso Juan, Mingorance Fausto and Romero Rafael were all jailed for seven years.

Fatima recalled that two years earlier, in 2008, Patrick gave a detailed testimony. Sad that he did not live to witness victory in the final judgment, Fatima likewise felt accompanied by his indefatigable struggle for memory, truth and justice.On the last day of the trial, I felt a release and a healing sensation that I am still processing.

A friend from El Salvador, Neris Gonzales, testified before the Federal Court of West Palm Beach in July 2002 that she was repeatedly raped, burned with cigarettes and given electric shocks.

She was forced to lie under a metal bed while four soldiers sat on the sides and rocked back and forth trying to crush her unborn baby. Pregnant during the torture, she said: I was feeling my own torture, but I was also feeling the torture of my son."

Worth commending was Neris courage to face two retired Salvadoran generals, Jose Guillermo Garcia and Carlos Eugenio Vides Casanova, whom she holds responsible for her torture in El Salvador.

While the CAT and the International Declaration of Human Rights both provide that no one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, torture persists globally.

In 2020, the UN secretary-general revealed that the UN Subcommittee on Prevention of Torture visited more than 1,000 prisons and other institutions and interviewed 1,000 detainees, officials, law enforcement people and medical staff, which confirmed that torture continues to happen in all nooks and corners of the world.

Innumerable nameless torture victims cry out for justice. Many more are being victimized in the context of the pandemic. The universal implementation of the Convention Against Torture that entered into force 34 years ago still remains a dream to be realized.

Reminiscent of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ several centuries ago, torture continues in an age when there is no room for torture in a supposedly civilized world.

Then the soldiers of the governor took Jesus into the Praetorium and gathered the whole Roman cohort around Him. They stripped Him and put a scarlet robe on Him. And after twisting together a crown of thorns, they put it on His head, and a reed in His right hand; and they knelt down before Him and mocked Him, saying, Hail, King of the Jews! They spat on Him, and took the reed and began to beat Him on the head. After they had mocked Him, they took the scarlet robe off Him and put His own garments back on Him, and led Him away to crucify Him. (Matthew 27: 27-31)

End torture NOW!

Mary Aileen D. Bacalso is the president of the International Coalition Against Enforced Disappearances.The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official editorial position of UCA News.

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Torture is a scourge that refuses to go away - Union of Catholic Asian News

Charlie Chubby Manning Walker learned to play guitar after being hit by a car. He was 15 when the car popped the pavement, slammed into him from behind, and left him with a broken arm and shoulder. Confined to a bed for a couple months, there was little he could do. But he somehow had just enough range of motion left to hold a guitar, make chord shapes, and strum. Fuck, he figured, Im just gonna practice guitar.

Some 15 years later, Manning Walker found himself confined again, this time to his London flat during the first Covid-19 lockdown in the U.K. The band he fronts, Chubby and the Gang, had released their debut, Speed Kills, in January 2020 on the local punk label Static Shock Records; there was good chatter at home and abroad, the kind you could spend a full year touring off of, until that became impossible. Not all momentum was lost the band signed a new deal with Partisan Records, home of Idles and Fontaines D.C., last spring but Manning Walker, whod spent well over a decade touring in bands from Londons punk and hardcore scene, was now holed up at home unable to do any of that. He couldnt even fall back on his day job as a union electrician on film sets.

I had six weeks to just fucking I dont know, the singer, 30, remembers on a recent Zoom call. I was lost for six weeks like, What am I gonna do?'

The answer was obvious when it came along: Fuck, he figured, Ill write some songs.

Speed Kills was like 2,000 mile-per-hour rock & roll, one ballad, one acoustic song, says Jonah Falco, the drummer for Toronto hardcore heroes Fucked Up, who now lives in London and produced both Chubby albums. The Mutts Nuts, theres four or five stations of total musical relief. Its like these rolling hills of taste, and its really great to see that flow going through.

Though Chubby and the Gang demoed, developed, and fine-tuned The Mutts Nuts over several months, the songs still feel tied to Manning Walkers flat. Theres a pervasive sense of being trapped trapped in dead-end jobs, in an unfair criminal justice system, by longing, depression, and expectation, the illusion of meritocracy, and circumstances beyond ones control that those in power have determined will seal your fate anyway.

On early single Lightning Dont Strike Twice, Manning Walker fumes at the inequality of opportunity, capturing the way so many are screwed no matter what they do by mixing his metaphors: They say lightning dont strike twice/But these still feel like loaded dice. Coming Up Tough takes aim at the carceral states lack of interest in rehabilitation, inspired by a family member who, at a young age, got into a fight that went wrong, then spent 20 years in prison and re-entered a world that wanted nothing to do with him: How can you prove them wrong/If no one even gives you a chance? On Its Me Wholl Pay, one of a couple of anthems for this era of stagnant wages and crushing productivity demands, Manning Walker bellows what could be a Chubby and the Gang thesis statement: Sell my soul to the fucking job? No way/If time is money then its me wholl pay/And all the coppers and politicians keep it all in place.

