And though many adults in the Wisconsin neighborhood where I grew up thought that message inappropriate for a 13 year old, I wore it proudly. Even then, I understood that it spoke not just to a person’s right to an abortion, but also to the respect and dignity that should be afforded every human being.

Since then, it has become increasingly clear that our society does not confer rights and dignity on we the people—as seen in the slashing of  programs; the denial of  in states that need it most; attacks on Black, Brown, and Native bodies by the  and border patrol; as well as the Supreme Court’s  to put fossil fuel companies ahead of the rest of us, guns above kids, and deny sovereignty to Indigenous people and tribes, while failing to protect our voting rights and ending the constitutional right to abortion.

For millions of us, the Dobbs v. Jackson decision on abortion means life in America has just grown distinctly more dangerous. The seismic aftershocks of that ruling are already being felt across the country:  have laws or constitutional amendments on the books now poised to severely limit access to abortion or ban it outright. Even before the Supreme Court issued its decision, states with  abortion laws had higher maternal-mortality and infant-mortality rates. Now, experts are predicting at least a 21% increase in  across the country.

As is always the case with public-health crises in America—the only industrialized country without some form of universal health care—it’s the poor who will suffer most. Survey data shows that  who seek abortions live under the federal poverty line, while many more hover precariously above it. In states that limit or ban abortion, poor women and others will now face an immediate threat of heightened health complications, as well as the long-term damage associated with abortion restrictions.

Indeed,  in the decades after Roe v. Wade indicates that the greater the limits on abortion, the more poverty for parents and the less education for their children. Worse yet, the  that had trigger laws designed to outlaw abortion in the event of a Roe reversal were already among the poorest in the country. Now, poor people in poor states will be on the punishing spear tip of our post-Roe world.

While the Supreme Court’s grim decision means more pain and hardship for women, transgender, and gender-nonconforming people, it signals even more: the validation of a  by Christian nationalists to remake the very fabric of this nation. For the businessmen, pastors, and politicians who laid the foundations for the Dobbs ruling, this was never just about abortion.

The multi-decade campaign to reverse Roe v. Wade has always been about building a political movement to seize and wield political power. For decades, it’s championed a vision of “family values” grounded in the nuclear family and a version of community life meant to tightly control sex and sexuality, while sanctioning attacks on women and LGBTQIA people. Thanks to its militant and disciplined fight to bring down Roe, this Christian nationalist movement has positioned itself to advance a full-spectrum extremist agenda that is not only patriarchal and sexist, but also racist, anti-poor, and anti-democratic. Consider the Dobbs decision the crown jewel in a power-building strategy years in the making. Consider it, as well, the coronation of a movement ready to flex its power in ever larger, more violent, and more audacious ways.

In that context, bear in mind that, in his concurring opinion, Justice Clarence Thomas  that the Dobbs decision gives the Supreme Court legal precedent to strike down other previously settled landmark civil rights jurisprudence, including Griswold v. Connecticut (access to contraception), Lawrence v. Texas (protection of same-sex relationships), and Obergefell v. Hodges (protection of same-sex marriage). Whether or not these fundamental protections ultimately fall, the Supreme Court majority’s  for Dobbs certainly raises the possibility that any due-process rights not guaranteed by and included in the Constitution before the passage of the 14th Amendment in 1868 could be called into question.

The Christian nationalist movement long ago identified control of the Supreme Court as decisive for its agenda of rolling back all the 20th-century progressive reforms from the New Deal of the 1930s through the Great Society of the 1960s. Less than a week after the Dobbs decision, in fact, that court overturned , the 2007 ruling that set a precedent when it came to the government’s ability to regulate greenhouse gas emissions by polluting industries. May Boeve, head of the environmental group 350.org,  this way: “Overturning Roe v. Wade means the Supreme Court isn’t just coming for abortion—they’re coming for the right to privacy and other legal precedents that Roe rests on, even the United States government’s ability to tackle the climate crisis.”

To fully grasp the meaning of this moment, it’s important to recognize just how inextricably the assault on abortion is connected to a larger urge: to assault democracy itself, including the rights of citizens to vote and to have decent health care and housing, a public-school education, living wages, and a clean environment. And it’s no less important to grasp just how a movement of Christian nationalists used the issue of abortion to begin rolling back the hard-won gains of the Second Reconstruction era of the 1950s and 1960s and achieve political power that found its clearest and most extreme expression in the Trump years and has no interest in turning back now.

Abortion and the Architecture of a Movement

Throughout American history, a current of anti-abortion sentiment, especially on religious grounds, has been apparent. Some traditional Roman Catholics, for instance, long resisted the advance of abortion rights, including a church-led dissent during the Great Depression, when economic disaster  the number of abortions (then still illegal in every state). Some rank-and-file evangelicals were also against it in the pre-Roe years, their opposition baked into a theological and moral understanding of life and death that ran deeper than politics.

Before all this, however, abortion was legal in this country. As a scholar of the subject has , in the 1800s, “Protestant clergy were notably resistant to denouncing abortion—they feared losing congregants if they came out against the common practice.” In fact, the Victorian-era campaign to make abortion illegal was  as much by physicians and the American Medical Association, then intent on exerting its professional power over midwives (mainly women who regularly and safely carried out abortions), as by the Catholic Church.

Moreover, even in the middle decades of the 20th century, anti-abortionism was not a consensus position in evangelical Protestantism. For example, the Southern Baptist Convention, evangelicalism’s most significant denomination, took moderate positions on abortion in the 1950s and 1960s, while leading Baptist pastors and theologians rarely preached or wrote on the issue. In fact, a  by the Baptist Sunday School Board found that “70% of Southern Baptist pastors supported abortion to protect the mental or physical health of the mother, 64% supported abortion in cases of fetal deformity, and 71% in cases of rape.”

So what changed for those who became the power brokers of a more extremist America? For one thing, the fight for the right to abortion in the years leading up to Roe was deeply intertwined with an upsurge of progressive gender, racial, and class politics. At the time, the Black freedom struggle was breaking the iron grip of Jim Crow in the South, as well as segregation and discrimination across the country; new movements of women and LGBTQ people were fighting for expanded legal protection, while challenging the bounds of repressive gender and sexual norms; the increasingly unpopular war in Vietnam had catalyzed a robust antiwar movement; organized labor retained a tenuous but important seat at the economic bargaining table; and new movements of the poor were forcing Washington to turn once again to the issues of poverty and economic inequality.

For a group of reactionary clergy and well-funded right-wing political activists, the essence of what it was to be American seemed under attack. Well-known figures like Phyllis Schlafly and Paul Weyrich, who would found the Moral Majority (alongside Jerry Falwell Sr.), began decrying the supposed rising threat of communism and the dissolution of American capitalism, as well as what they saw as the rupture of the nuclear family and of White Christian community life through forced desegregation. (Note that  didn’t preach his first anti-abortion sermon until six years after the Roe decision.)

Such leaders would form the core of what came to be called the “New Right.” They began working closely with influential Christian pastors and the apostles of neoliberal economics to build a new political movement that could “take back the country.” Katherine Stewart, author of The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism,  this Paul Weyrich quote about the movement’s goals: “We are radicals who want to change the existing power structure. We are not conservatives in the sense that conservative means accepting the status quo. We want change—we are the forces of change.”

Indeed, what united these reactionaries above all else was their opposition to desegregation. Later, they would conveniently change their origin story from overt racism to a more palatable anti-abortion, anti-choice struggle. As historian Randall Balmer : “Opposition to abortion, therefore, was a godsend for leaders of the Religious Right because it allowed them to distract attention from the real genesis of their movement: defense of racial segregation in evangelical institutions.”

Many of the movement’s leaders  around their fear that segregated Christian schools would be stripped of public vouchers. As Balmer points out, however, they soon recognized that championing racial segregation was not a winning strategy when it came to building a movement with a mass base. So they looked elsewhere. What they discovered was that, in the wake of the Roe decision, a dislike of legalized abortion had unsettled some Protestant and Catholic evangelicals. In other words, these operatives didn’t actually manufacture a growing evangelical hostility to abortion, but they did harness and encourage it as a political vehicle for radical change.

Looking back in the wake of the recent Dobbs decision obliterating Roe v. Wade, Katherine Stewart : “Abortion turned out to be the critical unifying issue for two fundamentally political reasons. First, it brought together conservative Catholics who supplied much of the intellectual leadership of the movement with conservative Protestants and evangelicals. Second, by tying abortion to the perceived social ills of the age—the sexual revolution, the civil rights movement, and women’s liberation—the issue became a focal point for the anxieties about social change welling up from the base.”

What this movement and its allies also discovered was that they could build and exert tremendous power through a long-term political strategy that initially focused on Southern elections and then their ability to take over the courts, including, most recently, the Supreme Court. Abortion became just one potent weapon in an arsenal whose impact we’re feeling in a devastating fashion today.

A Fusion Movement From Below?

As , co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, has pointed out, check out a map of the states in this country that have banned abortion and you’ll find that you’re dealing with the same legislators and courts denying voting rights, refusing to raise municipal minimum wages, and failing to protect immigrants, LGBTQIA people, and the planet itself. As the Economic Policy Institute  after Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s leaked draft opinion on abortion hit the news in May: “It is no coincidence that the states that will ban abortion first are also largely the states with the lowest minimum wages, states less likely to have expanded Medicaid, states more likely to be anti-union ‘Right-to-Work’ states, and states with higher-than-average incarceration rates. … Environments in which abortion is legal and accessible have  rates of teen first births and marriages. Abortion legalization has also been associated with  maternal mortality for Black women. The ability to delay having a child has been  to translate to significantly increased wages and labor earnings, especially among Black women, as well as increased  of educational attainment.”

Indeed, the right to abortion should be considered a bellwether issue when judging the health of American democracy, one that guarantees equal protection under the law for everyone. Fortunately, the most recent Supreme Court rulings, including Dobbs, are being met with growing resistance and organizing. Just weeks ago,  of us came together on Pennsylvania Avenue for a Mass Poor People and Low Wage Workers’ Assembly and Moral March on Washington and to the Polls. On the very day of the Dobbs decision and ever since, protests against that ruling, including acts of nonviolent civil disobedience, have been growing.

In a similar fashion, striking numbers of us have begun mobilizing against  and the . At this moment, as well, we seem to be witnessing the rise of a  movement, with workers already organizing at Starbucks, Dollar General stores, and Walmart, among other places. The Christian nationalist movement relies on a divide-and-conquer strategy and single-issue organizing. A pro-democracy and justice movement must resist that approach.

This story was originally published by , and is reprinted here with permission. 

Chris Harris, policy director at the , explains that the 2020��demands were rooted in a vision of public safety that ensures communities have access to “different means by which people get their needs met, [and] that people’s needs are actually being met, and they’re not just being sent police because that is the only public service that the community has invested in or �ٳ󲹳�’s available.” By the time the general election rolled around that November, however, establishment figures, including soon-to-be President Joe Biden, were from the demand to defund the police. Cities such as , , Austin, and Los Angeles that took initial steps to cut police funding in response to protesters’ demands soon faced challenges.��

Today, the struggle to realize the movement’s central goal of reimagining public safety continues in the streets, the conference rooms of community justice organizations, and in discussions around government budgets despite roadblocks and a lack of mainstream support. 

“The importance of this work is to see public dollars invested in and meeting the needs of people in our community and prioritizing those who have been historically marginalized,” says Harris.

Following the George Floyd protests, some cities initially made big changes, shifting hundreds of millions of dollars of city funds away from law enforcement. In August 2020, the city council in Austin, Texas, to the city’s police department budget totaling about $150 million over a year and to reallocate those funds to violence prevention, food access, and abortion access programs. That November in Los Angeles, California, , requiring that 10% of the county’s unrestricted general funds, totaling between $360 million and $900 million per year, be invested in social services and prohibiting the county from using the money on prisons, jails, or law enforcement agencies.

These wins soon faced establishment opposition. A superior court judge in Los Angeles issued a tentative ruling just months after voters approved it, claiming it improperly restricted the L.A. County Board of Supervisors from deciding how and where to spend county funds (an appellate court and upheld the measure last year). Meanwhile, the Texas state legislature passed , which levied penalties against cities that reduced police budgets. This legislation forced Austin to halt plans to reallocate police department funds and restore funds it had cut from its police budget the previous year. Similar legislation is being to ensure that even in cases of a city budget shortfall, “the police department will be the last department that would be defunded,” according to Representative David Marshall, one of the bill’s Republican sponsors.

Democratic politicians on Capitol Hill have also rejected calls to defund the police, even condemning Republican-led moves that would in federal budget appropriations using the talking point that “defund[ing] law enforcement hurts communities.” During his 2022 , President Joe Biden declared that when faced with questions about safety and justice, “We should all agree the answer is not to defund the police.” During Biden’s tenure, in 2023, by U.S. law enforcement than in any other year in the past decade. Since 2020, state and local governments in have also green-lit militarized police training facilities, some with federal funding.��

Research shows that the growing militarization of police forces nationwide communities and disproportionately worsens law enforcement outcomes for marginalized groups, such as disabled people and people of color. Claims that funding police training could help better protect communities fall flat, too, with research showing that even training programs designed against marginalized groups do not improve police interactions with those communities.��

Communities of color have led the movement against police violence for decades, recognizing that the institution of policing is rooted in racism. “Historically, those who were involved in lynching people in our community were local judges and sheriffs up into the 1950s and ’60s. We have continued to have similar incidents with police departments and abuse,” says April Albright, legal director of .��

With stubborn opposition from both sides of the aisle to reducing police budgets, organizers have shifted tactics. Harris says community leaders in Austin are now focused on preventing the city’s police budget from growing. They are also working on allocating funding from the city’s general fund in ways that align with some of the aims of movements to defund the police through a .

“This is a community-built and collaborated-upon set of budget recommendations at the city level, designed to invest in the community with a focus on equity, meaning particularly folks who have historically had their neighborhoods and communities disinvested by the city,” explains Harris. “We’re pushing forward for recommendations to see services, programs, and direct dollars given to people in those communities.” A similar budget-focused initiative is .

Starting the struggle with budget allocations is practical. “Most budgets—whether at the municipal level, county level, state, or national level—almost a lion’s share of these budgets are committed to public safety. And what safety looks like, traditionally, is law enforcement,” says Albright. Most cities dedicate of their budgets to policing.

Recommendations in Austin’s annual community investment budget include funding harm-reduction services, homeless services for Black youth and adults, emergency rental assistance, and alternative forms of first response to reduce police interactions with community members in crisis. “We have community health paramedics and community health workers [who] have proved pivotal in responding to both health and mental health issues in the community, particularly among unhoused folks, and connecting folks with services rather than pushing them into the criminal legal system,” explains Harris.��

When armed police are dispatched to an individual in crisis, especially those experiencing a mental health crisis, results can be deadly: According to at least 20% of those killed in a police shooting since 2015 were experiencing a mental health crisis at the time.��

Austin is one of dozens of cities to non-police first-response programs since 2020. Early research on these programs suggests that not only do they improve outcomes for people in crisis but they also . The public agrees: According to a recent national survey, think “sending behavioral health care workers to certain calls related to mental health, substance use and homelessness” would help improve public safety.

Efforts like those in Austin have also garnered some institutional support, with organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) backing them as evidence-based approaches to community safety. “We’re looking at shifting the paradigm in community safety to more front-end, solutions-driven approaches,” explains Cynthia W. Roseberry, director of the Justice Division at the ACLU.��

The ACLU recently held its on Capitol Hill to brief Congress and the White House on research showing the success of non-police first-response programs and investments in solutions to prevent crime, including addressing rising housing costs and improving access to mental health care. One of the ACLU’s asks to Congress was for $100 million to be earmarked for mobile crisis response in the appropriations process, which Roseberry says was well received by lawmakers.

There are legislative efforts already underway to reimagine public safety and first responses. Arguably, none is more promising than . This legislation, introduced by U.S. Representative Cori Bush in 2021, would establish a Division on Community Safety within the Department of Health and Human Services and provide funding for noncarceral first responders, restorative justice, and harm-reduction-based mental health and substance use treatment programs for communities nationwide.

Albright says that recent actions to stop Cop City in Atlanta, Georgia, and high-profile brutal crackdowns on pro-Palestine protests on college campuses have brought the demand to defund police back into the national spotlight and could help spur change. “Cop City and the movement against cop cities around the country, as well as what we see happening on campuses… is renewing the cry for folks to find a way to redirect the funds that are normally given to law enforcement to other areas,” she says.

While the demand to defund the police may not have the sort of establishment lip service it got four years ago, organizers say the issue remains top-of-mind in communities nationwide and will be on the ballot this fall. “We have to join forces and use every tool that we have available—from voting to protests to boycotts, whatever it is,” Albright says. “History shows us that when we do that, we win.”

When the Colored Marine Employees Beneficial Association of the Pacific (CMBA), was formed to improve conditions for Black workers, it competed with MCS for maritime jobs until 1934, when the two unions joined forces and merged. By the 1940s, the new MCS was under Black leadership and proudly flouting the repressive mainstream values of its era. Influenced by the vibrant subculture and militant deviant politics of San Francisco’s waterfront, MCS was notable for promoting racial solidarity, and dignity and equality for gay workers.

Following its reorganization in 1934, the MCS began a slow, painful transformation into one of the most progressive labor unions in the United States. Leftists gained control of the union’s leadership after 1935, mirroring a hard-left turn in American political culture and the labor movement more generally following the formation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in the same year. Though they did not change the culture of the union immediately, radicals in the MCS pushed against the racism that stained its history. “Gradually, as Communists became the leading force in the union,” Bruce Nelson notes, “the MCS began admitting nonwhites,” and by “1950 the membership was approximately one-third white and 45 to 50% black, with the remaining 15 to 20% drawn from other minorities.”

Revels Cayton, a radical Black labor activist, was elected as the MCS’s representative to the Maritime Federation of the Pacific Coast—an organization founded in the wake of the 1934 strikes to bring together various maritime unions—alongside a leftist slate of candidates in 1937, ushering in a period of progressive politics for the MCS that brought it into closer alignment with the Communist Party. By the 1940s, the rank and file had elected many Communist leaders, and the union was positioned on the front lines of radical race, class, and sexual politics. It amended its constitution to ban racist hiring practices, aligned closely with other radicals seeking social transformation, and positioned itself at the vanguard of union-building efforts that advanced greater gender equality in the maritime industries.

Black leaders such as Cayton, a straight Communist who was also a vocal champion of gay MCS members, became notable spokespeople for antiracism, mobilizing members to see racism as a singular obstacle to working-class revolution and opening up the union to articulate a broader platform of resistance to various forms of hatred and bigotry. The MCS developed a reputation for attracting members whose transgressions crossed racial, political, and sexual boundaries. “On the San Francisco waterfront in 1941,” one member recalled, “the word was that the Marine Cooks and Stewards Union was a third red, a third black, and a third queer.”  Those categories sometimes overlapped: gay Black Communists joined the union, and members marginalized from normative strains in American society were often among the most militant. This is not to suggest that the union dispatched its entire racist history. In fact, many of the most desirable union jobs continued to go to white workers even during the union’s most radical period. Yet the perception that the union was deviating from stifling normativity in American society shaped the perspective of its members regardless of whether they themselves belonged to marginalized groups.

Stephen Blair, a gay radical MCS member in the 1940s, recalled the taunting by longshoremen that sometimes greeted cooks and stewards upon arriving back in port. “You should’ve heard them,” Blair recalled of one hostile reception after returning to the shore following a stint at sea; “they were like animals, the sons of bitches.” The cries Blair heard harked back to deep strains of American violence that touched on each of the associations drawn with the MCS: “Lynch the sons of bitches! Kill those commie cocksuckers! Look at that fruit!”  Racial, sexual, and political violence represented interwoven strands of rage that the MCS marshaled by developing radical policies, advocating militant politics, and acknowledging the multiple prongs of oppression confronting its membership. The union also invited these epithets by resisting racism, refusing to condemn its homosexual members, and aligning itself with Communists. The tendency of members to associate with the dispossessed rather than aspiring to respectability suggests how tightly deviant politics were stitched into the fabric of the union’s culture.

The racial politics of labor further infected the culture of the MCS in ways that amplified the union’s queer dimensions.

The labor movement had long maintained silence on matters concerning homosexuality, instead focusing energy on workplace matters that especially foregrounded salary, benefits, inequality, and safety issues. The MCS was unexceptional in this regard. Even though the union attracted a sizable gay membership and quietly sanctioned same-sex intimacy on the boats where these workers spent long periods at sea, homosexuality was not typically addressed in public. Instead, sexual dissidents affected the MCS in two key ways. First, members of the MCS who were attracted to the progressive politics within the union repurposed its radical rhetoric to address homosexuality, especially claiming the language of dignity and equality to advance positions advantaging gay members. These efforts in turn precipitated representations of homosexuality within the MCS that pitted less-radical unionists against their militant comrades, in the process bringing to the forefront sexual dimensions of labor that might otherwise have been foreclosed. Second, the open secret of MCS sexual dissidence opened the union to incorporating queer representations into the vernacular graphics of the union. MCS radicals produced representations of same-sex intimacy that o set depictions of proletarian perversion.

The National Union of Marine Cooks and Stewards was sometimes referred to as “Marine Cocksuckers and Fruits” by its own members—a campy play on the union’s name that highlighted the sexual behaviors (“cocksuckers”) and subcultural communities (“fruits”) that were trademarks of the maritime workers. The fact that the MCS was based in San Francisco added to its queer flavor: the free availability of sex brought throngs of homosexual workers to the Bay Area, many of whom found work on the city’s thriving waterfront.  As a port city with a sizable working-class population, San Francisco housed a vibrant leftist community that was particularly centered in the maritime trades. Though it was not the radical center that New York became in the 1930s, San Francisco hosted a series of important Communist-led general strikes in 1935 that offered a model for the nation’s radicalizing labor movement, and its working-class communities were known nationally for their leftist bent.

Though the MCS primarily organized men, the vigorous masculinity that was a hallmark of longshoremen was less instrumental to the work of cooks and stewards on boats departing from the Bay Area. The familiar history of gay men working in “feminine” jobs such as waiting tables, cooking, and cleaning was repeated on ocean liners, where cooks and stewards worked alongside ship mechanics and crews. When MCS efforts to secure women’s employment on ocean liners achieved greater success in the 1940s, women and men were revealed to possess similar abilities in occupations that became associated with an uncharacteristically visible gender neutrality.

The cramped sleeping quarters and pockets of privacy at sea also facilitated erotic intimacies. Whereas workers in most industries had to negotiate daily between their work and domestic lives, ocean liners required laborers to spend extended periods at sea, where they lived among their fellow workers. As Nayan Shah has described in a different context, homosocial labor that collapsed workplace and living quarters produced a form of intimacy that incubated sexual dissidence.  The unavailability of a range of normative sexual outlets on ocean liners facilitated sexual contact between male workers and introduced a specter of homosexuality that permeated the culture on ships.

Historians Jo Stanley and Paul Baker write that “for gay seafarers in the mid-20th century such vessels were one of the only places where they could be open about their homosexuality.”  Even on land, the argot of homosexual “cruising” tacitly acknowledged the quasi-utopian space for developing same-sex intimacy in seafaring culture. “Hello, sailor” became a recognizable camp entrée both on- and off- shore, turning on the open secret that men resorted to, or took advantage of the relaxed prohibitions on, same-sex intimacy during lengthy bouts at sea. Though sexual liaisons between men were often dismissed as situational, they also pushed against sexual identities that demanded a homo/hetero binary. The pressure to find sexual partners on boats created a curious form of visibility for those who sought to make their sexual availability known, effectively shifting the coded performances governing everyday life once a ship departed from shore. Ocean liners represented spaces where rules for sexual contact were rewritten even when homosexuality was officially prohibited, and homosexual contact was widely available to those who sought sex between men.

The racial politics of labor further infected the culture of the MCS in ways that amplified the union’s queer dimensions. Black workers in San Francisco were increasingly organized between 1920 and 1940. Los Angeles eclipsed San Francisco as home to California’s largest Black population, still relatively small by national standards, but a rich history of cultivating Black institutions and progressive race politics shaped the Bay Area’s political and cultural landscape. San Francisco became especially amenable to the wave of Black radicalism sweeping across the United States in the early decades of the 20th century. The formation of the CMBA had represented an important moment when Black workers organized to compete with white unions. By the 1920s, both the NAACP and the Universal Negro Improvement Association had San Francisco branches, and the Communist Party had a growing presence in Black neighborhoods. As in most American cities, Black San Franciscans were disproportionately poor and working-class. Consequently, they were particularly drawn to movements calling for racial and economic justice. Left-wing political parties and radical labor unions appealed to Black residents who were shut out of mainstream unions and liberal political organizations that discouraged Black workers from joining their ranks. The Communist Party’s outspoken antiracism spoke directly to Black workers.

The overlapping realities of Black, gay, and radical San Francisco converged in the post-1934 MCS. Drawing on his deep knowledge of the Black organizing and radical labor movement, Revels Cayton articulated an explicit form of deviant politics. “If you let them red-bait,” Cayton recalled, “they’ll race bait, and if you let them race-bait, they’ll queen-bait. These are all connected, and �ٳ󲹳�’s why we have to stick together.” Paul Brownlee, an MCS worker, further articulated the stakes of deviant politics: “If you were in the Marine Cooks and Stewards, you were automatically gay. So fuck you!—we didn’t pay any attention to that.”

The deviant practices of interracial organizing, Communist association, and homosexual intimacy marginalized MCS workers to such a degree that respectability was hardly operative, impelling a movement toward militancy that capitalized on the organizing potential of dispossession. “Merchant seamen were considered trash! We were considered outcasts,” Stephen Blair recalled. The MCS “was a place where you lifted your head out of that sewer and said, God, I can make it this day.”

This excerpt from by Aaron S. Lecklider (University of California Press, 2021) appears with permission of the publisher.

In their new book, No More Police: A Case for Abolition, longtime police and prison abolitionists Andrea J. Ritchie and Mariame Kaba explore the meaning behind “defund the police,” and how activists are working to realize it. Both Ritchie and Kaba are nationally recognized experts on policing and criminalization, and co-founders of , an initiative that challenges the carceral state.

Ritchie recently spoke with YES! Racial Justice Editor Sonali Kolhatkar about how racial capitalism requires policing in an unequal society, how police foster violence rather than public safety, and how communities across the U.S. are successfully pushing to defund law enforcement.

This interview has been edited for clarity.

Sonali Kolhatkar: The idea of “defund the police” was not new in 2020, it was only new to the mainstream press and to politicians. We know that the idea of defunding the police goes back a few years, but the idea of abolishing the carceral state as a whole goes back decades, right?

Andrea Ritchie: Absolutely. I think that certainly the notion of defunding police gained a great deal more traction over the last couple of years, but it is something that can be traced back. Angela Davis, for instance—who’s a leading Black feminist abolitionist who’s inspired both Mariame [Kaba] and I in this work—traces, in some ways, the conversation back to W.E.B. Du Bois’ call to finish the unfinished work of the abolition of slavery, and establishing an abolition democracy, which would be one that would undo the vestiges of slavery and redistribute wealth resources and power in such a way as to rectify that, and to correct it and heal from it, transform it in our society.

And in many ways, the call to defund police grows from that. It’s a call to take resources, power, and legitimacy away from institutions rooted in anti-Blackness, in racial capitalism, and essentially in death-making—policing, punishment, surveillance, and exile—and reinvest them in the rebuilding of the commons, of a society built around the notion of the common good, of everyone’s needs being met as needs and not through distribution that amounts to policing.

So, I think that the focus on police and prisons as part of that movement came about in the ’90s, as more and more and more funding was being taken—stolen—from education, from social programs, from common goods, from social services, from public parks, from libraries, etc., and poured increasingly into policing, prisons, and immigration enforcement. And as that trend has skyrocketed, so has resistance to it, and so has it spread across the country.

Kolhatkar: So, when the rallying cry of “defund the police” in 2020 was met with opposition, that was the year of the presidential election. We had then-candidate Joe Biden saying he was absolutely not in favor of defunding police. And this was where the mainstream establishment drew the line, saying, “Yes, we’re all for racial justice, yes, Black Lives Matter, but certainly we ��Dz�’t want to defund the police.” And then this year we saw the most horrifying example that we could imagine of how police ��Dz�’t equal safety when we saw the mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas. Was that a turning point for this notion that police are central to public safety, when police did nothing for over an hour as babies were being shot?

Ritchie: The question we opened the book with is, “What is the moment when you began to question the violence of policing?” And there have been so many moments. [Uvalde] was a horrifying one that certainly drew a lot of people into the conversation who maybe had been hesitant to enter it before. And there have been many more, and there are many more every single day. Some gain more national traction and prominence, and others ��Dz�’t.

But it’s a daily practice that less than half of survivors of gender-based violence ��Dz�’t turn to the police because of the violence and criminalization that [police] perpetrate, and also because [police] fail to prevent, interrupt, or heal from violence. And so �ٳ󲹳�’s kind of a daily horror: that more than half of survivors of violence aren’t able or willing to avail themselves of the thing that is increasingly getting the resources to address the harms they’re experiencing. That’s sort of a quiet Uvalde, right?

Then, there’s the daily spectacular forms of violence, some of which gain national attention and some ��Dz�’t, that keep making the case for folks.

So, that is actually how we open the book, by inviting folks to think about the moment in which, for them, the violence of policing and its equation with public safety was ruptured. And then [we] invite them into a conversation about what that rupture makes possible in terms of the imagination of what could be, in terms of creating safer, more just, thriving, and sustainable communities.

And the point you make about the politicians around defund is really important, because defund [the police] is a very concrete demand. It asks them to put their money where their mouth is and to go beyond platitudes in Kente cloth, to actually making material change that will end the violence—the anti-Black violence, the anti-Indigenous, the anti-migrant, the settler colonial racial capitalist violence—that is policing, and shift resources in a way that undermines the accumulation of wealth and promotes the redistribution of wealth. So, of course, they ��Dz�’t want to do that, and �ٳ󲹳�’s why there’s been such a powerful and intense backlash against the demand, which, actually, as we argue in the book, is a demonstration of its power.

Kolhatkar: Those who defend police funding might admit that police are often violating their own ideals, that they are often the perpetrators of violence. But their “solution” is to reform the police. �±�’v�� seen years of reform policies, like outfitting cops with body cameras and creating citizen commissions that oversee police. How do you take on the reformists in your book, No More Police?

Ritchie: The first thing we do is take apart the word “reform.” Mariame [Kaba] always invites us to write the word reform in a hyphenated way, re-form, because �ٳ󲹳�’s what you’re doing. You’re re-forming the same thing into a new shape with the same purpose.

One of the things we did at —which was also another brilliant idea of thousands that come out of Mariame [Kaba]’s head—was to create a series of posters in which we, and other scholars and organizers, many of whom are cited or uplifted in the book, define policing in a sentence. Because at its core, what reform misapprehends is what police are. They’re not broken, they’re not rogue. They’re not in need of a policy reform or a new rule or more intense discipline or more intense regulation through civil litigation. They’re doing exactly what they were set up to do, and they’re doing it very well.

And [police] are clear that the rules aren’t for them. What they are charged with doing is maintaining the existing social order—and politicians will give them free rein, with the occasional exception, to sort of make it look like the system’s working to do exactly that. To use untold violence, criminalization, suffering, and pain and punishment in order to do that.

And so, the reform chapter [of our book] really lays that out, lays out what policing is, which is what Alyxandra Goodwin of the calls police—the muscle of racial capitalism.

I talk about [how] police are violence, not safety. Mariame Kaba talks about how police are set up to … manage the conditions that racial capitalism creates. There’s so many ways to talk about what policing is, and �ٳ󲹳�’s what we get at in the reform chapter, [which] is really saying you can’t reform something �ٳ󲹳�’s doing exactly what it was meant to do.

And [we] also point out that if you need further proof of that, you can look to the last century of attempts to minimize the harms of policing, reduce the harms, make it do what we hope it could do, while taking away its more harmful aspects.

And each of them [has] failed. And sometimes, they take technological forms. We think, oh, tech will save us—like the body cameras or the tasers—and we find they just keep reproducing the same patterns. And that, to us, is clear evidence that �ٳ󲹳�’s what policing is. We can’t keep throwing good money after bad, and trying to recuperate an institution that has been death-making since its inception.

Kolhatkar: Let’s focus on the notion of racial capitalism, which I think is so central to this topic, and you take it on so beautifully in your book No More Police. The word “defund” itself gets to the heart of that—taking money away from police and putting it back into the things that foster public safety so that we ��Dz�’t need police. Because currently, as it stands, you have a society where wealth keeps flowing upwards, and to quell the unrest among the masses, police are deemed “necessary.” That is an analysis that we almost never get in the mainstream media, where you might get critiques of capitalism, and you might get critiques of police, but you rarely get critiques that connect the two.

Ritchie: We are students of Ruth Wilson Gilmore, of Angela Davis, of Robin D.G. Kelley, of so many people who have made those clear connections. And they are definitely our touchstones among many. And many scholars and organizers in and have historically made those connections. The Black Panthers made those connections. They’re also part of the origin story of “defund” demands. So are incarcerated people who in the ’70s were calling for the abolition of the judicial-prison-parole-industrial complex.

And so, we learn from people who are directly targeted by racial capitalism. We learn from Angela Davis, who says that criminalization and prisons are designed to hide the effects of racial capitalism. We learn from Ruth Wilson Gilmore, who says capitalism is consistently trying to resolve crises of its own creation, and criminalization is one of the primary ways that it does so.

We also talk a lot in the book about the current manifestation of racial capitalism—neoliberalism—which is essentially the opposite of defund [the police] right? [Neoliberalism] is defunding education, social services, public housing, libraries, hospitals, health care, common good, public good of any kind, resources for people in need of any kind—and [it] funnels those [funds] to capital and then criminalizes people who are trying to survive under those increasingly desperate conditions.

That is at the core of the analysis of No More Police. And then where that takes us is [to ask the question], what kind of society, what forms of governance are the antithesis to the defunding of the commons, and the funding—and increasingly more and more voracious pouring of even pandemic relief funds—into the coffers and pockets of police and prisons and surveillance and borders?

And we [think the answer to that question is] a refunding of the commons. And �ٳ󲹳�’s what the demand to defund police is: We want to take money away from death-giving institutions and pour them into life-giving institutions, and we want to do that in a way that doesn’t reenact and reaffirm policing in new ways, in the ways that social welfare programs, social work, or public health and medical treatment can so often do so.

It’s really about reimagining: What is the form of society, what is the form of sociology, what is the economic system, what is the form of governance that we are looking to create that will enact our liberation dreams, that will make our hopes for a society in which everyone has everything that they need to reach their highest human potential?

What’s going to make that possible? Defund the police is definitely the first step. It’s certainly not the last, but it’s a clear step in that direction. And that, I think, is the power of the demand.

Kolhatkar: When the mass racial justice protests happened in 2020 in the wake of George Floyd’s killing in Minneapolis, the Minneapolis City Council started to consider the demand to defund the police. And if you just read the mainstream press or the right-wing press, Minneapolis defunded its police. What actually happened?

Ritchie: I do think what’s important about that is that the stories that are told about our work and what’s happening … are manipulated to serve the re-legitimization of policing. I think 2020 saw one of the greatest crises of legitimacy for policing in the United States in decades, and there was a swift and powerful and ongoing backlash that is fueled by the mainstream media in the same way that Ida B. Wells talks about the mainstream media being accomplices to lynching.

There’s a way in which the mainstream media continues to fuel this backlash, to attempt to recuperate police, to blame violence in our communities not on lack of things that we need to survive, but instead on individuals and on low police morale, and the absence of police in some way. So, I think we need to really deconstruct those narratives, and there’s a lot in No More Police to help us do that. There’s a lot in the study and discussion guide that came out with it.

I think the story of Minneapolis is central to this, and it didn’t start on May 25, 2020. And we’re so grateful that , one of the key organizations that was at the epicenter of that uprising, [was] willing to write a foreword, really laying out what they had been doing for years beforehand—they had succeeded in defunding the police department [by] over a million dollars in 2018—and then the mayor came back and re-funded it.

So, this was an ongoing struggle that was going on in the city. It wasn’t just that this demand came out of a moment. It came out of a struggle, and it came out of organizing, and it came out of political education, and it came out of political analysis and growth around what the impact of reform had been in Minneapolis.

You know Minneapolis [police] had adopted the vast majority of the gold standard reforms, best practices promoted by the Department of Justice, by everyone else. Derek Chauvin had been trained to not do exactly what he did when he kneeled on George Floyd’s neck for nine minutes. So, [the Minneapolis Police Department] had all the policies, all the training, and that still happened.

And so [the movement to defund the police in Minneapolis] was really an opportunity … that was seeded by many years of organizing and political education and analysis, and [Miski Noor and Kandace Montgomery of Black Visions] lay that out really beautifully.

We also talk about that evolution in the main text. So, what’s happened in Minneapolis has been really beautiful, that people have moved from that moment to engaging community members through surveys, through people’s movement assemblies, through ongoing conversations, to really ask people what they need to feel safe.

There have been many experiments and practices. There are groups like and the and who are really thinking and practicing what it looks like to create safety without police. A lot of their work is documented at if folks want to check it out.

And then [there’s] the . Black Visions put out a report on a series of conversations that happened in 2020, and they went back for a budget fight in 2021. In addition, [they fought for] a that would have unshackled the city from a mandatory level of a police budget that a police union fought for in 1961 to keep their jobs when there was also a crisis of legitimacy of policing at the time.

And so there’s been so much work happening on the ground in ways that are less visible than the , but certainly equally revolutionary in the sense that they’re really engaging people in conversation in Minneapolis about what safety looks like. And the city council has come and gone with the headlines in some respects, some folks have stayed in the struggle, others have sort of blown with the political winds. But we know �ٳ󲹳�’s how organizing works, and the key to organizing is building power to make it impossible for people to ignore your demands. We did that in 2020, and people are continuing to do that across the country.

Kolhatkar: Are there other cities in the country where you see activists successfully chipping away at the funding that police, the carceral state, and the prison system get, and putting that into the things that foster public safety and funding for the things that we actually need? Are there success stories at the micro level that we can look to as we imagine a world without police?

Ritchie: There are so many that we chronicle in No More Police and so many that didn’t make it into those pages but exist. And you can find out more about all of them at , which is a site that gathers together information from cities and towns and locations across the country doing this work.

And I will say that the biggest success is that cities and communities across the country engaged in similar conversations to the ones that Black Visions and and many other groups in Minneapolis engaged in, around what safety looks like in communities. , , and many [other] groups across the country engaged in community conversations about what safety requires that didn’t necessarily make headlines.

Some cities and organizers were successful in kind of commandeering, taking over, and mobilizing city-announced public safety task forces to really build out recommendations that would pour resources into communities and meeting community needs. [This happened] in Austin, [Texas,] in Oakland, [California,] and Durham, [North Carolina,] for instance. And in all of those cities, organizers are still very much contending for power around implementation of those recommendations—funding of those initiatives, etc.—with varying degrees of success.

And I think the success across the board is that, whereas pre-2020, it’s not like we weren’t fighting police budgets, but essentially, city policymakers would feel empowered to just write a blank check to the cops whenever they came and demanded money. Now, they feel like they have to justify what they’re doing, because they know that the organizers are going to come for them. There’s billboards up in L.A., there’s billboards up in Milwaukee today, talking about how much money is going to police and how much money is going to other things. That wasn’t something they had to contend with before, and �ٳ󲹳�’s the power that we’ve built. So �ٳ󲹳�’s really important.

I do want to lift up Seattle, which is sort of a sleeper in terms of people across the country not paying attention. They’re the only city �ٳ󲹳�’s defunded their police department two years in a row, that secured millions of dollars for community safety projects and millions more for participatory budgeting process. The city is dragging its feet on implementing that now.

Kolhatkar: And when you say “defund” you mean taking some money out of the police budget, not closing down the police department, right?

Ritchie: They have taken significant amounts of money out of the police budget. They’ve also taken 911 operators out of the police purview. They have taken some other functions out of the police department. Also, Minneapolis did the same, taking 911 out of the police department, which makes more [things] possible.

If the people answering the phone aren’t the police, they might offer you some options that aren’t the police, and might be safer and actually meet your needs. I think Atlanta has been very successful in doing that. The has now created an option with 311, that you can call non-police responders who are community responders, who are people who are going to offer folks a range of options rather than a cage. There are places everywhere where these things are happening.

Kolhatkar: Denver, Colorado, has a really interesting to calling the police, right?

Ritchie: What’s interesting about Denver is that—and this is true across the country too—is that when the cops see something that looks like it’s successful or is going to be successful in taking away some of their power or resources, they will set up a competing program. In Denver, because 911 was taken out of the police department, they conscripted the 911 operators to make sure they got the calls for their co-response program, as opposed to the non-police community response program.

Interrupting Criminalization documented that in a report based on talking to local organizers that you can find on our site, “.” That is also the thing that we need to pay attention to: The more successful we are, the more the police are going to fight back viciously, with fear-mongering narratives, literally stealing calls from people, literally undermining violence interruption programs by fomenting violence.

And by not answering calls for help and then blaming “defund” instead of blaming the fact that they are just not answering calls because they’re trying to make a point.

And continuing to police and criminalize poverty instead. Seattle police have been doing almost daily sweeps of unhoused people in communities and then claiming that they ��Dz�’t have the resources to answer domestic violence calls. Well, first of all, the legislation told you which ones to prioritize, and second of all, what you’re doing makes it clear … that you’re acting based on what your function is as opposed to what you claim it is.

Kolhatkar: Thank you so much for joining me. Best of luck to you and your co-author Mariame Kaba with the book.

Ritchie: Thank you so much for having me, it’s always lovely to speak with you.

I was incarcerated for more than eight years in Florida. I’ve been free for 18 months and just recently got the bug to vote again. Problem was, I didn’t know if I was eligible to register. I wasn’t debriefed on the matter when I left prison, and I’d heard different things from different people. Some said: “Felons can’t vote in Florida. Ever.” While others claimed: “You can vote as long as you’re done with your sentence.”������������

I needed guidance. And clearly I wasn’t the only one.  

A new proposal by the Florida Division of Elections seeks to end confusion around restoration of voting rights. If passed, the update to its existing advisory opinion process would provide people with felony convictions the chance to request a formal opinion stating definitively whether their voting rights have been restored. In so doing, it will clarify a complicated state statute that governs the process of reinstating voting rights for formerly incarcerated people. 

