Category Archives: Abolition Of Work

Maya Angelou became the second poet in history to recite a poem at an inauguration with her reading of "On the Pulse of Morning" when Bill Clinton was first sworn in as president in 1993. Now, she'll make history again as one of 20 distinguished women set to be honored by the U.S. Mint, appearing on a series of quarters starting next year.

Trailblazing astronaut Sally Ride, the first American woman launched into space on the shuttle Challenger in 1983, will also be honored on the coin.Angelou and Ride will be featured on the reverse, or "tails side," starting in January 2022 as part of the American Women Quarters series helmed by project manager Michelle Thompson.

"It's a huge deal, the American Women Quarters program gives the opportunity to have women out there on circulating coins," Thompson told CBS This Morning's Dana Jacobson. "Their legacies, their achievements, they're all going to be captured on pocket change for generations."

The U.S. Mint will oversee the design work, and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen will approve the nominees and final design.

While the front or "heads side" will continue to feature the likeness of George Washington, he'll be getting a makeover to distinguish the new coins, with several options being considered.

The other 18 honorees who have yet to be announced will come from a wide variety of fields including abolition, suffrage and civil rights movements, as well as the humanities, science and the arts.

"We're looking for a very broad, diverse group of women because that's what we have in America," said Thompson. "And they're the type of women who have shaped where we are as a nation."

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Maya Angelou and Sally Ride will be among the women being honored on quarters - CBS News

Published May 14, 2021 by Ruth Comerford

Flipped eye is launching a new flagship non-fiction imprint, phipl, and is also looking for a new young editor from an underrepresented background, with no...

Flipped eye is launching a new non-fiction imprint, phipl,and is also looking for an editorial internfrom an underrepresented background, with no experience required.

Phipl will launch with a collection of essays by International Dublin Literary Award-winning author Jos Eduardo Agualusa. Agualusa's collection,Paradise and Other Hells, is described as an "irreverent, intelligent and near impish essay collection fizzing with his trademark humour and proboscis-sharp observation". It will be released on 10th June, inaugurating the imprint.

It has been translated from Portuguese by a team including Rahul Bery, Andrew McDougall, Robin Patterson, Francisco Vilhena and Agualusas long-time translator, Daniel Hahn. The essays include: observations on a mugging foiled by laughter;the power of a gesture;the worlds oldest tree;Bob Dylan;Africas estrangement from itself; and aspects of Rio, Lisbon, Luanda andBerlin.

The indie has also launched a separate nationwide search for a young editor from a background underrepresented in the UKs publishing industry. With no previous experience required, applicants need to be UK residents, not in education, able to commit to two days of work a week for a duration of six months. As a paid intern, the successful candidate will receive hands-on editorial training atflippedeyes offices in London or remotely.

Applications for the new editorial internship open today, with a two-week submission window closing 31st May. Applicants should express their interest online, submitting a short bio anda cover note explaining why they're interested in the internship. There is no requiirement for a CV and flippedeyewill be selecting the candidate based on their passion and drive to become an editor, not on any qualification or what they achieved at school.

Nii Ayikwei Parkes, director and senior editor atflippedeye,said: Atflippedeye, we work extensively with our authors to try to understand their unique influences and norms; rather than send instructions, we send questions and more questions and we listen and listen some more as we help writers hone their voices and their craft. We approach our work with a humility that we feel comes not just from our non-traditional backgrounds, but also our working class roots. The working class is massively underrepresented in publishing and much of it is due to the inability of working class persons to forfeit a living wage for long enough to get on the ladder in publishing. We'd like to help change that.

The launch comes as the press, which celebrates its 20th anniversary this year, prepares to publishpoetry collections byEleanor Penny, Louisa Adjoa Parker and Maia Elsner this summer, in addition to a play by Gabriel Gbadamosi.

Gbadamosi's play"Abolition"is set in 1792, and reframes Britain's role in the abolition of slavery. It follows the journey of the "Blackamoor Jenny" out of Liverpool, through its sixth voyage to Africa.Meanwhile, in the ship of state, the radical abolitionist William Fox and William Wilberforcedebate the urgency of ending the slave trade. It will be published on 17th June.

Parker's collection, She Can Still Sing, will also be released on 17th June, following a virtual bookshop event organised with the Bookbag Bookshop in Exeter, in partnership with Africa Writes. The collection was written while Parker grieved the loss of a friend who took her life after a long struggle with mental illness. The collection is summarised as: "Aeulogy that projects from light one part love letter to the mundane, three parts hymn to the departed, four parts ride of wonderment, these poems celebrate the bonds of friendship and family even as they leave love notes to the departed stuffed into surprising images."

Eleanor Pennyhas been nominated for the Forward Prize for Poetry and twice shortlisted for Young Peoples Poet Laureate for London. She is the founder of the poetry podcast Bedtime Stories for the End of the World, asking some of the UKs top poets to re-imagine their favourite myths, fairytales and legends. Her dbut collection, Mercy,out on 24th Juneincludes poems on cruelty, love and obsession, and how familial and community memory warps and blooms over time.

Finally,Overrun by Wild Boars by Maia Elsner, out 15th July, is billed as a "search for intimacy and survival in the face of persecution and trauma", and is inspired by her family history that brings together two faiths, multiple languages, as well as Polish and Mexican mythologies.

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Flipped eye launches non-fiction imprint and young editor search - The Bookseller

A guard watches a prisoner do field work at Cummins Prison Farm, Lincoln County, Arkansas, 1971 (Eugene Richards).

In the late 1960s, a group of Arkansas prison inmates sued the state Commissioner of Corrections over conditions in what was then called the Cummins Farm, a 16,500-acre Old South-style plantation staffed by gangs of prisoners. Among their claims was one that life on the Farm was slavery, and thus a violation of the 13th Amendment, which prohibits slavery or involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime.

In a 1970 opinion, Federal District Judge J. Smith Henley summarized the evidence before him. The inmates at the Farm worked ten hours a day, six days a week. (The guards and trustees had until 1967 forced this labor by beating the inmates with a four-foot leather strap; a court order blocked the strappings in 1967, however, and now inmates were free to refuse to workand be punished by solitary confinement.) Inmates worked on labor-intensive Southern crops cotton, soybeans, and rice, among othersand raised chickens, pigs, and cattle. Work in the fields went on rain or shinein summer no matter how hot it got, in winter on any day above freezing. The prisoners were not issued rainwear or cold-weather jackets. Some were required to work without shoes.

The prison farm operation generated well over $1 million a year for the state. The inmates received no pay. If they needed money, prison authorities explained, they could make $5 a week as blood donors.

[COVID gives us a chance to close prisons. Heres why andhow.]

Nonetheless, Smith wrote, there was no violation of the 13th Amendment. Life at Cummins wasnt slavery, because [t]he State does not claim to own the bodies of its prisoners. Work on the Farm was servitude, to be sure, he wrote, and there is no doubt whatever that the servitude is involuntary. But it is equally clear that this servitude has been imposed as punishment for crimes whereof the inmates have been duly convicted. The framers of the Amendment must have been aware of generally accepted convict labor policies and practices, and the Court is persuaded that the Amendments exception manifested a Congressional intent not to reach such policies and practices.

Clinching the states case was expert testimony from a former director of the federal Bureau of Prisons. Prison labor, the expert testified, is as old as American penology. One of the best depictions of this traditional Southern practice, the judge noted, is to be found in Margaret Mitchells Civil War novel, Gone With The Wind.

Henley was not a bull-necked Southern judge consigning prisoners to their fate. After dealing with the slavery issue; he actually found that conditions at the Farm (and indeed in the entire Arkansas prison system) violated a different constitutional provision, the Eighth Amendments prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment:

It is one thing for the State not to pay a convict for his labor; it is something else to subject him to a situation in which he has to sell his blood to obtain money to pay for his own safety, or for adequate food, or for access to needed medical attention. However constitutionally tolerable the Arkansas system may have been in former years; it simply will not do today as the Twentieth Century goes into his eighth decade.

From a practical lawyers point of view, it probably didnt make much difference to the outcome that the court cited one amendment rather than anothercruel and unusual punishment rather than slavery or involuntary servitude.

Half a century later, Cummins is still a hellhole, despite persistent attempts to reform it. In a long article last year, Rachel Aviv of The New Yorker described the feeble and sadistic response of staff at the facility to the onset of the COVID crisis. Inmates told of being jammed into barracks with no social distancing, being falsely told they were negative so they could go on working, and, in some cases, being shunted into solitary confinementto live or diewhen they became too sick to work. As of April 2020 (when cases peaked), 670 inmates had tested positive (the prison holds up to 1725). On one day, April 21, 2020, the entire state reported a total of 304 new cases of COVID. Of those 304, fully 262 were at the Cummins Unit.

[How the 14th Amendment can bar ex-presidents from office.]

Is it possible that this treatment of human beings is not slavery because [t]he State does not claim to own the bodies of its prisoners? That the brutal involuntary servitude at Cummins is constitutional because it matches something in Gone With the Wind? That, in other words, the Thirteenth Amendmentwhich Americans revere as a shining moment of American freedompermits forced labor without pay, in dangerous and inhumane conditions? What is most infuriating about Judge Henleys opinion is that, as a matter of law, it was probably right.

When the Thirteenth Amendment was proposed in 1864, Abraham Lincoln portrayed it as a Kings cure for all the evils [of slavery]. It winds the whole thing up. But did it? Cool heads in the slave states did not agree. Seven months after Lincolns deathdays before the Amendment in fact was actually even ratifiedChicago Tribune correspondent Sydney Andrews reported a trip to Savannah, where he met a politically connected Georgia lawyer. He warned Andrews of what was to come: [T]here ll be private talk this session, even if there isnt open effort, to make the penal code take [Black Southerners] back into the condition of slavery. Itll be called involuntary servitude for the punishment of crime, but it wont differ much from slavery.

So it provedand, some argue, so it proves today. Soon after ratification, the all-white legislatures of the South enacted statutes that required Black Southerners to work for white planters under punitive year-long contracts; leaving a contracted job was a crime, and the offenders were to be jailed and then leased out as hired labor to other whites. An apprenticeship program even covered school-age children, who in some states could be sold back to their former owners. As the demand for cheap labor increased (and federal protection of civil rights faded), the use of vagrancy or other mock offenses became a system of convict leasing, by which Black Southerners convicted of crime could be leased like property to Southern planters. Michele Goodwin, a law professor at the University of California at Irvine, recounted this history in a 2019 article, The Thirteenth Amendment: Modern Slavery, Capitalism, and Mass Incarceration. These various types of slaveries transformed from one to another and back again, she wrote. Debt peonage morphed into convict labor, convict labor turned into convict leasing, and these transformed to chain gangs.

