Category Archives: Abolition Of Work

Around 30 people painted canvases with their ideas around abolition outside of Evanston Police Department on Sunday in an effort to build community as part of Evanston Fight for Black Lives third Reclaim the Block series.

Amalia Loiseau, a University of Illinois student and an organizer, said the goal of the event was to create a safe space for community members.

With the citys Black population declining, Loiseau said it is imperative to improve the quality of life of Black residents. Loiseau sees EFBLs Reclaim the Block events as an opportunity to take back power for the people and create a strong community.

As a member of the Black community in Evanston, we do events to uplift ourselves. It is really important to build community, Loiseau said. People are seeing that the police are given so much money to cause so much harm. Even simple things like this can help. Having open conversations can help with healing.

Omar Salem, an Evanston resident of 10 years, said he wants his children to know what Evanston youth activists are fighting for. He appreciated how family friendly Sundays event was, and his daughter, Sydney, immersed herself in the painting activity.

Organizer Sarah Bogan said considering that Evanstons population is around 74,000, she wishes more people had showed up. Given the high level of support among college-aged individuals, however, Bogan said she expects turnout will be greater as the summer progresses and students return home.

A big point is making a point to this department that we are not going anywhere, Bogan said. There is so much love that goes into this work and community building is the whole point of what we are doing.

Resident Liz Kenney, a member of Quaker congregation Evanston Friends Meeting, said she was impressed by the youths work and their engagement in creative non-violence and peace, which are central Quaker values, she said.

As a White woman, Kenney acknowledged her privilege in interacting with the police.

The police are designed to keep me safe. And they do. Like a lot of White people in this country, I am reckoning with that, Kenney said. We cant wait to take action. Its a moral imperative.

For Bogan, Sunday was an opportunity to share a community-based side of the movement different from standing in the streets and protesting. Particularly, she said creating spaces for people of color stands out as an important objective of the Sunday Reclaim the Block parties.

Im passionate because these are my people and we should all have the same rights and feel like we deserve to be in spaces just as much as other people, Bogan said.

Email: [emailprotected]

Twitter: @JackAustinNews

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Evanston Fight for Black Lives hosts third Reclaim the Block event - Daily Northwestern

A California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation officer opens the gate for an incarcerated person who is leaving the exercise yard at San Quentin State Prison's death row on August 15, 2016, in San Quentin, California.Justin Sullivan / Getty Images

People end up in prison for a reason, but its not the reason that were fed by all of these cop shows, says Victoria Law. In this episode of Movement Memos, Kelly Hayes talks with journalist Victoria Law about prisons, why they dont work, and what even well-meaning people tend to get wrong about incarceration.

Music by Son Monarcas

Note: This a rush transcript and has been lightly edited for clarity. Copy may not be in its final form.

Kelly Hayes: Welcome to Movement Memos, a Truthout podcast about things you should know if you want to change the world. Im your host, Kelly Hayes. As our regular listeners know, the subject of prison abolition comes up pretty frequently on this show, because, in addition to being a writer and organizer, I am a prison abolitionist. And I know this is a tough topic, for a lot of people, who may agree with me about a whole lot of other things. Because this society presents us with a lot of horrifying problems, and very few solutions. So when we talk about defunding the police, or abolishing prisons, some people feel like were talking about taking away the only recourse they have, in a society that subjects them to a lot of harm.

Thats why I think its important to, first and foremost, remember that, as Ruthie Gilmore tells us, Abolition is about presence, not absence. Its about demanding and creating structures and supports that would actually allow us to create safety, and prevent harm from happening, rather than grasping for punitive solutions after tragedies have already occurred. But I also think its important to get honest about what prisons and policing really are, and how they work. In a recent episode called You Cannot Divorce Murder From Policing, I talked with Alex Vitale about the history and current state of policing, and I encourage everyone to check out that episode if they havent yet. In todays episode, I talk with author and journalist Victoria Law about prisons, why they dont work, and what even well-meaning people tend to get wrong about incarceration. Regardless of how you feel about prisons or prison abolition, I think we all need to reckon with the realities of a system that is devouring millions of people as we speak. Because none of us are exempt from the harms being done or reinforced, and none of us are safe, so long as safety is mythologized on these terms.

[musical interlude]

KH: Todays guest is Victoria Law. Victoria is a freelance journalist and author whose most recent book Prisons Make Us Safer: And 20 Other Myths about Mass Incarceration dispels popular beliefs about prisons, violence, and safety. She is also a Truthout contributor and co-author of the book, Prison by Any Other Name. Victoria Law, welcome to the show.

Victoria Law: Thanks so much for having me Kelly, and thank you so much for all of these issues you cover.

KH: Im grateful for the chance to have these conversations. So how are you doing today, amid all the things?

VL: Im doing okay. I mean, in the midst of a pandemic and the twin pandemics of white supremacy and the coronavirus, I am doing as okay as can be. Im not imprisoned. I dont have COVID. I think thats okay.

KH: Well, I am so glad you could be here. Because I really think Prisons Make Us Safer: And 20 Other Myths about Mass Incarceration is one of the most important books Ive read in a really long time, and Im definitely not alone in that assessment. I know Mariame Kaba has called it an essential read, both for people who are new to this subject, and for those of us who are already organizing against the prison industrial complex. Angela Davis has also called the book an important tool that could enable precisely the kind of understanding we need in this moment.

I felt similarly about Prison by Any Other Name, which you co-wrote with my dear friend, and Truthouts editor-in-chief, Maya Schenwar. Ive heard you say that you think the two books compliment each other, and that you were actually working on them simultaneously. Can you say a bit about how the books serve as complementary resources and who you hope will read them?

VL: Sure. So I see prisons my Prison by Any Other Name, which Maya and I actually envisioned back in 2015 when Obama was president, and we were looking at bipartisan criminal justice reform and the ideas of kinder, gentler forms of surveillance and control, that didnt necessarily address root causes of imprisonment and still entrenched the idea that prisons or some form of confinement were necessary for some people. We wrote that with the idea that people who already understood that mass incarceration was a problem, that it was a gigantic 2.2 million person problem, and that it needed to be eradicated wouldnt fall for solutions that simply proposed building different sorts of prisons with the same underlying carceral logics.

Prisons Make Us Safer: And 20 Other Myths about Mass Incarceration is geared more towards people who are new to prison issues, might be coming into it especially this past year from movements and mobilizations to defund the police, understanding that policing and prisons are related forms of state violence, but may not necessarily know very much about prisons and thus are susceptible to some of the most pernicious and most pervasive myths about mass incarceration.

And as Maya and I noted frequently in Prison by Any Other Name, if you dont understand what causes mass incarceration, and you fall for some of these myths that point the finger at some entity that is perhaps a parasite, but not a primary driver of mass incarceration, youre going to fall for solutions that dont actually solve underlying causes of harm, violence, or this idea that we need prisons to keep us safer. And instead might fall for the more cosmetic changes that instead entrench prisons in other ways in our lives in our communities.

KH: Well, I cant stress enough that I hope everyone will pick up both of these books. In the opening of Prisons Make Us Safer, you offer up some pretty disturbing numbers. The United States has less than 5 percent of the worlds population, but 25 percent of its prison population. The U.S. had 2.3 million people in cages, as of 2019, and 6.7 million people whose movements were under some form of surveillance or control, such as house arrest, electronic monitoring, parole, or probation. 4.9 million people cycle through our nations jails each year, and the majority of those people have not been convicted of a crime. And on any given day, 2.7 million children have a parent in prison.

As Ive discussed on the show in the past, conditions inside U.S. prisons are so abhorrent, that each year spent in a U.S. prison takes two years off a persons life expectancy. And with over 2 million people incarcerated, prisons have shortened the overall U.S. life expectancy by almost two years.

So were talking about a grotesque system of torture and death-making, and a public health crisis, that most people have been conditioned not to think about. But what I hear most often, when I do confront people with facts or figures about how horrific prison conditions really are, is that people wind up there for a reason. And weve been trained by cop shows and popular, punitive ideas about justice and revenge to accept that vague notion of a reason as sufficient cause to write off whatever happens to people within those walls. But I really want to take a moment and dig into why we tolerate something so grotesque, that involves so many harms and indignities, that people would otherwise consider outside their values.

As you name in your book, the main arguments in support of incarceration are deterrence, incapacitation, and justice for victims. Can you say just a bit about why these arguments dont hold up?

VL: Yes. I mean, what we see when we have these three arguments. Well first, Im going to back up a minute. I want to address your point that people say, Well, people end up in prison for a reason or for reasons. And yes they do, but its not the reason that were fed by all of these cop shows, law and order shows, politicians, and media hype that push for stricter and harsher penalties. People end up in prison because our society does not have a robust safety net. We are a society that is still plagued with racism and white supremacy. With misogyny, transphobia, homophobia, and the unwillingness to provide basic resources to people living in this country. And instead of providing those resources, imprisonment in all of its forms seeks to sweep these problems under the rug and out of public view.

So yes, people end up in prison for a reason. But it is not necessarily a reason of personal responsibility. It is a reason of a collective failure, over decades, and decades, and decades, to provide for people. And it is our societal failure to uproot things like white supremacy and misogyny that this country was actually built on. And instead, strengthen ways in which people can be safe in their homes, among their families, and in their communities. So looking at prisons as either deterrence, incapacitation, or justice for victims feeds into this myth that prisons provide this sense of safety for people.

But if youre listeners think back to this idea of deterrence, and they think back to their past week and anyone who irritated them or annoyed them when they were going about their daily lives, how often did they respond to that person with violence or harm? If somebody cut you off in traffic, did you get out and punch them in the face? If somebody grabbed the roll of toilet paper that you were looking for or cut you in line at the supermarket, did you respond by slamming your shopping cart into their legs? If somebody cat called you on the street, did you turn around and take your meat cleaver out of your purse and smack them upside the head?

And if you did none of these things, did you refrain from doing this because you were afraid of the threat of arrest and imprisonment? Or did you recognize that this person was irritating, or annoying, or upsetting, and then choose either a different response or no response at all? Not because you are afraid that you might get arrested or you might be facing jail time, but because you recognize that this was actually not a way that you wanted to handle the situation.

And there have been studies that show that people dont think about prison or prison time when they are committing acts that are illegal, whether they be criminalized acts or acts of harm and violence. If they think about prison, its some far away notion that might or might not happen. But very few, if any people are deterred from causing harm and violence because of the threat of imprisonment.

Because if this were the case, given the gigantic number of people behind bars or under some sort of carceral supervision, everybody in the United States should be deterred by this giant looming threat of imprisonment hanging over their heads. And instead, we see that we are not the safest country. There are acts of violence happening on a daily basis. People are not deterred by this threat of arrest and imprisonment, despite all of the law and order shows, the cop shows, the draconian sentences, the increases in policing in urban areas. This has not deterred individuals from engaging in criminalized actions, including harm and violence.

When we think about incapacitation, and justice for victims, we have to remember that according to the Department of Justices own findings, over half of violent crimes go unreported each year. So over 50 percent of people who have been harmed by violence do not report it to the legal system. So people are not seeking justice or safety from the system in the first place. And from there, even fewer people are actually arrested. So if you have, say 46 percent of people who have been harmed reporting to the police, fewer people are arrested. And then from there, even fewer are referred to for prosecution, and even fewer are actually convicted and sent to prison.

So prison doesnt incapacitate people who cause harm and violence by and large. What were seeing is that it incapacitates some people who happen to be reported, arrested, prosecuted, and convicted. And then they are sent to prison.

And there, they often are sent into a chaotic, violent, racist, misogynistic, transphobic, and homophobic environment that does nothing to address the root causes of why they harmed somebody else, or why they engaged in violent behavior, or why they had to engage in criminalized behavior if there was not somebody who was directly harmed by their actions.

And again, what we see over, and over, and over is that the criminal legal system does not provide these kinds of resources either to the person who engaged in the harm or to the person who was harmed, who might need a plethora of resources in order to begin to recover, and heal, and rebuild their lives. The criminal legal system is not built to offer, say mental health counseling, or medical care, or help with medical bills, or time off from work so that they can begin to heal. Or childcare, or any other sorts of supports that people need after they have experienced violence and harm.

KH: I know that some people believe that prisons are sites of potential reform. But most of the people I grew up around, and most of the people I encounter in the world, dont really have any illusions about prisons being sites of reformation. Some of them argue that prisons are a deterrent. But mostly, they believe punishment is a necessary end in itself. I know I walked around for most of my life believing that, because we really are conditioned by this society to conflate satisfaction with justice. And that conflation is a pretty easy con. Most people want to be told that their impulses are correct. And when we are harmed, most of us, reflexively, want some kind of revenge. We dont like to call it that, so we may dress that impulse up linguistically, in a variety of ways some of them quite lofty but fundamentally, it is a completely human impulse to want to see the people who harm us hurt or suffer. Its understandable. But what this system does, is to tell us, Yes, you are right to want that. And that if this person does suffer, then justice has been done.