“We wanted to figure out a simple question: Whose job is it to determine voter eligibility?” Desmond Meade, executive director of the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition, told Spectrum News 13 in August in support of the proposal. 

Confusion Over the Law

The state statute in question, SS 98.0751, dictates that for all crimes other than murder or sex offenses, restoration of voting rights is contingent upon sentence completion, including parole or probation and the satisfaction of all court-ordered fines and fees. People convicted of murder or sex offenses must seek additional permission in the form of clemency from a state-appointed board.

But this alone doesn’t definitively answer the question of eligibility. Many people are not even aware of all the fines they owe post-incarceration, let alone the offense-specific guidelines laid out in the statute.   

Meade said the proposed process, including a special form, would affirmatively address these issues. He added, “The other thing, which I think is huge, is that it provides protection for people against” being arrested for voter fraud. 

Forty-one formerly incarcerated people were arrested in 2022 and 2023 for voter fraud in Florida, according to Southern Poverty Law Center. At least some of them had attempted to vote based on honest misunderstandings of the state statute—yet their prosecutions proceeded. 

In response, some critics charged that Gov. Ron DeSantis and state Republicans were deliberately suppressing the voting rights of felons. 

“Instead of fulfilling its role to enable Floridians to vote, the state has made it more difficult, which is anti-democratic,” said Courtney O’Donnell, a senior staff attorney for voting rights with the Southern Poverty Law Center, in an article posted on the group’s site.

Florida does indeed make it hard for felons to vote. A 2023 fact sheet by The Sentencing Project states that Florida disenfranchises nearly 1.5 million people with felony convictions, more than any other state in the nation.

A History of Controversy

The latest saga in the battle over felony disenfranchisement in Florida began heating up in 2018. 

That’s the year voters in the state approved Amendment 4, which automatically restored voting rights to anyone with felony convictions—minus those convicted of murder or sex offenses—upon release from prison. DeSantis opposed the measure. Not even a year later, thanks to legislative support by his fellow Republicans, DeSantis signed SS 98.0751 into law.   

Legal battles ensued. Opponents of the bill, including the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), said it effectively instituted a “poll tax,” whereby only those who could pay could vote, echoing similar attempts from the Jim Crow era. 

DeSantis said the measure was a safeguard against giving “violent felons” certain societal benefits “without regard to the wishes of the victims.”&�Բ�����; 

Ultimately, the fight reached the U.S. Supreme Court, which in 2020 decided against intervening in a lower-court ruling that upheld the new law. In a dissent joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that the law “prevents thousands of otherwise eligible voters from participating in Florida’s primary election simply because they are poor.”

Moving Forward

SS 98.0751 is the law of the land for the foreseeable future. In my case, once I did my homework, the registration process ultimately went smoothly. However, I credit this to my relative privilege in being resourceful enough to conduct such research and pay my fines, coupled with my not being convicted of murder or a sex crime.  Sadly, many others aren’t so lucky.   

The special opinion process proposed by the Florida Department of Elections is not expected to go into effect before the Oct. 7 deadline to register to vote in the fall election, according to CBS News Miami. 

For more information on voting in Florida, visit the website of the supervisor of elections in your county or. You can also review this����from the ACLU of Florida.

The tiny Native American settlement is named after the sacred, 10,000-foot-high sandstone peak that dominates the craggy skyline. It has been inhabited for centuries. It is in one of the most remote parts of the Beehive State, and in turn, the entire continental United States.

“Everything on Navajo Mountain is scattered and isolated,” says Dalene Redhorse, who was born in the town of Mexican Waters, around 60 miles to the east. “There are many off-roads with just one house. It’s not like a city here. Everything takes time.”

Redhorse is one of two “addressing specialists” at the nonprofit who, since 2019, have been going door-to-door visiting every home in the western half of Utah’s San Juan County, which includes Navajo Mountain. Her goal: to connect off-the-grid residents with essential services that they have often been denied.

Across Navajo Nation—the largest and Native American reservation in the country, spanning and three states—formal street addresses are a rarity. Out of the more than 60,000 structures, fewer than 500 are on roads with names and house numbers, according to the .

The culture of the Navajo, who are also known as Diné, , but modern American governments have imposed a systematized, Western concept of territory onto these communities. This has effectively erased their holistic relationship with ancestral lands and created staggering inequality. More than of the Diné live in poverty, are unemployed, 60% lack broadband, and 40% ��Dz�’t have running water at home. Those structural issues played a role when Navajo Nation at one point reached (though it also achieved a far higher vaccination rate than the national average).

The Diné say they have suffered because fundamental services and amenities such as emergency healthcare, mail delivery, broadband internet, government-issued IDs, and the right to vote often require having a formally recognized address. 

“I had to describe landmarks to direct the ambulance,” says Gordon Folgheraiter, 66, recalling an incident when his brother once cut his head after falling off a truck in Navajo Mountain. “I said: ‘Go to the end of the highway, continue for two miles, pass a house on the left with a red roof, and then turn right,’” adds Folgheraiter, who was then told by the dispatcher to stand outside wearing bright clothing to flag down the vehicle.

But steps have tentatively been made in the right direction. Last year Folgheraiter had a bright blue plaque mounted on his front door after Redhorse visited. All of the 800 or so residents of Navajo Mountain now have one.

Each sign is embossed with a plus code (e.g., ) in bold white lettering. This acts as a physical confirmation of the home’s location for deliverers, emergency services, and visitors. These fixed, simplified, 10-digit versions of traditional geocoordinates pinpoint a location to within three square meters. 

The open-source Plus Code tool, developed by , allows codes to be generated anywhere on the globe and instantly located on Google Maps. “It helps everyone get on the same page,” says Patricia Blackhorn, chapter president of . “People can just look it up.”

The technology is simple, but the ability to easily communicate a location without a street address could have a transformative impact on the world’s most marginalized populations. Beyond the sparsely populated expanses of remote Utah, creating addresses for informal spaces could bring change to densely packed urban areas that also lack addresses, such as in Lagos, Delhi, and Rio de Janeiro. One billion people lived in informal settlements in 2018, , and by 2030 that number will triple.

The Rural Utah Project is focusing on Navajo Nation, where it worked to obtain buy-in from local officials. The project is also deploying plus codes in other San Juan County communities such as Bluff, Mexican Hat, and the White Mesa Ute Mountain Ute Reservation. Separately, plus code projects are at various stages of deployment by other organizations in dozens of other countries, including India, Egypt, and Brazil.

For Folgheraiter, it means he no longer has to drive 50 miles to the post office to pick up packages from certain delivery companies. In San Juan County, there are countless uses—to buy vehicles, to locate ceremonies in remote areas, and, as one young student needed: to prove her residency for in-state tuition rates. The uses plus codes for patient home visits, and during the pandemic they proved invaluable for delivering supplies to those in need.

In addition to the technology, another crucial ingredient has been painstaking human labor: Initially, Redhorse and her colleague spent months scouring satellite imagery on Google Maps, zooming in over the arid landscape to locate homes. They identified 5,600 potential structures across San Juan County, but when they went to confirm each one in person, which involved long days of driving (the county has fewer than two people per square mile on average), many turned out to be rocks or abandoned houses—only half were occupied homes.

During her visits, Redhorse explains to residents how to use plus codes with emergency services, and also updates household voter registration and provides nonpartisan information about elections. The Rural Utah Project identified voting as a key target because flawed registration of rural, remote households has had a significant impact on democratic rights of the Diné: Research by the nonprofit found 87.7% of Diné residents were registered by San Juan County at the wrong location and a quarter in the wrong . 

“That was a massive problem for democracy,” says TJ Ellerbeck, the organization’s executive director. “There had never been a Navajo majority on the County Commission even though there is a majority Navajo population in the county.”

Since plus codes were deployed in San Juan County, which now accepts them as a valid address for voter registration, democratic participation has reached historic highs. Analysis by the Rural Utah Project found turnout in majority Native precincts has rocketed from 52% in 2014 to 87.6% in 2020. Along the way, Willie Grayeyes and Kenneth Maryboy to form the first-ever Native American majority on the County Commission. Plus codes are considered a major factor in that rise, alongside the switch from mail-only voting and the , as well as a after a court ruled they were . 

While turnout dropped in 2022, a midterm election, it was still the highest-ever overall number of midterm Native votes cast in the county, only slightly behind the historic high of 2020’s presidential election.

Before plus codes, Grayeyes, who is a longtime resident of Navajo Mountain in Utah but was relying on an Arizona mailing address, was from the ballot after a complaint was filed against his residency eligibility. “I threw my hat into the ring and then sparks started flying,” says the 77-year-old, who helped establish the . “All this time, Native Americans have been disenfranchised and our lands have been taken,” he says. “But we won. We were rewarded for persisting.”

Despite the benefits plus codes have brought, however, they have limits. While UPS and FedEx recognize them, the United States Postal Service (USPS) and Amazon ��Dz�’t. For Diné representatives, there’s exasperation at a system that continues to disenfranchise them. “The norm does not factor in places such as Navajo Nation,” says Leonard Gorman, executive director at . “It impedes our people’s human rights.”

A spokesperson for the USPS said plus codes are “not consistent with the sorting and delivery operations used by the Postal Service” since the company is limited to “what is considered a traditional address format.” Amazon said in an emailed statement that it uses the USPS “as our source of truth for U.S. address information.”

In addition, the broader issue of mapping Indigenous lands has led to skepticism due to the historic and ongoing . “Some residents have been worried about being numbered, placed, exposed,” says Redhorse. “Even my grandfather used to say: ‘Don’t let the white man map your homes.’”

But plus codes are only given out to those who want one, adds Redhorse, and increasingly Diné are proactively reaching out to request them. 

Google developed the open-source software so anyone can generate a plus code for any location in the world. It’s free and instantaneous and no data is collected. The Rural Utah Project is using the tool (along with its ground-truthing teams) to confirm the location of homes and install the signs. 

Google says the company’s only involvement is to provide the signs for free. “We wouldn’t have designed Plus Codes if it wasn’t open source,” says Doug Rinckes, its creator. “An address is official, but nobody owns it. For me, an address is something that you are assigned, but not something you have to pay for.”

The is taking a different, longer-term approach: naming the streets. A team of three is working with the reservation’s chapters to create road names, which must be translated from Navajo into English—Naatsis’áán means Navajo Mountain, for example—before they can produce street signs. About 20 of the 110 chapters of the territory have put up signs since 2010. 

“Plus codes are only a supplement to what we’re doing,” says M.C. Baldwin, who oversees the authority’s rural addressing activities. “The part �ٳ󲹳�’s missing is the physical address for the people that live out there. If we had a physical address for every house on Navajo Nation, it would be postal-compliant.”

So while Baldwin’s efforts and plus codes are making a huge difference for some residents and their representation, these solutions only touch on a fraction of the stark challenges across Navajo Nation: limited cell signals and grid electricity, , and the threats of infrastructure development. But a new generation of Diné sees the technological advance as an opportunity to empower themselves and transform their homeland for the better. 

Shandiin Herrera, 26, lives in Monument Valley, a red-sand desert region along the Colorado Plateau marked by enormous sandstone buttes. After a lifetime without internet at home, she used her plus code last year to sign up for the satellite-powered internet provider, .

“I tried every other internet service, but none of it worked because I needed to enter an address,” says Herrera. “But I just tried my plus code on Starlink and it zoomed straight into my address. I was so excited. I can even watch Netflix now.”

A public policy graduate of Duke University and a fellow with , Herrera has also used the tool for the betterment of her community. When the pandemic hit, Herrera became the leader of the Utah Navajo Nation COVID-19 response. Her team delivered food, medicine, and PPE to more than 1,500 households.

“The biggest challenge was finding people’s homes,” she says. “We’d hear: ‘Take the third dirt road, go past the brown house, and look for a place with a red car outside.’ For us, plus codes were easy. It was a luxury. But not everyone has one yet.”

For now, though, Herrera feels that after years witnessing the maddening difficulty in tracking down homes on the reservation, and often having lost ambulances turn up at her house asking for directions, the way forward might finally have arrived. 

“People always told me you need to get off the Rez to be successful,” says Herrera, leaning against her wood-paneled home; a tiny speck on the sandy horizon. “But I’ve always been proud of being Diné. I believe we can rewrite our own future.”

Most Western diners know Jamaican food for its bold flavors like “jerk” and a heavy emphasis on meat: namely, goat, beef, and chicken. However, Rastafarians (“Rastas” for short) have been promoting vegan lifestyles for nearly a century. Beyond stereotypes of lively men in dreadlocks smoking marijuana, Rastafarianism is a spiritual practice rich with political ideology and a reverence for the Earth. And their veganism is part of a broader belief in Black sovereignty, health, and ecological harmony. 

Last year, Americans were reported to follow a plant-based diet. And Black Americans are to be vegan than non-Black Americans. As the market for vegan food swells, a deeper understanding of Black plant-based food histories  becomes even more crucial. 

There are signs of progress: Black vegan chefs plant-based cooking from the African diaspora, and vegan influencers of color are about cultural appropriation. As more consumers awareness of diverse vegan foodways can help to decolonize the movement and be true to its diverse, historical roots. 

Rastafarians have been promoting vegan lifestyles for nearly a century

Ital is Vital

The 1930s brought widespread disenfranchisement of Jamaica’s peasant class, and Rastafarianism arose in opposition to British colonial control. Heavily influenced by the Black nationalist beliefs of Marcus Garvey, Rastafarians then and now reject the hegemonic power structures that contribute to Black oppression. 

Garvey, a respected activist throughout the Caribbean, prophesied that a king crowned in the East would bring redemption for the Black race. When Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie rose to power in 1930, fledgling Rastas believed him to be the Black messiah. The fulfillment of this prophecy became the foundation for the Rastafari movement, even taking its name from Emperor Selassie’s title before he was crowned, “Ras Tafari.”

Religion, culture, and political dissent converge in the Rasta worldview. Leonard P. Howell, an early Rastafari leader, drew inspiration from the Hindu practices of Indian laborers brought to Jamaica, to promote ital living. 

“Ital comes from the [] word for ‘vital,’ ” says Qulen Wright, a Rasta chef and co-founder of , a restaurant in New Haven, Connecticut. “It’s based on livity: an energy granted by God (Jah), flowing through all people and living things.” Those who eat ital avoid processed foods and meat (considered “dead” food) because it lacks the livity so fundamental to Rasta spirituality. Rasta communities created their own dialect of English, “” as another means to resist the language of their colonizers.

This is why Rastas typically wear their hair in dreadlocks: to celebrate the strength of Black hair, and because cutting one’s hair—thus, tampering with the body’s natural state—impedes livity. In 1981, Bob Marley, perhaps the most famous Rastafarian, died after refusing a because it violated Rastarian beliefs around livity. Not all practicing Rastas are as strict as Marley. groups, known as mansions, have their own tenets, but this notion of livity unites Rastas around the world. 

As Jamaican chef Tamika Francis, founder of , a Boston-based culinary startup, explains, “[Rastafarians] were always concerned with what we now call ‘,’ and are mindful about food production without sacrificing flavor.” Stews and soups are central to ital cuisine, and traditionally slow-cooked in clay pots with yams, potatoes, gungo (pigeon) peas, kidney beans, pumpkin, callaloo (a leafy green native to the Caribbean), aromatics (because strict Rastas forgo salt), and central to it all: fresh coconut milk. 

One-pot meals allow Rasta communities to feed many people at low cost, and harken back to cooking practices common during slavery. “Enslaved people had to throw something on the fire and go back to work, so high-nutrient ingredients were essential,” Francis continues. “Ital food might look really simple, but it’s so intentional.”

Land, Labor, and Liberation

Rastas have a complex relationship with sovereignty, largely because of the tumult surrounding the in the Caribbean in 1834 and subsequent years of British rule. As Howell and other Rasta leaders grew a following among Jamaica’s peasant class in the 1930s, cities saw a gradual exile of Rastas to rural parishes. 

From the beginning, colonial powers viewed Rastafarian anti-capitalist beliefs as a threat and those who openly identified as such. To escape persecution, Rastas fled to the mountains, where they could more freely access land and practice self-governance. The cultivation of ganja afforded them economic freedom and supported their ritualized use of the herb for spiritual enlightenment, which is why Rastafarianism today is so often associated with marijuana. 

The kitchen gardens and multi-acre plots now common among Rasta communities are remnants of provision grounds—hilly land unsuitable for growing cash crops that plantation owners set aside for use by the people they enslaved. Ital eating calls for a return to this form of self-sufficiency, and a diet rich in vegetables and foraged foods typical for newly freed Afro-Caribbeans. 

Decolonizing veganism—overturning its whitewashed history—is a critical act of resistance.

With imported foreign food remaining heavily subsidized today, Rasta farmers keep organic, locally grown food alive. Using permaculture principles and rain-fed agriculture, remote Rastafarian communities cultivate food for families and earn extra income from hosting the occasional eco-tourist.

The Rastafarian movement is remarkable for its anticipation of modern concerns around food justice. Independent Rasta communities often boycott commercial grocery stores and actively combat food insecurity faced by their poorest residents. “A Rasta food stand might sell a meal to locals for $7, but charge twice the price to tourists,” says Akeia de Barros Gomes, Ph.D., a cultural anthropologist-turned-curator at Mystic Seaport, who worked with Rasta communities in the Virgin Islands. “The poorest locals ate for free because their meals were subsidized by foreign capital from tourists.”

Lest we confuse Rastas with idyllic hippielike figures forsaking the modern world, the Rastafari movement has clear political aims. While the movement’s early leaders advocated for repatriation to Ethiopia, its contemporary focus is liberation for Afro-Caribbeans and all Black people: a means to resist the poor-quality food imported from Western nations and to reconnect the formerly enslaved with a lineage of eating in sync with the Earth. 

Decolonizing veganism—overturning its whitewashed history—is a critical act of resistance. Progress happens when more scholars, influencers, and food critics of color reclaim their plant-based food histories—unlocking more inclusive possibilities for all diners.

While Congress is continually being called to act, you can take other kinds of actions to help immigrants in transition, in detention, and in crisis. Here are 20 ways.

1. March and protest. outside of an army base and former internment camp at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, where migrant children will likely soon be housed, setting an example of how people can show up and speak out.

2. The  event aims to “bring thousands of Americans to detention camps across the country, into the streets and into their own front yards to protest the inhumane conditions faced by refugees.”

3. Helping is one of the fastest ways to help those who have been separated from their children, advocates say. paid if the person shows up for their court appearance.

4. Help pay for immigration counsel. Find organizations by Googling “indigent immigration defense” along with your state’s name.

5. Host an asylum-seeker or refugee in your home, with a group like .

6. Immigration is federal law, but all politics are local. Tell your local law enforcement and government officials not to partner with the Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials for raids or any other purpose.

7. People of significant financial means could play a more active role funding nonprofit organizations that directly serve immigrants and advocate for legal reforms. Philanthropists can fund case management, human rights watchdog groups, research that drives policy, or higher education programs and scholarships for social workers who specialize in immigrant support services. The National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy has several articles on .

8. Support local and national groups working to help immigrants, like , , and the . Local groups often hold community demonstrations and provide sanctuary, transportation, court accompaniment, and resettlement programs to immigrant populations, and they are in need of volunteers. Contact a local group and ask them what they need most.

9. Create a fundraiser. Immigrant Families Together offers a long list of on its site, ranging from movie nights to silent auctions.

10. ActBlue Charities is a registered organization formed to democratize charitable giving. It provides a list of reputable organizations that work to .

11. Volunteer locally to mentor and tutor English-language learners. By teaching English as a second language, you can help people navigate American culture more successfully.

12. Join a pen pal or visitation program for detained immigrants, such as the ones run by of New Jersey and New York.

13. Immigrant-focused groups are creating resources to if confronted by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials. Learn these rules and share them widely in your neighborhood and online.

14. Use art, music, social media, conversation, and other expressions and connections to draw attention to these issues.

15. If you work in education, create school curricula to help young people learn about human and, specifically, immigrant rights. offers learning materials that facilitate the exploration of topics like race and immigration in the classroom and “explore the value of a diverse society.”

16. Donate air miles. is one group that contributes airline miles and funds to people in border shelters. This enables those who have achieved asylum to leave and makes space for new arrivals.

17. Donate household goods. Organizations like the and give people the basic supplies they need to establish a new life in the U.S.

18. If you can go to the border, you can join many others taking direct action there, from and lawyers to those leaving in the desert for immigrants.

19. Explore how we got here. To learn more about how the U.S. government can respond to the border crisis and the root causes of migration and displacement in the Northern Triangle (the Central American countries Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala feeding much of the migration), check out this from Human Rights First and other organizations. A few of the recommendations for the U.S. are “restoring timely and orderly” asylum processing at ports of entry and an increase in permitted refugees, immigration judges, and case management services for immigrants (such as the Family Case Management Program, which was in 2017).

20. Finally, do like the current Shut Down Child Prison Camps Act and Families Not Facilities Act. Or tell your senators and representatives to to the government agencies responsible for the rise in detentions.

What other actions can you take? Remember to practice self-care and do what you can, today.

Thwarting Donald Trump’s war on immigrants and dismantling the vast deportation machine is possible. It won’t be easy, but it has to be done.

Simply put, Trump’s plan is ethnic cleansing. His actions go far beyond snatching from parents fleeing violence-ravaged countries.

From creating a taskforce to U.S. citizens of citizenship so they can be deported to severely curtailing asylum claims to his Muslim travel ban, Trump has made no secret of his disdain and contempt for people who, frankly, don’t look like him. He even traffics in the language of ethnic cleansing— of illegal immigrants who seek to “pour into and infest our country.”

Momentum is building around a movement to slow the president’s deplorable treatment of immigrants, including blameless children. have been going on for weeks. Workers are rather than aid in deportations and are exposing the appalling conditions in the . Major airlines have refused to transport the seized children. An ongoing blockade in Portland, Oregon, the main U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility and jail in the city, and a local organizing group has called for similar actions around the country. June 30 has been declared a national day of action under the slogan “” to protest the Trump administration’s policies.

Stymieing Trump’s plan means throwing a lot of sand into the gears. Here are some actions you can take, whether from the comfort of your phone or at the front lines of this crisis.

• Think big, look to history and be strategic. The border is where powerful demonstrations can be mounted, as that’s where the Trump administration is manufacturing this crisis. U.S. border guards are fleeing extreme violence and poverty from countries like Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala from applying for asylum. Historically, images of peaceful activists confronting oppressive forces have swayed public opinion. In the 1960s, civil rights activists did that in Selma and Birmingham, Alabama. Youth marching on the Pentagon in 1967 catalyzed the anti-Vietnam War movement. In 2005, when the anti-Iraq War movement had seemingly fizzled out, Cindy Sheehan revived it. Her son had been killed in Iraq the previous year, and she held a vigil for weeks near President George W. Bush’s Texas ranch as he vacationed there. Her protest, which had extensive behind-the-scenes support, put his administration on the defensive and sealed the war as a lost cause.

• Be creative. Trump now wants to jail families indefinitely, . Using families and children in protests makes people confront the added brutality heaped on those fleeing persecution. In the U.S. Senate building, a dozen kids evoked by sitting in the rotunda wrapped in mylar blankets amid cages and surrounded by supporters. In Manhattan, took his newborn son to Trump Tower and stood silently with a sign reading, “Imagine your child being ripped from your arms.” In Philadelphia, protesters lined up near a fundraiser being hosted by Vice President Mike Pence. Hundreds of an airport to show support for immigrant children being snuck into the city to be held in detention. In Berkeley, a with an image of a shocked child was rearranged so it reads, “We Make Children Disappear — I.C.E.”

• In Portland, Oregon, a group called drew on the strategy of Occupy Wall Street to shut down the ICE facility and jail in the city. On June 17, activists established a round-the-clock camp outside ICE. They nonviolently blocked ICE’s facility, forcing it to close. The tactic is spreading, with plans for a outside the ICE office in Los Angeles. In New York, , “mothers with babies in arms have taken over the ninth floor of ICE’s NYC headquarters and are chanting ‘families and children deserve to be safe.’”

• Expose for-profit detention corporations. Private companies that run detention centers rake in more than a year to house immigrants. Many corporations are sensitive to public opinion. At Microsoft, employees wrote CEO Satya Nadella demanding the company end its contract with ICE. Publicize how these companies profit from and .

• Protest where you can. Prime spots are ICE offices, which are in every major city. Their facilities sometimes include jails to hold immigrants. , both for ICE and its “Enforcement and Removal Units” that carry out raids, arrests, and deportations. There are also scores of around the country, many now the site of regular protests already.

• Target mayor’s offices, state capitals, and governor’s mansions. Trump-branded properties are a great spot for protests. Local officials can do a lot to impede immigration enforcement, if they are pushed by well-organized protests with broad public support. Many mayors claim their city is a “sanctuary city” for immigrants, but have they prevented police from cooperating with ICE, including pulling out of Joint Terrorism Task Forces and mandating punishment for city workers caught giving information to ICE? Is your city providing free legal aid for immigrants caught up in the deportation machine? Are there laws to punish landlords and employers who threaten undocumented workers and tenants over their immigration status? Local officials have many tools at their disposal to hamper ICE, but even supportive ones need to be pushed.

• Vigils and demonstrations at border detention facilities, sit-ins, and blockades of vehicles transporting detained immigrants, peacefully confronting border guards all make for arresting visuals. Effective border protests need hundreds of people along with support for legal, logistics, media, transportation, food, water, housing and medical care. Big liberal organizations and unions can fund this. Crowdfunding can raise a lot of money fast. Those who can’t go to the border can support .

• Find out what Latino and immigrant rights groups are doing in your area and support those organizing against ICE and Trump with time, money, and amplification of their message and events. If you do protest outside of ICE facilities or immigrant prisons, make sure to coordinate with groups working on detention and in touch with detainees and their families. Closing a prison can have unintended consequences, such as forcing relatives and lawyers who traveled long distances and spent considerable sums to cancel their trips. Guards sometimes retaliate against prisoners inside when there is a protest outside.

• Dog politicians and candidates whenever and wherever you can and interrupt and disrupt Trump officials whenever and wherever possible. In Columbus, Ohio, protesters received national attention for by Pence, yelling, “Why are you ripping children from their families?”

• Put immigrants at the center. Find immigrants who can safely talk: “We are the caregivers, nurses, doctors. We grow your food, we harvest it, cook, serve it. We drive the trucks, work in the factories, repair your cars, build your homes.” Humanize immigrants, don’t just treat them as victims. Be aware many immigrants believe fervently in the American Dream. Meet people where they are, not where you want them to be.

• Keep your message clear and simple: “End separation, end detention of families. Let in asylum-seekers. Let in refugees. End the Muslim ban. Reinstate Temporary Protected Status. Legalize DACA and all immigrants. Defund ICE and border militarization. No funding for the wall. This is illegal under international law. It’s a crime against humanity. Stop the war on immigrants.”

• Invite politicians and elected officials to your events. You are more likely to attract them by promoting specific policies. Make them say exactly what they are going to do in front of the cameras and reporters. Make them commit to dismantling the entire deportation machinery that goes back to the Clinton administration.

• Use the media to your advantage. Trump’s actions are so appalling, the mainstream media are sympathetic to protests and are looking for good stories and visuals. Liberal groups, unions, and many veteran organizers have extensive lists of local reporters. Plan protests so that media have lead time, get help writing a press release, and cultivate sympathetic reporters. Create good visuals. When you protest, take lots of video and photos to use across social media.

• Practice nonviolence even if you are not a pacifist. Images of fighting or broken windows will be used to discredit movements. But times have also changed. With neo-Nazis and the “alt-right” in the streets, link up with self-defense groups who know how to confront the violent right. Just their presence can dissuade aggressive right-wingers.

• Don’t ignore history. Be aware how Trump is using children as hostages to push through horrendous immigration policies. Democrats are using the border crisis for electoral advantage, and the detention apparatus is bipartisan. But what is happening now is both qualitatively and quantitatively worse than anything that happened under Clinton, Bush, and Obama. You don’t win people over by bludgeoning them with those woke facts or by weaponizing immigrants. Build a movement and win people to your side. Then you can change their minds. That’s how organizing works.

There’s an entire generation of queer men missing from the present-day frame, and many of those who are still with us are deeply traumatized from decades of watching their friends and lovers decimated by a deadly virus made more virulent by homophobia and medical negligence. When I heard that Roland Blais, the owner of a defunct gay bar in Lewiston, Maine, inconspicuously named the Sportsman’s Athletic Club, was retiring to Florida, I hastily interviewed him so there’d be some sort of official record. Mid-interview, he made me turn off the video camera and wept while describing what it was like to lose bartender after bartender to AIDS and what loss on that scale meant for gay men like him living in small cities and rural towns. I didn’t realize what kind of trauma I was prodding. I didn’t know any better. The history of HIV/AIDS that I had learned up to that point had been an urban-centric one, where small-town queers were unaccounted for—or, worse, unimaginable. The presumptive lie was that the only way for queers to survive and thrive was to move to the city, a lie that continues to circulate today.

By 2009, I grew restless for greater intellectual stimulation and queer mentorship with older gay men that I couldn’t connect with in central Maine. The economy had just tanked, so, like a lot of un/underemployed millennials, I headed back to school that September. Uniquely, my studies were paid for in part by settlement money from the city of Miami, where I was beaten unconscious by riot police and illegally jailed as part of the anti-Free Trade Area of the Americas protests in 2003. Through my studies, I would be paired with an adviser from outside the school, my main reason for applying to the program in the first place. I fought with administrators so that I could work with James Wentzy, a video artist and long-term survivor of HIV living in New York City.

As part of my studies in queer history, cultural memory, and HIV/AIDS, I met with James monthly in his basement apartment in the bowels of lower Manhattan. His apartment was filled with thousands of videotapes and pieces of AIDS activist ephemera that, at the time, you would never find in a museum. On my monthly visits, he would fill me with stories, tea, and biscuits while we reviewed hour upon hour of video footage, both raw and polished. It was through my time with James that I learned inspiring queer histories I had never been taught, particularly the work of AIDS activist video projects like Damned Interfering Video Activists Television, the AIDS Community Television series, and the Gay Men’s Health Crisis’ Living with AIDS series. I watched, in awe, the raw power of James’ un-narrated collage documentary Fight Back, Fight AIDS: 15 Years of ACT UP and the performance poetry of David Wojnarowicz that James had captured before David’s death in 1992. It was through my time with James, and the exposure to his work and the work of his friends, that I’d come to understand the AIDS crisis as a genocide committed by a government against its own people. In particular, James’ experimental short, a 1994 collaboration with Kiki Mason titled By Any Means Necessary, shook me to the core.

I’ve always understood the AIDS crisis, both in the past and present, to be deeply political. It wasn’t until this moment with James, however, that I began thinking through what it means to understand this history as a history of genocide. Why ��Dz�’t we remember the AIDS crisis in the same terms as it was described at the time by the people who experienced the mass death and destruction firsthand? What’s lost as metaphors shift? How is cultural memory passed from one generation to the next? Of course, I’d never know loss on that scale. I’d never know what it was like to drag a friend’s coffin through the streets, enraged and exasperated. I’d never know what it felt like to throw fistfuls of ashes of dead friends and lovers onto the lawn of the White House in protest. There are limits to what I could know of history, no matter how hard I wished otherwise.

For me, history has always been about understanding how we got to the very moment of the present we inhabit—to understand how we’ve survived, who our enemies and allies have been, which activist strategies have worked and why, what is made (im)possible through shared collective experiences and moods, and how the queer political imagination expands and contracts to render certain futures viable and others impossible. To think through these ideas, I made a short film, things are different now…, in the fall of 2011. I was at a particularly low point in my life—depressed, broke, recently uprooted, heartbroken, full of self-doubt, deeply alienated from living in a city for the first time in my life, and burned out from a decade of activism that never seemed to produce lasting structural change. At that moment, it felt like nobody gave a shit about queers, poverty, or HIV/AIDS, while the upwardly aspiring gays and lesbians were clamoring for marriage, open military service, and hate crime protections. I could barely get through my day most weeks, but making this film gave me structure and focus.

My short film struck an apparent nerve and was picked up by queer film festivals in North America and Europe, most excitingly, MIX NYC, where it premiered on opening night in 2012—the same film festival where James Wentzy’s By Any Means Necessary screened for the first time when I was just a kid. What I didn’t perceive was that I was part of a new wave of HIV/AIDS historicism in film, art, and literature. Suddenly, lots of people seemed interested in the history of HIV/AIDS. Documentaries and historical dramas came out every year for nearly a decade, some winning mainstream accolades and awards. Retrospectives of AIDS activist art were suddenly in vogue. New biographies and memoirs dotted the shelves at mainstream bookstores. It all felt a bit strange to be swept up in this moment, especially as a largely unknown artfag from a small town in central Maine who made irritatingly experimental short films that hardly anyone had seen.

This wave of HIV/AIDS revisitation projects was the subject of much criticism, some of it pointedly directed at me—my work was dismissed as merely nostalgic, and I was put on blast alongside famous and well-resourced artists, curators, and writers. I remain sympathetic to many of the critiques of whitewashing; of self-aggrandizing, questionable hero narratives; and of historical revisionism, misogyny, and lack of engagement with historiography itself. There were so many things to discuss, but it felt bizarre to me that any interest in the past was being dismissed as merely nostalgic.

History is how I understood myself. I had no sentimental wish for the good old days of mass death and hopelessness, and I continue to have a hard time believing that one can’t engage with history while also being involved in activist projects in the present—the very thing myself and others were doing. Importantly, though, this conflict over concentrated attention to the past was a symptom of a larger issue: How do we balance the urgent need to remember rapidly disappearing HIV/AIDS activist histories with the bifurcated urgency of HIV/AIDS in the present?

Surely, the imagined 40th anniversary of AIDS in 2021 will create new waves of HIV/AIDS historicism, for better or worse. Of course, how we tell stories about the past tells us just as much about the present. The renewed interest in critical and artistic work exploring HIV/AIDS speaks volumes to the desire in the present for a better understanding of recent history that younger queers and activists aren’t getting through formal and informal education. Thankfully, we now have a plethora of tools, both visual and textual, to continue thinking through how histories come to bear on the present. These tools are not simply part of a clichéd directive not to forget the past lest we repeat it but also an injunction to recognize and deal with the traumas of the queer past that will always haunt the unfolding present. History is not a luxury.

Ryan Conrad’s essay “Looking for Gaëtan” is excerpted with permission from , published by Arsenal Pulp Press. Essay copyright, Ryan Conrad 2021. Anthology copyright, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore 2021.

YES! Senior Editor Chris Winters spoke with Miller from his home in Arizona. This interview has been condensed and edited for publication.

Chris Winters: You’ve written about borders before, and you’ve got a lot of personal experience living on both sides of our southern border. But why did you choose this time around to write about not just “the border,” but about borders in general?

Todd Miller: The previous work that I had coming up to this book was looking at borders from different angles. My first book was called Border Patrol Nation, so I was looking at the post-9/11 expansion of the border apparatus. The second one was Storming the Wall, which looks at climate change and displacement and how borders are playing a part in that. And then I looked at also the internationalization of the U.S. border in the third book, called Empire of Borders. …

There’s a lot of in-depth reporting, and looking at all these different aspects, all these different angles, and really getting to know intimately what is exactly going on: unpacking this apparatus, looking at all the different components of it, looking at the strategies—for example, the strategy on the southern border. “Prevention Through Deterrence” is a strategy to inflict suffering on people. That’s what it is, it’s purposely blockading certain areas, so that people circumvent them and go through the Arizona desert where I live. And the idea is that the suffering or potential of death of going through those areas will deter people, that the word will get back. And �ٳ󲹳�’s been the strategy for 25 years.

My argument is that border security is not about security at all.

And then watching … the $1.5 billion budget for border and immigration enforcement [in 1994] going to $25 billion today. … So I’ve lived on both sides of the border, and just watching this thing just build up, build up, build up, build up with all kinds of technologies—drones, surveillance towers, motion sensors—it’s just a militarization of the border, really. And this is what just really led to this book: What is this thing that we’re told is sacrosanct? That we’re told that you can’t question?

Winters: In the book, you somewhat rhetorically ask the question, “What if we just showed up at the border and started taking it down?” We like to talk about the cliché of a world without borders, but what could it mean in reality?

Miller: You can look at the U.S.-Mexico border, and then you can look at the border systems around the world, and there’s 70 border walls in various countries. There are border patrols in a lot of different places. My argument is that border security is not about security at all. Or you have to ask the question, what does it secure? Whose security is it for? And then when you come down [to] that question, then it’s like, oh, the border is almost formed like a scaffolding to keep a status quo, to keep a business-as-usual world where, it may be overly simplified, but I’ll say it: like the rich get richer, the poor get poorer.

When we look at the 21st century, you have problems of inequality that are just yawning gaps between, what, that have more wealth than 4.6 billion people, right? The fact that people are going to get be on the move more than ever before due to climate change, those are the some of the things we have to look at. So the global border system is designed to keep this kind of world in place. And [it’s] a world also where, for example, U.S. companies can go to Mexico and get cheap labor, so there’s a whole labor component to it. And so my argument is this: This is a completely unsustainable world. But it’s getting more and more pressured by all these different changes and, for a world of justice, a world of equality, a world where we would respect all those values, the borders inhibit those forms of justice from happening. …

It’s time to look holistically at the border, to have an actual conversation about one of the things �ٳ󲹳�’s problematic… : You can’t question this thing. But it’s time to put it into a question: Is this the best way to go about things as we move into the 21st century, with its challenges, like climate change, where there will be tons of people on the move? Or is there a better way that we can organize the world? …

Winters: One of the issues that you also talk about in the book is the idea that there’s an underlying deterrence strategy that feeds into this notion of the border industrial complex. But the actual strategy underneath that, and the physical manifestation of that, which is the wall, tends to monopolize conversations about the border. It’s a question of either building the wall here or over there. How can we keep our focus on the broader issue?

Miller: When you think of the Biden presidency, that was a worry, obviously. With shifting from Trump to Biden, I was worried that the [attention] would go away from the border. And strangely, there has been a little bit of a focus on the border of late, especially with unaccompanied minors. And so there has been more reporting than actually I thought there would be. …

Biden comes out with some really nice-sounding executive orders, very much intent upon reversing some of the most egregious Trump policies, which everyone is probably happy with. And yet, at the same time, there’s almost no admission that there was anything going on before Trump, right? There’s no acknowledgment of this bigger issue, that bigger arc, what the border apparatus is, how many years that it’s been built up how it’s been built up in bipartisan fashion.

I like to look from the beginning of the Prevention Through Deterrence strategy on the U.S.-Mexico border in 1994, which is, of course, during the Clinton administration, and Operations Hold the Line, Gatekeeper, Safeguard, and others. And just looking at the budget then [in ’94], which was $1.5 billion for border and immigration, 4,000 Border Patrol agents. And then you look at the end of the Clinton administration: $4.2 billion, about 8,000 Border Patrol agents. And then you look at the beginning [and] the end of the George W. Bush administration with 9/11 happening, [which led to the creation of] the Department of Homeland Security, and the Customs and Border Protection and ICE. And it goes from $5 billion to $15 billion. … All of a sudden, you just have the money faucet just opening up, a flood of money going into this thing. …

Winters: You mention the concept of “wall sickness” in the book. What is that, exactly?

Miller: Well, wall sickness came from the Berlin Wall, and from I believe psychiatry and psychology, from looking at how people experience psychologically living so close to the wall. The conclusions that were drawn were that there was a sort of narrowness, that people [experienced] increased anxiety, that people would have a sort of “dis-ease”—and they want to put the hyphen there—by being so close to a wall. …

They’re impediments that are put down, physical barriers, but they also have these profound psychological impacts on people in many different ways. And in the end, the conclusion is breaking down the walls is therapeutic. The prescription is to break down the wall to alleviate the wall sickness.

Winters: Do you see that wall sickness is a thing �ٳ󲹳�’s not confined to the geographic area surrounding the wall?

Miller: Oh, yeah. You can definitely see that it’s spread throughout the United States, in certain degrees. I mean, [it’s been] particularly evident in the last four or five years, the kind of fervor. It’s almost a sickness and a religion at the same time. And I base this off Trump and Trump’s constituency, and the constantly mentioning of the wall and the fervor behind the wall.

I remember I was reporting on the Trump campaign in 2015, or ’16, one of those years, and Mike Pence came to Tucson to do a talk and, and I went there and it was a full house. And I was in the back and no standing ovations the whole time. And then Pence mentioned, they’re going to build this great big wall on the border, and then just people just rose like, into this huge standing ovation. It was quite the scene, and to me, when I think of wall sickness and how it spreads, we’re well past the walls. When you’re near it, it’s almost like you’re against it, because it’s so confining.

Winters: Do you find, where you live, that geographic separation is part of it, in the sense that the communities that are down there on the border, are less enthusiastic about it than the people who are up in Phoenix or are further north?

Miller: Yeah, �ٳ󲹳�’s truly the case. There’s a poll, a that came out a couple of years ago that the in-from-border counties that showed that people were against the wall and border counties, it was a pretty high percentage, too, I believe it was over 70% [opposed the wall]. I didn’t see a counter-poll in the interior. So yeah, there’s this tendency towards, the farther away you [are] from the border, if you’re of a certain mindset, the more you might say we want a wall.

With a more humane world, do you cease to need borders at all?

And in the borderlands here in Arizona, where you have some ranchers who were in media a lot 10-15 years ago for being fervently anti-immigrant, now they’re anti-Border Patrol. It’s shifted, mainly because the [migration] routes shift a lot and now the Border Patrol’s going into their land and cutting their fences. And the ranchers ��Dz�’t like going through the Border Patrol checkpoints. Nobody likes it. It doesn’t matter who you are, what your political party, no one likes the checkpoints.

Winters: You chose to include your kids in the book, and anecdotes with them, whether it’s your 5-year-old son urinating on a piece of DHS concrete barrier on the beach in San Diego, or watching a Border Patrol vehicle squash an iguana in Puerto Rico. What might we as readers experience through that inclusion, of having them along for the ride?

Miller: There’s a number of reasons. One, just seeing the world through their eyes offers this really incredible perspective to me. But I think one of the main reasons is … I’m part of a world [that is] handing off the world to another generation. When I was writing about William and Sofia, I was also thinking about the generations beyond them, the generations and generations that will be inheriting this planet, and what is being left to them. And I mean that in the sense of the bad, of course, but also of the good. What are possibilities for them to do something different? … Just being able to open up the imagination to something new, especially, it almost grounds it for me when you start thinking of these future generations.

