Category Archives: New Utopia

The five teaching unions of the Nation met with the Minister of Education, Nicols Trotta, and agreed on the wage claim: floor is 29%. The number jumps from the projection of the Minister of Economy, Martn Guzmn, on the inflation of the year despite the jump to 4% in January. With optimism, the teachers predict to close even higher in number.

In a joint scheme, all sectors are listened to. It is a negotiation process, Summarized Nicols Trotta, who led the virtual meeting from Palacio Sarmiento. On the other side of the screen they sat CTERA, UDA, CEA, SADOP and AMET.

The meeting had as a backdrop a meeting alone between Alberto Fernndez, Sonia Alesso (leader of Ctera), Roberto Baradel (Suteba) and the national deputy Hugo Yasky. It was at the Rosada and it lasted half an hour. We have a direct arrival with the President, was the Chicana from the national union. The photo did not like in the corridors of Education.

A simple statement from Ctera detailed that they spoke about lthe serious situation that the teachers of Chubut are going through; the National Vaccination Plan for education workers; the Law of Educational Financing; and the formation of the Economic and Social Council . On one side was the joint negotiation.

Where they did talk about numbers was at the platform meeting between Trotta and the union leaders. The number is closer to 35% than 29%, they pointed to Chronicle from the union halls. At another union table they were more cautious: We want it to be at least 2 or 3 points above 29%. Next week a new meeting will begin to put an end to the joint novel.

Our objective is to strengthen the instance of the parity that not only understands the salary aspect but also allows us to rethink the direction of the school in Argentina, said Trotta.

After the meeting, the head of Pizzurno shot that there is not only the starting salary of the teachers in Argentina, which for us is very important, but also strengthen the teaching incentive, which is the other component and whose amount in 2020 was doubled .

Last year the parties met four times. It was in February when the initial minimum teacher salary was set at 23,000 pesos, with a second tranche amounting to 25,000 pesos as of July 1 of the same year , detailed Education.

The agreement reached the payment of a extraordinary lump sum of $ 4,840. In July, the continuation of the payment of an exceptional amount FONID extraordinary sum COVID 19 was agreed and the working conditions were agreed with a view to returning to classrooms in person.

Finally, the last joint meeting of 2020 was in November, where the national minimum teacher salary was raised to 27,500 pesos as of December 1, 2020.

The City of Buenos Aires will have the first joint meeting of the year on Monday. The teachers closely follow the negotiation of the Nation since it is what marks us, said Alejandra Bonato -UTE union secretary- before Phase 5 by FM Milenium.

We are going to return to the classroom without even a hint of salary recomposition, added the leader, who summarized: We lost around 40 salary points. We want it to be above inflation .

From Ademys a Buenos Aires union that carries out a 72-hour strike it also demands a larger budget for infrastructure. On Monday, February 22, the debate between the 17 Buenos Aires teaching unions and the Minister of Education, Soledad Acua, will begin.

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Teacher salary: the 35% utopia and the picture of discord - Explica

Sussexes retreat

SIR The Duke and Duchess of Sussex are to be congratulated on the success of their retreat from the public eye.

The newspapers are full of it. We look forward to hearing details of their further retreat into privacy on March 4.

Brian SlaterEllesmere, Shropshire

SIR How can this young woman talk about her life as a royal? She didnt exactly put much into the role.

Sandra HancockStarcross, Devon

SIR If the Sussexes second child is born in America, it would be eligible to stand as president. Fingers crossed, we might get our 13 colonies back.

David GuessLetchworth, Hertfordshire

SIR Jan Etherington (Comment, February 18) writes as if she believes all moths are the enemies of her clothes.

In fact, of the 2,500 or so species found in Britain, only two the common clothes moth and the case-bearing clothes moth are a danger to natural fibres.

Most moths, like butterflies, are beautiful and harmless, and their caterpillars are strictly vegetarian.

Paul WinstanleyBraintree, Essex

SIR Having read accounts, by three daughters and a granddaughter, of the 9th Lord Hawkes despondency at the birth of yet another daughter by three of them and a granddaughter, will we be hearing from the rest of the family?

Jo-Ann RogersAlsager, Staffordshire

SIR Many years ago, the Prideaux boys sat in front of the Hawke girls in church. We could only muster four.

Julian PrideauxCoggeshall, Essex

SIR With five sisters and 10 female first cousins, my brother the 11th Lord Hawke almost had a death wish.

Every summer we went with our nanny to a boarding house in Westward Ho! One year he swung on a gas pipe and broke it, on another he sleepwalked out of a first-floor window and, on yet another, having been sent to his bedroom, he set fire to the curtains.

The 9th Lord Hawke may not have been blessed with a male heir, but he probably had a more tranquil life.

Nichola ForbesAlford, Aberdeenshire

SIR In 1516 Sir Thomas More wrote Utopia. In 2021 the British Medical Association has called for the near-elimination of Covid before any significant easing of restrictions (report, February 19).

What kind of cloud-cuckoo-land do these guys inhabit? We already live with reduced, tolerated exposure to other infectious killer diseases. We must learn to do the same with Covid.

Stuart AshtonWhitley Bay, Northumberland

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Letters: The Union with Scotland is safe, even without a new Cabinet minister - Telegraph.co.uk

Indias recent skirmish with Twitter is not an isolated case where a government has locked horns with US tech giants that have acquired a larger-than-life presence across the world. Nowhere have the arguments on big tech been more intense than in the US, where the last two general elections in 2016 and 2020 have seen strong charges of political manipulation by social media companies.

The story is not just about the oversized role of social media companies in elections. It envelops a range of domestic and international issues including the concentration of economic power, individual rights against the state as well as the corporation, disinformation, the rise of digital geopolitics, and global digital governance.

While China has come up with clear answers, for good or bad, to the new digital questions, liberal societies around the world are struggling to address the challenges to democratic forms of governance that emerged with the modern industrial society.

No one country or corporation in the free world can credibly preach to others on the right path to digital salvation. Democratic forces need to consult each other and collaborate in developing new norms for managing the digital world.

In the US, both the left and right are demanding that digital behemoths like Amazon, Google, Facebook and Twitter are brought under greater control if not broken up. The US has had a long political tradition of breaking monopolies going back to the progressive politics at the turn of the 20th century that targeted the concentration of power in the oil, rail road, and steel industries. In December, the US government filed a lawsuit against Facebook for anti-competitive practices in more than 40 states. Google and Amazon are also under legal scrutiny.

The current digital giants, however, are not easily amenable to political attack. They are bigger than the biggest we have known. They donate massively to political campaigns in the US and have an enormous influence on the legislative process in Washington. That makes the domestic battles against big tech in the US that much more interesting.

As the US takes a close look at the anti-competitive practices of the tech giants, Europe is not far behind. Last December, the European Commission proposed new rules to promote competition and fairness in digital markets. The EU is likely to approve a Digital Markets Act next year.

The war is playing out in multiple other theatres. In Australia, the government is staring down a threat from Google to shut a developed nation of 25 million people out of its popular search engine. The provocation? Canberra has decreed that Google must work out an arrangement with Australian newspapers to pay for the use of their content.

Google worries, rightly, that this will set a precedent for other governments and will undermine its revenues. Many governments in the developed world are cheering for Canberra. So is Microsoft, which is offering its Bing search engine as a more sensible alternative to Australia.

For more than two decades, governments across the world were happy to buy into the claim that the tech companies will lead us to a world of innovation and plenty. Legal and financial concessions from governments at various levels allowed tech companies to rapidly gain ground and commercial muscle and dominate peoples lives. But governments are now questioning the sharp business practices of the tech giants.

Let us highlight three issues here labour rights, taxes and politics. While the tech giants have created a lot of new wealth, some of them have sharply squeezed the labour. Amazon is the most notorious. There are new efforts to unionise Amazon employees, but the company has been good at crushing these challenges in the past. In California, trade unions are battling against the success of Uber and Lyft to turn employees into contract workers to deny them multiple benefits.

Digital giants have been aggressive tax evaders. But Caesar is demanding his due now. Joe Biden, who has outlined a progressive platform, has promised to get big tech to pay their share of taxes in the US. His Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is under pressure from Americas G-7 partners to work out the rules for taxes on US digital giants operating in other geographies.

On the political front, when Twitter and Facebook shut down President Donald Trumps accounts, there was celebration among liberals. But social media companies are unlikely to always find themselves on the winning side in other democracies. The context and issues are inevitably different and applying the same tactics against political targets will backfire, as Twitter discovered in Delhi.

If India raised Twitters differential treatment of the riots in Washington and Delhi, European leaders raised important questions about social medias actions against Trump. German Chancellor Angela Merkel spoke for many Europeans when she called it problematic.

The European Commissioner for internal markets, Thierry Breton, expanded on the issues involved. The fact that a CEO can pull the plug on an elected President of the worlds most powerful nation without any checks and balances displays deep weaknesses in the way our society is organised in the digital space, he warned.

The answer, Breton insists, lies in laying down a clear set of obligations and responsibilities for the digital giants; he promises that the EUs proposed Digital Services Act will do that. The moves in Brussels are in part about restoring the primacy of elected governments. They are also about building digital sovereignty that will let Europe make its own choices based on its own values.

Even as it claims digital sovereignty, Europe has offered to open talks with the Biden administration on the full range of digital issues that have emerged. The idea that the worlds democracies must get together to discuss global digital governance is gaining ground. Delhi is likely to be part of some of the initial conversations.

The promised utopia of a digital domain free from states and borders was always a chimaera. The digital holiday is over and the state is back. States, at least the strong ones, whether authoritarian or democratic, were not simply going to cede their right to govern to technology companies.

Reports that Twitter, after some initial defiance, has complied with much of the Indian governments demands, points to an easily forgotten reality. Twitter, like all other big tech companies, is a commercial beast and will live or die by its bottom line. Large states have the power to change that calculus.

As governments push back against big tech, a new challenge presents itself reining in the growing power of the state in the digital age. The answer lies in democracies modernising their laws to protect freedoms in the era of technological transformation. Twitter is of little help in this urgent but demanding domestic political battle.

This article first appeared in the print edition on February 16, 2021 under the title New digital question and answers. The writer is director, Institute of South Asian Studies, National University of Singapore and contributing editor on international affairs for The Indian Express

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Democracies must modernise their laws to protect freedoms in the era of technological transformation - The Indian Express

Ronald Reagan celebrating his birthday together with his wife Nancy and Margaret Thatcher in February 1993. (Frank Trapper / Corbis via Getty Images)

The concept of herd immunity, that is, the immunization of a whole population as a result of a high percentage acquiring resistance to a disease, has gained a lot of currency since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. It has long been a tradition of social sciences to borrow terms and concepts from the medical sciences, and the current global situation induces more of that. Thus, there are reasonable grounds to describe metaphorically as a pandemic the worldwide spread of far-right movements in recent years, including governments run or co-run by political forces that reproduce some of the key ideological tenets of fascism in countries as varied as Brazil, Hungary, India, Italy, the Philippines, Russia, and the United States.

The onset of this far-right pandemic goes back to the 1980s and was powerfully boosted in the following decade, as the editors of a collective book,Fascism and Neofascism, acknowledged in 2004: While a revival of extremist activity in Western Europe began during the 1980s, the collapse of Communism resulted in a surge of the extreme right all across the continent. During the 1990s, fascism, or something like it, was suddenly and unexpectedly resurgent. Like the classical fascism of the three decades that followed the First World War, this neofascismarguably the best designation, as it refers to both historical affinities and the renewal of forms in tune with our timestakes different shapes according to the countries in which it develops.

Karl Polanyi dedicated several pages of his 1944 classic, The Great Transformation, to underlining the great variety of fascisms and fascist ideologies. In fact, he commented, there was no type of backgroundof religious, cultural, or national traditionthat made a country immune to fascism, once the conditions for its emergence were given. He even affirmed that the existence of a fascist movement proper was not necessarily part of the symptoms of what he called a fascist situation. At least as important were signs such as the spread of irrational ideas, racist views, and hatred of the democratic setup.