And that line of thinking really lets the system and the rest of society off the hook. Because if all that really needs to happen for us to arrive at justice is for that person to suffer, we dont really have to address the inequality that youve spoken of, or the cycles of violence, or the lack of healthcare, or the destruction of the social safety net, or the lack of positive socialization or support that so many people are experiencing. Confronting those things would often involve a radical reorientation of the way society works. And the criminal system is about maintaining the norms, order and hierarchy of a grossly unequal society. Its not about our personal safety, or personal reckonings with injustice. Its about maintaining our cooperation with the very system that generates the harms we experience.

So rather than saying, What happened here should be unthinkable, what would we need to change to keep it from happening again? The system tells us that if the person is punished, we should experience satisfaction and peace, and feel assured that the world is safer. But of course, the system doesnt really offer that either. It offers the idea of that. Because most people who experience harm, as you say, dont even bother to engage with the system. And those that do rarely get any satisfaction from that engagement. Can you say a bit about the mythology of justice in the U.S. system and how it compares to how victims and survivors actually experience the system?

VL: Yes. So we have this myth that justice equals retribution. And to paraphrase Mariame Kaba, a long time prison abolitionist and an organizer against gender violence, prison abolition is not about not having consequences. But in our society, we equate punishment with consequences. So people should face consequences for actions that they take, whether they be large or small. I mean, think about how many times, if you live in a household with somebody, you try to hold them accountable for things like, Hey, you said you were going to do the dishes and you didnt. Or, Hey, please dont leave your dirty socks all over the living room. So small actions like this to larger actions like, Hey, you need to be responsible and there needs to be consequences for the fact that youve harmed somebody.

But because we live in a punitive society and a society that has conditioned us to expect that punishment is a logical consequence, we have this idea that people need to suffer. And they need to be put into places that are, to quote Mariame Kaba, Somewhere else away from us. And that these places must be hellholes. If theyre violent, if theyre chaotic, if there are no rehabilitative opportunities, if their relationships with their family members are destroyed, if their communities are devastated by having so many people pulled out, well, that is because of their individual actions. And it lets society off the hook for the large systemic failures of why we have income inequality. Why do women make so much less money than men? Why do people of color make so much less money than white people? Why do women of color make so much less money than their white counterparts? Why do police profile? Why are communities that are often income communities of color that are devastated by violence even further devastated by police violence instead of having money being put into resources that those communities need to address violence and to stop economic, and gender, and racial inequalities?

So prisons obviously dont solve any of this. Prisons are a solution to punish people for being part of systemic societal failures. And for victims, what this often looks like is if they decide to report to police, if they go to the system in the first place, they have to tell their story over and over to police officers, and later to prosecutors, in a way that is believable and credible. And we have to remember that not every person is seen as a victim. So when Black men are killed, the system takes their deaths less seriously than it does for their white counterparts. We see this also with people who are sexually assaulted, over three quarters of whom do not report to the police in the first place.

And then if the victims case goes to court, they are called to testify in front of a grand jury, which is a panel of total strangers who are impassive. And they have to tell their story in a way, again, that is believable to this panel of strangers who hear many, many cases in one day. So by this point, everybodys mind is just blurred into horror story, after horror story, after horror story. And then if their case goes to trial, they must then tell the story again in a courtroom to a jury in a way that is believable and stands up against any personal attacks on the defense.

And then at the end of this, if the person who harmed them is convicted, theyre able to come to court and give a victim impact statement. But for people who dont want there to be draconian penalties, I talk about the one mother whose son was accidentally killed. Her 17 year old son was accidentally killed by his friend who was also 17 years old. She did not want her sons friend to go to prison for a long period of time. But the district attorney and the courts never notified her about the sentencing. She had no opportunity to go and give a victim impact statement that said, My son is gone. Let us not wreck another 17 year olds life by sending him away to prison for a long period of time. But she never had a chance to do that. And she only found out later that her sons friend got some absurdly long sentence because the jury said, Okay, you are convicted of murder. And the judge said, Okay, here are the sentencing guidelines. And nobody asked her what she wanted.

Not all victims want the person who harmed them or their loved ones to go away for long periods of time. This is why we often see that family violence, particularly domestic violence and violence against children is underreported, because they dont want to see their family member or loved one spending long periods of time in some hellish prison. They simply want that person to stop hurting them. And that is not what the current policing in prison system can provide.

KH: I also want to talk a bit about private prisons. In 2019, Maya Schenwar and I co-wrote a piece called The Problem With Child Detention Isnt That Its Private. Its That It Exists. And we got a lot of pushback from people who I think mostly had not read the piece, about how private prisons were a good place to start. And that obviously people insisted, if you removed the profit motive, there would be fewer children imprisoned and better conditions for incarcerated children.

In your book, you wrote the best breakdown Ive seen of why thats just not the case, really shattering the myth that we would somehow be rescuing people by ending private prisons. And also, the myth that taking them on is even the best place to start. Could you say a bit about that?

VL: Yes. So what we have to remember is that people are sent to prisons as punishment. And private prisons for the criminal legal system make up 8 to 9 percent of the total prison population. They make up 73 percent of immigration detention, which is a different structure with many of the same similarities of imprisonment the lack of freedom, the violence, the chaos, the brutality, etc.

But when were talking about mass incarceration or immigrant detention, we have to think of private prison corporations as parasites in the same way that we think of the companies that run the telephone systems, or the companies that provide the uniforms, or the companies that sell mass amounts of soap and gruel and whatever else. As parasites that are making money off of mass incarceration. There is a place to make a buck, and they are going to figure out a way to do so.

However, what we have seen is that in places where private prisons are closed, this does not result in people being released. So when Obamas Justice Department issued a memo towards the end of his presidency stating that they were going to allow their contracts with private prison companies to phase out and they would not renew them, the order did not come with an accompanying memo that said, And for the X thousands of people who are currently held in private prisons, were going to arrange for them to go home. So they were not going to be released, as a result of private prison closures, they were going to be shuffled into government run prisons, which are just as shoddy, which are just as violent, chaotic, and ill-run. With the only difference being that there was not a giant corporation being paid a fixed amount per body per day for caging them.

We see the same thing in states where some states that have rescinded or stopped using private prisons contracts have not seen a decrease in their prison population. Instead, what they are seeing is they just shuffle people from private prisons to their government run prisons.

Last year, Oklahoma ended its contract with a private prison corporation to close one of its larger private prisons as a cost saving measure. But what they did not do as a cost-saving measure was have a large-scale release of people who were being held in that private prison, or a large-scale release of a corresponding number of people being held in that private prison. Instead, those people were shuffled into the already overcrowded state run prisons in Oklahoma to continue serving their time.

So what we see is that when private prison corporations, or when private prisons are closed, or when divestment strategies happen, private prisons themselves might close, but people inside are not freed. And furthermore, these corporations, which are built to make a buck, simply reshuffle and figure out new ways to profit. So we see groups like GEO Group, which is one of the largest private prison corporations, going into the business of halfway houses. We see them going into drug rehab. We see them buying up electronic monitoring company BI Incorporated to be able to continue their profit. But they are not the drivers of mass incarceration. We have to remember that two of the largest private prison corporations started in the mid 1980s, as prison population started to soar with this war on crime, war on drugs, tough on crime, just say no policies were happening, and states were really enacting harsher and harsher punishments, and corporations saw a way to make a buck.

I think of historian Elizabeth Hinton who talks about how Lyndon B. Johnson introduced both the war on poverty and the war on crime. And the war on crime won out. And thats why we dont have all of these structures to eradicate poverty because were so busy trying to lock people up.

But if the war on poverty had won out, some of these same corporations mightve evolved as corporations to make a buck off of efforts to eradicate poverty. So it is not necessarily that they are driving these policies. They may lobby. They may give political donations. But we also have to remember that the majority of prisons are government run prisons with government workers, who are in unions, who have a lot more political power, a lot more clout, donate far more money to political candidates, and offer to provide votes for these political candidates as well.

So private prison corporations are this sort of parasite that if we focus all of our attention on getting rid of them, we still dont solve the problem of mass incarceration. We get rid of a parasite. Great. You dont get to feed off of caging X number of people, whatever 9 percent of 2.2 million is. But this doesnt mean that people get to go home at the end of the day. And people should remember that.

KH: Another misconception you address in your book is the idea that prison slavery drives mass incarceration. You write that fewer than half of the 2.3 million people who are locked up in the U.S. work while theyre incarcerated, and less than 1 percent of those people work for private corporations. So why does the myth that slave labor is a driving force behind the prison system persist?

VL: I think we see this as a holdover from the 13th Amendment, which abolished chattel slavery in southern slave holding states with the exception of somebody who was convicted of a crime. And in the South, lawmakers seized on this exception. Law enforcers seized on this exception to be able to basically re-enslave the newly freed Black population and send them back to work in fields, in mines, in other types of hard, grueling labor. But it was a way to deprive them of their freedom once again.

Fast forward to the 1980s, and 1990s, and 2000s, and even today. We have large numbers of people who are in prison who remain idle. If prisons were about profit, every one of those 2.2 million people in prison would be put to work doing something. Instead, we have something like between 80,000 to 100,000 people in solitary confinement, which means that they are locked into their cells 23 and a half to 24 hours a day with absolutely nothing to do.

For example in Texas, there are large numbers of people in whats called administrative segregation, which is their fancy term for being locked in your cell 23 and a half to 24 hours a day. They are not being put to work in the fields, where Texas prisoners are often required to work, and plant food, and harvest food for people inside the prison. They are not being put to work in the braille industry where the Texas Department of Criminal Justice contracts with these textbook companies to translate books into braille. And people in prison are not being paid for this, but TDCJ is.

But if profit was the sole motivation, then you would not have well-educated people who are probably going to be very good at translating books into braille languishing in solitary confinement, or languishing in places where they are idle and unable to work.

Instead, what we see is work is often used as a control mechanism. It is a control mechanism if somebody has a job that pays them a better wage and allows them to buy some things. And we also see it as a way for prisons to offset their own costs. So if you have people, imprisoned people mopping the floors, scrubbing the toilets, cutting other peoples hair, running errands for the prison warden, working in these fields, that is work that you do not have to pay an outside person whatever the minimum wage is in the state or county that you were in to do, but it does not necessarily offset the gigantic costs of 25,000, 30,000, 45,000, $55,000 per prisoner per year that the state incurs. So it is not an offset.

I mean, in the outside world, saying that we would spend $55,000 for somebody to sit in their house all day, everybody would decry this as welfare queen, welfare, lazy, something, something, something. We would say no, you cannot pay $55,000 for a person to sit in their house and do nothing.

But we do this all the time with imprisonment. We see that very few people are employed. Even fewer are employed by private prison corporations. And instead, prison systems spend an enormous amount of money keeping hundreds of thousands of people just sitting all day doing absolutely nothing.

KH: I want to talk a bit about sex offender registries. In your book, you take on the myth that sex offender registries are necessary to keep children safe. I feel like this is a tough one for a lot of people, because the desire to hang on to these registries comes from a very emotional place. Parents and other people who love children are afraid for the young people in their lives, and many dont want to give up anything that they think could offer even the smallest chance of insulating young people from violence. We also have a lot of contempt in our society for people convicted of anything construed of as a sex crime. And I think thats both the product of personal pain and resentment, sometimes stemming from our own experiences, and also from the collective pain and trauma that some cases have instilled in us as a society which is why these laws are often named after victims, who we would like to believe these laws would have saved. Those feelings are reinforced by cop shows like Law and Order SVU that position police and prisons as our best protection against monstrously depraved people, who are depicted as lurking around every corner.

But one in four girls and at least one in six boys are sexually abused in the U.S. before their 18th birthday, as you wrote in your book. And prisons and sex offender registries are not protecting children from those outcomes. Can you say a bit about these registries and how they actually function, and why they dont keep us safe?

VL: Sure. So we have to remember that sex offender registries like arrest and like prosecution and imprisonment come after harm has occurred, and only come if the harm is reported. So we have to remember that this statistic that you just read, one in four girls and one in six boys nationally are sexually abused before their 18th birthday. And of those, very few report to the authorities that this has happened. We have to also remember that 93 percent of child sexual abuse happens at the hands of family members or acquaintances, not strangers. So we are fed this idea that sex offender registries deal with the stranger in a white van whos going to pop out of their van, and grab your kid, and do who knows what with your child. And in reality, child sexual abuse is more likely to happen at the hands of a family member, a community member, a trusted person, or an acquaintance.

And we also have to remember that child sexual abuse has a very low percentage of reporting. So of every 100 incidents of child sexual abuse, only 10 to 18 instances are reported to the authorities. And from there, the number gets significantly and terrifyingly lower. If we think that police, and prisons, and sex offender registries keep children safe. Of those 10 to 18, only six people who have committed harm go to trial. And only three are convicted. And they are convicted of something, not necessarily of hurting a child or children. But they might plead guilty to something else in order to avoid being labeled a sex offender.

