Category Archives: Intentional Communities

Chaka Coleman

By Chaka Coleman

What is leadership? This is a question I endeavored to answer when I took former Dean Andy Klein and professor Susan Brooks Leadership in the Law class at IU McKinney this past fall.

Too many times as students of color we have been asked, Do you know Jimmie McMillian? While I believe Jimmie to be a remarkable human being, he is just that human. He cannot mentor the entire city of Indianapolis, be a husband, father, top tier attorney and not sacrifice time. He needs your help, and as future lawyers, so do we. There are many potential Jimmie McMillians in the legal profession, many of whom youve never heard of, waiting for the chance to be elevated and challenged to provide solutions.

As I think back on my time in that classroom, I can name a place where each of the 20 or so students would thrive as leaders. The wonderful thing about IU McKinneys law program is that it accepts students from diverse backgrounds parents, police officers, engineers, educators and utilizes their real-world experiences to benefit the legal field. If attorneys dont provide these students with real leadership opportunities, not based on years of practice but based on the experience they already bring to the table, they are doing a disservice to ingenuity and relegating perseverance to an afterthought of the human psyche.

I had a candid conversation about leadership with IndyBar President Judge Alicia Gooden this past summer. I asked, How can you tell someone who navigated law school with a family and full-time job and who now practices complex bond financing deals or litigates major felony cases that they are not qualified to hold a leadership position?

Crisis management, financing and feeding humans certainly qualifies you for any position in any association, board or committee. And that, dear colleagues, should be the attitude that each of us takes with us when we look for a potential addition to our leadership teams.

The lack of leadership opportunities is even more prevalent in communities of color, which is disheartening. Quite frankly, there arent enough of us to not provide fresh perspectives the opportunity to shine. I liken this to both a fear of the unknown and a lack of faith; but faith is what we need to push our profession into the next generation of change. A great example of tapped potential is Angka Hinshaw. She is a soft-spoken superhero who has done a phenomenal job advocating for cultural awareness and equity within the legal profession alongside Justice Steven David.

Undoubtedly, expertise is important, and many attorneys are successful and accomplished and should be celebrated as such. I am advocating for the collective to continue to encourage and promote the unknown who may also desire the opportunity to make an impact but may not quite know how. Although not always the case, Im sure that veteran attorneys would like to go home to their families, proud of the fact that they are building a legacy of future policymakers, judges and litigators, one relinquished duty at a time.

So, I ask again: What is leadership? Well, sometimes it is simply asking what you can do to support someone elses growth. As practitioners of the law, we are taught to mitigate risk and keep our clients needs safe behind the shield of justice. But what we are not taught is that leadership and leadership opportunities are inherently risky, with rewards that can arguably outweigh any peril involved.

In conclusion, before you ask students and fledgling attorneys if they know Jimmie McMillian, I challenge you to first ask yourself if you know anyone other than Jimmie McMillian who can serve as a resource and support system to help a new attorney on their legal journey. Then ask yourself if there is a leadership opportunity not that he can provide, but that you, your network or organization are willing to provide. It takes confidence and fortitude to witness someone else succeed, but there is no greater gift that you can give than intentionality, and when it comes to opportunities, intentional investment in the next generation of leaders is what our legal community needs.

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IndyBar: Intentional Investment: Providing Opportunities to the Next Generation of Lawyers - Indiana Lawyer

Scott will invest over $10 million in ARPA dollars to establish CVI ecosystem and address violence across the city.

BALTIMORE, MD (Wednesday, April 13, 2022) Today, Mayor Brandon M. Scott stood as a national leader in the Community Violence Intervention (CVI) space to lay out his strategy toexpand Baltimores CVI ecosystem. Mayor Scott was joined by the Mayors Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement (MONSE), White House Community Violence Intervention Collaborative (CVIC) technical advisors, the National Coalition for Criminal Justice Reform, The Health Alliance for Violence Intervention (HAVI), Safe Streets Baltimore, community-based organization partners, Baltimore-area hospital system partners, and community partners.

Baltimores Comprehensive Violence Prevention Plan (CVPP) outlines the Mayors commitment to invest in evidence-based violence intervention programming rooted in community and a public health approach. Scott has already committed to accelerating the implementation of the CVPP through a $50 million American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) investment into comprehensive public safety efforts announced last fall.

We know that in order to reduce violence, Baltimores capacity to transform conflict positively and reduce violence must drastically expand, said Mayor Brandon M. Scott. Community Violence Intervention is a nationally-acclaimed and implemented strategy that is proven to save lives and produce sustainable outcomes for communities experiencing devastating levels of violence. Establishing this ecosystem is a critical part of my Comprehensive Violence Prevention Plans approach to breaking the vicious cycle of violence by addressing it as a law enforcement issue and a public health epidemic.

Between FY22 - FY25, Baltimore will invest $10,025,000 from ARPA to issue a minimum of 30 contracts with partner organizations at the institutional and grassroots levels in outreach and conflict mediation, violence intervention, hospital-based violence intervention, school-based violence intervention, intensive case management and life coaching, and victim services.

Making our communities safer will take meaningful investment anda coordinated approach to response and intervention efforts. Thats why Im glad to see Mayor Scott leveraging federal American Rescue Plan funds in his comprehensive vision to improve public safety in Baltimore," said U.S. Senator Chris Van Hollen. The Community Violence Intervention Ecosystem plan both increases support for victims while offering pathways to homegrown economic opportunity that gives people hope for their futures. This initiative is an important part of an overall strategy to strengthen public safety and make Baltimore an even better place to live and work, and Ill keep fighting for more federal resources to support these efforts.

Today, Scott detailed his approach to developing, coordinating, and fostering a Community Violence Intervention ecosystem in Baltimore that includes violence intervention programming and victim services, intensive life coaching, hospital-based response, and other wraparound supports.

Scotts vision for an expanded CVI ecosystem includes:

In addition, Scott released Establishing the Ecosystem: A Vision for Community Violence Intervention in Baltimore, an in-depth report outlining the ways his administration will invest in trauma-informed, community-centered, and evidence-based public health interventions to stem the tide of violence through the establishment of a comprehensive and multi-faceted Community Violence Intervention (CVI) ecosystem.

Before the Scott Administration, Baltimores CVI landscape included ten Safe Streets sites, some partnerships with hospitals for hospital-based violence intervention programs, and one contract with Roca, which provides life coaching and other support to older teens and young adults.

Baltimores CVI ecosystem will include familiar programs, like Safe Streets and Roca, and grow to include additional partnerships with hospitals, public schools, victim services providers, life coaches, and case managers - each working together, covering more ground across the city, and playing a uniquely important role in the overall strategy to prevent and reduce violence. This approach is supported by the White House as a best practice to reduce violent crime in partnership with local communities.

Baltimore City is home to ten Safe Streets sites, each with its own staff and physical location based in the community, across eight administrators. Each Safe Streets site is intentionally located in a BPD post in the top percentile of gun violence across the city.

Currently, these ten sites cover only approximately 2.6 square miles of a 90 square mile city. MONSE will use ARPA funding to contract with community based organizations and service providers to build capacity and amplify the effectiveness of community violence intervention strategy components including, but not limited to, the provision of direct services and wraparound supports. Organizations can learn more about funding opportunities and submit a letter of interest at the Mayor's Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement's Funding Portal.