Read in the light of the ongoing events in the United States, Polanyis following comment sounds chilling: Though usually aiming at a mass following, fascisms potential strength was reckoned not by the numbers of its adherents but by the influence of the persons in high position whose good will the fascist leaders possessed, and whose influence in the community could be counted upon to shelter them from the consequences of an abortive revolt. For the Hungarian-American thinker, fascism was above all a solution of the impasse reached by liberal capitalism aiming at a reform of market economy achieved at the price of the extirpation of all democratic institutions. In this light, the herd immunity to fascism achieved in most Western countries after 1945 was not only the result of the defeat of the Axis powers, but also and above all a result of an alternative solution to the impasse of liberal capitalism: the Keynesian democratic solution that discarded the idea of the self-regulating market, which Polanyi called a stark utopia.More on the Fascism Debate

In another and much older classic of the social sciences, the founder of sociology, mile Durkheim, was already lamenting, in his 1897 book Suicide, the fact that for a whole century, economic progress has mainly consisted in freeing industrial relations from all regulation. Government, instead of regulating economic life, has become its tool and servant. For the French sociologist, this economic deregulation was the main source of what he called anomie, i.e., a state of exasperation and irritated weariness resulting from the loss of economic security and the disruption of social patterns. Anomie leads individuals to seek refuge in some type of identity group andunless it is inward-oriented (suicide)deploy their exasperation against other identities held responsible for the increasing precarity of their social condition, primarily by way of racist and/or xenophobic logic. Thus, the rise of fascist-like ideologies and movements starting from the 1980s went along with the rise of other types of exclusive identity groups, of which religious fundamentalism is the most obvious.

This fully coincides with the observation made by Eric Weitz and Angelica Fenner, the editors of the abovementioned book about the resurgence of fascism: The right-wing revivals were very much a response to the political and social dislocations of the 1990s, including substantial unemployment, the erosion of the security net that the welfare states of both Eastern and Western Europe had provided, and the deterioration of urban neighborhoods. They were also a response to the wide-scale population migrations that have taken place across the North/South and East/West axes of Europe since 1945.

There is indeed a clear and undeniable correlation between the neoliberal onslaught that started in the 1980s, led by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reaganan onslaught that made deregulation one of its main goals, along with privatization, reduction of social spending, and tax cuts for the richand the rise of phenomena such as neofascism and religious fundamentalism after decades of marginalization. Likewise, the Great Recession, triggered in 2007, gave a major boost to neofascist forces, as did the major wave of mostly Syrian refugees pouring into Europe in 2015. The facts resulting from both crises are still very much affecting our world, and the huge economic crisis that is presently gestating as a consequence of the Covid-19 pandemic can only severely aggravate the anomic conditions globally (the far-right exploitation of anti-lockdown movements is an indication), unless it is countered by economic policies similar to those adopted after 1945.

Add to this the fact that, however significant Donald Trumps defeat in the latest US presidential election was, it was certainly not of a scope comparable to the defeat of fascist powers in the Second World War. His loss occurred not because of the disaffection of his supporters but despite a huge increase in their numbers (11 million more voters) at a time when, unlike 2016, there was no possible illusion about what Trump represents and, therefore, hardly any ambiguity in the sense of voting for him. At the global level likewise, there are presently no signs of neofascism waning: The continuing popularity of figures such as Jair Bolsonaro (until very recently, at least), Narendra Modi, or Viktor Orbn does not portend any withering away of the far-right pandemic in the foreseeable future.

Achieving a new state of herd immunity to fascism, like that of the postwar years, requires not only a political defeat of the most prominent neofascist movements and an uncompromising fight against their ideologies. It also requires, most crucially, a global shift away from the neoliberal paradigm that has been dominant over the past four decades.

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How Can We Revive Herd Immunity to Fascism? - The Nation

By Leah Crane

An artists impression of the Tianwen-1 spacecraft

Shutterstock/Axel Monse

Mars has another new visitor. The Chinese Tianwen-1 mission has entered orbit around the Red Planet, following the United Arab Emirates Hope orbiter by just one day and preceding the landing of NASAs Perseverance rover by a week. This is Chinas second interplanetary mission, but the first that it has attempted without international partners.

Reaching orbit is just the first step of the Tianwen-1 mission, which took off from the Wenchang launch site in Hainan, China, on 23 July last year. The spacecraft has three parts: an orbiter, a lander and a rover.

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Now that the craft is safely circling Mars, the next step is to start the preparations for sending the lander to the surface. Scientists have selected a site for this in Utopia Planitia, the same region where NASAs Viking 2 lander touched down in 1976. Tianwen-1 will take pictures of the area from orbit to make sure conditions are safe.

If everything looks clear, the lander will be released. It will hurtle towards the Martian surface, slowing down with the help of a cone-shaped heat shield and a parachute before a set of rockets brings it softly to rest on the ground. This is expected to happen around May to leave plenty of time to assess the landing site.

Finally, assuming all goes to plan, the lander will release a solar-powered rover to trundle around the dusty surface for about 90 Martian days. This vehicle is equipped with cameras, ground-penetrating radar, a magnetic field detector, a weather station and an instrument to measure the chemical composition of the dust and rocks. The orbiter also carries its own scientific instruments to investigate Mars from orbit.

Together, all of these tools will aid in the search for pockets of liquid water and ice on Mars, as well as laying the groundwork for more complicated future missions, including one to bring Mars samples back to Earth for analysis in the late 2020s.

Sign up to our free Launchpad newsletter for a voyage across the galaxy and beyond, every Friday

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China's Tianwen-1 mission is now orbiting Mars ahead of landing - New Scientist News

Ive been trying to think through how to write about The Stand. I really liked parts of it, and I bounced hard off other parts. But I think the moment that sums the show up best is that, towards the end of the series, theres a scene where a character has sex with the Devil. The Devil usually appears as Alexander Skarsgrd (exactly how I would appear if I were the Devil) but while the two character are having sex, his usual glamour slips a little, and the scene flashes between a romantic scenario in a rose petal-strewn hotel room with a naked Skarsgard, and some gross and rather violent writhing in a desert, which ends on a closeup of a terrifying monster screaming directly into the camera.

And then, we cut to a Geico ad!

This encapsulates the strongest part of The Stand, which is when it leans into the High Cheese with Serious Undertones And Actual Stakes that is Stephen King at his best. And packaging that between ad blocks adds a frisson of joy to the whole enterprise.

The Stand is considered one of Kings most iconic books. I wouldnt say best, because I think bits of it are mushy and its severely lacking in homicidal clowns, but it is an immense, sweeping look at three different kinds of apocalypse. Its a book only Stephen King could have written. Any End Times book could give you the horror of a pandemic sweeping the world, with the ensuing paranoia, the collapse of infrastructure, and the attempts to rebuild; any book could give you a religious take on the end times, with an epic battle between good and evil; any book could even give you a nuclear holocaust. But only Stephen King would smash all of these into a single book, and then give us two different Dad Rock charactersone an aging hippie professor and one the literal Devil. Only Stephen King would give us Trashcan Man, a damaged creature who loves firelike, romantically, sexually loves itand who has a crush on the Devil because, come on, who has more fire than the Devil? Only Stephen King would manage to have both a fairly feminist plotline about a young girl trying to navigate a dystopia full of incels and terrible boyfriends, and a plotline about multiple women who are Evil Because Of Sex.

The Stand is made up of a cacophony of plot threads, but Ill sum a few of them up. A weaponized virus known as Captain Trips (because, again, King) gets loose in the U.S. and wipes out most of the population. Some people are simply immune, but no one really knows why. A Texan named Stu Redmond (James Marsden) tries to help the pandemics Patient Zero, and, when this doesnt kill him, is dragged off to a military research facility for his trouble. Aspiring writer/teen creep Harold Lauder (Owen Teague) sets out from Maine with his former babysitter, the secretly-pregnant Franny Goldsmith (Odessa Young). As they travel Harold spray paints messages on buildings and abandoned semi-trucks. At around the same time, wannabe indie rock star Larry Underwood (Jovan Adepo) leaves New York City and follows Harolds messages across the country. Weeks later, Harold and Franny meet up briefly with Stu, who escaped the facility. Then Stu begins traveling with hippie professor Glen Bateman (Greg Kinnear). Larry picks up a girl named Nadine (Amber Heard) and a boy named Joe. A deaf person named Nick Andros (Henry Zaga) meets up with an intellectually disabled man named Tom Purcell (Brad William Henke). Gradually, all of them converge on Boulder, Colorado.

Screenshot: CBS All Access

Why Boulder?

All of them have been guided by dreams of a woman called Mother Abagail (Whoopi Goldberg). Theyre meant to found and lead the boulder Free State, which will be the post-apocalyptic utopiaif your idea of utopia is khaki, flannels, and dad rock.

Meanwhile, a man named Randall Flagg (Skarsgrd) has been drawing people to New Vegas, which is WAY MORE FUN. Flagg has his mental hooks in Harold and Nadine, and is building a totalitarian empire of debauchery with help from a lackey named Lloyd (Nat Wolff).

Naturally the two sides have to fight. And they do! For over 1,152 pages, in the extended edition of the novel. (Forty pages short of Infinite Jest! You win this one, David Foster Wallace!)

In the 90s there was a miniseries that never became cult hit that IT didbut it had an A-list cast: Gary Sinise as Stu, Molly Ringwald as Franny, Rob Lowe as Nick Andros, Jamey Sheridan as Randall Flagg, and Ruby Dee as Mother Abagail. I have vague memories of it being pretty stilted, and the effects were a bit too 90s television to work for the scale of the story.

The new version is more successful than its predecessor, but its still a very bumpy ride of excellent setpieces and strong performances, but long lapses in logic, and muted characterization that hold it back from being as great as, say, the first installment of Andy Muschiettis recent take on IT.

To be fair, I didnt expect to be in month eleven of a pandemic while I watched this thing. As I said in my review of the opening episode, seeing the fictional response to the disease felt falseI never felt the grief and horror was immediate enough. Im not a frontline worker or a coroner, but Ive been walking around in a nauseated daze since March. So the idea that these characters who are dealing with, for instance, burying their loved ones, removing bodies from a town so they can reclaim it, digging mass graves, crawling through sewers to escape gangs, freeing women who have been taken captive by sadistic men, etc.given how screwed up I am after eleven months of relative comfort, these people would be shells of themselves. And I think it would have been a great move for the show to portray that emotional hit a bit more than it does, because it would ground the gross-out moments of the first half and the cosmic horror that settles in over the second half in genuine human experience.

Screenshot: CBS All Access

The Stand, like a lot of these stories, plays out a secularized Rapture scenario or at least, at first it seems secularized. If it was just about a killer pandemic that decimates the human population, and leaves the survivors struggling to rebuild society, then we just have a dystopian thriller, a slightly higher-level Andromeda Strain or Contagion. Instead King veers into the mythic. His intention with the book was to create a modern, American Lord of the Ringsto the extent that when he was able to publish an extended edition in 1990, he went back and updated the timeline and references to try to keep it as modern as possible. The plague is only the opening salvo of his End Times scenario. In the book Captain Trips is a weaponized form of influenza, and when the initial efforts at containment fail, its actually released in other countries intentionally to make sure they suffer along with the United States. The new series never checks in with the rest of the world, or confirms that its a bioweapon, instead its implied that the outbreak is helped along by Flagg and, presumably, tactically ignored by God.

Wound around this narrative is the fact that the survivors are all having dreams of Mother Abagail and Randall Flagg. They choose one side or the other, seemingly without fully understanding what theyre choosing. Those drawn to Mother A end up in Boulder, while the Friends of Flagg travel to Vegas. Once the players are in position, the book tips fully into an epic tale of the battle between good and evil. Most of the people on Mother As side accept the idea that she is an emissary of Godbut they dont really debate too much about what that means, or seem to spend too much time thinking about the idea that they are suddenly in a very particular End Times story. (Theres no discussion of which god Mother A is repping, but she only quotes the Hebrew Bible and New Testament.) Those on Flaggs side dont seem to dwell too much on the idea that theyve sided with Hell Itself.

Ive written about pop cultural End Times before, so Im not taking us all through that again. But what I find fascinating about The Stand is the way King brought a couple of very different scenarios together for his book. He was working in a milieu of 70s paranoia/conspiracy thrillers/pandemic thrillers, and the resurgence of Rapture fiction like Thief in the Night. (I think its good to remember in these volatile days that End Times go in and out of vogue in cycles.) Rather than choosing to write a purely scientific story, like The Andromeda Strain, or a purely spiritual one, he took a Why not both? approach and treated a cosmic battle with the same seriousness as the aftermath of a man-made plague.