Maybe I felt like the world was closing in, Manning Walker says. Wed just had Brexit cant leave an island now. Cant leave my room because theres Covid. It just felt like the worlds shrinking and I got a lot of time to reflect on things I dont like, so I expressed my dismay by writing songs about that.

If rock & roll is good for anything, its detonating futility with sound and digging up a feeling of possibility from the wreckage. Chubby and the Gang, just two albums in and barely two years old, are already a crack demolition and excavation crew. Manning Walker built the Gang with musicians from his community: He and Tom Razor Hardwick played together in the hardcore band Violent Reaction; Meg Brooks Mills, who joined last year, was a bass shredder around London; drummer Joe McMahon and guitarist Ethan Stahl came out of the hardcore scene in Brighton, an hours drive away. All were seasoned musicians in their own right, and they made it feel like Chubby and the Gang arrived on this Earth fully formed as a band. Speed Kills does not betray the fact that it was recorded in two days, only months after Chubby and the Gang played their first show (Mills predecessor, Luke Austin, was on bass). Unable to spend much time cutting their teeth live due to the pandemic, they stayed sharp last year by practicing and, by Falcos count, doing three rounds of demos over six months before recording The Mutts Nuts.

Falco remains proud of Speed Kills, but credits the work Chubby and the Gang put in with transforming the band into so much more than even just a catalyst for [Manning Walkers] ideas they are their own force. The crux of their sound remains hard and fast rock & roll, but versatility is in their DNA. Pressure is a pitch-perfect pastiche of Manning Walkers beloved Mtorhead; Life on the Bayou lifts some New Orleans boogie for an ode to the deindustrialized docks of Brentford; and closer I Hate the Radio is one of the best songs Nick Lowe never wrote.

When you start off in a subculture, you want to emulate everything, and then the more time you spend in that subculture, the more you try and push the boundaries, Manning Walker says. I spent 15 years doing punk music. I cant shake it off, so anything I do that sounds like Buddy Holly is gonna sound like Buddy Holly as if he was a punk. I just make music that I like, and if they like it, they like it, and if they dont, well Ill be in exactly the same position as I was before.

When Manning Walker was growing up, his parents filled the house with Studio One reggae records and bands like the Ramones. By the time he was a teen, he was already sporting charged hair and a fucking sleeveless jacket. Even with such a punk-friendly upbringing, there was a need to rebel, and Manning Walker found his outlet one day while walking through Camden: a flier for a hardcore show.

I went in, I saw these people jumping on each other, the tempo was up here, and I was just like, This is it, he says. Im sure thousands of people have the same thing, where they just kind of stumble on something. (The artist Spoiler, who would go on to design the memorable, R. Crumb-esque covers for Speed Kills and Mutts Nuts, was, coincidentally, playing in a band that night.)

Manning Walker became a fixture in this hardcore scene, which centered loosely around labels like Static Shock and La Vida Es Un Mus Records. He played in, toured with, and helped out with songwriting for a litany of groups Violent Reaction, Arms Race, Abolition, Crown Court but Chubby and the Gang marked his first time recording tunes that were all his own. I wanted to show people I could do this, Manning Walker says.

That desire was almost monomaniacal, the idea of Chubby and the Gang burning bright in his mind long before the band actually existed. Falco remembers the first time Manning Walker told him about Chubby the Gang: The singer had it all planned out, down to the title of the first record.

Every time we were at the pub, a party, a gig, hed look over at me and be like, Speed Kills, mate, Falco recalls with a laugh. And then eventually it was, Speed Kills, youre gonna record it.

Manning Walker had honed his instincts as a songwriter over the years, but vocalist was a new role for him. When Chubby and the Gang recorded their first single, All Along Uxbridge Road b/w Moscow, Manning Walker went to hit the first note and his voice cracked like a teenagers. Manning Walker admits hes quick to bin something that doesnt immediately work, and he credits Falco with keeping him focused and committed to finding his voice.

The songs on Speed Kills were a level up, sound-wise and writing-wise, Falco says. They were fast, they were reckless, but they needed that Charlie howl. The personality of his ideas sometimes was presenting itself larger than what he was projecting as a vocalist. We had to get that up to the same level, and that was the big challenge.

That howl is deeper and gruffer on The Mutts Nuts, but its also more dexterous, and theres a jolt of new melodic confidence when Mills and Hardwick back him up. To Falcos point, as Manning Walkers voice gets bigger and more assured, so do his ideas. One of the albums most ambitious tracks is White Rags, a sludgy, sinister march with lyrics written after the murder of George Floyd. Institution rotten to the core/Treating prison like an abattoir, Manning Walker sings, voice rough with scorn. Where are all the singers? Theyre quiet, thats strange/When it comes to talk of real change.

Manning Walker admits he was initially unsure about weighing in as a white man from the U.K. But he felt that it was important not only to express solidarity with Black Lives Matter, but to respond to those in England who seemed to see police brutality and systemic racism as a largely American problem.