For over two decades, Safe Streets violence interrupters have been trusted messengers in the community and have stood on the frontlines, putting themselves in between a person pointing a gun and the person the gun is being pointed at to to interrupt the transmission of violence, said Shantay Jackson, Director of the Mayors Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement. The Scott administration is committed to cultivating a CVI network that is intentional about establishing support for those experiencing violence, and for those working on the ground to prevent it from occurring.

MONSE conducted an in-depth review of Baltimores ten current Safe Streets at Mayor Scotts direction. This evaluation focused on operational and cultural norms across the sites and was completed in the second half of 2021. As outlined in the 33-page report, MONSE will prioritize workforce safety, oversight and accountability of the program, training and development, workforce morale, career pathways for violence interrupters, and overall program efficacy.

An updated academic evaluation of Safe Streets is currently underway. One part of the study will analyze and evaluate Safe Streets Baltimores impact on gun violence. Another aspect of the study will include an investigation of Safe Streets sites in the Western District to generate a deeper qualitative understanding of how the sites engage with program participants, staff, local community-based and government organizations, and community members. The findings of these evaluations will be public and are expected to be shared in the first half of 2023.

Members of the public can read the report in full here.

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Mayor Scott Announces Vision for Community Violence Intervention Ecosystem in Baltimore - Mayor Brandon M. Scott

It is useless, for now, to predict where the six-justice conservative majority on the Supreme Court may be heading. But one possibility is worth noting: If the majority holds firm on just a handful of constitutional questions, it can decisively defeat what I call the coercive equity regime. The Court has an opportunity not only to halt the rise of wokeness but to dismantle its legal foundation. Americas traditional constitutional order can then be restored to vitality.

The Court can perform this rescue operation without any rethinking of constitutional theory and even without a reliable majority on most questions of constitutional law. I leave aside the stimulating debates over whether to abandon or modify originalism. My aim in this essay is narrow. I wish only to show that a conventional right-wing jurisprudencewhether described as originalist or noton a select number of questions is a mortal threat to the regime. The only question is whether the conservative majority will act decisively before it is too late.

To describe Americans as living under a regimelike Eastern Europeans living under communism during the Cold Waris to court dismay and disbelief. After all, the constitutional order that Americans founded in the eighteenth century remains recognizable. The forms of governmentthe periodic elections, the divided branches, the flag and sealpersist. The institutions of civil societychurches, schools, businesses, and associationsremain nominally independent of the state. No one eventan invasion, a coup, or victory in a civil warmarks the ascendancy of a new system of rule (although the late toppling of the old orders monuments makes one wonder). For these reasons, a powerful faction of American conservatives dismisses critics of the regime as dangerous catastrophists.

At the same time, Americans endure affronts to their heritage that not long ago would scarcely have been imaginable. Mobs desecrate statues of Christopher Columbus, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln. Hospital systems propose to withhold life-saving medicines based on race. The vice president celebrates political violence (and her administrations Department of Justice seeks leniency for homicidal arsonists). Scholars submit professions of loyalty as a condition of hiring or advancement. Public school teachers urge children to sterilize themselves and mutilate their sex organs. Virtually every institution in American life boasts a permanent diversity, equity, and inclusion bureaucracy. The United States government flies the rainbow and Black Lives Matter flags and funds the advance of woke ideology abroad.

These developments follow from the embrace of a new moral principle unknown to generations before the 1960s. In its most benign form, the principle is as follows: Any disparity in outcome between groups, whether defined by race, ethnicity, religion, or sex (or more recently, sexual practices and gender identification), is evidence of injustice. But that formulation turns out to be inadequate. The overrepresentation of black people in the National Basketball Association or of Indian Brahmins in medicine attracts neither comment nor criticism. Instead, the evil that the principle demands to be corrected is any over-representation of the characteristics of any historically European populationheterosexual, white, and Christian. The demand for reduction in the power, status, and representation of such Americans we may call the principle of equity.

The principle of equity has not just advanced as an idea but become institutionalized. Public schools teach critical race theory. Universities boast multiple grievance studies departments and pledge tens of millions to increase faculty diversity, while their administratorsmany of them answerable to student demands for adherence to the principle of equityoutnumber faculty. On his first day in office, President Biden ordered equity audits of every federal agency. The principle of equity, in short, is not just a moral aspiration. It is the fountainhead of a sprawling network of power. That network we may call the equity regime.

Mercifully, the equity regime is relatively mild. It will not soon be constructing a gulag to house dissidents. Nevertheless, like communism, which sought equality of material wealth, equity, which seeks equality of outcomes for those in protected classes, can be achieved only through coercion. Indeed, socialism is far less utopian than the doctrine of equity. Zealous intentional communities, from the Benedictines to the Shakers, can achieve common ownership of property. But no society has ever eliminated disparities among racial and ethnic groups or between the sexes. As Thomas Sowell has documented, set patterns of achievement and social capital persist among different populations in an extraordinary variety of political and social circumstances. Whatever the causes, which are probably deep and intractable, disparities among different groups have outlasted all the policiesfrom affirmative action and social handicaps to expulsion, dispossession, and massacreever adopted to erase them.

Only the equity regimes hypocrisy prevents the principle of equity from taking more extreme forms. By the principle of equity, for example, colleges and professional schools should suspend the admission of whites for at least a generation, businesses should declare a moratorium on white male advancement, judges should favor the party who has more intersectional credit, and a special racial tax should be imposed to fund reparations. So far, the regime has yet to go to those extremes, but it is hard to identify a principled reason why not. (Ibram X. Kendi proposes a constitutional amendment that would indeed impose antiracist totalitarianism.) The doctrine of equity is perhaps silently held in check only by the many powerful white peoplesuch as the Bush, Biden, Clinton, and Sulzberger clanswho, even as they profess support for the equity regime, would lose their own power and privileges if the regime consistently sought to achieve its goals.

Inevitably, however, the failure of the regime to realize the principle of equity gets noticed. It takes but one event to catalyze the next lurch toward the obliteration of the old American order. In 2020, after George Floyd died while in police custody, a nationwide orgy of arson, murder, and looting ensued. The ruling class did not condemn the violence or aid its victims. On the contrary, corporations and universities pledged billions more dollars for the cause of equity. A year later, their candidate for president announced that he would appoint a black woman to the Supreme Courta wonderfully explicit commitment to discrimination on the basis of race and sex.

One cannot predict what, exactly, the coercive equity regime will target next. A decade ago, few imagined that biological males would find glory in humiliating girls in sports. After all, just a generation earlier, the principle of equity had forced the cancellation of male athletic programs (such as wrestling) on the theory that girls and boys are equally interested in sports and therefore should be able to join the same number of sports teams. Now its the turn of womens sports to be the victim of the principle of equity. Likewise, ten years ago, it seemed unlikely that uttering a moral sentiment as old as the Axial Ageall lives matterwould be met with demands for struggle sessions and groveling apologies. The next manifestation of the principle of equity is arbitrary, as parents of transgender children are discovering. But that the next one is coming is certain.

Vast and inexorable as the coercive equity regime may appear, it is vulnerable. As can occasionally be seen, a willingness to exert political power can halt its progress. Thus parents can confront school boards that support shaming students for their whiteness, and voters can demand that prosecutors and politicians incarcerate criminals (regardless of race) and keep streets and neighborhoods safe. Americans can and should resist this or that extension of the principle of equity where they can.

Meanwhile, one institutionthe Supreme Courthas the power to defeat the regime altogether. To do so, the Court need only follow through on a small number of constitutional reappraisals of civil rights doctrine that it developed in the decade and a half after the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, reappraisals that already enjoy wide acceptance in the conservative legal establishment. In other words, no radical overhaul is needed. The Court, aided by the work of activists who can bring the necessary cases and controversies, need only do what conservatives for decades have hoped their pipeline of favored nominees would accomplish.