Which becomes a little bit of a problem for the series. At its heart The Stand is claiming that the pandemic was sent by the Devil (but God allowed it) and that in the plagues aftermath God and the Devil are gathering the remaining U.S.-ians together into two opposing camps who will then battle for supremacy as the proxies of two supernatural forces. Many of the people in Boulder seem to know this. The people of the Boulder Council, Stu, Larry, Franny, Glen, and, Nick, explicitly know this. Which casts every decision they make in a giant cosmic spotlight, because I think its safe to assume that if youd lived through a pandemic at the level of Captain Trips, been guided across a post-apocalyptic U.S. by visions of Whoopi Goldberg in a cornfield, and then found yourself in a new utopian city that was ordained by God (which by the way exists apparently) that that would affect your outlook on life. And yet people just kind of seem to keep going? Do normal stuff?

And meanwhile any time the series cuts to Flagg the show becomes, as a mentioned, WAY MORE FUN. I know, I know, hes literally the Devil, and yes theres a giant dark side to New Vegas, i.e.; its a totalitarian state, and people are forced to fight in a big coliseum and everyone there is going to Hell eventually, butit looks incredibly fun. Appealing. This is where the queer people are, this is where women who would be considered overweight in our world walk around in bustiers looking fabulous, this is where everyone, regardless of gender or sexuality, is covered in glitter. There are some downsides. First, yeah, the Hell thing. And like a lot of Kings work, this bit of the adaptation seems to be stuck in the 80s for some reason. Flagg projects himself like Max Headroom over a Thunderdome-esque coliseum, and theres enough cocaine flying around to power a dozen Weeknd albums. And, more problematic, sex and violence are conflated as evilespecially frustrating since this is where all the post-apocalyptic queerness seems to concentratebut the New Vegas sections are so much more vibrant than the Boulder sections that its hard to stay invested in the triumph of good.

Screenshot: CBS All Access

This is one of the problems with the series as a whole: its really fun in fits and starts, but some of the showrunners decisions have sucked the tension out of it. During the first half the show, when it might have been better to lean into the terror of living through the pandemic, the show skips around in time like a Christopher Nolan-helmed reboot of Quantum Leap. If a viewer who hasnt read the book already knows that Stu and Franny are a couple in Boulder, that makes some of the scenes between Harold and Franny less fraught. Later, once all the players are gathered, the show gives us flashbacks to journeys like Nick and Tom Purcells which would have been better as linear stories. Where the various journeys people make could have been layered together to make us wonder if theyll get to Boulder, too often in the early episodes, the show treats the characters futures as inevitableWhich, again, could be interesting as a way to underline the idea that these characters are fated to fulfill certain destinies! But thats the kind of thing that works better when a viewer looks back at the shape of the series.

And then sometimes there are just choices with writing and editing that I felt undercut the series. A good example is the way the show frames the Boulder Councils decision to send spies into New Vegas to get info on Flagg. In the book this decision comes at a very specific point, when it makes a little more sense. But in the show, theyre acting directly against Mother Abagails wishesand thus, as far as they know, Gods. Which is a really interesting decision for people to make in this context! But the way the show deals with this plotline is by showing us the Committee interviewing their potential spies, rather than with them wrestling with the ethical ramifications of sending them. Then, the scene when Mother A finds out is weirdly rushed and muted, even though her reaction ends up leading to a huge plot twist. There are a number of times when the show saps the potential tension in this way.

When King wrote the book in the 70s, the choices he made were quite progressive: an elderly Black woman is Gods representative on Earth, while the Devil takes the form of a white male Classic Rock enthusiast. The storys biggest Christ figure is the deaf man who chooses compassion in the face of abuse. One of our main POVs is a kind, young college woman who got pregnant by accident, and who ends up having to lead society a few months before facing new motherhood. One of the books biggest heroes is a gentle man with intellectual disabilities, and one of its worst villains is a white incel.

Some of the new series updates work well.

Screenshot: CBS All Access

Council member Ralph, a white farmer in the book, is replaced by Ray Brentner (Irene Bedard), an Indigenous woman who is one of Mother Abagails closest confidantes. Nick Andros is now the orphaned son of an Ecuadoran refugee. Larry is a Black indie singer struggling with addiction, rather than the somewhat more shallow fading pop star of the book. On the evil side of the spectrum, Harolds incel tendencies are made more complex, and that combined with all the echoes of Kings own young life as a writer gives the character more depth. Flaggs right-hand man Lloyd is now a troubled, insecure young man who fakes being a cop killer to convince people hes tough.

But on the other hand, it also got to me that the only instances of queerness that I saw were part of the New Vegas debauchery. (Youre telling me the Boulder Free State rebuilt itself from nothing without the benefit of lesbians? Doubtful.) I dont think I saw any queer couples among the Boulder residents, while New Vegas was more than comfortable using diverse sexual configurations as background as the main characters walked around being evil. As I mentioned above, too, we dont see any examples of people practicing Islam or Hinduism or anything, and Mother Abagail is explicitly Christian, so we get no sense of how people of other faiths respond to suddenly being part of this Divine Plan. (We do get a few scenes of Glen being amused by it.) And to be clear, Im not saying that the shows creators needed to tick off checklists, here, just that if your goal is to make an epic that reflects America As It Is Now, you have to give us real, layered diversity. Because despite what some people, for reasons that continue to baffle me, might want, the US is in fact an overflowing fondue of different people and cultures. Its kinda what makes us great, when we can be arsed to be great.

Screenshot: CBS All Access

The performances are uniformly excellent, even when the script is shaky. Owen Teague brings a jittery, spiteful energy to Harold (at times creeping close to becoming a Jack Nicholson impression) but he also lets you see that there is a better person in there. You can see how Franny, who has known Harold since childhood, might keep hoping his good instincts will win out. You can see why this person would be seen as a lost soul who just needs some love in the utopian society of Boulder. Amber Heard brings some heft to Nadines Flagg-based emotional conflict, especially when shes playing against Jovan Adepos warm presence as Larry. James Marsden and Odessa Young both do solid work as the ostensible leads, Stu Redman and Frannie Goldsmith, but the characters are both too blandagain, I know Im harping on this, but living through this kind of event would leave wayyy more damageFranny has to bury her dad in the backyard, Stu loses his wife and his child, and is taken prisoner by the remnants of the U.S. government for a while. Theyve seen some shit. But their characters remain so upbeat and hopeful that it became hard for me to be invested in them even when they did objectively heroic things. Greg Kinnear gives probably my favorite performance as Glenn, and Katherine McNamara and Fiona Dourif are both fantastic as two of the leading members of New Vegas, Julie and Rat Woman. (Rat Woman, I wanted so much more time with you.)

Now, leaving behind the good, let us move on to the transcendent.

Ezra Miller is unhinged as TrashCan Man. He flails through his scenes in leather S/M wear and a distressingly white-flesh-toned codpiece, screamwhispering MY LIFE FOR YOUUUU to Flagg and jerking off to explosions. In short, hes perfect in the role.

Heres a shot of him pre-Flagg:

Screenshot: CBS All Access

And heres a shot of him meeting Flagg:

Screenshot: CBS All Access

This is exactly what you want from this character.

Alexander Skarsgrd is frankly amazing as Randall Flagg. Hes languid and deadpan, and makes being evil look incredibly fun until suddenly hes dead-eyed and threatening Mother Abagail. The interesting thing to me is that I would argue that in this adaptation of the story his actual mirror is not Mother A, or Stu Redmond, but Glen Bateman. Flagg, at least for most of the series, has a sort of ironic detachment from the events around him. Hes amused by human misery, by earnestness, by moral compasses. Confronted by one of the good guys, he fakes his death to fake her out. Then, when he comes back to life and startles her, he doesnt mock her for falling for itinstead he says, You dig that? I learned that from my old lover, Konstantin Stanislavsky. He said great acting is all about reacting. He isnt the boogieman trying to terrify her into betraying herself, hes simply trying to make her see reason. Thats so much worse. On the other side is Glen, a man who remains a skeptic and the worlds preachiest atheist in the face of apocalypse, even after he seems to be part of a Divine Plan. (Respect.) Glen regards both the fanatical love of Mother Abagail, and the frenzied worship of Flagg, with equal suspicion.

I really wanted to like this show, but I think the big issue for me is that theme is overly simplistic. Where in the book you get page after page of internal monologue, and dialogue between characters, raising the emotional stakes and grounding the cosmic battle in human lives, the show keeps itself too distant from the characters emotions to pack the punch its trying to land. But to talk about why Ill need to get into some spoilers for the end of the series now, so if youre not caught up, please skip down to the bolded text a couple paragraphs hence.

Screenshot: CBS All Access

SPOILERS BEGIN

If The Stand had committed fully to the feints toward Glen vs. Flagg I mentioned above, it could have built into more of a story of inquiry vs blind fanaticism. Instead it sort of comments on that, but also rewards other characters for their blind acceptance of Mother Abagail. If the writers had committed to giving Flaggs right-hand man, Lloyd, a redemption arc, they could have made his journey mirror Harolds. The final confrontation in New Vegas between Larry, Ray, Glenn, Lloyd, and Flagg could have been about Lloyd, after a life of fuck ups, finally having to make a choice. Instead he makes a series of mistakes, shoots Glen in a panic, seems to have a crisis of conscience, kind of says no to Flagg, but also kind of tortures Larry and Ray when hes told to, but also chooses to tell Larry that he always loved his music. He yells that Larry and Ray should be released, but doesnt make any move to do it himself. Flagg stands back and allows all of it. The crowd doesnt turn on Larry, Flagg doesnt kill himhe just dies in a fairly comic way during the final collapse of the casino. And I love a good comedic death, but this seemed rushed given that the show was also giving Lloyd more inner life in these last episodes.

I know, I know, I tend to harp on religiousbut this is a series about a battle between God and the Devil, so I think its valid. If the show had mused on its religious aspects the whole time, it could have shown us Larry and Stu making decisions because of personal religious conviction, Ray making them because of her love for Mother A, and Glen respecting their beliefs but rejecting the spiritual underpinnings. That would have been cool! A reflection of the multifaceted society we strive for in this country when were not being awful. Instead, no one but Glen wants to talk about larger questions, until Stu gets hurt on the way to Vegas. Then, suddenly, Stu is goading Larry into reciting bits of Psalm 23 out of nowhere (thats the I will fear no evil one), and Larry is taking deep personal meaning from this. Glen gets an amazing final scene telling them all to reject fear, but thats cut short by Lloyd. Then once Larry and Ray are imprisoned, Larry returns to the Psalm as he dies, screaming I will fear no evil! at Lloyd and Flagg, but until one episode before we never got a sense that this would be his rallying cry.

The show repeats this in its final episode, when Franny has to reject Flagg one last time. Shes grievously injured, and Flagg tempts her with the idea that he can heal her and guarantee her childs safety. She refuses him and escapes, but almost immediately runs from him, straight into the arms of Mother Abagail. Which, yes, its a vision, so logical sense doesnt matter, but Mother A talks about Job, and feeds Fanny a very simplistic morality of blind obedience to God no matter how difficult life getsbut then Franny returns to life and is magically healed. How much more meaningful would this temptation/rejection scene be if Flagg had visited Franny throughout the series, as he did Nadine? Or if she reject Flagg, only for Mother Abagail to tell her that her leg would never properly heal? (Part of my frustration with fantasy shows always falling back on Job in these kinds of storiesJob ends with a new family, farm animals, wealth, etc. Its a happy ending, from a certain point of view. How much more interesting would it be if the restoration doesnt happen, and you just have to keep slogging along?) If youre going to create a show about enormous moral choices and their consequences, dont sugarcoat how those choices turn out.

SPOILERS END

Screenshot: CBS All Access

To come back to what I thought was the strongest throughline: the reason I love mentally pitting Glen against Flagg, rather than Stu or Franny, or even Mother Abagail, is that he and Flagg both seem to be hanging back and watching the action around them more than participating in it. This seemed to be part of the general update to the show, and felt like a genuinely new direction for this story. By making part of the End Times scenario revolve around bullies who deny science, and a Devil who exploits them, its oddlyperhaps even unintentionallyrelevant to our current moment.