It wasnt that long ago that Mark Duggan was killed, Manning Walker says, mentioning the 29-year-old man who was killed by police in 2011, setting off an uprising in London. The Independent Police Complaints Commission in the U.K. has a zero percent conviction rate [for murder or manslaughter of a person in police custody]; thats the body that essentially polices the police. You cant tell me, straight-faced, theres no racism in the U.K. within our police system. I wanted to say not only that were in solidarity with everyone in America, but you cannot feel like were free of guilt. (At the time of this interview, the last time a U.K. police officer had been successfully prosecuted for the death of a person in custody was 1971; on June 23rd, a police officer in Birmingham was convicted of manslaughter in the death of former professional footballer Dalian Atkinson.)

Manning Walker traces the political fervor of The Mutts Nuts to those six weeks of lockdown songwriting, when he could reflect and tease things out instead of tossing off some drunken tirade about how I dont like cops or something. Perhaps more than anything else he writes about, Manning Walker is uncompromisingly clear about his politics. The world is so politically charged, he says. Sometimes you need someone to just fucking tell you, thats how I feel, unapologetic, bang.

Chubby and the Gang in London, June 2021.

Owen Harvey for Rolling Stone

Years ago, on tour with his old band Abolition in Hungary, Manning Walker played a show to a room he describes as half-full of fascists. As he told the 101 Part Time Jobs podcast, he neither wanted to compromise, nor let down the other half of the audience. So Abolition hung up a banner behind them onstage that read Fuck Fascists, and, afterwards, spray-painted something similar on a wall outside. The next morning, their photo was plastered on a far-right website and the fear of retribution followed them the rest of the tour. Manning Walker says hes never had to deal with such elements at home, the once frighteningly robust fascist punk contingent in the U.K. having been largely stamped out by older generations. The U.K.s far-right now, Manning Walker says, hides more behind soft nationalism, insidiously careful to avoid being as overt as what he encountered in Hungary.

Those guys were wearing swastikas. They werent gonna say, No, no, Im not like that, Manning Walker says. They were like, This is what we are. Thats why Im so blatant. These guys dont give a fuck, so Im gonna tell you why Im pro-trade-union, or why Im such a fucking lefty. Im not gonna apologize.

Work, in particular, feels central to Chubby and the Gangs politics. The Speed Kills bonus cut Union Dues is characteristically direct Union rock, union roll/Keep scabs on the dole! and on The Mutts Nuts highlights like On the Meter and Beat the Drum, Manning Walker tells vivid stories about the moonlit charms and dark alley dangers that defined his time as a minicab driver in London. He can also go in on the never-ending exploitation and degradation of the working class: On Overachiever, a dizzying hit of Chubby and the Gangs more madcap side, Manning Walker twists glue-sniffing la the Ramones from an act of boredom into a better use of ones time than working to death for an exploitative boss.

In this way, Chubby and the Gang are an important reminder that rock & roll despite decades of bloat and excess is rooted in music made for working people, by working people. The bands music feels in tune with an inflection point for labor movements everywhere, including the music business, where the pandemic has spurred organizing efforts from the National Independent Venue Association to the Union of Musicians and Allied Workers to the employees of the indie label company Secretly Group. Manning Walker, for his part, just started paying dues to the Musicians Union in the U.K., but hes quick to note hes never viewed his music as a job, let alone a career: If I was trying to make some money, the last thing Id jump into is music. Im definitely going to put in the work, but thats because I love to do it. It makes things in this world bearable, so fuck it, lets do it.

Its a rational view. The vast majority of artists make a fraction-of-a-fraction of a cent each time their songs are streamed, and the cost of entry for bands in cities like London remains on the rise. Manning Walker notes that practice space rates in London are up to 50 for a couple hours, while venues, clubs, squats, and DIY spaces have been totaled by gentrification, to say nothing of the still unknown toll of the pandemic: If I was a kid in London and I was into punk music, its like, how could you afford this shit?

As assertive, assured, and bold as Manning Walker is, these arent the qualities that make Chubby and the Gang a great band. Despite the bravado, there is a lot of humility there, Falco says. That might sound laughable, but theres a subtle humility that evades other rock & roll acts.

Theres humility in Manning Walkers politics: an understanding of power, what the individual can achieve and whats more possible with the whole gang behind you. But theres also a humility in the way Chubby and the Gang approach rock & rolls most innate pleasures. As serious as the content can get, its always balanced by a rough and tumble energy, a cheeky swagger, and a sense of fun. Trouble always follows me, Manning Walker belts on The Mutts Nuts, But theres no place Id rather be.

Every two or three years, youll get this band thats reinvented hardcore, reinvented punk music, and its like fucking hell, how many times can you reinvent something? Manning Walker cracks. Its not even broke, why do you need to reinvent it? Sometimes you just want to hear some rock & roll. Sometimes you want to go to an art gallery to see some abstract painting that really makes you think, and sometimes you want to see a picture of a guy on a horse. And I feel like were just that. This isnt some abstract, make-you-think, whoa-Ive-fucking-had-an-epiphany. Its just a fucking cold pint on a Sunday, which is nice!