[When] I’m with William, he has had these incredible insights and moments around the border. Because I bring him down to the border all the time. And, and I quote him in the book, and he says, “Why can’t we turn the border wall into bikes?” And then he says, “Why can’t we turn the border wall into houses for people?” And then other [times he’ll say] “Why can’t we turn the border wall into rails for trains?” And to me, those are some of the most profound insights. …

You know that quote about tearing down the wall in the book, like why can’t we just go tear down the wall? What’s interesting is when, in the last part of the book I do put the border in conversation with some of our some of our most well-known prison abolitionists, like Ruthie Wilson Gilmore. When she’s talking about prison abolition, she talks about abolition as “presence.” So maybe it’s 1% about destroying the prisons, this idea of destruction, but it’s 99% about creating a new world … where prisons aren’t an answer, or a solution to a problem.

So, I really tried to put the border in conversation with that. How does the border apparatus become a solution to the problem? And are the right questions even being asked? And then when you start to ask the right questions, then the solution, from an abolitionist approach, is a more humane world. And then with a more humane world, do you cease to need borders at all?

I hadn’t. Then I came across a black-and-white photo on Instagram of a stately yet solemn-looking Black woman who lived during the 19th century that made me stop scrolling through my feed.

It’s Black History Month, and here’s an image of someone, although similar to those of which I’m familiar—Ida B. Wells, Phillis Wheatley, Sojourner Truth—I’d never seen.

As I read the post, I learned that she was the daughter of abolitionist Frederick Douglass. But she was also a trailblazer of U.S. history in her own right.

Although her name is rarely (if ever) mentioned, , the largest federation of local Black women’s clubs.

That’s just one factoid I learned when I began following the IG account called Race Women, a social media project spotlighting generations of early Black feminists—“foremothers” such as Sprague, many of whom have gone unacknowledged.

Unveiled in January, Race Women could be one solution to increase people’s knowledge of Blacks in U.S. history—particularly early Black feminists—inside and outside of the classroom.

For centuries, Black history in K-12 education had been limited. But a ��noted that since the 1960s, when several states “passed laws requiring or recommending that the contributions and achievements of minority groups be included in school curricula,” the presence of Black history taught in schools has improved.

Still, Dr. LaGarrett King, the article’s author noted, there is room for improvement and representation is not enough.

“At the moment, Black history knowledge required by the curriculum is often additive and superficial,” King wrote. “In many ways, we teach about Black history and not through it. The voices and experiences of Black people have often been silenced in favor of the dominant Eurocentric history curriculum.”

With the first post, Race Women creator Maya Millett shared the partial history of , a writer who worked as a novelist, journalist, and playwright in the 1900s. Hopkins wrote about the work of other Black women then, in a similar way that Millett is doing with Race Women now.

Creator of Race Women Maya Millett. Photo from Maya Millett.

Also, similarly, says Millett of the different generations of women, Black women and their stories are minimized if not altogether brushed aside. Yet these women have and continue to forge ahead.

“America, in a lot of ways, continues to be a hostile environment for Black women but particularly at that time, we have historically been undervalued,” Millett says. “We have historically been the most uncared for group and yet these women decided that they had to speak up for us, that they wanted to demand their freedoms for us, and they wanted to define freedom in their own terms.”

Prior to creating Race Women, Millett who is a producer and nonfiction writer and editor, was researching for another project. She kept coming across Black women�� she’d never heard of. It initially shocked and angered her that it had taken so long for her to learn about them, she said.

In a more recent post, she uses a screenshot of a Lucille Clifton poem called the lost women. In it, Clifton writes, “all the women who could have known me, where in the world are their names?”

That piece resonated with Millett. And it encapsulates the reason she started Race Women, to share the histories of these unsung sheroes.

“They deserve space, they deserve a space in our public consciousness just as much as those civil rights folks you do know,” she said. “They deserve a space on our mantels next to Rosa Parks, next to Harriet Tubman, next to Sojourner Truth.”

So far, Race Women has highlighted , a journalist and author of The Work of the Afro-American Woman; and , an abolitionist and lecturer who is known as being the first American woman to speak in public about racial and gender issues.

Millett says she decided to use Instagram because it’s where people are consuming content and is an accessible site. The medium also has few constraints, she says, as opposed to an article, book, or audio story that would limit the number of women who she could highlight—she wants to share about every Black feminist foremother that she can.

“On a platform like this, you can shout out everybody in a post.”

View this post on Instagram

on Feb 1, 2019 at 1:33pm PST

Had it not been for running across Race Women on my IG feed, it’s likely I would have not learned of Sprague, Hopkins, Mossell or Stewart. And it’s experiences like mine that Millett hoped for.

She wants Race Women to be a catalyst for people to learn more about Black women in history—their names and their stories.

“The whole point for me was that they had historically been looked over. People had consistently made choices against including them, against making them visible or seen,” Millett says, noting that she didn’t want to do that.

“The women on my list are women who’ve I’ve just come across in my research, but I know that there are more.”

The Black characters, stories, and even the creators in the genre have had to struggle to gain a foothold. So, when scholar , it seemed like a chance for Black creators to thrive. Some did, but like science fiction as a whole, Afrofuturism was largely represented by Black men.

It would take nine decades after the science fiction genre was created and about 25 years after this subgenre was coined before Black women started finding their place and voices in the genre.

Now, the most popular names in Afrofuturism are women, and they seem to be reshaping the entire genre. Janelle Monae’s genre-transcending music tops the charts. Writers N.K. Jemisin and Nnedi Okorafor and may soon be getting screen adaptations. Even the TV reimagining of the modern classic comic, Watchmen, had a plot cemented in racial justice, with Regina King’s portrayal anchoring the series.

What is Afrofuturism?

Afrofuturism has been defined by scholar Mark Dery in his 1993 essay, “Black to the Future,” as “speculative fiction that treats African-American themes and addresses African-American concerns in the context of twentieth-century technoculture—and, more generally, African American signification that appropriates images of technology and a prosthetically enhanced future.”

This subgenre of science fiction is one where Black artists can tell stories of their limited past, intertwined their complex present to see a different future. That future is often more hopeful or at least one wherein we exist as more than junkies, thugs, or the help.

Thus, it’s no coincidence that work labeled “Afrofuturist” includes themes of utopianism and liberation in their depictions of the future. As such, it transcends categories, from literature to music to film and visual arts.

The term “Afrofuturism” was more of a retroactive naming. When Dery coined the term, it was already some 40 years after Sun Ra dazzled jazz audiences with bebop tunes performed to flashing lights and costumes. His music built on Swing Era big-band styles to create a sound that was faster, with experimental harmonies, and which was largely undanceable, but still found a wide audience that enjoyed its futuristic themes and virtuoso musicianship. This was around the time , published in 1952, which includes elements of sci-fi in the torture of a gifted man who is targeted by and becomes disillusioned with the racist country he had come to trust.

Dery and scholars of Afrofuturism had to dig back into the history of literature, music, and art to find other examples—Octavia Butler, Samuel R. Delany, George Clinton’s Parliament-Funkadelic collective, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and the artwork of William Henderson “Billy” Graham, the first Black comic artist who is known for work on the Afrofuturist series Luke Cage, Hero for Hire as well as Black Panther. Save for Butler, the most well-known names of the early creators were largely men. Women have entered the genre over the years, but their entrance seemed to come after the term was established, and after space was created and deemed fitting of their work.

For Black women, more was at stake than participation in the subgenre. It’s more than about telling their stories—it’s about making the space one that will accommodate the Black woman’s experience.

In one of the interviews Mark Dery conducted for “Black to the Future,” Brown University scholar Tricia Rose said that Black women would change the patriarchal look of a cyborg if given the opportunity. “If we had hordes and hordes of women who were paid to sit around and reimagine the science fiction genre, they might treat technology differently, placing it in a different relationship to the organism, and then what would cyborgs look like?”

It’s a question that could have been answered by recording artist Janelle Monae in her ongoing musical saga. She started with her debut album “The ArchAndroid,” in which she adopted the alter ego of Cindi Mayweather, an android that looks softer, with smoother lines and curves than the androids that sci-fi audiences are used to. But hers is just one example.

At the 2019 Chicago Comic & Entertainment Expo, Eisner-award winning comics artist and illustrator Afua Richardson said in an interview that Afrofuturism lets her write and create what she wants without needing permission or having parameters.

“Now [I’m in] a position where I can make [anything] and I ��Dz�’t have to wait on anybody,” Richardson said. “People will listen. They will care because I’ve worked on popular [science fiction] stories. So now, I’m writing. I am writing so I can say, ‘I can complain all day, but what am I going to do to change it?’” For Richardson, Afrofuturist creation is also about using art for change—something more than just entertaining through science fiction.

Afrofuturism and the Feminine Wave

In the early 2000s, the list of Afrofuturist names become more feminine. Blade was a popular Black male sci-fi comic and film character in the ‘90s, but he was quickly replaced in favor by Storm of the X-Men film series. Writers Steven Barnes, Ishmael Reed, and Octavia Butler held the door open for Nalo Hopkinson, Nnedi Okorafor, Karen Lord, and N.K. Jemisin, who in 2016 was the first Black female writer to win the “Best Novel” Hugo Award, and then went on to win it again in 2017 and 2018, the first time any writer had won it three years in a row.

Comics long have been a major artistic outlet for Afrofuturism. Writers like Jim Owsley (who later changed his name to Christopher Priest) broke through in the 1980s and ’90s to breathe life into classic Black characters like Luke Cage and Black Panther. Meanwhile, Milestone Media broke new ground with Icon, published by DC Comics in 1993, which was a story about an alien sent to Earth and raised during the period of slavery in the American South in the guise of a Black man.

These male-dominated stories held the door for Eve Ewing’s recent work on the Marvel series Ironheart, the story of Riri, a genius Black girl who dons Iron Man’s suit after he retires, and for Nnedi Okorafor in 2018 to pick up the story of Shuri, the Black Panther’s sister, in Wakanda Forever. Even Octavia Butler had a posthumous debut in comics with .

In music, Sun Ra and George Clinton spawned several acts starting in the 1950s that tapped into the Afrofuturist aesthetic, and which continue today (posthumously in the case of The Sun Ra Arkestra). A few women like Grace Jones and Janet Jackson also explored Afrofuturist themes, standing out next to male groups like Wu-Tang Clan. In time, more women artists came to dominate Afrofuturist music, such as Missy Elliot, Erykah Badu, Nicki Minaj, Beyonce, and Janelle Monae, even as some male artists like Outkast and RZA continued to explore the subgenre.

A closer look at this time through the eyes of Afrofuturist creators show that the change was not necessarily a revolution. Instead, it seems to be a matter of opportunity meeting possibility.

When these characters and their stories came along, they inspired young Black kids who would later become creators themselves.

Ashley Woods, the artist who illustrated the Afrofuturist comic series Niobe (written by actress Amandla Stenberg and Sebastian A. Jones)said that her early influences came from science fiction, and named Xena: Warrior Princess, Hercules, and stories from Greek mythology as her childhood favorites, which led to her work today. “I just draw upon the movies and animation, just everything that I was into growing up,” she said.

Stephanie Banks, a professional cosplayer at conventions, said that the Afrofuturism on television was what inspired her and her work today. “Well, I always liked to play dress-up since I was a kid,” Banks said. “It’s just as I got older, that I started learning more about cons [comic conventions] and seeing that there are people out there like me who dress up in experiences. So, I kind of found my groove, my people.”

Banks said that the men dominated the field of cosplayers in the early years, but �ٳ󲹳�’s not the state today, and women are certainly growing in number at the conventions.

New Creators Means New Stories

With women taking more a prominent presence in the subgenre, the stories get to come from a perspective that hasn’t been explored. The 2018 film Fast Color featured three generations of women (played by Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Lorraine Toussaint, and Saniyya Sidney) and who have been hiding supernatural powers. In addition to the tension of running from the government, the film explores poverty, motherhood, and survival when living in U.S. society as a Black woman with a power strong enough to change the weather and the compositional makeup of matter.

Actor Laz Alonso, from Amazon Prime’s The Boys and the film Avatar, believes that leading role women now play in the Afrofuturism genre has resulted in the generation of a lot of new ideas and directions.

“I love the fact that Afrofuturism is now that next level of storytelling where we see ourselves in a different context,” Alonso said. “Where we can lead the saving of worlds—whether it’s this world or another world, where women are empowered, and they’re not created under the guise of patriarchy. So, they’re not fetishized or limited under some man’s opinion.”

From these stories, we get androids like , or the protagonists of Nalo Hopkinson’s 1998 book Brown Girl in the Ring, a dystopian novel that deconstructs the “urban” experience in a story about home, bodies, and real Black girl magic.

A Fresh Look and the Sci-fi Universe

This fresh look is key, said Darrell May, an art director and artist for Stranger Comics, the publisher of Niobe. “I love Luke Skywalker,” May said. “I ��Dz�’t need to see that again. I need to see a young woman playing a half-elven Black woman like Niobe.”

He said that Afrofuturism stories created by Black women are so in demand became they are telling stories in a new way.

Rita Woods, author of the recent Afrofuturist novel Remembrance, believes that this new way comes from taking back and rewriting that history. “What do I think when I think fantasy? I actually see it as a reworking of our own history,” Woods said. “And, in many ways, our history has been co-opted. And so, when I hear Afrofuturism, what comes to my mind is we’ve taken [history] back, and we’re rewriting it. Not only are we writing our past, but also a lot of those stories that are steeped in our tradition, our storytelling tradition, our myths, our gods, our religion.”

“We are the protagonists,” she adds. “We are the stars of our own show, not killed off before the ending.”

Each foray into creating a new world, no matter what the medium maybe—pen and paper, music, art, film, or design—is a personal endeavor for the writer. It’s a journey inward. Those inner lives and experiences of Black women are still largely uncharted for the entertainment public. For this reason, the popularity of Afrofuturist works by Black women are considered new and fresh stories.

For Black women in the audience, it’s an opportunity to finally be seen and represented in mediums the way we feel inside. For others, it’s a new perspective on some staid tales that are long overdue. It was bound to break through whether Black Panther happened or not. Women are reshaping the genre, but it’s all for the best.

A peace treaty is a document that spells out how warring parties can cease violence. Often there is systemic change that follows at every level, from the federal government to local institutions. After WWII, the U.S. required Germany and Japan to change their constitutions, demilitarize, and educate their citizenry for peace in order to prevent other wars.

Inside U.S. borders, there have been numerous treaties with the Indigenous peoples of this land—many of them broken. This nation has even issued reparations as a peace treaty in recent history to Japanese Americans who were forced into internment camps. That treaty, known as the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, just marked its 30th anniversary last year.

Until recently, serious discussions of reparations for the enslavement of African peoples on this land and the subsequent oppression of their descendants—through Jim Crow, Black Codes, redlining, mass incarceration, and deadly racist policing—have fallen on deaf ears among most U.S. lawmakers, and those outside of the scattered silos of African American activists. It represents a remarkable turn of events that on Juneteenth of this year—a previously under-recognized yet historically significant day—Congress held a hearing on reparations.

Now, extraordinarily, people at various points along the political spectrum have signaled some level of support for reparations. History tells us that when such a emerges on both sides of the aisle, we may be moving toward a cultural and political tipping point.

Therefore, we should take advantage of this moment by considering all that reparations entails. The United Nations defines reparations as involving:

1. Restitution, or return of what was stolen;

2. Rehabilitation, in the form of psychological and physical support. Consider how the maternal health of Black mothers and the trauma inflicted on Black bodies impacts our daily experience in the White world. But rehabilitation is also for White folks—because it encourages healing from Whiteness, which is an existential or spiritual problem, as it posits White as superior;

3. Compensation, which must incorporate meaningful transfer of wealth. While some of us just want a check, reparations can’t only be transactional, because those most likely facilitating the transaction—large banks—continue to play an active role in keeping our communities disenfranchised through redlining, predatory lending, and so much more;

4. Satisfaction, which requires acknowledgement of guilt, apology, burials, construction of memorials, and education about the true history of this nation’s founding sin;

5. Guarantees of non-repetition, which reinforces reparations as a long-term process that requires systemic and personal change.

The slate of Democratic presidential candidates has, so far offered a limited vision of reparations, given their need to present palatable sound bites digestible for mainstream media. And overall most people—including politicians—are not yet thinking of reparations as an instrument for peace.

We recognize the militarization of law enforcement as the manifestation of a war waged against Black communities.

My colleague Tarell Kyles, a Ph.D. candidate at Pacifica Graduate Institute, told me during a recent conversation about decolonization, “Reparations is a peace treaty.”

His statement was brought on by the scholarship of Maldonado Torres, who points out the state of being colonized is never separate from ideas of war. When we think of the ways in which “wars” on drugs and poverty were wars on people, it is easier to see the connection between reparations and peace: from urban renewal programs that were actually urban removal programs—displacing people of color from their neighborhoods—to redlining that kept Black people from building wealth, from the G.I. Bill’s exclusion of Black veterans from opportunities to the weaponization of the Fair Housing Act .

From this lens of direct structural violence, Torres explains that violence against Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) has been normalized in ways the status quo—and sometimes our own communities—doesn’t see as an actual war.

But from Ferguson to Baltimore, we recognize that the militarization of law enforcement—with its tanks, tear gas, and military gear—is the manifestation of a war waged against Black communities.

If we ever needed an intervention, we need it now. Black people continue to be killed without consequence. The killers of Eric Garner, Sandra Bland, Antwon Rose, or the countless others whose names we do not know will never be held accountable.

In the next five parts of this series, we will explore what a Reparations Peace Treaty would look like: national educational initiatives teaching young citizens about the true history of this nation; educating for peace rather than war; an abolishing of prisons and police; and a complete end to war.

have already been made. Reparations are a long overdue debt, and it is beyond time to collect. The question is no longer whether reparations are owed or should be paid, but a matter of when and how.

As we begin our journey toward this process, the FOR Truth and Reparations campaign, #ReparationSundays, has created two national days of reparations observance for spiritual and faith communities to help people unravel themselves from White supremacy. Many spiritual and faith communities have taken up the work of addressing racism and reparations. As Rev. angel Kyodo williams, a Buddhist priest and co-author of Radical Dharma: Talking Race, Love, and Liberation, posits, “The conversation about reparations is about personal reckoning.” Rabbi Ruth Zlotnick in Seattle . These positions will be further explored in this series.

This series will demonstrate that reparations are not only a political and social intervention in the lives of Americans, but also a spiritual one that opens the possibility for reconciliation in the pursuit of justice and true peace.

After into anti-trans and anti-LGBTQ ads during the election, Trump spent the first few weeks in office signing a number of rapid-fire executive orders. The , issued on inauguration day, attempted to limit the definition of sex to male and female only. Others followed suit, banning trans people from , , and rescinding .

Taken together, these executive orders target everything from the and to basic, life-saving health care.

“[An executive order] doesn’t carry the force of law itself,” says Sruti Swaminathan, a staff attorney at the ACLU. Indeed, opposition is mounting as these orders face significant logistical and . But, Swaminathan says, the impact is felt immediately through a “chilling effect” that and emboldens their detractors—cultural sentiments that can’t be challenged in the court of law.

For trans people, especially those existing at the intersection of multiple identities, the impact of anti-trans policies and rhetoric doesn’t trickle down into their lives so much as it opens the floodgates for harm.

“ It’s got the pressure of a fire hose being sprayed, and it’s not being filtered in. It’s beating into our existence,” says Nish Newton, an organizer for the Idaho-based organization (BLC). Simple tasks like running errands, seeing friends, and other essential, enriching parts of life can feel out of reach for trans people right now. “A lot of folks ��Dz�’t even feel like they can leave their homes.”

Since 2020, there has been a swell of anti-trans and anti-LGBTQ legislation, all running parallel to attacks on reproductive care, , and education. According to , there are currently 569 active bills in the United States and nine have passed. Though some of this legislation may pass, it is important to note that the , in part due to their own unpopularity and the dedicated work of organizers. (The in both the Senate and the House, which also may make it challenging to enact Trump’s agenda.)

Now, grassroots organizations—specifically those led by and with trans people—are uniquely poised to not only help their communities weather the storm but also challenge the policies and attitudes that harm trans people in the first place.

“I see the moment as an opportunity. An opportunity for trans leaders to really, really get engaged, unite, and speak in one voice,” says Sean Ebony Coleman, founder and CEO of , a LGBTQ grassroots organization working in New York City, Atlanta, and Washington, D.C. “Folks that understand history know that we’ve seen some of these tactics before, so that means there are ways to push back.”

On the Front Lines

Political actions on the state and federal level have a direct impact on the day-to-day lives of trans people. Bathroom bills, for example, which require people to use the restroom based on the sex assigned to them at birth, can mean that trans people have to plan their days around when they will use the restroom or risk potential harm. 

“You learn to navigate systems and places early when you are trans,” says TC Caldwell, executive director of , a Black trans- and queer-led organization in Alabama. “I make sure to use the bathroom before I go out to eat or shop. Why? Because most places ��Dz�’t have gender-neutral bathrooms. If I do have to go, I go to the bathroom of the gender I’m called the most for that day because safety is our priority when going out as trans people.”

But in reciprocal fashion, grassroots actions—providing mutual care, building resources, and developing effective programming—can ripple upward and bring systemic and cultural change.

“We know our communities best,” says Caldwell. “We are on the front lines, responding to crises in real time while also working to dismantle the systemic barriers that create those crises.”&�Բ�����;

According to Caldwell, TKO Society uses a mutual aid and care-based approach to provide comprehensive health and wellness services to their community. “We focus on building networks of trust and support, leverage community knowledge to design programs that actually work.”&�Բ�����;

Caldwell says the care coordination program, for example, has helped hundreds of people access affirming health care and secure stable housing. “We’re expanding those efforts by partnering with other grassroots collectives to scale up.”

“When people are turned away from shelters or denied health care because of their identity, we step in—not just to provide immediate support but to advocate for systemic change through education, coalition-building, and policy work,” says Caldwell. “This approach isn’t just about filling gaps. It’s about building infrastructure that uplifts and empowers marginalized people.”

And unlike top-down charities or larger, more hierarchical organizations, grassroots networks have the ability to adapt in real time to the changing needs of their communities. 

BLC organizer Nish Newton says their organization used to rely on a mutual-aid-focused model of fundraising, but soon they found that “[the model] wasn’t really proactively pouring into folks and sustaining their wellness.” To move away from this more “reactive,” emergency-based model, BLC launched a guaranteed-income program in 2023, BLC PWR, which provides Black trans Idahoans with $1,000 monthly stipends. 

This year, Newton says they are already reimagining the program to better respond to their community’s feedback around financial support and other direct services. “It has been really, really beautiful in a lot of ways to shed our skin every year, and it doesn’t really fit into the mold of a lot of traditional organizations,” says Newton. “ It’s an innovative way of existing, but essentially we make ourselves and we break ourselves every year.”

Trans Rights Start Close to Home

In addition to providing direct services, there are a few main ways grassroots organizers push back against transphobic policies at the federal level—and much of it starts close to home.

Though it may sound simple, this type of relationship-building—especially with Congressional members who vote on —can help set a political agenda �ٳ󲹳�’s actually aligned with the overall country’s expressed desires. (After all, most voters, , think the government should be less involved in legislating the lives of trans people, according to a by Data for Progress.)

Destination Tomorrow founder Coleman says speaking to elected officials about funding, policy work, and anti-trans legislation helps who otherwise may not truly understand the scope and impact of these initiatives. “If [elected officials] ��Dz�’t see [trans people] as their constituents, I think it’s easy to harm us,” Coleman says. “When folks pass these ridiculous laws, executive orders in this case, it is done without the thought of how it’s honestly going to impact people.”

This manner of networking also allows advocates to play offense, nudging policymakers to introduce bills that would both enshrine and expand rights for trans people. Currently, 14 states and the District of Columbia have that protect access to gender-affirming care, according to the Movement Advancement Project. Two additional states, Arizona and New Jersey, have protective executive orders in place. 

Introducing protective policies at the local, state, and federal levels makes it harder for new transphobic legislation to take root—and if there are more progressive LGBTQ elected officials, then more protective, trans-affirming policies will possibly be passed. In Minnesota, for example, the state’s first openly trans legislator, Rep. Leigh Finke, made sure a was a priority among Democratic leadership. And despite an attempted filibuster from opponents, the bill passed both the state’s House and Senate. 

In 2023, Minnesota’s “trans refuge” law , offering protection to patients and clinicians seeking gender-affirming care, including those coming from out of state. “Hundreds of people and families within the first six months moved to Minnesota,” Finke told NPR. “I’m sure �ٳ󲹳�’s a major undercount.”

In the Courts

Despite these efforts, some anti-trans legislation will surely pass. When proposed anti-trans legislation becomes laws, litigation offers an important guardrail against discrimination. Litigation, which resolves rights-based disputes through the courts, can retroactively challenge unjust policies, enforce civil rights laws, and set far-reaching legal precedents. 

Lawsuits start at the local or state level and can flow upriver, all the way to the Supreme Court. In 2023, three families of trans minors and a medical doctor in Tennessee filed a lawsuit to challenge the state’s law banning gender-affirming care for minors. 

Though the court’s ruling is still forthcoming, the impact of litigation similar to  is twofold. Not only does the case question the legal basis of harmful, transphobic legislation, but it also provides a platform for trans people to that counter far-right fear mongering. In other words, these cases are not just legal proceedings. They are tried in the court of public opinion, too.

By mobilizing public support on behalf of vulnerable trans youth and naming bullying for what it is, ACLU staff attorney Sruti Swaminathan says it is possible to deter further policies and “reshape the political narrative around trans people in general, but also what rights we deserve.”

There’s no denying that these strategies—educating officials, introducing protective policies, litigating anti-trans discrimination, and shifting cultural narratives—are hard and slow-moving, sometimes taking years to come to fruition. Part of the value of grassroots organizations is that they tend to their communities now while still planting the seeds for a future where all trans people can thrive. 

“Every time someone gets connected to life-saving care, or finds a stable place to live, or even just feels seen and affirmed by their community, we’re chipping away at the systems designed to erase us,” says TKO Society founder TC Caldwell. “A big part of our work is to remind people that no one is disposable, and we prove that change is possible when we fight for each other.”

CORRECTION: This article was updated at 11:01 a.m. PT on Feb. 26, 2025, to update the number of active anti-trans bills circulating in the United States. Read our corrections policy here.��

To be a Black disabled woman in America is to be unwillingly invisible in your greatest time of need. The most visible layer as a Black disabled person is our Blackness, which is constantly under the threat of scrutiny, assumed guilt, and, as logically follows, persecution.

Our pain , as is borne out by multiple studies as well as my own experience of chronic pain. We are believed to be able to bear more pain. Some medical devices ��Dz�’t work as well for us due to our skin color. These compounding issues of , and ableism endanger the lives of Black disabled women.

At this point, there are two basic things that disabled people and chronically ill people ��Dz�’t have—upward mobility in alignment with our ability to work and access to proper health care. As a disabled person, you can never be sure you received proper care. Navigating what this country calls a health care system is difficult. If you need to see a specialist, which most chronically ill or disabled people do, you have to go through paperwork or related delays. Then there’s everything before the appointment: setting the appointment in coordination with related testing and arranging transportation.

To add insult to injury, disabling conditions can and have contributed to lack of access to equal employment opportunities, which Black people already do not have access to; this can get more complicated for those of us whose symptoms or disabilities aren’t apparent by looking at us. Essentially, thousands of eligible people each month for benefits. And if you’re lucky enough to get them? We are pretty much taking a vow of poverty, as our ability to acquire assets and generate an income is limited by our disability.

Moving forward, policymakers need to recognize that health care is a human right and not a privilege afforded to those who can afford it. Having affordable or universal health care for all would be a simple way to help solve the problem of chronically ill and disabled people being treated better, partly because being able to fully afford care would stabilize many of us. Even more would not develop the additional conditions that result from not being able to receive stable or proper treatment.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s , for example, has made it incredibly difficult for pain patients to receive treatment (that is 50 million Americans who used to be able to live and work, albeit in relative discomfort, left in pain). While there is a problem with opiate overdoses, restricting prescriptions has not decreased the rate of overdose and addiction. That’s because, despite exciting television plots, overprescribing hasn’t been the problem with opiates since the mid-2010s. The problem now is illegal fentanyl being sold to desperate people who try to get their medication without going through the proper channels.

Being better served in health care also means listening to disabled people. Health care facilities could hire various types of chronically ill and disabled people to give feedback in all areas. It’s hard to see what we need if no one asks us.

We’re often uncomfortable in pharmacies and waiting rooms, made to stand in line. Meanwhile, the system of taking a number seems to work well in delis, butcher shops, or motor vehicle departments. Moreover, we often ��Dz�’t get the services we need until nondisabled people need them. We have asked for video doctor appointments and telehealth long before the pandemic, but once the rest of the world needed them, they became commonplace quickly.

The problem of the perception of Black disabled women is a long-standing one. It’s complicated by —we aren’t a monolithic group with a one-size-fits-all solution. But if the world doesn’t treat white women with the same cookie-cutter approach, why do that for Black women?

With respect to generating access to equitable health care, especially for Black women, part of the answer is self-evident. The recent victories of women like Stacey Abrams, Serena and Venus Williams, Kamala Harris, and the endless list of Black women who excel, some with disabilities, show the world what we already know: that Black women can lead. And so we should let Black women lead, unencumbered, with respect to assisting in equitable health care services for disabled people. Putting more Black women in charge would not be an act of charity. The economy has due to racism, so it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that subverting racism would be profitable.

Being put in charge isn’t the only resolution here. As a Black disabled woman, I would not have to worry about being well enough to work if I could receive the proper accommodations to apply for jobs and still be considered fairly. Thus, workplace accommodations should be the norm and enforced by law.

Begin by including accommodations in job listings. So many job descriptions say that they require sitting, standing, lifting, or driving, but in practice, the majority of those jobs could easily be performed without any of these restrictions. Currently, there’s not enough of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), and if there were, there’s a huge loophole in it called . If a business can claim that accommodating a disabled person would be too expensive or cumbersome, they can claim undue hardship, which means no accommodation for disabled people or people with chronic illness.

As a small business owner myself, I understand why these guidelines are in place. But perhaps instead of having a loophole that allows businesses not to help disabled people work comfortably, there should be programs that incentivize businesses to remove the obstacles that prevent disabled people from being able to work. The Small Business Administration could be incentivized to fund businesses that are making efforts to hire and serve disabled employees and customers.

Finally, it must be understood that disabled people ��Dz�’t have “special needs.” We just have needs that, like everyone else’s, differ from person to person. Giving them a separate name makes it sound like we’re being given something extra. Then when it comes time for legislation to help change our circumstances, the perception hurts our chances of success. Yes, it is possible that, in the workplace, we may need better chairs, but wouldn’t this change benefit all employees?

Give us, the chronically ill, mentally ill, disabled, neurodivergent, deaf, or blind, the same things, beginning with access to proper health care and opportunities for upward mobility in alignment with our ability to work.

Disabled people want the things the rest of the world takes for granted. While it would make life a bit more boring than what we are used to, we would rather be treated as regular people, allowed to fully thrive.

This excerpt by Tinu Abayomi-Paul is from , edited by Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman. Copyright © 2022 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Publishing Group.

On March 3, 2022,  legislation that affects transgender girls and women wanting to compete in accordance with their gender identity.

It comes just days after legislators in Indiana  aimed at K-12 trans students.

That proposed legislation will now go to Republican Gov. Eric Holcomb, who has previously  to sign the bill into law.

Meanwhile, in Texas, it emerged that  the parents of transgender boys and girls for alleged child abuse. This follows an  requiring to report as child abuse any instance of a young person using puberty blockers or other . The order allows for criminal penalties to be imposed on those who refuse to comply and on the parents of transgender children. A judge has  into the parents of one trans teen, but set aside a  until a hearing on March 11.

Indiana, Iowa, and Texas are far from being the only states advancing an anti-transgender agenda. More than 30 states initiated anti-trans legislation in 2021 alone, and at least .

These anti-transgender health care bills and legal interpretations are part of a package of initiatives that mark 2021 as a for anti-LGBTQ policies introduced in state legislatures across the country, according to the advocacy group Human Rights Campaign. And 2022 is already on track to .

These efforts include bills that will bar transgender athletes from participating in student sports, such as in Indiana and Iowa, and , or , any school curriculum that references sexual orientation or gender identity. One additional variety— in April 2021 by Montana Republican Gov. Greg Gianforte—requires gender reassignment surgery before any individual can change the sex marker on their birth certificate.

So far, anti-transgender athlete bills have gained the most traction. Despite consistent ,  have now considered barring transgender athletes from playing on teams that match their gender identity. Ten states have already enacted bans on transgender student athletes through .

As a , I have found that campaigns that mischaracterize LGBTQ-supportive policies as harmful to young people are a  Conservatives use to galvanize their base.

‘Save our Children’

Anti-gay activist and Florida orange juice queen Anita Bryant first perfected the strategy in the 1970s to oppose ordinances prohibiting sexuality-based discrimination. Bryant’s “” campaign demonized gays and lesbians as “recruiting children.” Bryant successfully encouraged voters to oppose legislative attempts to protect gays and lesbians from discrimination and prompted Florida legislators to , a law that was  in 2010.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Conservatives prompted over 40 states to bar same-sex marriage on the basis that —those raised by same-sex couples and those introduced to marriage equality at school.

In 2015, when the Supreme Court overturned these bans in the landmark case , Conservatives began targeting transgender rights.

Conservatives again trained their focus on nondiscrimination measures—this time those prohibiting gender identity discrimination. They misleadingly argued that any measure protecting transgender individuals would place cisgender girls and women—individuals whose gender identity and birth-assigned sex are both female—at risk by  to use women’s locker rooms and restrooms.

There is  supporting this claim. Yet there is  of health and safety  if they are prohibited from using bathrooms that reflect their gender identity.

Significant Costs

Anti-transgender athlete and health care bills follow a similar approach. Advocates for bills targeting trans female athletes claim that transgender teammates will “.”

Supporters of anti-trans health care bills claim that children are being pressured to employ these therapies by physicians and parents and .

 to back up these assertions. Puberty blockers are an increasingly common treatment precisely because they provide a  option for transgender adolescents and are provided only with the patient’s fully informed consent. Cross-gender hormone treatments, which are typically provided in later adolescence, are also .

And there is little evidence to suggest that transgender female athletes in K-12 settings are unfairly outcompeting their cisgender competitors—. In fact, conservative legislators have pointed to only one instance in their campaigns, when  in Connecticut took first and second place in a 2017 statewide track tournament. Several cisgender female athletes who lost unsuccessfully  state officials for permitting transgender athletes to compete.

A far more common story is the  of transgender athletes in women’s sports and their similarities with their cisgender teammates.  considering the legislation have no known trans female athletes or have trans female athletes who are performing on par with cisgender female teammates.

And even the cisgender Connecticut athletes who attempted to sue state officials had  in several championship races against their transgender competitors shortly after filing their lawsuit.

But none of this has prevented bill supporters from stoking fears.

Researchers and health care providers do know, however, that the  transgender young people.

Prohibiting gender-affirming care, like puberty blockers, or barring transgender-inclusive athletic teams imposes . Transgender people who do not have access to the kinds of hormone therapies that are being outlawed are  than cisgender people to struggle with depression.

They are also  more likely than cisgender individuals to attempt suicide.

Put simply, gender-affirming policies and  are .

Furthermore, if upheld in court, the athlete bills could require any female athlete to “prove” their gender to participate, potentially through .

Political Landscape

Conservatives may be using these bills—which some describe as “”—to catalyze Republican voters to participate in upcoming . And the strategy could work.

Attempts to bar transgender athletes appeal to at least some . And some high-profile women athletes have joined the fray, convening the  in order to “” cisgender female athletes from trans athlete inclusion.

Conservatives also used anti-trans-athlete talking points to oppose the , a bill that would have added prohibitions against sexual orientation and gender identity discrimination to existing federal civil rights bills. The House passed a similar measure in 2021, but it failed to pass the Senate.

Transgender advocates have some recourse to fight the bills.  is one option. Litigation is another. Advocates for transgender rights have secured  in state and federal court challenges involving bathrooms and locker rooms. More recently, a federal judge in Idaho blocked that state’s passed in 2020.

And the Supreme Court’s 2020 ruling in , which protects LGBTQ individuals from certain forms of discrimination, seems at first blush to support transgender student equality. But the Bostock case is relatively new, its application to sports and health care untested, and political fervor is mounting. With a  on the Supreme Court—and in  across the country—legal battles may be unreliable.

In the meantime, transgender young people across the country are contemplating a more uncertain and dangerous future for themselves and their parents. Some are working with their parents to  for puberty blockers. Others are contemplating . All of this because Conservatives have channeled trumped-up claims into harmful legislation that outlaws and endangers transgender youth in an attempt to further divide American voters.

This story originally appeared in and is republished here with permission.

I have a nice life, one my parents say was made possible by the American Dream. But I am an American because of American imperialism.

My introduction to empire came in childhood, helping my mother pack and label balikbayan boxes for a trip back to the Philippines. Each member of our family was allotted two pieces of checked baggage; all children were expected to surrender at least one to a balikbayan box the size of the maximum space allowed by the airline. The balikbayan operation, which took over our living room for weeks, was one I had observed for years. I was thrilled to finally join the ritual, Tetris-like packing of enormous cardboard cubes filled with Reese’s Pieces, Nike sneakers, three-packs of Hanes men’s briefs, boxes of Ziploc bags, Ferrero Rocher chocolates, and other items. All the gifts were crammed in amid hundreds of face towels and washcloths, bought in bulk at whatever department store had recently had a linen sale and that were exclusively for my paternal grandmother, Ima, who sold them for profit at the supermarket she owned. The pasalubong was expected, my mom explained, given out of love and the financial success my parents had achieved abroad. At the time, I took it to mean we were giving our less fortunate Filipino relatives the American goods they could not afford otherwise.

After being filled and weighed, each balikbayan box was sealed and wrapped in packing tape, the screeching sound and chemical plastic smell of which filled the house. Cages of bright yellow or pink twine—for easy identification amid the sea of other boxes at baggage claim as well as easy lifting from the carousel—were knotted around them. Then, our family name and address were written in foul-smelling black Sharpie on four sides of each box: Garbes Dizon Supermarket, MacArthur Highway, San Fernando, Pampanga. The road my grandparents lived and worked on is named after the American general whose decisions led to so much Philippine death and heartache during World War II.

I learned and memorized the proper spelling of the Philippines through labeling balikbayan boxes until my hand ached. It was an object lesson in the lasting effects of colonialism.

“Write PHILIP for the King of Spain,” my mom instructed me. “Then PINES, like the trees outside.” I found Spain on our globe afterward, unsure why our country on the other side of the world would be named for its king. Later, I learned that in 1544, Spanish explorer Ruy López de Villalobos, having sailed across the Pacific from Mexico, claimed and named a few islands for his king. Eventually, this archipelago—comprised of more than 7,000 islands and over 100 Indigenous ethnic groups with their own customs and languages—would be condensed into one country, now known as the Philippines.

You can say that my parents came to America for a better life, and that they got one. In fact, they would be the first ones to say so. But that tidy narrative oversimplifies the story and fails to capture the geopolitical manipulations that shaped their paths.

My parents met in 1969 at Manila’s Philippine General Hospital. My mom was a quiet 22-year-old nurse who kept her hair slicked neatly back in a ponytail at the nape of her neck; my dad was a medical student with a perpetually wrinkled lab coat, big lips, and a head of wild curls. My mom says her first impression of him was that he was a “slob.” Six months later, they were married.

As the seventh of nine children, my mom was told that upon graduation she would work as a nurse in the United States and send money home to help her two younger sisters go to college. My father, the eldest of seven and the first person in his family to attend college, was instructed to study a profession he was expected to pursue for the rest of his life. Though my parents were not aware of it at the time, their decisions to work in health care and move to the United States were shaped and constrained by centuries of conquest, bloodshed, and American policy.

Prior to the passing of the U.S. Immigration Act of 1965, also known as the Hart–Celler Act, which lifted quotas on visas for skilled workers from other countries, Filipino migration had been limited to just 50 visas a year. This was the lowest number allotted to any country in the world, a harsh reversal from the previous decades when Filipinos, called “U.S. Nationals” under American colonial rule, were able to travel freely throughout the United States and its territories. Filipino bodies—hands, backs, knees, minds, voices—have always been viewed as economic leverage for the United States.

The U.S. government’s decision to allow an influx of Filipino workers such as my mother conveniently coincided with a nursing shortage in the United States. In the two decades following World War II, the rapid growth of hospitals, higher demand for health care services, and creation of medical insurance made filling nursing positions across the country difficult. While hospital managers believed the shortage was caused by women leaving the workforce to care for their families, nurses stated that low wages and poor working conditions were to blame. They organized and advocated for better pay, but efforts stalled as nurses held little status within hospitals, and administrators opted to hire supporting workers—nurse aides and practical nurses, rather than registered nurses. Recruiting and bringing in a skilled foreign labor force, aided by the Hart–Celler Act, allowed hospital administrators to keep costs low.

My mother, a graduate of the colonial education system who spoke fluent English and held a brand-new nursing degree, qualified for immigration in 1970. My father, who never intended to leave the Philippines, reluctantly agreed to move to America for love. His medical degree made obtaining a visa relatively easy. My mother followed the path of many Filipina nurses before her—and tens of thousands after.

“Her story is a part of something larger, it is a part / of history,” poet Rick Barot writes of his grandmother’s journey from the Philippines to the United States many years before. With these words, I can grasp the magnitude of forces that sent my mother across the Pacific.

“Or, no, her story is separate / from the whole, as distinct as each person is distinct,” Barot goes on, and I see my mother—a brave individual in a foreign country, with a new husband, and a burgeoning sense of self—forging her way forward.

“Or, her story / is surrounded by history, the ambient spaciousness / of which she is the momentary foreground,” continues Barot. I now see my mother’s story as her own, important and distinct, but always part of a larger diasporic whole that I will spend my life trying to wrap my mind and heart around.

This excerpt is from Essential Labor by Angela Garbes. Copyright © 2022 by Angela Garbes. Published by Harper Wave, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Reprinted by permission.