Hostile work environment. Under the theory of hostile work environment discrimination, an employer can be held liable merely for tolerating what anyone in a protected class might deem offensive. To be sure, a plaintiff can prevail only if the offensive conduct is severe and pervasive. But those standards are vague. A prudent corporate executive seeks to avoid liability, and this means adopting a zero-tolerance policy that prohibits any speech or conduct that could offend. Further, to bolster their bona fides should they be sued, employers make sure to adopt the latest ideological fashions. These business imperatives in turn require human resource departments that formulate and enforce diversity, equity, and inclusion guidelines. The result is that it is all but illegal to permit discussion of, say, the latest book by Charles Murray, and all but mandatory to endorse, say, the Black Lives Matter movement.

In short, hostile work environment law both promotes woke ideology and proscribes dissent. The Supreme Court can eliminate this systematic bias by holding that hostile work environment doctrine violates the constitutional right to free speech. Such a holding would not be especially radical. In the public school and university settings, two circuit court cases have held that anti-harassment guidelines conflict with free speech rights. Even the oncenotoriously progressive Ninth Circuit (though speaking through retired Reagan appointee Alex Kozinski) noted that an employers speech is entitled to significant breathing space before it will be deemed harassment. A conventionally conservative Supreme Court would be expected to hold that hostile work environment law violates the free speech clause. To be effective, the Supreme Courts holding must limit the power of Congress, state and local governments, and administrative agencies to revive hostile environment claims. A case must be brought where hostile work environment guidance can be held facially invalid.

Disparate impact. The fons et origo of the equity regime is the theory of disparate impact liability in employment discrimination cases. First conjured by the Supreme Court in the 1971 case of Griggs v. Duke Power Company, disparate impact law allows a plaintiff in an employment discrimination case to prevail without evidence of discriminatory intent, simply by showing that a job requirement or hiring procedure has a disparate impact on the plaintiffs protected class. Put in todays parlance, disparate impact law assumes systemic racism.

In theory, a disparate impact claim does not automatically prevail, for the law allows businesses to defend a practice by proving business necessity. But that is a costly and uncertain prospect. For businesses, the practical import of disparate impact is clear: Any failure to achieve proportionate outcomes among groups is an invitation to a lawsuit. To avoid disparate impact claims, employers must monitor the race, ethnicity, sex, and sexual orientation of their employees to keep numbers up for those in protected classes. To be sure, overt discrimination remains technically unlawful, which partly explains why employers shroud their practices in the latest rhetoric of inclusion recommended by a permanent staff of diversity professionals. Nevertheless, achieving diversity means discriminating on the basis of race and ethnicitythe very practice Americans thought they had outlawed with the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

Justice Thomas has argued that Griggs should be overturned. Indeed, but the Court must go further. As Justice Scalia wrote in a 2009 concurrence, the day is coming when the Supreme Court must decide whether the government, through disparate impact law, can effectively compel employers to discriminate on the basis of race or other ascriptive characteristics. The Supreme Court should not shrink from providing an answer. As soon as the occasion arises, it should hold that disparate-impact liability violates the Fifth Amendments guarantee of equal protection. To defeat the equity regime, disparate impact must not only be purged from civil rights law. It must be constitutionally cremated and buried, never again to be resurrected by Congress or government agencies.

Race-conscious admissions. The Courts tortured affirmative action jurisprudence has simultaneously legitimized the doctrine of equity and revealed its absurdity. Almost twenty years ago, Justice OConnors majority opinion in Grutter v. Bollinger upheld race-conscious admissions on the theory that racial diversity in the student body serves a compelling state interest. (Before its elevation into a sacred value, diversity was one justices makeshift attempt in 1978 to rationalize racial discrimination in university admissions.) But OConnor added that race-conscious admissions must be limited in time, and announced that the majority expected racial preferences to be unnecessary after twenty-five more years.

We are now nineteen years in, and racial gaps in test scores and GPA still show no sign of narrowing. Grutter itself was decided forty-two years after affirmative action had begun. Whether cynically or sincerely, OConnors opinion postponed a reckoning on racial discrimination for one more generation. The ongoing failure to achieve proportionate outcomes among all groupsnot just in universities, but in any domain of lifepointedly demonstrates the folly of trying or expecting it ever to happen. Why arent more firefighters women? Why arent more men nurses? Why are there so few black tax lawyers? And what about ensuring roles for transgender persons in movies?

In the pending cases in which Students for Fair Admissions is suing both Harvard and the University of North Carolina, asking the court to overturn Grutter, the Supreme Court must do more than reject diversity as a legitimate pretext for discriminating on the basis of race or other characteristics. Surely the Court knows that striking down affirmative action as unconstitutional will provoke resistance on a scale to dwarf the massive resistance attempted in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education (1954). Segregationists in the 1950s represented but one divided region of the country, a region held in disdain by the richest and most powerful people of that era. By contrast, the practitioners of affirmative action control every powerful institution in America. To counter the inevitable backlash, the Supreme Court must give Americans the weapons they need to stop quota-driven discimination altogether.

The crucial move is to elaborate a burden-shifting framework that will make it impossible for universities to camouflage the practice of discrimination. First, the Court should hold that, in light of decades of covert discrimination, any concealment or obsfucation of admissions criteria will be treated as conclusive evidence of a constitutional violation of equal protection (or in the case of a private university receiving federal financial assistance, a violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act). For a university to defend against a claim of an equal protection violation, the Court should hold that it must disclose how many slots are available for which categories of admission, such as legacies, athletes, residents of particular areas, and children of major donors, as well as the academically gifted. Likewise, a defense must also require disclosure of what facially race-neutral methods, criteria, or formulae are applied to fill each category and the class as a whole.

But mere disclosure of targets and methods is not enough. Once a university discloses targets and methods, the Court should hold that a plaintiff has a prima facie case of discrimination if a universitys actual admissions results differ materially from the results that would be achieved if the purported methods were applied to the population at large. With a prima facie case established, the university can then seek to justify the deviation. Consistent with the Courts jurisprudence that protects fundamental rights from violation, any justification must be strictly necessary and narrowly tailored to achieve a superior educational outcome.

This burden-shifting framework would have the effect of making it all but impossible for universities to discriminate in admissions on the basis of race or any other factor. Even the dishonest and covert discrimination of the past fifty years would be untenable. Moreover, the framework would be a massive embarrassment to the equity regime. It would force out into the open the reality that groups differ in performance. It does not even matter what metrics the universities choose. They could abandon IQ substitutes like the SAT and admit students based on skill at playing hopscotchstill, group differences would inevitably emerge. The requirement that actual admissions results match the distribution of sought-after talents and characteristics in the population at large would effectively elevate natural inequalitya reality that the Founders and our constitutional order once took for grantedinto a constitutional principle.

Let utopians remain free to pursue their dreams of equality, as Robert Owen and others did theirs in the nineteenth century. But do not let them continue to employ the coercive powers of the state to impose their vision on others. Many say that the rising generation demands measures to ensure diversity, equity, and inclusion, and that institutions and companies that hope to recruit the best and brightest must comply with the equity regime. Fine, let woke college students make demands. But handing them the coercive power of our rule of law has been among the most irresponsible acts of recent decades. By requiring universities to justify in court any deviations from measurable inequalities, the Supreme Court can not only end government-protected racial discrimination but permanently discredit the doctrine of equity. Perhaps, after twenty-five years, it will no longer be necessary to continue the burden-shifting device. Only time can tell.