And it isnt just that. Just as when King updated the book for the 1990s, so the series creates an End Times scenario that is happening in our future. Harold amps himself up by staring at a photo of Tom Cruise that hes taped to his mirror. His friend Teddy muses on whether The Rock was immune to Captain Trips. But most startling, but also, I guess, inevitable, is a scene in New Vegas. After playing up the idea that this the city is a pocket universe where its always 1987 (but never Christmas), the series veers hard into NOW toward the end of the series. Flaggs people imprison some of the Boulder residents, housing them in freestanding chain link cages that are horrifically reminiscent of the camps on the U.S. border. The prisoners are made to sit in a mock trial that matches up with incidents in the bookbut its also broadcast as a reality TV show, and at a certain point the character who is positioned as the most intellectual of the Boulder crew comes out and says that Flaggs acolytes are: scared, lost people. And following someone makes them feel a little less lost. Then, in a nod to one of Kings ongoing themes, he points out that Flagg only has power because of peoples fear. Later the acolytes chant three-word slogans like Make them pay! and Burn them down! in unison, and it was rather difficult not to see and hear the last five years all balled up into a couple of scenes and chucked in my face. And I mean that as a compliment.

Obviously there was no way that the makers of The Stand could have predicted that wed all be watching the series in the midst of a pandemic, but I do think that leaning even harder into updating the story to mirror our reality TVd, Twitter-addled, politically exhausted consciousness would have made the commentary sharper. I think King fans will love parts of the show (I certainly did) but I also think that it needed to be a bit more over-the-top with its horror, and a bit more thoughtful with its reflection of society, to rise to the epic level of the book.

Leah Schnelbach is rather startled to see how much they vibe with Randall Flagg in this iteration of the story? Something to contemplate. Come discuss the End times with them onTwitter!

View post:

The Stand Is Half of a Great Television Series - tor.com

"Women who lead, read," said Laura Bates, the feminist writer and the founder of the Everyday Sexism Project, an online resource inviting women to share the sexist encounters they've experienced. Bates' words speak to a powerful truth about not just feminism, but about activism more broadly: to be an activist leader, first you'll need to get educated. Perhaps you've already explored the rich world of feminist writing, or perhaps you're adrift in the sheer surfeit of excellent choices, unsure of where to start. Wherever you're calling from, we've curated a list of exceptional feminist books both old and new.

In these fifteen books, feminist thinkers interrogate everything from intersections of racism and misogyny to Pepe the Frog's deeper meaning to online enclaves of sexist men. A feminist thinker needn't be an academic, of coursethese writers range from feminist scholars to novelists, poets to producers of feminist pornography. Whatever their trade or their topic, their work is bound to inspire you, enrage you, and galvanize you to take part in the feminist movement, whether that's marching in the streets or producing powerful change in your own workplace or home life.

1This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, edited by Cherre Moraga and Gloria E. Anzalda

$33.55

The fourth edition of this venerable anthology, first published in 1981, remains an enduring trove of foundational thought from women of color. Before the term intersectionality entered academic discourse, This Bridge Called My Back put in the radical work of developing intersectional feminism, challenging the hollow sisterhood of white feminists while drawing connections between race, class, gender, and sexuality. Forty years later, the panoply of perspectives contained in this anthology continues to undergird third wave feminism and emerging activist coalitions. May future generations of radical women fall just as hard for This Bridge Called My Back as their forebears did; after all, the future of feminism remains forever indebted to thisgroundbreaking anthology.

2Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot, by Mikki Kendall

In Hood Feminism: Notes From the Women That a Movement Forgot, writer and feminist scholar Mikki Kendall writes, We rarely talk about basic needs as a feminist issue Instead of a framework that focuses on helping women get basic needs met, all too often the focus is not on survival, but on increasing privilege. This is the thesis of Hood Feminism, an urgent and essential text about the failure of modern feminism to address the needs of all but a few privileged women. Hood Feminism is a searing indictment of whitewashed, Lean In feminism, with Kendall calling for the movement to embrace inclusivity, intersectionality, and anti-racism. In powerful, eloquent essays, Kendall highlights how the movements myopia has failed Black women, Indigenous women, and trans women, among others, and how feminism must shift its focus away from increasing privilege in favor of solving issues that shape the daily lives of women everywhere.

3Men Explain Things to Me, by Rebecca Solnit

From one of our most imaginative and incisive writers comes a contemporary classic: seven sharp essays, each one an exceptionally hewn gem, beginning with the rousing title essay about how conversations between men and women are often driven off-course by mansplaining. In the ensuing essays, Solnit peers through politics, history, art, and media as lenses on cultural misogyny, arguing that seemingly isolated acts of sexism, like mansplaining, exist on a dangerous continuum of gendered exploitation and abuse, leading perilously to sexual violence. Solnit writes, Its a slippery slope. Thats why we need to address the slope, rather than compartmentalizing the varieties of misogyny and dealing with them separately. Candid, courageous, and unflinchingly honest, Men Explain Things to Me is a powerful polemic for a future where women can enjoy equal power and respect.

4The Bluest Eye, by Toni Morrison

To choose a single work from Toni Morrisons prolific and peerless oeuvre is a daunting task, but when in doubt, begin at the beginning. Morrisons visionary first novel is the painful and poignant story of Pecola Breedlove, an abused and unloved Black girl, pregnant by her own father, who suffers relentless oppression and cruelty in her rural Ohio town. Pecola wishes desperately for blue eyes, convinced that conventional white beauty is the ticket to a better life, but soon finds her mind colonized to the brink of madness. In 1970, The Bluest Eye put Morrison on the map as a once-in-a-century writer of preternatural gifts; in the decades since, it has remained a mainstay on banned books lists, with states citing offensive language and sexually explicit material as justification for excluding it from academic curriculum. Oprah Winfrey once said of Morrison, She is our conscience, she is our seer, she is our truth-teller. May the lightning rod of Morrisons truth strike these states, as The Bluest Eye is a groundbreaking text with an important place in the American canon. Saturated with sorrow and charged with wonder, it remains an indelible study of trauma, shame, and internalized racism.

5Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger, by Rebecca Traister

Released just five days after Dr. Christine Blasey Fords historic congressional testimony and four days before Justice Brett Kavanaughs Supreme Court confirmation, Good and Mad is the rare book published exactly when the culture needed it. Through exhaustive and compelling historical research, Traister illuminates female fury as a powerful political toolone thats long been ignored and suppressed, to the great detriment of American society. Traister traces womens rage to the roots of the abolition and labor movements, exploring the forces that have sought to curb and marginalize womens voices, while also emphasizing the ways in which Black women have long laid the foundation for the activism of American women. Powered by Traisters own anger and laced through with compelling anecdotes from women about wielding righteous rage for constructive purposes, Good and Mad is galvanizing proof that hell hath no fury like half a nations population silenced.

6Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity, by Julia Serano

$18.69

In this twenty-first century cornerstone of transfeminism, Serano, a transgender woman, exposes the myriad ways in which trans women have been stereotyped and disregarded in popular culture. Serano challenges the hyper-sexualization of trans women and connects transphobia to misogyny, while also debunking dangerous and deeply-rooted cultural mistruths about femininity as weakness and passivity. Her acute analysis builds to a rousing manifesto for a new framework of gender and sexuality: one rooted in inclusivity and empowerment, designed to embrace femininity in all its many varied forms.

7Bury My Heart at Chuck E. Cheese's, by Tiffany Midge

"Whats the Lakota word for intersectional feminism? Is it just an emoji of a knife?" asks prolific humorist Tiffany Midge in this uproarious, truth-telling collection of satirical essays skewering everything from white feminism to Pretendians to pumpkin spice. Midge, a member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, muses bitingly on life as a Native woman in America, staring colonialism and racism in the face wherever she finds them, from offensive Halloween costumes to exploitative language. This collections deliciously sharp edges draw laughter and blood alike.

8The Witches Are Coming, by Lindy West

Only Lindy West, one of our foremost thinkers on gender, could capture the agony and the ecstasy of 21st century life in one slim volume. In this searing collection of seventeen laser-focused essays, she unveils her unifying theory of America: that our steady diet of pop culture created by and for embittered, entitled white men is directly responsible for our sociopolitical moment. Adam Sandler, South Park, and Pepe the Frog all come under her withering scrutiny in this uproarious, hyper-literate analysis of the link between meme culture and male mediocrity. West crafts a blistering indictment of the systems that oppress usthe government that denies our rights, the media that denies our stories, and the society that denies our dignity.

9Girl Decoded: A Scientist's Quest to Reclaim Our Humanity by Bringing Emotional Intelligence to Technology, by Rana el Kaliouby

At once a moving memoir of one womans becoming and a fast-paced story set on the bleeding edge of artificial intelligence, Girl Decoded traces el Kalioubys personal and professional journey as a Muslim woman in the overwhelmingly white and male world of technology. Raised by conservative parents in Egypt, el Kaliouby broke with obedient daughterhood to earn a PhD at Cambridge, then moved to the United States to pursue her dream of humanizing the tech industry. As she recounts her quest to bring emotional intelligence to emerging technologies, el Kaliouby writes beautifully about the personal challenge of learning to decode her own feelings. Her efforts led her to found Affectiva, a software company pioneering artificial intelligence that can understand human emotions. As women in STEM continue to fight misogyny, racism, and countless other challenges, Girl Decoded is a rousing reminder that women can and should be able to succeed without sacrificing any part of their wholeness.

10The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love, by bell hooks

In this seminal excavation of patriarchys devastating effect on the male psyche, hooks describes an endemic pattern of psychic self-mutilation, which drives men to lead lives of spiritual barrenness when they lose touch with love, self-expression, self-knowledge. Hooks addresses common male fears of intimacy and loss of patriarchal status while encouraging men to enrich and share their inner lives. Although hooks wrote The Will to Change with an eye toward reforming the emotional and spiritual lives of male readers, it nonetheless contains troves of wisdom for women. After all, as hooks writes, Anytime a single male dares to transgress patriarchal boundaries in order to love, the lives of women, men, and children are fundamentally changed for the better.

11Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women, by Kate Manne

The visionary author of Down Girl returns with a bracing and brilliant study of male entitlement, bound to become a cornerstone of contemporary feminist canon. In a far-ranging analysis, Manne explores the myriad manifestations of male entitlement in American society, from Brett Kavanaughs Supreme Court appointment to the unequal division of domestic labor. So too does her scrutiny fall on incels, the medical undertreatment of female pain, and the myth of female politicians as unelectable, among other forces that police and punish women. Manne interrogates how entitlement gives rise to misogynist violence, making for a perceptive, precise, and gut-wrenching account of a social framework with devastating consequences.

12Circe, by Madeline Miller

Disparaging tales of witches, harpies, and other female monsters are burned into our cultural imagination, but in the lush, luminous pages of Circe, a minor sorceress from Homers Odyssey receives a long-overdue feminist reimagining. Miller charts the lesser goddess Circes exile to the enchanted island of Aiaia, where Circes prison soon becomes her paradise. For centuries, she lives a free, feral life, honing her divine gifts of witchcraft and transfiguration while bedding down with lions and wolves. When Odysseus is shipwrecked on Aiaia, Miller reimagines the power dynamics of their entanglement, chipping away at Homers fabled myth of one man's greatness to expose a selfish man as flawed as any other. In Millers masterful hands, a long-overlooked goddess steps into the spotlight, giving rise to a powerful story of independence and self-determination in a mans world.

13I Must Be Living Twice: New and Selected Poems, by Eileen Myles

In the past decade, a new generation of feminists awakened to the work of Eileen Myles, whose lifetime of intimate and inimitable poetry is collected in I Must Be Living Twice. Spanning almost four decades of visionary work, this collection assembles an eclectic blend of Myles finest work, from their reminiscences on life as a young creative in New York City to more universal reflections on falling in love. Resisting heteronormative modes and subverting facile labels, Myles reminds us that poetry is a form of activismone that can shift how we understand and empathize with the world around us.

14The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure, edited by Tristan Taormino, Constance Penley, Celine Parrenas Shimizu, and Mireille Miller-Young

Can pornography and feminism coexist? At the heart of this informative and far-reaching volume is that thorny question, explored in a series of gripping and provocative essays authored by producers, actors, consumers, and scholars of feminist pornography. From plus-size porn to disability in porn to trans womens fight to be included as frequently as trans men, these essays demand an inclusive new future for erotic representationone where fantasies of power and pleasure are egalitarian, in front of and behind the camera.