So A, the sex offender registry does nothing to prevent sexual harm and sexual abuse, because it happens after the fact. Also policing and prisons do not keep children safe, because it happens after the fact. But what this does do is it vilifies people who harm children as depraved monsters. And it makes it harder for us to identify and recognize people who are exhibiting warning signs as people we should perhaps look out for.

So nobody wants to think that their grandfather, or their great uncle, or their aunt, or their cousin, or their neighbor, or their little league coach, or their music teacher or whoever, or their brother or their sister might be somebody who will harm children. Because in our minds, people who harm children are these depraved monsters. And they must have horns, and goblin fangs, and something else. And they could never be the beloved people in our community.

And when we fail to recognize these warning signs, we fail to act to prevent them. So what are the warning signs that could have prevented this from escalating in the first place? So similarly, what are the warning signs if you see somebody that is behaving in a way that leads you to believe that they may not be safe to be around children?

So when we fail to recognize these warning signs, we fail to do things that could either support that person in getting help before they harm somebody or before they continue to harm somebody. And instead, what we do is we turn a blind eye and were like, Thats Desmond. Desmond is great. He might be kind of weird, but I know that Ive known him since we were both six years old. And I know that he would never harm anybody. As opposed to saying, Hey Desmonds, lets talk. Lets try to figure this out. Lets look for resources together. And it also keeps people who are in criminalization, keeps people who are struggling with impulses or ideas about hurting children from voluntarily seeking help, because they are afraid of being criminalized, locked up, and put on the sex offender registry.

In addition, people are put on the sex offender registry with no way to get off and no support to help keep them from hurting somebody else again. Instead youre given a long list of what you cannot do. You cannot live near a school. You cannot live near a daycare. You cannot live with your sister, because shes got three minor children. You cannot get a job here because you might be violating X, Y, or Z. You cannot live in this place because it is near school, daycare, children. You might have to be cut off from what little support system you might still have that might be able to hold you if you feel like you are struggling.

And there have been numerous studies that show that people who commit child sexual abuse are more likely to commit violence again when theyre without their support system, when they are stressed, when theyre feeling isolated, than when they are in a system that tries to hold them responsible and accountable, however imperfectly that might be. And I say however imperfectly, because what we know again, and again, and again, is that the creation of the sex offender registry has not resulted in larger numbers of children being safe. We have more than 900,000 people on the National Sex Offender Registry right now. That is a number that is greater than the entire population of Vermont. Yet we are not seeing an increase in safety for children. The creation of the sex offender registry did not stop Larry Nassar, the doctor who was arrested and imprisoned for sexually assaulting numerous child gymnast throughout his career, from doing what he did.

It did not allow anybody to recognize that this nice doctor that treated so many gymnasts might have a problem and might require intervention. Instead, what happened is that countless young people were subjected to child sexual abuse at his hands were afraid to come out and say something about him. Or if they did, their complaints were not taken seriously because he did not fit this idea that people who harm children are depraved monsters, and somehow we can spot them a mile away.

KH: I absolutely agree, and I also want to name that these registries, of course, reach far beyond the bounds of child sexual abuse, and beyond crimes like rape. As many people know by now, there are states where people can wind up on these registries for things like public urination, or taking a naked photo of yourself, if youre a teenager, or even being a client of a sex worker, and I want to acknowledge that there are people whose lives are being destroyed by these registries over those things too. Because when we create mechanisms of surveillance and control like this, their reach will always creep outward, and ensnare people who are not the supposed targets of the legislation. But, to avoid falling into a reform trap, where people think we just need to tweak who gets registered, its really crucial to name, as Victoria has here, that even in cases where people have committed acts of sexual harm that deeply disturb us, these registries are not preventing those harms from happening and they are not making anyone safer. They really do cause nothing but harm.

I want to circle back, for a moment, to Prison by Any Other Name, and the sort of creeping extensions of the carceral system that we are witnessing. Because people often think of incarceration, and that kind of surveillance and control as happening somewhere far away, or, at least, removed from their existence. But as you and Maya Schenwar wrote in Prison by Any Other Name, the prison nation really is extending into so many areas of our lives. As society fails more and more of us, it becomes increasingly important for the system to depict us as failures, who have to be surveilled, punished and controlled, because it cant be society that has to change. It has to be us, who are lacking and failing, and need to be whipped into a better state of cooperation with it. So we see escalations of the carceral management of people, in schools, at work, in healthcare, and in family regulation systems, like DCFS [Department of Children and Family Services]. And, of course, we also see the outsourcing of incarceration into peoples homes. Can you say a bit about how the prison industrial complex is presently extending its reach?

VL: Yes. I mean, what we see is we see the prison industrial complex creeping into our lives in several different ways. First, we see the expansion of prison-like solutions often posited as alternatives to incarceration.

One of the most popular is electronic monitoring, which is when somebody is shackled with a global positioning system device, or a GPS device, which tracks their every movement. And electronic monitoring is almost always accompanied by home confinement, which means you are locked in your house. Well youre not physically locked. You are told to say in your house. And if you want to leave your house, you must have prior approval from the authorities. That authority can be the Sheriffs office, the electronic monitoring company, a probation officer, a parole officer. The authority varies, but the result is the same. If you walk out of your house, even in an emergency, without that prior approval, you can be sent back to prison. And electronic monitoring is one of the growing ways in which imprisonment has been extended into our homes and communities. It is seen as a kinder, gentler form of imprisonment. And many people say, Yes, I would rather be sleeping in my own bed, eating food from my own refrigerator. Not having to get up five times a night to recite my prison ID number whenever the guard demands that I do so. But it is still a form of imprisonment. And as a solution to the physical jails and prisons, we need to be careful not to create similar structures in our homes and communities.

What we also see is this creep of criminalization into other institutions that are not meant to be prisons, but start looking remarkably like prisons. We see this with schools, particularly schools that serve low income students of color. So we dont see this in the Waldorf and the Montessori schools. We dont see this in the schools in the wealthier, whiter suburbs of, name the city of your choice. What we see this is in the schools that are often Black, brown, and immigrant, where the students and the families are from lower income brackets, and do not necessarily have the resources and the wherewithal to go someplace else. And we see these schools criminalizing students from an early age. We see these schools having more police officers than school counselors. We see students being brutalized and punished for acts that two decades ago would just be dealt with by the school. So we see that students are being arrested and put in handcuffs for things like having a fistfight. In some instances, which occur more frequently than anyone can imagine, we see that young Black girls as young as five or six get put in handcuffs by school police officers for things like having a tantrum because they dont want to take a nap, or they dont want to stop coloring, or whatever the case is.

Listeners who have small children in their lives, whether it be their own children, or their loved ones children, or their neighbors children will know that four, five, and six year olds sometimes throw tantrums. And no parenting book in the world says the way that you respond to a small child that does not want to do something and is throwing a tantrum, is to bring in a large law enforcement officer who will then put handcuffs on this child and terrorize them, and handcuff them to a desk, or put them in the back of a police car, or do something else that will cause them much, much more trauma.

Now that is not actually the way to deal with children, ever. But that is what we see with this creep of criminalization into institutions like schools, like preschools, like child welfare systems or foster care systems. So we see this idea that people should be treated as if they have somehow committed wrongdoing. Yes, tantrums are annoying. But they are not criminalized actions and they should not be punished in that kind of brutal way. And we see people being punished, sometimes brutally, for acts that a few decades ago, we would have said, Okay, clean up your crayons. Okay, you dont get to participate in sing-along because you broke all the crayons and threw a tantrum, and it took us 20 minutes to have to deal with you. So were not going to allow you to do this. Or were going to talk to your parents about that. But we do not respond with brutal physical punishment, or we should not. And we are seeing in an increasing number of instances this idea of punishment, carcerality creeping into our systems.

KH: I just want to say that as someone who has experienced that carcerality, in the mental healthcare system, and in other systems that were supposed to be offering me assistance when I was younger, I felt really seen reading Prison by Any Other Name. And I think a lot of people who have had these experiences will feel the same when reading this book. Because whats positioned as help is often a form of punishment, and the blame aspect is important, because the system has to depict people as failing to correctly participate in something that fundamentally works, in order to maintain itself, and to avoid having to make any correction. Society didnt fail that person, were told. They failed at participating in society, and they need to be disciplined into getting it right. And given whats happened to wages over the last 30 years, and whats happening to the environment, health care, and just all of the ways this society sabotages people, we have to confront the reality that people arent failing at something that works, and they dont need to be managed and punished and treated harshly, in order to do better. Abusing people further wont magically give them a functioning role in this slow motion collapse were experiencing, this thing Ruthie Gilmore calls organized abandonment. Punitive responses wont save people, and allowing them to be enacted on others will not save the rest of us.

So I highly recommend that people read Prison by Any Other Name, and really challenge themselves to recognize how easily most of us could be ensnared by one of these tentacles of the prison nation.

But all of these things said, I think a lot of people, when confronted with the realities of the prison system, are at something of a loss. Because while police and prisons are about the maintenance of order within the system, they also help us order the world in our minds. In the absence of them, a lot of people dont know where to begin. I know this isnt a question any one person can answer for the rest of us, and that there are many potential answers and experiments under construction, but what would you say to people who are listening and find themselves agreeing in principle, but who cant really picture another way?

VL: I think first of all, they should think back to their own interactions. In their families, in their communities about how they deal with harm and violence. So most of us when confronted with harm done to us by people that we love or care about, or maybe even people that we dont like and dont care about but are in our communities, often do not go to the police as a first step. Again, as I mentioned earlier, over half of violent crimes are not reported to the police each year. So we are already not going to the police and to the prison system to resolve our conflicts, including conflicts that are involving violence.

So A, we need to think about ways in which we have dealt with harm and violence in our own lives. And some of that might be, I wish I had responded differently. Not necessarily, Oh, I have this magical solution. But its also thinking about what else can be done. One of the insidious things about policing in prisons and this reliance on policing in prisons is it has shrunk our imagination so that we do not think that we individually or collectively can deal with conflict or harm on our own. And instead, we have to outsource it to this violent institution that takes up more and more of our resources.

So I would say, first of all, look at some of the experiments, initiatives, and projects that have been happening. Some of them are relatively new that have come up in the past year or two. Some of them have been long-standing initiatives. In the back of my book, I list several places where people can go to start looking for blueprints and roadmaps on how to address harm without calling the police. We have to understand it is not a one-to-one solution. We do not take out everybody who is convicted of X and then put in a similar sized one-size-fits-all solution. So if 55 percent of people have been incarcerated for violence, we dont take out prison as the solution and then put in something else that is as giant and mammoth, and does not address everyones needs. But what we can do is we can say what have other people done in these situations?

One of the things that Ive turned to is the idea of pod-mapping, which was started by the Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective, which seeks to end child sexual abuse. And Mia Mingus, one of the co-founders and a long-term abolitionist, put it this way, is that abolition and accountability are a muscle you have to continue to practice or exercise. She gave some sports examples that I dont really remember because I dont follow sports. But she said such and such basketball player did not magically one day just start shooting baskets into a hoop all the time. He had to practice, and practice, and practice. And thats something that we have to do with abolition.

So they have an idea, this thing called pod-mapping, where you map out relationships that you have with people. Who can you turn to when you need help? And these can be different people for different roles. Maybe if you are in need of $10, you can take a taxi to the hospital or to urgent care. Or you need $10 for groceries. Who can you turn to? It might be neighbor X, neighbor Y, and neighbor Z.

Who can you turn to if you have been harmed by somebody? That might be best friend A, best friend B, best friend C. But those best friends may never, ever have 10 extra dollars to be able to lend you. Whereas your neighbors might say, Im really busy, or I dont have the wherewithal, or I dont have the skills to be able to support you if you have been hurt by violence.

Now, who can you turn to when you are the one that has committed harm? Because we have to be honest with ourselves in that we also cause harm to other people. It might not be forever lasting, traumatizing, violent harm, but we also harm other people in our day-to-day lives because we are humans. And who do we have in our lives who might say, Hey Vicky, that was a messed up thing that you did. What are you going to do about it?

And that person might be a community member M, community member, and community member O. But those people may not be there for you when you need $10. They might not be able to provide childcare. They might not be able to do other things.

So its important to think about what your relationships are to other people, and who might be able to help. And also, where you are in relationship to other people. So you might say, Neighbors, A, B, and C that can lend me $10. I dont ever have $10 to lend back, but Im home on Tuesday afternoons, and their kids can come over to my place and have a safe place to go. Or, I can be here if they need help during X, Y, or Z times, because I am home during this time, and I can be the person that helps them with this. So I think its building relationships, and building supports, and being able to envision before a crisis happens what are the relationships, and then strengthening those relationships as well.

Theres also a website called One Million Experiments that Mariame Kaba has put together that looks at ways in which people are experimenting with responses to harm and violence that do not involve calling the police. Theres also a gigantic 400 page toolkit called Creative Interventions, which is also available online that chronicles peoples stories and experiences dealing with harm, violence, and conflict without calling the police. These are not manuals. Theyre not like your stereo manual or the manual to put together your Ikea shelf in which you follow A, B, and C to the letter and voila, you have a shelf or you have a stereo system.