In her new book , Dionne takes readers on a personal and political journey that begins with her own health issues and her resultant encounters with fatphobia in the medical establishment. 

Although the medical industry has, for decades, warned about an “,” the real health hazard, as Dionne points out, is systemic fat shaming that can have deadly consequences for children and adults. 

But there is a shift, as a growing fat liberation movement has begun pushing government, medical, and cultural institutions to begin dismantling biases against fat people.

Dionne spoke with YES! Racial Justice Editor Sonali Kolhatkar about her story, how the support of her family has helped her thrive, and which system-wide changes are needed to counter fatphobia.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Sonali Kolhatkar: Can you begin by telling me your personal story about how you received a frightening health diagnosis while you were in the process of writing this book—a diagnosis that helped set the stage for your critique of the medical industry?

Evette Dionne: Yes. So, I was diagnosed with heart failure when I was 29 and then subsequently diagnosed with pulmonary hypertension, which is a rare progressive lung condition, when I was 30. And, I’ve been experiencing these symptoms for many years, at least three years, possibly more than that. And I was going to different doctors and trying to figure out what was happening with my body and constantly being dismissed. 

And so, it finally came to a head when one day I thought I was having an asthma attack—I had childhood asthma, really bad asthma, actually—and so I thought I was having an asthma attack. I went to my local clinic to have professional albuterol treatment to open my lungs, and my lungs wouldn’t open. And thankfully, I got a doctor who recognized that something was wrong and that it could possibly be either my heart, or possibly a blood clot because I just had surgery, maybe two months before that. And so, she referred me to a cardiologist who discovered the problem. But from the first symptom to diagnosis, it was about three years. 

Kolhatkar: So, this journey around your interactions with doctors—not just with this health issue, but others that you detail in the book—what has that confirmed for you about how the medical establishment treats people who are considered “overweight” and how that affects their diagnoses?

Dionne: It is a really troubling issue. Once I’d been diagnosed and started going toward the path of trying to recover from heart failure, I realized that my story was not unique, which is the sad part of it all. Yeah, I was 29, and you’re really at the prime of your life, as they say, and I’m experiencing a chronic illness. But unfortunately, my experience is very common, because what happens is doctors, particularly family physicians, are trained to think about weight. They’re trained to think about BMI [Body Mass Index]. They’re trained to treat “obesity” as an illness. And because of that, when they get a patient who they consider obese, they ��Dz�’t actually treat the symptoms of whatever issue it is that they’re experiencing; they treat the obesity itself. 

So, I include examples in my book. There’s one woman in particular who had been experiencing lung issues for a long time. Come to find out, she had a tumor in her lung and ultimately had to have half of her lung removed. But they didn’t catch it for many years because they kept saying that if she lost weight she would feel better. 

And so, what happens with that, with the shame and the stigma that accompanies that, is that many people stop going to the doctor. 

So, there’s a  in the book about fat women in particular who stopped going to the doctor for gynecological screenings. So, if they do develop uterine cancer, by the time it is discovered, it’s more advanced. And �ٳ󲹳�’s across illnesses, because people just stop going, because they fear the shaming that happens because of the size of their bodies.

Kolhatkar: So basically, when you go to see a doctor, they tend to diagnose or link any symptoms you might be having to your weight, rather than actually trying to find out what is happening? And in your instance, you were struggling with fibroids, you had a history of fibroids, and it took you almost a year to convince your doctor to have the surgery, right? It was infuriating and heartbreaking to read about your experience.

Dionne: It is infuriating, and it’s so common. That is what’s infuriating about it. It’s regardless of a woman’s size. We know that Black people, in particular, when they go to the doctor, they’re assumed to be able to handle more pain than other people.

Kolhatkar: Right, there are intersectional biases there.

Dionne: Right! Women are thought to be hysterical if they’re experiencing pain. So, they ��Dz�’t take care of them. I think my greatest example of this is . I mean, it’s Serena Williams! And if Serena Williams can go, after giving birth, and say to her nurse, “I think I’m redeveloping blood clots,” and she’s not believed, many of us ��Dz�’t stand a chance. That’s the reality of what we’re living with.

Kolhatkar: Is the medical establishment changing? I know there’s more and more research, and more writers like yourself are calling out the medical industry. There have already been studies showing that the supposed correlation between weight and disease is probably correlational rather than causal. Is there a change taking place within the industry? Or is it a matter of individuals having to find the doctors they know they can trust?

Dionne: It’s the latter. A lot of it is having to search for doctors that you can trust. So, I include information in the book about the  movement. So, there are doctors who are trained through that theoretical lens, that think that no matter what size your body [is], you’re deserving of good care. It’s a matter of searching and finding that doctor, but I ��Dz�’t think a lot of change yet is happening at the systemic level in terms of retraining doctors. 

I think so much of this has to happen at the residency level, at the educational level, of training them to recognize an unconscious bias toward fat patients and to change that—to recognize and change it in the moment. That hasn’t happened yet, but I’m optimistic that it can, because so many people, particularly during the pandemic, so many people were criticizing the medical establishment and how it handled the pandemic. I think more people’s eyes are open, and if we continue to move in that direction, there can be change at some point.

Kolhatkar: Let’s talk about the reasons why there is this bias that is all around us. It’s in the culture. It’s in the water here in the U.S. and even in many parts of the world. You write about pop culture—and, of course, things are changing now, especially with the advent of social media and a lot of especially Black women influencers proudly speaking out—but there’s been decades of fat shaming in Hollywood, right?

Dionne: Our society treats fatness as a choice. So, when we think about race in the United States, if you’re an out-and-out racist, there are consequences for that, typically. If you are fatphobic, there are no consequences. You can fat shame people at the gym. You can fat shame them at the airport. You can take photos of them and post them online and humiliate them. There are no consequences for that. There is no social shaming attached to that.

And so, in pop culture, there’s a reflection of that, where we get characters who are fat, which on the surface seems to be revolutionary. I’m thinking about a company that recently released a short with their very first plus-size character, but that character was dealing with body dysmorphia. That is what fat people are encountering in pop culture. 

We really fit into one of three archetypes, which I outline in the book. And because of that, that mirrors the way fat people are treated in our society, where we’re treated as if we were not capable of having good partnerships, romantic or familial partnerships. We’re treated as if we should be comedic relief. We’re treated as if we are defiant against our thin social order, is how I frame it in the book. And therefore, we need to be shamed into assimilating. All of that is happening in our real life, and it mirrors what we see on screen.

Kolhatkar: One of the changes that we are now seeing is that there are a few shows here and there that are quite popular, that are trying to challenge fatphobia on screen. One of the earliest ones that you write about is Ugly Betty. It’s one of my favorite shows as well. Tell me why that was a revelation to you when you started seeing on screen this young woman who didn’t fit into the world of the fashion industry in New York, but made her own mark anyway.

Dionne: I loved Ugly Betty. I really, really did. I think I saw a lot of myself in that character. I’m also a girl from Queens. I also, at the time, really loved fashion. Clearly, I love magazines, because I’m now a magazine editor. 

But with that particular character, we saw [Betty] constantly really running uphill to try to be accepted by a society that said she couldn’t be who she actually naturally is. She couldn’t dress the way she wanted to dress. She just couldn’t exist the way that she existed. And so, I saw a lot of myself in that. 

And I think what that show really showed us [was that] in the end, she was able to step into her destiny, into her fate, and she was able to retain her dignity at the same time. And I saw it as a possibility model for me, of something that I could also do; that I didn’t have to become thin to live my life; that I could start right now, in the size that I’m in, the way that I look. My life is dictated by how I want to shape it. 

Kolhatkar: And it mattered that the protagonist is a woman of color, right? 

Dionne: Absolutely. Absolutely. I also outlined other women of color characters in the book, such as Queen Latifah, [who’s] one of my favorite actors. Many of the characters that she has portrayed, including Khadijah James on Living Single, which was a show in the ’90s. The fact that these are plus-size women of color who are not allowing fatphobia to get them down, I think there’s a lot of lessons in that for people who are watching it. And it really does imbue you with a sense of hope that it doesn’t have to be the way that it is right now. 

Kolhatkar: There are lots of well-meaning campaigns around the country to try to address fatness, but end up going down the wrong path and pathologizing obesity. One of the campaigns that you outline in your book is Michelle Obama’s campaign, which started out being centered on eating healthier. How did it end up feeding into the same culture that shames fat people? 

Dionne: Right. Ultimately, �ٳ󲹳�’s what it ended up doing. And I ��Dz�’t want to pick on Michelle Obama, of course, but the  campaign was really designed to end childhood obesity. So, the way that it was framed is that childhood obesity is the biggest crisis facing the United States. The numbers are skyrocketing, and that on a federal systemic level, something needed to be done, to ensure that our children, the next generation �ٳ󲹳�’s inheriting this country, are “healthy,” but what it actually does is put a target on the back of children who are already being demonized and ostracized and constantly told that the size of their body is a problem. 

It just further entrenched that, without addressing the larger systemic causes of “childhood obesity,” such as that a lot of parents are impoverished. (We just watched a presidential administration attempt to end childhood hunger or reduce childhood hunger in the United States, because that is a systemic issue.) Or living in a food desert, or being at a school that doesn’t prioritize, at all, the humanities. So, all you’re doing is learning; there is no physical education, there aren’t music classes, there aren’t theater classes. All of that leads to children not being able to [move their bodies and] eat the way in which the Let’s Move campaign wanted them to eat. But it doesn’t actually address those issues. It just demonizes the children themselves without addressing those systemic challenges. 

Kolhatkar: And Michelle Obama talked publicly about the worries that she had watching her own very young daughters start to get a little chubby and how she began changing their diet. This seemed to be heartbreakingly typical of how some parents may mean well but end up shaming their children and actually triggering eating disorders where there might not be any.

Dionne: Right! The shaming doesn’t actually cause people to lose weight. All of the statistics show that when you shame fat people, when you ostracize them, isolate them, target their weight, it just causes them to gain more weight. 

So, while people are well-meaning, including parents, [who] are well-meaning, trying to police what their children are eating, watching what their children are eating—which is the parents’ responsibility, right, to ensure that their children are eating “balanced meals”—�ٳ󲹳�’s a community’s responsibility to ensure that children have food. 

At the same time, if you focus solely on their weight and what they can do to lose weight, you’re just doubling down on the idea that they should not be comfortable in the skin that they are currently [in], which just causes them to gain more weight. It becomes a cause-and-effect problem. 

Kolhatkar: So, let’s cycle back to what we started our conversation with, which is around health and the medical industry. Often, you have folks saying, of course we ��Dz�’t want to be fat shaming, but in the end, you hear a lot of folks couch their fat shaming in concerns about health. But is it really true that obesity is the root cause of the epidemics of heart disease, cancer, hypertension, diabetes, etc.?

Dionne: The short answer is no. What I always say is that every disease seen in a fat person is seen in a straight-size or thin person. Every single disease. It’s not just that heart disease impacts fat people. It impacts thin people as well. It’s not just that any of these diseases impacts just one subset of people. 

What is happening is that because the medical industry is so hyperfocused on obesity, they literally surveil fat people. So, you cannot go to the doctor as a fat person for a cold without them testing your blood sugar or asking you if you want to be referred to the metabolic weight loss center. That is happening over and over and over again. So, it seems as if the statistics [of disease correlation with obesity] are really high, when in actuality, every single disease seen in a fat person is seen in a thin person. Nobody escapes that. 

Everyone is pre-susceptible to cancer. Everyone is pre-susceptible to diabetes. It really is about genetic makeup. So, a lot of what we’re seeing in this movement around shifting the medical industry’s relationship to obesity is disavowing them from the BMI, or the Body Mass Index, which just looks at weight and height and doesn’t think about fat adiposity, for instance, or doesn’t think about medical history, or doesn’t consider that if you’re a shorter person, your BMI may be naturally higher than if you’re a taller person, no matter what size you are.

So, [we need to be] thinking about new metrics for measuring weight and whether or not somebody is healthy, thinking about new ways in which to approach that. So, if we are going to treat obesity as an illness, that doesn’t mean we treat it as the almighty illness, and ��Dz�’t treat anything else. But, rather, that we treat obesity alongside any other illness that may arise.

Kolhatkar: How do we change our culture to not just embrace every single one of us, but also allow people of different sizes to feel comfortable in their skin? The story you tell in your book about your parents and how they have supported you is such an instructive one and can be such a model for parenting. I’m wondering if you can share a little bit about that?

Dionne: I will say that I’m very fortunate to have been born into the family that I’m born in. It’s not only that my parents are really supportive. But I’m fortunate that my best friend is a plus-size woman. My grandmother is a plus-size woman. My aunt is a plus-size woman. And outside of me—who happened to be struck with heart failure and pulmonary hypertension—every woman in my family is healthy. 

So, the narrative that I grew up with is, just because you’re fat doesn’t mean you’re automatically unhealthy. And that was said over and over and over again from my grandmother on down. And so, I was able to really be born into a paradigm that thought about fatness differently from the onset. And I think that that is something that we can apply, firstly in our interpersonal relationships. 

The thing that I always say is that it’s never acceptable to make a comment about the size of someone’s body. You never know the reason they’ve gained weight or the reason they’ve lost weight, and by implying that, particularly if they’ve lost weight, that it’s a good thing—like, “Wow, you look good, wow you look amazing”—while that is well-meaning and it’s not intended to be malicious, the way in which it comes off is that you’ve lost weight intentionally and �ٳ󲹳�’s always a good thing, no matter how it’s been earned. 

So, it’s really showing up for one another on an interpersonal level, if you’re going to befriend or be in a just relationship with a fat person, never making your interactions about the size of their bodies—�ٳ󲹳�’s crucial and really a good step. And that goes from parent to child, �ٳ󲹳�’s friends, �ٳ󲹳�’s romantic partnerships, etc. That’s an easy thing to do on an interpersonal level. 

On the systemic level, I think a lot of it, it’s going to take all of us. And when I say all of us, I mean all of us who care about body politics, all of us who care about fat acceptance, to come together to really push these industries to think differently about what they are putting out into the world.

It’s very shocking to me and sad to me that even right now,  is the only state in the United States that has prohibited that discrimination in the workplace. It’s one state out of 50 states. And so, that requires all of us to organize, to lobby, to come together, to say, “This is something that cannot stand, and these are the things that we can do together. These are our political priorities as a fat acceptance movement to ensure that Hollywood includes fat characters who ��Dz�’t just think about their weight.”

I think a lot about the . Is there a test that can be implemented for Hollywood about fat characters, that you have a fat character who doesn’t just care about their weight, you have a fat character who is three-dimensional, has relationships, is navigating their life? Can that be implemented? Can we get the Federal Communications Commission to outlaw dieting ads? 

Those are the sorts of priorities that we can come together and rally around and lobby around. And I think if at some point that happens, all of this will shift, both on the systemic level and the interpersonal level.

But amid this, on August 19, 1960, a new storefront appeared on First Avenue. Located in Belltown, just a few blocks north of Seattle’s “Red Ghetto,” the Seattle Indian Center opened its doors, offering an oasis inside the urban wilderness. Any Indian, regardless of their tribe or background, was welcomed, offered coffee, and counseled. They were given food, clothing, and emergency financial assistance, but most importantly, they were listened to and treated as human beings with a rich heritage.

The kind Native women who volunteered there were not outsiders or government workers. They were Native mothers and grandmothers who saw in the faces of the Native street people the eyes of their ancestors pleading for help.

Seven Native mothers, led by Pearl Warren from the Makah tribe, formed the first “urban Indian” support organization in the country, the American Indian Women’s Service League. The group formed political inroads that contributed to the Red Power Movement, and became a wellspring that gave birth to a number of important Native service organizations that continue their work today.

The Birth of the American Indian Women’s Service League

“Indian people have radar,” says Jackie Swanson (Muckleshoot/Warm Springs), an early member of the Service League. It’s that power of observation that led to the formation of the service league in the first place. 

“The story is, there was a Makah woman who was approached by a couple from Montana, and the husband had been released from the hospital,” Swanson says.

The federal government’s Indian Health Service (IHS), which has a trust obligation to provide healthcare to federally recognized tribes, had paid to send the couple to Seattle for a medical procedure to be performed on the husband. But once the procedure was completed and the husband was discharged, the IHS obligation was fulfilled. The agency made no arrangements for the couple to return to Montana.

Frightened, intimidated, and no doubt feeling out of place among all the white faces, they had no one to turn to until one smiling Native face appeared out of the crowd.

“With the Indian radar they noticed this Makah woman. They went to her and told her their plight: that they were stuck in Seattle, that he’d been released from the hospital with no way home,” says Swanson. That Makah woman was Mary Jo Butterfield, the daughter of Pearl Warren. Together with her mother and some friends, Butterfield helped the couple find the resources to return home. After the incident, the seven mothers realized there was a massive gap in social services for Native people in Seattle.

In 1956, Congress passed the , which paid for Native people to move to large cities and promised them job training programs as an incentive. But the shock of moving to the big city was too much for many. Places like Seattle, San Francisco, Chicago, and Minneapolis were huge, impersonal urban centers compared to the remote, rural reservations they were used to, and many dropped out of the ineffective training programs that had lured them to the city. Once out of the programs, they were left to fend for themselves with absolutely no assistance from the government.

Many believe this had been the plan all along, to kill Indian people with despair and then assimilate the few who survived. After that, the government would have no more obligations to the Native people whose land they stole. In effect, the urban Indians of Seattle were abandoned and left to die miserable deaths on the street.

“The sooner we can get the Indians into the cities, the sooner the government can get out of the Indian business,” the head of the , Republican Sen. Arthur Watkins, is quoted as saying in a 1969 Seattle Post-Intelligencer article.

So, on September 10, 1958, the seven mothers formed the American Indian Women’s Service League to save those who had been left to struggle alone.

A Welcoming Atmosphere

It took two years to raise the money to open the first Seattle Indian Center. The group held rummage sales, potluck dinners, and salmon bakes with donated salmon. They also solicited donations from individuals, church groups, and tribes.

But the Native mothers’ real work was out on the street. Warren and the others would stake out the Greyhound bus terminal and stop anyone who looked Indian, asking if they needed help. They searched the streets and were not afraid to knock on doors in rundown hotels and tenements looking for Native people in need.

“They were like the Welcome Wagon,” remembers Ramona Bennett (Puyallup), an early volunteer.

In 1968, the center helped solve the problems of 3,917 Native people, according to one news story. But more telling than that, in one seven-month period in 1961, they served 5,592 people coffee, according to an Indian Center News story, attesting to the “living-room atmosphere” of the center. Intertribal fellowship was one of the group’s earliest and most important principles.

The Most Powerful Medicine of All

The people who volunteered at the center were often not much better off than those they were helping. Most volunteered because it gave them the satisfaction of helping and socializing with other Native people. Those who received assistance often became volunteers themselves. 

One woman, according to service league member Lillian Chappell, after receiving help getting clothes for her children, became the head of the clothing committee, finding wearable used clothing for people going on job interviews or for children preparing for a new school year.

And quite often, volunteers were the children of previous volunteers, emphasizing the powerful role of mothers in Indigenous societies and adding to the familial and tribal quality of the center.

But this is not to say they didn’t work hard. One Indian Center report noted volunteers performed 1,140 hours of work during January and February of 1961. One of the founding members, Ella Aquino, took over the responsibility of publishing and writing the Northwest Indian News, which became the service league’s newsletter, and the Indian Center News—both of which became critical sources of Indigenous journalism for Seattle’s Native community. The publications helped inform, and more importantly unite, the Native people in Seattle from 1957 to 1980.

Aquino’s granddaughter Linda Soriano remembers how Aquino prepared the newsletter and took the bus every month to the post office to mail them to hundreds of subscribers.

“She knew how important it was for the Native community to stay connected,” Soriano recalls.

With only an eighth-grade education and no experience as a journalist, Aquino learned how to run the mimeograph machine and how to do the layouts, and even wrote a column called “Teepee Talk.”

The deep satisfaction that came from helping fellow Native people became the most powerful medicine the service league dispensed for healing a generation of wounded spirits.

“It Changed My Life”

Slowly, as the service league grew, more emphasis was placed on preventing emergencies among Seattle’s urban Native population instead of simply dealing with emergencies. To do this, the service league needed more money than they could raise through bake sales and donations.

Ramona Bennett, who began volunteering at the Seattle Indian Center in 1964, remembers how Pearl Warren spotted her potential immediately.

“Pearl Warren taught me how to write basic grants to get dollars to provide services for the city Indian people,” Bennett recalls. Before then, Bennett had worked as a directory assistance operator for Pacific Northwest Bell and had organized a union walkout for higher wages and benefits. The teamsters offered her a job as a union official that would have resulted in a lucrative career. But once she got to know the other women of the service league, she felt a real sense of belonging.

“I was more comfortable and much happier with my own people than I had ever been in that other world,” Bennett remembers. “The service league completely changed my life.”&�Բ�����;

Later, another founding member of the service league, Adeline Garcia, paid the tuition for Bennett to return to school to receive a master’s degree in social work.

“When I asked her how I can pay her back, she said, ‘Don’t pay back, come back.’” And Bennett did, working for five years as a social worker at the Seattle Indian Center after receiving her degree. 

Bennett then got elected to the Puyallup tribal council and later served as the tribal chair from 1971 to 1978. The federal government considered the tribe terminated, but Bennett dug in and researched tribal history, creating an updated roll of members based on records that were nearly lost. She pulled her tribe back from the brink of termination—thanks, in part, to the leadership she witnessed and learned in the service league.

The Legacy of the American Indian Women’s Service League

Pearl Warren resigned from the Seattle Indian Center and the service league in 1970, after serving 10 years as director. Warren’s style of leadership was based on love and a desire to help Native people. She understood the healing power of helping, both for those being helped and those doing the helping. This reflects the deeply embedded tradition of matrilineal power that moves almost invisibly in all Native cultures.

But by 1970, a new generation of administrators had taken over, and they resented the near total control Warren had over the center and the service league. They also wanted to take better advantage of the opportunities government grants offered them.

Warren had resisted basing the service league’s budget on government grants, using them only as a last resort. Her philosophy had always been one of self-sufficiency and self-determination, having come from a period when no government funds were available to help the plight of urban Native people. The motto of the service league was, “Helping Indians Help Themselves.”

The new generation “weren’t even interested in being Indian before the service league came along,” she famously said.

Once, no one cared about the urban Native people destined to die on the streets of Seattle. But Pearl Warren, Adeline Garcia, Ella Aquino, Mary Jo Butterfield, and the other founding members of the service league built their organization into a formidable force for change.

The American Indian Women’s Service League continued, but many people complained after Warren left that the service league and the Seattle Indian Center had devolved into standard social service organizations and have lost most of their tribal quality.

“Once money came into the picture, things changed, and it got a lot more political … that turned off a lot of people,” Marilyn Bentz, director of the at the University of Washington, says in the book Native Seattle: Histories of the Crossing-Over Place, by Coll Thrush.

The league eventually dissolved in the mid-’80s. 

But the Seattle Indian Center still exists, providing, among many other things, a food bank, a day center where Native people can socialize, education and employment assistance, and community outreach services. 

One could argue that this shift was necessary to attract the government funds to build a more efficient system for helping Seattle’s Native population. The , the , and the , all of which help thousands of Native people each year, were started by former service league volunteers with the help of millions of dollars in government funds. Adeline Garcia, for example, went on to become president of the Seattle Indian Health Board.

But one could also argue that none of the new generation of leadership, many of whom were bureaucrats or Native politicians, had the wherewithal to stake out bus stations or knock on tenement doors looking for Native people to help. It all started with Warren and the founding mothers of the American Indian Women’s Service League, carrying out their traditional roles as caretakers of the culture, a tradition that goes back thousands of years, and one that will never die. It was this tribal quality that saved urban Indians in Seattle from falling off the edge.

CORRECTION: This article was updated at 12:51 p.m. PT on May 11, 2023, to clarify that Ramona Bennett worked for the Seattle Indian Center for five years, not three. Read our corrections policy here.

Within a month, Dismer’s body began changing in painful and traumatic ways. Their chest grew larger, triggering gender dysphoria, and their preexisting health conditions quickly threatened both their health and the health of the pregnancy. “It was miserable,” they told , an abortion storytelling organization. “After a month of contemplation, I knew I needed an abortion.”

It isn’t uncommon for nonbinary people to seek abortion care: A 2023 analysis by the Guttmacher Institute found that as many as do not identify as heterosexual women. But too often, the language used by abortion clinics, abortion funds, and abortion advocacy organizations ��Dz�’t reflect that reality.

“�±�’v�� been the sole statewide abortion fund for 32 years, and we’ve prided ourselves on supporting folks from all backgrounds,” Sam Woodring, communications manager for the , said in an email. The fund, which used to be known as Women Have Options, intentionally in 2022 to be more inclusive of abortion seekers who ��Dz�’t identify as cisgender women.

“When we use gendered language, the implicit message is that folks not included are unworthy of that care [and] support,” Woodring says. “To need support getting an abortion, and the only option available to you is also deeply gender-exclusive can be yet another barrier to accessing the care they [trans and nonbinary folks] want, need, and deserve.”

Moving Beyond the Battle of the Sexes

When freestanding and emerged in the 1970s, many deliberately branded as being women’s-health focused. This was the age of second wave feminism, when activists tried to assert and at every level of government. In 1970, provided federal grants for contraception; Roe v. Wade established the constitutional right to an abortion in 1973. At the time, these were considered to be “women’s health” services.

But 50 years later, our understanding of gender has moved beyond the binary of “man” and “woman”—and it’s well past time for abortion care organizations and clinics to reflect that.

The Abortion Fund of Ohio is one of many organizations and funds that have rebranded in an effort to become more gender inclusive. Previously known as the Gateway Women’s Access Fund, the Missouri Abortion Fund , well before Roe was overturned with the Supreme Court’s 2022 ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. The Abortion Liberation Fund of Pennsylvania from the Women’s Medical Fund in 2021. , the independent abortion clinic where Dismer works, was known as Hope Clinic for Women until early 2023.

Unfortunately, this tidal wave of change has been criticized for “.” Apparently, changing our language about abortion to be more inclusive and ensure access for everyone who wants, needs, and has an abortion is unfair and discriminatory to those who have fought “.”

Rebranding an organization to be gender inclusive and using language like “pregnant people” does not mean that someone who identifies as a woman can no longer call themself a woman. Woodring of the Abortion Fund of Ohio sums it up well: “Making the switch to gender-inclusive language hurts no one, because, as we like to remind folks, women are people too.”

Rebranding to Reality

Trans and nonbinary people have always existed, and while the women’s liberation movement of the 1970s may not have had the language or understanding to contextualize abortion rights within a gender-inclusive framework, we do now. Refusing to do so, continuing to say “women’s reproductive rights,” and specifically spelling out in the name of a clinic or fund that it serves “women” are all ways that deny the very existence of trans, nonbinary, and gender-expansive people.

And, since research now shows that one in six people who have an abortion ��Dz�’t identify as a heterosexual woman, it’s harmful to continue to insist that abortion or reproductive health care is a “women’s issue.”

Some clinics, like Boulder Valley Health Center (BVHC), have been providing gender-affirming care and other health care services to people of all genders for years. BVHC, previously known as Boulder Valley Women’s Health, in 2023, the 50th anniversary of the Colorado-based clinic. The clinic’s choice reflected the expansive care it had long been providing.

“�±�’v�� always actually served anyone,” director of development Jennifer Johnson told the . “It doesn’t matter what people’s gender identity is; we’re here to serve the whole community … we really wanted to make sure that everyone in the community knows they’re welcome here for their health care, however they identify.”

For other clinics, pivoting to gender-inclusive language reflects the stark reality that it’s illegal for some of them to provide abortion care at all.

Once Roe was overturned, abortion became illegal in the state of Alabama. Robin Marty, executive director of WAWC Healthcare (formerly West Alabama Women’s Center) in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, knew she needed to keep the clinic open to provide other types of reproductive and sexual health care.��

WAWC shut down for more than a week in the wake of the Dobbs decision. When it reopened on July 7, 2022, the clinic had revised its entire model. “We were then officially a nonprofit, sliding-scale health care center,” Marty says. “We built our new services around all of that, and that included HIV testing and treatment and prevention, as well as doing gender-affirming health care.”

In 2024, West Alabama Women’s Center became WAWC. The clinic waited to change its name because it was uncertain if it would be able to remain open at all. It took nearly two years for “us to feel that we were actually going to be able to stay open permanently,” Marty explained. “Before that, it didn’t make any sense to try to put into place an entire branding change if we thought we were only going to be operating for another month or two.”

Now, more than two years after Dobbs eradicated the constitutional right to an abortion, WAWC is still open and serving patients. WAWC doesn’t provide abortion care, but, true to its new gender-inclusive name, it does perform a wide range of reproductive and sexual health care options.

“We provide gender-affirming care across the state,” Marty said. “It’s not just those [in Tuscaloosa] who are coming to the clinic. �±�’v�� been able to do a telemed program … We’re actually able to provide medication to people regardless of where they are in the state.”

It’s unclear whether WAWC will ever be able to provide abortion care again, but if it does, its gender-inclusive name will signal its willingness to accept abortion patients of all genders. Even if abortion remains illegal in Alabama, WAWC’s rebrand, as other clinic and fund rebrands, hold an important lesson for clinics and funds nationwide: Changing a name to be gender-inclusive isn’t a rhetorical exercise. 

Being gender-inclusive is about reflecting the many genders a clinic already serves. It’s about welcoming patients of all genders, no matter how they identify. It’s about signaling to the broader culture, to the entire country, that access to safe abortion care is for everyone.

I am writing with an exciting update about this column. Since we launched “������” in 2021, we have collectively survived, witnessed, and lost loved ones, species, and land to floods, drought, fires, tornadoes, hurricanes, pandemics, genocide, a rise in fascism, and so many variations of cancer and disease.

We’re also enduring the ongoing violence of late-stage capitalism that shows up as institutional violence—denied health care, trigger-happy police, identity-based violence, and increasing economic disparity and insecurity. As all of these crises unfold around our precious globe, we are learning to persist in the work of living. We can simultaneously feel the end of the world as we’ve known it and the beginning of what will be shaped by us.

Though it’s looking dire, I am constantly reminded by friends, comrades, Octavia Butler, and historians that these are the conditions from which we have to make our way to lives worth living. We are at the beginning. Right now, I mostly feel a sense of devastating loss, but as the smoke clears, I know we will learn what is lost and where there are opportunities to survive. 

I began this column because I was feeling overwhelmed by what the pandemic had unveiled to us, about how hard it was to protect each other, and about how much we need each other. I wanted to call on the wisdom of murmuration: moving together, with adequate space and proximity, avoiding predation by being in right relationship. For humans to be in right relationship, we must practice accountability—being intentional about how we take up space and resources, attending to our role in the world and our impact on others, shaping what we can touch, and being able to repair and set boundaries, especially as conditions change.

After a year of exploring these themes in this column (also collected in ), I opened ������ up to other emergent strategists who are thinking about and practicing how we relate, change, grow, and hold each other through changing conditions. Those columns have been abundant and divergent, representing a healthy ecosystem of ideas and practices.

Emergent strategy is the only thing that makes sense to me right now. The Earth awaits our partnership, and we have to decentralize but move together to avoid the predation of this moment. We feel smaller and we may be smaller, but we—the workers, the makers, the parents, the birthing bodies, and the Earthlings who want a future on Earth—are still the majority. We need a place to keep learning how to flock together.

So, for our third iteration of the column, we are partnering with (MG), a group I worship. MG is shepherding a set of ideas that blow my mind every time I encounter them. I reference the organization often in conversation and interviews, and I included their “Shocks, Slides and Shifts” framework in . To me, MG feels like emergent strategy in action, and the thinkers who founded the organization were teachers in the soil of my own “ahas” about how the world works, what matters, and what we must do.

MG taught me that eco– comes from the Greek word oikos, which means home, and that home is what we always want to center, protect, and grow. That takes multiple forms: Ecosystem is all the relationships in our home. Ecology is what we know and understand about home. Economy is not money or markets, but how we manage the resources of our home. And ecological justice—a state of balance between human communities and healthy ecosystems—is rooted in and flows from home. 

MG also taught me about “.” Without realizing it, I had developed a short-term way of thinking about the impact of humans on Earth, but the “lag effect” framing helped me understand the cumulative effect of human behavior on our planet. Did you know it takes between 40 and 50 years to fully feel the effect of burning fossil fuels? Our Earth is experiencing the effect of the fossil fuels humans were burning in the 1980s. Consider how much fossil fuel has burned in the decades since then, a climate impact that will shape our next half century. Understanding this can give us a clearer picture of what is to come and how to take the right action. 

MG taught me that everything is precious. One of their beloved founders, , often tells the story about how he and his daughter would brush their teeth together so he could simultaneously teach her about the preciousness of every drop of water. I took that practice into my own life. 

MG helped me understand the true web of our interconnectedness. Our Earth isn’t organized by the borders we have set on top of it. Instead, Earth is a single living system operating as a spider’s web, where all of us are connected and impact each other, and core webbing ties it all together. There is fragility and strength in all of this connection. 

Learning interconnectedness helped me understand there is no “over there.” There is no climate catastrophe that can actually be contained. If we hope to survive, then we have to think about how we cause impact and are impacted by others and how we can protect the meta systems—air, water, soil, and energy—that hold us all. 

helped me understand strategy in a way I could quickly use and apply. In this exercise, the three overlapping circles represent what we need, what’s politically possible, and what are false solutions. So often, our political system will hear us articulate what we need and return with a false solution, claiming it is the only option that is politically possible. MG helped me understand that our work is never to settle for the false solutions, but to instead organize, exert pressure, and educate ourselves to make what we need politically possible. This has saved me so much time and helped me determine where to expend my own precious life force. 

This is just a taste of MG’s incredible thinking and experimentation. The organization has also liberated land in the Bay Miwok territory of the San Francisco Bay Area and is building a Justice and Ecology Center for communities to gather, deepen, and learn in part of a larger shift to return land to Indigenous hands and those who will love and steward it. 

As we keep watching our government devolve, I am calling on MG to helm ������ in 2025 and offer a guide for how we can foster a , even against the odds. Movement Generation is going to use this column to provide current ideas, frameworks, and practices that can help us navigate this storm. 

I am so excited to be their student again, and I am grateful for YES! Media letting us continue to iterate to make the best offer we can. We invite you to learn with us, grow with us, and change with us.��

The history of slavery provides vital context to contemporary conversations.

Slavery has been in the news a lot in recent years. From the discovery of the auction of 272 enslaved people that enabled to remain in operation to the over calling slaves “workers from Africa” and the , Americans are having conversations about this difficult period in American history. Some of these dialogues have been wrought with controversy and conflict, like the ��who challenged her professor’s understanding of enslaved families.

As a scholar of slavery at the University of Texas at Austin, I welcome the public debates and connections the American people are making with history. However, they still have many misconceptions about slavery, as evidenced by the conflict at the University of Tennessee.

I’ve spent my career dispelling myths about “the peculiar institution.” The goal in my courses is not to victimize one group and celebrate another. Instead, we trace the history of slavery in all its forms to make sense of the origins of wealth inequality and the roots of discrimination today. The history of slavery provides vital context to contemporary conversations and counters the distorted facts, internet hoaxes and poor scholarship I caution my students against.

Four myths about slavery

Myth 1:��The majority of African captives came to what became the United States.

Truth: Only a captives, or 4 percent to 6 percent, came to the United States. The majority of enslaved Africans went to Brazil, followed by the Caribbean. A significant number of enslaved Africans arrived in the American colonies by way of the Caribbean, where they were “seasoned” and mentored into slave life. They spent months or years recovering from the harsh realities of the Middle Passage. Once they were forcibly accustomed to slave labor, many were then brought to plantations on American soil.

Myth��2:��Slavery lasted for 400 years.

Popular culture is rich with references to 400 years of oppression. There seems to be confusion between the (1440-1888) and the institution of slavery, confusion only reinforced by the Bible, :

Then the Lord said to him, ‘Know for certain that for four hundred years your descendants will be strangers in a country not their own and that they will be enslaved and mistreated there.’

Listen to Lupe Fiasco—just one hip-hop artist to refer to the 400 years—in his 2011 imagining of America without slavery, “”:

[Hook]

You would never know

If you could ever be

If you never try

You would never see

Stayed in Africa

We ain’t never leave

So there were no slaves in our history

Were no slave ships, were no misery, call me crazy, or isn’t he

See I fell asleep and I had a dream, it was all black everything

[Verse 1]

Uh, and we ain’t get exploited

White man ain’t feared so he did not destroy it

We ain’t work for free, see they had to employ it

Built it up together so we equally appointed

First 400 years, see we actually enjoyed it

Truth: Slavery was not unique to the United States; it is a part of almost every nation’s history, from Greek and Roman civilizations to contemporary forms of human trafficking. The American part of the story lasted fewer than 400 years.

How, then, do we calculate the timeline of slavery in America? Most historians use 1619 as a starting point: 20 Africans referred to as “servants” arrived in Jamestown, Virginia, on a Dutch ship. It’s important to note, however, that they were not the first Africans on American soil. Africans first arrived in America in the late 16th century not as slaves but as explorers together with Spanish and Portuguese explorers.

One of the best-known of these African “conquistadors” was , who traveled throughout the Southeast from present-day Florida to Texas. As far as the institution of chattel slavery—the treatment of slaves as property—in the United States, if we use 1619 as the beginning and the 1865 13th Amendment as its end, then it lasted 246 years, not 400.

Myth��3:��All Southerners owned slaves.

�հ��ܳٳ�:�� of all Southerners owned slaves. The fact that one-quarter of the Southern population were slaveholders is still shocking to many. This truth brings historical insight to modern conversations about inequality and .

Take the case of Texas.

When it established statehood, the Lone Star State had a shorter period of Anglo-American chattel slavery than other Southern states—only 1845 to 1865—because Spain and Mexico had occupied the region for almost half of the 19th century with policies that either abolished or limited slavery. Still, the number of people affected by wealth and income inequality is staggering. By 1860, the , but slaveholders represented 27 percent of the population, and controlled 68 percent of the government positions and 73 percent of the wealth. These are astonishing figures, but in Texas is arguably more stark, with 10 percent of tax filers taking home 50 percent of the income.

Myth 4:��Slavery was a long time ago.

Truth: African-Americans have been free in this country for less time than they were enslaved. Blacks have been free for 152 years, which means that most Americans are only three to four generations away from slavery. This is not that long ago.

Over this same period, however, have built their legacies on the institution and generated wealth that African-Americans have not had access to because enslaved labor was forced. Segregation maintained , and limited African-American recovery efforts.

The value of slaves

Economists and historians have examined detailed aspects of the enslaved experience for as long as slavery existed. enters this conversation by looking at the value of individual slaves and the ways enslaved people responded to being treated as a commodity.

They were bought and sold just like we sell cars and cattle today. They were gifted, deeded and mortgaged the same way we sell houses today. They were itemized and insured the same way we manage our assets and protect our valuables.

Enslaved people were valued at every stage of their lives, from before birth until after death. Slaveholders examined women for their fertility and projected the value of their “future increase.” As the slaves grew up, enslavers assessed their value through a rating system that quantified their work. An “A1 Prime hand” represented one term used for a “first-rate” slave who could do the most work in a given day. Their values decreased on a quarter scale from three-fourths hands to one-fourth hands, to a rate of zero, which was typically reserved for elderly or differently abled bondpeople (another term for slaves).

Slavery was an extremely diverse economic institution, one that extracted unpaid labor out of people in a variety of settings.

For example, Guy and Andrew, two prime males sold at the largest auction in U.S. history in 1859, commanded different prices. Although similar in “all marketable points in size, age, and skill,” Guy was US$1,280 while Andrew sold for $1,040 because “he had lost his right eye.” A reporter from the noted “that the market value of the right eye in the Southern country is $240.” Enslaved bodies were reduced to monetary values assessed from year to year and sometimes from month to month for their entire lifespan and beyond. By today’s standards, Andrew and Guy would be worth about $33,000-$40,000.

Slavery was an extremely diverse economic institution, one that extracted unpaid labor out of people in a variety of settings—from small single-crop farms and plantations to urban universities. This diversity was also reflected in their prices. And enslaved people understood they were treated as commodities.

“I was sold away from mammy at 3 years old,” recalled Harriett Hill of Georgia. “I remembers it! It lack selling a calf from the cow,” she shared in a with the Works Progress Administration. “We are human beings,” she told her interviewer. Those in bondage understood their status. Even though Harriet Hill was too little to remember her price when she was three, she recalled being sold for $1,400 at age 9 or 10: “I never could forget it.”

Slavery in popular culture

Slavery is part and parcel of American popular culture, but for 40 years the television miniseries was the primary visual representation of the institution, except for a handful of independent (and not widely known) films such as Haile Gerima’s ��or the Brazilian

Today, from grassroots initiatives such as the interactive , where school-aged children spend the night in slave cabins, to comic skits on , slavery is front and center. In 2016 A&E and History released the ��which reflected four decades of new scholarship. Steve McQueen’s “12 Years a Slave” was a box office in 2013, actress Azia Mira Dungey made headlines with the popular web series called , and —a series about runaway slaves and abolitionists—was a hit for its network WGN America. With less than one year of operation, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History, which devotes several galleries to the history of slavery, has had more than .

The elephant that sits at the center of our history is coming into focus. American slavery happened—we are still living with its consequences. I believe we are finally ready to face it, learn about it and acknowledge its significance to American history.

Editor’s note: This is an updated version of that originally appeared on Oct. 21, 2014.

This article was originally published on . Read the .

Or, as , I “believe [I am] White.” I’ve yet to get a DNA test, which led to a for a White supremacist who thought himself 100% White. Perhaps most indicative of the power and prevalence of White Privilege is that, though people of color have been fighting racism since its invention, those who are most associated with White Privilege education tend to be White people: Tim Wise, Robin DiAngelo, Paul Gorski, and, of course, , author of the 1989 article, “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.”

And I understand why Peggy McIntosh’s “Knapsack” article continues to fill anti-racist syllabuses 26 years later. Her list of privileges makes the concept readable and digestible—heck, the success of is largely because of this listing format. For example: “I am never asked to speak for all the people of my racial group” or “If my day, week, or year is going badly, I need not ask of each negative episode or situation whether it has racial overtones.”