Prisoners built and repaired roads, laid railroad tracks, toiled in coal mines, and tended brutal state-run prisoner-run plantationsnotorious hell-holes like Angola in Louisiana (1901), Parchman in Mississippi (1901), and Cummins Farm (1902).

As it had been in the old South, the unfree labor of Black people became, after the end of Reconstruction, crucial to the Southern economy. Goodwin noted that the practice of leasing convicts became so corrupt that it embarrassed even the Jim Crow governments of some Southern states. Alabama was never known for being progressive, she said in an interview, but even the Alabama legislature had to investigate wardens who were just collecting men and women and boys and shoving them down coal mines.

Goodwin, and others who have studied the issue, link the punishment clause of the Thirteenth Amendment to the growth of prison labor and the rise of mass incarceration and private, for-profit prisons. In the era of mass incarceration, convict labor has gone national without losing its racial character. The modern masks of slavery: mass incarceration, pay to play probation, modern chain gangs, and the exploitation of cheap labor emerge along the color line just as Antebellum slavery was anchored in the same, she wrote.

[Bryan Stevenson Says Slavery Didnt End; It Just Evolved.]

Today, prison labor abounds in both state and federal prisons. The federal Bureau of Prisons maintains its own for-profit corporation, UNICOR, or Federal Prison Industries. In a report last November, UNICOR said that it has agricultural, industrial and service operations at 63 factories and 2 farms located at 52 prison facilities that employed 9,452 and 10,998 inmates as of September 30, 2020 and 2019, respectively. In fiscal 2020, the company lost $473 million and recorded a loss of $2.9 million, largely because of the pandemic. In 2019, revenues were $ 466,747,000, with net income of nearly $21 million.

Many states also maintain extensive systems of inmate labor, and some systems contract with private companies to produce goods to be sold to the public. In some systems, inmates staff private call centers handling sales or complaints. Some state prisoners, even today, receive no pay for their work; many others are paid well below the market rate for their jobs. California state prisoners who battle the hellish wildfires of the past several years are paid, depending on skill level, between $3 and $5 an hourplus good time credits to reduce their sentences. They are trained as firefightersbut this training was, until recently, worthless to them upon release, as they were not eligible for civilian firefighter jobs. (A state law passed last year now permits released inmates to petition courts to lift this restriction.)

Prisoners staff the state capitols and governors mansions in a number of state capitals. As First Lady of Arkansas, Hillary Clinton recalled managing a household staff on loan from state prisons: we had far fewer disciplinary problems with inmates who were in for murder than with those who had committed property crimes.

For-profit prison companies have also been found to be extorting labor from individuals detained for immigration violationswho have, thus, not been convicted of any crime and thus may not lawfully be subjected to involuntary servitude.

How did we get here? Why does the text of an amendment aimed at freedom include words allowing slavery as a punishment? This language, it turns out, was first written by Thomas Jefferson. In 1784, Jefferson drafted a land ordinance for disposal and management of the Western lands that were being ceded by the original states to the new national government. As historian Eric Foner notes in his bookThe Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution, as a devotee of Enlightenment prison reform, Jefferson felt that labor was good for the character.

His draft Land Ordinance provision read: [A]fter the year 1800 of the Christian era, there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in any of the said States [formed from the Western Lands], otherwise than in punishment of crimes, whereof the party shall have been duly convicted to have been personally guilty. The final Northwest Ordinance flowing from this draft kept the punishment language. It eliminated Jeffersons 16-year extension of slaverybut added a provision that required slaves escaping from the original states to be lawfully reclaimed by their masters.

By the 1860s, this language had acquired a patina of reverence among politicians and intellectuals. That reverence came to the fore during the last months of the Civil War when it came time to write an amendment ending slavery. Sen. Charles Sumner, the most radical abolitionist member of the Senate, in 1864 offered an amendment providing that, everywhere in U.S. territory, all persons are equal before the law, so that no person can hold another as a slave.

Brown University historian Michael Vorenberg writes in Final Freedom: The Civil War, the Thirteenth Amendment, and the Abolition of Slavery that Lincoln and his congressional allies knew the Amendment would not pass without the votes of War Democrats, who had stayed loyal to the Union but were less than enthusiastic about emancipating slaves, much less equality before the law. Some of these conservatives saw Sumners language as a potential threat to the status of husbands as masters of their wives and children.

Opponents attacked Sumners draft because it drew on the wording of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen. Sen. Jacob Howard said he preferred the good old Anglo-Saxon language employed by our fathers. The punishment clause was included without much further debate. The textual result is that slavery is prohibitedbut also that, for the first time, it is recognized by name in the text of the Constitution, and apparently (depending on how you read the sentence) is actually permitted for some Americans duly convicted of crime. (This being why Judge Henleys opinion might be correct.) And it is pungently ironic that the kings cure for slavery retains words first written by an American Founder who wrote that all men are created equal, but who was also, as historian Paul Finkelman notes, a creepy, brutal hypocrite in his treatment of his roughly 200 slaves.

With the 21st centurys new movement against mass incarceration has arisen a desire to cleanse the Constitution of this affirmation of slavery. In December 2020, as the 116th Congress dragged to its contentious and violent end, Sen. Jeff Merkley of Oregon, joined by Sens. Ed Markey (D-MA), Bernie Sanders (I-VT), and Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), along with Rep. William Lacy Clay (D-MO) introduced a joint resolution proposing a 28th constitutional amendment: Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude may be imposed as a punishment for a crime. The proposal was backed by a coalition of criminal justice and reform groups, including the Constitutional Accountability Center, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and Color of Change. A statement issued by Merkleys office said that [t]his amendment would close this loophole that has been used for a century and a half to perpetuate mass incarceration and allow others to profit from the forced labor of their fellow Americans, disproportionately Black Americans and people of color.

In an email, Merkley said that [l]ike a lot of people, I never really thought about that one except clause in the 13thAmendment until I saw Ava DuVernays incredible documentary, 13th, which documents the post-Civil War history of prison labor and mass incarceration as an outgrowth of the antebellum slave system. He later consulted with Goodwin, the UCI law professor, in formulating a proposed constitutional amendment.

[Americas Twentieth-Century Slavery]

The aim of the amendment, proponents say, is not to prevent prisoners from working. Work, and work experience, are clearly valuable in prisonboth as preparation for re-entry and as a means of staying sane while still inside. Instead, they say, work programs would have to be voluntaryand would have to pay genuine market wages.

Historians differ about how much harm the punishment clause has caused. Michael Vorenberg, author of Final Freedom, told me in an email that the state of racial mass incarceration todaya genuinely serious and systemic problemdoes NOT have its origins in the exceptional clause of the Thirteenth Amendment.

In 2016, Patrick Rael, a historian at Bowdoin College, wrote in the Black Perspectives history blog that the punishment clause was not an important source of the Jim Crow labor system: To justify their oppression, white supremacists usedmuch more powerfulandovert legal devicesthan slippery language in the Thirteenth Amendment.Jim Crow and mass incarcerationwouldve happened with or without the exception clause. In an impassioned reply in the same blog, Dennis R. Childs, a literature professor at the University of California at San Diego and the author of Slaves of the State: Black Incarceration from the Chain Gang to the Penitentiary, responded, white supremacist law refabricated slavery in both old and updated forms using the exception clause as legal cover. The fact is that a major catalyst of southern industrialization after the Civil War was a product of neo-slave labor in the form of convict leasing, chain gangs, and prison plantations.

Its hard to imagine that changing the punishment clause by itself would put an end to the open scandal of prison labor. (Remember Judge Smith, who didnt see the big deal, slavery-wise, about Cummins.) But Merkley wrote that having this conversation at the national level can help encourage states to remove similar provisions from their state constitutionsas we are already seeing with red and blue states across the nation. A nationwide advocacy group, the Abolish Slavery National Network, reports that, as of today, 19 states have punishment language in their constitutionsbut that since 2018, Colorado and Utah have both removed punishment clauses from theirs. A similar change is pending in New Jersey.

Goodwin also offers slavery abolition as an issue that might bring left and right together even in 2021: If there is any issue where there should be immediate bipartisan support it should be doing away with slavery in the U.S. Constitution, she said. And the change in wording itself would be a good thing: This is a nation that is heavily invested in its symbols. Symbolically we should not want to be linked with slavery.

The rest is here:

The War Over the 13th Amendment and Modern Day Slavery - Washington Monthly

The first African-American college president called Rutland home in the 1800s.

On Thursday, a sculpture was unveiled downtown to mark the 195th birthday. of Martin Henry Freeman,

The sculpture was crafted from the only known photo to exist of Freeman. His great, great, great grandson was there for the unveiling.

Theres a huge way we could have never known about this, said Robert Dennis. As we put it, this was meant to be.

Dennis only became aware there was a model of one of his ancestors underway when his cousin was working on their family tree.

He was just doing some DIY genealogy and was able to connect with the people in Rutland, he said.

Martin Freeman fought in the Revolutionary War and became president of the Allegheny Institute in Pennsylvania. He later traveled to Africa in hopes of escaping racism, where he became a professor and president of Liberia College.

The artwork was a collaboration between sculptor Mark Benett and carver Don Ramey. It took more than 6 months of combined work.

We both agreed that we should use a darker stone, Ramey said. I showed some samples of what I could do with different tools to make the hair texture.

People on hand noted that Freemans writing around abolition are very much applicable to issues society faces today.

I want them especially in this day of age, to continue his work of inclusion and fairness for all, and importance of scholarship, Dennis said.

The sculpture was funded by the Wakefield family, who hopes this will form an increased understanding of African American history.

Weve had a hand in Vermonts history thats been here-for unrecognized, said Alvin Wakefield. Thats happening here in Rutland.

Its the 8th piece of artwork added to the Rutland Sculpture Trail.