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Chubby and the Gangs Radical Rock & Roll Kicks - Rolling Stone

Emancipation Day celebration band, 1900. (Photo by Mrs. Charles Stephenson / Courtesy of Austin History Center)

The publication of the 1619 Project by The New York Times in 2019 pushed many Americans to reconsider what they assumed they knew about African American and, more generally, US history. The project, whose title refers to the importation of the first enslaved Africans to the Virginia colony in 1619, sought to show how, in the introductory words of its special issue, no aspect of the country that would be formed here has been untouched by the 250 years of slavery that followed.Books in Review

There were good reasons to start the project in 1619many African Americans trace the beginnings of Black America to this momentand to focus on Virginia, but it could have started earlier, too. The story of Africans in North America can, in fact, be traced as far back as 1526 and the creation of the San Miguel de Gualdape colony in what would become South Carolinaa colony that was likely destroyed by a mutiny of the colonists and a slave revolt. More than 140 years later, the colony of Carolina would be founded by English settlers from Barbados who hoped to create a settlement purely for the purpose of plantation slavery.

Annette Gordon-Reeds new book, On Juneteenth, considers another set of bifurcating paths in African American historythis time in her home state of Texas, where both her own history and that of Juneteenth began. Texas, she argues, provides a key to the history of Africans in North America, and, coupled with the rapidly popularized holiday of Juneteenth, offers a different perspective from the one to which most Americans are accustomed. For her, the history of Black Texas, in fact, allows one to tell the larger history of Black America. The history of Juneteenth, she writes, which includes the many years before the events in Galveston and afterward, shows that Texas, more than any [other] state in the Union, has always embodied nearly every major aspect of the story of the United States of America.

This is a bold statement. Others might alternately cite the Low Country of South Carolina or the Mississippi Delta or the South Side of Chicago. Yet Gordon-Reeds contention, by the end of her book, proves hard to dismiss. By using the history of Black Texas, she is also able to tell the story of Black America, and by doing so, she places Black, Hispanic, and Indigenous Americans at the forefront of US history. If nothing else, she shifts its focus away from the East Coast origin stories of Jamestown and Plymouth and toward the West. Everything is bigger in Texas, and in the hands of Gordon-Reed, the history of Texas becomes large enough to encompass the fullness of the American story.

Gordon-Reed has spent her career studying the majestic and often confounding contradictions of American life and how we memorialize them. Her two best-known works1997s Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy and 2008s The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Familytold the story of Sally Hemings, the enslaved woman who was forcibly involved in a sexual relationship with Thomas Jefferson.

Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings offered a thorough account of the relationship between the two, a subject that had long been ignored by many Jefferson scholars. The book also proved to be something far more: an analysis of those historians who refused to reckon with the centrality of slavery in the founding of the United Statesand in particular its importance in the lives of the countrys founding fathers.

Much of this previous scholarship was criticized by Gordon-Reed as a rejection of black peoples input and black peoples participation in American society. Along with an emerging new generation of historians, she sought to correct this. As David Walton argued in his review of the book in The New York Times, Gordon-Reed provided a devastating and persuasive critique of those who have rejected the possibility of Jefferson having sex with Hemings and is sure to be the next-to-last word for every historian who writes about this story hereafter.Current Issue

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The Hemingses of Monticello was arguably even more groundbreaking, shifting the traditional lens on Monticello from Jefferson and Hemings to the family tree they produced. The book, for which she became the first African American to receive the Pulitzer Prize for History, was also part of a larger goal at the center of her career: to push Americans to rethink their nations pastin particular, its origin myths. Her scholarship, Gordon-Reed explained in an interview, sought to establish black peoples participation as American citizens from the very beginning. For her, this was more than a matter of the historical record; it was also an assertion of citizenship. Because white supremacy had so deeply influenced the telling of US history, she noted, you have to be able to help write the history of the country in order to establish your right to be here, to say that youre legitimately here.

This quest to re-center American history around the experience of those who are not white is also at the core of On Juneteenth. By focusing on Texas, Gordon-Reed can tell not only the story of Black America but also of Indians, settler colonialists, Hispanic culture in North America, slavery, race, and immigration. It is the American story, told from this most American place. She does have a point: Nearly every great movement in American history did, at some time, touch Texas. Everything from the rise and fall of slavery in antebellum America to the Populist movement to the civil rights movement and the white backlash against it has left an imprint on the history of Texas, and, in turn, Texas impacted each of them in ways the entire United States had to deal with.