15 The Feminist Utopia Project, edited by Alexandra Brodsky and Rachel Kauder Nalebuff

What would a feminist utopia look like? Just ask any one of the fifty-seven cutting edge feminists whose voices resound in this expansive collection, which invites us to imagine a radically different world of freedom, safety, and equality. With essays by Janet Mock, Sheila Heti, Melissa Harris-Perry, and more, The Feminist Utopia Project proposes vigorous and compelling thought experiments: how might birth control be different if it were designed by an abortion provider? What would our economy look like if it valued caregiving and domestic labor? What would good sex mean through a framework of female pleasure? Next time you feel the feminist project is doomed, dive into this galvanizing book for a curative and necessary dose of hope.

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These 15 Feminist Books Will Inspire, Enrage, and Educate You - Esquire

Listen toBerkeley Talks episode #107: Charles Henry on the case for reparations.

Sandra Bass: Good morning, everyone. Im Sandra Bass. Im the Associate Dean of Students and Director of the Public Service Center at UC Berkeley, and welcome to the latest offering of the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute series on Americas Unfinished Work with Professor Emeritus Charles Henry.

Professor Henry will be talking about the case for reparations, and the current movement for providing reparations to the descendants of former U.S. slaves. An African American descendant of slaves myself, this talk is particularly close to my heart for a couple of reasons. In all honesty, Ive often doubted that we as a country would get to the point where reparations to African Americans could be part of our mainstream conversation.

In fact, Professor Henry mentions in his book that a somewhat flippant remark about the futility of pursuing reparations from a prominent African American political insider, was one of the reasons he wrote his book. Yet, in the last couple of years, weve seen an upsurge of not just interest, but actual actions towards reparations.

Several universities have acknowledged how slavery was central to the development as institutions. Georgetown students recently voted to assess student fees to provide reparations to the descendants of the over 200 slaves that were sold to keep that university afloat during a financial crisis. Just in the last few weeks, Gov. Newsom signed a bill that would open the door for providing reparations to African American descendants of slaves in California. What has changed, why now, and what are the possibilities of success in our current political moment?

Im also thrilled to be here because Professor Henry has been a mentor of mine since I was a graduate student at Cal, and what I remembered in meeting him for the first time was his intellectual generosity, warmth and encouragement. Ill tell you, as an African American woman in graduate school in the 90s in a discipline that has struggled with diversity and inclusion, having such a thoughtful and supportive ally was the difference between finishing my program and choosing to walk away. Rarely do we get opportunities to publicly acknowledge those who have guided us along the way, and so I wanted to take this opportunity to offer Professor Henry my gratitude for his support not only to me, but to generations of students at Cal during his long tenure in the Department of African American Studies.

With that, Ill share a little bit about Professor Henry, well turn it over to him for his talk and then what wed like you to do is to put your questions in the chat. Well have time for Q&A at the end, Ill be pulling those questions out and sharing them with Professor Henry.

Charles Henry is Professor Emeritus of African American Studies at the University of California at Berkeley. He received his doctorate in political science from the University of Chicago and joined Berkeley in 1981. He was the former president of the National Council for Black Studies and the author or editor of eight books and more than 80 articles and reviews on Black politics, public policy and human rights. Professor Henry was chair of the board of directors of Amnesty International USA and is a former NEH post-doctoral fellow and American Political Science Association Congressional Fellow. In 1994, President Clinton appointed him to the National Council on the Humanities for a six-year term.

He also served as an office director in the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor in the U.S. Department of State during the Clinton Administration. Professor Henry was Distinguished Fulbright Chair in American History and Politics at the University of Bologna in Italy and also was one of the first two Fulbright-Tocqueville Distinguished Chairs in France teaching at the University of Tours, I hope I pronounced that correctly, and Chancellor Birgeneau also presented Henry with the Chancellors Award for Advancing Institutional Excellence in April 2008.

And so with that, I would like to turn it over to Professor Charles Henry.

Charles Henry: Well, thank you, Sandra, for that very generous introduction, and thank all of you who have managed to join us today for the discussion of what has historically been a very controversial topic. Back in the Jurassic period, which was the 1970s, at least at this reading, I co-authored an article called Imagining a Future in America, or the subtitle was No Black Utopias. The article was prompted by a book that was published in 1975, called Ecotopia by Ernest Callenbach, and some of you watching might be old enough to remember that book, or even read that book.

I was struck at the time, by the fact that this was a Utopian work that took many of the characteristics or tropes of the counter culture of the 60s and turned that into a future vision where we had a society in which Oregon and Washington and Northern California had seceded from the Union and established essentially Ecotopia. The culture was biologically based rather than physics. It was gender-free, a woman was the president of Ecotopia, power was decentralized and people sort of admired Native Americans and their relationship to nature and culture. So, wed seemed to have solved lots of the problems that affected us during that period, including climate change, gender inequality, et cetera.

There was one exception to that, there were enclaves of Blacks living in city states and they were actually, one proposal that was being considered was a sort of separate city state around Salinas and the Monterey Bay for Blacks. It struck me that, in this vision of Utopia in the future, we get to solve the problem of seeing Blacks as an integrated and equal whole of the rest of society.

My co-author and I looked at a number of classical works from Thomas Moore to Nathaniel Hawthorne to Edward Bellamy and found that even though many of them are written in times of great racial turmoil, race was not even discussed. It was assumed to be taken care of, or other things would solve that problem. And the fact that theres an absence of Black equality in the Utopia tells us that something about our visions of the future that have emerged from our past histories, and thats why I want to talk reparations briefly as kind of cycles.

But to start, we can talk about the fact that no mainstream white political leader has given us a vision of an integrated future in which Blacks and whites live together in equality. Martin Luther King said that Blacks and whites had different definitions of integration, and for whites it simply meant desegregation, the absence of harm. It didnt include a positive vision of a multicultural, equal and just society of people living together.

Certainly, if you look at our history, if you look at mainstream news and we look at eight of our presidents before the Civil War, they were slave owners. And even Lincoln, during the Civil War, was actively exploring the possibility of colonization for Black Americans at some place outside of the United States, whether it be the Caribbean or Africa or Latin America, and was actually at one point told it would be physically impossible to relocate 4 million slaves. There simply wasnt the transportation available, even if you can find the space.

Weve had two or three books on presidents racial views from that period on out to the current period, which showed that up through Reagan, I havent seen any in the last decade or so, but up through Reagan, they all had problems with race, which may help explain why then reparations has been such a controversial issue in our history.

A kind of shorthand definition for reparations would be a process that includes acknowledgment, redress and closure, and I think one of the ways Ive tried to, in this very brief time, encompass a long history of efforts in this regard is the first slide that we have up here, reparations cycles.

So let me briefly talk about this, I want to try to talk for maybe 30 or 35 minutes right now, and then leave you time to ask some questions and for me to try to answer them. So obviously Im going to cut out a lot that I would normally want to talk about if this were a full-length course or a long lecture.

But I see this in cycles that sort of cover generations and reparations doesnt mean the same thing, or isnt the things emphasized in certain periods as in other periods. In the most immediate post-Civil War period, its land. Its land that African Americans want, Frederick Douglass, and later Ida B. Wells, were famous for saying that the United States has done less for its freed slaves than Russia did its serfs in the early 19th century. Russian serfs got three acres of land and farm implements to work that land, and 4 million Blacks were cast out with nothing, with no way to make a living at all.

Probably the most famous land claim, although there were other presentations from Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens and others, but people remember 40 acres and a mule, and indeed that was in Stevens initial proposal to the House of Representatives. Its what Sherman instituted in his famous Field Order 15 after meeting with recently freed Blacks in Savannah, Georgia, along with Secretary of War, Stanton, and asked what they want. They said that they wanted land. They wanted to be able to work independently and make a living, and consequently, we get the figure of 40 acres.

It was suggested that each of the 4 million slaves should be entitled to 10 acres of confiscated or abandoned confederate land and that the many mules that had been working in the Civil War be leased out or loaned to those to help to the new freed men to help them work this land. So, a family of four then would be entitled to 40 acres and a mule.

Colonization was still an option for some. Some Blacks did go to Liberia and other places but the vast majority wanted to make a living in the areas and that they knew best, through the methods they knew best, which was farming. It obviously had been against the law for most of them to be taught to be read and write, so farming was the mode of making a living.

Fast forward quickly to the turn of the century. The United States had provided pensions for Civil War veterans, actually on very generous terms. For example, if you were a woman you could have married a Civil War veteran 25 years after he mustered out of the military and receive a part of his pension as a widow if he died. There was serious talk of giving Confederate Army veterans pensions and so that slaves, there are about 1.9 million at the turn of the century, ex-slaves who are getting old, who are having medical issues as many seniors do, were wondering, Well, wheres our pension? We have the same problems that the veterans do in terms of age. Incidentally, there were Black Union Army veterans. They found it more difficult to get these pensions, in part because they required a birth certificate and many Blacks didnt have birth certificates in 1860 when they mustered in.

Between the period of roughly 1895 and 1915, there were roughly 15 pension associations involving some 5 million Blacks. It was the first sort of large mass organization of Blacks petitioning Congress for some sort of pensions and medical care, etc. The most famous of these pension associations, which was co-led by a Black woman, Callie House along with Reverend Isaiah Dickerson. I want to mention her, I dont have time to talk extensively about her, but I want to mention her and Queen Mother Moore as two Black women essential leaders in this reparation struggle from the turn of the century up through the 60s. Queen Mother Audley Moore is actually the link between these early efforts and contemporary efforts, or efforts within in my lifetime.

When the pension associations closed down as World War One came along and they were not successful, and actually Callie House was harassed by the federal government and jailed, they went into Marcus Garveys, many of them went into Marcus Garveys organization. One of the people that grew up in the Marcus Garvey Organization was a woman called Audley Moore and she would later develop one of the mid-20th-century Black reparations groups that would take the claim for reparations to the UN among others in 1950. So, shes a kind of link between this generation of Callie House and Reverend Dickerson and the people that well talk about in the 1960s, in the mid-20th century.

So, after the failure of these pension plans, we could turn to the 1960s as the next cycle of reparations demands, and one of the things thats kind of unique about this cycle is we have a demand on private individuals, corporations, associations, as well as a demand on the government itself. The public demands come from Black nationalists. We have the Black Muslims, which become popular and the Black Muslims incidentally have connections to the Garvey Organization as well through Elijah Muhammad, who had been associated with the Garvey movement, but they become popular with Malcolm X becoming the lead minister, and of course they have a 10-point program, a major plank of that program asks for land in the South that will be developed as a Black nation in the South.

The Black Panther party, which adopts a 10-point program also, in some ways mirroring what the Black Muslim said, but in a secular way in what they consider a more progressive way, in that its not calling for separate land from whites, but its calling for land, housing, jobs, food, but land is a part of the Panther demands.

So, you have on the one hand, the demands of Black nationalist organizations, you also have demands from civil rights leaders. After the success of pushing for civil and political rights in the 64 Civil Rights Act, the 65 Voting Rights Act, the Urban League puts forth a martial plan for the Negro saying, We have to be concerned about economics as well, as Ella Baker said, Whats the use of being able to sit at a lunch counter if you dont have the money to buy a hamburger? And so, the Urban League is saying, We could at least do as much for African Americans as we did for those that were displaced by World War II. So, lets have a Marshall plan for the Negro.

Martin Luther King picks that up and expands it, and asks for an Economic Bill of Rights for the disadvantaged, and we can go right on through that Economic Rights argument with the Congressional Black Caucus through the early 70s, calls for full employment for Americans. So, these can be seen as a type of economic reparations.

Then, finally in 1969, James Forman, the former leader of CORE, puts forth what he calls a Black Manifesto asking for $500 million from Americas churches, saying churches have been the most segregated institutions in the United States and they need to live up to their moral and ethical preachings by devoting some of their assets to African Americans. I believe of the $500 million, $5 million is actually paid to the churches, to various organizations, during that period.

Then, we get to the contemporary period. Im going to have to start moving faster than usual. I kind of date the contemporary period from 1989, there were things going on all throughout these periods but theyre kind of signal events like the end of the Civil War, like the development of pension movement, like the Civil Rights Movement, and I think we can kind of date the contemporary period from 1989. For one particular reason, in 1988, Japanese Americans received an apology and reparations for the internment of Japanese Americans in the United States.

This legislation was passed and signed by Ronald Reagan and benefited about 120,000 Japanese Americans. A number of people who had been working on reparations, and the number of people who werent working on reparations, say Aha! If the government can provide reparations for Japanese Americans, it needs to seriously look at reparations for African Americans.