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Sculpture of first black college president unveiled in Rutland - Local 22/44 News

#STOPASIANHATE HAS BECOME a rallying cry in response to the surge in anti-Asian violence since the beginning of the pandemic, from random, brutal attacks on the elderly to a white gunmans murder of six Asian women as well as two others in Atlanta in March. As incidents of anti-Asian violence have accumulated alongside a continuous stream of viral videos of police officers killing Black people, there has been a tendency to collapse all forms of anti-Asian and anti-Black racial violence into an amorphous framework of white supremacy. At the same time, videos of Black men attacking Asians have undercut the universality of the white supremacy narrative, instead reinforcing stereotypes of Black criminal aggression while promoting the exceptional vulnerability of Asian Americans to racist violence. Such generalizations about white supremacy or the aberrational quality of anti-Asian violence risk obfuscating the structures of racial disposability embedded in neoliberal capitalism. By contextualizing anti-Asian racism within a longer arc of capitalist development, I argue that understanding the racial discontinuities are as important as the continuities for determining our collective response. My purpose therefore is to clarify the specificity of Asian racialization as it exists on a settler-colonial terrain of anti-Blackness. Rather than create an equivalence between anti-Asian and anti-Black racisms, I underscore the asymmetries of racial difference that coalesce to reproduce the inequality, scarcity, and isolation that capitalism requires.

The racial ontology of Asianness is marked by an unusual abstraction, eliciting a reactionary form of dehumanization that is based less on ideas of biological inferiority than on a menacing foreignness. In the mid-nineteenth century, Chinese migrants arrived in the US during a period of heightened social unrest surrounding the abolition of slavery. Caught between proslavery and free-labor debates, Chinese coolies, neither free nor enslaved, were pulled into a classificatory paradox. Explaining this contradiction, Moon-Ho Jung notes that coolies were viewed as [both] a natural advancement from chattel slavery and a means to maintain slaverys worst features. Chinese migrants thus became associated less with their status as free or enslaved workers than with their mode of labor efficiency, whose excess could threaten the normativity of white labor within the settler-colonial capitalist system. In other words, the humanity of Chinese migrants was reduced to an economic functionality based on labor efficiency, identified not with the qualitative substance of their bodies but with the quantitative rate of their labor. Between the poles of freedom and slavery, this form of racialized plasticity was constituted on the fixed ground of Black unfreedom.

The aberrant productivity of Chinese labor eventually took on a perverse character in the settler-colonial imagination, symbolized by degeneracy, disease, and vice that endangered the white-settler nation. The source of Chinese perversity was the bachelor home, a space whose nonconformity to white heteropatriarchal norms was seen as constitutive of Chinese labor efficiency. As homosocial spaces not bounded by relations of normative kinship or procreation, the costs of Chinese social reproduction were lower than those of the white nuclear family, where the male breadwinner assumed the social-reproduction costs of his wife and children. The deviancy of the Chinese domestic sphere thus threatened both the value of labor and the stability of the heteropatriarchal home. The fungible character of Chinese labor held a degenerative power, establishing the foundation on which Asians more broadly have ever since been associated with a destructive value regime. Chinese migrants were depicted as both pestilent rats and rat eaters, a threatening swarm of contagion and cultural depravity. Always lurking unseen in the background, the foreign peril that Asians have come to represent is largely a covert one, akin to the invisible enemy that Trump invoked at his press briefings to characterize Covid-19. Popular constructions of Asians that evoke inscrutability, untrustworthiness, mystery, or deceitfulness collectively reinforce the hidden menace they embody, suggesting that the negative, racial substance of Asianness is, like disease, beyond representation. This is the mirror opposite of Blackness, which has historically been constructed as manifestly and eternally biological.

Generalizations about white supremacy or the aberrational quality of anti-Asian violence risk obfuscating the structures of racial disposability embedded in neoliberal capitalism.

While the economic and political exclusion of Black people was partially controlled through Jim Crow and antimiscegenation laws, the abstract threat of Chinese labor was managed through gendered and sexual regulation at the border. When cheap labor was no longer required for the infrastructural expansion of the white-settler nation, the US government passed a series of laws to restrict the biological reproduction of the Chinese population and thus restore the normativity of white social reproduction. Border control initially took the form of gendered and sexual policing, first of Chinese women, then of Chinese men. In 1875, Congress passed the Page Law, which was designed to bar Chinese women from immigrating to the US for lewd and immoral purposes, including prostitution. This law placed a cloud of suspicion over the sexual morality of Chinese women, who were subject to an interrogation process that presumed they were prostitutes unless proven otherwise. The Page Law was implemented not out of any concern for the sexual trafficking of Chinese women, but rather from the fear that their degeneracy was a threat to the white race, so much so that the American Medical Association conducted a study on whether a Chinese strain of syphilis was poisoning the nations bloodstream. The policing of these womens bodies became what Eithne Luibheid calls a blueprint for exclusion, one that remains embedded in immigration policy today. Its legacy extends to the Atlanta shooting through the widespread assumption that all of the shooters Asian victims were sex workersand, by extension, that sex workers are undeserving of protection.

The analogue to the hypersexualization of Chinese women was the sexual perversity associated with Chinese men. Crowded, segregated bachelor communities were stigmatized as hotbeds of homosexual vice, addiction, and illness. The excessive efficiency associated with Chinese bodies through their higher rate of exploitation found its corollary in the depravity imagined to breed in the nonreproductive spheres of Chinese homosocial domesticity. This combination of moral panic and economic anxiety led to the passage of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, which restricted Chinese immigration for more than half a century.

While the gendered and sexual contours of Chinese foreignness represented an abstract threat to white social reproduction based on the destructive economism of their labor, this form of racialization was molded onto an existing terrain of anti-Blackness. The status of the Chinese as unassimilable aliens who were ineligible for citizenship amounts to what Claire Jean Kim refers to as a racial position of simultaneous disadvantage and advantage: disadvantage because of not-whiteness but advantage because of not-Blackness. While policy constructions of the intractable foreignness of Chinese people were undoubtedly racist, Kim clarifies that they were also a testament to the perceived strengthand hence threatof Chinas civilization and culture. For Black people, in contrast, legal enfranchisement in the aftermath of the abolition of chattel slavery was constituted on the basis of their lack of national origins. Chinese unassimilability was a therefore a sign of civilizational difference, while Black assimilability was an index of uncivilized barbarism. While the passage of Chinese Exclusion and Jim Crow laws in the nineteenth century was a means of maintaining white supremacy through racial segregation on national and global scales, there was no equivalence in the substance of anti-Asian and anti-Black racism. While the former remains an Orientalist projection of a fundamental Asian otherness, the latter is based less on antipathy toward African origins than on an essentialized conflation of Blackness and criminality that was instantiated under slavery. In the eyes of the law, the only will that enslaved people could exercise was a criminal one. The implication, as Sau-ling Wong observes, following Elliott Butler-Evans, is that Rodney King was beaten as a member of an American minority, not as a member of the black diaspora. The same cannot be said for Asian Americans.

Globalizing Domestic Warfare

The global dimensions of US imperialism were shaped by the continental accumulation of Indigenous land and African bodies and are intertwined with the association of Asian women with sex work that informed the horrifying murders of the Asian spa workers. During the expansion of US empire from the Philippine-American War at the turn of the twentieth century, the postwar occupation of Japan, and the wars in Korea, Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, sex work was a mode of survival for Asian women in devastated countries. In the postWorld War II era, the building of military operations and bases in Asia and the Pacific went hand in hand with the expansion of the sex industry in military camptowns and the development of Thailands modern-day sex-tourism industry. Camptowns, particularly in South Korea, reinforced a culture in which American GIs were effectively immune from prosecution for the rape and murder of any Asian woman, regardless of employment. This culture of violence has steadily been transplanted to southern US bases, where camptown massage parlors and spas were reconstituted through brokered marriages between GIs and camptown madams after troop reductions in South Korea impacted the military sex economy. Referring to the futility of containing the human spillover of empire, Yuri Doolan underscores how US military encounters in [Asia] have changed American society by bringing US imperial spaces, practices, and subjects into the home front.

The acute vulnerability of the Asian women who were killed in March is layered onto the devaluation of Black and Indigenous women. Historically, the legal protection of white womens virtue was not extended to Black and Indigenous women. As critical-race scholar Kimberl Crenshaw has demonstrated, rape statutes were limited to the regulation, protection, and restoration of white female chastity. Alternatively, for Black women, chastity was never presumed and therefore outside the laws protection. Courts in some states went so far as to instruct juries that unlike white women, Black women were not chaste, which made it virtually inconceivable that a Black woman could even be raped, let alone that a man could be convicted of doing it. The intersection of colonialism and misogyny also informs the movement for Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women, which has exposed the vulnerability of Indigenous women to murder by non-Native men. Even after the passage of the 2013 Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act, violent crimes on Native lands remain subject to federal and state law rather than Native judicial systems, creating an accountability vacuum in which non-Native men can commit rape and murder on Native land with virtual impunity. In the case of Asian women, their sexual deviance was constructed in immigration policy and reinforced by US militarism in Asia. This confluence of domestic and global contexts subjects them to the threat of sexual violence, while their presumed sexual immorality serves to justify increased surveillance, policing, and criminalization.

Hate Crimes and Carceral Care

Despite the historical asymmetries that exist between and across the experiences of racialized groups, the state has offered only a single solution to address anti-Black and anti-Asian violence: the expansion of antidiscriminatory policing and hate-crimes legislation, most recently with the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act and the Covid-19 Hate Crimes Act. The former bill bans the use of choke holds and no-knock warrants and limits qualified immunity, among other reforms. Designed to eliminate discriminatory policing, the bill gives millions of dollars to the police during an unprecedented economic and health crisis that has disproportionately impacted Black and brown communities. If passed, the George Floyd Act authorizes new grant programs that will allocate a combined $850 million to investigate repeated civil-rights violations and deadly use of force by law enforcement. As Mariame Kaba notes, this funding offers an expensive answer to a nonexistent question: They already know how we die. Its policing. The tragic irony of the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act is that none of its provisions would have saved the life of the man for whom it was named. Floyds death was not the result of a choke hold, a no-knock warrant, qualified immunity, or racial profiling. Rather, he was killed by a police officer who knelt on his neck for nine minutes. Regardless of reforms, the police have at their disposal any number of ways to kill a person. The state of New York spent thirty-five million dollars to train officers to comply with the ban on choke holds, but this did nothing to save Eric Garners life. As Kaba emphasizes, the only way to prevent people from dying at the hands of the police is to reduce police contact with communities of color.