The origin of Juneteenth exemplifies the central role Texas played in the history of Black America. When Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger entered Galveston on June 19, 1865, and informed the enslaved that they were free, the Civil War had ended across much of the South, and the regionand most of the nationwas convulsing with the beginnings of Reconstruction. If the Confederacy had won the Civil War, Texas would likely have become the chief example of what that government would have stood fornot only as a bastion of slavery but as a harbinger of its expansion throughout the Western Hemisphere via white settler colonialism and violent confrontation. But with Grangers emancipatory declaration, and in the aftermath of the Souths defeat, Texas became an arena in which those pursuing a more inclusive idea of American freedom battled those seeking to restore the subservient relationship of African Americans as close to the old form of slavery as possible. Before the Civil War, Texas took steps in its Constitution to prevent the movement of free African Americans into the state. Seeing that Black people could exist outside of legal slavery, Gordon-Reed writes, put the lie to the idea that Blacks were born to be slaves.

For Gordon-Reed, the history of East Texas, which was the nexus of slavery in the state and where much of the fight over the terms of emancipation raged, helps tell this story of American contradictions in microcosm. Reconstruction was a bloody affair across the South, but in Texas it was especially grimin part because, Gordon-Reed notes, the white population still remembered that the state had been a republic. The struggles over civil and political rights that roiled the nation during Reconstruction were magnified in Texas by the contradictions of self-governmentof a white majority seeking to impose its will on a large Black minority.

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The pursuit of emancipation was frustrated almost from the start. Gen. Philip Sheridan, the military commander of the Fifth Military District (Texas and Louisiana), created by the Reconstruction Act of 1867, worked hard to protect the rights of newly freed African Americans, but as a result he drew the ire of former Confederates and eventually was fired by President Andrew Johnson. (Sheridan purportedly said, If I owned Texas and Hell, I would rent Texas and live in Hell.) His replacement, Winfield Scott Hancock, was far more lenient toward white Southerners who resisted giving Black Americans any rights whatsoever. As W.E.B. Du Bois noted in Black Reconstruction in America, citing a report from the Committee on Lawlessness and Violence in Texas, Charged by law to keep the peace and afford protection to life and property, and having the army of the United States to assist him in so doing, [Hancock] has failed.

For generations afterward, African Americans would fight to save Texas from the hell it had been turned into by white supremacy. Black Texans like Norris Wright Cuney would play a pivotal role in helping other Black citizens get involved in their native states politics. Cuney himself would become the Texas national committeeman of the Republican Party in 1886 and as president of the Union League led the national fight against the attempts of the partys conservative wing to purge what was left of the Southern Black leadership. Like Sheridan, however, Cuney found that his leadership of the Texas GOP was one of the last hurrahs of the emancipationist spirit of the 1860s. Even if Texas was the state in which Juneteenth and the celebrations that followed were born, so, too, was it a state of stalwart resistance to Reconstruction and Black freedom.

For Gordon-Reed, who was born in 1958, this grim past was never dead. Growing up in East Texas, she saw living reminders of it all around herboth the struggles for freedom and the institutions created by African Americans to survive in a cruel Jim Crow system. Just as in the years after the Civil War, the power and dogged determination of white supremacy persisted.

As Gordon-Reed recounts of her own childhood, she initially attended an African American school, as so many of her friends and family had, before becoming one of the first Black students in her area to desegregate an all-white school. Entering first grade in the mid-1960s, she was enrolled in the Anderson Elementary School, leaving behind her all-Black school, Booker T. Washington. While some Black parents frowned on the Gordons sending their child to a previously all-white school, Gordon-Reed remembered the moment as one that was as much about practicality as politics. Her father, Alfred Gordon Sr., simply believed it made more sense for a school to have students correctly separated by age. Anderson Elementary provided that; Booker T., as it was affectionately known, did not. But it also meant that Gordon-Reed would be the only Black student there.

Gordon-Reed excelled in school, both at Booker T . and at Anderson. At the time, she felt that she never experienced any different treatment. In fact, I felt nothing butsupport. Still, she knew and understood that she was different from the other studentsand that she had to excel on behalf of the Black community. This period was intense, she writes. My mother remembers me breaking out in hives at one point, a thing I dont recall.

Gordon-Reeds experience of desegregation is a valuable one. Often, the story of school desegregation follows a student or studentsthe Little Rock Nine of Arkansas, for exampleup to the school door and then leaves them to be immortalized in history. There is little consideration about the short- and long-term consequences of the experience on the children. There was an oddity of being on display, Gordon-Reed recalls, but few considered the effects of desegregation on the Black students who entered the formerly all-white schoolsespecially those, like Gordon-Reed, who were on their own. Not to take anything away from the teachers and administrators at Anderson, but I did make things easy for them, she adds. Her intellect certainly helped, but so did the fact that, because she was the only Black person enrolled at the school, she was not seen as an invasion of Black students. The degree of racial tolerance among Whites has always been about numbers, she notes.

Gordon-Reeds experiences after high school were like those of other African Americans who came of age during the civil rights and Black Power eras: increased opportunities for education at the finest of American universities. For Gordon-Reed, that meant attending Dartmouth College in the late 1970s and, eventually, Harvard Law School. But the experience of desegregating a schooland understanding what that desegregation meant for other African Americanslingered, both for her and, more broadly, she argues, as a feature of the history of Texas and Black America.