Taken together, McIntosh’s list reveals a privilege she never explicitly states: the privilege to feel normal. But how odd is it that White people are the ones who so often disproportionately get the credit for educating about White privilege? Think of it this way: Because I have always had full use of my legs, I’d be the last person you’d turn to to learn about life in a wheelchair. In fact, navigating a tour of the state capital with a student in a wheelchair for 30 minutes taught me more about life in a wheelchair than my previous 30+ years had taught me.

Yet, when it comes to White Privilege, White people somehow become the authority. While I have indeed learned important lessons from prominent White anti-racist educators (like the above ability-privilege analogy that I pulled from Tim Wise), here are lessons people of color have taught me that have changed my life—and they could change yours as well.

1. I Have the Privilege of Having a Positive Relationship with the Police, Generally

Sure, the police who patrolled the affluent neighborhoods of my youth were an inconvenience to a few keggers, and I maintain that a traffic violation from the late 90s was unfair, but I grew up thinking of the police officers as a source of safety if I were ever in danger; I certainly never viewed them as the source of danger. In 1999, —and the 41 bullets that police officers in plainclothes discharged at this unarmed Black man with no criminal record—taught me that not all share this privilege.

Diallo was for me what Michael Brown has been to some White people. Too many Black and brown people are not safe with the police. Not even if you are child, a lesson and taught me. Not even if you are seeking medical help, a lesson taught me. Not even if you call the police for help with your mentally ill son, a lesson taught me. Not even if your back is turned, a lesson and taught me. Not even if you tell the police you “can’t breathe,” a lesson taught me. Not even if you have your hands up, a lesson Antonio Zambrano-Montes and Michael Brown (according to ) taught me. Not even if you are “safe” in custody, a lesson , , , and taught me. Not even if you plead for help while in custody, a lesson taught me.

These are just a fraction of my teachers, those whose names reached the media, which too often neglect reporting police killings of and people. Of course, I might not have learned any of these lessons if not for the efforts of , the founders of the Black Lives Matter movement, a movement that is changing , not to mention our .

2. I Have the Privilege of Being Favored by School Authorities

and , both of whom were arrested for bringing science projects to school while , helped teach me this lesson. Recently, one was suspended for intimidating a White girl through his staring—staring that took place during a staring contest. Huh?

Studies confirm such mistreatment of Black and brown students. In , White students who reported that they committed 40 crimes in a year were “as likely to be imprisoned as black and Hispanic students who reported committing just five offenses.” In my hometown of Seattle, Black middle school students are as likely to be suspended as White students, a reality that has attracted an investigation by the federal government.

One found similar disparities start as early has preschool. Preschool. As a parent of a White 4-year-old, I can’t fathom how such heavy-handed practices would ever help my child (who recently smacked my face because he didn’t want me to leave his room at bedtime). But because we’re White, I’m unlikely to ever receive the call from school officials that Tunette Powell recounts in her article, “.”

3. I Have the Privilege of Attending Segregated Schools of Affluence

That’s true, even if I’m , a demographic rarely forced to live in “.” If you are Black and poor, however, you are nearly to live in concentrated poverty than poor White Americans.

When I was growing up, was more than history; it was a value. Civil Rights icon taught me this lesson. And research shows that both and benefit from integrated schools. Even though we “ended” segregation in 1954, ; integration has long ago been forced from the table of education reform.

Using fear tactics and coded language, White people continue to be the barrier to any attempt at integration, a fact that This American Life reminded us of last summer with its must-listen, two-part series “ .” In Seattle, it was a White parent, unhappy she couldn’t get her daughter into a nearby (recently renovated) high school, —which, not ironically, many White families had already fled because of previous integration efforts. Even in “” Seattle, people of color can’t even find a safe yoga class for people of color.

4. I Have the Privilege of Learning about My Race in School

In response to outrageous shutting down of Tucson Unified School District’s Mexican American Studies program——, winning victories in districts that are predominately of Color, such as and most recently . Until White America joins the fight, the lesson that educator and activist teaches below will continue to hold true:

Unfortunately, in too many schools and districts, ethnic studies is not even an elective.

5. I Have the Privilege of Finding Children’s Books that Overwhelmingly Represent My Race

And the whitewashing of curriculum extends into bookstores (less so into libraries) where I live. And it’s not because I’m a bad shopper (though I am). In a New York Times op-ed, taught me that “of 3,200 children’s books published in 2013, just 93 were about Black people.” And that doesn’t mean the remaining 3,107 are filled with people of color of various races.

In 2013, only of children’s books were written by or about people of color. On my many trips to Seattle bookstores, I find the few such stories that do exist tell the stories of Civil Rights icons and trailblazers, such as Jackie Robinson and Rosa Parks. And while these stories are important and inspirational, I have not yet been ready to teach my 4-year-old that people of color have been normally oppressed; I just want him to view the faces of people of color as normal. Fortunately, the we can join has emerged to , which is actually a curse if we want our children to interact with others based on reality, not stereotypes.

6. I Have the Privilege of Soaking in Media Blatantly Biased Toward My Race

Everyday Feminism writer deepened my understanding of this bias that rears its unwelcome, White-loving head, for example, in pictures that humanize White killers while simultaneously dehumanizing victims of Color:

Two sets of pictures, one with and one without mugshots——further illustrate this bias:

And these biases are besides a media that, according to , continue to be overwhelmingly whitewashed (not to mentioned malewashed, straightwashed, and youthwashed). If you are still not convinced, check out actor Dylan Marron’s website, , through which the Venezuelan American has edited mainstream movies so that .

Even the two-hour-and-19 minute-movie, Noah—set in a region filled with Brown people—is reduced to just eleven seconds. More proof is just one Google image search away. Google “beauty” and count the people of color. Here’s what my search found (and notice the glaring lack of Idris Elba images):

And if the media are not blatantly biased, remember that they are covering a blatantly biased country, one that views the epidemic of heroin, , as a Apparently, the addictions of White people merit a “,” not the three-strikes laws and mandatory minimums that have devastated Black and brown communities.

7. I Have the Privilege of Escaping Violent Stereotypes Associated with My Race

Given that, throughout this country’s history, White people have been responsible for unspeakable atrocities against people of color—genocide, forced migrations, lynchings—what a set up that violent stereotypes attach to people of color and not to White males like me. Or the three White males recently charged with plotting to bomb “.”

Or these two, , who were arrested for threatening the lives of Black students at the University of Missouri, students who had dared to protest .

The Huffington Post’s recently taught me that, since September 11, White supremacists (who tend to be White) have perpetuated more terrorism in the United States than any foreign threat. connects nearly 100 killings to a single White supremacist website, Stormfront (whose users also tend to be White). And though I share a similar skin color as these violent White people, I move about free from violent stereotypes—and I haven’t even brought up all the famous White serial killers! Meanwhile, Homeland Security misdirects its resources on the who dare to protest rampant racism in our country.

8. I Have the Privilege of Playing the Colorblind Card, Wiping the Slate Clean of Centuries of Racism

Another set up that benefits White people. And I ��Dz�’t mean to sound judgmental. If we have espoused , it’s because we have been taught to do so. However, countless students of color have taught me a different lesson: Race is a fundamental part of their identities and deserves to be acknowledged and appreciated. Yes, race is a social construction based on physical differences that, genetically speaking, make as much sense as classifying people by fingerprint pattern and blood type.

Nevertheless, White people have been using the invention of race, , to systematically benefit White people from as early as the colonial era. And when overt racism (finally) became socially unacceptable—after, of course, vast inequality had become deeply entrenched in every —we switched to , making it virtually impossible to address this societal inequality.

It also makes it very difficult for White people to examine their , like the ones that associate . Or the ones that prescribe for Black and Latinx children than White children in “severe” pain. Or the ones that when it comes to school discipline, job applications, and government inquiries. And, of course, who pays the heaviest price? Again, what a setup, one that clearly benefits White people, though it does lead to some hypocrisy:

9. I Have the Privilege of Being Insulated from the Daily Toll of Racism

Then I watched Color of Fear, and Victor Lee Lewis taught me a new reality (as did , who made the film).

And while it’s not the job of people of color to educate White people on racism, it’s no longer difficult to find that the toll Victor Lee Lewis powerfully describes above.

10. I Have the Privilege of Living Ignorant of the Dire State of Racism Today

Shaun King, a prominent voice of the Black Lives Matter movement, set me straight on November 10, 2015.

We are living during a “Civil Rights Movement.” Will you spend it enjoying the privilege to ignore the movement—or will you join it?

This article was originally published by . It has been edited for YES! Magazine.

My phone continued ringing into the night, with text messages exchanged between my girlfriends and me. We shared the news articles about the shooting and the victims. Shooting incidents are not uncommon in America, but the fact that this tragedy happened so close to home, and to our neighbors, was deeply shocking and profoundly saddened us. And then we got scared—and angry. When we had nothing to share but our anxiety and despair, we concluded our conversation by saying, “stay safe.” But even that got me thinking: What did these women do that was “unsafe” to put themselves in danger? Can we really keep ourselves safe from hate crimes by staying at home, or simply being cautious of the threat? What is this danger that we are facing anyway?

On March 16, eight people were killed in shootings at three separate Asian American-owned spas near Atlanta. The suspect, Robert Aaron Long, claimed that he was not motivated by racial hatred, but rather by his “sexual addiction.” Based on the fact that to three Asian American-owned spas and most of the victims were Asian American women, it’s impossible to hide racism in this scene of the crime. Instead, we need to adequately address that this shooting is a racially motivated crime, specifically rooted in sexualized racism against Asian American women. We must also address American history’s role in creating vulnerable subjects, and encouraging (or at least dismissing) violence against them.

During the pandemic, violent attacks, and harassment toward Asian Americans have spiked. In 2020, hate crimes targeting Asian people rose by 150%, while such crimes decreased overall by 7%, according to a by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino. I have personally witnessed how xenophobic rhetoric around the coronavirus, and controversial comments about immigrants by our ex-president, have fueled anti-Asian discrimination and inflamed hatred in this country.

This portrayal of Asian American women is not our history—it is what the history of White supremacy and systematic racism wishes to insert.

During times of crisis, more vulnerable populations have historically become scapegoats. We Asian Americans have been targeted by , the Chinese Exclusion Act, the internment of Japanese Americans, the post-9/11 surveillance and violence directed at Muslim and South Asian communities, ongoing ICE raids in our Southeast Asian communities and Asian-owned businesses, the detention and deportation of our community members, and now, rising anti-Asian attacks during COVID-19. This is how our community’s history is crafted under the United States’ long history of White supremacy and systemic racism.

On March 16, we lost who were our beloved families, friends, and neighbors. Working as a Korean community organizer at , one of the Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) organizations in Georgia, I received several media requests in the wake of the shootings. In one interview, I was asked about Asian American women’s hypersexualization and sexual fetishization, as though we are to blame for the actions of a violent White man who claimed he had an “addiction” that required him to “eliminate” the “temptation” of our existence.  The United States’ long history of bigotry against Asian American women has made us more vulnerable to gender-based violence and sexualized racism. Asian American women as submissive and obedient, a manifestation of Oriental beauty—dehumanized sexual objects whose bodies are fetishized for White male pleasure. But this is not our history. This portrayal of Asian American women is again what the history of White supremacy and systematic racism wishes to insert.

Take, for instance, Asian American women’s participation in the beauty industry. Asian American women are not involved in the beauty industry to fulfill the sexual fetishization of White men. In 2017, I conducted in Duluth, to examine how their sociocultural experiences before and within immigration have contributed to their understanding of women’s subjectivity. These first-generation Korean American women I interviewed were working in service and beauty industries owned by local Asian Americans. By immigrating, these women increased their socioeconomic statuses by becoming working-class immigrants in the U.S., which offered them new opportunities to enter the workforce and provide substantial economic contributions to their families. None of the subjects of my research voiced a desire to enter that industry to fulfill a racialized, fetishized stereotype.

Likewise, the six Asian American women killed in Atlanta were not hypersexualized objects responsible for the suspect’s “sexual temptation.” They were hard-working women who worked to provide the best for their families.

I am heartbroken and angry for losing the precious lives of our neighbors. But we cannot just stay heartbroken by this tragedy.

As our society is finally having a racial reckoning, from Black Lives Matter to Stop Asian Hate, I have become more aware of racism and sexism around me. Unlike many other Asian Americans who shared their frustration with the racism implicit in being asked “where are you from?” I did not have a problem with this question. Growing up as an immigrant kid, I defined myself as a foreigner to this country. It was pretty obvious to me that I was from Korea. However, I soon realized that I was going through the process of becoming a minority, transforming from Korean into Korean American.

As an Asian American, I expect levels of discrimination and inequality here, and I bear with them. Because I am labeled as a minority, I feel like there exist boundaries I shouldn’t cross to the side of the majority. I’ve heard about cultural integration, where different cultures and customs become part of American culture, but it’s a mere myth. My experience suggests that White Americans do not believe in Americans of color. They want to make sure we ��Dz�’t cross their boundaries by questioning our origins, stigmatizing us as “others,” and confining us to a “model minority.” Remaining at the bottom of this country’s racial hierarchy, I have gradually internalized  inferiority and repressed my voice. Living as an Asian American woman, I experience endless sexual harassment. Regardless of how I express my sexuality, I am still considered a “small and tight Asian woman who can bring the best joy for men”—and yes, this is literally what a man whispered to me inside a crowded train in New York City.

Our calls to action are simple: protect our communities, and promise our future generations that they will be valued as important.

Until now, I ignored the ignorant. But from now on, I won’t. I cannot be silenced any longer when I see my brothers discriminated against when claiming themselves Americans, and when I know my sisters are harassed by sexual fetishization that strips them of humanity. Together, we must end the history of White supremacy, systemic racism, and misogyny. We must revise the history with our stories and voices. I am heartbroken and angry for losing the precious lives of our neighbors. But we cannot just stay heartbroken by this tragedy. We need to act to restore justice, and empower AAPI communities and other communities of color, to access the equal opportunities and treatment we deserve as Americans who call this land “home.”

First, let’s center the victims of this attack and their families—including with financial and community support. We need to make sure their lives are honored with dignity and respect. Second, we need to recognize that the rise in anti-Asian attacks hurts many Asian American businesses in our community. We need to support our local AAPI businesses to make sure our community is not isolated, but keeps thriving. Most importantly, get involved with AAPI organizations in your community and nationwide. These organizations are committed to making safe communities where we all belong and thrive. Numerous organizations are leading racial dialogue, community-building to address the root causes of violence and hate, and offering responsive crisis intervention resources, including in-language support for mental health, legal, employment, and immigration services. In Georgia, Asian American Advocacy Fund is working at the state and local level to advocate for policies that ensure the needs of immigrants and communities of color are reflected in policy. And to mourn the tragedy in our community, we have created a offering healing, solace, and building solidarity. Our calls to action are simple: protect our communities, and promise our future generations that they will be valued as important.

Even as we continue to —the shooter’s motive, the acts of heroism and sacrifice made by people who only wanted to gather in love, safety, and community—it’s important to be honest about what we know. Club Q was not simply “a nightclub.” It was for LGBTQ people to gather in Colorado Springs. The politically conservative city of less than 500,000 on the western slope of the Rocky Mountains is circled by five military bases (including the Air Force Academy) and several prominent, well-funded that have been drumming up anti-LGBTQ sentiment for decades. 

The gunman opened fire moments before the clock struck midnight, signaling the beginning of Transgender Day of Remembrance (TDOR), an annual observance of the ever-growing list of transgender people killed by hate violence. At least one of the five people killed at Club Q was an out transgender man; his name was no doubt added to the ceremonial reading of names in somber gatherings around the country on Sunday. 

Club Q was hosting a weekend of events to commemorate TDOR, including a drag show on Saturday night, and an all-ages drag brunch scheduled for Sunday morning. Events like these by far-right, anti-LGBTQ groups, including the Proud Boys—who have showed up to harass families at drag queen story hours in , , , and other states this year. 

On a local scale, the member of Congress representing Colorado Springs—Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert, who just secured re-election by a razor-thin margin—has spent much of her time in Washington , including introducing legislation that would criminalize gender-affirming medical care for transgender youth. On Sunday, “thoughts and prayers” to the victims and their families, adding, “This lawless violence needs to end and end quickly.” Out lawmakers, including Brianna Titone, the first out trans woman elected to Colorado’s state legislature, were , noting that Boebert not only opposes common-sense gun control, but also has promoted the anti-LGBTQ myth that gay, transgender, and queer people target children for sexual abuse. 

The death, devastation, and despair in Colorado today is the tragic but predictable outcome of relentless fearmongering, of hate speech allowed to go unchecked on major broadcast and social networks, and of legislation that attempts to control and punish people deemed “different” simply by the nature of their existence. All of this, in a country that refuses to implement even basic gun control measures that might have kept weapons like the AR-15 used at Club Q (and in ) out of the hands of people who use them to commit mass murder.

Many of us have seen the writing on the wall. Queer people have been bracing for another attack like this, and many have been sounding the alarm for years. Sunnivie covered the Pulse massacre in Orlando in 2016, and it’s impossible to ignore the parallels with the attack on Club Q—and what members of our community have learned about how to protect each other since then. In Orlando, police waited hours to enter Pulse, likely resulting in additional fatalities. In Colorado Springs, reports indicate that a transgender woman and an with his wife and daughter, actively fought, disarmed, and detained the gunman before police arrived. They undoubtedly saved countless lives. We have always been the ones to keep each other safe—but this rises to a new level, where LGBTQ people and our loved ones now carry active combat training and knowledge of emergency medical care to a night out with our community. 

It doesn’t have to be like this.

There’s little doubt that the mass shooting at Club Q is the horrific result of rising anti-LGBTQ sentiment. There’s also little doubt that it will happen again unless we, as a collective community—straight, gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, queer, nonbinary, and cisgender—make a serious commitment to act. We must commit to stopping queerphobic and transphobic legislation, to publicly and privately challenging anti-LGBTQ rhetoric spewed by politicians and people we’re in community with, and to protecting LGBTQ people at all costs. 

That’s what YES! is about: bringing people together to explore solutions that transform our world for the better. The mass shooting at Club Q might not change gun laws, but it should be a rallying cry for all those committed to a world where LGBTQ people are free—free to exist as we are, free to thrive, and free from hatred. We deserve that—and so do each and every one of you.

In 2013, an 18-year-old had enraged outbursts at school and threatened to kill his debate coach. Concerned, the school’s threat assessment team interviewed him, rating him as a low-level risk for violence. But three months after the assessment, he shot and killed a classmate and himself on school grounds in Centennial, Colorado.

By 2018, a 19-year-old man had more than 40 documented encounters with law enforcement and a history of threatening others and weapons purchases. After his mother died in 2017, family friends contacted law enforcement and expressed concern about his behavior. In 2018, he perpetrated a shooting that killed 17 people in Parkland, Florida.

All three perpetrators displayed disturbing behavior before their attacks—and the people around them missed the opportunities to intervene.

 are  at the  at the University of Colorado, Boulder. We study the circumstances that lead to violence in which an —like a person, group, or school—in advance.

We find that the same patterns of concerning behavior emerge among the perpetrators, but �ٳ󲹳�’s not all. We also find that there are often many opportunities to intervene with the perpetrator before the tragedy that peers, family members, school staff, law enforcement officials, and others miss.

Much of the public discussion on preventing school shootings focuses on whether and how to limit people’s access to firearms. While these efforts remain important, over the past 30 years, our work has identified other strategies that can reduce the risk for violence. Here are three evidence-based steps that schools and communities can take to prevent violence.

1. Teach Students and Adults to Report Warning Signs

Most school shooters  and  to cause harm before their deadly attack.

These troubling behaviors and communications provide , for students to speak up, and for people to help a student who may be in psychological or emotional distress.

But the warning signs for violence can be difficult to distinguish from other types of problem behavior, particularly among adolescents.

According to the U.S. Secret Service, the  are:

• Threats to the target or others, and an intent to attack, including on social media
• Intense or escalating anger
• Interest in weapons
• Sadness, depression or isolation
• Changes in behavior or appearance
• Suicide or self-harm
• Interest in weapons or violence
• Complaints of being bullied
• Worries over grades or attendance
• Harassing others

Attackers typically exhibit five or more of these concerning behaviors.

 that encourage people to share their concerns about, and seek help for, those engaging in worrisome behavior may improve safety in schools and communities.

2. Develop and Publicize Around-the-Clock Anonymous Tip Lines

People need a way to safely report their concerns.  systems include websites, phone numbers to call or text, email addresses, and apps. They let students and others anonymously, or confidentially, share their concerns about another’s threatening behavior or communications.

These tip lines can make people less hesitant to report situations that worry them or that they think may not be their business, such as bullying, threats, drug use, or someone’s talk of suicide.

Several states have modeled their tip lines after , which is a 24/7/365 live anonymous reporting system that was created in the wake of the 1999 Columbine High School mass shooting. Safe2Tell relays tips to local law enforcement officials and school leaders, who investigate and triage each tip. These law enforcement officials and school leaders determine the nature of the concern, along with the most appropriate response.

A 2011 study found the system had , but that research has not been updated in the years since. Recent Safe2Tell reports indicate that the system also helps students get help for significant mental health needs.

During the 2021–2022 school year, for instance, Safe2Tell received 19,364 reports. Of those, 14% were related to suicide threats, 7% to bullying, and 7% to welfare checks. Of the 84 self-reports related to mental health that year, , 32% had their parents notified, 22% had an official check on their well-being, 12% were hospitalized at least briefly, and 10% were given a suicide assessment; some received more than one of those responses.

These types of interventions are known to prevent school violence. The National Policing Institute is a nonprofit organization based in Arlington, Virginia, that maintains the . As of 2021, the database contained case information on  were first discovered by a peer of the potential attacker.

3. Conduct Behavioral Threat Assessment and Management

Once people report their concerns, law enforcement officers, school staff, and mental health professionals must evaluate the reports and determine how to handle the information and the people implicated.

One method, called , seeks to identify the cause of the concerning behavior—such as a grievance, psychological trauma, or mental health concern. In schools, this process encourages the threat assessment team to evaluate the risk for violence and , their behavior, and their communications.

Schools that use this approach are  the students they evaluate. That means students can still receive services and support through their school, rather than being excluded from it.

This process also helps  in which a student made a threat but does not intend harm from those in which a student poses a real threat.

Once the team has assessed the threat, it can  to ensure everyone knows how to handle the student and their behavior. School staff members then also know how, and to whom, to report any subsequent observations of worrying actions or statements from the student.

It’s important for all school personnel to know that the federal student privacy law allows this type of information-sharing because it . Some school leaders hesitate to share the plan because they are confused about this provision of the law.

For that reason, and because resources may be constrained at school or may not extend to a student’s home life, the action plans that follow behavioral threat assessments  properly. So the team may have , but not the actual work of supporting, managing, or monitoring the student’s needs.

Americans are not helpless in the face of school violence. Research has identified solutions. We believe it’s time to act to consistently and effectively implement these solutions.

This article is republished from under a Creative Commons license. Read the .

Most of the women, like organizer Wolf Terry of Lakewood, Colorado, were at the event from before 5 a.m. until well after 5 p.m. “It’s been an immense morning,” she says. “There was a lot of anticipation leading up to this moment. This is why we’re here. This is what we’re here for. We’re here for the kids. We are here to ban guns and this movement is starting to grow.”

And grow it did. By midday, the crowd had swelled across the street and into Lincoln Veterans Memorial Park. A week before the sit-in, organizers had sent their , imploring him to ban guns in the state and implement a buyback program. They wanted him to issue an executive order declaring gun violence a public health emergency that warrants such actions.

However, by the end of day 1, Gov. Polis had not complied. Unbeknownst to Terry and others outside the Capitol that day, Polis’s public relations team had sent a long memo to the press stating all the reasons why he would not comply with Here 4 the Kids’ demands. In it, Polis said, “Unfortunately, the asks being made by the organizers are simply not in the governor’s executive powers and would violate both the state and federal constitutions.” The memo went on to say that Polis agreed to meet with the organization’s legal team to discuss alternatives, but the group declined.

The women behind the Here 4 the Kids movement want all the guns gone—no compromises.

Saira Rao, cofounder of Here 4 the Kids, also helps lead a project called , which launched a series of dinners in 2019 where Rao and co-organizer Regina Jackson facilitated conversations forcing white women to confront their relationship to white supremacy. Those dinners became the basis of the documentary film . Those conversations also inform the racial dynamic at play in Here 4 the Kids’s strategy: women of color guiding white women to use their racial privilege to win social justice. 

Rao, a former resident of Denver, once had children in Denver-area schools. She shares that her children would have attended East High School, the site of a .  However, it was the March 27, 2023, mass shooting in Nashville, Tennessee, that motivated her to start researching solutions. That solution became Here 4 the Kids. 

Rao noticed that the Nashville shooting took place in a predominantly white school and involved white kids. In spite of this, it dominated the news for only six hours.

“I’m scrolling through my phone looking for news on that shooting. And I’m sort of like, stopped in my tracks, because I’m like, it’s gone. It’s gone,” Rao says. “And so I’m sitting here on March 27, thinking, holy moly, white babies dying ��Dz�’t matter anymore, not even for six hours. So, if white babies’ lives ��Dz�’t matter, what does that mean for everybody else?”

Rao says she spent the rest of the evening listening to President Joe Biden “say the quiet part out loud,” in a that he had done all he intended to do, and the rest was up to Congress. She summarizes, “As Americans… we are told on the evening of March 27, that we have a full federal institutional catastrophic failure [to address] the number one killer of our children.”

“I have read a ton of Supreme Court cases,” says Rao, who has a law degree from New York University Law School, and clerked on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia. Rao came up with the idea of an executive order on gun control after extensive brainstorming and workshopping the idea with fellow activists, a few legal scholars, and other friends.

More specifically, the idea of activating white women came from her work with Race2Dinner. “I’ve always known that white women hold the power,” says Rao, calling them “the most powerful demographic in this country.” She says, “There’s a reason advertisers chase white women between the ages of 25 and 55. … Statistically, white women are the most privileged in that they’re the least likely to be harmed by police ever.” So, she concludes, “white women have the most power and privilege.” Rao believes that since white kids are dying, it was time that white women stepped in to help the fight against guns.

Rao collaborated with a Black activist named to launch Here 4 the Kids. Strawn, who provided the plan for the sit-in, spends her days steeped in civil rights history in Alabama—giving tours of the area around Selma and Montgomery.

“I think that there is a disconnect in America,” Strawn says, “where we do not fully balance that we have not fully overcome… That we’re still overcoming… That we’re still in the fight” against white supremacy.

“It makes sense that we examine our current situation, our current challenges, the current injustice,” when seeking inspiration from Selma’s history for action on gun control in Colorado. “It makes sense that we look back to the blueprint that our ancestors gave us back then, to the blueprint that other Black civil rights leaders gave us. Doesn’t it make sense that we looked at them to see how they affected change?”

Strawn recalls trips that she took to the, also known as the Lynching Memorial in Alabama. The memorial shares stories of many Black people whose lives ended because of the lies told by white women. That detail stuck with Strawn. Here 4 the Kids provided an opportunity to not only confront the injustice of such racial dynamics but to also begin to correct it. Through the organization, the words of white women would be used to save Black lives.

Strawn refers to a by Malcolm X: “The most disrespected person in America is the Black woman.” As a queer Black woman, she says that she experiences an additional level of hatred. “We are always the ones showing up on the frontlines of protests, leading,” she asserts. “So what would happen if the white women that rely on us and who, for years, caused our communities to be destroyed, just because they said‘some a Black man slipped me a letter or note,’ or ‘a Black man spoke to me,’ or ‘a Black man walked in front of me and behind me,’ to destroy in an entire Black town” were the ones in the frontlines of the protests? Strawn sees white women confronting their role in white supremacy as long-overdue justice. 

Further, she views their role in using their privilege to effect change as a form of reparations. “Let’s have these white women show up and make this demand. Because make no mistake, Black and Brown kids are the ones that are being killed at greater rates than the white kids. But we do know the white kids are [also] dying.”

Strawn and Rao agree that it’s time for a shift in the way white women participate—and that it’s time for them to show up.

And led by organizers like Terry, they do .

However, by day two of the protest, Gov. Polis had still not signed onto the order presented by Here 4 the Kids. But Rao and Strawn had prepared the group well, and the white women protesters were ready to respond. 

Terry describes a “tone shift” on the second day, saying, “this morning, we sat on the steps of the Capitol for about an hour, close to an hour and a half. And women shared stories of the people that they have lost, their relationship to gun violence in the United States of America.” She is most moved by the moment that Strawn and Rao came out to read the names of all the victims who lost their lives to gun violence within the past two months of their movement. She calls it, “powerful,” “solidifying.”

Afterward, Rao and Strawn conversed with the women. Terry describes the interaction: “We spoke and had hugs [with] our founders, and just held community. Then one of the white women here said this would be a great time for us to open up an ‘honesty circle,’ so we can have honest conversations about white women and white supremacy culture and how we uphold it, how it moves through us, how it shows up and comes out of us.”

Just like that, the movement to ban guns became a moment for white women to reflect on white supremacy on the Colorado Capitol lawn. Although banning guns is still the organization’s primary goal, Here 4 the Kids is also looking to do the deeper work of racial justice started by Rao and Strawn, and by civil rights workers more than 50 years ago. The conversations that played out at the sit-in revealed that white supremacy empowers gun violence—and so to abolish latter, the former must be addressed as well.

On day 3, the protest disbanded, but the tone was once more communal and empowering. It was as if these women heard my conversation with Wilmer. They were shifting and changing into something that would “keep this going.” It became clear that victory lies in the conversations that began in the , and in the truth circles and conversations on the Capitol steps. It lies in saying the quiet parts about connecting white supremacy and gun violence out loud, and in white women holding each other accountable for their role in upholding such institutions. These conversations are still happening on social media. Here 4 the Kids is also making a documentary, filmed across the three-day sit-in. For Terry, this is not the end, it’s a beginning.

“Today I am settled in this somber reality that this is the beginning of a very, very beautiful revolution,” she says. “We planted the seeds and now we’re watching them sprout. And by next year, we‘ll be picking the fruits.”

One day after the sit-in ended, California Gov. Gavin Newsom began a media blitz calling for a to the Constitution, which would repeal the right to bear arms. Terry and the Here 4 the kids community may be harvesting the fruit of their labors sooner than expected.��

Since 2023, there have been in the United States alone, and it has gotten more difficult to face these tragic numbers without despairing, shutting down, or feeling infuriated all over again. Even so, we can channel our strong emotional responses into action taken at any level: participating in a local phone barrage for gun reform or donating to mental health interventions that address extremism and male violence.

There are existing communities we can learn from that have taken fervent steps toward gun violence prevention. Filmmaker and visionary Kyra Knox directed a documentary that elevates two such communities in the city of Philadelphia, and one of the platforms these communities use to address violence is a basketball court.

Philadelphia has a long history of gun violence. According to , there have been 1,036 victims of shootings in the city this year alone. Knox took an ironic spin on former president Donald Trump’s notorious response in the 2020 presidential debate by giving her film the title Bad Things Happen in Philadelphia—a documentary that features both the beauty and terror that exist in Philly.

The documentary follows the stories of individuals who lost loved ones to arms-related violence: mothers who lost their sons, and young adults who lost friends and family. Knox also captures Philadelphia’s gritty and vibrant creativity, strong community ties, and an outstretched resilience that comes from a deep love for the city.

“This is where I grew up. We’re filming in the playgrounds where I grew up,” says Knox in an exclusive YES! interview with Knox, Garry Mills, and Mark Mims. “When I filmed, it’s not just the bad things �ٳ󲹳�’s happening in Philadelphia, but also the good shit happening, too. Even though all this chaos is going on around us, it’s a story of hope that we have not given up on our city, because we love our city. We love Philly. I love my city!”

The Basketball Court as a Playground for Change

The documentary centers three young adults who are a part of (SBNP), an organization founded and primarily run by Garry Mills, with the mission to “use basketball as a vehicle to change and save lives.”

During our interview, Mills shares his model for coaching: “I consider myself a players’ coach,” the type of coach who not only mentors young players, but also builds lifelong relationships with them. “I needed to pull back the onions of trauma first. Some [techniques] can’t even be implemented until I get to the bottom of what and where these kids are coming from.”

Mills reflects on what it means to understand each player’s story, with their varied backgrounds and struggles—which sometimes involve losing multiple family members in one year. “Some of these things are hard to process because I’ve never been through what these kids are going through yet.”

“It’s more complex, because you’d see random outbursts from kids in the middle of the game, and you wonder where it comes from. And it’s not like they’re angry, but that the kid hasn’t eaten yet or gone to school today.” Mills shares how some kids have to tackle grown-up responsibilities, like taking care of their siblings while their mom works two or three jobs. “I try to understand where the child is coming from before we get to the teamwork and sportsmanship piece.”&�Բ�����;

that children exposed to gun terror endure negative short- and long-term psychological effects, including post-traumatic stress, unprocessed anger, withdrawal, and desensitization to violence. Certain minors may be at higher risk when they have been injured in gun violence or exposed to high levels of violence in their communities, schools, within close proximity, or in media. Now that children and young adults have protocols in school for when a shooter enters the premises, it’s no wonder why they are more susceptible to the negative effects of trauma: They constantly fear for their lives. 

In Bad Things Happen in Philadelphia, Kalil Camara, a young member of SBNP, shares that his experiences in Philly shouldn’t have to be normal for anyone, let alone a young adult. Organizations like Shoot Basketballs Not People are invaluable when inner-city youth are burdened with fear and grief, and the role of play has been core in the organization’s interventions.

Play is a familiar experience in a person’s early life. One of our first social interactions is in the context of play. It is our earliest form of communication; even before we develop language skills, we play. Play is vital in our survival and in child development, because it helps with building social skills and releasing energy, which is needed for in little kids. 

that moderate sports involvement for youth—three to six hours per week—could result in lower depression scores than for the low sports-involvement groups of two hours or less per week. Sports can also be enjoyable and useful for relationship-building. In another interview with YES!, Allen Iverson, NBA legend and one of the executive producers of the documentary, shares his own experience with the power of play in sports: “Basketball has been a huge part of my life since I was a kid. It’s helped me deal with a lot of emotions.” He highlights how basketball has been not only a sport to him, but a lifeline: “When I was going through tough times, basketball was a way for me to escape and forget about my problems for a while. It was also a way for me to express myself and feel like I was in control.”

Gun violence prevention doesn’t have to be at the expense of kids’ youth. SBNP does its work against gun terror while letting kids play. The organization has not only been at the forefront of helping kids process trauma through play and intentional mentorship, but according to the young players and parents interviewed in the documentary, it has also been an avenue for saving lives.

Mark Mims, executive producer of the film and co-founder of , an award-winning production company that elevates creators and stories in the margins, also joins our conversation. He shares his thoughts on Mills’ work with the youth: “They’re close. Like, they’re close. They’re like family.”

Even after their time at SBNP, young players are still able to access Mills’ support. His part in their lives goes beyond his role as coach, according to Mims: “[Mills] is building family units. You ��Dz�’t see that often, which makes Shoot Basketballs Not People so much bigger than basketball. He’s building community. You ��Dz�’t see that anywhere.”

Avoiding the Exploitation of Trauma in Filmmaking

To Knox, Bad Things Happen in Philadelphia is a love letter to her city. With that in mind, she facilitated her interview process with attentive care by avoiding the commodification of trauma stories. She notes that because she grew up in Philly, her neighbors trusted her. 

“I’m not here to exploit anyone… I’m not in the business to exploit these stories, but for these stories to be heard.” While filming—knowing how vulnerable it can be to share personal stories about gun-related crime—Knox frequently asked for consent from interviewees, checking in with them to see if they approved of the footage; when they didn’t, Knox removed the footage her interviewees did not consent to adding to the film. The commodification of trauma is within the film industry, . Knox’s ethical practices are critical at a time when the entertainment industry makes spectacles out of real suffering.

Mims addresses the complexities of film distribution, and how the entertainment industry tends to view documentaries like this as nothing more than a product, without “caring enough about the people in [the] film. It’s very infuriating… I ��Dz�’t play that game,” says Mims. He contends against the commercialization of grief in order to incite an audience response. It shouldn’t take showcasing a community’s pain to incite social action. Mims and Knox take these sensitive matters seriously, making it imperative to maintain the humanity of the film. This is especially the case when Knox, Mills, and Mims are immersed in the communities of Philadelphia and have also lost family and friends to gun violence during production.

“It’s so hard navigating this space. I’m dealing with these mega-billion companies that ��Dz�’t care about what’s going on. [Now that] I have something �ٳ󲹳�’s my own, I’ve been protecting it like a baby, and I ��Dz�’t give a shit how much money [executives] are gonna offer me if they’re not gonna do right by this film, these organizations, these kids, and these mothers,” Knox says. 

Mims calls the documentary “a loving tribute to what’s happening to Philly, but not reducing it to what’s just happening to Philadelphia.” Iverson hopes the film inspires people “to see that despite the bad things that may happen, there’s always a chance for positive change and growth.”&�Բ�����;

When you watch the film, you will see how the relationships within Shoot Basketballs Not People and their connection with the film crew make safe spaces for play possible. May our relationships also rest at the heart of all our movements against injustice and threats to our safety, including gun violence.

To learn more about Shoot Basketballs Not People, you may go to . Mothers in Charge, a violence prevention center, is another community the documentary spotlights. You may learn more about their work .

My second-grader, Reid, came home after a recent school lockdown drill chewing on his sleeve and reporting a tragedy: “Hey, Mom, a moose came into a school in Florida and rammed into the doors. One kid got a broken leg, so now we have to practice hiding in our classroom in case a moose comes to our school.”

We live in Maine, where moose fill our northern woods as well as the pages of many of my children’s picture books. Our kids attend a socioeconomically diverse public school with families who likely represent all colors of the American gun-politics spectrum. In short, I didn’t envy Reid’s teacher having to explain the lockdown drill to these eight-year olds, but the moose story left me uneasy.

“There aren’t moose in Florida, Reid,” my fourth-grader, Liam, said, rolling his eyes. During the same drill, Liam had cowered with his classmates and art teacher under a paint-stained table, lights out, door locked, shades drawn. “We had to be really quiet,” he said, his older-brother confidence fading from his face. “If someone bad comes into the school—I guess maybe with a gun?—then we have to be silent so they’ll think no one’s there, that school’s not happening that day. Then maybe they’ll leave?”

My kids’ confusion about the lockdown drill reminded me of a school facilities forum I had attended shortly after the Parkland massacre. Architects showed parents and teachers pictures of modern high-school buildings as prototypes for our small public-school district. Someone in the audience raised his hand. “I love all of the natural light in that slide, but I’m not sure we want big windows, given all of the recent…” the man waved his hands in the air, “…you know, safety concerns.”

Aside from a few teens, this was an adult audience, so we really didn’t need to use moose metaphors, but the man’s inability to say “shooting” or “gun” fit with the euphemisms I had heard adults in our town use since Parkland. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised when school administrators asked high school student leaders not to “get political” or mention the word “gun” during their planned March 14 walkout. These teens had recently published a letter to the editor in the local paper advocating for gun control, but the school was asking them simply to memorialize the Parkland victims. You know: martyrs, thoughts, and prayers.

Guns had become the school-safety Voldemort of my small New England town. In our silence, we adults were making it plain as day that we were scared. But in this “That-Which-Shall-Not-Be-Named” environment, I wondered how we’d ever allay our kids’ fears, let alone insist upon changes to protect them. I believe guns are to little boys what sex is to teens. And if I wasn’t talking to my children about this difficult topic, you could bet some other kid on the school bus was.

So, I did what a lot of my parent peers hadn’t: I burst the moose bubble and told my 8- and 10-year-olds about Parkland. I showed them teenage survivor Emma Gonzalez’ moving speech, pausing the video every few minutes to celebrate her straight-talking courage and her insistence that if adults wouldn’t get real on the topic of guns, then kids would. I also showed them a video about African-American activists plagued by gun violence on the South Side of Chicago.

My mantra throughout was that I wasn’t scared for us. Liam and Reid didn’t need to be scared. In our small university town, they were more likely to be hit by a car on their walk to school than to be shot. But the opposite is true for some kids in the United States.

I was grateful—grateful that our kids were exploring these issues with us.

Fired up, Reid stopped chewing on his sleeve. “Guns are so stupid,” he said.

“We should protest, like those kids,” Liam added.

And so we did. The three of us teamed up with a seventh grader organizing a . Liam and Reid made posters to advertise the march, and we went door-to-door around our one-block downtown, asking waiters, barbers, librarians, and grocers—some likely not sympathetic to gun control—to display our posters. I spammed a local parent email list, encouraging folks to join us on Saturday with their kids.

Only one family replied.

The night before the march we had celebratory-Friday pancakes for dinner and hand-made signs. Liam drew a picture of George Washington proclaiming, “Yuck,” as he stuck his tongue out at an assault rifle. In second-grader scrawl Reid wrote, “We don’t want this” next to a gun and then, inspired by his brother’s giggles, drew a rainbow and a pink unicorn with the words, “Make it be this.”

Soon our whole family was howling with laughter, and I was grateful—grateful that our kids were exploring these issues with us, rather than at the school lunch table where one of Liam’s classmates apparently insisted the Parkland shooting was staged. But I had one lingering fear—that just a few people would show up for the march, and that all of our efforts would amount to teaching the kids that, at least on this issue, we were alone.

Having real conversations about our fears takes practice.

The next day, the church basement that was to be our gathering point was packed. Marchers made signs and filled out petitions; reporters interviewed and filmed kids; and Liam and Reid joined older students to give short prepared speeches. Soon we were marching, a long line of grandparents, toddlers in strollers and red wagons, a preschooler on his bike, teenagers, and parents, all snaking across the bridge at the center of our otherwise quiet town, iconic church steeples in the background.

The handful of elementary-aged kids in the crowd quickly found each other and gathered around the high-school boy with the bullhorn at the head of our line. They echoed him loudly: “Hey, hey, NRA. Take your money, go away.” When we reached our endpoint, Liam and Reid glanced sidelong at a huddle of men draped in yellow Gadsden and American flags, but they joined my husband when he approached these counterprotesters and shook their hands, thanking them for their civility and for coming.

I noticed a few things that day: that I couldn’t have asked for better role models for my kids in the older students who showed up, articulate, informed, and inclusive as they spoke and then led our kids down the road; that all of the elementary-school-age boys present drew detailed depictions of guns on their signs, evidence enough that we certainly weren’t managing to shelter them; and that none of the kids at the march looked scared. Serious, yes. Empowered, definitely. But not scared.