Like the George Floyd Act, the Covid-19 Hate Crimes Act will allocate funding to expand reporting and data collection by the Department of Justice, adding to existing hate-crimes legislation that includes sentencing enhancements. Just as the police reform bill would not have protected George Floyd, the Covid-19 Hate Crimes Act does not increase the safety of Asian women who work in stigmatized industries. The bill largely disregards the public statements of Asian American community leaders and organizations, including Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Atlanta and the grassroots migrant-sex-worker coalition Red Canary Song, which have opposed additional policing. They have advocated instead for the legalization of sex work as the most effective means of increasing safety for migrant women employed in these industries, whether they are engaged in sex work or not. What calls for more policing and more surveillance fail to acknowledge is that massage parlors are already surveilled, criminalized, and targeted by immigration raids. It is precisely in these contexts in which police departments double as border enforcement that migrant workers become powerless and hyperexploitable.

It is time to stop looking to the carceral state for the care and protection it cannot give.

If the Covid-19 Hate Crimes Act is passed, which is likely, anti-Asian hate crimes will be catalogued as all hate crimes are: as individualized, dehistoricized instances of bias rather than as part of a domestic and global structure of imperial violence. Above all, by quantifying the escalation of anti-Asian violence during the pandemic, the Covid-19 Hate Crimes Bill promises to reinforce the notion that hardworking Asian Americans are the innocent victims of undeserved hate. While thats true, what will be missing from this accounting is that Asian Americans are the only group of color that have lower Covid-19 mortality rates than white people; Indigenous, Black, and Latinx groups have the highest. The hate-crimes bill will make it easier to overlook this gap, to turn away from a more honest reckoning with the reactionary, anti-Black foundations of model minority status.

Anti-Asian racism isnt exceptional, nor was it initiated by the Sinophobic ravings of the former president. It is deeply embedded in the colonial, anti-Black foundations of our racial capitalist order. Since the nineteenth century, economic and social dislocations, particularly for white men, have presented ideal conditions for the growth of a regressive form of romantic anticapitalism, a staple of white-settler ideology that has informed immigrant-exclusion campaigns, the eugenics movement, and, more recent ecofascist mobilizations. To be clear, romantic anticapitalism is not anticapitalist; rather, it is a regressive ideology based in a binary view of the social world. A profound misreading of capitalist modernity, this ideology promotes the violent, patriarchal defense of the natural white world against the unnatural and abstract circuits of destructive capitalism. Under Nazi romantic anticapitalist ideology, it was Jewish people who became the personification of this abstract evil. By comparison, in North America, Asians have personified a destructive value regime rooted in the excessive efficiency of their labor, whether in conflicts between capital and labor against the backdrop of Reconstruction, or in fears over Japanese agricultural monopolies during the early-twentieth century, or in the evisceration of the US auto industry by Japanese competition in the 1980s. In the current moment, the gendered economic and political dislocations resulting from a forty-year period of wage stagnation, the deterioration of white-male breadwinning potential, and the steady decline of US global hegemony present the prime breeding ground for romantic anticapitalism. Moreover, the passage of neoliberal immigration reforms in 1965 that favored Asian immigrants from investor and managerial classes, alongside the rise of Asian economies, has further reinforced the identification of Asians with the speculative dynamism of finance capitalism. In this light, the Chinese virus might also refer to the abstract flows of capital that produce a toxic intersection of race, disease, and crisis.

Collectively, ending these forms of gendered racist violence would require an end to US empire: an end to militarism and policing, criminal punishment, state regulation of womens bodies, and an economy based on violent relations of scarcity over plenty, individualism over interdependence. Alternatively, antidiscrimination and hate-crimes legislation represent what Ren-yo Hwang calls carceral care, punitive solutions that expand the power of prisons, borders, and bases that disproportionately target the very gendered, racialized bodies they purport to protect. Covid-19 still has much to teach us, perhaps most urgently that it is time to stop looking to the carceral state for the care and protection it cannot give.

Iyko Dayis associate professor of English and Critical Social Thought at Mount Holyoke College.

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Iyko Day on Asian hate through the prism of anti-Blackness - Artforum

ON JANUARY 21, the president of Marquette University, Michael Lovell, announced that he was laying off 39 staff members. These layoffs were initially framed as part of a substantial restructuring of the university by the administration, which aimed tocut between 225 and 300 jobsin order to address a projected budget deficit. Although the pandemic has thrown budgets into chaos across the sector, at Marquette these moves began long before the pandemic. Back in 2019, the university was already laying off 24 employees and leaving nearly 50 vacancies unfilled, in response to gloomy predictions about future enrollments. As Marquettes provost, Kimo Ah Yun, told theMarquette Wire, We are making these decisions precisely because the future of higher education is at an inflection point. The demographic projections have prepared us for that and the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated some of the issues we were already preparing for.

At Marquette, as at schools across the country, demographics has become synonymous with crisis. With the number of high school graduates projected to decline significantly in the coming years, many colleges expect to face growing difficulties recruiting and enrolling students, putting pressure on the key revenue stream of tuition. But this challenge to business as usual should not be conflated with the way that demographics has come to be deployed by administrators as a new discourse of crisis, used as a lever to push through unprecedented austerity measures and restructurings. The future of higher education does not have to be governed by demographic realism.

The leading spokesperson of this emergent discourse of demographic crisis is the economist Nathan D. Grawe, whose book Demographics and the Demand for Higher Education sent a shockwave through higher educations administrative class. Since 2018, when the book came out, he has been an in-demand speaker at events like the Council of Independent Colleges 2020 Presidents Institute and the 2019 Future of Higher Ed conference, where his graphs elicited gasps from the deanlets in the audience. For university administrators, Grawe has become a cross between a prophet of doom and a crisis management consultant, sometimes leaning toward one role and sometimes the other. His work has become a ubiquitous point of reference for administrators across the country, at institutions as diverse as Ithaca College, University of Vermont, and Mt. Hood Community College, among many others. Marquettes plans for restructuring, and the layoffs they entailed, were based on Grawes model, and President Lovell specifically referenced Grawes book in a 2019 email to the campus community explaining the layoffs, noting that he had asked his University Leadership Council to read it.

Demographics and the Demand for Higher Education lays out a straightforward argument. Since the financial crisis of 200708, the fertility rate has dropped by more than 12 percent in the United States, locking in a significant decline in the traditional college-going population starting in 2026. Using a new model that he calls the Higher Education Demand Index (HEDI), Grawe attempts to predict these changes at a more granular level than prior estimates, taking into account birth rates as well as the probability of college attendance across demographic groupings, including race/ethnicity, family income, and parental education, and isolating regional differences. Among other things, his model shows the sharpest drop in college-going students in the Northeast and Midwest, a decline so significant that population growth in the West and South does not make up the difference.

This granularity is framed as a challenge to the dominant, pessimistic narrative of the impending collapse of higher education as a consequence of demographic change. For Grawe, the available data, general forecasts of high school graduates from the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education (WICHE), were too broad to help administrators at different types of institutions appealing to different student populations and located in different regions to navigate demographic changes effectively. By building into his model the previously mentioned factors affecting the probability of college attendance, Grawe aims to provide estimates that are more attuned to the specific conditions in which administrators at different institutions make their decisions. Using his model, Grawe writes in the introduction, doesnt simply modify the picture painted by the dominant narrative. Depending on the type of institution considered, it entirely reverses the story line from one of plummeting populations to one of robust growth.

Grawes model does offer a more optimistic forecast of rising demand for a small set of selective colleges and universities, as a result of both the expansion of college attendance in recent decades and the corresponding increase in parental education as well as the forecasted growth of the Asian American population (see below). But the picture for non-elite institutions is broadly similar to, if not markedly worse than, the dominant narrative. Two-year colleges and regional four-year institutions alike will see significant enrollment pressure, especially in the Northeast and Midwest, and second-tier national institutions will face serious challenges as competition over students intensifies. In other words, Grawes account of the coming demographic crisis continues to have negative if not catastrophic implications for the vast majority of institutions. Overall, things are not looking good. [W]hile careful study of demographic subgroups is essential for projections of demand for subsectors of higher education, he writes, for broad postsecondary enrollment, demographics really is destiny.

Demographics really is destiny. No institution, no matter where it is and who it aims to serve, will remain unaffected for better or worse by what Grawe calls the birth dearth and the subsequent collapse of demand for higher education. The prophet comes bearing a theory of crisis. Much as Mark Fishers capitalist realism captured how capitalism works to produce the belief that there can be no alternatives, Grawes demographic realism provides an objective limit that cannot be avoided, overcome, or argued against, as his projections are locked in by a decline in fertility that began a decade before the books publication. Population here plays a role similar to the one played for decades by the smoothly misleading charts of university finance executives who insist that there is no alternative to layoffs, budget cuts, and program closures. Demographic realism thus shores up these previously effective financial logics which appear to be faltering under the pressure of calls for free college and student debt abolition. Organizing of all kinds has otherwise laid bare administrative fictions about cash-strapped universities needing to invest in debt and labor exploitation.

The assertion of demographics as destiny has unsettling racial implications, though not in the way Grawe intends. As noted above, race is a key variable in his calculations of the probability of college attendance. Asian Americans and non-Hispanic whites, he observes, are substantially more likely to acquire some postsecondary education, and especially to attend selective institutions, than non-Hispanic blacks and Hispanics. Built into his model, correlation becomes causation: though the white population is expected to decline, the forecasted growth in Asian American 18-year-olds translates neatly into a projected increase in demand for selective institutions. [E]lite schools expect healthy demand increases driven by rising levels of parent education and an increasing Asian American population with strong connections to higher education.

Grawes work is not alone in the contemporary discourse in turning to demographics, population, and bodies. From race realists who believe in biological racial differences to green fascists who push arguments that the earths population has surpassed its carrying capacity, much of the resurgent far-right discourse today invests in new forms of populationism. Grawe, of course, advocates for neither of these positions. However, his work does reduce complex social problems to abstract bodies, which in his dataset are raced. Sometimes it is difficult to discern, as Grawe discusses the propensity of different races to attend college, if destiny is demographics or just race. Certainly part of the reason Grawes particular form of demographic realism has been so immediately convincing to so many is that it reduces complex personhood to the stand-in of race, at least in part, and participates in a general return to the common sense of demography and population.