More radical theories. One can certainly imagine a more radical Court that is willing to take constitutional theories now considered off the wall and affix them to the wall of legitimate interpretation. Freedom of association, for example, is perhaps the most vital freedom of all in the American tradition of ordered liberty, yet it has been given short shrift by the Supreme Court, apart from a narrow category of expressive association. To take another example, an expansive definition of religion for establishment clause purposes would imply that public schools cannot teach divisive secular religions such as wokeness. A Supreme Court that manifested a will to lead our country away from its current path to woke tyrannya will that we very much need right nowcould recognize freedom of association as a fundamental right protected by the Fourteenth Amendments long-dormant Privileges or Immunities Clause, and it could use the Establishment Clause to cast doubt on the constitutionality of governing schools. Perhaps this seems a reach. But those who recognize the dangers posed by the coercive equity regime can certainly dream.

Americans often take solace in the thought that extremism must eventually bring a healthy reaction. The pendulum will swing back, they say. They assure themselves that what cannot go on must eventually come to an end. In reality, oppressive regimes can last indefinitely. The caste system in Indialike wokeness, a sacralized system of subordinationhas persisted for thousands of years. The doctrine of equity has already shown exceptional durability. For three generations, it has only advanced, paused, and advanced again. This is not because the doctrine of equity is popular. Given the chance, voters have rejected it, even in liberal bastions such as California. Rather, the doctrine of equity grinds on toward complete dominance because it has been awarded tremendous legal power to destroy dissenters. To defeat it will require leadership and the exercise of political power. The Supreme Court has the power. It only has to use it.

Frank Resartusteaches at a law school in the Northeast.

Image by Epsos via Creative Commons. Image cropped.

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Defeating the Equity Regime by Frank Resartus | Articles - First Things

As you enter Walmarts Home Office you cant miss a painting on the right. The long line of trucks heading into New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, ready to bring supplies to communities in need, reminds all associates of the moment that forever changed our thinking. A moment that helped us realize how we could draw on our strengths as a business to support communities during disasters and help solve pressing challenges like climate change and food insecurity.

Since 2005, responding to natural and human-made disasters across the U.S. and worldwide, from hurricanes to wildfires, the COVID-19 pandemic to civil unrest has become part of Walmart and the Walmart Foundations DNA. As the frequency of these events continues to climb, our approach evolved, realizing that while responding in the moment is vital, our impact can be greater by also helping the places we call home prepare. We also deepened our focus on equity, because a more equitable response helps make communities stronger for everyone.

Lack of preparedness can have lasting economic and social impacts on communities especially communities of color. When communities are unable to quickly respond to disasters or access necessary resources, the impacts can increase inequality and hurt communities in the long-term. For example, a Society for the Study of Social Problems report showed that in the wake of disaster, white Americans living in certain counties gained $126,000 net worth on average, while Black Americans in the same areas lost $27,000.

By helping communities get ahead of disasters and focus on equity in response so that all people can recover, we can better serve them when a disaster strikes. Thats why we are pushing forward on new philanthropic investments in areas prone to disasters with higher numbers of Black, Latinx and Indigenous communities. Starting these investments in the Gulf Coast allows us to test solutions and learn how we can use philanthropy to help communities build the capacity to respond to disasters more effectively and equitably.

The Walmart Foundation has made an investment of more than $3 million in a group of organizations helping local government leaders and community-led organizations in the Gulf Coast prepare their communities for disasters. These investments include:

The firm belief that sparked in us after Hurricane Katrina remains the same. By using our resources and learnings from the past 15 years, we know we can have a major impact in helping our neighbors prepare for, and respond to, disasters. This focus on the Gulf Coast will help us learn how intentional investments in communities can strengthen the ability of local governments and organizations to better prepare. And by looking at the whole system of mitigation funding and planning, we hope these investments help other underserved communities access the funding and resources they need to move disaster preparedness forward.

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Pushing Disaster Preparedness Forward in the Gulf Coast - Walmart Corporate

When people of color burn out in the workplace, they often focus on the immediate factors: a challenging relationship with a manager; unpredictable hours that complicate work-life balance; and perhaps, if theyre feeling safe in sharing, the biases and aggression that are all too pervasive in American worklife. There is no doubt being the only black trader on the floor the week after George Floyds murder had real mental health effects. Indeed, the CDC reported a rise in anxiety and depression for Black Americans immediately after the horrific video surfaced.

In response to this and other mental health crises, a number of digital health startups have entered the fray promising to address mental wellbeing for employees from all backgrounds. Indeed, with fast increasing demand from employees, employers and investors are putting more funds and resources toward mental health initiatives and startups. Firms like Cerebral, Lyra, Ginger, and Talkspace help employees connect with providers. While these services can be helpful, they tend to overlook the roots of why people of color suffer from more workplace anxiety and depression: isolation and the feeling of burnout from being the only person of color in the room. These differences are magnified by the fact that while the U.S. population has become more diverse, U.S. workplaces have become more segregated. When high-growth and high-wage firms do hire people of color, these workers are few and far between.

As firms seek to hire more people of color, how can they make sure that new hires dont end up burnt out, and looking for the exit? Black executives report that feelings of isolation drive their burnout. In response, large firms have started affinity-based, employee resource groups. For example, Black Googler Network provides everything from professional development and mentorship programs to holding dialogues on topics affecting the Black community. And the Hispanics of the Linkedin Alliance host a quarterly meeting with the CEO of LinkedIn to raise awareness over issues affecting them.

However, most companies just dont have the numbers to build out such affinity groups, either because the firm is a small business or because of an internal lack of diversity. Indeed, firms that are now committed to building a more diverse workforce face a dilemma. When people of color join they might be the only person at their company from their background, which can lead to those feelings of isolation and burnout discussed above. Research shows that when firms fail to hire enough workers of color to build community they end up especially likely to quit the firm.

Fortunately, a new model of addressing feelings of isolation and burnout has emerged in recent years, focused not on the needs of employees within one particular firm, but on addressing the feelings of isolation from employees of color across firms. Consider, for example, the Gentlemens Factory, a coworking space in Brooklyn that offers men of color an environment to develop as professionals, and find solidarity. They write on their website, Gentlemans Factory is designed to deliver one simple message: youre not in this alone.

And then, theres Chief, a networking community for senior executive women. Key to their model is an investment in core groups, wherein a small group of female executives get together to bond to discuss personal, leadership, and other challenges. Beyond promoting career success, Chiefs community focus is designed to reduce burnout and the exit of female executives.

Finally, one of the authors of this piece, Tarun Galagali, is building out a platform for BIPOC workers (Mandala). Mandala helps employers create intentional communities for their people through their flagship service, Circles, whereby an external facilitator will bring a group of BIPOC workers together to talk about topics ranging from their identity to their inner critic. In the process, they create a space of belonging and well-beingtaking the pressure off of employee resource groups. Down the line, Mandala will involve companies connecting their underrepresented talent so that there are spaces between companies just as much as there is within a company.

These examples and an increasing number of startups focused on the interaction of mental health, burnout, and inclusion can begin tackling employee burnout, especially for people of color. But it requires companies to focus on building community just as much as they focus on improving individual mental health needs. Its just not because theres a moral imperative here. The financial costs of race-related attrition ($34 billion), absenteeism ($54 billion) and productivity loss ($59 billion) are only beginning to be tabulated. So, next time leaders reflect on burnout for people of color, they should explore investing in their sense of belongingboth within the company, and by connecting employees to the working world at large.