But there are ways in which we should and can stretch our imaginations to say, What else is possible when something happens? Instead of saying, Well, I can either call the police or I can do nothing, which are currently what larger society tells us are our only two options.

KH: Thank you for that. Are there any asks or final thoughts you would like to leave our listeners with today?

VL: I would quote Ruth Wilson Gilmore, who is a co-founder of Critical Resistance and a long-term prison abolitionist who says that abolition is not aspirational. Its a journey. And were practicing abolition every day and in many different forms. This is actually a paraphrasing, not a quote. And she points out that fair wages are a form of abolition. She points out that migrant justice is a form of abolition. Theres so many different ways in which we can work towards abolition. Because we have to remember that abolition is not just the tearing down of prisons in all of its manifestations, but also replacing them with resources and supports that actually meet peoples needs and effectively addresses and reduces harm and violence, therefore making prisons unnecessary and obsolete.

KH: Absolutely. And we will be including links to some of the resources that Victoria mentioned in the show notes, which you can find at the bottom of the transcript of this episode on our website at truthout.org. And, I just want to say, as someone who reads a lot about prisons, I really learned so much from your book, Victoria. And I really hope that all of our listeners will check out Prisons Make Us Safer: And 20 Other Myths about Mass Incarceration and also Prison by Any Other Name, because I really believe that if a critical mass of people really took the time to process these texts, we might find ourselves living in a different world. And both are available as audiobooks, by the way, since I know thats important to some people including me. So dont forget to look for those links in the show notes.

Victoria, I want to thank you so much for joining me today. This has been a great conversation.

VL: Thank you so much, Kelly.

KH: I also want to thank our listeners for joining us today. And remember, our best defense against cynicism is to do good and to remember that the good we do matters. Until next time. Ill see you in the streets.

Show Notes:

Victorias books:

Prisons Make Us Safer: And 20 Other Myths about Mass Incarceration by Victoria Law

Prison by Any Other Name by Victoria Law and Maya Schenwar

Read more:

Getting Real About Prisons and Why They Dont Make Us Safer - Truthout

PESHAWAR: The Medical Teaching Institutions Appellate Tribunal has ordered the attachment of salaries of the hospital and medical directors of Hayatabad Medical Complex and a director of the attached Institute of Kidney Diseases (IKD) until further orders over failure to respond to an appeal of some employees against the abolition of their share in the charges of radiology and pathology tests.

The three-member tribunal headed by chairman Justice Nisar Hussain ordered the HMCs hospital and medical directors, the secretary of its board of governors, and the director of IKD to appear before it on the next hearing on June 2 besides submitting reply to the appeal within a week.

It took exception to the issue as neither the reply was filed by the officials nor did any of their representative turn up during the hearing into the appeal filed by Prof Malik Zeb and several other doctors, who challenged the abolition of their share in the charges of tests done by the radiology and pathology departments.

Calls them over abolition of staffs share in radiology, pathology test fee

Last month, the tribunal had admitted the appeal to regular hearing and sought the response of the respondents.

The tribunal is empowered under the MTI Act, 2015, to adjudicate on the grievances of all MTI staff members.

The appellants, who are pathologists and radiologists of HMC and IKD, had filed the appeals saying by misinterpreting the amendments to the MTI Act, the BoG had withdrawn their share, which was even unattractive, in the user charges of the two departments.

When the tribunal took up the appeal, it observed that during the previous hearing on May 6, the counsel for the respondents was present and directions were issued to the IKD director and HMC medical and hospital directors to file response with a fortnight.

The tribunal observed that despite the acceptance of notice by the counsel, no one appeared on their behalf nor did they file reply.

This indifferent and contumacious conduct of the respondents is highly deplorable which cannot be overlooked, the tribunal observed.

Senior advocate Mian Muhibullah Kakakhel appeared for the appellants and said the radiology and pathology were those specialties to which doctors rarely opted due to low salaries and limited work opportunities and professional development opportunities.

He said the government decided in 2005 to give shares to doctors in total earnings per test done through a devised formula.

The lawyer said the appellants opted for the specialty due to that formula and were currently heads of departments and professors.

He said those were diagnostics-based specialties and his clients provided services in HMC and IKD round the clock with one team serving in the morning and another at night.

The lawyer said the government introduced the concept of institution-based practice through the MTI Act, 2015, under which all the doctors, who could perform in their personal capacity and ran clinics later, were asked to examine patients in the place, which they used in the morning.

He said through MTI (Amendment) Act, 2018, the petitioners i.e. radiologists and pathologists were also made subject to it and in case they didnt opt for IBP, they wont be given share.

The lawyer said the 2018 amendment to the MTI Act was being destructively interpreted against appellants to whom it was not applicable and that their unattractive shares were being unreasonably stopped.

Published in Dawn, May 26th, 2021

Read more:

Tribunal attaches salaries of HMC, kidney institute heads - DAWN.com

Citing the likelihood that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell will obstruct a bipartisan House bill that would create a 9/11-style commission to investigate the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, progressive lawmakers and campaigners in recent days intensified demands to end the filibuster.

"There are Republicans who still refuse to acknowledge that Biden won the election. And we're supposed to think that they'll magically work with us on passing our agenda?"Rep. Pramila Jayapal

House lawmakers voted 252-175last Wednesday to establish an expert commission to probe the events of January 6, when a mob consisting mostly of supporters of former President Donald Trump and his lie that the 2020 election was stolenstormed the Capitol, resulting in five deaths, a delay of the certification of then-President-elect Joe Biden's Electoral College victory, and Trump's subsequentimpeachment.

Thirty-five House Republicansjoined their Democratic colleagues in voting for the bill. However, it is highly unlikely that the measure will garner the requisite support of 10 GOP senators needed to avoid a possible filibuster, as McConnell (R-Ky.) appears poised to use the ultimate obstructionist weapon to torpedo the bill.

GOP intransigence has sharpened Democratic opposition to the filibuster, which is especially robust among progressive lawmakers and campaigners.

"The American people voted for progress, and we need to deliver," Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.)assertedSunday. "It makes no sense that one member of the minority party can trigger a minority veto. That's not what people voted for."

There are Democrats in the Senate who say that we need the filibuster for bipartisanship while Republicans are literally filibustering an investigation into the insurrection that could have killed them.

We don't compromise with white supremacy. End the filibuster.

Cori Bush (@CoriBush) May 21, 2021

A bipartisan deal was reached on a commission investigating the January 6th riot at the Capitol and Republicans are still blocking it.

Abolish the filibuster.

Stand Up America (@StandUpAmerica) May 24, 2021

Noting that "there are Republicans who still refuse to acknowledge that Biden won the election," Rep. Pramilia Jayapal (D-Wash.) tweeted Monday that the Senate must "end the filibuster so we can get to work."

There are Republicans who still refuse to acknowledge that Biden won the election. And we're supposed to think that they'll magically work with us on passing our agenda?

No. Let's end the filibuster so we can get to work.

Pramila Jayapal (@PramilaJayapal) May 24, 2021

That work includes passing the For the People Act (pdf), a sweeping pro-democracy bill that would expand voting rights including for former felons, curtail partisan gerrymandering, strengthen ethics rules, limit money in politics and implement the DISCLOSE Act, and make Washington, D.C. a stateamong other reforms.

Although the House passed the bill in early March without a single Republican vote, the threat of a GOP filibuster bodes ominously for its Senate prospects. This has increasingly spurred Democratic lawmakers and pro-democracy campaigners to link the possibility of legislative success with ending the filibuster.

It takes 60 votes in the Senate to pass voting rights, a $15 minimum wage, universal health care, gun violence prevention, and civil rights protections.

But Republicans can cut taxes for their wealthy donors and corporations with a simple majority.

How does this make sense?

Ro Khanna (@RoKhanna) May 24, 2021

END THE FILIBUSTER. PASS THE FOR THE PEOPLE ACT.

Alex Padilla (@AlexPadilla4CA) May 24, 2021

Appearing on WCVB's "On the Record" Sunday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said,"I'm ready to sign up and say it's time to get rid of the filibuster."

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"If you can get a majority in the House, get a majority in the Senate, and get the president of the United States to sign off, that should be enough to advance legislation," Warren argued. "And this piece of legislation for an independent commission, that's a good starting placea reminder why the filibuster needs to go."

This morning, @ewarren is the guest on OTR. She is pushing for legislation that would create a bipartisan commission to investigate the Jan 6 insurrection at the Capitol. Senate Republicans say they will filibuster. #WCVB pic.twitter.com/iHfGoeTDF4

Jennifer Eagan (@Jennifer_Eagan) May 23, 2021

Opponents reiterated the filibuster's racist rootsit has been used to defend slavery, Jim Crow segregation, and opposition to civil and voting rights legislationin calling for its abolition.

"It's important that we not continue to allow the filibuster to be a tool used to suppress the right to vote, that Black people have fought and died for," Rep. Hank Johnson (D-Ga.) told Axios on Thursday.

*Open tweet*

"The filibuster is a racist relic predominantly used to prevent a mostly white minority of Americans from losing control of the United States government."

*Send tweet*

Citizens for Ethics (@CREWcrew) May 24, 2021

Others reminded voters of McConnell's infamous vow to obstruct then-President Barack Obama's agenda via the filibuster, with former Treasury Secretary Robert Reich tweeting Sunday, "Now, McConnell is doing the same thing to Biden."

A quick history lesson:

In 2009, Mitch McConnell vowed to do everything he could to block President Obama's agenda.

Now, McConnell is doing the same thing to President Biden.

It's time to abolish the filibuster and deliver for the American people. There's no time to waste.

Robert Reich (@RBReich) May 23, 2021

One formidable obstacle impeding potential efforts to end the filibuster is oppositionfrom Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin (W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.). At a virtual statewide convention of the Arizona Democratic Party on Saturday, committee members passed a resolution calling on Sinema and Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.)who has refused to clearly state his stance on the issueto vote to eliminate the filibuster from Senate rules.

Prior to the convention, hundreds of progressive activists rallied in downtown Phoenix Thursday to urge Kelly and Sinema to end the filibuster.

"The filibuster has been used to stop the Voting Rights Act," Rev. Reginald Walton, executive director of the African American Christian Clergy Coalition, said at the event. "The filibuster has been used to stop the Anti-Lynching Bill. Guess what happens when that happens. People are hurt!"

"They want to mute the voices of Black people," Walton said of Republicans. "They want to mute the voices of Brown people. They want to mute the voices of LGBTQIA people. They want to mute your voices and we cannot let that happen!"

Original post:

As Frustration Grows Over GOP Obstruction, Progressives Intensify Demands to Kill Filibuster - Common Dreams

If education is, in Horace Manns words, the great equalizer, why hasnt a substantial increase in spending on education and a sharp rise in college attendance and graduation rates narrowed the income and wealth gaps in the United States?

Americans have the second largest number of years of education of any people in the world. Yet economic stratification has increased even among those with a college degree, challenging the widespread view of higher education as an engine of upward social and economic mobility.

The best explanation I have seen for this paradox -- that economic inequality expands even as educational attainment increases -- can be found in Cristina Viviana Groegers stunning The Education Trap.

A powerfully persuasive rebuttal to Claudia Goldins claim that educational attainment largely explains the decline in economic inequality after 1929, The Education Trap is anything but a thesis-driven polemic. This richly researched, methodologically sophisticated, well-written study of schooling in Boston from the 1880s to the early 1940s offers eye-opening insights into the shifting pathways into the labor force.

Much more than an impressive work of historical reconstruction, this book should serve as a cautionary tale for our own times, when, once again, the paths to an economically secure livelihood are undergoing a momentous transformation.

During the last decades of the 19th century, informal pathways into the workforce -- including apprenticeships and reliance on kin and ethnic networks -- were supplanted by formal education. It was then that education began to acquire the credentialing responsibilities that it holds today.

As Groeger demonstrates, a wide range of educational options proliferated around the turn of the 20th century. Alongside the rapidly expanding public high schools, there were proprietary trade, commercial and secretarial schools; normal schools; correspondence schools; and an expanding ecosystem of colleges, universities and technical institutes with highly differentiated missions and resources.

Indeed, the educational universe was broader and the options greater than today.

One of Groegers most important discoveries is the many attempts to create educational institutions specifically designed to serve working-class men. Some, like Northeastern, one of many YMCA and night schools, survived, but most efforts at industrial education failed, with profound consequences for the future.

The inability to create technical and vocational training opportunities facilitated the growth of Taylorism and what Harry Braverman called the degradation of labor.

Industry increasingly replaced skilled craftsmen with semiskilled laborers (who had been hired informally, often by kin or fellow workers, who were responsible for their training and supervision). Increasingly, hiring became the responsibility of expanding HR departments.

At the same time that industrial labor was proletarianized, many young women benefited from the shift to the new educational path. Office work, following a training course, offered a much-welcomed alternative to earlier kinds of female employment in domestic service and the garment industry, even at a low, pink-collar wage.