Demographics and the Demand for Higher Education is written with administrators in mind it is a book for administrators, by an administrator. In the introduction, Grawe underscores his experience as an administrator at Carleton College in the aftermath of the Great Recession, and suggests that his book promises to be an important guide for those responsible for leading institutions of higher education through the impending demographic crisis. And yet, the books administrative frame strains against the logic of demographic realism, which implies that there is simply not that much that can be done about the crisis. Only schools with exceptional agility, he suggests, will be able to beat the odds. Frankly, this is not very helpful or inspiring. In the end, the book does not really provide the administrators who make up its target audience with the tools they are hoping for.

It is easy to imagine Grawes publisher, seeing the splash his first book made (not to mention his packed schedule of speaking invitations and frequent quotes in the higher education press) yet understanding that the book is not the guide it promises to be, urging him to write a follow-up volume oriented toward administrative responses to the impending crisis. The administrative market demands solutions otherwise what good are all these administrators?

This is where Grawes new book comes in. If his first book speaks more like a prophet, the second speaks more like a consultant. As the title suggests, The Agile College: How Institutions Successfully Navigate Demographic Changes begins with an updated recap of the demographic argument from the previous book, before moving on to a series of chapters identifying and evaluating an array of possible responses, in large part through interviews with college presidents and other high-level administrators. Over six chapters, he discusses the following approaches: recruitment strategies, retention initiatives, program/curriculum reforms, layoffs and cuts, growth plans, and collaborative policy action. And these institutional responses are echoed in a corresponding shift in his position on demographics as destiny. Since colleges and universities are actively engaging demographic change along multiple dimensions, Grawe writes, the demographic trends explored in this and subsequent chapters do not represent higher educations destiny.

Even with this repositioning, however, the logic of demographic realism remains intact. The birth dearth continues to function as the defining constraint in higher education. This is evident from the start. In the introduction, Grawe draws from an interview with the president of the New England Commission of Higher Education to propose the analogy of a car crash to understand the coming demographic crisis. What kills is not the speed of the car but rather its change in speed. Automotive safety features are designed not to reduce the cars maximum velocity, then, but to reduce the rate of deceleration by lengthening the time over which energy from a crash is absorbed. Similarly, he goes on, institutions have some control over how much deceleration they experience. Rather than waiting until the demographic crisis arrives, administrators ought to start responding to the impending crisis now. [B]y setting out on a path for change today, it is possible to design and implement institutional changes over more time and so reduce the inherent stresses. He adds: This is particularly true in the context of long-term commitments such as capital investments and tenure. Though Grawe claims to have disavowed demographics as destiny, then, his latest work doubles down on demographic realism.

Anyone working at a college or university, particularly over the last 12 months, will have no trouble seeing where this framework leads: Dont wait! Cut now! Whatever his intentions, whatever complexities he aims to bring into relief, Grawes work is a tool, and like any tool it can and will be used in ways that escape the inventors grasp. At Marquette and elsewhere, demographic realism is, has been, and will be used to justify all manner of preemptive cuts, layoffs, and restructurings.

Perhaps the most unintentionally revealing part of The Agile College appears in the chapter titled Reorganization, Rightsizing, and Other Names for Retrenchment. There, Grawe speaks with John Neuhauser, the former president of St. Michaels College, a liberal arts college in Vermont, about his program of rightsizing (which Grawe glosses as decreasing institution size). Grawe explains that in response to demographic challenges and in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, the college decided in 2014 to decrease enrollment from about 1,900 to 1,600 students, or around 15 percent, over the course of three or four years. Of course, this would mean eliminating staff and faculty positions as well.

Author and president both judge the plan a success. Curiously, however, neither provides any details about its financial impact. There is no evidence to suggest, for example, that budget projections or net revenue have improved. (In fact, net tuition declined by 15 percent between 20152019, and Moodys downgraded the schools bond rating from Baa1 to Baa2 last year.) A strange compression occurs, as if, within the logic of demographic realism, reducing enrollment had been the goal in and of itself, rather than the financial sustainability it presumably was intended to achieve.

In fact, more than any other part of the book, this section provides the clearest picture of demographic realism at work. This is because it captures its deployment not as a social scientific theory that explains and clarifies the landscape of higher education but rather as an argument marshaled by administrators in the face of worker resistance. Anyone who has been following the situation at Marquette knows that Grawes arguments have been used strategically by administrators, but in his discussion of St. Michaels College it becomes clear that Grawe is aware of this too. He writes that Neuhausers plans for cuts engendered some resistance, primarily from faculty members, and accepts the former presidents frame that these faculty were backward-looking and reluctant to change with the times. So how did the administration force their cuts through? The key, he argues, was to persuade the faculty. If it is easy to imagine why some would oppose a smaller campus, what was persuasive in getting to the downsizing outcome? Neuhauser thinks the strategic assessment, and the demographic arguments in particular, actually carried significant weight. This is demographic realism in practice: demographics as a rhetorical device to win over, or at least scare and confuse, unwilling workers. Demographic realism breaks down resistance and clears the way for restructuring to move forward.

If this example suggests that demographics is most effective as an argument, the St. Michaels restructuring case study ends with a scene that perfectly captures its performative character. According to Grawe, Neuhauser says that if he were to do it over again, he would change one small thing. The former president notes that the cuts were accompanied by strategic investment as a way to boost morale among remaining faculty, to demonstrate that the college wasnt just cutting but reorienting. In practice this meant new hires in departments with growing enrollments (primarily in no surprise here STEM). Looking back, Neuhauser insists that this was a mistake. Symbolically, he tells Grawe, it was vital to communicate the idea that this was an imminent crisis. Grawe goes on: Neuhauser thinks a hiring moratorium would have served the college more effectively. While it would have disrupted campus relations a bit, he sees that outcome as a price that was worth paying to communicate the urgency and necessity of a fundamental change like the one St. Michaels had embarked on. Once again, there is not even a gesture that administrative decisions ought to be made with revenue generation or even enrollments in mind. Instead, all that matters is the performance that contributes to a sense of emergency, one that would justify such a major restructuring.

What Grawe gets right across both books is that higher education is in crisis. Yet his work has generated so much interest among administrators at least in part because his crisis theory disturbs nothing of their understanding of the world. The monocausal theorization of birth dearth is a set of blinders shutting out every aspect of university political economy that every other sector of university worker knows backward and forward. The crisis in higher education, like the wider economic crisis, has many moving parts. These include the defunding of public education, student debt, tuition limits, vicious mismanagement, and the financialization of everything. But by laying everything at the feet of only one exogenous cause, Grawe allows administrators to frame the whole landscape as a technical problem with only technical fixes. As a part of this administrative logic, his solutions operate entirely within official and existing institutional channels.

Reading Grawe against Grawe, organizers at Marquette have pointed out that the administration is misreading Grawe. They argued that the universitys stated goal to become a Hispanic-Serving Institution could offset the envisioned shrinking pools of white prospective students. Another opportunity in Grawes work, which hasnt received as much attention from campus organizers, is his strikingly optimistic take on the impact of retention initiatives. In his chapter on retention, Grawe notes that attrition is so high in 2018 only 62% of students returned to the institution at which they began studies the year before, and more than one in four failed to enroll at any institution in the second year that colleges that are able to reduce attrition rates by half could offset the demographic losses projected in earlier chapters. These policies represent opportunities with which campus organizers can push back against cuts, challenging the administrative rhetoric of demographic realism.

But beyond individual campuses, there is only so much that recruitment and retention can do within the system of higher education as it is currently organized. In this sense, Grawes repeated reminders that enrollment is a zero-sum game, that every college that successfully recruits or retains a student is effectively taking that student away from other colleges, is accurate. Put another way, helping a handful of agile institutions to successfully navigate the crisis is not the same as resolving or overcoming the crisis. Addressing the crisis from the perspective of the institution, as administrative policies will tend to do, functions as a serious constraint on the political horizon of Grawes work.

This is why the second-to-last chapter of The Agile College, on what Grawe calls collaborative action, is so disappointing, if not particularly surprising. This chapter aims to explore the kinds of reforms that could be taken if institutions worked together instead of treating each other as zero-sum competitors. But Grawe downplays popular proposals that have been taken up by progressive politicians like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Free college is quickly dismissed, because it apparently favors public institutions over private ones, which means that the latter will not support the policy. (Grawe is far more interested in how individual institutions could use free tuition as a recruitment strategy.) On student debt, Grawe insists that the current student loan system works well for many students, but, after some hemming and hawing, agrees that some sort of income-based repayment program could be part of the solution. Debt abolition goes unmentioned.

These overlooked policies would radically reshape the pool of potential students, especially supporting those who are poor, Black, Native, or Latinx. It is worth noting that Grawe briefly acknowledges that an aggressive tuition reduction policy could substantially alter college attendance patterns in the coming years in Demographics and the Demand for Higher Education, but for some reason this admission does not make it into The Agile College. What is at stake here is less the omission of an important policy response to the crisis than the limits of Grawes theory of crisis. To be blunt: A theory of crisis that has no engagement with political economy is either empty rhetoric or, worse, rhetoric that has something to hide.

The point here is worth repeating: Grawe almost admits that there are variables that could completely explain away his theorization of crisis. Drastic tuition reductions, combined with public funding and debt forgiveness, could not only explain away the birth dearth but transform higher education in the United States. And for those outside the ivory towers of university administrators, that transformation would not be a problem, it would be a solution. And it could be a revolution.

What if the crisis was coming from inside the house? What if it was already here a decade ago, when a new wave of student mobilization first kicked off? When you start from political economy rather than demographics, the contours and timeline of the crisis of higher education look very different. But readers scanning Grawes books for in-depth discussions about student debt, administrative bloat, expensive construction projects, policing, and the adjunctification of academic labor will search in vain.

Can we understand failing retention and declining enrollments without considering that todays college-age students might have parents still paying off their own student debt? Can an inflation-adjusted increase of tuition of 26 percent at public and 21 percent at private institutions in the last decade really be discussed without student debt and the financialization of universities? What might the future of higher education look like without the debt service and endowment fees and administrative and athletic salaries that clog university balance sheets? Can we imagine a future for universities without police, and with livable conditions for labor? In our previous work, we have argued the current crisis is driven by a tuition limit: students and families are no longer willing to continue paying the premiums that institutions demand of them. The political economy of most institutions of higher education, from their bond issuances to their labor policies, are shaped by a dependence, and desire for, ever-increasing streams of unrestricted revenue, of which tuition is the most dependable source. Did the fertility rate drop? Yes. Does this explain why universities are in crisis? No.