Today Liam and Reid received two notes in the mail from generous neighbors—one from a baby-boomer couple and another from a teenager—thanking them for their activism. In a few days, they will join older students to deliver the group’s petition to a state senator’s office. I’m grateful for this movement. Having real conversations about our fears takes practice. So does civic engagement. We need to treat our children like participants in the fight for gun control, because they—perhaps more than us—are involved. I’m certain they have something to teach us.

At KCUR, the local public radio station, reporters, and editors saw an opportunity for an ongoing program series called “,” looking beyond the crime statistics for the motives and backstories to help listeners better understand what happened.

Now the Kansas City station has a chance to broaden that level of reporting by examining another disturbing American dynamic: gun violence. KCUR is one of 10 public radio stations nationwide selected to participate in a new collaborative, two-year fellowship called . Funded with a $5.3 million grant from the and spearheaded by Washington D.C.-based station, , the will use effective storytelling to examine the many ways Americans interact with firearms.

The project was in the works long before the shootings at a Parkland, Florida, high school and more recently in Texas focused the nation’s attention on the issue of gun violence. It comes as Americans are seriously grappling with a range of political solutions—from a and against retailers refusing to sell guns to those under 21, to “ in Connecticut that arose out of stricter laws following the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting.

Inevitably, in this country, the debate around guns breaks down along party lines, leaving both sides scratching their heads about why the other side could possibly believe what it does. Guns & America is designed to advance the conversation by taking listeners beyond the politics to help them understand the many ways people use weapons—whether as tools, protection, to hunt, or to enforce the law. “We really want to get to how people come to believe what they believe about guns,” says Andi McDaniel, senior director of content and news at WAMU. “It’s impossible to have a conversation about how or if to regulate them if we don’t understand where people are coming from.”

They also want listeners to connect with the subjects of their stories as real people, leading real and understandable lives. “I think anytime you can put a human voice to an issue it helps people listen. Listening is so rare these days. That’s something we try to do with every one of our stories,” says Jeremy Bernfeld, director of collaborative reporting at WAMU.

What McDaniel and Bernfeld are describing are called “driveway moments,” which National Public Radio listeners have come to know well—moments created by compelling storytelling, a powerful tool made even more dynamic in the digital age. The challenge comes in creating those moments around an issue as divisive as guns.

“The problem is deeply entrenched views about what’s good and what’s bad, what’s right and what’s wrong and a lack of understanding about how different people come to their understanding of their beliefs about guns,” McDaniel says.

“A person’s zip code is more of an indicator of life expectancy than his or her genetic code.”

In order to do this well, the organizers at WAMU sought out partner stations with strong reputations, the ability to collaborate, and the capacity to cover topics with nuance rather than preconceived notions. “We looked for public media partners creating innovative and trustworthy journalism where the guns issue was important to the community, with an eye toward diversity, including different political persuasions and regulations, to speak to the tapestry that is the United States,” Bernfeld says.

That included places like Kansas City, with racial and socio-economic diversity in its listenership and a market that straddles two states, both touting some of the nation’s .

For KCUR, it’s a chance to take what reporters there learned in producing The Argument and applying more collaboration, technology, staffing, and support. In that year-long series, reporters examined the emotional forces behind more than 200 murders in the Kansas City area in 2016. It was the second year in a row that the metro area had seen an increase in murders, landing it on a list of seven similar-sized cities that helped to drive up the nation’s murder rate.

In , the reporters described how a longstanding dispute between two men led to the murder of one of them as he changed a baby’s diaper. Kansas City’s public health department described murder as a public health epidemic stemming from childhood trauma that extends out into the community. “A person’s zip code,” concluded the deputy director of the Kansas City Health Department, “is more of an indicator of life expectancy than his or her genetic code.”

Donna Vestal, director of content strategy at KCUR, said having more data capabilities, comparing trends and being able to see the bigger picture, will help them to tell a better local story.

“This initiative will give us the firepower in terms of journalistic thinking and commitment to take it to another level,” she says.

Organizers at WAMU and Kendeda believe public radio is uniquely positioned for such a project because it is audience-funded, has a network of stations, and is focused on sustained and in-depth journalism. And they want to use it to be even better positioned in the future to reach younger and more diverse audiences and take full advantage of storytelling in the digital age. “We want our cohort of fellows to leave having done great work, journalism that has an impact, but also to leave after two years feeling like they have all the skills and experience necessary to be cutting edge journalist in 2020,” Bernfeld says.

The stations will select mid-career journalists with strong journalism backgrounds to create a cohort with diverse political viewpoints and life experiences. Each will be trained in solutions-based journalism, digital media, and multiple modes of storytelling. “It takes a whole new set of skills, an entrepreneurship and nimbleness that public media will require in the future,” McDaniel says. “We are working on a series of embeds at digital-first news publications, to give a different orientation to that approach, as well as expertise in guns, and reporting on issues with some level of trauma involved.”

Still, they recognize that collaborating across editors, stations, and working within the NPR network will be challenging. Because of the polarizing nature of the gun debate, they also realize it will be difficult to reach diverse audiences and open them to new perspectives. “It’s the same set of challenges that exist around any initiative that aims to move a needle: resistance, inflexibility and set cultures, a lack of openness. It’s hard to move people from what they think and what they believe, what they’ve heard or seen affirmed by their peers,” McDaniel says. “That’s why we are focusing on moving stories, human stories.”

A Navy reservist and former NCIS agent, Scott became the reluctant owner of a crime gun, until he learned about a new organization, the , where he sent it to be destroyed: “One less gun is a step in the right direction,” he says.

Based in Helena, Montana, NCUF was born of necessity to meet a growing demand for gun disposal in a country with nearly as many guns as people, a firearms industry that produces millions of low-priced weapons every year, and school shootings.

In many parts of the country, gun owners can donate weapons to local police to be destroyed, discard them through buyback programs, or even turn them into garden tools. Bruce Seiler, who worked for the U.S. Secret Service from 1987 to 1992, founded NCUF to provide them another option, while addressing gun violence in the process.

He was more than happy to cut Scott’s Ruger in half: “There’s more than 300 million firearms in America,” he says. “There has to be more guns destroyed.”

As a Secret Service employee charged with assessing threats on the president’s life, Seiler was always mindful of how easily criminals could acquire guns. But as an armorer and ordnance specialist, he is also a strong supporter of the Second Amendment. “I’m anti-gun violence and gun crime,” he says. “That’s my political affiliation.”

In 2006, he began developing the idea for an organization that could facilitate the safe transfer and disposal of firearms. Ten years later, he and his business partner, Chip Ayers, a former member of the Secret Service’s Counter Sniper Team, launched a website for NCUF, advertising options for people with unwanted guns: transfer them to a federally licensed dealer, repurpose them for use by law enforcement, preserve those with historical value, or simply destroy them.

The first gun they destroyed was a cheap revolver, made of pot metal.

The organization secured non-profit status a year ago and now operates from a large workshop on Seiler’s property. The center has helped clients transfer hundreds of guns to dealers with Federal Firearms Licenses (FFL), who are required to run background checks before any sale. Nationwide, a fifth of gun sales occur without background checks, and that number troubles Seiler.

“We’re not trying to take guns away or outlaw guns,” Seiler says, “but we can try to keep them from showing up in garage sales and newspaper ads.”

Most of the center’s clients have been middle-aged people who inherit unwanted guns and don’t want them ending up in the wrong hands.

The weapons his organization has acquired have either been turned over to law enforcement for repurposing, retained for their historical value or destroyed.

The first gun they destroyed was a cheap revolver, made of pot metal, which Seiler said was “more dangerous to the user than the intended victim.”

The center had acquired it and 11 other firearms from Robert Cogan, a retired college professor from Edinboro, Pennsylvania. “I didn’t want them anymore,” Cogan says emphatically, “and I didn’t want to sell them where they could be circulated again in the local market and could be misused.”

Seiler transferred 11 of the guns to an FFL dealer. He then broke the small revolver into three pieces, which he plans to mount in a shadow box in his home. Modern versions of cheap handguns like this one are “out there like tennis rackets and skis,” he says. “I’ll probably be destroying more.”

The number of guns in the U.S. is growing exponentially. According to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, firearms manufacturing increased 43 percent in the past five years. In 2015, the and recent data show that gun exports are slowing while imports are picking up. In 2016, a record year for gun sales, more than 5.1 million firearms were imported, a 30 percent increase from 2015.

“Taking firearms for us is a no-go because we’re stuck with them.”

This explosion in production contributes to the problem of unwanted firearms, especially for law enforcement. “Across the country, police property rooms are bulging at the seams with firearms,” says Ray Reynolds, a retired police commander and founder of  a St. Louis-based company that also destroys guns. Since 2014, his business has expanded to four locations, and he’s destroyed more than 20,000 firearms for agencies across the country.

This surplus of firearms negatively affects both rural and urban agencies, but options for safe gun disposal vary significantly by state and jurisdiction.

The Seattle Police Department, for example, doesn’t re-sell guns. Instead, they melt them down at a local foundry. The number they’ve destroyed has increased from about 200 in 2014 to 1400 in 2016.

But that’s not an option for all law enforcement agencies. Police are restricted from destroying guns in 12 states, including Montana, which has the sixth highest rate of gun ownership in the country. “Taking firearms for us is a no-go because we’re stuck with them,” says Steve Hagen, Assistant Police Chief in Helena. “We can sell them, but there are a lot of issues with that as well.”

One of those issues is the possibility of a gun being seized as evidence in a criminal investigation after it had been sold by a law enforcement agency, a possibility that became reality in Washington state more than a dozen times since 2010, according to The Associated Press.

Looking ahead, Seiler hopes NCUF can help prevent such tragic outcomes, and he thinks an increase in gun destruction is an “inevitable” part of that work.

This certainly was on his mind recently as he prepared to destroy that Ruger .357 revolver that had taken a young man’s life. He removed its cylinder, placed the gun on a band saw in his shop and slid the crime weapon width-wise into a whirring blade. The gun, he remarked, could easily be resold for $500, but within minutes, it lay in pieces—worthless and harmless.

The irony was not lost on Seiler that at that very moment, across the country, gun manufacturers were busy producing new weapons that would replace it. “As we’re talking about it, they’re cranking them out,” he says. “There needs to be a junkyard for guns in America.”

This is the work of the “Swords to Plows” initiative of the nonprofit RAWTools. Gun owners from around the country send RAWTools their disassembled weapons for transformation. Most guns can be made into several tools, such as hoes and pickaxes. Shotguns often become hand spades, and a weapon like the AR-15 that was used in recent mass shootings has a thicker barrel that suits an afterlife as a mattock.

RAWTools’ first donated gun was an AK-47 from a retired public defender. Since then, it has reshaped more than 200 weapons so far, with more in progress. The tools they create are typically returned to the donor, given to community gardens, or sold to raise money for programming.

RAWTools founder and Executive Director Mike Martin was inspired to learn blacksmithing and start the nonprofit after the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in Newtown, Connecticut. By late May 2018, 23 school shootings in the U.S. have involved injury or death this year.

This summer, and the Newtown Foundation, an organization formed after the Sandy Hook Elementary shooting to focus on post-gun violence healing, will carry out an extensive version of weapons transformation. In cooperation with the New Haven Police Department in Connecticut, weapons from a gun buyback program will be taken apart by a local metal sculptor. Volunteer inmates from the New Haven Correctional Center will do the blacksmithing to create the tools, which will be used by students at local high schools to plant gardens. The harvests will be donated to soup kitchen and shelters.

“The entire process will essentially transform weapons of death into implements of life,” Newtown Foundation Communications Director Steve Yanovsky said.

Martin is a former Mennonite pastor. “Swords to Plows” is a reference to the biblical quote, “They will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks … nor will they train for war anymore.”

He works with his dad and three other blacksmiths locally in Colorado Springs, as well as in traveling programs. RAWTools also promotes community dialogue around gun violence and leads peacemaking workshops. It partners with churches, community groups, and organizations like the Newtown Foundation and the Children’s Defense Fund.

Getting firearms out of circulation is only one of many potential ways to reduce gun violence.

During the group’s community demos and workshops, participants can try their hand at forging the metal. Cherie Ryans is one of numerous mothers who lost a child to gun violence and has taken a turn at the RAWTools forge. Martin said that between each swing of the hammer to the iron she said: “This bang is bang for bang my bang son.”

“I was holding the hot metal as she did it. Everyone was in tears, and it was all I could do to hold the metal safely,” Martin said.

More than 300 million guns are loose in America—the equivalent of about . About are killed by guns in America every day.

The type of gun surrender program that RAWTools is reimagining has been going on in the U.S. since the 90s in the form of police-run buybacks. Weapons can be turned in anonymously to police, no questions asked. To encourage participation, police often give out gift cards in return.

A 1994 study evaluating a Seattle buyback, which the National Rifle Association , that while buybacks are broadly supported by communities, their effect on decreasing violent crime and reducing firearm mortality is unknown. The nonprofit GUNXGUN, which mobilizes community-funded buybacks, the infrequent and isolated nature of U.S. buyback programs makes it hard to analyze their effectiveness. But, it points out that after a 1996 mass shooting in Australia, an extensive buyback program coupled with stricter gun regulations led to a significant reduction in .

Getting firearms out of circulation is only one of many potential ways to reduce gun violence. Along with changing guns into peaceful instruments, RAWTools runs workshops on intentional conflict resolution. Martin says these range from “serious to silly” and integrate dramatic arts, role-playing, and direct instruction.

“Guns drain so much of our imagination to explore other ways to engage with conflict or confrontation.”

RAWTools artist-in-residence Mary Sprunger-Froese leads many of these multiage programs, which might include rapping, personal storytelling, skits, and other ways to train in de-escalation and peacemaking. So far she has taught an adult bystander intervention class and led a theater and nonviolent tools workshop for middle schoolers.

Martin envisions a nationwide RAWTools network, and said it’s happening already.

Volunteers across the country have helped gun donors disable guns for the forge, and churches have opened their parking lots for tents and anvils. Blacksmiths throughout the U.S. have signed on, and Martin says he needs “more people to help make tools, especially if they come from guns in their region.”

RAWTools is piloting a regional chapter in Toledo, Ohio. This summer, it will host youth workshops involving making tools from guns, creative expression and conflict mediation.

“There’s something beautiful and good about participants forging something that destroyed our community in some way into something that will bring beauty and life to our community,” says pastor Joel Shenk, who is leading the project.

New Mexicans to Prevent Gun Violence in Santa Fe, which previously collaborated with RAWTools, has now started their own creative gun transformation . They invite community members to use the metal and the plastic from relinquished guns to make tools, sculptures, and jewelry.

Elsewhere in the U.S., a group called changes guns into shovels for tree plantings at sites affected by violence in Atlanta and Oakland, also citing the “swords to plowshares” tradition as an inspiration. So does Mexican artist Pedro Reyes, who also turned guns into shovels.

For Martin, transforming weapons at the forge and teaching nonviolence are important because guns in America are “elevated to such a level that they are viewed as an ultimate problem-solver.” He said, “Guns drain so much of our imagination to explore other ways to engage with conflict or confrontation. They are a tool to use power over others for the sake of the individual and not the community. This is what motivates me to do the work of RAWTools.”

A military veteran named James gave his guns to RAWTools after studying Christian scripture supporting pacifism. He wrote that he could no longer justify owning the guns because there was “no way to guarantee they would never be used to take a life.”

Another participant, who chose to remain anonymous, wrote: “I’m a teacher. After Parkland, I can’t own a gun anymore. How do I get it to you?”

Still, Wolfson persisted as a self-described “internal gadfly” during much of the 1980s and 1990s. Throughout this period he worked to convince those around him that setting out a bold goal like freedom to marry would prove more effective than simply calling for more public acceptance of same-sex couples and less discrimination against them. “You should ask for what you want and not bargain against yourself. You may leave the negotiation or the round or the battle taking less than you initially wanted. But you should not go in asking for less than you want,” he told me. In other words, you won’t get half a loaf of bread by asking for half a loaf. You have to ask for the whole loaf. That principle has long guided my own advocacy in gun violence prevention. When I formed Guns Down America, I realized that no other group was asking for what all of us believed was necessary to truly reduce gun violence: fewer guns. As a result, we were not having much success on the legislative front getting the policies we believed we needed, and we are not building a strong people-powered movement that people can buy into. We are not offering bold solutions that people believe will succeed in reducing gun violence. Along with lack of a clear goal, the gun control movement has also lacked a clear strategy. A tight strategy is essential, Wolfson told me. It tells you exactly what you have to do and what you do not have to do. It ensures that you are not distracted by other obligations, educates everyday Americans about how you are achieving your goal, and allows them to plug into it. A clear strategy also helps sustain you through the inevitable turmoil of a movement: the wins, the losses, and everything in between. The marriage movement reminds us that after you’ve focused on one long-term objective, incremental changes that move you closer to your goal are essential building blocks to achieving your success, just as every yard forward moves a football team a little closer to the goalposts. Each gain provides a motivating victory for advocates in all parts of the movement and shows that progress is indeed possible. As the wins accumulate, they accustom the general public to accepting gains on the issue and, just as important, permit advocates to demonstrate the insufficiency of half measures, redoubling efforts toward the ultimate goal. Wolfson faced an important movement-defining decision after achieving incremental success in 2000, when Vermont recognized gay and lesbian civil unions but not marriage. Should he accept the half-measure or reject it? Would accepting it signal to others that the fight was over and suck energy out of the struggle to full marriage equality? Maybe people would think that civil unions were good enough. After much debate and deliberation, Wolfson decided to accept the win—but then push for more later. He went on to argue that because the sky didn’t fall when gay and lesbian couples entered into civil unions, why deny them access to the institution of marriage? And the same thing? Wolfson began to disparage civil unions and argue that they were not an adequate substitute for marriage because they were fundamentally unequal.

The fight toward the long-term goal was very much still on. “What we needed in the late 1990s was the affirmation of gay couples at the marital level,” Wolfson told me in describing his dual strategy. “And then what we needed later was the insufficiency of civil union as a substitute for marriage itself.” The most substantial wave of change that helped pave the way for marriage equality took place during President Obama’s presidency. Gays, lesbians, and bisexuals were permitted to serve openly in the armed forces through the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. The administration stopped defending the Defense of Marriage Act, which defined marriage as a union between a man and a woman for the purposes of federal programs. Obama himself came out in support of marriage equality, and ultimately the Supreme Court found that preventing gays and lesbians from entering into equal marriage was unconstitutional. All of that happened as a result of the foundation Wolfson and other advocates had laid down over the preceding decades of hard, often thankless, focused advocacy toward the goal of marriage equality. By the time Obama was sworn in as president, Wolfson was no longer a gadfly; his goal had become a goal of most grassroots LGBT advocates, and throughout the Obama era they pushed a reluctant White House to act on its equality agenda. While reporting for ThinkProgress, I covered gay and lesbian service members who tied themselves to the White House fence demanding equal service and rejecting the politics of incremental change. I covered grassroots advocates who criticized the president for initially defending DOMA and for not coming out for marriage early enough. They wanted change now and could not care less about the political process in Washington. As I wrote these articles, established political operatives and Democrats would tell me these grassroots actions were disruptive, naive, or, worse yet, counterproductive. The president, they argued, had to be sensitive to political realities. He was on the right side, they told me, but he needed time to make these decisions so as to avoid political backlash. Acting too swiftly could set back the movement and undo the progress already made. It’s easy, in hindsight, to laugh at these voices or view their stance as a miscalculation of the winds of political change. A sober reading of the history, however, suggests that they were as necessary for progress as Wolfson and the grassroots groups that were pushing the administration to boldly embrace true equality. Journalist Kerry Eleveld, who covered the progress LGBT Americans made during the Obama presidency with inspiring persistency and intelligence, told me that, in the end, “everybody ended up being right to some extent.” Take Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. On the campaign trail, President Obama had pledged to repeal the discriminatory law, but almost two years into his administration, it remained on the books, and Democrats in Congress were not rushing to get rid of it after losing their congressional majority in the 2010 midterm elections. Knowing that the window of opportunity was closing fast, grassroots advocates clamored for action, engaging in protests and direct actions and shaming lawmakers for doing nothing, while the insiders were preaching caution and patience. With just days left until a new Republican-controlled House would come into power, Congress added the repeal measure to a must-pass bill, and Obama signed it into law in December 2010. Here, too, diverse voices were necessary for achieving progress. Eleveld, author of Don’t Tell Me to Wait: How the Fight for Gay Rights Changed America and Transformed Obama’s Presidency , told me, “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell repeal would not have gotten across the finish line if there weren’t people who knew Capitol Hill really well and could get the ear of very prominent lawmakers in positions of power within the last month of that Congress. But it also would not have gotten to that point if the grassroots activists hadn’t been pushing for it all along.”

In other words, everybody had a role to play, and a sort of righteous cycle emerged. The grassroots activists pushed the professional political insiders to expect more, not to settle for middling progress, but the movement would not have progressed to that point had the professional advocates and insiders not laid the groundwork that ripened the issue for action. A successful movement is a cacophony of voices, not a fine-tuned choir. Another similarity between the gun control movement and the fight for LGBT equality is familiarity of experience. For decades science had been disproving and professional psychology had been gradually abandoning the idea that nonstandard sexuality was some sort of disease rather than an array of natural and normal variations along the whole sexual spectrum in humans (and most other animals). But it took a long time for this view to spread more widely. One of the factors that helped drive the general population toward accepting and supporting marriage equality was the coming out of gay people themselves, a wave that really began during the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, when the community realized that silence would lead to death. It was a process that even a visionary like Wolfson could not have predicted, but in the ensuing decades, a growing number of Americans’ family members, friends, and neighbors told their loved ones that they were gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender. The general population began to see gays and lesbians of every religion, every race, and both genders as human beings, rather than caricatures who could be demonized as deviants who didn’t deserve civil rights. A growing number of families now saw themselves as part of the push for marriage equality. Heterosexuals began to see themselves as part of the movement for the sake of people they loved—their families, friends, neighbors, and community members. A similar phenomenon has led to gradual de-prohibition of cannabis, and the same thing could now be happening with guns. As gun manufacturers pump more and more guns into our communities, more and more people of all races, genders, religions, and socioeconomic levels are dying from or living with horrific gun injuries. The coverage of mass shootings and our ritualized grief after them continue to educate people about the dangers of too many guns. We all see ourselves in the faces of the bereaved, and we imagine photos of our own loved ones posted at the candlelit memorial. That dynamic of familiarity allowed the LGBT equality movement to achieve its goal faster than anyone could have predicted. If we build our movement and pair it with successful strategies, we can start moving toward a future with fewer guns sooner rather than later. Copyright © 2019 by Igor Volsky. This excerpt originally appeared in Guns Down: How to Defeat the NRA and Build a Safer Future with Fewer Guns , published by and reprinted here with permission.

After college, I took a job in New York City working for PricewaterhouseCoopers. I was in my 20s, and moving to the city was thrilling. But that particular adventure didn’t last long. After a few short months, I moved back home to Tucson [Arizona] and took over for my father as the president and CEO of El Campo Tire Warehouses. I wasn’t very excited about entering the tire business. But my dad needed help, and when your family needs you, you show up. I had to learn the tire business from the ground up. That first year was such a whirlwind, but it was an experience I now realize forever changed my life.

While I learned about the tire business, I also learned a lot about my community and the people who live there. I began thinking differently about the issues that matter most to them, like access to jobs and affordable health care, and the real impact policy decisions have on their daily lives. When I took over the tire company, I noticed women weren’t given the same opportunities as men, and I worked to change that, and made sure that all of our employees got treated with respect. Three years later, after careful consideration, including negotiations for all our employees’ jobs, I sold the company and decided to pursue public service. When I first ran, I did what I’ve always done: Listen to the stories of people. I took meetings with as many people as possible and knocked on as many doors [as] I could. What I heard gave me inspiration to keep running.

There is a time to compromise and a time to be tough.

---

After the shooting in Tucson, my life changed in many ways. I lost good friends. Six people died, and twelve others were injured. And it left me with a long road to recovery. Not many people realize that speaking is still hard for me. My eyesight isn’t great, and despite hours and hours of physical therapy, my right arm and right leg remain mostly paralyzed. But instead of focusing on the things that I cannot do, I’ve tried to focus on the things that I can do—and live without limits. But one thing that never left was my desire to contribute to society.

Mark and I had begun talking about if and how we could get involved in helping reduce gun violence. That discussion actually started during a vacation we took in July 2012. The day before we got on the plane, the news was dominated by a gunman opening fire in Aurora, Colorado, killing 12 and injuring 58 others. It was absolutely horrifying. In my career, I’ve always sought to find the common ground. So, on that plane, while we thought about Aurora, both of us realized that more needed to be done to bridge the divide between gun owners, like us, and the majority of Americans who simply want their communities to be safe. Those conversations continued. But it was when 20 first- and second-graders were murdered in their classrooms at Sandy Hook [Elementary School] that we decided to launch our fight. The country was outraged. We were outraged. We wanted to chip away at the conventional wisdom that nothing could be done about this country’s gun-violence crisis. We can have disagreements about what exact laws should be passed, but when Congress refuses to even debate policy solutions, much less take any meaningful action, then it’s time for a change. After the school shooting in Santa Fe [New Mexico, in 2018], I remember hearing a student comment that she wasn’t surprised a shooting happened at her school. She expected one would happen eventually. What a horrifying statement. �±�’v�� all got to ask ourselves: is that really the kind of country we want to live in?

There is a time to compromise and a time to be tough. I think of my friend, former Sen. John McCain. He didn’t mince words. Yet he also sought to hear people out. So, you stand up for what you believe in, while recognizing that in order to make change happen, we ultimately need to bring people together. In Congress, I made sure all the legislation I introduced was bipartisan. I knew we—in Congress and in our country—were at our best when we worked to find common ground. But there were also times that called for courage. The fight against gun violence requires compromise at times, but we must also recognize that when it comes to protecting the lives of our kids and doing everything in our power to stop the carnage, there is no other side.

Mark has been an inspiration to me—since the shooting, he’s never wavered. I also draw inspiration and courage from those that have been down hard roads themselves. Leaders like John Lewis. I’ve learned a lot from him, and always remember something he once said: “We may not have chosen the time, but the time has chosen us.” These can be hard times. Even scary times. But I remain hopeful because of the strength I’ve seen from our children. They have pointed out that America has failed to keep them safe and are following in the footsteps of our country’s heroes who, at critical moments in our history, have stood up and said, “Enough. It’s time for change.”

Excerpt from  by KK Ottesen, Chronicle Books 2019, appears with permission of the publisher.

It’s not just . In recent weeks, there have been confrontations over removing , clashes over the use of , attempts to —o��&�Բ�����;—Black Lives Matter protesters, and even a renewed interest in “.” Some of these events have turned   and deadly.

These events show Americans moving beyond differences of opinion and free speech into private displays of force. Their participants may be trying to , or , or —especially in light of the failures of police to provide a fair system of justice.

Attorney General William Barr has claimed, by contrast, that this vigilantism might be a  if police funding is in fact slashed in communities nationwide.

As a scholar of vigilantism in U.S. history and a political scientist interested in how the state and law develop over time, , as have , that for many Americans, law and order has long been as much a private matter as something for the government to handle.

Two sparks for vigilantism

Vigilantism—the private, violent enforcement of public moral or legal standards—tends to rise in two types of situations, neither of which may be what people expect. It doesn’t come from a government being weak or absent, leaving citizens on their own, but rather when .

And it doesn’t necessarily come from situations where one ethnic or racial group clearly dominates others—but rather in times and places where  to a particular community is . Vigilantism is often about trying to establish power rather than a reflection of preexisting hierarchies.

Many Americans believe the rules of the game are changing in  and have a sense of  about what the nation is going to look like in the future. As  and  opine about the serious possibility of , the grave implications of domestic political violence loom more than at any point in the past 50 years.

These fears are reinforced by a president who seems to   and  among Americans, even as Black people’s voices are attracting more attention in the public and the halls of power.

Vigilantism is American law enforcement

Through U.S. history, the distinctions between vigilantism and lawful arrest and punishment have always been . Frequently, vigilantism has been used not in opposition to police efforts, but rather with their . Indeed, in some , that still .

Before police departments existed, arrests were made under traditional common law, which depended on  in legally organized  and serving as . Institutions such as  required that non-slave owners were willing to use, or at least permit, violence to maintain White supremacy. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, private detectives and security guards also possessed  similar to those of police officers.

Even the spate of “” laws passed in the past 15 years borders on vigilantism, giving private citizens lots of freedom about how to use force to protect themselves.

Vigilantism is also American culture

American vigilantism is primarily associated with the terrible  of the late 19th and early 20th centuries that . But that isn’t the whole story.

Political scientist  and I studied what were called “,” private groups organized in the decades before the Civil War that typically promoted anti-immigrant sentiment in areas, including cities, precisely as the laws concerning the powers of local governments were rapidly changing.

In fact, though it has been most often used to try to , vigilantism—including —has also, at times, been used by disadvantaged communities for self-defense.

Take recent events in Milwaukee, for instance: A small gathering of people in a predominantly African American neighborhood  of a house where two girls were believed to be held in a sex-trafficking ring. This follows a  of people of color using private forces to   and defend their .

Vigilantism has often abetted the worst instincts in the politics of crime in the U.S., making justice appear to depend on what the people want rather than the rule of law.

But it is also evidence of the complicated relationship between violence and justice at the core of American democracy. The founders  about self-protection and community protection and believed that  could be an important corrective to an unresponsive and oppressive legal system.

But allowing the majority to impose justice can have unequal effects on disadvantaged members of the nation, granting the police a mandate to act violently precisely because that seems to be .

As Americans focus on the way in which people of color, in particular, have been policed in this country, they should disentangle the damaging forms of vigilantism from a deeper notion that democracy might require ordinary citizens to rely at least partly on themselves to enforce the law.

Democracy requires Americans to somehow be vigilant over the use of force in their midst—without themselves becoming vigilantes.

Editor’s note: This is an updated version of an article first published July 9, 2020.

This article was originally published by . It has been published here with permission.

“Usually when people are sad, they don’t do anything. They just cry over their condition. But when they get angry, they bring about a change.”—Malcolm X

Daunte Wright. ����è.

Millions of Americans know his name by now. Not for something great that Daunte did. He didn’t have the chance. At 20 years old, he was yet another victim of police violence.

On April 11, Daunte was fatally shot in a traffic stop by a Minnesota police officer—a 26-year veteran—who claims she mistook her handgun for a taser.

Yeah, take a breath on that.

Daunte’s death happened just miles down the road from the courthouse where the case in the police killing of George Floyd is being heard.

I struggle to write about the police killing of Daunte Wright. I’ve written this story multiple times: fill-in-the-blank city, state police officer kills insert new name, on new date, for fill-in-the-blank-reason—reported stories, data stories, analyses, commentaries, infographics, illustrations. You name it. �±�’v�� said it eloquently at times and ranted at others, with sadness, with rage, with frustration, with exhaustion. What more can be said that hasn’t already been said? Not only by me but also by hundreds of others.

Similarly, I struggled with what to write about the most recent mass shooting in Colorado. So, I did not. And with the increase in violent attacks happening to Asian Americans since the COVID outbreak, I decided not to write, but to support Asian voices that were saying what needed to be said.

Clearly, I’ve been struggling. … A lot lately, in fact. I know that I’m not alone. But this misery does not love company. At least not complacent company. Not sad company. Not passive company. Not so overwhelmed by all the problems in the world that I’m not going to do anything company.

I do welcome, however, angry company—angry to the point of bringing about change company! Real change. No more reforms. True transformation. I mean, how long is this going to be allowed to go on? The level of unnecessary violence happening in all of our communities across these United States is unacceptable. From state violence to community violence to corporate violence.

The violence that happens in this country is allowed because of the violence upon which this country was built.

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I can’t help but wonder sometimes: If these acts of violence were happening in mostly White affluent communities, would we not have solved the problems by now? Would we have not dismantled the system of injustice under which we live? If little White boys and little White girls, and teens, and dads and moms, and grandparents were being killed at the same magnitude by police, by each other, by environmental pollution, do you honestly believe we’d be having the same conversation, fighting tooth-and-nail for meager, surface-level “reform?”

Come on, now, y’all.

We can’t point fingers at individuals any longer. As Jennifer Ho poignantly posits in her article “Race-Related Violence in the U.S. Stems From White Supremacy,” it’s a system that we’re up against. The violence that happens in this country is allowed because of the violence upon which this country was built.

Let me repeat that: The violence that happens in this country is allowed because of the violence upon which this country was built.

Until the system changes, nothing will change. The tweaks in reforms are not the answer. Those who believe that they are need to stop kidding yourselves.

I wrote nearly two years ago, in response to the harm “oozing” from the Oval Office by the 45^th president, that most folks focus on the “pursuit of happiness” line in the Declaration of Independence, when what we should be uplifting—especially now—is this part:

“That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to affect their Safety and Happiness.”

Lots of us like to point to Donald Trump as the bringer of harm, trauma, and chaos, and are now breathing a sigh of relief that he’s gone. But as I said then, Trump was not the cause of the harm we all experience in the United States—nor the harm caused by the United States government that others experience elsewhere in the world. Trump is out of office, and still here we are. Dealing with the same traumas we were dealing with long before he became president.

We have a police system predicated on othering and violence toward others. It’s unconscionable that some of us live in and with so much fear and harm that we still, knowing this history, cannot see another way of community safety without police.

�±�’v�� been so damaged by the systems and institutions in this country that the only manifestation of “safety” we seem to know and trust is that of violence.

But those who live on the receiving end of harm and violence day in and day out are clear: We are calling for transformation, for transformative justice.

Why is no one heeding that call? Why are those who have access to power—and those in power themselves—refusing to use their influence toward a solution that works for all?

The solution isn’t as complicated as some are trying to make it. It’s really simple. But some are so addicted to the ease and comfort in which they find themselves that working toward that solution means they’ll have to give up that luxury. If �ٳ󲹳�’s you, then ask yourself: how committed am I, then, to well-being for all?  

Those who seek to sow hatred and division stand up for what they believe in. They support their candidates, they get them elected, and then they make demands of them, and threaten to rescind that support if representatives ��Dz�’t pass laws they feel benefit them. That history is documented in cities throughout the U.S.

Meanwhile, Black, Brown, Indigenous, and Asian demands for justice, for equity, for a recognition of our very humanity is up for “discussion.” In progressive and liberal spaces, we’re having “conversations.”&�Բ�����;And yet there are bills in both Houses of Congress we can be actively supporting. One being the decades-old reparations bill, best known as H.R. 40, that was just advanced as I’m writing this.  

I’m reminded yet again of something I wrote a few years back: “It’s the discomfort of privilege and the resulting cognitive dissonance that make folks avoid the pain and anger still brewing in oppressed communities. They cannot see how ineffective are their attempts at building bridges—that are still burning. … Even Dr. King saw this tendency of White people to too quickly and with too much relief declare success and head home smiling.”

Trump is out of office! We have our vaccine! Now we can go back to normal. But normal has been anything but. Do you really consider all the violence, injustice, and inequity to be normal?

In his oft-quoted Letter from a Birmingham Jail, Dr. King wrote:

“First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Councilor or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action’; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a ‘more convenient season.’ Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will.”

This part, however, is rarely summoned. Despite centuries of advocacy, storytelling, public grief, and patience, we are still surrounded by shallow understanding and superficial alliance from people who claim to be of good will.

It brings to mind the words of James Baldwin in his book, The Fire Next Time:

“The subtle and deadly change of heart that might occur in you would be involved with the realization that a civilization is not destroyed by wicked people; it is not necessary that people be wicked but only that they be spineless.”

The violence that continues to harm each and every one of us is at our feet. Cowardice is no longer acceptable. When you ��Dz�’t know what to do, do anything. Ignorance is not a defense. And at this period in our history, with all the technological advances we have at our fingertips and voice commands, it is neither an excuse. 

If you’re not actively doing something to prevent the violence from occurring, then you’re part of the problem. This is not a condemnation; it is a demand for true transformation, a call to ignite a fire in you that burns so hot and so high and so bright that you will not settle for anything less.

Sustaining a movement at such scale and duration requires substantial infrastructure, which in Portland emerged from autonomous organizing, deep networks of mutual aid, and a collective commitment to redefining and prioritizing community safety. As Portland’s protests evolved, YES! sought to document this infrastructure, and the challenges of organizing around demands for justice being led by Black people. YES! solutions reporter Isabella Garcia, a resident of Portland, spent months on the ground with protesters, organizers, and community members to understand how the movement emerged and sustained itself, how local and federal law enforcement responded, and what Portlanders hope to accomplish going forward.

Inside Portland’s Autonomous Protest Movement

Portland, Oregon’s five months of ongoing protests in support of Black lives are sustained by a vast, multifaceted, and ever-evolving network of activists, organizers, and mutual aid.

How Portland Protesters Keep Each Other Safe

“Protesting ultimately isn’t safe and we’re not trying to say that it is,” says one Portland street medic. “But that doesn’t mean we can’t take care of each other.”

What Comes Next for Portland’s Protests?

After more than 100 days of continual demonstrations, protesters in Portland are looking to the future—and each other—for ways to sustain their movement for Black lives.

Video: Lessons From Portland’s Protest Movement

Portland organizers and volunteers offer an inside look at the infrastructure that supports the city’s ever-evolving movement for Black lives.

Crime is on the����in America.

Many in the media have argued that this uptick may be because of calls to reform or defund police stemming from the George Floyd police murder in May 2020. However, crime and murder rates were  before the protests. In addition, few if any law enforcement agencies have been defunded or reformed. The rise in shootings and crime happened as police continued to be highly militarized, funded, and resourced. 

Take Los Angeles. In the summer of 2020, as George Floyd-related protests swelled across the country and the world, the Los Angeles City Council agreed to slash $150 million from the Los Angeles Police Department’s budget. This is a minuscule cut from the overall LAPD budget, which totaled $1.71 billion that fiscal year. And while the money was to be used for crisis response teams and to pay furloughed employees, it nonetheless failed to do anything around crime prevention or intervention.

Then, this past July, LA Mayor Eric Garcetti proposed a 3% increase in police funding, angering many activists who called for cutting the police budget and using those funds for youth programs, drug treatment, mental health assistance, and more.

Even in one of the most liberal of cities, police never really had their budgets cut. Yet, crime and murders are at their highest levels since the 1990s in LA and other major cities. While COVID-19 claimed more than 300,000 lives in 2020, that same year gun violence and gun crime resulted in . That’s the highest death toll in more than 20 years. 

Crime is not solely a police issue.

But if you can’t blame “defunding police” or policing reform for the increased killings, what can you blame?

Crime, like most issues in our industrial and post-industrial capitalist economic system, is a diamond with many facets. Police address crime mostly from the back end—after the crime has occurred. We have a large, highly budgeted policing system, courts, and a carceral system to address this. But crime continues to rise. What’s sorely lacking is what to do on the front end, to focus on crime’s causes and underpinnings.

To paraphrase Henry David Thoreau, too many are hacking at the branches and not at the roots.

I have spent about 50 years working on reducing gang and street violence, including with gang truces and intervention, in LA and Chicago. I’ve also consulted with communities around the country, at Native American reservations and among the urban and rural poor. I’ve been going to prisons, juvenile lockups, jails, and parolee housing for over 40 years for poetry readings, talks, and healing circles. I’ve also taught creative writing as healing from trauma in high-security facilities. Because of my reputation, I’ve visited penal institutions and juvenile detention centers in nearly 20 states as well as in Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Argentina, England, and Italy, with a month teaching poetry to abandoned children in Honduras. I’ve written a book about my experiences and research called Hearts & Hands: Creating Community in Violent Times (2001, 2011: Seven Stories Press, NYC).

This is what I’ve learned about crime prevention:

1.��Poverty is a major source of crime. Bad housing, bad schools, bad infrastructure, including the “poverty of access.” Poverty destroys families, their dignity, and hope. Most criminality is of want—because of lack of income, food, and other necessities. If you end poverty, you end most crime.

2. All violence, even the most “senseless,” makes sense. Get to the core. Fill the gaps in economic,��health, mental health, and��skills development with real resources, or they end up getting��filled with increased illegal drug use (and more crime to get money for the drugs), gang warfare, and violence. Domestic violence, the No. 1 violence concern among the poor, is hardly ever investigated or treated.��

3. Treatment for addiction on demand is nonexistent in too many rural and urban communities. People need high-quality and free access to health care as well as mental health care and drug treatment. People are being punished instead of receiving the help they need. We should start young, and then continue through the developmental stages to adulthood.��

4. Fully address the increased access to guns in our communities.��Some�� were made from March to May 2020 alone. This demands stricter gun control laws but also—again, going to the source—why guns and drugs are easily accessible in any community, while books or art programs or safe recreational sports are almost nonexistent in the poorest areas.��

5. Promote arts as essential for human development, given that we are entering a stage in human society where the arts become primary as technology develops to supersede physical and most mental��labor. How are we on the verge of concentrating on the creative capacity of each child and student, and how can we begin to do this now? This is wholly different from STEM education systems. While I’m all for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics,��creativity is essential to all four aspects. The arts are not just another field—they are the key that turns all the rest.

6. We need community-driven initiation and spiritually based rites of passage for young people. This is how communities across the ages have dealt with trouble, which can’t be eradicated but can be addressed with tools, connections, and resources. This also includes proper mentoring, in the sense of the original meaning of the word in��. Mentor is at the helm, the captain of the “ship” that young people use in their quest to find their genius, their destiny, or their calling. A good captain knows that a good sailor is born from rough seas, not calm ones, and that on any journey a young person can always be taken off course. A mentor helps keep the student on track. A mentor’s teachings can be imprinted in the soul of a student for a lifetime.��

We know how to do this. Many cities have implemented measures such as drug and mental-health courts, treatment for mental health and drug issues, restorative/transformative justice practices, and wraparound services for the most troubled youth and adults. But they have never been fully or adequately implemented across the country, especially in areas where such comprehensive programming is most needed.

Crime is not solely a police issue. We do police agencies a terrible disservice when we place this squarely in their laps. Most police are not trained for the multifaceted and multidimensional aspects of crime. Law enforcement officers are also subject to attack and stress, making them more susceptible to suicide or substance abuse than other professions. We must—going to the root again—deal fully with the front end of crime as a societal, and mostly preventable, malaise. I’m convinced this would be nowhere near as costly as law enforcement, courts, and prisons now are.