Tarun Galagali is a second year MBA student at Harvard Business School, and founder of Mandala, a belonging and wellbeing platform for BIPOC employees. Rem Koning is an assistant professor of business administration in the Strategy Unit at Harvard Business School. They are hosting a virtual Belonging summit on April 18 (free, virtual and open to all). RSVP here.

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Helping BIPOC employees fight burnout and find community - Fast Company

Robbed of ancestral lands, American Indian and Alaska Native tribal communities face an unparalleled housing crisis that pleads for national housing reforms. As victims of centuries of intentional government policies to remove and reallocate lands and resources, many live in third-world conditions that have led to sky-high rates of health problems, ranging from diabetes and cardiovascular disease to chronic liver disease, obesity, unintentional injuries, substance use disorders, violence, and suicides. This paves a path to extremely high rates of disability and prematurely shortened lives.

The stark reality of poverty became obvious when I traveled to my reservation home in Mescalero, New Mexico as a child. There I saw discolored, fractured, or weather-tattered homes, and yards littered with old, rusted, and abandoned cars. According to the National Congress of American Indians, substandard housing makes up 40% of on-reservation housing compared to just 6% of housing outside of Indian Country. On reservations, almost one-third of homes are overcrowded.

In 2019, an estimated 20% of American Indian and Alaska Native people lived in poverty compared to an 11% national poverty rate. Poverty, low education levels, and harsh conditions mean that many American Indians and Alaska Natives lack the foundation for basic survival: stable, secure, adequate, affordable housing.

As historian Claudio Saunt so eloquently wrote, an "invasion" of approximately 1.5 billion acres occurred in the United States from 1776 until the present. This loss of traditional homelands has had devastating, lifelong effects on housing and living conditions. Poor health outcomes soared among the millions displaced over the past 300-plus years.

Today, as a result of poor housing conditions, American Indians and Alaska Natives struggle from environmental ills that include lead exposure, asthma from poor ventilation, infectious diseases due to contaminated water, sanitation issues, and overcrowding. Mental distress is common. Exposure to pollutants raises risk for lung disease, cardiovascular events like heart attack and stroke, and many other illnesses.

American Indians and Alaska Natives have disability rates 50% higher than the national average, and among people ages 55 and older mobility and self-care disability rates are especially high. Housing that is old, in poor repair, or crisscrossed with physical barriers may not be accessible for many people, preventing them from living independently within their homes and participating fully in community life. This can cause isolation and exacerbate distress and despondency. In addition, unreliable electricity could pose life-threatening risks to people with disabilities requiring ventilator support, and threaten the safety of power wheelchair users (wheelchair batteries must be kept well-charged).

Housing is a well-known contributor to health outcomes and a meaningful lever for health equity. Despite the United States promise to assume responsibility for housing and health for American Indians and Alaska Natives in exchange for billions of acres in conceded land, little has been done to achieve positive change. Outsiders may assume that Indians are getting rich from tribal casinos, but that is far from the truth. Many tribes do not have casino revenue. Those who do often struggle to break even, with any earnings canceled out by their tribes needs.

Conditions on tribal lands sadly reveal the consequences of historical trauma, poverty, and insufficient federal government support. Each sovereign nation must create sustainable housing projects for its members as determined by its tribal government and housing departments. Federal support varies depending on tribal financial status, resources, and competition from bordering communities.

Seeking national support for these measures could go far:

The US government has a moral obligation to ensure that American Indians and Alaska Natives are allowed to acquire lost tribal lands, and afforded the best housing possible to be successful, join fully in community life, and remain healthy. Last year the US Interior Department reauthorized the regional directors of the Bureau of Indian Affairs to review and approve applications to place land into trust. This represents one important step forward, though hopefully not the last.

As a service to our readers, Harvard Health Publishing provides access to our library of archived content. Please note the date of last review or update on all articles. No content on this site, regardless of date, should ever be used as a substitute for direct medical advice from your doctor or other qualified clinician.

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Poor housing harms health in American Indian and Alaska Native communities - Harvard Health

The work she has done crafting her Scripted in Black has been doing an amazing job telling the story of Black art and artists from many different disciplines, McKinney said.

Graham said she was grateful and honored to have been recognized.

What I hear from both of their nomination is my passion for the community, my passion for Black culture, creativity and art, she said. So the fact that that shines through all of the things that I do with Scripted in Black, my intentions with Scripted in Black and just how I carry myself, that makes me feel very good.

Graham formed Scripted in Black as a hobby in 2017, but didnt make it official with Ohio until 2020.

Black and brown identities didnt really have a socially forward and intentional creative space in the community, especially in the Dayton community, that was representative of our stories, who we are, how we operate, how we live, she said. I feel like the traditional creative spaces in the city didnt do a great jobs of keeping us lifted and represented in the types of content of work that they were showcasing. I just felt that there was a need to tell our stories differently, actually in our communities at black-owned businesses that our community frequents, just right there in their face and not having them feel that its not affordable or welcoming.

Throughout the pandemic and the relaunch of her brand, Graham has done an amazing job of highlighting art from a holistic perspective, McKinney said.

Scripted in Black is a place where you can learn, have fun and heal through and with art by highlighting not only important things from our culture, but by also celebrating the people in Dayton who make the art scene special, he said.

Graham said she cant ever say she accomplished what she did by herself.

I would be remiss if I did not mention (visuals and marketing director) Korey Smith and (installment coordinator) Ashley Brooks, who have definitely done amazing with hosting and curating events in the city, she said.

Scripted in Black, she said, helps the underground scene of Black creativity within cities to find their space, find their home and connect with other like-minded individuals and to be able to collaborate in a unique way that may not be mainstream.

Originally posted here:

Community Gem: Dayton woman helps tell the story of Black art and artists - Dayton Daily News

The devastating impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on poor and low-income communities across America is laid bare in a new report released on Monday that concludes that while the virus did not discriminate between rich and poor, society and government did.

As the US draws close to the terrible landmark of 1 million deaths from coronavirus, the glaringly disproportionate human toll that has been exacted is exposed by the Poor Peoples Pandemic Report. Based on a data analysis of more than 3,000 counties across the US, it finds that people in poorer counties have died overall at almost twice the rate of those in richer counties.

Looking at the most deadly surges of the virus, the disparity in death rates grows even more pronounced. During the third pandemic wave in the US, over the winter of 2020 and 2021, death rates were four and a half times higher in the poorest counties than those with the highest median incomes.

During the recent Omicron wave, that divergence in death rates stood at almost three times.

Such a staggering gulf in outcomes cannot be explained by differences in vaccination rates, the authors find, with more than half of the population of the poorest counties having received two vaccine shots. A more relevant factor is likely to be that the poorest communities had twice the proportion of people who lack health insurance compared with the richer counties.

The findings of this report reveal neglect and sometimes intentional decisions to not focus on the poor, said Bishop William Barber, co-chair of the Poor Peoples Campaign which jointly prepared the research. The neglect of poor and low-wealth people in this country during a pandemic is immoral, shocking and unjust.

The report was produced by the Poor Peoples Campaign in partnership with a team of economists at the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN) led by Jeffrey Sachs. They have number-crunched statistics from more than 3,200 counties as a way of comparing the poorest 10% with the richest 10%.