Like her earlier work on the Hemingses, On Juneteenth is determined to force us to rethink our origin stories. As Gordon-Reed notes, for example, the push for desegregating schools did mark the beginning of a new turn in Black freedom, but it was also greeted ambivalently by more African Americans than classic narratives of the civil rights movement would have us believe: Some members of the Black community felt that my parents were making a statementalas, a negative oneabout the quality of teaching and education at Washington. Leaving Booker T. for a formerly all-white institution was seen in her African American community as equal parts heroic and bordering on betrayal. For most, Black schools were symbols of community empowerment and self-determinationsymbols that, in the aftermath of the Supreme Courts Brown v. Board of Education decision, would eventually be degraded and destroyed by an education system that had previously ignored them.

Eschewing nostalgia, Gordon-Reed demands that her readers reexamine their assumptions about American history and their commitments in the present. Focusing on the history of African Americans in Texas helps her make this compelling argument for an update to the story of America: She welds a new narrative onto the one we already have. Origin stories matter, for individuals, groups of people, and for nations, she explains, but we also need to separate out the origin stories we tell ourselves from actual history, making it clear that the two are often not the same.

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Gordon-Reed challenged the infallibility and the mythology of the founding fathers through her work on Jefferson and the Hemingses, and in On Juneteenth, she spends a considerable amount of time demarcating the differences between the origin story that places the beginning of the United States in Plymoutha founding story about valiant people leaving their homes to escape religious persecutionand the one that places it in Jamestown colony: It is difficult to wrest an uplifting story from the doings of English settlers who created the colony for no purpose other than making money or, at least, to make a living for themselves. Starting before 1619 and beyond Jamestown colony, she argues, also gives the African American experience a longer and more international origin story, touching as it would on the presence of Estebanico, an enslaved African explorer who was part of the Spanish expedition of what is now Texas in the 1530s.

Spanish St. Augustine, Gordon-Reed writes, had long existed partly as a settlement for Africans whod escaped slavery in the English colonies, and ignoring the presence of Africans in other European settlements in North Americawhether established by the Spanish, the French, or the Dutchled to what she calls an extremely narrow construction of Blackness. By considering the other Black Americasthose formed outside the reach of the English-speaking coloniesGordon-Reed also helps us better understand the relationships among African, Hispanic, and Indigenous Americans and reminds us of the non-Anglophone influences on the formation of what became the United States. By incorporating so much recent scholarship on the Atlantic world and the early encounters among various ethnic and racial groups in North America, she argues, we can understand that the origin story of Africans in North America is much richer and more complicated than the story of twenty Africans arriving in Jamestown in 1619.

As readers come to the end of On Juneteenth, they begin to realize that as much as the emancipation in Galveston and the original holiday of Juneteenth frame the book, contrasting these different origin stories is one of its central premises. Even the origin story of Texas comes under scrutiny. Building on the scholarship of others, Gordon-Reed notes that the early days of Texass struggle for independence from Mexico were also tied to the institution of slavery. Rather than pursue freedom, the white Americans who fought for Texan independence sought to create a slaveholding republic. Growing up in Jim Crowera Texas, a young Annette Gordon was not taught this. When it came to the Alamo, the birthplace of modern Texas, she writes, I didnt know that an enslaved person was there. For Americans who wish to avoid the unpleasantness of racism in our countrys past, Gordon-Reed points to the documents themselves. Race is right there in the documentsofficial and personal, she writes. Texass own constitution, promulgated after independence in 1836, explicitly excluded free people of African descent from citizenship. Black people in Texas were to be there for one reason: enslavement.

Gordon-Reed also writes of how Texass oft-recounted origin story elides the plight of Indigenous peoples. The early Republic of Texas under Sam Houston could potentially countenance living side by side with Indigenous groups like the Alabamas and Coushattas, but later Texas leaders insisted on the familiar American pattern of driving Indigenous groups from their lands. This experience of oppression also linked the fates of enslaved Africans and Indigenous peoples: Both had a common enemy in white supremacy, one that was around after slaverys abolition. As a young girl coming of age during not only the civil rights and Black Power eras but also the rise of the American Indian Movement of the 1970s, Gordon-Reed wondered why Indigenous and African groups had not joined forces against the Europeans in North America. One complicating factor was certainly that some Indigenous peoples also held Africans in slavery. There was no natural alliance between the groups, Gordon-Reed writes, reminding us once again of the problem of crafting myths about the past, as opposed to cold, hard actual history. Writers, and consumers, of history must take great care not to import the knowledge we have into the minds of people and of circumstances in the past, she warns.

On Juneteenth begins and ends with the holiday of the same name, and here too Gordon-Reed reminds us that like origin stories, our regional and national holidays say a great deal about the stories we wish to tell about ourselves. While at the beginning of the book Gordon-Reed expresses surpriseand a little consternationthat a holiday celebrated primarily in Texas during her life has become nationally known, at the end she reminisces about how Juneteenth was an important part of her life, and one that incorporated cultural traditions from other groups.