Meanwhile, management positions increasingly went to those who attended traditional colleges and the new research universities or prestigious technological institutes like MIT.

All of this should sound eerily familiar.

Our deep-seated belief in the value of education as the key to economic opportunity leads many who never earn a college degree to regard themselves as failures who are personally responsible for their lack of success.

Meanwhile, we severely underfund technical and vocational education and seem not to care about its inability to place those who complete those programs in appropriate jobs. We still do a terrible job of coordinating training with likely employers.

We call out less selective colleges and universities when they cut programs but refuse to fund them at the levels commensurate with the high-need students that they serve.

Then, the selective institutions, in turn, disproportionately funnel their graduates into the analytic, symbolic upper management and professional jobs that reap the largest rewards and exercise the most societal power and influence.

We need to recognize an unsettling truth: whatever else it is, our educational system is also a sorting mechanism. Educations failure to narrow class divides isnt an accident. Thats how the system currently works.

As Groeger observes, increased education was only one factor -- and not the most important -- in the decline of economic inequality during the mid-20th century. Unionization, Social Security, the minimum wage, the abolition of child labor and various kinds of government regulation also contributed.

We live in a very different context, and past solutions may not work today. But have no doubt: If we hope to diminish economic disparities, two- and four-year institutions have a big role to play.

Heres what Id recommend:

No one wants higher education to entrench or magnify economic inequalities. It need not. But if it is to be a great equalizer, it needs to innovate.

Steven Mintz is professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin.

See the original post:

Higher Education: Equalizer or Engine of Inequality? | Higher Ed Gamma - Inside Higher Ed

On May 25th a reckoning with systemic racism was reignited. It's still here and so are we.

In the week after the murder of George Floyd on May 25 last year, cop cars burned, storefronts shattered, and the streets thrummed and swelled with the U.S. largest-ever mass action. The action quickly formalized into the Defund the Police movement, a budget justice demand with abolitionist roots. Organizations across the country called on elected officials to divest funds from cops and reinvest them into education, youth services, housing, healthcare, mental health response teams, alternative systems of justicethe things the movement believes every community needs to be healthy and safe.

Some of the Senates top Democrats answered calls for the defense of Black life by kneeling in Kente stoles for the introduction of a relatively anemic police reform package called the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act of 2020. But on a local level, politicians appeared more receptive to the policy demand that quickly gripped protesters and whipped pro-cop entities into a frenzy. (The much-decried property damage might have had something to do with it.)

Winter and a spike in COVID-19 cases winnowed down street actions, but the demand to defund the police has reverberated through this years national conversationoften as a scapegoat for people across the political spectrum. Criticsincluding former president Barack Obamahave knocked the slogan (and, by proxy, the movement) as incendiary, confusing, and unpopular. Arguments down the center claim defund is overly radical, blowing a chance at measured reform. Arguments from the right rest on the (statistically false) belief that cops spend their time fighting crime. Arguments from the left take shots at defunding as a step toward police abolition as impractical and unattainable.

From summer 2020 onward, politicians in both major parties (from Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey to former President Donald Trump), law enforcement officers, and police unions have wrongfully pointed to Defund as the sole explanation for spikes in crime during an unprecedented public health crisis and a period of severe economic downturn thats left millions unemployed and desperate. In November 2020, Democrats blamed Defund for a lackluster performance in the polls. And, just shy of a year after their roundly mocked photo op, Senate Democrats are gearing up to defang the Justice in Policing Act of its only meaningful reform by dropping the repeal of qualified immunity for law enforcement officials, which notoriously shields officers who commit constitutional violations and other acts of violence from accountability.

But according to Interrupting Criminalization researcher Andrea J. Ritchie, these attempts to discredit the movement have obscured its very real victories, particularly when it comes to challenging the deeply embedded cultural narrative that police power is the key to public safety. When I talk to people on the ground, they are very invested in increasing community safety and very invested in not being killed anymore, or raped or beaten, Ritchie told VICE. They're like, I don't care what the slogan is, as long as we're clear about what we're doing, which is divesting from institutions that criminalize, police, punish, surveil, and kill people and investing in the things people need to recover from this unprecedented pandemic and economic crisis, and the climate crisis that's ongoing, and the ongoing crisis of anti-Black police violence.

As Ritchie outlined in a January 2021 report titled The Demand Is Still #DefundthePolice, police budgets were cut; superfluous units were cut; enforcement areas, like parking and homeless outreach, were delegated to other city agencies; and campaigns a literal decade in the makinglike the Black Organizing Projects push to abolish the Oakland School Police Department and reinvest its $6 million budgetclinched their wins.

The political backlash to Defund doesnt engage very much with the fact that the police violence the movement aims to address is still happening. According to data from Mapping Police Violence, 223 Black people have been killed by cops since George Floyds murder. In April, Minneapolis Police Department officers killed 20-year-old Daunte Wright just 10 miles away from the then-ongoing trial of MPD officer Derek Chauvin, the cop found guilty of murdering Floyd. The inability of the police to meet the Defund movements fundamental demandstop killing Black people without more intervention is evident.

And while Defund has made huge strides, the actual dent made in fiscal-year 2021 police budgets in most major cities is significant, but its still relatively small in most places. Cuts that look big on paper also havent translated to capacity changesNew York City officials claim that defunding the police is to blame for a rise in violent crime, but the so-called shift of $1 billion out of the NYPD budget didnt remove a single cop from the streets.

Still, after a year of grueling work, a handful of organizers and activists helped VICE recap what the Defund movement has already accomplished, and explained how they will continue fighting for Defund, both in defense of this past budget cycles victories and to further dismantle the system.

We started to redefine public safety.

Last summers street protests produced an undeniable national spectacle of police violence. The well-documented use of violence on people protesting against police violence, coupled with an increased awareness of the highly racialized history of policing, helped germinate something special: a new consensus that maybe cops dont keep us safe after all.

In a June 2020 New York Times op-ed arguing in favor of police abolition and cutting police budgets and headcounts by 50 percent nationwide, movement leader Mariame Kaba asked, What would the country look like if it had billions of extra dollars to spend on housing, food, and education for all? This change in society wouldnt happen immediately, but the protests show that many people are ready to embrace a different vision of safety and justice.

Ritchie said the uncorking of our collective civic imagination is a bigger victory than any single FY21 budget cut or even the sum of all the budget cuts. It's not about dollars at this point, Ritchie said. There are more people engaged in, and really wrestling with, a conversation about what communities need to actually really be safe, rather than just continuing to default to policing. We're up against a pretty big behemotha 200-year-old institution that has deeply entrenched itself, not just in our city's budgets but in people's hearts and minds as what safety is, even when faced with concrete, repeated, ongoing, qualitative and quantitative evidence that it is not producing safety, and it's producing more violence.

Breaking that consensus has mattered on a city-by-city basis, too, especially for organizers specifically pushing to defund the police as a non-reformist reformone that pushes for change outside the existing power structureon the path to police abolition. Anglica Chzaro, an organizer with Decriminalize Seattle, told VICE: We were just all riding this train every year where more cars got added on in the shape of like more SPD budget numbers: more officers, more money, more training, more tools. It felt like we derailed that trainthe direction of infinite growth for policing that has been the consensus, even in a so-called liberal city, for so many years.

Still, Chzaro said she knows from her decade of organizing experience that the work is far from over. If we're trying to fundamentally shift the paradigm of public safety in Seattle, that's gonna require constant vigilance, she said. Thankfully, people seem to have signed up for the long haul.

We cut police budgets and diverted resources and manpower.

Ever read a city budget for fun? Of course not. The city budget process involves a series of dense, boring, and convoluted documents, doled out over the course of months. In order to sharpen their demands on city officials, Defund activists rolled up their sleeves and dug into those documents, delivering potential cuts and other targeted demandsa meticulously researched FTP!

Chas Moore, founder and executive director of the nonprofit Austin Justice Coalition, told VICE that unpacking what the Austin Police Department spends its funds on created obvious openings for his coalition, and others fighting for budget justice in the city, to carve out $100 million in Defund demandsa number he said he came up with on the fly while speaking to a reporter. We got our hands on the police budget and we started chipping away at things we thought could be moved out of the police department, like forensics, Moore said. We were poking at certain units that we thought didnt really need to exist, like the mounted patrol unitthey fucking ride down 6th Street on Clydesdales, like do we really need this?

Moore said he thinks this hands-on approach was instrumental in the Austin city councils decision to move $150 million in city funds from the Austin Police Departments $434 million budget, with $22 million in outright cuts, tens of millions more in reallocations, elimination of mounted patrol units, and the removal of a city forensics lab from police control.

Seattles budget wins specifically included moving 911 dispatchers, victim advocacy work, and parking enforcement out of SPD control and cutting millions of dollars in training, overtime, and civilian vacancy SPD funds, for a total of approximately $76 million in eliminations and transfers from the police departments $409 million budget. Chzaro said past organizing workincluding budget justice campaignsput Seattles Defund movement at an advantage.

Chzaro and others had spent years working in the racial justice space on campaigns like an eight-year battle to end youth incarceration in King County, Washington, where Seattle is located, and May and Junes street protests presented an opportunity to supercharge that work.

The experience of being forced to reckon with radical demands in the past in Seattle meant the demand to defund SPD by 50 percent was something people were ready to take up pretty quickly, Chzaro told VICE. Once we put out the call to defund, instead of it taking eight years to get signatories, it took eight hours to get dozens and dozens of groupsultimately over 40,000 individuals signed up to support the demand, and over 400 organizations.

KennedyEzra Kastle, senior communications director for Minneapolis-based, Black-led, queer feminist nonprofit Black Visions, said that Minneapolis was very ready to mobilize (and demand $200 million in cuts to the Minneapolis Police Department budget) in the wake of Floyds murder for one reason: Theyd done it so many times before.

Unfortunately, organizing was something that folks are used to. Folks are used to the police departments murdering innocent Black folks and folks of color. Folks come together like clockwork, Kastle told VICE. They understand who will be doing the mutual aid work to uplift the family, who is providing the medical services to those who are being tear-gassed, who will be providing the gas masks, the first aid kits. There are groups online organized around who's gonna bring the water close to this site in case we get kettled and who has a nice little yard where we could set up some tents. It has always really been us taking care of us.

Because of this, Kastle said he doesnt see any of the most recent budget changes in Minneapolisincluding an $8 million budget cut from the MPD, rerouting of property damage calls to 311, and a decrease in MPD headcountas meaningful beyond the symbolic. I don't believe we see victory, he told VICE. I think that these cuts and these changes operate in a way of pacification. No real, meaningful change can come until the police department has fully been abolished. This rings especially true after the headline-making city council vote to disband the MPD was effectively blocked from the November 2020 ballot by an unelected, judge-appointed charter commission.

We made the budget process something anyone could plug into.

Organizers continued to engage people through participatory budgeting, an annual cycle of meeting and voting designed to allocate funds most directly based on community demands.

Taking money from the police and reinvesting it in participatory budgeting has helped keep enthusiasm alive, according to Moore. He said the Austin Justice Coalition used a tool called #WeFund to get a sense of what Austin community members would like to see from their dream budget. That was very interesting, because that showed us that although I had said out of the blue we wanted $100 million in cuts, on average, people were taking away like $230 million from the police department and putting it in parks and rec, or the health department, he said.

Reimagining the city budget as a document for everyone also requires some serious translation. Ashley Sawyer, senior director of campaigns for Girls for Gender Equity, a member of New York Citys Communities United for Police Reform nonprofit coalition, said while New Yorks mayor and city council failed to meet their demand for a $1 billion cut from the NYPD budget, she and other coalition members were still heartened by last summers surge of interest. A lot of the things that we demanded, we didn't get, Sawyer told VICE. But the wins were this renewed commitment to defunding police and recognizing the ways that the money spent on policing is money that's not going toward creating healthy communities.

Another win? The fact that so many people turned their attention toward making the citys budget process something a layperson could actually follow, through Instagram graphics, political education sessions, readable analysis with actionable takeaways. and policy demands.

I cannot emphasize enough that the movement to defund isn't about people who necessarily work at a nonprofit organization or people who have the time to be at every hearing. It's about everybody getting access to the information so that they can meaningfully participate, Sawyer said, not just full-time activists. So many of the decisions that affect people's day-to-day lives are happening without their participation, and I believe that's intentional. In theory that could be plastered on the subway: Tomorrow, there's a budget hearing. Everybody who wants to say something, you can say something! But that's not how the city council works.

Access to information leads much more directly to calls to action: email targeted demands to reps, call city council members offices, testify at public safety hearings, bother the people who spend all our money on the things that hurt us until they give up. Throughout the year, people answered. Tens of thousands of people called into budget hearings across the country. 60,000 people sent emails to their council members in Philadelphia, in Dallasthese are people who are deeply engaged now in a question of how do we spend our collective resources? That, to me, is also the biggest victory, Ritchie said.