They then interrogate the interplay between Covid death rates and poverty, as well as other crucial demographic factors such as race and occupation.

Until now the extent to which the virus has struck low-income communities has been difficult to gauge because official mortality data compiled by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and elsewhere has not systematically factored in income and wealth information.

The new report seeks to fill that gaping hole in understanding of the US pandemic. One of its most striking findings is that within the top 300 counties with the highest death rates, 45% of the population on average lives below the poverty line as defined as 200% of the official poverty measure.

Sachs, a Columbia University professor who is president of the UN SDSN, said the findings underlined how the pandemic was not just a national tragedy but also a failure of social justice. The burden of disease in terms of deaths, illness and economic costs was borne disproportionately by the poor, women, and people of color. The poor were Americas essential workers, on the frontlines, saving lives and also incurring disease and death.

The authors rank US counties according to the intersection of poverty and Covid-19 death rates. Top of the list is Galax county, a small rural community in south-west Virginia.

Its death rate per 100,000 people stands at an astonishing 1,134, compared with 299 per 100,000 nationally. Median income in the county is little more than $33,000, and almost half of the population lives below the poverty line.

Among the counties with punishingly high poverty and death rates is the Bronx in New York City, where 56% of the population is Hispanic and 29% Black. More than half of the borough lives under the poverty line, and the Covid death rate is 538 per 100,000 within the highest 10% in the US.

Racial disparities have been at the centre of the pandemic experience in the US. Early on it became clear that Black people and Hispanics in New York City, for instance, were dying of Covid at twice the rate of whites and Asians.

The consequences of such racial inequity are still only now becoming visible. Last week a study in the journal Social Science & Medicine reached a disturbing conclusion.

It found that when white Americans were informed through the media that Black Americans were dying at higher rates than their demographic group was, their fear of the virus receded and they became less empathetic towards those vulnerable to the disease. They were also more likely to abandon Covid safety precautions such as masks and social distancing.

But low-income predominantly white communities are also in peril. Mingo county in West Virginia, for example, has one of the lowest income levels in the US following the collapse of coal mining and the scourge of the opioid epidemic.

The county is 96% white, with over half its residents living below the poverty line. Its Covid death rate is 470 per 100,000 putting it within the top quarter of counties in the nation for pandemic mortality.

The rest is here:

Covid had devastating toll on poor and low-income communities in US - The Guardian

[Cross-posted toFront Porch Republic]

There is an accusation which has been flung over the decades (if not centuries) at practically every sort of intentional community-building effort, thus oddly discovering something which apparently entirely disparate elements of the right and left have in common. Sometimes that accusation takes the form of condemnations of a supposedly unrealistic idealism, sometimes in terms of contempt for what is labeled a nostalgic myopia. But either way, the heart of all these attacks is the same: attempting to build communities of cooperation, equality, and justice, in contrast to the socio-economic self-interestedness which has been the rule for 300 years or more, is utopian, and thus nonsensical and wrong. The ease of that accusation, and the fact that it has been and still is unthinkingly lobbed at intentional communities of every sort, makes it worthy of push-back, I think.

The caveat which those who fling the accusation will insist upon, of course, is that it is not all community-building activities which they think deserves their condemnation and contempt; only comprehensive community-building. And for most critics, thats probably correctit would require an insanely individualist outlook to describe every effort to strengthen neighborhood ties (organizing a block party!), to secure social justice (expanding handicap accessibility!), or to serve the public through the provision of common goods (health insurance, public schools, environmental protection, the Veterans Administration, and more!) as instances of utopianism. (That some people do in fact affirm such anihilistic libertarianismis worth noting but not much more. There are also people who make life-size nude sculptures of Richard Nixon out of butter, and more power to them.) The great majority of those who look askance upon community-building would insist that they do not mean to reject every communitarian project; rather, what they reject is community-building visions and efforts that aspire to comprehensivenessor, on my reading, the ones that aspire totopography.

My point in invoking topography is to bring up that element which everyone with the slightest interest in or affection for localism must take seriously: the topos, the place or location or referent upon on which one stands or acts. Such language is, of course, what gave birth to the accusation in the first place: Thomas Mores 16th-centuryUtopia, the rationally organized no-place of agrarian communism, communal eating, universal health care, and chamber pots made of gold (so as to subliminally communicate a contempt for wealth). Mores neologism, it should be noted, was perhaps not his intended one;Utopiaconcludes with an addendum in which More remarks upon the pun in his books title, suggesting that the city is should be understood less as a dreamy no-place and more as a good-place that inspires: not Utopia, but rather rightly my name is Eutopia, a place of felicity. Whatever his intent, though, the history of the term is grasped easily enough: throughout history, there have been 1) those captivated by comprehensive visions of how to cooperate rather than compete, to encourage virtue and inclusion, to establish peace and justice, and to witness to the truth as they understand it, with the material articulations central to those visions involving the establishment of a distinct community, and 2) those who find any and all such visions dangerous and simply flawed. (And, of course, one can find plenty of capitalists in group 2) who will insist the placeness inherent to mostpopulist challenges,distributist arguments, andmutualist alternativesmeans theyre all in the same camp as the socialists and radicals in group 1), but lets stick with the clear communalist examples for now.)

The danger which canand, tragically, often doesaccompany any effort to establish a complete community in accordance with specific intentions, whether religious or ideological or both, is well established, both historically and theoretically. The genocidal historical record of many comprehensive society-shaping visions is incontestable (though whether the kill-count of all such revolutionary movements is greater or fewer than the kill-count of non-comprehensive, profit-motivated world historical slaughters like the African slave trade or the European colonization of the Americas is something I leave to the terminally morbid to calculate). Theoretically as well, the problems with this conceptualization of humanitys fundamentally social and political nature are large, though not insurmountable. Humankinds embodiment as distinct individuals means an organic, evolving pluralism willalwaysbe present in all our social and political orders, and the rationalist temptation which is entailed by many communitarian visions directly contradicts that, with frequently destructive results.

But the emphasis there must be placed on frequently, as opposed to always. Human beings, despite (or perhaps as part of) our pluralism, regularly tend towards the dialogical and aspirational and spiritual, which means that what we trulyarealways reasoning about and reaching forthanks to God or nature or bothis how to make our lives fit with that we consider to just and right and good: to achieveeudaimoniain our places, ourtopoi, and then make those places available to others. So while dangers and flaws of comprehensiveness must always be attended to, the topographical aspect of our spiritual and ideological longings is too central to the human character to dismiss it entirely. Indeed, if Wendell Berry is any guide, much of contemporary thinking reflects an overlearning (or an encouragement towards overlearning by those who benefit from our individualistic status quo) of the lessons of comprehensiveness. To automatically reject communitarian efforts and imaginings which involve the making of actual cooperativeplacesas obviously pointless from the start is to succumb to a false sense of inevitabilityan economic and technological determinism, as heartless as it is ignorant (Berry,The Art of Loading Brush, p. 51; morehere).

So perhaps we can allow that the accusation of utopianism is not necessarily, or at least should not beacceptedas necessarily, fatal to the communitarian imagination. But does that allowance have anything to do with localist projects, which, while obviously centrally concerned with places, rarely approach thosetopoiwith any comprehensive vision in mind? While it is true that the watch-word for most genuinely localist politics today is incremental, eschewing comprehensive reforms for the humble and the partial, there is, I think, a utopian element usually present nonetheless, hidden in the idea of intentionality.