Grawes work is limited by its failure to engage with a broader set of factors and lack of political vision. If college was free, if debt was abolished, if students were given more support (both financial and instructional), what would the retention rate be, who would enroll, what other worlds might be possible?

These are important questions, but demographic realism will not answer them. Demographics isnt destiny, it is simply the most recent version of a long line of self-serving administrative ideologies. To contest these ideas, we would do well to see Grawes work for what it is, an attempt to shore up a set of administrative logics and arguments that are committed first and foremost not to making education possible for as many as possible, but to making it efficient for those who profit from it. We have to do so without losing sight of who produced the policies that produced the crisis, a crisis that Grawes friends in administration are trying to balance on our backs.

Brian Whitener is an assistant professor of Spanish at the University of South Alabama and author of Crisis Cultures: The Rise of Finance in Mexico and Brazil (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019).

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Demographic Realism and the Crisis of Higher Education - lareviewofbooks

Wordsworth Grasmere, Lake District

From the new rooftop viewing deck of the Wordsworth museum, the veil of Grasmere looks mottled and spongy on a waterlogged day. The hills are smudged out by an ethereal cloud line that seeps into the fields beyond the four chimneys of Dove Cottage. From up here, its clear that the inspiration for Wordsworths poetry started right at his front door.

The rooftop deck, along with new garden paths and two glass walls inside the museum that look on to the hills and village, are designed to reconnect Wordsworths poetry to the landscape in which he created it a key aim of the 6.5m transformation of his former home into a 21st-century attraction. Period paintings of the Lakes also punctuate the new gallery-like space, and the singsong of cuckoos and linnets that Wordsworth describes in his poems is played through the rooms.

Grounding the attraction in its location, the museum has been rebranded as Wordsworth Grasmere for its reopening, and community involvement has never been greater. After a year-long closure, it should have launched to much fanfare on the 250th anniversary of Wordsworths birth last April, but then Covid hit.

Dove Cottage briefly opened last August with immersive audio and new exhibits that restore the cottage to what it would have looked like in Wordsworths day. But building work on the neighbouring museum (which now has 50% more permanent gallery space) and the new roof deck was hit by Covid, and these two key elements will finally open on 18 May.

Lockdowns been pretty tough for us because wed already gone a year without visitor income when Covid hit, says museum director Michael McGregor.

If it werent for emergency funding from the Arts Council, Culture Recovery Fund and the local authority, the museum would be in severe difficulty. Now that funding is tailing off, we need to get people in, but the visitor market is by no means anywhere near back to pre-pandemic levels, says McGregor.

Continuing Covid restrictions means Dove Cottage and the museum will open with capacity capped at 50%, but few other adaptations have been needed.

The brief for the museum overhaul was to reimagine Wordsworth, giving contemporary context to a man who died in 1850, in a bid to reverse declining visitor numbers. The project is built on three foundations: people, poetry and place, says McGregor.

Technology enhances the journey through the museum, starting with a double-height wall of illuminated poetry quotes and ending in an audio-visual space with looped readings of Wordsworths works, including The Prelude spoken by Sir Ian McKellen, set to a Lakes landscape film.

The Cumbrian slate-coloured galleries also give space to diverse voices through films and manuscripts, including a prominent feminine influence on Wordsworths life his sister Dorothy, who wrote the Grasmere Journals. Adult 12, child 5, fives and under free, family 20-32.00 (or 8.50/4/15-23 without cottage entrance), wordsworth.org.ukLorna Parkes

When the Thackray Museum of Medicine was forced to put its 4m reopening plans on hold because of the third lockdown in November, it became the first museum in the UK to be used as a vaccine hub instead. Thackrays medical director, Prof Simon Kay, even volunteered at the centre, which has now delivered 50,000 jabs.

The museum, housed in a Grade II-listed Victorian workhouse on the grounds of St Jamess Hospital, has amassed a nationally important collection of 55,000 objects covering the history of healthcare. Thackray himself was a local maker of surgical instruments.

After an 18-month closure to upgrade the museum, including building work setbacks, Covid came as a kick in the teeth for the team at Thackray. But theyve continued to work throughout the pandemic to adapt for a Covid-safe reopening on 17 May, and have incorporated an outdoor cafe seating area.

Staff had to think long and hard about the new interactive, tactile displays . Some interactives will be in quarantine when we open but for most weve adapted procedures so we can keep our galleries interactive, says Sue Mackay, director of collections and programming.

As the museum benefits from a large footprint, it hasnt needed to reduce visitor capacity to enable social distancing (but will introduce timed entry). Laid out over two floors and 11 galleries, Thackray charts the medical innovations that have changed our lives, through displays co-created with academics, medics, schools, community groups and artists.

The visitor journey follows the trajectory of medicine: out of the dark and into the light. It starts on a dimly lit, recreated Victorian Leeds street with immersive audio and video, then moves upstairs into light-filled galleries exploring innovations including antiseptic, imaging, diagnostics and assisted birth. Visitors can assess MRI scans on a light box and even try their hand at operating a machine to detect polyps in a colon.

As fate would have it, one of the new galleries, Response to Crisis, includes a wall dedicated to epidemics. Now the museum is collecting evidence related to the Covid pandemic, such as vaccine vials and oral histories, to add to its archive. Another exhibit, Disease Detectives, is about understanding germs a topic that has never seemed more pertinent. Adult 11.95, child 8.95, under-fives free, family 18-43, thackraymuseum.co.ukLP

When first established in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1951 by film director Cecil Williamson, the Museum of Witchcraft met with fierce opposition from some of the towns god-fearing residents. Moving to an abandoned mill on the Isle of Man it gained its own resident witch Wiccan founder Gerald Gardner though the two men eventually fell out and Williamson returned to the mainland. There was further opposition when it relocated to Windsor and then Bourton-on-the-Water in the Cotswolds, and it finally found a home in Boscastle harbour in 1960, where it has remained ever since.

Renamed The Museum of Witchcraft and Magic by current director Simon Costin, it is home to the worlds largest collection of artefacts relating to witchcraft, ritual magic, cunning folk and Wicca, and houses an extensive library of occult literature.

As a small, independent museum it isnt eligible for public funding; its main source of income is from door takings. For Costin that has meant not taking a wage over the last 12 months.

I have a day job as a set designer. It could have been crippling for us had I not set aside my wage at the museum for six years in order for there to be some kind of reserve, says Costin. Thats what saved us. Staff were furloughed and topped up on full pay.

And social media has really helped. We would have chewed through that money without Instagram. We have about 75,000 followers, which is remarkable for a small museum. We guided people to our online shop to our books, jewellery and ritual objects like our handmade wooden athame [ceremonial blades]. That helped us survive.

The museum opens its doors on 17 May but can only accept 25% capacity based on timed entrances, which means no more than 32 people in the building at a time. We had to weigh up if it was actually worth us opening but I am so desperate to bring people in again.

The shop has been moved from the front of the museum to avoid any congestion, which means weve lost a whole gallery. Items from the shop are now numbered and behind glass there. It works a bit like Argos, Costin concludes. Except, instead of a folding chair or battery rechargers, its charms, amulets and black candles on sale.

This year also marks the museums 70th anniversary and includes a new exhibition, In the Land of the Bucca, themed around the folk magic, customs, myths and legends of Cornwall. To round off a visit, the shop will be selling pewter Cornish piskies (fairies) as lucky charms. Youll have to go elsewhere for your Cornish pasties. Adult 7, child 5, under-fives free, museumofwitchcraftandmagic.co.ukDavid Bramwell

When lockdown came in March 2020, Wilberforce House Museum closed its doors to an uncertain future. Some staff were seconded to other jobs, working in Hulls parks and libraries, but for others the museum work did not stop. Simon Green, director of museums for the city, soon realised there was an opportunity and a challenge: We were fortunate to have the support of the council and realised we needed to deliver exhibitions digitally.

For Wilberforce House it was actually the culmination of a long process that had been going on for a decade, updating and rethinking the displays to reflect modern approaches to the questions of slavery and abolition. There was also a recognition that although William Wilberforce had been an important part of the campaign to end slavery in the British Empire (culminating in the anti-slavery acts of 1807 and 1833), he was only one part of it, and slavery still exists. We get visitors from the US who can spend two or three hours examining the house carefully, says Green. We have had to respond to that kind of scrutiny.

In place of outdated mannequins, the rethink has brought displays that emphasise the horrors of slave ships: one new item is a simple outline that shows the space allocated to a single enslaved person. I cant actually get into it, says Green. Its a sobering experience to try. Items related to William Wilberforce himself still take pride of place, but there are also explanations of other campaigning lives in Hull: Lil Bilocca, for example, a trawlermans wife who responded to the 1968 triple trawler tragedy with a blistering campaign for safety. Harold Wilsons government adopted all the proposals, but Lil lost her job in the fishing industry, received death threats and, unlike William Wilberforce, died in 1988 with her successful campaigning unrecognised and almost forgotten.

For the museum, last summers brief easing of regulations brought a painful realisation: it could not actually reopen. The house is a relatively small merchants dwelling that backs on to the historic River Hull, and free access with social distancing was impossible. Now the plan is to test small group guided tours that can be prebooked online. The reopening for Wilberforce will come in late June, although Hulls other museums and galleries will be back, with online booking, on 17 May.

Its been a challenging time, says Green, But also a chance to reflect on what we do. The next objective is a major realignment towards maritime heritage, backed by a 38m national lottery grant with a new museum that Lil Bilocca might have appreciated: a North Sea cod trawler, the Arctic Corsair, veteran of the Icelandic cod war, to open with a new visitor centre. Free admission, humbermuseums.comKevin Rushby

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I am desperate to bring people in again: small museums in England on reopening - The Guardian

"Music for Abolition"is the name of a music video program that three-time Grammy-award winning musician Terri Lyne Carrington has curated over the past year for UCSCs Institute of the Arts and Sciences.

Bringing together musicians across a wide variety of genres, it creates a soundtrack to the shared struggle for abolition and resolution in response to the ongoing history of racism and oppression in the United States.

The program is part of the Institutes extensive Barring Freedominitiative, which highlights the role of art, music, and visual culture in engaging and confronting issues of prisons, policing, and abolition in this country.