Juneteenth celebrations, Gordon-Reed tells us, included the traditional red soda-watera delicious strawberry-flavored drink that some argue traces its origins to the hibiscus tea of West Africaseen at so many African American holiday gatherings, but they also included the preparation of tamales, a dish originating with Mesoamerican civilizations, and pointed to the ways in which Black, Indigenous, and Hispanic Americas intersected in Texas. Such a set of culinary rituals, Gordon-Reed writes, made the day so very Texan. But as she goes on to argue, it also made the dayand its historyso very American.

Making Juneteenth into a national holiday not only nationalizes Texass history but, Gordon-Reed argues, also serves as a moment of national reflection on the effort needed to destroy slavery and, in its aftermath, the struggle to affirm a new birth of freedom. With Republican politicians pushing to abolish critical race theory and the continued assaults on use of the 1619 Project in the classroomnot to mention the raging debates about Confederate statues and other Lost Cause memorialsit is clear that powerful leaders in society also understand the importance of historical memory. Besides origin stories, Gordon-Reed reminds us, history provides us with a way to think about the present and futureand, just as with the past, the remaking of our contemporary world will likely be messier, if potentially more emancipatory, but also more tragic than any of us is willing to fathom.

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Annette Gordon-Reed's Personal History of Juneteenth - The Nation

Finally, the U.S. has a federal holiday recognizing the emancipation of Black people from slavery. Congress passed the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act on June 15 barely four days ahead of a day that Black people have been celebrating every year since 1865.

Lawmakers were pushed to vote by a massive outpouring of anti-racist outrage at the police murder of George Floyd last May. Millions of people, led by Black Lives Matter, protested that Black people should at the very least be free of the threat and reality of cop killing.

This holiday certainly doesnt guarantee that it doesnt even mandate a paid day off. And the same Congress just refused to pass a voting rights act that would especially protect voters of color!

What continues to happen are bold and repeated acts of Black self-liberation. These are part of a glorious history of Black resistance in the U.S. carried out for hundreds of years with no blessing from bosses or owners on high.

As soon as African peoples, kidnapped and forced into slavery, set foot on what later was called U.S. soil, they began to fight to free themselves. They ran away from owners, established maroon communities with Indigenous peoples forced from their lands and mounted armed uprisings against plantation masters. (Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts, 1936)

In Black Reconstruction in America: 1860-1880, the great Marxist sociologist W.E.B. DuBois argued that the thousands of Black workers who walked away from enslavement during the Civil War did so not from merely the desire to stop work. It was a strike on a wide basis against the conditions of work. He argued this general strike not only ended slavery but was also based on a vision of a different economic and social order a new reality emancipated from all forms of enslavement.

The Juneteenth holiday is a faint reflection of this vision. Though federal troops brought final word of freedom to Galveston, Texas, June 19, 1865 two years after proclamation by President Abraham Lincoln many landowners openly defied compliance, with reports of people held in bondage as long as six years after emancipation. (tinyurl.com/5f88cpwm)

Thwarted from using African peoples work for no wages, the Southern owning class turned to white terror massacres, lynchings, rapes and finally legalized Black Codes to control Black workers, including convict-lease arrangements with plantations and factories.

That slavery continues in the U.S. to this day, explicitly authorized by a clause in the 13th Amendment to the Constitution: Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

This loophole has allowed not only 19th century forced labor, but also the current massive exploitation of workers incarcerated in the U.S. prison-industrial complex.

A true act of emancipation would be to strip the vile language of slavery from the Constitution and abolish the forced labor of imprisoned people beaten, denied calls and visits with family, put into solitary confinement or given marks on their record all for not taking a prison job or not being able to do work they are assigned.

Real emancipation would include the abolition of police, along with all jails, prisons and detention centers built and filled with people under capitalism.

Emancipation from the legacy of enslavement would mean unimpeded voting rights for all, especially those historically disenfranchised. But there would have to be more. There have been centuries of theft of body, land and life from African American people.

A program of reparations is necessary to rectify the accumulation over generations of the value of unpaid and low-paid labor of people of African descent. Reparations for this exploitation which amounts to untold trillions of dollars and unquantifiable collective injustice would be a step beyond survival toward true emancipation and liberation.

Our work is to create a world where we celebrate Juneteenth not only because people have been freed from the killing brutality of bodily enslavement. Lets build a world that frees all workers from the exploitation of their labor.

Photo Credit: Aletho News

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Emancipation and abolition - Workers World

As thenation this week madeJuneteenth a federal holiday, honoring when the last enslaved Black people learned they were free, lawmakers are reviving calls to end a loophole in the Constitution that allowed another form of slavery forced labor for convicted felons to thrive.

Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley and Georgia Rep. Nikema Williams told The Associated Press they will reintroduce legislation to revise the 13th Amendment, which bans enslavement or involuntary servitude except as a form of criminal punishment. That exception, which has been recognized since 1865, has led to the common practice of forced labor by felons.