Every localist concern involves looking at a neighborhood, an association, or a community, and tending to it. That tending, however, unless wholly and unthinkingly reactionary (and if it were, then no communitarian tending would take place over the long haul at all, because to think outside of ones own immediate interest and ones own temporal moment isinvariablyaspirational), cannot help but involve an ideal, a visionsomething that isintended. That intentionality, like comprehensiveness, can be dangerous is a simple sociological fact, but it is also that which grants community the transformative promisewhether personal or collective or bothwhich it has always held, separating us,as Aristotle observed, from otherwise equally gregarious animals like bees.

The difficult-to-dispute point that we form communities for the sake of collective ideals and not just individual interestssomething every Bible-reader, at the very least, should have realized as soon as they came to the second chapter of Actshas, perhaps, been made harder to swallow for many by the legacy of 19th and 20th-century socialisms, particularly the statist, scientific socialisms of the Marxist variety. But even there, a fuller appreciation of the history such surprising diversity. The Oxford political theoristDavid Leopoldhas made a career out of exploring and undermining (or at least seriously complicating) the rationalist, universalist, non-utopian reading of Marxs legacy, arguing that even within the first century of the modern European socialist movement, when the materialist assumption of universal revolution were strongest, you nonetheless can find robust expressions of and arguments about the age-old understanding of socialism as a cooperative, communitarian ideal, as something that must necessarily be rooted in the organically constructed architecture of a locality and place. The intermingling of these became even more pronounced as the revolutionary determinism of Marxs early interpreters was replaced with a recognition of the inevitability, even sometimes the value, of party politics in democratic countries. Ultimately,Leopold suggests, the differences between place-obsessed reformers like Robert Owen, the founder of New Harmony who constantly experimented with forming small, cooperative, egalitarian communities (what Leopold calls the communal or horizontal strategy), and detail-oriented policy wonks like Sidney Webb and Beatrice Potter, early members of the Fabian Society who worked within the Labor party to introduce specific egalitarian and collective policies to the whole of the United Kingdom (what Leopold calls the political or vertical strategy), are not nearly as great as their similarities.

You dont need to work out the historical implications of such political theories to recognize the truth of that judgment, thoughyou could, instead, simply look at the real world example of dozens of intentional communities and communes and collective projects throughout history, and the mixed perspectives they embodied. You could look at theBruderhof, an Amish-inspired movement of deeply traditional Christians, organized into communities of cooperation and equality around the world, whose communal devotion have led them to a political position ofuncompromising pacifism. Or you could look atKoinonia Farm, an intentional community of believers in Georgia who humbly practice sustainable agriculture, but were also central to shaping, in the face of enormous racial hostility,the non-violent resistancewhich politically defined much of the civil rights movement in America.

Or, much less celebratedly but with no less admiration, you could look to the Solidarity Collective, a cooperative association of activists, artists, and democratic socialists, deeply committed to the vision of living sustainably and defending justice in Laramie, Wyoming. Close to four years ago, the collective was founded by several passionate workers and dreamers, one of whom is an old and dear friend; its charter (read it here!) is frankly revolutionary in its vision of a fully democratic and inclusive socialism, while its actual operations reflect the difficult, patient, humbling work of living in accordance with utopian ideals of cooperation and consensus. It was at the invitation of my old friend that I began to seriously reflect on the particularityincluding thetopographicparticularity, or simply the localityincumbent to the physically and emotionally demanding labor and negotiations involved in building a home, a refuge, and a community that seeks to exemplify its ideals, and has only the material and psychological resources which its own members can bring to it. As no doubt everyone who has ever been part of an attempt to comprehend and bring to life a community (or a church, a labor union, a co-op, or any other such idealistic effort), sometimes it seems that community always fails. With typical honesty, the members of the collective turned their own impasses intoa podcast episode, talking about how impossible it sometimes seems to bring everyone laborious work into union with one anotherand why they keep trying anyway. (Hint: its because, in part, they genuinely believe in theplacethe house, the farm, the community, and the human resources through which they are enabling to flourishwhich theyre building.)

Listening to that podcast, as members of the collective honestly and searchingly challenge one another regarding the roots of their manifold struggles, I was struck at how intentionally and comprehensively pushing against the norms of capitalist modernity in the 21st-century requires practices that have not changed much since the 19th century, or earlier. In Chris Jennings wonderful history, Paradise Now: The Story of American Utopianism(though his focus is really just the story of the early utopian movements which emerged in the context of Protestant revivals in Europe and America and the Great Awakenings they were part of), he lays out one of the secrets of the success of the Oneida Community, whose radical communismwhich included the sharing of not just all property and work, but of sexual partners as wellendured in the face intense opposition and deep internal divisions for more than a generation:

[T]he biggest reason the Perfectionists were able to maintain communal harmony despite such fraught circumstances was institutional: a form of weekly group therapy that they called mutual criticism.[B]y the time the community relocated to Oneida, regular sessions of mutual criticism had become a central pillar of [what the followers of John Humphrey Noyce, the found of the community, called] Bible Communism.As the Perfectionists got better at mutual criticism, most of them came to regard it as a vital catharsis and an essential means of maintaining the colonys delicate social harmony. It functioned like a cross between confession, performance review, and psychoanalysis, but crowdsourced. The fact that everyone had a turn in the hot seat took some of the sting our of the ordeal.One man was cautioned that he had masculinity carried to excess. There is not enough woman in him.Perhaps most important, the regular sessions of mutual criticism allowed the colonists to air the countless minor aggravations that will erode a cooperative colony from within if left to fester (pp. 346-348).

It is probable that Jennings would not entirely agree with my likening of the practices of the comprehensive community-builders of the 19th century with those of today. In his view, while the revival of intentional efforts to create alternative forms of life over the past half-century is admirable[l]ike the nineteenth-century utopians, the long-haired communards of the sixties and seventies rejected the prevailing values of their day as morally corrupt and expressed that rejection through the total reconfiguration of their own daily livestheir intentionality is of a lesser category entirely: [a]lthough the communalists of the sixties and seventies tried (and often succeeded) to build strongholds of cooperation, pleasure, and consciousness amid the mercantile bustle of American life, theyexpressed a secessionist impulsea leave-taking from the World[and thus their] revolution was more personal and, ultimately, far less utopian (pp. 379-380). But I find this unfair, because it wrongly assumes that any envisioning of a place that isnt millenniarianthat is, that doesnt proclaim it to be a model for a world which teeters on the edge of total destruction and/or transformationhas no radicalism, no true utopianism, to it at all.

In a world where the pluralism of the human condition has been, for centuries, from the age of imperialism to that of industrialization and beyond, both subject to and expected to express itself through an ever-evolving, ever-varying, but nonetheless also ever-expanding, technologically-enabled socio-economic universalization, privatization, and individuation, it seems to me thatanyattempt to build into onestoposprinciples and practices that aspire to, or at least are in dialogue with, ideals of social justice and civic strength and equality, cannot help but involve at leasta degreeof comprehensiveness, a degree to utopian hope. To quote the striving local socialists of the Solidarity Collective, there are many potential models of anti-capitalist activism and politics, and the search for cooperative, sustainable systems will always be a matter of good-faith deliberation.