Kastle said he views both the upsurge of interest in reimagining public safety and the $30 million in funding that Black Visions and connected community-led safety organization Reclaim the Block received in donations last summer as the real tools to make meaningful change in his community. So far, Black Visions and Reclaim the Block have redistributed almost $9 million of that money to individuals and Minneapolis-based organizations through need-based funds and grants.

When there are young Black folks out here without housing, without legal aid, without food, you know, we don't go hold a press conference at City Hall and say, We're doing the best we can, he said. We truly reach out into the community and start to help folks. We do it without excuses and we do it with partners. And the fact that we are able to operate better than our city officials and our local police department should upset the public. People should be outraged that a nonprofit is able to govern this community better than its elected officials.

We need help making progressand defending what we won.

Defund has received a lot of pushback from law and order defenders: Organizers and street protesters have been targeted with trumped-up charges from last summer that many are still battling in court. Republican lawmakers in Florida passed a bill preemptively overturning local defund efforts; Texas, Missouri, Alabama, and North Carolina all have bills with similar aims passing through their state legislatures.

Cops are seeing the threat to their hegemonic hold on public safety and are becoming more outlandish in their claims to defend it, Ritchie said of the backlash. And the ways that kind of [anti-Defund] legislation is spreading across the country shows the power of our movement, but it also means that people are now fighting at local and state levels, and on multiple frontsfighting copaganda backlash and backlash from neoliberal elites who are like, Wait a minute, you're really trying to upset the status quo and you're really trying to reorganize society around community needs?

On a local level, organizers have had to debunk insidious counter-narratives from police themselves. One example: a claim from the Seattle Police Department that budget cuts were forcing them to ignore certain 911 calls. We've been able to dive very deeply into that data and see that actually, the numbers haven't actually changed much, if at all, Chzaro said. It's actually a success that we're seeing SPD spend more time on the quote-unquote top-priority cases, instead of Somebody called 911 because a kid threw a snowball.

Budget justice, racial justice, defense of Black life, and police abolition arent fights that Defund organizers in any of these cities can close the book on. In spite of the backlash and the exhaustion, organizers are still pushing forward with new campaigns and new experiments aimed at diverting city fundsand rearranging city prioritiestoward a cop-free vision of community health and safety.

In Minneapolis, Black Voices is mobilizing around the Yes 4 Minneapolis campaign, a ballot initiative backed by a Black-led coalition that would allow voters to replace the MPD with a department of public safety staffed by peace officers. In New York City, NYC-DSAs DefundNYPD campaign (which, full disclosure, I have volunteered with) is pushing city council candidates to pledge to block any budget that falls short of its demand for $3 billion in cuts.

Meanwhile, Communities United for Police Reform is working on a state level to defend the repeal of 50a, a law shielding police misconduct records from the public, which police departments across the state have fought bitterly. In Austin, organizers are fighting to hold their city council accountable after the politicians reneged on a pledge to eliminate all police cadet classes in 2021, while the threat of state intervention looms. Organizers in Seattle are working to get its participatory budget process up and running, with Black leaders at the helm.

And, wherever youre reading this from, theres a great chance Defund-adjacent work is in motion too. Interrupting Criminalization, in collaboration with national organizations like Critical Resistance and the Movement for Black Lives, created DefundPolice.org, a hub for users to track pro-Defund legislation and plug in to local organizations across the U.S.something Ritchie said is critical in the fight against police power. The world that you were chanting for and dreaming of and demanding last summer is a long haul struggle to get to. Get involved in your local budget fight, join an organizationorganizations are containers in which we can have conversations, find community, and collectivise our energies, Ritchie said. We're not going to win a new world in one or two budget cycles.

Follow Katie Way onTwitter.

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Heres What the Movement to 'Defund the Police' Actually Won - VICE

May 24th 2021

by Jason Stanley

Editors note: Twelve months on from the killing of George Floyd, The Economist is publishing a series of articles, films, podcasts, data visualisations and guest contributions on the theme of race in America. To see them visit our hub

POLITICIANS USE critical race theory (CRT) in much the same way that they use Keynesian economics: as cudgels in a propaganda campaign to advance their cherished political goals, with little regard for the actual philosophies at issue. CRT, a doctrine more caricatured than understood, rests upon the distinctly unradical claim that American institutions have systematically fallen short of the countrys egalitarian ideals due to practices that perpetuate racial hierarchies. It began in the 1970s as a way to analyse the intersection of American law and race; its creators were legal scholars such as Derrick Bell and Kimberl Crenshaw. It has since expanded its purview to analyse American institutions more broadly.

CRT stems from the need to provide a language for what institutions actually do, rather than how people in those institutions describe themselves. CRT thus seeks to explain the fact of persistent racial injustice by analysing the practices of American institutions. Such practices are racist because they perpetuate racial inequality, not because people within them seek deliberately to oppress individual and specific black people. Mortgage lending, for instance, can function in a racist way, even if the lenders themselves harbour no personal bigotry against non-whites.

CRT holds that such institutional practices are difficult to change and endemic to American institutions, and that they, rather than the malice of individual bigots or the supposed pathologies of black American behaviour, are primarily responsible for racial inequality. CRT is thus not about peoples individual characters. It is rather a claim about the structures, practices, and habits that perpetuate racial inequality. Even the most avowed anti-racist can participate in an institution with racist practices.

Martin Delany, a political philosopher and black abolitionist, writing in the year 1852, noted that even in Anti-Slavery establishments, by which he means institutions in Northern cities devoted to the abolition of slavery and the elevation of the colored man, by facilitating his efforts in attaining to equality with the white man, black citizens only occupy a mere secondary, underling position. Even whites most devoted to the cause of the advancement of racial equality hired black Americans for inferior jobs.

Such whites might have argued for a distinction between political and professional inequalitythey might have felt, in other words, that the law should treat everyone equally, but also that American citizens of African descent are best suited for menial work. But this is explicit racism, which no avowed anti-racist could accept. The professions of anti-racism from these whites, whom Delany called the truest friends, might have been sincere, but they coexisted with obviously racist practices. Delany denounces this faux liberal equality, declaring, There is no equality of persons, where there is not an equality of attainments.

Almost 170 years later, how has the American polity done on Delanys measure of equality? Consider the criminal-justice system, decried in W.E.B. Du Bois 1903 book The Souls of Black Folk as a a double system of justice, which erred on the white side by undue leniency and the practical immunity of red-handed criminals, and erred on the black side by undue severity, injustice, and lack of discrimination. As of this writing, the United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world. Black Americans are incarcerated in state and federal prisons at five times the rate of white Americans.

It is true that rates of violent crime among black Americans are higher. But just as higher covid-19 death rates among black Americans are best explained by differences in environmental conditions, higher crime rates are also due to racial disparities, such as harsher policing (a racial disparity not explained by differential crime rates), lack of decent job opportunities, homelessness, and poverty. Thus the longstanding American practice of addressing crime spikes through increased policing rather than, say, more job-training programmes is an example of a practice that perpetuates racist outcomes.

Inequalities in the justice system are mirrored, unsurprisingly, in inequalities in wealth. In 2016, the median black family had 10% of the wealth of the median white family. This is an improvement from 1963, when the median non-white family had only 5% of relative wealth. But it is a far cry from equality of attainment, 170 years after Martin Delany set that down as the standard for racial justice.

From sharecropping in the South to predatory lending in the North, white Americans have been materially invested in creating and maintaining racial domination. In addition to these material benefits of racial hierarchy, documented in a justly famous essay of Ta-Nehisi Coates, there is the desire to preserve what Du Bois in 1935 called the public and psychological wage of whiteness.

Jennifer Richeson and Michael Kraus, both psychologists, along with their co-authors, have documented a delusion among white Americans about the racial-wealth gap. They show that Americans estimate that in 2016 the median black family had 90% of the wealth of the median white familyrather than the true figure of 10%. Their research shows a bias towards what Ms Richeson calls a mythology of racial progress. As Ms Richeson writes in a recent article, People are willing to assume that things were at least somewhat bad 50 years ago, but they also assume that things have gotten substantially betterand are approaching parity. This belief that the present has come close to parity is longstandingin a Gallup poll from March 1963, 46% of white Americans agreed with the statement, blacks have as good a chance as whites in your community to get any kind of job for which they are qualified.

Many Americans believe that we are nearing racial equality after a long progression of positive change. That means that any attempt to push for structural change to address inequalities will be met by profound disbelief. Those who argue for such changes get painted as radicals with a devious and destructive hidden agenda. This sort of moral panic helps maintain the status quo.

But such panics might not happen if schools made more efforts to teach students how American institutions fell short of their ideals. Hence, in few arenas does the battle over CRT rage as strongly as in educationwhich fits the historical pattern. The aim of Du Bois 1935 work Black Reconstruction in America was to tell the true story of the end of Reconstruction (the brief period of racial progress that followed the end of the civil war), which is one of violent white backlash against emerging black political power. He denounces the teaching of history for inflating our national ego, and for years his work was overlooked in favour of an interpretation arguing that Reconstruction failed because black Americans were corrupt and incapable of self-governance.

More recently, Nikole Hannah-Joness 1619 Project, which seeks to illuminate how the legacy of slavery has shaped American institutions, was met by fury from the right, as well as demands for patriotic education. The same cycle again: illumination implying the need for structural change produces a moral panic seeking to reinforce a racist status quo.

The targets of the Republican attack on CRT reveal that the issue is not CRT, but something much broader. A recent education bill passed in Tennessee bans promoting division between, or resentment of, a racesubjective language that could easily bar teachers from discussing how race has shaped American institutions. In 1935, Du Bois explicitly argues that American history, properly taught, is divisive, as war and especially civil strife leave terrible wounds. White Americans enslaved black Americans, and shortly after the latter achieved their freedom during the brief period of Reconstruction, excluded them by legislation and force from civic and political life until the 1960s. American democracy is young. These facts are divisive. The Republican attack on CRTs aims is thus a broadside against truth and history in education.

CRT urges America to reform practices in virtually all of its institutions, including criminal-justice, education, housing, banking, and hiring. The United States has attempted this before most notably during Reconstruction, when the federal government poured large resources into empowering a newly free southern black population. That period saw formerly enslaved black legislators elected across the South, and free public education offered to children of all races. The response to these drastic changes was moral panic, widespread racist terrorism and rapid reversal of progress.

Decades later, in the 1960s, the civil-rights movement fought for major legal changes to end the era of legal segregation. During this fight, its leaders were denounced as anti-American communist sympathisers. It should come as no surprise now that the same Republican legislators who want to ban CRT are also advancing voter-suppression laws that target black communities.

Dramatic structural change is hard, and involves missteps. Diversity workshops that involve little more than people sharing feelings, or being told their race is the single most important and determinative thing about them, are no doubt examples. But critics vastly inflate the importance of these missteps, to make such calls, and CRT more broadly, seem outlandish. When such complaints dominate the discussion, they fuel moral panic that is cynically used to halt and reverse progress towards equality.

___________________

Jason Stanley is the Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy at Yale University, and is the author of several books, including How Propaganda Works and How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them. For a contrary argument, please see John McWhorters essay here.

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Jason Stanley on critical race theory and why it matters - The Economist

It was another day of confused messaging at the New Brunswick legislature over what Premier Blaine Higgs has in mind for the province's two regional health authorities.

Higgs told reporters there will "always" be English and French hospital networks in the province, while Health Minister Dorothy Shephard refused to be as categorical.

And Higgs would not rule out some kind of new health entity that oversees the two health authorities and ensure they co-operate and complement each other.

"He is not clear at all, and he keeps saying things differently," said Opposition Liberal Leader Roger Melanson.

"The question is simple: is there going to be two health authorities with two boards of directors and two CEOs? It's just a yes or no question. Answer."

During question period, Melanson repeatedly pressed Higgsto clarify his intentions amid talks between the Horizon and Vitalit health authorities on how to work together to reduce the impact of severe shortages of nurses this summer.

The president of the New Brunswick Nurses Union has called for the merging of some services between the two hospitals, so that overworked nurses can avoid 24-hour shifts and get some vacation in the coming months.

Shephard said the two health authorities "did wonderful work" on May 8 and 9, when they worked together to keep both their emergency departments open asVitalit was on the verge of closing the one at the Dr. Georges-L. Dumont University Hospital.

The talk of co-operation and shared services has prompted concern among francophones that the province wants the two authorities to merge some functions permanently or even combine the two health authorities.

"We know there's always going to be a French hospital network and there's always going to be an English hospital network," Higgs told reporters Friday, apparently nixing the idea of a merger.

"I think there's some people thinking that could happen. I don't see that happening. That's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about complementary services."

But when he was asked if the two networks could be run by a single health authority, Higgs would not rule out some kind of new structure to ensure the co-operation he's looking for.

"Each hospital network will have its own management capability, the French system and the English system," he said.

"My concern has been how do we standardize our health-care delivery system so we can deliver the best services we can throughout the network? So I don't know what that looks like, how we have those ongoing opportunities evaluated."