Social justice advocates say it created generations of Black families touched by mass incarceration and poverty and that the ramifications are still being felt today.Juneteenthseemed like the appropriate time to address this huge piece of systemic racism in the middle of our Constitution, Merkley said.

At the moment that we are celebrating, if you will, the 13th Amendment and the end of slavery and its eventual announcement we should at the same time recognize that the 13th Amendment was flawed, Merkley said. It enabled states to arrest people for any reason, convict them and put them back into slavery.

The amendments loophole for criminal punishment encouraged former Confederate states, after the Civil War, to devise ways to maintain the dynamics of slavery. They used restrictive measures known as the black codes, laws targeting Black people for benign interactions from talking too loudly to not yielding on the sidewalk. Those targeted would end up in custody for these minor actions, and would effectively be enslaved again.

The so-called abolition amendment was introduced as a joint resolution in December. Mostly supported by Democrats in both the House and Senate, it failed to gain traction before the sessions end. The hope this time around, Merkley said, is to ignite a national movement.

The issue is important to Williams, a Black woman who grew up in the South. She hopes this legislation wont be viewed through the prism of money and what the loss of prison labor would mean. Instead, she says, the history of the prison system and its relationship to people of color must be viewed in a people-centered way.

Our people have already been in chains and enslaved because of money, Williams said. We have to make sure that we are truly moving forward and not using money as a crutch of why were continuing to perpetuate sins of our nations founding and our nations history.

One group that has long been part of the movement is Worth Rises, a criminal justice advocacy group helping with the legislations rollout. The amendments clause has significant repercussions today, says Bianca Tylek, Worth Rises executive director. Incarcerated workers make at most pennies on the dollar for their contributions, she says, and they lack recourse if they get hurt working or have to work when sick.

Were talking about people who can be beaten for not working. People can be denied calls and visits, contact with their family, Tylek said. People can be put into solitary confinement. People can take hits on their long-term record.

Jorge Renaud, national criminal justice director for LatinoJustice and a parolee, said those punishments happened to him when he couldnt get through some jobs. He spent much of his 27 years in Texas state prisons doing hard labor like picking cotton, chopping down trees and grading roads. Texas does not pay jailed workers.

For Renaud, 64, what was worse than no pay was not having much sense of self-worth.

Its not just the choice to work. Its the choice to do anything, he said. We live in a country that prides itself on individuality. Its impressed upon you over and over again that you are worthless and you belong to the state.

Advocates of the bill note that it targets forced labor and not prison work programs, which are voluntary.

What were saying, Tylek said, is the value of that work must be demonstrated and people must not be forced to work against their will.

In Renauds experience, prison labor was also something often done without racial equity. White incarcerated workers often were assigned less labor-intensive tasks like running the prison library or refurbishing computers. But their Black and Latino counterparts got kitchen and laundry duty. He noticed a similar trend when he gave some legislators a tour of a prison unit three years ago.

The jobs that might prepare you for something out in the free world or are technology based are still reserved for whites, Renaud said.

More than 20 states still include similar clauses involving human bondage or prison labor in their own governing documents, which date to the 19th century abolition of slavery. Nebraska and Utah, which are represented by GOP senators, were two of the first to amend their constitutions for the very same issue last year through voter-approved initiatives. Only Colorado came earlier, removing such language through a ballot measure in 2018.

Merkley is optimistic that his Republican colleagues will ultimately support the legislation.

Nothing about this should be partisan, Merkley said. I think every American should be about ending slavery in our Constitution.

Williams, too, does not want this to be painted as a partisan issue.

I am willing to work with you as long as you are willing to work around making sure that everyone in this country regardless of their background, their ZIP code, or their bank account has access to the full promise of America, she said. That includes making sure we rid involuntary servitude in this country in our Constitution.

The 13th Amendment grew from President Abraham Lincolns determination that the Emancipation Proclamation did not do enough to abolish slavery, according to historians. While the Emancipation Proclamation freed slaves in the South in 1863, it wasnt enforced in many places until after the end of the Civil War two years later. Confederate soldiers surrendered in April 1865, but word didnt reach the last enslaved black people until June 19, when Union soldiers brought the news of freedom to Galveston, Texas. That day was dubbed Juneteenth.

Meanwhile, Lincoln proposed a constitutional amendment to dismantle the institution of slavery once and for all. The Senate passed the 13th Amendment in 1864, and the House followed in early 1865, barely two months before Lincolns assassination. The amendment was then ratified by the the states.

Constitutional amendments require approval by two-thirds of the House and Senate, as well as ratification by three-quarters of state legislatures. They are also rare.

Tylek, of Worth Rises, hopes other lawmakers will see that an exception to slavery bans is unacceptable.

Its a huge stain on our culture, on our Constitution, on our nation to say No slavery except, Tylek said. We have to be able to say no slavery no exceptions.

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Juneteenth spurs revival of abolition amendment by lawmakers - KFOR Oklahoma City