Consequently, Representative John Conyers of Detroit introduces H.R. 40, a bill to create a study commission that would issue recommendations in terms of African American reparations. This was modeled after the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, which was the Japanese American Bill, which also called for a study commission that issued recommendations that were then taken up and passed.

Now, there were things happening before this, NCOBRA, one of the leading sort of contemporary organizations for reparations was formed in 1987, etc., but we see a whole host of things coming after the Conyers Bill is introduced, which was, as I said, inspired by the Civil Liberties Act of 88. One of those involved survivors of Rosewood, and when Rosewood was successful, people in Tulsa started organizing, etc. So, theres a kind of domino effect flowing from the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 and we have action on the local level, as well.

So, let me move then to a comparison of Rosewood and Tulsa because what I find interesting, particularly from the political standpoint, is looking at movements that are successful versus those that are not successful and what are the factors that contribute to that the success or the failure. And these are two of the most prominent sort of cases. Theres been a popular Hollywood movie made about Rosewood, and Tulsa has recently, in the last few years, become a better and better-known case. I saw a piece, a brief snippet, in the San Francisco Chronicle just yesterday on Tulsa, saying they had found 10 bodies in an unmarked grave in a cemetery in Tulsa that they think were people who had been killed during the Tulsa Massacre of 1921, and those bodies had not been counted in that. So, even today, were finding the consequences of Tulsa.

So, let me briefly talk about those cases. The first thing to note is that both Rosewood and Tulsa are cases in which legal redress was tried and failed, and it was a legislative strategy that was successful. The reason that legal cases have had problems historically in the United States, in terms of winning reparations, are three major, I think. One is sovereign immunity and that its difficult to sue public entities, its difficult to sue the police department, its difficult to sue the fire department, its difficult to pursue emergency workers. Theres some very good reasons for immunity, if youre a paramedic and try to save someones life and youre not able to do that, you dont want to be sued for that failure.

This has obviously become a more of an obstacle in recent years around police brutality issues and the immunity, its been called qualified immunity that police officers have, but in general its very difficult to sue a city or a state and in some cases, you can be given permission to sue.

So, thats an obstacle that we see repeatedly, standing as an obstacle and what we mean by standing is the court will say, Have you been harmed? If youre bringing the case, have you been harmed by this action? If you cant prove that youve been harmed, that your ancestors have been harmed as one thing, that people you know had been harmed, but if you havent been harmed its difficult for you to bring that case.

The third is the statute of limitations, which in many cases if your property had been stolen or destroyed, the statute of limitations, in the case of Tulsa and Rosewood had passed and so its difficult for you to bring legal action.

So, we find that the legislative route, in terms of both the local and state level, has been more favorable than the legal route in most cases. I look at Rosewood and Tulsa in my work because there are so many similarities, then it becomes striking that the outcomes were different. The similarities include, one: the time that they occurred. They occur within a year and a half of each other, in 1921 in the case of Tulsa, 1923 in the case of Rosewood, and they both occur in the South.

One more word about the time because I wont have time later to really get into it and that is, this is a time of particular violence in the United States in the post-World War I era, 1919 has been called the Red Summer. There was racial violence in 25 cities in the United States, Chicago being the most prominent. In 1917, there was violence in places like East St. Louis, Illinois.

In Florida, Rosewood was not the worst case, there were worse cases of Black massacres and violence and lynchings in the areas around Rosewood. One of the factors for this is that Black soldiers had come back with a new attitude about how they wanted to be treated in the United States, and so we see some resistance that we hadnt seen in earlier massacres of Blacks, like Wilmington

Sandra Bass: Dr. Henry can I interrupt you for just one second? People are asking in the chat about Rosewood, I dont know if everyone knows that case. If you could just very briefly speak to that?

Charles Henry: Yeah, Im going to give you the triggering incident in both cases.

Sandra Bass: Great.

Charles Henry: Im going to read a paragraph and thats the best I can do. Maybe I should have done that first, but let me finish this line and then give you the particulars.

The place, there was resistance, both were prosperous communities, Tulsa especially. The press played a very negative role, the white press in the cases of Rosewood and Tulsa, particularly Tulsa. There was a failure of legal redress, there were at least 100 lawsuits in the case of Tulsa. There were lawsuits also in Rosewood and theres an erasure from history that I wanted to talk about.

Let me read you a quote from my favorite author first, in regard to the erasure for history, and then Ill briefly talk about the cases.

This is from James Baldwin: People who imagine that history flatters them (as it does indeed, since they wrote it) are impaled on their history like a butterfly on a pin and become incapable of seeing or changing themselves or the world. This is the place in which it seems to me most white Americans find themselves: impaled. They are dimly or vividly aware that the history they have fed themselves is mainly a lie, but they do not know how to release themselves from it and they suffer enormously from the resulting personal incoherence.

Now, that leads me into a discussion of Rosewood and Tulsa because they were very prominent cases in the news. They were in the New York Times, the Black press wrote about them, as well as the white press. And no one in my generation knew anything about them. It had simply been erased from history.

Its really striking, in the case of Tulsa, that one of Americas most prominent historians, Daniel Boorstin, who was also the Librarian of Congress at one point, was raised in Tulsa and never wrote a word about Tulsa. John Hope Franklin was raised around Tulsa, the Dean of Black historians, and only very late in his career discussed Tulsa at all, so theres this kind of erasure of history that Baldwin is hinting at. Let me just read a paragraph about each case and then talk about the outcomes.

This is Rosewood: The trouble started in Sumner, which is a city close to Rosewood, in the early morning of New Years Day 1922, when Fannie Taylor stumbled out of her house bleeding and battered. As a crowd of neighbors gathered around her, the weeping and hysterical white housewife claimed that a Nigger had attacked her. By the time Fannies husband, James, arrived back home from his job of oiling machinery at the Sawmill, county sheriff Rob Walker was already there and a posse was forming. Sheriff Walker believed the likely culprit was a Black convict, Jesse Hunter, who had escaped from a county road gang the day before.

And then, the situation evolves from there, the posse goes out, any Black they stop, they question about where this escaped convict is, they shoot Blacks along the way, they torture people to try to get information, they go to the house of Sylvester Carrier, Army war veteran. They tried to break in, he shoots back out. Word spreads and people start coming in from outside that theres a race riot going on and it simply spins out of control from there. I have to stop there, as I will keep going, but you get a general flavor of that because you have a kind of similar thing in Tulsa.

On May 30th, 1921, Dick Rowland, a bootblack, took the elevator to the colored restroom in the office building near the shine parlor where he worked. He had to go to a colored restroom, it was in this building. As he got on the elevator, he apparently tripped and grabbed the arm of a 17-year-old Sarah Page, the white elevator operator, to balance himself. Page screamed, and as Rowland hurried away, a clothing store clerk spotted him. The clerk called the police and claimed that Roland had attempted to rape Paige, although there is no record of what Paige said to the police.

The police come and they arrest Roland at his adopted mothers home and the Tulsa Tribune, the major paper, runs a front-page story that afternoon entitled Nab Negro For Attacking Girl In Elevator, and then also, some residents recall an editorial entitled To Lynch a Negro Tonight, and so, after the word of the lynching came out through the newspaper, it spread like wildfire.

Black citizens in Tulsa, including veterans, were concerned that Rowland would be lynched, so they armed themselves and they went down to jail and they offered to the sheriff to help protect Rowland from any mobs that might come. The sheriff said he didnt need them and they leave, and then whites sort of descend on the jail and Blacks come back to the jail and offer their assistance again, its refused. As theyre leaving, a white tries to disarm a Black and gets shot and all hell breaks loose.

A very significant factor in this is that the sheriff in Tulsa deputizes 500 whites to serve as his sort of posse and they go into the Black community. Blacks escaping are put in internment camps, 4,000 to 6,000, theyre held there for three days. While theyre in their camps, their homes are looted and burned. The claims of death range from 39 official to over 300, including aerial bombs. This is in the early 1920s, so these are some of the first aerial bombs that people fly over and throw explosives out of.

Okay, Im not doing well, so Im not going to elaborate on the details on this, other than to say Rosewoods claim for reparations was successful, Tulsas was not. What are some of the factors? There was no sophisticated lobby in the case of Tulsa, there was in the case of Rosewood, in that they were successful in getting a white lawyer who was a lobbyist, who agreed to take on the Rosewood case and was skillful in taking it through the state legislature, and there was a dispute mechanism to handle a claim like this in the case of the Florida legislature. This was not the only time that people had complaints against the state, and the state had a mechanism with a kind of Ombudsperson. He was called a special master that would handle these cases and so, it came through that neutral sort of mechanism.

Second, there was no organized Black Caucus in the Oklahoma legislature as there was in the Florida legislature, and most importantly, there was no Hispanic Caucus in the Oklahoma legislature. There was in the Florida legislature and the claimants in Florida were able to frame their argument as a case of being just your land being dispossessed from you and taken away from you unlawfully. This appealed to Cuban Americans who had their land confiscated by Fidel Castro and the Cuban government, and even though most of them were conservative Republicans, they supported the reparations claim of Rosewood and that was a key in getting through the state legislature.

The Rosewood survivors were not as closely united as I mean the Tulsa survivors, which was a larger group, was not as closely united as the Rosewood survivors and because there were more survivors in Tulsa and the dollar figure was considerably larger, there was more white opposition to reparations in Tulsa. Therefore, the best that they got out of the Tulsa Both of these had study commissions, there were financial reparations in Rosewood, the survivors in Tulsa got medals, no financial compensation, okay?

Shifting public opinion. The ground has shifted some since this last period. During this last period, we had a number of actions going up until from the 80s and in the 90s. Rosewood was decided in the early 90s, 1994. I could point to a number of other actions, but things slowed down after the Durban conference in 2001, the UNs Conference on Race, where reparations was a central issue. That conference occurred one week before 9/11, and after 9/11 many, many issues were off the agenda and terrorism became the issue. And so, we see kind of less reparations activity up until 2012, we begin to see a shift in public opinion in the United States and there are lots of polls I could cite.

Im just giving you sort of a sample of that, but the Pew Research Group has polls if youre interested in looking at the Pew polls, a lot of them deal with race. The American National Election surveys for those of you who are more social science oriented has asked questions about race, race and racial relations, and if you read the New York Times, you know that Thomas Edsall often quotes a lot of recent research on race in the columns that he does.

But you see this shift in public opinion and just to cite a few things, the Kaiser CNN poll, a recent Kaiser CNN poll, a few years ago, found that racial tensions were worse today than there were 20 years ago. At the beginning of the Obama administration, for example, in 2008, things were pretty hopeful. After the formations of the Tea Party by 2012, that optimism had really declined and race relations were seen as becoming very polarized.

Gallup reported in the last year to a 20% rise in liberalism among white Democrats. You would see that reflected, for example, in the candidacy of someone like Bernie Sanders, and respondents in another poll favoring cash reparations to descendants of slaves rose from 14% to 29%. Now, that seems pretty low, but it was significantly lower before, that includes African Americans, who a vast majority of favor, so that raises it some.

The basic point is that this shift in public opinion to the left then has prepared more favorable ground for reparations claims, and we see that reflected in some recent successes in reparations. And Ive just pulled these out of newspapers over the last couple of years, including some just in the last month or two. A very significant case, because it relates to the Black Lives Matter movement and others, is that the Chicago City Council agreed to pay reparations to victims of police torture in a particular precinct in Chicago. Now, this was a rather famous case started in 2015 that actually made it to the UN and was discussed at the UN.

We have North Carolina, within the last year or so, agreeing to pay reparations to victims of forced sterilization and there were about 7,000 of them in a period from, I think, the 1920s to the 1950s in North Carolina. Incidentally, theres a large number of victims of forced sterilizations in California, as well. But the North Carolina case highlights the fact that weve had apologies from six state governments for slavery, state legislatures apologizing, and we had the House and the Senate issue apologies, I think, in 2009.

Now, this is significant because Tony Hall, a congressman from Dayton in the 1990s, introduced a resolution for an apology for slavery and received more hate mail, he said, than any other piece of legislation hed ever been associated with.

Sandra Bass: Oh, Im sorry, I just want to do a quick time check. Weve got just about 15 minutes left, and I wanted to make sure we got to some of the questions.

Charles Henry: Give me two minutes, and then Im done.