On Tuesday, May 18, the Institute of the Arts and Sciences will present a Music for Abolition artist panel featuring Carrington, along with a dozen prominent guest musicians, including Dianne Reeves, Camila Cortina Bello, Nicholas Payton, Lisa Fischer, Orrin Evans, Eric Revis, Nicole Mitchell, Queen Cora Coleman, Maimouna Youssef (Mumu Fresh), Sara Elizabeth Charles, and Cecile McLorin Salvant.

They will all join together for an online conversation about the role of sound and music in the struggle for abolition. Video clips of their work will also be shown. Admission is free and open to the public with registration.

Carrington was invited to curate the music program by UCSC feminist studies professor Gina Dent, co-organizer of the "Visualizing Abolition event series.

Music for Abolition has been such a gift over these last months, enlivening our speaking events and encouraging us through the pandemic, said Dent. The amazing group of musicians that Terri has brought together have provided moving sonic explorations of the embodied and painful history and present of prisons and policing. What we hear in these sounds is the ringing-out of abolition--people working collectively together to reimagine a world filled with beauty and freedom, and allowing us to see and to hear the beauty that has always surrounded us and is in us.

Carrington worked as a New York session drummer in the mid 1980s before gaining national recognition as the house drummer for both the Arsenio Hall Show and Quincy Jones VIBE TV show. In 1989, she released a Grammy-nominated debut CD on Verve Forecast, Real Life Story, and toured extensively with Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock. In 2011, she released the Grammy-award-winning album, The Mosaic Project, featuring a cast of all-star women instrumentalists and vocalists, and in 2013 she released Money Jungle: Provocative in Blue, which also won a Grammy, establishing her as the first woman ever to win in the Best Jazz Instrumental Album category.

She has performed on over 100 recordings and worked extensively with such artists as Al Jarreau, Stan Getz, Woody Shaw, Clark Terry, Cassandra Wilson, Dianne Reeves, James Moody, and Esperanza Spalding. She is also an honorary doctorate recipient from the Berklee College of Music, and currently serves as founder and artistic director for the Berklee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice.

Carrington debuted her new band Social Science in 2019, releasing an eclectic double album, Waiting Game, to confront a wide spectrum of social justice issuesincluding mass incarceration, police brutality, homophobia, the genocide of indigenous Americans, and political imprisonment. It featured guests including MCs Rapsody, Maimouna Youssef (Mumu Fresh), Kokayi and Raydar Ellis, vocalist Mark Kibble (Take 6), and trumpeter Nicholas Payton, along with spoken word artists Malcolm Jamal-Warner and Meshell Ndegeocello, plus words of resistance drawn from recordings of Angela Davis, Leonard Peltier, Assata Shakur, and Mumia Abu Jamal.

It has been a real honor curating the musical contributions for Visualizing Abolition, said Carrington. It has been an enlightening experience for myself and many of my musical colleagues, and has allowed us to look at these issues through the lens of some incredible artists and scholars. To create music having to do with circumstances, realities, and destinies that I could not yet imagine was not only exciting but also quite expansive, for which I am grateful.

"The symposium brought together an amazing cohort of creators whose work can now reflect each other's in some way or another, sharing messages, ideals, hopes, and dreams, she added. In recognizing the bonds of our common humanity as artists and cultural workers, we not only strengthen ourselves and our existing communities, we participate in designing the future.

Terri is an amazing musician and activist, with a commitment to thinking about and advocating for the roles music can play within struggles for social justice, said Rachel Nelson, director of UCSCs Institute of the Arts and Sciences. "As Terri has said, for artists and musicians,to create something thats transformational or helps point us in the direction of a differentfutureI think thats a big part of our roles."

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The Music for Abolition: Artist Panelfeaturing curator Terri Lyne Carrington and guest musicianstakes place on Tuesday, May 18, from 4 p.m. to 5:30. Admission to this online event is free and open to the public with registration.

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Creating a soundtrack and adding a heartbeat to the struggle for prison abolition - UC Santa Cruz

Political Report

Time is running out for the state Senate to advance a bill repealing the death penalty. Two influential Democratic senators also work as prosecutors, and the states DA association is fighting the reform.

Nevada, a state where district attorneys are fond of death sentences, is close to repealing capital punishment. When the Assembly passed a bill to abolish the death penalty in April, the chambers Democrats, who hold the majority, all voted in its favor, sending it to the Democrat-controlled Senate.

But a pair of Democratic senators, both of whom work as prosecutors when the legislature is not in session, may derail the effort. Nicole Cannizzaro is the Senate majority leader and has not committed to bringing forward the legislation, Assembly Bill 395. Melanie Scheible leads the Judiciary Committee, which has yet to hold a hearing or vote on the bill. The clock is ticking; the bill would need to pass the committee by next week, and the entire legislative session is winding down at the end of May.

Cannizzaro and Scheible are deputy district attorneys in the office of Clark County (Las Vegas) DA Steve Wolfson. Wolfson is a staunch foe of death penalty abolition who has sought death sentences in dozens of cases over his tenure, testified against AB 395, and is trying to schedule an execution just as this debate is coming to a head in the state Capitol.

Theres an apparent conflict of interest, where the people that are making laws are enforcing laws, Scott Coffee, a longtime public defender in Clark County who has worked on many capital cases, told The Appeal: Political Report. Walking into that office after repealing the death penalty would be kind of like walking into the Red Sox dugout after trading Babe Ruth. Neither Cannizzaro nor Scheible responded to requests for comment for this article.

The Nevada Association of District Attorneys, the states prosecutorial lobby, has been urging lawmakers to reject AB 395. Its president, Elko County DA Tyler Ingram, testified against abolishing the death penalty in the Assembly. Throughout Nevada, prosecutors make the decision to seek the death penalty sparingly and judiciously, Ingram told the Assembly. It is reserved for the worst of the worst.

But Nevada prosecutors have pursued the death penalty so frequently that they have helped make their state an outlier even by national standards.

Nevada has about 70 people on death row. Relative to the states population, that is the second-highest number in the country, behind Alabama. The numbers are completely out of whack with the rest of the country and the rest of the free world, to be quite honest, said Coffee, who blames a culture where DAs seek death sentences in volume because its always been sought in volume.

And state prosecutors have filed notices seeking death sentences in dozens of additional casesbut have either failed to secure them or else dropped their quest. Critics say prosecutors use these notices to gain leverage in plea negotiations.

The Nevada District Attorneys Association, contacted through its president and through two registered lobbyists, did not respond to requests for comment.

For Assemblymember Steve Yeager a Democrat who is a chief sponsor of AB 395, the death penalty gives prosecutors an alarming degree of discretion over someones life.

Yeager worked as a public defender in Clark County for eight years, going up against the countys prosecutors. He says he already opposed the death penalty before that experience, but his resolve hardened when he witnessed the unjustifiable differences in how prosecutors handled similar cases. A disproportionate share of the people on Nevadas death row are Black, and Yeager says last summers protests for racial justice have helped push this bill further than similar measures have gone in the past.

AB 395, as currently drafted, would commute the sentences of people on Nevadas death row to life without the possibility of parolein addition to barring future death sentences.

Nevada has not executed anyone since 2006, in part due to its difficulties obtaining execution drugs from manufacturers. But abolition advocates point to the resurgence of federal executions under President Donald Trump to warn that a pause could end at any moment.

Wolfson, the Clark County DA, is looking to break Nevadas stretch by trying to schedule an execution for Zane Michael Floyd, who was sentenced to death in 2000 for the murders of four people. There is a hearing scheduled in state court for next week, shortly before the deadline by which the Judiciary Committee must act on AB 395, though a federal judge said on Thursday that he may intervene to block the proceedings.

Holly Welborn, policy director at the ACLU of Nevada and a member of the Nevada Coalition Against the Death Penalty, says the DAs involvement in the death penalty debate this year mirrors how theyve torpedoed past criminal justice reform proposals. She regrets that lawmakers let them have such sway in legislative proceedings.

Its almost like they have a veto, that everything has to be signed off by the DAs, by some law enforcement entity, Welborn said. Referencing a 2019 omnibus reform bill that several DAs opposed that was weakened before its final passage, she added, It seems that every change in a bill is at the request of law enforcement, who then still show up and oppose these measures.

This dynamic has played out before, in ways strikingly similar to the current debate on the death penalty.

In 2019, the Assembly overwhelmingly passed legislation to limit civil asset forfeiture. Advocates who supported the bill called on Cannizzaro to allow a Senate vote on the bill, much like they are doing now with AB 395. But the bill never received a vote in the Senate.

The Nevada District Attorneys Association testified against that asset forfeiture bill in the Senates Judiciary Committee. This year, when lawmakers introduced a watered down version that also has yet to get a vote, the association testified against it again. The group has also been resisting a bill that would toughen use-of-force standards for police.

Throughout the country, DAs and their statewide associations play a similar role of adamantly fighting reform, but they are facing a reckoning in some states. Reform advocates in Nevada hope their state can follow suit. This is something that were not tolerating anymore, Wellborn said, describing renewed efforts by criminal justice reform advocates to expand whose voices are heard at the state Capitol.

Leslie Turner, an organizer with Mass Liberation, credits AB 395s progress to community organizing. We really focused on getting into impacted communities and empowering our own community members, reducing the stigma and shame about having been impacted by the criminal justice system, she said. And I think that that has created a lot of momentum around criminal justice reform in general.

There is a difference between the emotional satisfaction that comes from revenge, versus actual justice, Turner added about the death penalty. Justice to me is making sure that this doesnt happen in the future. Were having three or four mass shootings a week, because we never actually got to the root cause of why this was happening. We just react over and over again. I think theres just a mass refusal in the community to accept this anymore.

Local elections have also added to the influence of public defenders, sparking new fault lines even within the Democratic Party. In addition to former public defender Yeager, the chief sponsor of AB 395 in the SenateDemocrat James Ohrenschallworks as a public defender in Clark County when the legislature is not in session.

Public defenders also secured a string of victories in judicial races in Clark County last year after running on promises to bring a decarceral outlook to the bench. In response, Wolfson called on the state to move away from electing its judges. Wolfson himself is up for re-election as DA in 2022.

The Nevada Democratic Party has faced broader turmoil this year. A slate aligned with the Democratic Socialists of America took over the leadership of the state party. And Judith Whitmer, the incoming state party chairperson, supports abolishing the death penalty.