I’m convinced that this is how we “care” straight, not scare straight.

I’m convinced that this is how we “win” on crime.

An 18-year-old White man was taken into custody unharmed, reportedly wearing military fatigues and body armor, after law enforcement allegedly talked him down from killing himself.

As have many mass shooters before him, the gunman published a that espoused a fear that people of color are “replacing” White people, adding that he hoped his violence would spark a “race war.” Fox News hosts like frequently tout this “replacement theory,” and have openly embraced the idea.

The Buffalo massacre comes nearly three years after a White suspect was reportedly inspired by similar ideology to commit a . That incident resulted in the death of 20 people, most of whom were people of color.

And nearly seven years ago, a young White man shot , South Carolina, also allegedly hoping to spark a race war.

Prominent scholar, activist, political commentator, and journalist sees the Buffalo massacre as part of a new and terrifying trend of White supremacists unleashing violence on communities of color. Clemente, who is currently completing her doctorate at the W.E.B. Du Bois Center at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, also sees links between this trend and the coming abortion ban, which she discussed in conversation with YES! Racial Justice Editor Sonali Kolhatkar.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Sonali Kolhatkar: Media outlets are not hesitating to call the Buffalo massacre a racist attack or domestic terrorism attack. Does that labeling suggest that we’re making some progress in, at least, recognizing these horrors?

Rosa Clemente: Yes, definitely it is a terrorist attack, but first and foremost it’s a White supremacist attack that also was livestreamed for a while. Even if it was a couple of minutes, �ٳ󲹳�’s a long time for someone at Twitch not to have shut it down. Maybe they didn’t want to.

I do think we have to say it is a White supremacist attack, because I’ve already seen some media have non-Black people [as experts] saying “This could happen to all of us at any time.” And �ٳ󲹳�’s not true. Especially when [the attack was] specifically targeted to kill Black people.

Kolhatkar: When we examine the suspected shooter’s manifesto, we see this idea of the “replacement theory” that routinely spouts about on Fox News, that is repeated by politicians such as , and other Republicans who are mainstreaming this theory. There is a pretty clear link between the promotion of this theory and what happened in Buffalo, right?

Clemente: Yes, and Elise Stefanik is up here—they call it the North Country, �ٳ󲹳�’s between Saratoga, after Albany to Buffalo—she’s the sitting congresswoman.

I’ve read the “replacement theory,” but historically, ever since Indigenous people were used, [and] African, Chinese, and other people [were] exploited, especially [in terms of] work exploitation and capitalistic exploitation, this country has never wanted Black people here. It saw them as non-human, as chattel, that would be here to work the fields and then die. So, whether you call it “replacement theory” or White supremacist thinking, the fact is that this country is looking Blacker and Browner more and more every day—it’s looking more like the rest of the world.

And then being coupled with so much disinformation and propaganda, reading something like [replacement theory], it’s not surprising to me, the age of the people it’s targeting, which is younger White kids that might be disaffected because of the growing inequity in this country.

I ��Dz�’t think it’s too far [fetched] to say, “Here’s this young White man, who had already been flagged, he went armed, he would’ve killed more if he wasn’t stopped. He was stopped without being killed. He wanted to do this at another supermarket.”

I also think it can be linked to what is happening right now with the possibility of Roe being overturned and abortion being illegal and no longer a right in so many states, if not [in] the rest of the country pretty soon. I think there’s a reason that this is tied in with abortion: They need more babies. To me, what [White supremacists are] trying to do is a White project [of] nation-building, right now, when their numbers are going down.

We can go all the way to the totalitarianism we’re seeing, with the potential end of not just abortion, but reproductive rights. White men in power are, at least, going to want White women to be able to produce their White babies, while [at the same time] using this replacement theory to have us killed or carted away, or [have] other forms of mass incarceration.

I really wish people on the Left and progressives would expand the notion of this [mass shooting in Buffalo] as just “a hate crime.” This is America. That’s what they’ve been doing.

Kolhatkar: Is it a sort of “ethnic cleansing” �ٳ󲹳�’s happening?

Clemente: Absolutely, yes. And the strategy that they’re using, they’ve used in the ’80s when they first went after academia. They’ve been going after critical race theory.

There’s been a mistake that a lot of so-called progressive academics have made, which is focusing on teaching White people how they’re responsible for White supremacy. I ��Dz�’t actually think �ٳ󲹳�’s our job. I ��Dz�’t think we need to be writing books anymore about White people figuring out that they live in a racist country and have had privilege just by the nature of being White.

We need to figure out on the Black and Brown radical Left, or create a really radical revolutionary Left that is about self-determination and sovereignty in our communities and also preparing ourselves.

Many people down South or in other parts of this country are arming themselves and preparing themselves. It’s been part of the Black radical tradition, as this week we celebrate , his birthday. That’s what he talked about. He was like, basically, “They’re gonna do what they’re gonna do. What are we gonna do to make our community safer for ourselves and self-determine ourselves?”

And we can see that happening with the younger generation, particularly Black and Brown people, that are like, “We’re going [to] farms, we’re moving away from the big cities. We need to know how to protect ourselves. We need to know how to heal ourselves. We need to have mutual aid. We need to figure out other forms of sharing information, because we’re seeing already how the right wing or Conservative, mostly White, men control all social media, and soon we might not be able to get our ideas out in this way.”

So, I think moments like this call on us for now, not to put our energy into changing the hearts and minds of White people. I’ve been done with that. But I really think a younger generation has to stop trying to make White people feel better because of how they are born. That’s for them to contend with. If not, these attacks are gonna grow.

They’re gonna keep growing and growing, especially if the right wing takes back Congress and the presidency, and the Democratic party, as usual, shows its weakness and ineptitude to deal with anything that is critically important to poor Black and Brown people in this country.

Kolhatkar: I’m wondering if you think that leaders and Liberal elites are going to take this massacre as seriously as it needs to be taken. I remember in France in 2015 when the and the massacre of 12 people, mostly journalists, happened. Then, a few days later at the Golden Globes awards ceremony, U.S. movie stars were saying “je suis Charlie” and making common cause with the victims. In our country, we have had massacre after massacre of people of color by White supremacists. I wonder how seriously Liberal elites will claim to be moved by Buffalo and do something.

Clemente: I ��Dz�’t think anything is going to come from elected officials. Since Charleston, I believe that this is a new wave of racial massacres against Black and Brown people. This government can’t keep those who sought to overthrow the government—those mostly White men and women [who rioted] on January 6 [imprisoned]. Many of their charges have been dropped, many have had jail sentences [dropped] from 15 years to now 30 days, 90 days. For those that have done a little bit of time and are about to come out, they are being lauded as heroes of the Right.

If they’re not going to impose what should be imposed against people who conspire to overthrow an election, then ��Dz�’t really care about what they are still gonna call “lone wolf” White young men, mass murderers. There will be no reform on gun laws, ever.

I think these [shootings] are gonna rise. I mean, even if there were gun laws, this would have happened anyway. The country is heading [toward] real quick inequity, I mean, monetary, financial inequity. People are being pushed to the edge already with gas [prices], inflation, and all that. And in these times, it is often young White men who feel disaffected. They feel they ��Dz�’t belong, they turn their anger out in in a very hyper-violent way, and they do that to us. I mean, [the suspected shooter] drove for two hours to get to Buffalo.

And a lot of people ��Dz�’t understand, there’s a lot of Black people in Buffalo, New York. It used to be [that] General Electric was there, and Chrysler Motors was there. Buffalo was a huge Black community. It’s predominantly a Black community and a poor community.

So, [the suspected shooter] drove from where he [lived], where there were hardly any Black people, and scoped it out. He didn’t just go there and do it. He made a plan.

I think there’s a lot more of these that we’re going to see, unfortunately.

Kolhatkar: There are reports that the suspect had planned more massacres and that if he hadn’t been stopped by police, there would have been more killings. Do you expect that this massacre will be used as justification for more police, rather than for a crackdown on White supremacists and guns?

Clemente: Oh yes, absolutely. We are already seeing the Democrats, Mayor [Eric] Adams in New York, and [President Joe] Biden talking about funding more police. We already are witnessing in LA, in New York City, in other major cities, mass hirings [of police].

Adams has put back the [same NYPD] . The over-policing is already happening. They’re tying it to particularly “violent crime” in Black and Brown neighborhoods. But if we look back to the ’80s and my generation, the Black and Latino politicians then did the same thing. They started advocating for more police. So �ٳ󲹳�’s where we’re at now.

So, we’re going to get more police, and White young men will get the ability to buy any gun, be kicked out of school, get denied at five gun shops because of mental health [issues], be on the radar of police, and still go and massacre Black people as they see fit.

Kolhatkar: Let’s link this back to the issue of the coming abortion ban. We’re likely going to see abortion criminalized, and that criminalization is likely going to come with police enforcement, and it’s going to impact poor women of color, trans folks of color, who are going to try to access abortion. There were all over the country this past weekend. You attended one of them. Will Americans, a majority of whom want the right to an abortion, be able to push back against the coming Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade?

Clemente: Yeah, it wasn’t enough.

I first want to thank the leaker [of the draft of Justice Alito’s opinion], because it was obviously a clerk in there who did what they had to do to warn people, even though many of us felt and knew that it was coming.

Second, I think we have to have a complete interrogation into Planned Parenthood, the National Organization for Women, all these large reproductive organizations that have billions of dollars of nonprofit money, like, “How did this happen on your watch?”

And it’s not just about abortion. If they can overturn [Roe], this is about taking away complete control of one’s ability to do what they want with their body. It will affect women first, women of color, poor women. It will all go down like [The] Handmaid’s Tale, dystopic.

Maybe they will decide who, in general, can have children. What if you’re poor and you can’t have a child? What if you’re a Black man, White man, or Indigenous [man] that was formerly incarcerated, and you’re deemed that you can’t have a child?

What’s already happening is that we have the arrests of doctors, we have laws that are passing in states that will charge women with murder [for having miscarriages or abortions]. And then we have attacks on LGBTQI people that we know is going to lead to mental health [problems] and suicide, and that parents could be fined, children can be taken away, you can’t say the word “gay.”

People ��Dz�’t understand, we are right now at that first step of totalitarianism. We’re already fascist, we’re there. I believe we have to do a better job of linking it all together as progressives.

It was important for many of us to be out there [at the abortion rallies] on Saturday. But, I mean, the whole country should be ungovernable. If this was something that was affecting men’s genitalia—and I know �ٳ󲹳�’s a very binary and scientific way to say it, but I believe people need to hear that too—these streets would be on fire. It would be ungovernable.

And it’s also really disheartening not to see many men and people who identify as men out there. They need to be having the marches.

�±�’v�� been to the marches, we’ve done this, our foremothers did this, abortions are gonna happen. People will find other ways. But they’re gonna go down the road of banning contraceptives.

Kolhatkar: They’re already talking about , the “morning after” pill.

Clemente: Oh, yeah. Like we’ve always said, there’s moments to wake up, but this is a big moment where you have to decide: “I am gonna have to fight harder than I ever thought. I’m gonna have to lose some comfortability in my life,” or, “What are we leaving for our children? A planet that may be uninhabitable?”

Kolhatkar: President Biden claimed that he was going to fight for racial justice, fight for racial equity. But is it inadequate to look to political leaders to bring racial justice? We have midterm elections coming up in November, and Democrats are saying to us, “Well, if you ��Dz�’t vote for us, the Republicans will be in charge,” but it seems as though they ��Dz�’t give people good enough reasons to vote for them. Yet, policy gets made at the government level. Going back to what you were saying about being “ungovernable,” what does that look like, and how does it translate into change?

Clemente: The Democrats can’t [even] keep baby formula on the shelves. What is happening?

Being ungovernable means that you also have to give up on the electoral political system as it is now. I just ��Dz�’t see any type of elected official, even the most progressive, [being able to put] a dent in this machine that keeps going no matter what.

I would like to see younger, progressive, so-called Democrats, “The Squad,” just leave and walk out, maybe go back to community organizing, because nothing is seeming to stop, especially given Biden and [Vice President Kamala] Harris, the most Democratic elected officials we’ve had in a while.

The Republicans have always played the long game. But they are also themselves elected officials in a party has [that] put out enough propaganda for the majority of their own to not trust the electoral political system, yet they can participate in some way. I ��Dz�’t think we have the ability to do that.

And part of it [is] simply [that] we are Black and Brown people. In the end, it’s a White Christian nation, and they want to keep it that way, even if we’re in it.

So, I really think we have to rethink all this energy that we keep putting into electing officials. We did all this and still abortion and Roe v. Wade is going to be overturned? What else are we supposed to do?

We have to fight back in different ways, organizing has to look really, really, different, and I think we have to take very seriously also the impact of the rest of the world that is moving towards the Right. I think it’s a sobering time, and we have to act that way, and we have to figure out how we make change outside of elected officials or parties at this point.

1. Dramatically Limit Access to Guns

Gun regulation matters.

When my colleagues and I looked at gun regulations on a state-by-state basis, we found that .

This relation held even after we took demographic, economic, and educational factors into account. Other researchers have found that “permissive firearm laws and higher rates of gun ownership” were linked with .

What these results essentially mean is that in states where it is more difficult to acquire a gun, fewer people are killed by guns. Examples of these restrictions are raising the age for legal purchase, imposing lengthy waiting periods before access, requiring meaningful background checks, and more. These and similar measures—for example, eliminating access for individuals at a high risk of committing violence, such as the perpetrators of domestic violence—all move toward making it significantly harder to access guns, which would reduce gun violence substantially.

Placing meaningful restrictions or outright bans on firearm equipment associated with greater lethality, such as assault-style rifles and high-capacity magazines, should also lower the number of people being killed by firearms. Research  that greater access to guns is associated with higher numbers of gun deaths.

2. Use More Violence Risk Assessments in Schools

In the years since the Columbine shooting in 1999, researchers and federal law enforcement agencies have  and developed  to gauge the likelihood of actual violence by a young person identified as a possible risk.

These assessments are conducted by professionals that include police officers, school officials, and teachers. They also involve mental health professionals, such as school counselors and psychologists. Together, these professionals all consult with one another to determine a young person’s risk for violence.

These teams may not be able to prevent every possible incident. Still, this sort of approach is critical to improving the process of identifying and stopping potential shooters overall. Guidance on how to use these assessments is  and based in extensive applied research. For example, in , “”—a set of guidelines for the investigation of a reported threat, thorough assessment of the individual making the threat, and preventive or protective measures to be taken in response—were shown to . They were also shown to lower out-of-school suspension rates while improving teacher and student perceptions of safety.

3. Expand Evidence-Based Strategies to Reduce Violent Behavior

To help reduce the number of youths who grow up to become violent, governmental agencies could increase the availability and use of evidence-based interventions in schools.

Aggressive and violent behavior has been shown by research to emerge from a . The factors include impulsivity, callousness, exposure to violence, and victimization.

In light of this research, effective approaches were developed to  aggression by teaching students to problem-solve for better responses to peer conflict. They also teach students to think carefully about others’ motivations when they feel provoked.

Programs shown to  aggressive behavior typically train youths who already have exhibited some aggression on new and better coping skills for managing stress and anger. And for youths who have become seriously violent,  teach new, constructive behavioral and communication skills to youths and their caregivers. The treatments also help young people develop better relationships with family members and school personnel.

4. Make School Buildings Safer

The Robb Elementary School shooter entered the school building through a door that reportedly . This highlights the absolute importance for schools to take and maintain physical security measures.

In the wake of school shootings, schools often turn to solutions such as .

These measures can have  on students’ perceptions of safety and support—cameras posted outside appear to increase felt safety, whereas cameras posted inside seem to promote unease.

Increased law enforcement presence might make  in school. But it also might  without .

Still, there are a number of ways for schools to  without increasing student anxiety or needlessly deploying law enforcement. For example, in one large study, students were less likely to skip school because of safety concerns when metal detectors were . In that study, those metal detectors also reduced the likelihood of weapons being brought into schools.

5. Reduce Exposure to Violence Through Media and Social Media

Entertainment media and social media are  of physical assaults, gun violence, and gore. Exposure to and participation in virtual violence might not lead to aggressive behavior for all children and adolescents. But watching violent programs and playing violent video games can lead to increased , , emotional , and, ultimately, . These effects can potentially be lessened by reducing the amount of screen violence to which children and adolescents are exposed over time, particularly early in development.

This article was originally published by��. It has been republished here with permission.

Violence—and especially the killing of children, such as the recent mass killing that occurred at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, leaving 19 students dead—can’t be understood in the immediacy of shock and despair, however deplorable and understandable. The ideological and structural conditions that nourish and legitimate it have to be revealed both in their connections to power and in the systemic unmasking of those who benefit from such death-dealing conditions.

Among Democrats, the general response to mass violence in the U.S. is to call for more gun regulations and criticize the NRA, gun lobbies, and the weapons industry. This is understandable given that the arms industry floods the United States with all manner of lethal weapons, pays out millions to mostly Republican politicians, and in the case of the NRA, has sponsored an amendment banning “.”

We should indeed criticize the gun lobby and arms industry, but this critique does not go far enough.

We should indeed criticize the gun lobby and arms industry, but this critique does not go far enough. The tragic murders of the 19 schoolchildren and two teachers in rural Texas at the hands of a young man who resorted to a horrific act of violence—and the killing of Black shoppers in a Tops grocery store in Buffalo by a hate-filled racist and self-proclaimed fascist—represent the end points of a culture awash in guns and violence, a society that nourishes and rewards the gun industries and values the accumulation of profits over human needs. All of the latter is amplified by a modern Republican Party that accelerates a gun culture, revels in violence as a form of political opportunism, strips young people of crucial social provisions, and enables a culture of lies that make it difficult to discern the truth from falsehoods, good from evil. The New York Times columnist Charles Blow rightly claims that “”

In the current historical moment, the market-driven values of “freedom,” choice, and rugged individualism have merged with the concentration of power in the hands of the superrich and corporations, an unbridled individualism, and a culture of terror and fear. One consequence is that the corruption of politics as big money is used to pay off politicians while using a corporate-controlled media to flood the culture with the notion that individual liberty is synonymous with unfettered gun rights. How else to explain that “Gun rights groups set new records for lobbying in 2021, spending over $15 million, with GOP Sen. Ted Cruz the biggest recipient,” as . It is not surprising that Cruz responded to the mass shooting in a Texas elementary school by declaring that one way to solve the problem of school violence was to arm teachers. It is worth noting that, , “Sales of weapons and military services by the world’s 100 biggest arms companies reached a record $531bn in 2020.”

While the power of the NRA; arms dealers such as Lockheed Martin, the largest war industry in the world; and the military-industrial complex to shape politics and a permanent war economy is indisputable, this is only one register of a form of gangster capitalism that believes that market values, which privatize, commodify, and commercialize all social relations, are more important than addressing vital human needs, crucial social problems, and the public good. This is a logic that suppresses human rights, views the struggle for social justice as a scourge, and cancels out the future for young people. William Greider in his book Who Will Tell the People: The Betrayal Of American Democracy, published in 1992, stated that if the U.S. lost its civic faith in the promise of democracy, it “has the potential to deteriorate into a rather brutish place, ruled by naked power and random social aggression.” Greider’s words were not only prescient, they also capture the loss of vision and cult of authoritarianism at work in the United States. 

Violence proliferates in a society when justice is corrupted and power works to produce mass forms of historical and social amnesia.

Under neoliberalism, democratic life has no vision and no meaningful ideological civic anchors. Neoliberalism strips society of both its collective conscience and democratic communal relations. Violence proliferates in a society when justice is corrupted and power works to produce mass forms of historical and social amnesia largely aimed at degrading society’s critical and moral capacities.

There are more guns in circulation in the U.S. than people, in a country of 325 million. The U.S. constitutes 5% of the world’s population and owns 25% of all guns on the globe. Judd Legum in Popular Information reports that in 2020, “.” He notes further that this is an alarming figure given that “firearm ownership rates appear to be a statistically significant predictor of the distribution of public mass shooters worldwide.” Equally significant but not surprising is the fact that “More Americans have died from gunshots in the last 50 years than in all of the wars in American history,”&�Բ�����;. The Pew Research Center , “More Americans died of gun-related injuries in 2020 than in any other year on record.” What emerges from these figures and the relentless mass shootings in which young people have become an increasing target is the question of what kind of society the United States has become, and what are the broader economic, political, and social forces that produce massive violence and its increasing collapse into authoritarianism?

As horrific as these figures are, the backdrop to the politics and plague of violence in the United States is rarely a subject of debate in the mainstream media. Even as specific policies are debated, what is ignored is a neoliberal economic system that feeds on self-interest, inequality, cruelty, punishment, precarity, and loneliness. Neoliberal society fuels a criminogenic system that celebrates violence both as a source of pleasure and as an organizing principle of governance. 

Neoliberal capitalism has given rise to a carceral state that criminalizes the behavior of young people while filling the prisons with poor people of color, destroying their families and their futures. This is a system so cold-hearted that it refuses to renew the Child Tax Credit, pushing 3 million children below the poverty line.

The U.S. is the only country in the world where children as young as 13 are sentenced to prison without any chance of parole. Such policies are just one register of the slow and silent state violence waged against young people that works in tandem with the mass violence that is produced by a society in which injustice, poverty, fear, and racial cleansing are central modes of governance. The irony here is that the current White supremacist Republican Party now claims it is the party dedicated to protecting children. This claim is ludicrous when tested against a party that bans books, models schools after prisons, demonizes transgender youth, assaults reproductive rights, and consistently puts policies in place that undermine efforts to lift children and their families above the poverty line. 

Domestic terrorists now parade as politicians, and White supremacists dominate the Republican Party and revel in a civically depleted culture that has abandoned justice, ethics, and hope for the corrupt currencies of wealth, power, and self-aggrandizement. Increasingly, young people are the targets of a form of gangster capitalism that has written them out of the script of democracy, placed them at the mercy of politicians who are self-proclaimed White Christian nationalists, and abandoned them through institutions that have broken from the social contract. Increasingly, they are stripped of their dignity, their hopes, and, in too many cases, their lives. This is the death machine of social abandonment and terminal exclusion that creates the conditions for blood to flow in the streets, schools, malls, supermarkets, churches, mosques, and synagogues.

In an age of fascist politics, mass violence has become normalized and is nourished by a culture of conspiracy theories, moral indifference, corrupt politicians, a social media.

Young people are being killed in spaces that are supposed to protect them. In an age of fascist politics, mass violence has become normalized and is nourished by a culture of conspiracy theories, moral indifference, corrupt politicians, a social media that trades in hate, the normalization of mass shootings, and a grotesque public silence in the face of massive inequalities in wealth and power.

In such a context, it is not surprising that an increasing number of Republicans support violence as a tool for resolving political issues. It gets worse. The Washington Post  that “1 in 3 Americans say they believe violence against government can at times be justified.” Violence has become so widespread that it both neutralizes the public’s sense of moral outrage and shatters their bonds of solidarity. As society is increasingly militarized under neoliberalism, violence becomes the solution for everything. This is especially dangerous for those individuals who feel isolated and lonely in a society that atomizes everything. Some of these individuals turn to the internet and social media in search of community, often to be radicalized by White supremacist conspiracy theories, as was the case with the Buffalo shooter.

The culture of violence has intensified since the 1980s and has found a privileged place in the cult of authoritarianism in the United States. It is embraced, legitimated, and endorsed by a Republican Party that uses gun violence and mass school shootings as part of a poisonous script designed, , to transform “public schools into death traps as part of a deliberate strategy to create an atmosphere of fear and suspicion conducive to survivalist mentalities and support for illiberal politics.”&�Բ�����;

Gun violence cannot be abstracted from a broader culture of violence and authoritarianism that calls for more gun ownership, more police, and more national security. Moreover, both the gun industry and right-wing politicians who benefit from its profits are well-aware fear and extremism sell more guns and generate lucrative markets for the merchants of death. The right-wing response to school shootings is as disingenuous as it is morally corrupt. In order to feed the coffers of the surveillance industry and other merchants of death, it calls for turning schools into armed camps, awash with high-tech security systems, more police, and more firearms for teachers while increasingly defining the purpose and meaning of schools through the language of a military culture. Such actions cultivate a mass consciousness that worships violence even as it bemoans the terrible price it enacts on human life, especially when children become collateral damage in such a culture. The cult of violence in the U.S. is inseparable from the cult of authoritarianism and the rise of neoliberal fascism.

We all need to mobilize to turn despair into militant hope, critical analysis into action, and individual anger into collective struggles.

In moments like these, we all must remember that justice is partly dependent upon the merging of civic courage, historical understanding, a critical education, and robust mass action. There is a long history of resistance in the U.S. that is under siege and is being erased from schools, books, and libraries by right-wing Republican politicians and their followers. This is not only an assault on historical consciousness; it’s also an assault on thinking itself, and the very ability to recognize injustice and the tools needed to oppose it. One consequence is that neoliberal authoritarianism now thrives in an ecosystem of historical amnesia and has become an accelerating agent of violence.

Authoritarianism as a death machine thrives by hiding in the language of common sense and the discourses of fear, terror, and moral panic. As it becomes more widespread, it is normalized, becoming all the more destructive. Normalization is a form of mystification, and it can be seen in the way in which the larger forces behind mass shootings, such as those at Tops supermarket and in the Texas school, are often reduced to personal stories of individual grief and narratives limited to the assailants’ lives. As structural conditions are obscured, connecting the dots to a broader culture of violence becomes more difficult.

Hiding behind a rhetoric in which the political collapses into the personal, and private troubles are removed from broader systemic considerations, power now functions in the service of a cabal of religious fundamentalists, charlatans of mass ignorance, the financial elite, and the corporate-controlled cultural apparatuses that trade in dishonesty, the spectacle of violence, and the demonization and dehumanization of anyone who is not a White Christian. Even worse, the modern Republican Party not only endorses calls for violence by members of its own party, including those made by Paul Gosar, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and others, but it has also become a party that —to seize power and destroy democracy. Rather than being alarmed by violence, the Republican Party has created the conditions that suggest it wishes for even more. , the Republican Party, trading in fear and paranoia, terrorizes the public by claiming that “criminals are coming to menace you, immigrants are coming to menace you, a race war (or racial replacement) is coming to menace you and the government itself may one day come to menace you. The only defense you have against the menace is to be armed.” The only solution is to not only accept the American way of violence and death but to affirm it, be complicit with it, and, in doing so, legitimate it. 

The killing of children turns this invisible scourge of power and its poisonous instruments on its head, if only for a moment, because of the shock of the unimaginable, gesturing at its roots the workings of current political and economic formations that function as a lethal force that turns everything into ashes. Such horrors cry out for connecting the endless threads of violence that mark the brutality waged against women, transgender youth, Black people, Indigenous people, undocumented immigrants, youth of color, disabled people, the environment, and all those considered disposable in this neo-fascist social order.

Against this authoritarian death machine, we all need to mobilize to turn despair into militant hope, critical analysis into action, and individual anger into collective struggles that refuse the seductions of gangster capitalism and its rebranded fascism.

On multiple fronts, youth are already at the forefront of this organizing. After the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, in 2018, youth rose up against gun violence in unprecedented ways, creating the  and connecting the issue of school shootings with police violence, racial justice, and other urgent issues.

Youth are also speaking out and rising up in monumental ways regarding the , , , , , and more. Adults would do well to recognize, bolster, and amplify these forms of youth activism to help them grow and gain momentum.

History is open, and the signposts of the current moment are waiting for a radical change in consciousness, institutions, and action. How much more blood will flow in schools and other places where young people and adults live their lives before a sufficiently powerful mass movement arises to put an end to this capitalist architecture of ideological and institutional violence?

Resistance is the only option, and it has to be educational, structural, bold, and disruptive—far removed from the weak call for a revitalized electoral politics or moderate gun reforms. Resistance has to breathe anger and outrage, and mediate a sense of moral righteousness through a mass movement for economic, environmental, and social justice.

Frederick Douglass was right when he stated: “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.”

How many more deaths can this country endure? How many more innocent children will be killed before a mass movement arises that can bring this brutal social order to an end?

This article was originally published by . It has been republished here with permission.

A short while later, Sasmita Sing Banara, a multilingual education (MLE) teacher gathers some of the students in a circle and begins to read aloud in the Ho language from a second-grade textbook. “It dances when it sees the dark clouds. What is it called?” she asks, pointing at a picture of a peacock. “Mara,” the children sing back. “Yes, �ٳ󲹳�’s the word in Ho. And what is it called in Odiya?” she asks. “Mayuro,” the children respond.

Odisha is the state with the second-highest Indigenous population in India, home to as many as 62 Indigenous communities, including the Ho. But the sounds of their languages ��Dz�’t often reverberate through the classrooms this way.

India is linguistically diverse countries in the world, but its constitution officially recognizes only 22 of the hundreds of existing languages, and these are the ones taught or used in schools. India’s census dismisses altogether languages spoken by fewer than 10,000 people. Since independent India’s state borders were first along linguistic lines in 1956, certain languages with territorial majorities and scripts have gained social and political power. Indigenous languages, in contrast, have been marginalized, along with those who speak them.

This has led to  that at least 400 of the 780 languages currently spoken in India are at the risk of extinction in the next 50 years. The ones most at risk are those used by Indigenous communities, and the consequences of their loss is grave, experts warn. These languages hold the knowledge of the communities’ ecological surroundings, agricultural activities, and social relations—and also encapsulate some of the oldest historical memories, says Ganesh Devy, a literary scholar who, starting in 2010, led a project called the People’s Linguistic Survey of India. Over a span of three years, he and a team of 3,500 volunteers aimed to document India’s linguistic diversity. With the help of an 80-person editorial team, the survey’s findings were published in 50 academic volumes.

“In oral traditions, these memories continue to go to the next generation, keeping the communities intact,” he says. When the languages are lost, so too are the communities often lost.

For decades, a growing number of studies and policy recommendations in India have noted that the language gap in classrooms serves as a major cause of poor learning, retention, and self-esteem for Indigenous students.

On paper, Odisha has taken these concerns seriously. Banara was one of about 3,400 language teachers appointed after 2014 when Odisha a mother-tongue-based multilingual education program focused on Indigenous communities. Through an official policy, the state mandated that lessons in early grades be imparted in a child’s own language, and became the first—and currently only—state in India to do so.

In the face of crippling poverty at home, Banara managed to complete her secondary schooling before getting married. She says her family practiced subsistence farming, and she did not know of anything else she could do for work. But in 2011, when she was about 21, an opportunity came up.

Sikshasandhan, a local nonprofit working on education, was hiring volunteers from Indigenous communities to assist government school teachers, who usually did not belong to the local communities themselves or speak the children’s languages. The organization ensured that the government was on board, and also provided training and salaries to the MLE volunteers. District officials eventually supported and expanded the program to 176 schools.

The program was borne out of Sikshasandhan’s decade-long experience of running alternative education centers whose teachers, curriculum, and functioning were all rooted in the Indigenous communities that the students belonged to. The idea was to transfer the same learning and format to government-funded public schools.

Banara began work as an MLE volunteer. And in 2014, when the state government advertised for the recruitment of language teachers, Sikshasandhan encouraged and trained Banara and other volunteers to apply so they could effect change within the government system. Following a language test and interview, Banara was hired as an MLE teacher.

At first, the job simply felt like a noble way to supplement the family income, but with time, it became a source of profound interest and joy to her. She saw that the students were able to understand and get along with her better than with the other teachers, which, in turn, led to better learning. She now has the assistance of an MLE volunteer herself, which helps distribute the task of managing the class and liaising with the community. “The language is ours. The children are ours. It feels good to be teaching like this,” Banara says.

Banara isn’t alone in her observations. Studies that Sikshasandhan’s efforts as well as those of the state’s MLE program increased Indigenous student enrollment and lower dropout rates in schools. Research conducted over a period of three years and in 2011 found significantly better academic comprehension and performance (in language proficiency, mathematics, and environmental studies) as well as more active classroom participation by Indigenous students (with the classrooms being “noisy, lively, and engaging” instead of “teacher-centric” and silent) in schools that followed the MLE program compared to those that did not.

The Issue of Implementation

Since the policy first came into place in 2014, Odisha has more than 300 textbooks and 2,500 supplementary materials in 21 indigenous languages. Still, government officials confirm that there have been no further MLE teacher appointments, research, or revision of the curriculum framework since the initial push. Teachers interviewed for this piece say they require more program-specific training, resources, and support—and in some districts, the lack of these things to the underutilization of Indigenous teachers.

The multilingual education program is active in only about 1,500 of the estimated 14,000 primary-level government day-schools that have at least 50% Indigenous students, which experts say exemplifies insufficient effort. There was also a widespread notion among interviewed teachers and officials that the program simply served as a way to “switchover” to Odiya or English instead of Indigenous languages being used simultaneously (and arguably meaningfully) as students progressed through the grades. Besides, thousands of Indigenous children continue to be in the more than 1,700 government-run residential institutions across the state that teach primarily in Odiya and are yet to implement the policy.

On the nonprofit side, while Sikshasandhan’s program includes providing MLE volunteers, training, and resource support to better implement the policy, their work, too, is currently limited to a handful of schools in Mayurbhanj due to lack of funding. In the past few years, India has the restrictions on how nonprofit organizations can receive and spend foreign funds, placing limits on administrative spending, requiring that foreign donation be received only through a specific bank branch in the capital New Delhi, and restricting subgranting. The work of thousands of nonprofits large and small has been severely .

And so efforts to center students’ Indigenous languages are getting stymied even as the country’s constitution them on paper.

“It’s not a question of whether this is important or not. This is the child’s constitutional right,” says Sapan Kumar Prusty, the district coordinator for tribal education in Mayurbhanj. But even he admits that the policy hasn’t been effectively implemented because the state government has failed to give it the due attention or priority. “It is a problem.”

Still, the programs that exist are better than nothing, or outright discouragement, which has long been the case with Indigenous languages, experts say. Just as residential schools in the United States and Canada aimed to forcibly remove Native children from their homes and communities in order to “civilize” them in residential schools that were often violent and dangerous, such facilities are still operating in India. There has been a continued emphasis on residential schools in India as the means to “mainstream” Indigenous children without making space for Indigenous language, culture, or knowledge systems in the curriculum while simultaneously to account for adequate facilities and safety. 

Jema Gadsara is a 6th-grade student in Dillisore village in the district who has been enrolled in a residential school more than 40 miles from her home since first grade. She says that staff actively encourage Indigenous students to “forget their mother tongue” and speak only in Odiya, so much so that Jema actually began to jumble up and forget certain Ho words when she came home and spoke the language with her parents. Understandably, she says she came to enjoy speaking Odiya more.

Many Indigenous parents feel the need for their children to speak and learn in the dominant language, Odiya, if they are to secure a future for themselves in the face of widespread displacement and loss of traditional livelihood in a state where their language isn’t widely respected or acknowledged.

Students, at an early age, often come to agree. In Barada’s class, for instance, Damodar Purty and Manai Sing, both in the third grade, say they prefer Odiya to Ho even as they speak to each other in the latter, because it means being able to communicate with the other non-Indigenous teachers and understanding the lessons quicker. So the teaching of Indigenous languages faces institutional barriers as well as cultural ones.

Lessons Learned

In recent years, there has been some renewed focus on the issue. India’s New Education Policy, released in 2019, emphasized the use of the student’s mother tongue as the medium of instruction at least until grade five. A  of states have announced efforts to teach Indigenous students in their own languages, and some have developed textbooks, , and to that effect.

The UN General Assembly declared 2022–2032 as the International Decade of Indigenous Languages and formed a global task force under UNESCO. Anabel Benjamin Bara, assistant professor at the Delhi-based Faculty of Management Studies, is the co-chair of the task force, and says it is “vital to focus more on the children and the youth in order to preserve Indigenous languages.” They are, after all, the future of every community.

In his advocacy for the use of Indigenous languages in schools in India, one of the major issues Bara encountered was the lack of Indigenous teachers who are well-versed and trained in teaching such languages. The efforts in Odisha show that a first step could be to work with volunteers from the community.

Growing up, 23-year-old Jana Gadasara was acutely aware of the lack of Indigenous teachers in her schools, and with time, her own circumstances explained the reasons for it: systemic barriers, lack of guidance, and a feeling of shame brought on by the language gap. Gadasara is now using her salary as a MLE volunteer with Sikshasandhan to pay for her college degree so she can meet the qualifications required for government recruitment. “It’s very important to have teachers like me in the classroom. I can’t express in words how much I want to be one myself,” she says.

In the absence of widespread state intervention, scattered efforts have shown the continued importance of alternative forms of education to fill the gaps. Bhopal-based nonprofit runs an experimental school and several community learning centers for marginalized children, including those from Indigenous communities, which incorporate the children’s local context, languages, and community in their teachings.

Similarly, the in the Badwani district of Madhya Pradesh is a  for Indigenous children that was built along with the community. They teach in the Bareli language in the initial years, and encourage the continuation of traditional knowledge systems through activities like farming.

Bara says India can draw lessons from the efforts in other countries where community participation has led to the prioritization of the use of Indigenous languages. In Canada, for instance, the Maskwacîs Cree Nation and the Alberta government a historic education agreement in 2018, which ensured that more than 2,300 children are taught under a Cree-based curriculum. This curriculum was devised in consultation with the community and brought the schools under the administrative control of the Maskwacîs Education Schools Commission. Similarly, representatives of the Sami Parliament in Norway, Finland, and Sweden have been working on a that incorporates Sami languages and traditions into the early education system for Indigenous children. It is being in kindergartens in Norway.

Linguistic Pride

The biggest lesson from the MLE program has been that the investment of time—which also requires sustained funding—is key, according to Anil Pradhan, member-secretary of Sikshasandhan and part of the MLE-policy drafting committee in Odisha. He says this will require several years of uninterrupted work with and by the government, alongside constant engagement with the teachers and the community to help children build confidence and self-esteem in and through their languages in the long term.

For 30-year-old MLE teacher Goura Barda, his classroom experience has helped him feel like teaching in Ho is “a matter of pride.” He vividly recalls his own schooling experience where this was not the case. He struggled with Odiya in the initial years and did not perform well academically as a result. There was no one to turn to for help. “There were 10 to 15 of us from this area in our class,” he says, referring to other Indigenous children, but only two of them, including him, managed to reach college.

As Barda communicates in Ho in his classroom today, it makes him wonder: “If a program like this existed during my time, maybe I would have flourished.” That, he says, is the��hope with which he teaches his students.

This reporting was supported by the International Women’s Media Foundation’s Howard G. Buffett Fund for Women Journalists.

Interviews that took place in Odisha were conducted in the Odiya language and translated by the author.

Even as Indian Americans prefer to assert their model behavior by touting their selectively handpicked IT professionals, tech workers, and entrepreneurs, forgotten is the swelling population of undocumented Indians, which according to the Migration Policy Institute as of 2019 is approximately 553,000 (5%) of the estimated 11 million unauthorized immigrants in the United States. Nor included are the working-class Indians, some of whom moved to the United States in the late 1800s and continue to form a significant population of Indians, especially in areas like New York City and Philadelphia, and parts of California. 

Bengali Muslim peddlers and Punjabis from rural immigrant communities in the nineteenth century experienced and responded differently to discrimination from the largely “upper”-caste educated professionals during the time and were among the most targeted by the “yellow peril” racist American policies of that era. 

“While those who came to work the land, work in lumberyards, or work on the railroads bore the brunt of physical attacks, educated professionals who did not confront such direct hostility began crafting a racial politics that would distinguish them from their poorer compatriots, from other nonwhite immigrants, and from Black Americans,” notes [Harvard-based anthropologist Ajantha] Subramanian.

The notorious case of —an Indian immigrant who, in 1923, argued to be considered white, since he was a “high caste Aryan full of Indian blood”—is a remarkable insight into the period’s eugenics-flavored “upper”-caste ideology, by which several “upper”-caste Indians considered themselves genetically superior to Dalits and Adivasis, and instead more aligned with white Caucasians. 

As Thind lost the case (ultimately leading to scores of Indians having their citizenships neutralized by 1926), equating “upper” casteness to whiteness became a losing strategy. However, by the 1960s, around the second big wave of Indian “upper”-caste immigration, identifying as “not Black” was quickly becoming a go-to for Indian Americans. “There was a common thread of understanding that emerged: the path to social and financial security was to avoid the taint of Blackness. While professional Indians no longer did so through recourse to whiteness, as had earlier elite migrants, they now leveraged class, nationality, and, most importantly, educational achievement, to fashion themselves as members of a model minority,” writes Subramanian in The Caste of Merit. 

Regardless, Indian Americans who moved to the U.S. over the last century were treated with racism, with many of them still considered “Black” regardless of their effortful delineations. During her interviews with [Indian Institutes of Technology] IIT graduates from the sixties, Subramanian discovered the tactics which several immigrant Indians employed to distinguish themselves as “not Black,” especially in the South, which was still in its Jim Crow era. Men started wearing a turban, whether or not they wore one back home in India, while women were encouraged to wear a sari to identify themselves as distinctly Indian. 

“I got the impression that the South was embarrassed to be mistreating foreign visitors,” one of the interviewees told Subramanian. “They had no problem discriminating against U.S. Blacks, but they went to lengths to ensure that we were fine.” This disposition, although prevalent in the “upper”-caste Indian immigrant professionals of the time, more or less ignored the efforts of the Black civil rights movement that, after decades of exclusion, made Indian immigrants’ reentry in the U.S. possible with the changes in the 1965 U.S. immigration laws. 

“Immigrants from India, armed with degrees, arrived after the height of the civil-rights movement, and benefited from a struggle that they had not participated in or even witnessed. They made their way not only to cities but to suburbs, and broadly speaking were accepted more easily than other nonwhite groups have been,” reads an Atlantic piece titled “The Truth Behind Indian American Exceptionalism.” Mindsets towards those who were “lower” than them on the hierarchy of caste among “upper”-caste Indian Americans easily transferred to those who they saw as now being “lower” on the hierarchy of race. 

By not treating Indian “foreigners” with the same disdain and disgust they did Black folks who had helped build their country, white Southerners, among others, inscribed a racial hierarchy, where Indians—neither the highest but not the lowest either—found themselves squarely in the middle. This new racial marker perfectly aligned with the self-ordained myths of “upper”-caste Indian tech graduates who, according to Subramanian, already equated their middle-class identity with a constructed idea of “upper”-caste merit, and further propelled this notion leading them to define themselves as different if not “better” than Black Americans. 