So, this is a turnaround in public opinion. Oxford and Glasgow universities have paid reparations to people in the Caribbean for their role in the slave trade and offered scholarships and research money on reparations, as have a number, as Dr. Bass has mentioned, of American universities. Berkeleys hands are not clean on this, if you want to talk a little bit about that later. Dutch and French governments, after study commissions, have agreed to repatriate stolen art back to Africa.

I mentioned that and I mentioned the National African American History and Culture Museum, because these I see as forms of reparations. Its not all about cash payments; its about education, its about restoring history and capturing history as in the American History and Culture Museum, its about repatriation of art.

There were congressional hearings, finally after 30 years, in the summer 2019 on H.R, 40, the original bill that Congress had submitted. And we saw, in the last several months, presidential candidate support for reparations, from Marianne Williams saying, Ill pay the money now, to Joe Biden saying, Oh, well, I think this is something that we could study. So, the consequence of that is, and I wont talk about it and youve probably seen it, is the California Commission Bill thats just been signed by the governor.

The final thing is a list for further reading. I hope I got you curious enough that youll want to look at something in more depth, and each of these works looks at different aspects of reparation, so theyre not totally repetitive. So, let me stop there and try to answer some questions.

Sandra Bass: Great. Thank you so much. I really appreciate, I mean, such a rich history that I dont think everyone was aware of, this conversation has been going on for a long time.

We got several questions in the chat related to what should or would reparations look like, and youve touched on that a little bit, so part could be cash payments. Other questions about social welfare programs, but I really like this question of, What would it look like for, or what would enable Black Americans to feel acknowledged, redressed, and with closure?

Charles Henry: Yeah. Well, its talked about as a process and the first is apology or acknowledgement that harm has been done. Its always interesting to me that a term that means redress, that means reconciliation, reparations, an attempt to heal has been such a divisive issue. There is no public policy issue that has separated Blacks and whites more in terms of opinion than reparations, and candidates for office have avoided that like the plague up until very recently, including Barack Obama.

So, we have acknowledgement, and then once you have some acknowledgement that harm has been done, and this is why study commissions are so important, because we seem to be disagreeing so much today on what the facts are, that we need to have a set of facts that everybody agrees that this is what happened. That once we reach that, acknowledge that, then we can have some form of redress and then there has to be some closure on both sides. Both sides have to be sort of a part of this, it cant be forced on something.

And in terms, kind of the trope is, I want my check, kind of thing and why should Tiger Woods get a check and all of that. Most reparations discussions I see want to affect the wealth gap in the United States, which ranges from, the California Bill quotes a figure of, Blacks have one-sixteenth the wealth of whites. Ive seen other figures that say one-tenth the wealth, but a sort of one-time cash payment of a few thousand dollars really doesnt close that wealth gap at all. That doesnt help you buy a home, for example. One of the things I didnt talk about when I talked about 40 acres and a mule, was at the same time, theyre talking about 40 acres and a mule, the Homestead Act passes in 1866 and theres several Homestead Acts.

The Homestead Acts give about, I think its 240-some million acres to whites to settle, free land if you settle on it and develop it, to white Americans. Blacks were largely excluded from that, I think 1.6 million whites benefit from this, 4,000 Blacks got land. But the remarkable figure is about a quarter of the American population today can trace their ancestry back to somebody who got some land through the Homestead Act. Well, that has helped create the wealth gap that gives whites more wealth than Blacks. We were also denied GI loan mortgages etc., etc. So, we see people talking about then some sort of fund that would be used to help Blacks gain assets to close this wealth gap and I could talk further on that, but there are other questions.

Sandra Bass: Yeah, its another question thats related to Isabel Wilkersons latest book, Caste, which I think is really important, and Ill just share one of the questions Ive often wondered is, if in some possible world reparations did happen, is that sort of a way of brushing off the question of the systemic challenges that Black Americans have faced from slavery on in multiple ways? And so, the question is, what can reparations do to address this inequity and change the system?

Charles Henry: Yeah. Well, I think thats why people have talked about sort of having assets which are intergenerational wealth that you can pass along. We see upward mobility in the white community, but we see downward mobility in the Black community. So when you say, Well, if I give you a $5,000 check, I think this was something on the Colbert Show once or something, If I give you a $5,000 check Actually, it was, I think, Charles Krauthammer said at one point a few years ago, the late conservative columnist, Lets just write a check for $5,000 to give it to people and I dont want to hear any more complaints from you. That sort of doesnt make up for intergenerational wealth.

So, we can see something like in the bail bond system, which is on the ballots in California today. Poor people cant get out of jail, stay in jail, cant pay bail bonds, those with assets get out. Their families have homes they can put up for bail, whatever. So, if youre able to close that wealth gap, it gives you the resources to survive pandemics when youre not employed or youre not getting your paycheck, kids who cant afford their apartments can come home and stay with parents who are in a house that has their mortgage paid, etc.

So, in terms of the long-term problems of the other problems, I think reparations advocates see having assets, having wealth, gives you the power to survive unemployment, the power to deal with the police, the power to contribute to political candidates, so that you can get politicians that respect you, etc.

So, I dont think anybody believes theres a silver bullet, but if theres one thing that would give you, empower you in some way, it would be to have the wealth to afford college tuition, to cover unexpected health dilemmas. Those kinds of things that those with assets can survive and those without are all of a sudden, theyre living from paycheck to paycheck. That paycheck stops and theyre on the street, theyre homeless and we see that in a disproportionate number of Blacks in the homeless population.

Sandra Bass: Right. So, one of the things youve noted is just how poorly the legal system is equipped to collective redress, and particularly were talking about historical harms. So, youre not actually giving redress to the person who is harmed, which means that with regards to national reparations, were beholden to a political context.

Right now, as everyone knows, were extremely polarized and very combative. Do you think national reparations is a pathway? What guidance would you give for groups who are working in that space? And one of the questions was, who do you know is working at the national level on reparations?

Charles Henry: Well, I mean we can talk both about elected officials and non-elected officials and, of course, the elected officials, most of the efforts behind H.R. 40 and most of the presidential candidates Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, those in the Senate had signed on as co-sponsors of that legislation.

So, the problem will become the Senate of course, which is not in Democratic hands and so if you want H.R. 40 passed, youre going to have to have a senate that will vote on it and then a president who will sign it.

So, thats sort of the name of the game at the electoral level, although a question I got when we passed it in California was somebody said, Well, isnt it kind of superfluous to do this in California because were doing it on the national level?

Yeah, but weve been doing it at the national level for 30 years, and California legislature is more liberal than the state legislature at this point because we dont have a Senate like we do in Washington, and so maybe California can be a model for how this can be done, so lets not put all our eggs in one basket.

And so, weve got action both at this level, the California level, and at the national level electorally. And then are a number of groups of activists who have pushed reparations for years through the UN. Probably the most notable has been NCOBRA, the national coalition, but there are others and there are then these local actions like Chicago. There are actions around universities so if youre a college student, look at your universitys history, look how its benefited or not.

In the case of Berkeley, look at LeConte Hall and who its named after, for example. If you want to get involved in reparations that may or may not involve cash compensation, but I consider the whole sort of removing confederate statues a part of, Lets look at the real history here and why these statues are here and what they represent, and what the absence of statues for Black women or Black men represent.

Sandra Bass: Absolutely. We got a couple of questions about the truth and reconciliation process. As we know, the most famous one being in South Africa, but theres been local ones here in the U.S. and others around the world. What do you think is the strength and weaknesses of that approach? Would that be something helpful for us in this country?

Charles Henry: Yeah, I think thats the beginning point. We found that in the case of the Japanese American operations, for example. The internment of Japanese Americans had not been talked about by the generation, by the parents. Many had been very silent about this, and their kids and grandkids knew very little about it.

When they had hearings on this, it kind of opened up this pent-up emotion and these feelings. Many of the people that had been put in these camps had felt ashamed about it and that was why they didnt talk about it, and so there was a kind of catharsis that was a result of this process of talking about this history.

I think this is, when we talk about the buildup of microaggressions and that kind of thing, it would be a cathartic thing for people to talk about their experiences in this country on both sides of the issue. I think thats a kind of necessary conversation to get to the point where youre talking about any kind of redress, because as long as were arguing different histories and not coming together as a community and seeing this as part of our whole history, then were not going to reach a point where we can actually have any meaningful redress.

Sandra Bass: Yeah, absolutely. So weve only got a couple of minutes left. I want to give you an opportunity. If you have one thing that you wanted people to gather from our time together today and really thinking about the possibilities of reparations in the U.S., what would you share?

Charles Henry: Well, all history is kind of local and my notion would be not to sit around and wait for Congress to do it. You can write to your congressperson or your state legislator, but look around in your community to see what are people studying in terms of public school books.

If we look at textbooks in places like Texas, for example, you wouldnt recognize Tulsa or Rosewood. If they were there at all, it would be a totally different perspective, it was like if you read the white newspapers after Tulsa and the Black newspapers, it was like people were in two different universes. These white women were attacked by these vicious Black men and they were rightly defended by these posses and yes, some people were lynched, but it was justice that was meted out. If you read the Black version of these accounts, theyre totally different.

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Berkeley Talks transcript: Charles Henry on the case for reparations - UC Berkeley

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Less than two years after Rihanna debuted Fenty, her luxury maison backed by LVMH Mot Hennessy Louis Vuitton, the popstar-turned-designer announced she will pause the label while doubling down on her Savage x Fenty lingerie line that recently secured $115 million in new funding. LVMH confirmed the news with a brief statement: Rihanna and LVMH have jointly made the decision to put on hold the ready-to-wear activity, based in Europe, pending better conditions. According to sources, a small staff remains at Fentys Paris headquarters to wind down operations, and the e-commerce site will go dark by the end of February.

LVMH plans to concentrate instead on Fenty Beauty, Fenty Skin, and her successful lingerie venture, which experienced 200 percent revenue growth last year alone. The decision may be informed by the coronavirus: lockdown grounded Rihanna in Los Angeles, where her beauty and skin operations are located, but distanced from her fashion venture in Europe. LVMH and Rihanna havent ruled out reviving the maison in the future since it attracted repeat customerspredominantly professional, high-net-worth womenin its two-year lifespan, but others remain skeptical. I have the impression that celebrity-originated brands can be very popular very quickly, Luca Solca, a luxury goods analyst at Bernstein, tells WWD, but that their staying power is questionable.

The Frick Collection is preparing to open in the Breuer building as the Frick Madison while its 1914 Gilded Age mansion on Fifth Avenue undergoes renovation. The brutalist Upper East Side buildingformerly the site of the Met Breuer and the Whitney Museum of American Artwill open at 25 percent capacity Thursday through Sundays starting on March 18. The permanent collection will be organized chronologically by region across three floors, showcasing works gathered by the industrialist Henry Clay Frick, and featuring paintings and sculptures by Bellini, Goya, Rembrandt, and Velzquez, among others. While specific details have yet to be announced, programming will include the decorative arts, 17th-century Mughal carpets, and Jean-Honor Fragonards series The Progress of Love, with the original four panels created for Madame du Barry. Back at home, Annabelle Selldorfs renovation, which was approved in 2018 after much controversy, is expected to be completed in 2023.

National Assembly of Benin by Kr Architecture

Initial visuals of the forthcoming National Assembly of Benin have been unveiled by Kr Architecture, a Berlin-based firm known for its sustainable and cultural work in remote locations. Situated in Porto-Novo, the capital of the West African nation of Benin, the building pays homage to the tradition of gathering under the native tree and is meant to symbolize the countrys current democratic values. The orthogonal structures courtyard layout includes loggia-like pavilions, a communal green space, roof terrace, and an assembly hall. The Benin National Assembly marks an important next step for our studio, says principal Francis Kr. This project gives shape to our ideas about community gathering, the importance of indigenous forms of governance, and what contemporary African architecture can be on a national scale. Im honored by the trust that has been placed in us, and am grateful that together we can build a new house of democracy for the Republic of Benin. The project is slated for completion in 2023.

Seven artists were asked to make works on the subject of monumentality for this years edition of Prospect New Orleans. The contemporary art triennial, which emphasizes site-specificity and collaborative partnerships, is slated to open in October after being postponed from last fall. A $2 million grant from the Mellon Foundation will sponsor the seven worksby Simone Leigh, Adriana Corral, EJ Hill, Glenn Ligon, Dave McKenzie, Anastasia Pelias, and Nari Wardto be featured in a new curatorial exhibition, Monuments: A Proposal. Taking its name from Leighs project, its meant to provoke thought about the mutability of monuments, something the director of Prospects fifth edition, Nick Stillman, hopes the exhibition can do overarchingly.