Even if the Senate were to pass AB 395, though, Democratic Governor Steve Sisolak has tentatively indicated he may block the legislation. He said he would have a hard time supporting a bill that fully abolishes the death penalty.

Death penalty opponents remain hopeful that the states broad political transformations, combined with the reckoning brought about by protests and the nationwide tide against executions, can outweigh Nevadas propensity for capital punishment.

Welborn invoked the anti-death penalty movements recent triumph in Virginia, another state that long embraced executions. We know that the death penalty system is too broken to fix in the state of Nevada, and anywhere else in this country, she said. Virginia at one time had the highest rate of executions in the country. If they can do it, we certainly can do it here in Nevada.

Originally posted here:

Nevada Prosecutors Are Standing in the Way of Abolishing the Death Penalty - The Appeal

This had changed by the time Kaba left college and returned to New York City to work with survivors of domestic violence. She was befuddled that many of the women she was working with did not want to call the police on their partners. Kaba said, Then I started asking people questions like, Why dont you want to go to the police? And people would look at me, like, What are you talking about? Why wouldnt I go to the cops? Do you not see who I am? The cops dont keep me safe. And so I slowly came to consciousness. In her book, Kaba writes, What happens when you define policing as actually an entire system of harassment, violence, and surveillance that keeps oppressive gender and racial hierarchies in place? When thats your definition of policing, then your whole frame shifts. And it also forces you to stop talking about it as though its an issue of individuals, forces you to focus on the systemic structural issues to be addressed in order for this to happen.

There is no definitive beginning point for prison-abolition politics, but it is clearly connected to a turn, beginning in the sixties, in American imprisonment, in which it went from a method, in part, of rehabilitation to one of control or punishment. During the civil-rights movement, police were the shock troops for the massive resistance of the white political establishment in the American South. By the mid-sixties, policing and the criminal-justice system were being retrofitted as a response to a growing insurgency in Black urban communities. By the seventies, they were being used to contain and control both Black radicals and Black prisoners. The scholar and activist AngelaY. Davis may be the best-known prison abolitionist in the United States today. But, in 1972, she was facing charges of kidnapping, murder, and conspiracy, after guns registered to her were used by the seventeen-year-old Jonathan Jackson, in a botched attempt to free his brother, the Black radical George Jackson, from Soledad prison.

Davis had become a leader of George Jacksons defense committee and had developed a close relationship with him. As a result of their collaboration, and of Daviss experience of spending sixteen months in jail before her acquittal, she devoted her political energies to prisoners rights and eventually to prison abolition. In an interview that she gave while awaiting the outcome of her trial, Davis said, We simply took it upon ourselves at first to defend George Jackson, John Clutchette, and Fleeta Drumgothe radicals known as the Soledad Brothers. But we later realized that the question was much broader than that. It wasnt simply a matter of three individuals who were being subject to the repressive forces of the penal system. It was the system itself that had to be attacked. It was the system itself that had to be abolished.

In 1995, the radical theorist Mike Davis wrote a cover story for The Nation describing a new prison-industrial complex being established in California, with no pretense that the exponential growth of prisons was tied to the rise and fall of crime. Indeed, according to the scholar and activist Ruth Wilson Gilmore, in her pathbreaking book Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California, even though the crime rate peaked in 1980, between 1984 and the early two-thousands, California completed twenty-three major new prisons, at a cost of two hundred and eighty to three hundred and fifty million dollars each. By contrast, the state had built only twelve prisons between 1852 and 1964. Bodies were necessary to justify the rapid growth of the prison sector, and the Crime Bill of 1994, along with Californias three-strikes legislation, passed that same year, provided them. Gilmore writes that the California state prison population grew nearly 500 percent between 1982 and 2000. The three-strikes law, which mandated twenty-five-years-to-life sentences for a third felony, had an especially severe effect on Black and Latinx communities. Mike Davis reported that, during the first six months of prosecutions under the new law, African-Americans made up fifty-seven percent of the three strikes filings in L.A. County, even though they made up only ten per cent of the state population. This was seventeen times higher than the rate at which whites were being charged under the new law, even though white men were responsible for at least sixty percent of all the rape, robberies, and assaults in the state.

The three-strikes law was an accelerant to what would come to be called mass incarceration, but it was also the makings of a new movement against prisons and against the means and methods by which they became populatednamely, policing. In 1997, in Berkeley, Davis, Gilmore, and others formed the organizing group Critical Resistance, which brought together activists, the formerly incarcerated, and academics to build an international movement to end the prison industrial complex by challenging the belief that caging and controlling people make us safe. Ten years later, Gilmore published Golden Gulag, which she describes as the culmination of research projects undertaken with Black mothers of incarcerated persons in California state prisons. She wrote, What we learned twice over was this: the laws had written into the penal code breathtakingly cruel twists in the meaning and practice of justice. This produced new questions, extending far beyond the passage of new laws. The mothers, along with Gilmore, asked, Why prisons? Why now? Why for so many peopleespecially people of color? And why were they located so far from prisoners homes? In this sense, although academics have been important to formulating the movements arguments, the journey toward abolition is not an academic or intellectual exercise. Instead, it has been gestated within the communities deeply scarred by the disappearing of sons and daughters by the state.

By the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, the cumulative, devastating effects of twenty years of increasing policing and incarcerationinaugurated by Reagan but abetted by the policies of the Clinton Administrationcame into greater focus, as new conversations opened up about structural inequality in the United States. Michelle Alexanders book The New Jim Crow, published in 2010, offered a breakthrough analysis of continued Black inequality as a product of years of policing and imprisonment in Black communities. Kaba identifies the failure to stop the execution of the Georgia death-row inmate Troy Davis, in 2011, as catalyzing the emergence of an abolitionist consciousness among what Elizabeth Alexander has described as the Trayvon Generation. Five months after Daviss execution, Trayvon Martin was killed by George Zimmerman. Kaba noted that the call, when Trayvon Martin was killed, was to arrest and to prosecute and to convict Zimmerman. In 2014, after Michael Brown was killed, the push was to indict Darren Wilson, and for body cameras. Zimmerman was acquitted, and a grand jury failed to bring charges against Wilson. Kaba said, And, because so many of these young folks were actually mobilized in the organizing, they could see the futility of the demands that they were making and the limits of those demands, and wanted and were ready to hear something new.

That generations maturation in the world of police reform became apparent last summer, when many young activists and organizers began to embrace a demand that funding for police departments be redistributed to other public agencies and institutions. The demand originated in Minneapolis, where George Floyd was killed, and where the city council briefly committed to defunding the police department. But, Kaba said, its important to note that local Black radical organizationsBlack Visions Collective, Reclaim the Block, and MPD150had been campaigning for years to divest from the police department and invest in community groups, battling the police over the citys budget. She explained, Youve already got folks on the ground over there that have had two cycles of budget fights around defunding the police based on divestment. So the part of this people dont understand is the continuity of these ideas. They dont just come out of nowhere. People arent just yelling stuff randomly. It got picked up nationally because people were, like, This makes sense.

Although the demand to defund the police may have had its specific origins in Minneapolis, Kaba understands that the growing curiosity about abolitionist politics is rooted in something much broader. She said, People are frustrated by the way that the welfare state has completely been defunded. People dont have what they need to survive. And yet the military and prisons keep getting more and more and more. Contrary to the beliefs of their critics, abolitionists are not impervious to the realities of crime and violence. But they have a fundamental understanding that crime is a manifestation of social deprivation and the reverberating effects of racial discrimination, which locks poor and working-class communities of color out of schooling, meaningful jobs, and other means to keep up with the ever-escalating costs of life in the United States. These problems are not solved by armed agents of the state or by prisons, which sow the seeds of more poverty and alienation, while absorbing billions of dollars that might otherwise be spent on public welfare. The police and prisons arent solving these problems: they are a part of the problem.

At its core, abolitionist politics are inspired by the necessity for what Martin Luther King,Jr., described as the radical reconstruction of the entirety of U.S. society. They intend to promote systemic thinking instead of our societys obsession with personal responsibility. Derek Chauvins conviction was premised on the idea that he was personally responsible for George Floyds murder. The emphasis on his accountability distracts from a system of policing that administered his continued employment, even though eighteen complaints had been lodged against him during his nineteen-year career. Moreover, Chauvin was a field-training officer, who had trained two of the other officers who will face trial for participating in Floyds murder. Chauvin may be held to account for the killing, but neither the Minneapolis Police Department nor the elected officials charged with overseeing the M.P.D. will be held to account for allowing someone like Chauvin to be on the streets, let alone responsible for training others.

To approach harm systemically is to imagine that, if peoples most critical needs were met, the tensions that arise from deprivation and poverty could be mitigated. And when harm still occurs, because human beings have the propensity to hurt one another, nonlethal responses could attend to itand also to the reasons for it. To be sure, these are lofty aspirations, but they are no more unrealistic than believing that another study, expos, commission, firing, or police trial is capable of meeting the desire for change that, last summer, compelled tens of millions of ordinary people to pour into the streets. Indeed, the trial of Derek Chauvin could not even conclude before a Black man was killed at a traffic stop.

Our current criminal-justice system is rooted in the assumption that millions of people require policing, surveillance, containment, prison. It is a dark view of humanity. By contrast, Kaba and others in this emergent movement fervently believe in the capacity of people to change in changed conditions. That is the optimism at the heart of the abolitionist project. As Kaba insists in her book, The reason Im struggling through all of this is because Im a deeply, profoundly hopeful person. Because I know that human beings, with all of our foibles and all the things that are failing, have the capacity to do amazingly beautiful things, too. That gives me the hope to feel like we will, when necessary, do what we need to do. Abolition is not an all-or-nothing proposition. Even the guiding lights of the movement are embedded in campaigns for short-term reforms that make a difference in daily life. For Kaba, that has meant raising funds for mutual aid during the pandemic and campaigning for reparations in Chicago. For Gilmore, it has meant working with incarcerated people and their families to challenge the building of prisons across California. For Angela Davis, it has meant lending her voice to movements for civil and human rights, from Ferguson to Palestine. The point is to work in solidarity with others toward the world as they wish for it to be. Hope is a discipline, Kaba writes. We must practice it daily.

Excerpt from:

The Emerging Movement for Police and Prison Abolition - The New Yorker