Adding to the ambiguity was Shephard's careful use of the present tense in her own question period answers.

She said "There is no amalgamation" and "We have two health authorities, Horizon and Vitalit," without saying whether that would be the case in the future.

When reporters asked if there would always be two health authorities, Shephard refused to guarantee it, saying she has "no intention of amalgamating" them.

"We didn't know when we had eight authorities that we could go to two" in 2008, she added.

"We don't know what the future's going to bring in how we establish and answer challenges in our health-care system. For now we have Horizon and Vitalit. I have no intentions of changing that."

Shephard accused the Liberals of using divisive tactics by suggesting the province's largest francophone hospital and its French-speaking health authority are in jeopardy.

They have taken what is"very obviously [a] contingency plan that was necessary [on May 8-9]and pulled it into this conversation," she said.

While the Liberals called for clarity from the premier and introduced a 3,200-name petition opposed to any merger of services at the hospitals in Moncton, People's Alliance Leader Kris Austin said he was happy to hear talk of the two health authorities working together.

Austin has called for the abolition of the two health authorities while insisting he supports hospitals operatingin French in francophone regions.

"What I'm seeing now for the first time is an actual light moving in that direction," he said.

"Now we're starting to see at least some elements of that when we're talking about services coming together."

View original post here:

Higgs, Shephard pressed for 'yes or no' answers on merging health authorities - CBC.ca

Illustration by Kim DeMarco.

Last year, as I sat in my study in Southern California and watched videos of the Minneapolis Police Departments Third Precinct station on Lake Street burning in the aftermath of George Floyds murder, a memory eddied up in the flames.1

Its one or two in the morning. Lake Street runs like a deep scar down the southern arm of the city. Im idling in my parents green station wagon at a stoplight with a couple of teammates from the football team. Marcus, Ray, and me; three Black, intrepid, rusty-butt boys out looking for a thrill. Curtis Mayfield croons Freddies Dead on the eight-track player. A blunt passes from Marcus to me, in the front, then to Ray in the back seat. Soon, a contender pulls up beside us. White boys in letter jackets from a rival school. Their engine revs. Their windows roll down. They say, Eat shit and die! Got to bring ass to get ass! we yell back. Green winks the light. First car to the corner of Lake and Cedar wins.2

Were spotted by a patrol car. The white boys peel off long before they reach Cedar. The cops give chase to us, not the white boys. I careen right onto Cedar and make a hairpin turn into Pioneers and Soldiers Memorial Cemetery. I kill the ignition and take my foot off the brake so that the red eyes of the brake lights die. We scrunch down and wait. I dont know how long we crouched below the windows. Somebody farted. Everybody laughs. Marcus asks Ray for a roach clip so the joint wont go to waste. After the revolution, he says, sputtering smoke in the moonlight, my grandkidsll be like, Grandpa Marcus, whats a fascist pig? Ill be like, Dont you worry, baby, Ima take you to a museumthey got some on display.3

Though we laughed at the joke, we treasured its inevitability. A world with no 5-0: life as it would be after the revolution. In 1972, we thought of revolution as a question of whenin five years, six, or maybe, on the outside, eightnot if. Only the time line was up for debate. The FBI director died in May that year. All summer long I wore a T-shirt like a bulletproof vest. It read, j. edgar hoover is alive and well in hell.4

We were going to have our revolution. My dreams then werent of fair legislation or police reform. I loved football, chocolate, Ho Chi Minh, and Mao. I read Ramparts magazine, often aloud, the way Billy Graham read his Bible. The Peoples Army of Vietnam had launched a spring offensive. It demoralized Nixons brass as much as the Tet Offensive had demoralized Johnsons in 1968. When Saigon fell, we mused, Americas demise would not be far behind.5

The war would come home. Two, three, many Vietnams: Che Guevara still called us from the grave. In 1972, a deep, abiding sense that Black liberation was inextricably bound to anti-colonial struggles around the world and working-class resistance at home went without saying for most people on the left, including that teenage boy who answered to my name. Racism, Fred Hampton said more than once, is just a by-product of capitalism. That was good enough for me.6

Now, from my coastline of old age, I see how the funeral procession of Black death that litters this landscape tells a different story. Anti-Black racism is not a by-product of capitalism or patriarchyor even colonialism. Nor is anti-Black racism in any way analogous to any other paradigm of oppression. Anti-Blackness is its own beasta conceptual framework that cannot be analogized to capitalism, or any other ism. Nor is it a by-product of any oppressive necessity other than its own. The need to disavow the singularity of anti-Black violence, and the impulse to disguise Black suffering and rage (the need, that is, to characterize anti-Black violence as class oppression or even white supremacy, for that matter, and the impulse to disguise Black suffering as exploitation of the working class or as a kind of suffering thats common to all people of color), are a need and an impulse that are shared by the police and the protester. Black people find ourselves trapped in the vise grip of a pincer move between two juggernauts: the state and our allies.7Current Issue

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Black people are hemmed in by two strategies of containment that, at first blush, appear not only to have nothing in common (who in their right mind, one might ask, would equate the left and the state?) but are so hostile to each other (the left calling for the police to be defunded and the police characterizing protesters in the streets of Minneapolis, Portland, and New York as domestic terrorists) that it seems they couldnt agree on lunchmuch less a pincer move against Black people.8

The word strategy may be a bit misleading, because it implies the pincer move against Black people comes about through conscious, if not coordinated, efforts by the left and the state. This is not the case. The state kills and contains Black bodies. The left kills and contains Black desire, erases Black cognitive maps that explain the singularity of Black suffering, and, most of all, fatally constricts the horizon of Black liberation. There are important differences. The nub of the anti-Blackness that saturates these desperate strategies lies elsewherein the shared unconscious beneath their disparate conscious acts.9

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In 2016, revelations from Dan Baums 1994 interview with Watergate co-conspirator John Ehrlichman reemerged in Harpers. Ehrlichman was assistant to the president for domestic affairs under Richard Nixonwhich meant he was Nixons drug policy adviser. As Baum recounted to NPR:10

[Ehrlichman] told me an amazing thing. I started asking him some earnest, wonky policy questions and he waved them away. He said, Can we cut the B.S.? Can I just tell you what this was all about? The Nixon campaign in 68 and the Nixon White House had two enemies: black people and the anti-war left. We knew that if we could associate heroin with black people and marijuana with the hippies, we could project the police into those communities, arrest their leaders, break up their meetings and most of all, demonize them night after night on the evening news. And he looked me in the eyes and said, Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.11

If there had ever been any doubt that the War on Drugs was a cynical political tool manufactured in the Oval Office, Ehrlichmans confession laid such doubt to rest. But whats most instructive is what the confession reveals about the place of Black people in the unconscious of the state. The structure of the Nixon administrations anxiety about the white anti-war left was very different from the attitude toward Black people. Nixon and his cronies were at war with the ideas of the white left. But they were not at war with the ideas of Black peoplethey were at war with the embodiment of Black people, the threatening presence of Black bodies.12

The besetting hobble of multiracial coalitions is manifest in the ways Black members become refugees of the coalitions universal agenda. In social movements dedicated, for example, to prison abolition, the selection of topics, distribution of concerns, framing of issues, filtering of information, emphasis and toneto quote Noam Chomskys definition of how consent is manufactured and consensus enforcedand the way debate is bound within premises acceptable to non-Black coalition partners, work to crowd out a deeper understanding of captivity and anti-Black violence by limiting the scope of the dialogue to those aspects of state violence and captivity that non-Black coalition partners have in common with Blacks. Its sometimes as blunt and straightforward as our coalition partners simply telling us to stop playing Oppression Olympics.13

Burn it down: The Third Precinct station of the Minneapolis Police Department in flames on May 28, 2020. (Julio Cortez / AP)

In the 1980s, I taught creative writing at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis. The novelist Toni Cade Bambara gave a weekend workshop for teachers and advanced fiction writers. Before leaving town, she agreed to have dinner with me. During dinner, as I recall, she lamented the breakup of a coalition to fight rape in Philadelphia comprising Black women and white women. The white women had put forth a motion that they launch a campaign to educate the police about rape and how it affects their lives. The Black women were completely against this. The white women made comments about how they must try to weed out good cops from bad cops. The Black women scoffed at this. The white women said the Black women were too hasty in their rejection and had not put forth reasons that were good enough or offered an alternative plan. The meeting disintegrated, and, as Bambara lamented, so did the coalition.14

Twenty years after dining with Toni Cade Bambara, I began to witness different manifestations of the same conundrum that the Black women in her coalition faced. As a graduate student of critical theory and, at the same time, as an activist in San Francisco Bay coalitions dedicated to abolishing the prison-industrial complex, lobbying Congress and President Bill Clinton to pardon political prisoners who were former members of the SDS, AIM, the Black Panthers, and the FALN, or organizing (unsuccessfully) to stop the passage of legislation that would allow children as young as 14 to be prosecuted as adults and warehoused in adult prisons, I saw how episodes similar to the one Bambara had described kept repeating themselves. Our coalition partners were policed for their transgressions, and the counter-hegemonic ideas that they embodied. We were shot for breathing while Black. Black flesh stimulates a dread more fundamental than the fear of transgressions: the fear and loathing of Black bodies.15Related Article

Bambaras coalition between white women and Black women broke down not due to some ineffable, murky misunderstanding, but because the fissures in the room revealed a structural antagonism between the women, and this revelation was too much to bear. Even though white women are positioned as victims of violence in relation to white men, they are simultaneously positioned as beneficiaries, if not perpetrators, of anti-Black violence. They are on the policed side of violence against non-Black women, but they are on the policing side of anti-Black violence. They had little enthusiasm for that conversation.16

Saidiya Hartmans Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America illustrates the double bind Black slave women faced when appealing to the courts for redress in the event of rape:17

If the definition of the crime of rape relies upon the capacity to give consent or exercise will, then how does one make legible the sexual violation of the enslaved when that which would constitute evidence of intentionality, and thus evidence of the crimethe state of consent or willingness of the assailedopens up a Pandoras box in which the subject formation and object constitution of the enslaved female are no less ponderous than the crime itself or when the legal definition of the enslaved negates the very idea of reasonable resistance?18

We should read Hartmans book as an allegory of the present, because the Pandoras box is precisely what the white women in Bambaras coalition were anxious about. What kinds of political strategies of redress can be deployed by a sentient being who is always already outside of the political and, most importantly, whose exile white women depend upon for their own categorical coherence?19

It is not just that the injury of rape does not translate for Black women in the same way it does for white women; it is that injury itself is the categorical inheritance of non-Black womenin the absence of any coherent notion of consent, the concept of injury has no representational supports within Blackness. We are confronted by two regimes of violence that are irreconcilable. This was the spanner in the works of that feminist coalition. More broadly, it is the spanner in the works of every multiracial coalition Ive been a part of. But this paradox is rarely addressed because Black people are not given the space to express how our suffering and the violence that underwrites our suffering is not analogous to the violence and suffering that dominates our allies. It is as though the collective unconscious of the coalition knows that to open that can of worms would be to face the ways in which our allies, though enemies of the state, remain antagonists of the Blacks.20

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Hartman suggests it would be more precise to say that consent is not constitutive of Black subjugation; ergo, the sexual violence against Black women cannot even be theorized as a violation. What happens, then, when Black women (and men) are raped if Blackness and consent cannot be conjoined? This is the paradox that a suffering for which there are no words presented to the coalition. But coalitions, typically, are unwilling to entertain problems that arrive without solutions. The regime of violence that structures and saturates Blacks makes us objects of accumulation, rather than alienated subjects of exploitation.21Related Article

The unwillingness of the white women to give the Black women space to develop their sharp refusal of the white womens proposal (police education) into a deeper explanation as to how and why Blacks are not recognized as subjects of rights, claims, and consent was why the coalition fell apart.22

What do the cops and the coalitions have in common? One flank of the pincer is composed of the police, the army, the prison-industrial complex, and the ancillary formations of civil society that bestow legitimacy, such as the media and the church. The opposite flank is the terror of our allies, who dress us up as workers, women, gays, immigrants, or postcolonial subjects: mirror images of themselves that fulfill the need to disavowand the impulse to disguisethe singularity of Black suffering.23

The stakes of this pincer move are high because they crowd out Black peoples capacity to be captured by our own imaginations. Our allies pincer move threatens the imagination and the enunciation of Black thought and thus should not be trivialized as an ensemble of bad attitudes that can be overcome through dialogue. This prong of the pincer is as constitutive of an anti-Black world as the police and the prisons. It doesnt simply kill or warehouse Black desire the way the state kills and warehouses the Black body. It terrorizes us through an interdiction against Black performance, coupled with a demand for Black performance. The coalition craves and applauds Black energy, exuberance, and righteous indignationas long as Black suffering doesnt tag along.24

Beyond repair: The police department whose officers murdered George Floyd, or did nothing to prevent his murder, had been hailed as a model of police reform, lending new urgency and legitimacy to cries to Abolish the Police. (Eduardo MunozAlvarez / VIEWpress / Corbis via Getty Images)

In early June, as George Floyd was laid to rest and the Third Precinct stood gutted on Lake Street where Marcus, Ray, and I had raced dreaming of a world with no 5-0, I could not believe what I saw on the news. Coalition partners, from anarchists, to socialists, to non-Black supporters of Black Lives Matter, to the Minneapolis City Council, all calling for the abolition of the police! My mind and my body surged with the same exuberance that 48 years ago had surged through the bones of a boy who loved football, chocolate, Ho Chi Minh, and Mao, when Marcus laughed, Dont you worry, baby, Ima take you to a museumthey got some on display. I grinned from ear to ear and thought, Marcus wasnt jivinits finally coming to pass.25

But within weeks, the joke slipped back through my fingers like four decades of sand. For one hot summer moment, the cries of our allies had been authorized by the demand that Black suffering embodies; and their political desire was animated by a kind of Black desire that is normally crushed between them and the state.26

That moment did not last. Abolish mutated into defund, defund melted into delay, and the zeitgeist shifted from unfettered Black rage to sober tutorials on activist websites and affinity gatherings on how to massage a message that was already massaged, to win the hearts and minds of Middle Americans as they watched us being gunned down on Instagram and the news. Black death, once again, was weaponized by our allies to incarcerate Black demands, kill Black desire, and soothe the psyches of everyone but us.27

I called neither Marcus nor my grandkids. I closed my eyes and tried to see that Black, intrepid, rusty-butt boy who answered to my name. I needed to recall his optimism and his smile before he felt the world kneeling on his neck.28

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An Afropessimist on the Year Since George Floyd Was Murdered - The Nation

"Too many Asian Americans have been waking up each morning this past year genuinely, genuinely fearing for their safety,"President Joe Biden saidlast week, as hesigned into lawa new measure intended to help law enforcement agencies combat a rise in anti-Asian hate crimes thathas occurred in the past year, coinciding with the Covid-19 pandemic.

The Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism atCalifornia State University, San Bernardino, for example,found that while the number of overall hate crimes declined by 6 percent between 2019 and 2020, the number of anti-Asian hate crimes rose by 145 percent during the same period. Between March 2020 and March 2021, theStop AAPI Hatecoalitionrecorded 6,603 hate incidents,ranging from verbal harassment to physical assault, directed at Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders.

The daughter of refugees from Laos, Sarasota's Tihda Vongkoth is a professionalpercussionist and the founder of Modern Marimba, a nonprofit that presents concerts, lectures and exhibitions with the explicit goal ofcombatting racism and otherforms ofdiscrimination. Vongkoth, 34, describes herself as "an abled-bodied cis Lao American woman occupying Calusa territory" who has "deep respect for the land, the Indigenous peoples who stewarded this area before colonization, and the generations of Black ancestors from the African diaspora."

She spoke with Sarasota Magazine about growing up Asian American in Largo, Florida, what it's like to beone ofonly a fewnon-whitepeople in an orchestra, and why she has become more outspoken about race in recent years. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

"I was surrounded by a lot of white families and my peers were mostly white. I was usually one of the only few Asians in my community.But I also went to predominantly Black schools, because my brother and I were ina gifted program. I ended up sharing spaces with different cultures, but it was all very segregated and weird.

"Inelementary school, I was living in a predominantly white neighborhood going into mixed-race schools. In middle school, I was still living in a predominantly white neighborhood but going to a predominantly white school. And in high school, because of the arts, I was living in a predominantly white neighborhood going into an arts school, Gibbs High School in St. Pete, which is historically Black.

"[In the predominantly white schools I went to]people of colortried so hard toassimilate that we didn't group together. That was my experience. Most of my friends were white. But in high school, there were all kinds of peopleLatinpeople, lots of Black people, more Asian people,Tongan peopleand we all hung out.It wasmore integrated and it was so cool."

"Iknew that Iwasdifferent, obviously, so it's something I've always known, but it didn't occur to me that it was a problem until I started experiencing people calling me ethnic slurs. That happened in elementary schoolnot with other kids, but with the white parents in my neighborhood.

"For a lot of my childhood and my adulthood, Iwas totally unequipped to respond, but I knew that it made me uncomfortable.I didn't know how to talk about it. I didn't understand, because I grew up in the States. I didn'tunderstandmy own personal identity and the history of Laotian people. It was very confusing."

"It was not something that was talked about during my upbringing and childhood.My mom and my dad really wanted both my brother and I toassimilate as best as we could. It was kind of like, 'Just ignore them.'"

"That came in middle school. As I got older, my parents didn't want me to keep hanging out with the group of people we were living near, because it was a low-income area. I stopped hanging out with the kids in the neighborhood and really focused on school. Practicing music and performing music became a way for me to connect with people, like ensembles, and have a social life, but it was more structured. It was a way for me to deal with a lot of the weirdness and being isolated at home."

"It's fun.It sounds cool. And it requires different skills. I was not into the whole marching band thing, and marimba was a way for me to get out of marching band and focus on solo and chamber music. It was a way for percussionists to learn how to read treble clef and bass clef and learn about harmony. It's more inclusive."

"[Interlochen] was kind of diverse. I started seeing the inklings of, 'Oh, this is a rich white kid pursuit.' And I was all about that, because I thought that was the best thing that you could be. I started feeling isolated the further I got into music but, obviously, that didn't stop me.

"The status quo of audition lists is predominantly dead white cis men, European men. [People would tell you,] 'Well, this is standard. You should learn that solo.' Or, 'You need to focus on this, because that's how you get a job.' You don't see yourself in that at all.

"That was a macro-aggression. Micro-aggressionswere people making comments, assuming that Iwasn'tgood at what I do or that I got in because Iwas a scholarship student.

"Automatically, the vibe of the group changes [when I'm there]. It's not as fun when I'm in the section. With some of my colleagues, who I lovedearly and havealways felt open with, it's not always like that. But there is a cultural thing where I'm consciouslyhaving to police what I say and do in front of certain groups of people that may not be accepting of my race or gender."

"With musicians,part of thegig and playing and performingis also the hang, right? But when thehang is at adive bar that's full of white people and could be shady, and I'm the only person of color and a woman in those spaces, I really honestly do not feel safe. SoI tend to not go. But when I'm in those spaces, [other people] arelike, 'Oh, now we can't say this.We can't objectify women in front of Tihda. We can't make fun of Black people in front of Tihda.' You can tell that the other people are uncomfortable with my being there, because they can't say all those really awful things that I know they're talking about behind my back.

"Safe spaces in college weren't created for me. I sublet an apartment from my friends, off campus, at Southern Methodist University, and I was sleeping in the middle of thenight, and the police entered my apartment. I did not open the door. I don't know how they got in. They must have had a key or something. Itwasn't forced entry.

"They came in and woke me up and searched my apartment. They asked me for my ID, my student ID and my passport. They wanted to make sure I was who I said I was, in the middle of the night, and it was super scary.

"The next day, I went back to school. It was really traumatic, but I didn't have the resources to be able to talk to anyone that I could trust about it, or work through it. I didn't even know to report it or what I was supposed to do afterwards, other than move on."

"No. And I wasn't going toask.Inthat situation, I'm only going to do what they ask me to do, because otherwise I could die, go to jail, get hurt. I just complied with them."

"I moved here after I graduated. I didn't have a place to stay. My friends at the time were like, 'Hey, we're going on the road for a year. You can stay here for free and figure it out.'

"And then I started getting work. I definitely had to break in, but my pedigree, coming from certain schools or certain teachers, opened the door in some ways. I used that to my advantage and tried to work as much as possible. Over time, it became clear that it wasn't a welcoming culture. I am still being hired in predominantly white spaces. But are those spaces safe and welcoming for people of color? I would say no."

"Because of the toxicity of the structures of orchestras and the power imbalances that happen when you have an orchestra that has several hierarchies of musicians, identity and management. I think the hierarchical modelof orchestras is inherently violent. The status quo of style and approach to playing certain music and the elitism of pedigreethat's just not safe.

"And the systems that are available to people of color are not safe. When [human resources] departments decide to investigate somebody, they sometimes involve an employment lawyer, and exposing peopleof colorto the legal systems in the United States, and using that as a threatening thing is not a way to resolve problems. I'm learning, because of my work with ModernMarimba, that using the models of transformative andrestorativejusticethat come from Indigenous roots and are led by a lot of women of color and Black women are better ways of approaching the issues."

"[People will find] reasons to not hire you because you are rocking the boat and you're raising important questions about how we are in communitywith each other, and the lack of accountability when people make mistakes. People are always going to side withthe white man and whathe thinks about what happened. And that's hard when you're entering spaces that were not created for you and based on oldmodels of colonialism. So it's like, 'Why am I posting something? I literally need money.' I have to navigate this in a way that's going to preserve my sanity and my mental health.

"I'm very active on social mediaand my friendships with people and my professional relationships have definitely changed. I have been paying theconsequences for speaking out. [I get a lot] of emails and messages from white people who just need to see themselves and see the violence that they participate in with their silence. [People say,] 'I've done this for you. I hired you. And now this is what you say about me. You're just doing this to make me look bad.' There's just a lot of fragility, and people [are] not able to acknowledge the truth about themselves."

"I startedModern Marimbabefore the pandemic and before the [George Floyd] protests, justbefore everything blew up, because I finally was like, 'I need to have an outlet for me to do my own thing.' ButI embraced opening up a side of me that that peoplehave probably notseen, ever, because of the protests. Unlocking and unpacking and understanding liberation and speaking up for all people and knowing my silence and complicity with a lot of these music organizations and in generalit's no longer an option."

"I've stayed home and I've been really careful, so I wasn't exposed to it in public. But my hairdresser is Korean, and I noticed before we started that she locked the door. And it's like, 'Oh yeah, that's what we have to do now.' I'm just being careful as I'm going out. I know that [hate crimes] have happened in other places in the U.S. more than here. There's no outward aggression. But when Imake statements about anti-Asian hate on Facebook and in the marimba circles, I definitely get a lot of hate DMs."

"It's such a big issue. I think having people of color have agency and autonomy in how resources are controlledresources being money, space, all thatisreally important. Just literally putting resources in the hands of people of color without all these conditions is important. It's all about power and hierarchydismantling the hierarchies that you have in your workplace.

"I would love to see lists of all the ways that institutions have been limiting to people of color and make it a public thing: 'This is what we've done. These have been our donors. This is what they've represented. We have this money because of this.' It needs to be explicitlike a truth and reconciliation commission. We really need that.

"You can't do that through the legal system. You can't do thatbyinviting people in the community to speak up. You have to do that with action. You have to actually say the things that happened, because it's an ugly truth. And the system of how to do that is transformative justice, restorative justice. The processes of those are not rooted in the systems that we have todaythe systems of hierarchy, the systems of capitalism. You have to actually do it in a different way. And the only people qualified tolead that are people of color who understand.

"It's changing how we interact with each otherour kinship. And people are just not ready for that. But that is the work, and it's dangerous work."

"Weare trying to create a safe space, and we're giving ourselves five years to do that, or else we willdismantle. Basically, we want our resourcesand especially moneyto be circling within the community. That affects the kinds of partnerships that we form and it puts pressure on our community to move forward with a lot of these things.

"[During] the pandemic, we did a lot of commissioning new music by composers of color to be added to the Florida Bandmasters'solo and ensemble list so students will have an opportunity to pick solos that represent them, that they can see themselves in.

"The pandemic helped us out a lot, because we were able to livestream performances,do a lot of panels and be an organization that is not afraid to talk about these issues openly. We hada series called Marimba Monday. We would interview artists around the world who are committed tomallet keyboard instruments and interview them and give thema platform to talk about their work.

"Wehosted a virtual summer music festival and had a lot of diverse faculty, and we had an end-of-the-weekconcertthat was opened up to the public on Facebook. We did an abolition and percussion panel. We did an Earth Day concert and we openly talked about the issue of Honduran Rosewood being used for instrumentsand the trajectory of that. We talked a lot about equity in queer culture and having people be authentically themselves and work with us.

"We also did two concerts at theNewtown Farmer's Market and we were able to perform the works we commissioned throughout the year. We're really putting Sarasota on the map for new music, for people who are doing this work."

"Ido want to say that I knowmusiceducators have had a really tough year, and musicianshave had a tough, tough year, and that you don't have tosacrifice your values to be able to make money. It is possible to be your authentic self and pursue the music that you really believe in and be anti-racist.

"I hope that any musician or any personcancome to our website and look at the resources for music educators and look at our resourceson anti-racism, and use that as a starting point, or even just a check-into see where people are on their journeyin trying to make this world a better place, because it actually really is possible.

"Rocking the boat can be a wake-up call, and people may take it as, 'Oh, cool. I want to work with that person because they actually stand up for what they believe in.'"

For more info about Modern Marimba, visit the organization's website.

The rest is here:

Tihda Vongkoth on Anti-Asian Hate, the Music World and the Risk of Speaking Out - Sarasota