Maybe monuments shouldnt be fixed. Maybe they are things that need to be ephemeral because were such a rapidly changing society, Stillman tells Artnet News. I dont think that feeling is going to go away anytime soon. Full details have yet to be announced, but Stillman disclosed a few hints: Ward will devise a mobile artwork with a police siren, McKenzie plans to build a memorial for his late father, and Hills ambitious project repurposes a local ferris wheel for a performance piece.

Prosthetic hand by John Amanam

For amputees of color, the reality of living with a limb or body part in an opposite tone to their natural skin is very real. Until recently, the BIPOC community has been almost altogether sidelined by international prosthetics markets that primarily cater to white patients. That is until recently, when the 33-year-old sculptor and former movie special effects artist John Amanam who hails from the Uyo, Nigeria, set out to change this inequality three years ago and quickly became a pioneer in designing hyper-realistic Black prosthesis. Spanning prosthetic hands, fingers, legs, toes, ears, noses, and breasts, his awe-inspiring work was so rare that he was able to file a patent of his innovations in Nigeria last year. Amanam attributes his dedication to his work after his brother lost his hand in an accident, and, at that time, Black prosthetics were not available in Nigeria. I quickly discovered that I was the only one around making Black prostheses; not only in Nigeria but in the whole region, he says.

A new program aims to diversify the real estate industry, which is fewer than six percent Black and only nine percent Hispanic, compared to nearly 75 percent white. National Association of Real Estate Brokers (NAREB) is seeking to change that by launching a new partnership with real estate platform HomeLight to increase the number of Black real estate agents in the United States. The initiative will provide financial and educational support to aspiring agents, with the goal of closing the income and racial gap while increasing Black homeownership rates. In July 2019, the reported Black American homeownership rate of 40.6 percent hit a historic low in the United States; a Black homeownership rate nearly mirroring the rate at the time of the passage of the Fair Housing Act in 1968, says Antoine Thompson, NAREBs executive director. In comparison, the rate reported for non-Hispanic White Americans for the same period in 2019 was reported at 73.1 percenta more than 30 percentage wealth gap.

In his short but illustrious career, the activist Amar Singh has already helped legalize homosexuality in India, champion womens rights through his namesake art gallery, and landed on Forbes 30 Under 30 list for his contributions to art and culture. Now, Singh has pledged to donate more than $5 million worth of art by female, LGBTQ+, and other minority artists to museums by 2025. Museums are safe-keepers of culture and humanity, Singh tells Vanity Fair, but the reality is that theyve historically failed us. They have not represented humanity across the board. Already backing up his words with actions, Singh recently gave a Mario Berrio painting to LACMA and a portrait of the Inauguration poet Amanda Gorman by the artist Raphael Adjetey Adjey Maybe to the permanent collection of Harvard Universitys Hutchins Centre for African & African American Research. Adds Singh: Art matters and museums need patrons who arent just going to donate dots by Damien Hirst.

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Rihanna and LVMH Close the Fenty Fashion House, and Other News - Surface Magazine

It's Valentine's Day, which means romance is everywhere, along with the not-so-subtle message that being in a relationship is the absolute best thing in the world. We wanted to highlight some books that know that's not the case! We asked our friends at Goodreads to share some of their highest rated books about being single books that explore the joys of being single; that remind you of your worth; that emphasize the importance of relationships with friends, family, and yourself; and even books that argue loneliness can be fruitful. Below are 13 titles that are particularly well loved.

When author and illustrator Amalia Andrade was hit with a painful heartbreak, she decided to channel her energy into something positive. The result was this "interactive roadmap for getting over someone," full of inspirational lyrics, recipes, journaling prompts, and tips for exploring and enjoying your freedom.

5-star review: "Honestly needed this after going through a tough breakup with my first and only boyfriend of seven years. I love how the book is laid out quick reading for when you're so sad and it's hard investing energy into reading, the author's personal handwritten touches and sense of humor. They're the perfect little reminders and pick-me-ups." Sarah

Lane Moore has survived toxic relationships of all kinds; because of this and especially because she spent her childhood essentially parenting herself she has a lifetime of experience taking care of herself, learning to trust others, and finding ways to feel less alone. She shares her insights here.

5-star review: "I bought this book last week and it has seriously helped me in so many ways. Besides being incredibly entertaining and compelling, I relate so much to so many things written in this book and it has helped me see and feel things that have been true for me for a long time that I couldn't describe or identify. I'm in the middle of getting divorced, which has impacted my life a lot lately, and this book has helped me reconcile some of those feelings tremendously. I see so much of myself and my relationship in this book, it has made me think about who I am and why I am the way that I am, and that is something that is so helpful to me right now." Brendan McGuire

Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman, hosts of the podcast Call Your Girlfriend, chronicle their first decade in each other's lives, describing the way their Big Friendship the type of strong bond that survives life's biggest shifts helped them get through health scares, career woes, relationship pitfalls, and more.

5-star review: "Big Friendship tackles our cultural issues with giving platonic relationships the care and attention they deserve, both on a personal and an intellectual level. There's plenty of research and discussion around family dynamics and romantic relationships, but so often friendships get shunted off to the side when it comes to individual and societal introspection. Sow and Friedman tell the story of their own intense Big Friendship while masterfully weaving in larger conversations of how our friendships come together and fall apart, taking on everything from the unique struggles of interracial friendships to how friend breakups can often feel more devastating than romantic ones. There's also just a familiar ease to their writing that makes this an easy read." Lily Herman

Consider it the antidating advice book: Chidera Eggerue aka The Slumflower reframes the entire notion by explaining why you don't need to find a man, offering advice for recognizing your own worth first and foremost.

5-star review: "Although this book is called How to Get Over a Boy, I bought this book more as a guide to being a better woman. This book is an amazing way to bring yourself back up and to raise your standards of yourself up to where they should be. It's a great book not only for advice on how to get over someone, but also how to find out who you are and knowing your worth." Kayleigh Kenworthy

The result of over a decade of research, All the Single Ladies started as an exploration of the experiences of single American women in the 21st-century, but grew into a historical analysis of the tremendous impact of single women in the US over centuries, spurring progress in social, educational, and political spheres.

5-star review: "All the Single Ladies gives female singlehood the positive attention it rightly deserves, finally. Its an examination of the varied and surprising benefits single women enjoy. Its also about the unique power single women wield. The main message is that female singlehood, rather than pitied, should be celebrated, and maybe even envied." Caroline

When Olivia Laing moved to New York in her mid-30s, she was confronted with a new and persistent loneliness. Compelled to better understand this universal but often stigmatized experience, she begins an examination of art throughout the city, investigating the ways artists draw from, explore, and portray their loneliness (and alone-ness) and how it affects human connection.

5-star review: "WOW!!! This was an exceptional compilation of artists and how they framed their lives and worked through their loneliness! I highly recommend this to anyone who wants to travel with Laing on this mesmerizing journey through the outsider art of 'being alone.'" Meg Tuite

Dealing with the lingering trauma of a rough childhood and bad heartbreak, a reclusive anonymous writer invents, and creates a Twitter account for, a fictional persona: 81-year-old Duchess Goldblatt. The plan is to lurk and be snarky from a distance, but as her following grows she finds she appreciates the many connections she makes.

5-star review: "A woman who has a fake persona called Duchess Goldblatt on Twitter now has a book?! Hmmm. Thankfully I put aside my misgivings and dove in. Becoming Duchess Goldblatt tells the story of a lonely woman crippled by grief and how she created a fictional internet sensation who brings joy, laughter, and, most importantly, a sense of community to an often negative platform. She sprinkles her tweets throughout the book, often providing the backstory for a particular missive and the responses certain tweets received. Along the way, she befriends Lyle Lovett and numerous others and inspires groups to come together in her name and is there for those who need a helping hand. At times heartbreaking, at times heartwarming, at times hilarious, this book will stay with me for a very long time." Cindy Burnett

Glynnis MacNicol's memoir follows her 40th year, as she enters into a life largely without a blueprint. How does the single, middle-aged woman live when she's not relegated to the role of the cautionary tale, the punchline spinster, the wacky aunt whose family suffers her visits out of equal parts love and pity?

5-star review: "I love this courageous, gentle, thoughtful memoir. Determined to avoid the stories and stereotypes so often told about single, childless women (e.g., objects of pity, selfish and spoiled creatures, invisible humans), she sets out to create a new, more empowered narrative. She embarks on a journey of self-discovery and connecting with others that entails family illness and struggle, travels to foreign countries and encounters with men, and embracing old friendships filled with support and shared history. Within this year, MacNicol has numerous insights about love, loneliness, meaning in life, and more, all while recognizing that taking ownership of her choices and her destiny brings about a radical fulfillment outside the confines of a conventional life." Thomas

In her late 30s, Leslie Gray Streeter fell madly in love with Scott. Soon after, they married and began the process of adopting their son. Then, at just 44 years old, Scott died of a sudden heart attack. Black Widow is about Streeter's journey through grief, her unexpected strength, and the people who helped her survive.

5-star review: "What Streeter accomplishes with her debut book is nothing short of profound. In telling the story of her incredible love and loss, adaptation and triumphant adoption, she dives into the wreck and shines a light on all of it." Jeff Snow

Ephron's classic autobiographical novel follows Rachel Samstat, a cookbook writer who finds out her husband is cheating on her when she's seven months pregnant. Reeling from this betrayal, Rachel turns to food her most consistent form of comfort while ricocheting between wanting her husband back, plotting her revenge against him, and learning to stand on her own two feet.

5-star review: "Nora Ephron manages to make the horror story of her separation and eventual divorce warm and funny while still making it clear what a total jerk her husband was and how devastating the whole experience was for her. I listened to this as an audiobook fabulously narrated by Meryl Streep, whose voice felt like the perfect one for this story." Sigrid A

Described as a "Black Bridget Jones," Queenie follows 25-year-old Queenie as she navigates romantic entanglements, a frustrating job at a local newspaper, the ongoing tension among her and her white, middle-class peers, and pressure from her Jamaican British family all the while figuring out who she is and what she wants on her own terms.

5-star review: "This book is about discovery of your own potential, learning what you want from the life, and respecting yourself. Its about friendship. Its about forgiveness. Its about family. Sometimes you hate Queenie; sometimes you feel sorry for her; but mostly you understand her! Shes flawed, shes broken, and shes confused, but shes strong enough to find her way." Nilufer Ozmekik

In an alternate version of late-1800s America, women who are unable to have children are ostracized by society, and babies are a hot commodity after a flu wiped out much of the population. Ada, a young newlywed, hasnt gotten pregnant yet, so her only choice is to become an outlaw. She joins up with the Hole-in-the-Wall Gang, a group of misfits who refuse to conform to gender or societal norms. But their dream of creating a utopia for outcasts comes with a dangerous plan one that Ada isnt sure she can live with.

5-star review: "I was absolutely captivated by Adas narration and found myself completely immersed in the dystopian-esque world Anna North created. In fact, I was so enthralled by the story that I couldnt put it down, and I finished it the same day I started it. I loved the feminist themes and historical details, particularly the insights into early midwifery and medicine. And I adored Ada; a woman who, in a time when women had very few rights, forged her own path and fought for what she believed in." Hayley (meet_me_at_the_library)

So this one isn't so much about a great single life as it is about... murdering boyfriends... but if you're in a particularly angry part of a breakup or if you want a stark reminder that sometimes relationships are more trouble than they're worth this novel might be the one for you. It follows Korede, a nurse who has found herself in a dangerous pattern of abetting her younger sister who cant seem to stop killing men, and it's a thrilling, morbidly funny read.

5-star review: "This book takes on and metaphorically eviscerates so many urban modern myths and fantasies. It tackles worldwide patriarchy, family trauma, misogyny, sexism, the concept of beauty, rejection, familial obligations, mental illness, complicity, the malleability of character, self delusions, the slow erosion of self-esteem/respect when coupled with constant disappointment, and much more. It's a really deep character study that was darkly comical and acerbic, deceptively brief for the depth it contains." Monica

Read an excerpt.

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13 Books That Prove You Don't Need A Relationship To Be Happy - BuzzFeed News