Such deliberationor mutual criticism, for that matterisnt a rejection of the possibility of building a locality of such comprehensive, communitarian felicity that others will be inspired and transformed by it, and thus go forward to build other such eu-topian communities in other places. (That is, in fact, exactly the primary aim of the Solidarity Collective:as they write, We hope that by creating a thriving, fun, and engaged non-capitalist ecosystem we can demonstrate the viability of a more cooperative and less oppressive way of life and hence attract more people to our cause.) What it is, is a recognition that such places shouldnt be conceived as environments that will just rationally unfold, without particular work done by particular people in particulartopoi. Thus, maybe, does incrementalism and utopianism meet. If youre looking intentionally at your locality, wanting to make it more just and more civil and more communalwith, say, cooperative food practices, responsible energy usage, democratic decision-making, and social arrangements premised upon love and respect rather than financial and racial advantagewell, that doesnt automatically make you into a communard, fully engaged in the struggle to build a comprehensively new world. But it does mean, I think, that you probably share more with those inspired folk than you may think.

Teaser photo credit: New Harmony, Indiana, a Utopian attempt, depicted as proposed byRobert Owen. By Drawn and engraved by F. Bate. Published by "The Association of all Classes of all Nations", at their institution, 69, Great Queen Street. Lincoln's Inn Fields, London, 1838.Published by "The Association of all Classes of all Nations", at their institution, 69, Great Queen Street. Lincoln's Inn Fields, London, 1838. Alamy, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=77106397

See the rest here:

Localism, Intentionality, and Utopia (Socialist or otherwise) - Resilience

This article was written by the Terra staff for the 2021-2022 academic year. Terra is one of the largest co-ops, tucked in Cowell Cluster (right behind Vaden) and its the unofficial LGBTQIA+ theme dorm. This means that we center and prioritize the needs of queer and trans folk on this campus, and globally. Terra values the loving community that has emerged from centering QT folk but is simultaneously aware of the ways Stanford and co-op communities exacerbate exclusion on the basis of race, class and ability. Were committing to centering Black and Indigenous QT folk, disabled QT folk, undocumented QT folk and other historically marginalized members of our communities. Queer and trans liberation cannot happen without overturning systems of white supremacy, settler colonialism and capitalism. As a result, we have a zero-tolerance policy against any form of discrimination, including homophobia, transphobia, racism, misogyny, ableism, classism, xenophobia, Islamophobia and more. We will also not tolerate any form of assault, abuse or violence. Our community is our home, and we want all of our residents to feel safe.

The issue is not with trans people. Its with policies that allow men to enter spaces designed to keep women safe. And its with the people who take advantage of those policies to harass, intimidate, assault and terrorize women in such places. Lucy Kross Wallace.

On March 31, 2022, the International Trans Day of Visibility, The Stanford Daily published the article From the community | I stand with J.K. Rowling, and so should you filled with transphobic sentiments and bad-faith arguments about the experiences of J.K. Rowling to further the authors harmful transphobic beliefs. As the student staff of Terra, Stanfords only queer-trans themed dorm, we found it necessary to respond immediately.

This article is nothing short of the pure rot of the American culture war which has regurgitated the same points since 2014 and presents them as revelatory truth; the author probably does not care for either issue except to grift from the outrageous claims she has consistently published for the past two years. The term outrage politics encapsulates this best: the author hides behind terms such as free speech, tolerance and liberal-democratic values. If this was about standing with women, she would discuss single mothers across the country who struggle to feed their children, trans girls who are abused and ostracized by their families and the domestic labor that women are expected to do without compensation. Yet, she would rather stand with an elite celebrity who hides in her vampire castle and writes snarky articles about the downtrodden of our world. We say downtrodden because it is known that trans folk are ostracized and consistently subjected to abuse by both civil society and the state.

All over America, trans people are at risk of violence and death. They may often need to enter precarious situations due to the lack of support they receive from traditional institutions such as family, legal institutions and school. Even at Stanford, an oasis from the worst that trans folk encounter, TGNC (transgender and gender nonconforming) students are universally at the highest risk of violence. The results of the 2019 AAU survey conducted by Stanford show that 30% of TGNC undergrads have experienced unwanted sexual contact by their fourth year, and 55% have experienced harassment.

It is laughable to say that J.K. Rowling represents women: she has more in common with the rich men who sell out our country and make life unbearable for women. But the delusion of the culture war obscures the obvious under abstract terms and knee-jerk arguments.

The populist right want to believe they are for the common people, as the author posits herself as an ally to women. Yet, she utilizes women as fodder to protect a multi-millionaire, just as the populist right protect any politician, celebrity or whomever else they believe to be oppressed by a mob. It is delusional, and insulting to any cause that is truly for the people.

At Stanford, we often repeat the adage assume intent, acknowledge impact as we navigate issues that impact vulnerable community members. However, the Rowling article is filled with transphobic sentiments obscured by rationality. As we began with the article, the author states how the issue is not with trans people. Its with policies that allow men to enter spaces designed to keep women safe. And its with the people who take advantage of those policies to harass, intimidate, assault and terrorize women in such places. This is an intentional jab at calling trans women men, which is a tired joke that sounds more like a middle school sneer than the remarks of a reputable adult. We cannot assume that you had any good intentions towards trans people. It is very clear that we cannot change your mind or educate you further on gender expansiveness, but we still felt moved to write this statement as part of the queer community. There is no place for transphobia at Stanford, and we all have a responsibility to ensure that.

The Rowling article calls for empathy for Ms. Rowling amidst the doxxing and death threats she is receiving. Terra staff do not condone any form of violence: physical, sexual, emotional, verbal or digital. Ms. Rowling does not deserve to fear for her life, no matter how vile her positions are. We believe that harassment towards Ms. Rowling is wrong and should be criticized. However, we must ask you; why do you have empathy in abundance for Ms. Rowling, a wealthy, white, cis celebrity who has used her platform to endanger vulnerable people yet such little empathy for your trans classmates and community members?

Ms. Rowling wrote about her own experiences as a survivor in further defense of the vile and harmful beliefs she has. Again, it is awful that these things have happened to her, but it gives her no right to be malicious towards our trans community members. Why do we prioritize her needs and her trauma over the experiences of trans survivors, trans elderly, trans youth and trans children? Trans people are globally at the most risk for gender-based violence and share similar traumatic experiences.

Finally, we as Terra staff are incredibly disappointed in the author, the Opinions editors and The Stanford Daily at large for publishing such a transphobic, ignorant article on the same day as International Trans Day of Visibility. As Stanford University has a very high population of LGBT community members, it felt like a slap in the face to an integral, yet vulnerable part of the Stanford community. The Stanford Daily is read far beyond Stanford, from Bay Area residents to powerful alumni to prospective students. Statements like this do not reflect us at all. As the author writes, the rest of us do have a choice.

The right one, however, will never be rooted in transphobia.

Signed,

Terra Staff 2021-2022

Munira Alimire, External RA-C (2021-2022), Kitchen Manager (2019-2020), ASSU President (2020), ASSU 21st Undergraduate Senate Chair (2019-2020)

Lois Wi, Queer Health Associate (2021-2022)

Elias Aceves, Community Manager (2021-2022), Queer Health Associate (2022-2023), Stanford YDSA Co-Chair (2021-2022)

Noor Fakih, House Manager (2021-2022), Kitchen Manager (2019-2020), Member of Abolish Greek Stanford.

Phillip Ipock, Financial Manager (2021-2022), Community Manager (2022-2023).

Megan Hall, Kitchen Manager (2021-2022)

Jacky Lin, Kitchen Manager (2021-2022)

Callum Tresnan, Terra RA (2022-2023)

This article has been updated to change the headline from In support of Rick Riordan to We stand against transphobia and so should you at the request of the authors.

Link:

From the community | We stand against transphobia, and so should you - The Stanford Daily