In her interview with the famous angel investor who launched the first Indian American company on Nasdaq, Subramanian finds him saying that Indians in Silicon Valley were “seen differently, as people who engaged in self-help, not asking for handouts,” echoing an anti-welfarist rhetoric targeted against Black and Brown Americans that is also often used against Dalits and Adivasis who avail reservations. 

The model minority ideal, created by “upper”-caste Indians with more than a little help from white Americans who first coined the term to describe Japanese immigrants, suffocates all other modes of existence and helps Indian Americans deny the existence of caste-based distinctions in the United States. There has been a long history of Black and South Asian solidarity, including the relationship between Ambedkar and W. E. B. Du Bois; the Dalit Panther Party; the early relationships between Black civil rights leaders and the gandhian movement (including Martin Luther King and Bayard Rustin); and the rich tapestry of Bengali Muslim and Punjabi immigrants who settled in New York’s East Harlem and in Baltimore, New Orleans, and Detroit, and married and partnered with Black and Caribbean women since the early 1900s. 

Yet, they are rarely heard, recounted, or remembered. “It was the more prosperous sector of South Asians, the post-1965 professionals, who had the means to represent the community as a whole, so it was their image that came to dominate the image of South Asian-Americans,” says documentary filmmaker, historian, and MIT professor , who painstakingly traced the narratives of Bengali immigrants in Bengali Harlem and the lost histories of South Asian America. 

The lid has been held tight for too long. Breaking free from this mold will allow the Indian American community to not only reckon with their denial of caste but also allow more vulnerable members, Dalit, Adivasi, and otherwise, to get the attention, care, and justice they deserve. Caste has successfully escaped our attention for far too long, not in small part as a result of the concerted efforts by the Indian American “upper”-caste majority who have willfully erased, denied, and blurred its existence while continuing to benefit from the privileges their higher status provides them. It’s time to stop accepting wafer-thin excuses on why we should not pay greater attention to this damaging segregation and discrimination of people on the basis of their birth. And it’s time to start rethinking our models. 

Excerpted from by Yashica Dutt (Beacon Press, 2024). Reprinted with permission from Beacon Press.

Ranjana is a vegetable vendor who was deceived into a live-in relationship by her partner who told her in 2019 that he would marry her soon after his divorce was finalized. Five years later, Ranjana has a 2-year-old son, and marriage is nowhere in sight. The partner abandoned her just like he did to three other women he’d had children with—and initially kept Ranjana in the dark about the other relationships. She says he has separated from (but not divorced) one of the women whom he has legally married. 

“Someone told me about the Mahila Panchayat, and I came here with my plea that he come back to me, marry me, and help me financially maintain my child. I ��Dz�’t have anyone I can go back to so I registered my case here,” she says. 

“When the Mahila Panchayat talked to my husband and pressured him, he returned home after 13 days,” says Ranjana, who refers to her partner as her husband although they are not legally married. “He’s been home since and gives me spending money also.” Although her “husband” might never marry her, the fact that he has returned and provides for her and their child gives Ranjana some relief. 

Ranjana feels a deep sense of support from the women of the Mahila Panchayat. In contrast, her experience reporting her complaint at the local police station felt scary, and she says that she “hates” the institution. 

“When I was telling them about my husband, the lady constable slapped me and questioned the way I was talking about him,” the 27-year-old recalls tearfully.

Another woman named Reshma, a mother of three, also came to the Mahila Panchayat to discuss her case of acute domestic violence during her 10-year marriage. “He first hit me when my eldest daughter was only 6 days old and our marriage was a year in. [The reason for the violence was] because I’d put extra salt in the khichdi. The violence increased gradually over the last four years.” As she shows the scars on her body, she adds, “He creates such a fuss in giving me a basic allowance for me and my children.”

Reshma was convinced to seek help at the Mahila Panchayat by a friend who resolved her case of domestic violence in three hearings. “I was severely distressed when Radha saw the scars on my arms and asked me to come for the sunwai [hearing]. I consulted my family, who also encouraged me, and I decided to register my complaint here,” she says. Reshma shares that she did not consider going to the police because she doesn’t want to destroy her family by getting into a legal dispute. 

Radha, Reshma’s friend, has a much happier married life now. “My husband used to beat me after alcohol abuse and refrained from paying me an allowance, which is why I had to take up the work of house cleaning and earn [money] for my children.” She explains that after she complained to the women of Mahila Panchayat, they summoned her husband and talked to him. “He has now quit alcohol, stopped hitting me, and also gives me a monthly allowance. He has now enabled me to quit work too,” says Radha with a big smile. She continues to come to Panchayat meetings because here she gets to learn about other women and gains knowledge on her rights too. Additionally, the women of the council get updates on how her marriage is going.

Aside from Jahangirpuri, there are five other Mahila Panchayat councils run by , a nonprofit organization that works for women’s empowerment in India. Action India devised the model of a Mahila Panchayat in 1994 when the leadership of the NGO was struck by the vast issue of domestic violence in the neighborhoods of the capital’s slums. Per Action India, there are currently active women’s councils in Seemapuri, Sunder Nagri, Dharampura, Jahangirpuri, Welcome (Junta Mazdoor Colony), and Dakshinpuri areas. Of these, Sunder Nagri, Seemapuri, Dakshinpuri, and Jahangirpuri Mahila Panchayats are the oldest.

Action India’s co-chairperson, Gyanwati, has had an illustrious career spanning four decades working on women’s rights. She recalls the journey of the women’s councils: “We piloted with building groups of five women each from within the communities for the Mahila Panchayat because there was no space for women to go with their marital conflicts in the city.” She adds, “The so-called Panchayats were all led by men where women had no agency.”

Significantly, all the areas where Mahila Panchayats are active are inhabited by large migrant populations from Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, and other parts of the Hindi-speaking belt of the country. Most of the women are from different marginalized religious, caste, and class sects of society, states Gyanwati. As the Mahila Panchayats have progressed, they now have about 25 women in each hierarchy-free council, selected from within the local area based on their leadership abilities, articulation of domestic violence matters, and basic education for writing “First Information Reports” for police, and other documents.

Gyanwati explains that the Mahila Panchayat meetings are carried out meticulously, with careful record keeping of all cases that are registered with them. “Every Wednesday, we take about two cases per council and sometimes on other days of the week as well, as per the availability of the case victim and her husband. During the meeting, we listen to both parties and then make a fair decision agreed upon by both parties.” She points out that the process is a fair one, saying, “We ��Dz�’t necessarily side with women in all cases.”&�Բ�����;

Manorama Jha, a member of the Jahangirpuri Mahila Panchayat since 2014, moved to Delhi from Bihar’s Madhubani district in 2006 after she got married. She discovered the council through a friend who is also a member. Since joining the Panchayat, she has felt a sense of comfort in the company of women who discuss their personal matters without judgment or rebuke. “I have learned a great deal about women’s rights. Before, I didn’t know that household chores are also regarded as work in society. But now I know, and it makes me feel valued,” says Manorama.

She has also helped resolve several conflicts of women and regularly attends council meetings. “We attend legal workshops and other rights-based sessions that help us build our understanding of GBV and patriarchal nuances of society,” says Manorama, adding that she has also visited the police station and courts in cases that require a law-based approach. 

On whether her family supports her social justice activities, Manorama shakes her head with a smile, “I lie to them when I come for the meetings or when I have to go to the police station. I tell them about it when I come back. They fear that I’ll become too forward if I get to know more about my rights, but that hasn’t stopped me in the last decade.”

While Action India ushered in the wave of Mahila Panchayats in the mid-1990s, the (DCW), a government initiative, officially adopted the concept in 2002 in collaboration with several privately run NGOs. Currently, DCW is running 64 Mahila Panchayats across the city with 53 NGOs. DCW Member Firdos Khan explains that the commission has 400 Mahila Panchayat members who are in turn connected to 400,000 women from marginalized sections of the city. 

“We routinely conduct sessions with Delhi State Legal Services Authority to empower these women in their understanding of legal rights to address GBV. We also went a step beyond GBV cases to ensure their children get [school] admissions, older women get pensions [and have access to] awareness programs … [that help them get] their documents in place to be able to access benefits,” says Firdos. She adds that it’s not just about filing a case with the police and initiating a “mountain of litigation,” but also how to prevent injustices in the first place.

Recently, to equip the Mahila Panchayat coordinators with sensitivity skills to deal with women’s mental health issues, DCW organized a workshop in collaboration with Mariwala Health Initiative, a funding agency for innovative mental health initiatives. After one such workshop ended, Mahila Panchayat coordinators from different NGOs shared how deeply women’s mental health is intertwined with their dignity and social standing in society.

Parvati, who works with Sofia Educational and Welfare Society and is a Mahila Panchayat coordinator since 2013 in Mustafabad area, explains that a Mahila Panchayat resolves cases by first listening to women and trying to understand their needs. “Most cases happen [because] homebound women need money to run their houses and educate their children. When the husband loses the money in gambling and alcohol, it becomes a problem for the wife. In such cases, we counsel women and use social pressure on the husband to come to the right path,” says Parvati.

Several Mahila Panchayat members and coordinators agreed that there are times when men refuse to budge or might be agreeable in front of the council but later will deny all agreements. In such situations, the Mahila Panchayats keep track of the cases, sometimes for months on end, to ensure the woman has won a just resolution.

Another NGO called (CEQUIN) has run Mahila Panchayats since 2010 in the Jamia Nagar clusters in South Delhi and also in some areas of other states such as Rajasthan and Haryana. 

Jamia Nagar, a Muslim-dominated area, has a significantly large portion of women with low levels of basic literacy and education. Growing up in conservative environments, many have not ventured out of their homes, but after CEQUIN worked with them for decades to help them explore the outside world, they now know that in cases of violence, they have a Mahila Panchayat to fall back on. 

When Mumtaz, a resident of Jamia Nagar, completed eighth grade, her father stopped her education and married her off as soon as she turned 18. Mumtaz was familiar with domestic violence, having witnessed her father beat up her mother for the smallest of mistakes. So when her own husband began assaulting her, she endured it for a long time. 

“My father came to see me one day and was filled with guilt for my mother, whom he used to beat up. He kept asking for forgiveness from her until the day he died,” shares Mumtaz. She recalls that because she was relatively sheltered, she initially did not know whom to turn to for help. But then she remembered taking a makeup class at CEQUIN before she got married. “I reached out to them, and they directed me to the Mahila Panchayat,” she recounts. “My husband would beat me after getting drunk. We had a full house with his brothers and their wives, but none would rescue me,” she says.

After a few hearings with the Mahila Panchayat, Mumtaz’s husband not only stopped physically abusing her but moved the family into a new house and enrolled her in an international makeup course. Now Mumtaz works as a beautician in Jamia Nagar and has more than 10K Instagram followers.

CEQUIN co-founder Lora Prabhu defines Mahila Panchayats as “women’s collective leadership,” saying, “The most important thing for women in Mahila Panchayats, particularly in the urban context, is that social dynamics can range widely across different castes, religions, and communities, and yet they come together for the greater good.”

Naseem Khan, manager of implementation and monitoring at CEQUIN, has had a lot of experience working with Mahila Panchayats, first with Action India and now with CEQUIN. She states the importance of Mahila Panchayats as self-sustaining and independent. “We focus our training sessions on developing leadership among the girls and women in our women’s councils. Secondly, we prioritize community participation and contribution where women members open their own homes for the hearings on a rotation basis,” says Khan. She points out that in contrast to the Mahila Panchayats run by CEQUIN, other NGOs rent spaces and give coordinators an honorarium to run the program. This makes them dependent on the organizations.

The majority of the thousands of cases that Mahila Panchayats tackle each year are beyond the scope of the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) in Delhi. The NCRB 14,247 crimes against women in Delhi in 2022—the highest across all metropolitan cities in India—of which 4,901 cases center on abuse by husbands or relatives. Of these, only three cases were reported under the Protection of Women From Domestic Violence Act. 

Mahila Panchayats offer a good chance at fair resolutions of domestic violence, bigamy, alcohol abuse, dowry, and other gender-related crimes in India, and specifically in the nation’s capital. More importantly, such councils are helping women to speak up and reframe their ideas of justice.   

It was a wedding like no other. At a time when Indian families go into debt trying to arrange a good match, Sunil and Sulochana’s wedding was a simple yet radical one. It stood in stark contrast to the spectacle of the Ambani wedding.

The mandap (wedding altar) had a small fire burning in the middle with a photo collage, not of Hindu gods, as is the tradition, but of Indian revolutionaries including Savitri Bai, Fatima Sheikh, Mahatma Gandhi, Bhagat Singh, B.R. Ambedkar, and a copy of the Indian Constitution. In between Sunil and Sulochana stood a female priest, Kamayani, who presided over the ceremony. 

The couple walked around the fire seven times as is customary in a traditional Hindu wedding but they reformed it by reading their own vows to each other as opposed to the standard regressive verses that promote rigid gender roles for brides and grooms in modern India. Their vows stood on the fundamentals of gender equality, togetherness, respect and dignity. It was considered a revolutionary ceremony in the Indian context where weddings are usually performed in extremely patriarchal, casteist, and classist ways.

“We were confident that we wanted to break away from the casteist structure of how a Hindu marriage is performed and do it in a way that reflects our ideology and the respect we have towards our great reformist leaders,” says Sulochana. “Traditional weddings in our villages have archaic gendered rituals, so we didn’t want that. �±�’v�� educated ourselves and we work with children in villages to teach them about the struggles our revolutionaries have faced to bring about changes in our society,” she adds. Those struggles, explains Sulochana, “have helped us to rise from the perils of the caste system, educate ourselves and live in a free country. So when we started to discuss our wedding, we kept that in our minds.”

Aside from their nonconformist wedding, Sunil and Sulochana are bucking trends even as a couple. They are in an intercaste relationship and fell in love when they were only 15. Having met at the Youth Center of the Jan Jagran Shakti Sangathan in Araria town in Bihar, their love soared as the caste barrier faded between them. Sunil belongs to the Scheduled Caste (SC), and Sulochana is from the Other Backward Class (OBC) community, which considers itself as higher .

Marriages are highly politicized in a country where parents dictate whom their child will marry depending on their caste, class, and religion. Resisting this culture often leads to grave results, such as . The limited show that nearly 5,000 women and girls lose their lives each year in honor killings worldwide, and almost one-third of them are from India and Pakistan. Yet, increasingly, young people across India are resisting this conservative system and are guided by love and affection rather than caste.  

Sunil and Sulochana have faced several such barriers. But, while their caste difference is a major issue, there are other differences compounding why some people in their communities reject their union: Sulochana is older than Sunil, albeit by only a few months. She is also slightly heavier than Sunil. Despite public pressure, both stood firmly by each other and proceeded to get married. 

“People tried to dissuade my parents from [allowing us to get] married, but I was resolute about getting married to Sulochana. When my parents got convinced, I went around the whole village to invite everyone to our wedding,” Sunil recounts.

Although Sunil’s parents agreed to the marriage, Sulochana’s haven’t spoken to her since. “No one in my family talks to me except my sister, who [attended] the wedding. It’s been two years since we tried convincing them, but they refused flatly. They got my younger sister married without telling me while she was studying in 10th standard [grade],” says Sulochana. She recounts feeling terribly hurt and helpless. “Everyone abused me for my relationship with Sunil, and the journey to my wedding was very challenging. But Sunil stood by me, and �ٳ󲹳�’s when we decided to get married,” she relates, with tears in her eyes. 

While the two may still be struggling with restoring their family relationships, their union and the ideological approach of their wedding is an example of a new ethos around marriage among young Indians.

Mamta Meghwanshi and Krishna Kumar Verma had a similarly nontraditional wedding in Sidiyas village near Bhilwara district in the northwestern state of Rajasthan. Meghwanshi is the daughter of Bhanwar Meghwanshi, a Dalit activist and author who wrote the memoir I Could Not Be Hindu. His daughter celebrated sahjeevan (cohabitation) with her partner Verma in a Buddhist ceremony in mid-March 2024. 

“We met about three years ago at a legal training workshop in Kumbhalgarh, Rajasthan,” she says. “I’d never known what it was to love because I’d always been engrossed in studies, so it was very different for me. We kept in touch after the workshop, and three years later we decided to get married.” Explaining that she and her partner are both believers in the philosophy of , considered to be the most important Dalit revolutionary in India, they decided they did not want to “perpetuate casteist rituals in our ceremony.”&�Բ�����;

Unlike the , which made headlines for its unimaginably large cost and was centered on the traditional patriarchal Hindu ceremony, Meghwanshi maintains, “We didn’t want to do pheras [circling the wedding fire when traditional vows are made] or have a [a recognizable necklace required to be worn  by married women in India].” Instead, she explains, “We wanted to register our marriage legally and do a small Buddhist ceremony that advocates for equality for life between us.”

Meghwanshi’s father, Bhanwar, played a huge role in their ceremony and didn’t allow any criticism to be aimed at her. “He stood like a pillar of support. I’m older than Krishna by three years, and that is a matter of great concern to a lot of people, as our family is quite large,” says Meghwanshi. “However, my father was not fazed by it and didn’t let it affect me.”&�Բ�����;

Meghwanshi grew up in a very progressive family where inequalities of gender and caste have always been critiqued. So during their cohabitation ceremony, both Meghwanshi and Verma ensured that it was egalitarian. They had a ring ceremony after which they chanted a mantra centered on a vow to show kindness toward all living beings. 

They also came up with a specific set of promises toward one another to replace age-old rituals such as the pheras.

Traditionally, Rajasthani marriages are deeply regressive for women, who are required to wear long veils after their weddings and to live under multiple restrictions from all of their family members, including their husbands. Meghwanshi’s father, Bhanwar, wanted to break away from this system for his daughter altogether. 

“When we were thinking about how we would like to perform the ceremony, I approached a Buddhist monk to perform the wedding, and he shared a letter that Babasaheb Ambedkar had written on the similar dilemma,” says the older Meghwanshi. In the letter, Ambedkar talked about his own wedding with his wife, Savita Ambedkar. “The monk asked me if we can draw inspiration from it,” said Bhanwar. He adds, “I readily agreed because both our family and Krishna’s family believe in the Ambedkarite movement deeply. It not only challenges the traditional Hindu wedding customs and the regressive Buddhist customs but also is more constitutional and dignified for all,”

The ceremony brought people from diverse religions and cultures together in the village in a way that had never been seen before. No gaudy jewelry or wads of cash were on display as is customary in Indian weddings. Instead, people blessed the couple with potted plants and books. Kamayani, who had officiated Sulochana and Sunil’s wedding, also anchored this ceremony and supported the couple through it. 

As an advisor to the Jan Jagran Shakti Sangathan, Kamayani ran the youth center that Sunil and Sulochana had attended in the obscure town of Araria. There she started conversations around gender equality, sexuality, freedom, and independence from regressive societal structures with young people who had a traditional upbringing. Years of efforts by her and a few others have encouraged young people to gain agency and the courage to voice their own opinions and choose their own partners so they can break free from the shackles of caste, class, and religion. Her pioneering efforts have helped young people to develop an understanding of choice.

“If we see rituals as a stand-alone phenomenon, then we can say that [they] ��Dz�’t impact anything but the day of the wedding,” says Kamayani. But, she explains, “Rituals communicate what the society’s and a religious group’s belief system is, so if we talk about kanyadaan [giving away one’s daughter in the Hindu custom], it fundamentally means that the woman is [the] property of a man and … the property rights are being transferred from the father to the groom.” Forgoing such a ritual, then, becomes a political statement on women’s equality. 

In many ways, the high-profile Ambani wedding has perpetuated the casteist and gendered rituals of Hindu marriage traditions. Before the kanyadaan ceremony during Anant Ambani’s wedding, his mother, Neeta, took to the stage and sugarcoated it as a “noble act” wherein one family welcomes a daughter while the other welcomes a son.

For Kamayani, caste and gender hierarchies are unimportant in the context of bringing two people together. The idea is not to completely abandon the rituals that may be specific to a culture or geography but to eliminate the patriarchal, casteist, or misogynistic aspects of marriage to be in line with equality and mutual respect.

“We ��Dz�’t want to create a monolithic idea of a marriage,” adds Kamayani. Rather, she hopes to “enhance the multiplicity of cultures.”

For Sunil’s father, Deepnaranyan, those who believe in Brahmanic weddings may criticize him for having his children choose how to marry, but he says he stands with his children. He reasons that Hindu marriages are designed to put heavy financial pressure on families and to appease Brahmins, the highest caste. “We will not do it anymore. We can pray to our gods ourselves, and no Brahmin can tell us that our wedding is flawed just because we are not pandering to them,” he adds.

Mithun and Krischam, a couple who also hails from Araria, had a simple intercaste wedding in a temple where they exchanged only garlands and had the temple priest officiate their wedding. Mithun notes that people are superstitious and disregard different ways to perform a wedding. Even if they do not understand the rituals, they adhere to them because they are familiar and ��Dz�’t want to break tradition. In his opinion, they should not criticize those who think differently and should try to co-exist with one another. 

“Education makes one aware of the meaning of various rituals and their casteist and gendered meaning,” he says. “One would be able to respect their partner and account for their equality in society,” shares Mithun, who is currently working and supporting his partner. In an example of how the couple are living their values of equality, Krischam supported Mithun when he was studying before he got a government job.

With roots in India, caste is a systematic structure of oppression and social hierarchy transplanted to the United States. Anti-caste organizers like myself have been working to end caste oppression around the world for decades. We endeavor to heal ourselves and our families through international solidarity with other oppressed people, as we work to dismantle caste apartheid collectively.

negatively affects more than 260 million people worldwide, crippling their quality of life. This exclusionary system ranks people into that are based on spiritual purity and their deeds in past lives. For anyone born into a culture where caste is rampant,��it determines who and where they worship, choices and advancement in education and career, even personal��relationships—in essence their entire lives.

Brahmins, who created this system in Hindu scripture, are at the top of the caste system and have benefited from centuries of privilege, access, and power because of it. , who sit at the bottom of this hierarchy, are branded “untouchable” and sentenced to a violent system of caste apartheid with separate neighborhoods, places of worship, and schools. While caste-based discrimination in the United States is not as widespread and overt as it is in India, it exists here too.

This is why the Cisco case is so significant. 

The , “John Doe,” at the heart of the case was expected to accept a caste hierarchy within the workplace where he held the lowest status within the team and, as a result, received less pay, fewer opportunities, and other inferior terms and conditions of employment because of his caste. Doe endured insults, demotions, and isolation.

In addition, the Cisco HR department was not willing to admit they lacked the competency in caste to address their casteist hostile workplace. The California department of fair employment and housing did not have to be experts in caste to see Doe’s civil rights were being violated.��

Our communities are fighting for caste to be added as a protected category in discrimination all across the United States.

The Cisco case is the tip of the iceberg of how deep caste discrimination is rooted in South Asian American institutions. While we are not in the same violent conditions of caste, as in our homelands where dominant castes control all the institutions of power, we recognize a troubling reorganizing of caste in every aspect of American life. Affecting such diverse issues as immigration, labor, housing, domestic violence, education, personal relationships, and national politics. Our communities are fighting for caste to be added as a protected category in discrimination all across the United States.

With U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris as the presumptive vice presidential nominee, there is opportunity to raise this issue on a much higher platform. and represents the state where this case was filed. Given how powerfully she asked Biden to be accountable to his past on busing, Dalits in the U.S. are also asking Harris to make a statement about caste, admit her own caste privilege, and to make way for the many caste oppressed people who need legal redress now.��

new book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, affirms the significance of caste as a foundation for understanding inequity and helps create a foundation for Americans to better understand race through the older system of caste. As Wilkerson explains, “Caste focuses in on the infrastructure of our divisions and the rankings, whereas race is the metric �ٳ󲹳�’s used to determine one’s place in that.”&�Բ�����;

Race and caste are not the same system, but they are parallel oppressions that have the same logic. The resulting structural violence has led to millions of Black people and Dalits to organize for their freedom. The uprisings this summer have laid bare the racial inequity and injustice in the United States while also inspiring Dalit Americans to stand up in unprecedented numbers to defend Black lives while also courageously speaking out all across the country to challenge caste in both our homelands and the diaspora.

Race and caste are not the same system, but they are parallel oppressions that have the same logic.

Many Americans ��Dz�’t know the scope and the scale of the problem, so our team decided to dig into our stories through community based research. 

After key mentorship from scholars such as political activist and Harvard professor Cornel West, my colleague Maari Zwick-Maitreyi and I helmed the first U.S. survey on caste discrimination in 2018 for our organization Equality Labs, a Dalit civil rights organization that works on empowering Dalits and caste-oppressed individuals on the issues of caste, gender, and religious intolerance. The survey results, compiled into the report , confirm what many caste-oppressed Americans have known and experienced for years: Casteism exists here, too.

Our 2018 survey, which resulted in responses from 1500 participants across the U.S., found that 1 in 4 Dalits have faced physical and verbal assault right here in the U.S. This includes casteist slurs, fist fights, and even knife and gun violence. 

Priya, one of our Dalit leaders, recently shared, “I hate how I feel when I am around dominant caste people. I am waiting for the attack. I ��Dz�’t know when it will come, but most dominant caste folks are ignorant and use caste slurs casually. They ��Dz�’t know any better, but that doesn’t mean I have to be around it. My family has survived caste atrocity back at home, and I will be damned if I have to deal with it again here. I need to protect myself because each time I hear their words about my people, I die a little. And I can’t live like that anymore.”

We also found that 2 of 3 Dalits have experienced workplace discrimination in both white-collar and blue-collar work environments. Whether on an assembly line or in a corporate C-suite, caste-hostile workplaces flourish in companies lacking competency in caste. One worker in California shared, “The managers and other workers found out I was Dalit and they used to call me by a slur. They would trip me up in my tasks and report me to my manager—who was also a dominant caste. I considered reporting it to HR but what would they do; they can barely find India on the map, do you think they would understand caste?”

Dalit Americans are united in the desire to do more than tell our stories.��

Our experience has been that dominant caste people openly boast about their caste privilege and supposed biological superiority, which makes Dalits hide our identities and stay silent in the workplace. Casteist supervisors also create climates of fear where if discovered, we face demotions, harassment, and even termination or the loss of our employment-based H-1B visas. This issue continues to be a problem because for weeks after the Cisco lawsuit was announced our team received complaints from more than from Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, Netflix, and dozens of tech companies to report discrimination, bullying, ostracizing, and even sexual harassment by colleagues who are dominant caste Indians. This includes 33 complaints from Dalit employees at Facebook, 20 complaints at Google, 18 at Microsoft, 24 more at Cisco, and 14 at Amazon. Complaints were also recorded from employees at Twitter, Dell, Netflix, Apple, Uber, and Lyft—as well as dozens more from a range of smaller tech companies.

Our survey also found that 1 of 3 Dalits faced discrimination in educational institutions. Caste-oppressed students who have accepted opportunities offered by India’s affirmative action programs (meant to redress centuries of historical wrongs committed against caste-oppressed and Indigenous South Asians) face a special stigma. On American campuses, caste is used to shame, disregard, and exclude students from campus life and prevent their professional advancement. Many hide their identity because they do not want their competency to be questioned—especially within alumni networks dominated by the privileged castes.

Suresh, another Dalit leader, shared, “I went to school in the U.S. There was a Brahmin student who was sharing with people how pure he was and that he was glad to have left India where he could escape Dalit scum. I fought back. I told him by every measure I was a better student and that he should stop being a caste monster. The fight isolated me from other Indian students, which was fine. I just knew that I had to speak up no matter the cost. Because if I stayed silent, the other students would have thought it was OK to bring that bias here.”

Discrimination also prevails in community circles. Dalit families are often shunned by those of the dominant caste and so build relationships outside the South Asian American community or with other caste-oppressed families. We face a double injury: the pain of leaving our homeland and the isolation within the broader Indian American community. A Dalit mother in California explained that “When other mothers see my child, they remark on how light she is despite coming from my community. I despise how they spoke to me and my daughter. I left India to escape this, I do not want my daughter to face their slights and their bigotry. Let the pain end with me. If this means I do not meet with other Indians, so be it.”

This mother’s remarks also open up the issue of colorism as grounded in caste. Many of the slurs and comments about caste-oppressed people reify stereotypes that caste-oppressed people are darker and less attractive. Even though there is diversity in skin tones throughout South Asia, the persistence of this harmful myth and the privileging of light skin have left many Dalits struggling with their self-esteem. Combating colorism, Dalits offer powerful messages of acceptance and community love. 

Casteist practices invade romantic relationships. No matter how vehemently people might deny harboring bias, caste is one of the first criteria mentioned when looking for a partner. Caste and love are deeply connected through the process of endogamy, or marriage within a tribe or caste. In this way, caste controls the reproductive function of all genders, and South Asians who cross caste lines for love suffer grievous consequences.

Dalits and other caste-oppressed people often report being rejected by their partners because their families refuse to accept them or even before a possibility of romance can be entertained. One survey respondent shared, “I was disowned by my family because I fell in love with a man from a different caste. My in-laws also disowned us.”&�Բ�����;

Caste pervades our religious institutions, with more than 40% of Dalits reporting they felt unwelcome in a place of worship. Casteism in our places of worship is the first core wound for many caste-oppressed people, because caste originated in Hindu scripture. As a result, many dominant caste people link Dalits to spiritual defilement as a way to justify discrimination. Caste is now found in all South Asian faiths and in the U.S., there are strong Dalit Buddhist, Ravidassia, Christian, Sikh, and Muslim caste-oppressed people of faith who want to worship with others in peace. Yet our survey found that Dalits were barred entry to dominant caste-led Hindu temples, churches, and gurdwaras. They even faced physical violence. One Dalit shared this painful incident: “We are a group of Chamar (Dalit) friends, and when some of us Chamars tried to get leadership in our gurdwaras, we were jumped in the parking lot by a Jatt (dominant caste) gang with knives.” 

Dalit Americans are united in the desire to do more than tell our stories. 

Caste is not just the story of the consequences we bear as caste-oppressed people; it is also about the networks of dominant caste people who benefit from our exploitation and discrimination. We are resolved to hold those of the dominant caste accountable and to dismantle caste structures in the United States as well as around the world. 

A vibrant movement of anti-caste activists, advocates, and organizers are working toward the annihilation of caste in the diaspora and in our homelands. We need to break the silence around this insidious system of oppression and work toward structural solutions that address this problem at the root. We also need South Asian American politicians to speak more openly to caste as the time for them to ignore this rampant problem is over. 

Anti-caste activists have rallied around the Cisco case to advocate for the inclusion of caste as a protected class, alongside race and gender. Employers nationwide should be required to develop policies identifying and redressing caste discrimination whenever and wherever it occurs. Human resources and managers must be trained in caste competency so they can better understand the needs of caste-oppressed workers and stop caste discrimination. At present, American institutions are failing their caste-oppressed workers and consumers. 

Justice has been denied to our community for far too long. 

We ask that all people of conscience break the silence that surrounds this harmful system and learn more about caste apartheid. For those who are in leadership in progressive spaces, reach out to Equality Labs to help build your caste competency and better support your caste-oppressed employees and members. For folks in tech, please take the Caste in Tech survey .

Finally, we ask everyone to sign the and stand with caste-oppressed Americans today. Each of these steps supports the national movement to have caste designated as a protected category in our civil and human rights laws. 

Together, we can abolish caste in our lifetime.

I thought about these decisions in the context of the court’s , including granting exemptions to the law for religious organizations. I considered just how short-term our wins could end up being under the court’s new conservative majority.

I think unions could be key in transforming the labor movement by strategically organizing LGBTQ workers into their ranks.

It all brought up an important truth for me: the “law of the land” is ever changing—and the odds of getting justice are always stacked against those of us who cannot easily access legal advocacy. So, we organize.

History has shown that we have to demonstrate the power of the people to make our rights real on the ground. As a labor and community organizer, I get to be a part of that work. Still, as a Black nonbinary, lesbian, and immigrant worker, I’ve longed to find a piece of the labor movement that centers all my parts. I think unions could be key in transforming the labor movement by strategically organizing LGBTQ workers into their ranks.

There are , most of whom live in places without local laws that prohibit gender or sexual orientation discrimination in housing, education, or public accommodations. This is the landscape in which LGBTQ workers is fighting workplace discrimination, the crisis of violence against trans people, and .

A 2018 report from the found that 25% of LGB and 27% of transgender people report experiencing discrimination at work. The report also showed that Black, Latinx, Asian, and other people of color are more likely than White people to identify as LGBT—and make up a third of the LGBT population in the U.S.

And for 1 million undocumented LGBTQ workers in this country, hostile immigration policies make it almost certain that they, in particular, will face increased risks of discrimination and exploitation at work.

Unions could make a difference here.

I know unions aren’t perfect. In fact, a White union worker, , had Rosa Parks, a Black woman, arrested in 1955 for refusing to give up her bus seat to a White passenger in Montgomery, Alabama. Blake eventually retired 19 years later; some would call this a privilege of being a union worker. I would add: it’s a privilege of being a working, White, cisgender, heterosexual male in the U.S.

My point is that unions represent all workers, and for better or worse, this means unions represent workers on the right and wrong sides of history. For instance, U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents have been . The National Border Patrol Council, a union and affiliate of the American Federation of Government Employees, and to describe migrants and asylum-seekers. This union, like the segregated transportation unions of the past, put the labor movement at odds with the common good.

This is why it is more important than ever that unions rethink in which workplaces and with which populations they choose to build power. It’s time to meet the challenge of openly bringing more marginalized workers into their memberships and leadership. 

There are also lessons to be learned for the mainstream gay and lesbian advocacy contingent of the LGBTQ movement, which has power-fueled two strategies: winning policy changes and shifting popular opinion. These strategies previously culminated in SCOTUS striking down part of the Defense of Marriage Act in 2013, and then affirming a constitutional right to same-sex marriage in 2015. Both of these rulings were touted as victories for all LGBTQ people.

The reality is that the end of DOMA, and even the embrace of marriage equality, fell short—really short—of what Black, Brown and immigrant LGBTQ (emphasis on the T) people need to live full lives. What these rulings did was affirm mostly White, mostly gay, and mostly middle-class people’s access to one of American society’s notable upward mobility tools: marriage. What it didn’t do was fix the economic crises that transgender and LGB people of color find ourselves in, while earning disproportionately less than our straight, cis, and White counterparts. 

Imagine if we could measure our movement’s strength by the harms we can prevent altogether.

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So, unions still matter. That’s why I am desperate to create a large and powerful entry point for LGBTQ immigrants and people of color into the labor movement. That desire led me and my good friend, Joan Jones, to co-found the National LGBTQ Workers Center in 2018. Our goal is to work against workplace discrimination and fight for economic justice for LGBTQ people, including support in forming a union.

At the National LGBTQ Workers Center, we’re not a union, but we come from the union movement. Jones and I both know what it’s like to have a contract that mitigates discrimination in pay and promotions—or a shop steward who has your back—and the democratic power of a worker-funded political action committee. �±�’v�� both been laid off with a clear severance policy that allowed us to support our families for a few months—something that many workers can only dream of in today’s pandemic economy. It’s what all workers deserve.

LGBTQ workers could be the poster children for the power of a union contract. We are often denied raises and promotions, and discriminated against or harassed because of our gender identity or our sexual orientation. But imagine if we could measure our movement’s strength by the harms we can prevent altogether.

Of course this idea is racing against shrinking union density �ٳ󲹳�’s gone to . The constant anti-union lawsuits certainly ��Dz�’t help. But what if the version of the labor movement that brought union membership to its peak in the early 20^th century is outdated for today’s American workforce? There may not be an LGBTQ union, but there are LGBTQ people in many unions. These 8.1 million workers could make up a big chunk of—or even add to—the 14.6 million workers represented by a union today.

It’s about time that unions paid more attention to these often-overlooked workers. Bringing hundreds of thousands of LGBTQ workers into unions would move the labor movement further in the direction of racial and gender justice—period.

It is worth saying that changes in the courts and in the law do matter too. I, for one, was overcome with joy when I heard about the Bostock decision on the morning of June 15, which also happened to be my wife’s birthday.

But I couldn’t ignore the questions of how this would be enforced in Georgia, where I live, or wondering what would happen if SCOTUS invalidates this decision the way that it invalidated parts of the 1965 Voting Rights Act in 2013. That ruling came down under the nation’s first Black president, no less. The results of that 2013 decision have been hard felt, especially in places like Georgia, where the stakes have risen significantly over the past few weeks, as the nation turns its eyes to our state and braces for two hotly contested runoff elections that could determine which party controls the U.S. Senate.

What does stand the test of time is workers coming together to set standards and determine what is fair and just, not for one, but for the whole. And, yes, this can happen even without a union. It did in 1881, when formerly enslaved African-American washerwomen in Atlanta went on strike to demand better conditions and higher pay for their back-breaking labor. They organized and they won, and most domestic workers continue to do so today, without a union.

Many ideas move the labor movement, and I believe the time has come for unions to lean on the potential that LGBTQ workers represent as a base. How? Prioritize LGBTQ workers in their advocacy to the incoming administrations. Support organizations such as the National LGBTQ Workers Center and others. This year, we launched an LGBTQ anti-discrimination hotline in Chicago that provides workers with culturally competent peer-support as they navigate incidents or patterns of discrimination. Unions can start by looking to us for solutions now, just as we look to them for much needed reinforcement.

In The Future We Need: Organizing for a Better Democracy in the Twenty-First Century, Erica Smiley and Sarita Gupta suggest ways to evolve collective bargaining, not just for the workplace, but for social justice for communities and beyond. In this excerpt, Rubynell Walker-Barbee, a Black woman impacted when unemployment benefits were suddenly denied to school workers in Georgia, shares her story. She and her fellow service workers had to cope with a real-life economic nightmare. But they persisted and not only organized a union, but rolled back unfair legislation.

It was like a tornado had hit us. Here we all were, ready to end the school session thinking that, if nothing else, we were going to get unemployment while we waited to be rehired in the next semester. It was never all that much, just enough to help some of the women keep their lights on until they were called back. But come to find out, Mark Butler, the head of the Georgia Department of Labor at the time, decided we weren’t going to get unemployment benefits anymore. We had no choice but to do something. And we had to do it together.

I grew up in Kalamazoo, Michigan, with 10 sisters and five brothers. I was smack in the middle. My parents migrated there from Mississippi, a town called Okolona near Tupelo. We were a close family. My mom stayed at home, and my dad worked at restaurants and swept houses. He did the best he could. He was sick a lot because he had been shot before. He’d come up hard. His mother died when they were all babies, and there were 11 of them. His sister, who was 13 at the time, took on raising them. I ��Dz�’t know how she did it. And I really ��Dz�’t know how my parents did it either, raising all of us. I would never have known it if we were struggling though. We always had nice clothes. We always had food. My mother would always say, “God will provide.” And �ٳ󲹳�’s the way we lived.

I started working when I was 12. I had a full-time babysitting job watching my younger cousins. I would leave school by four o’clock and keep the kids until midnight, three little girls. To this day, I ��Dz�’t know how well it paid because back then the money went to my parents. My cousin’s parents didn’t pay me directly. All income was shared. It went to my parents. It wasn’t my money. By the time I was 16, I had a job as a receptionist at city hall. And from there I went on to become a payroll clerk for the school system. I did that from 9th to 12th grade when I finished school. That’s just how it was. We all worked, come to think of it. And we all contributed. Maybe �ٳ󲹳�’s how we survived. We took care of each other. Anyway, after I finished school, I wanted to travel and see what the world had to offer. I’ve lived in Nevada, California, Indiana, all over. I’ve always felt that before I let a city bury me, I’d rather move on to somewhere else. I eventually moved back to Michigan to take care of my mother when she had heart failure. I was there for nearly 13 years caring for her. She passed away in 2005. And by February 2006, I’d moved here to Atlanta.

I had a sister in Atlanta, so I thought I’d try it out next. A friend of mine was in the military, and I took on watching her sons who were 11 and maybe 13. There were actually supposed to be three of them, but one of the boys was killed just before I got there. I guess you could say they were troubled kids. They probably just needed a little counseling or something. When I was with them, it was one of the first times I started thinking about the phrase “no child left behind” because they had so clearly been left behind. When they got in trouble at school, they were disciplined and eventually sent to an alternative school. No one thought to work with them or help them. I was always getting called into the school because one of them was being punished. I would talk to the principal, but I couldn’t get any help. And I didn’t want to stress their mother out because she was off in Iraq with the military. The youngest boy, he’s in prison now. And like I said, he’s been left behind.

I guess I’ve seen a lot of children left behind if I really think on it. I had a nephew that was shot. He was 22. And another nephew was diabetic. He couldn’t get the help he needed and kind of let himself go. He was also young. I had one nephew who was a notorious homebody. Once, he was at home waiting on his mother to finish cooking Sunday dinner. They say some of his friends came and got him because someone was fighting, but it was he who lost his life that day. So many Black boys gone too soon. So many children left behind.

I just ��Dz�’t think our system is set up correctly. People are going through all kinds of things. Some people are able to get out of it. Some people aren’t. Growing up, I knew we were poor and that I had to work to get what we needed. But I had people in my life who were able to help me get to those goals. Some people need a little bit more attention. Some tragedies keep a person wrapped up in the trauma. That guy begging under the bridge, you ��Dz�’t know what he’s been through. Some people need help to get out. It takes a village. And our system isn’t always designed to help them survive the trauma they’ve had.

Still, as always, I keep it moving. I started working in food service at Morehouse College after I retired. I like working, and I like to keep busy. I became a manager at the Chick-fil-A on campus. I enjoyed the work. I was close to a lot of the students who came through, my grandson being one of them. He graduated with a 3.8 grade point average and recently got married. I’m so proud of my grandchildren.

However, that is not all I saw while working there. I worked hard. But when it came time to reward me with a raise, they offered me two cents. 

What in the world did they think I was going to do with just two more pennies? They brought me into the office, sat me down, and told me, “You’ve been here for three years. You’ve been doing a great job. We really appreciate you. We’re going to give you a raise of $0.02.” That’s no reward.

Then I started asking around and realized that some people I worked with weren’t even making the minimum wage. They were working the grill in these hot conditions, and they weren’t getting paid fairly. And when you got things straight with one general manager, you got a new one. The company was always changing general managers. I think I had three general managers over the course of a year at one point. I started getting more involved with my co-workers after that.

Now, remember, I come from Michigan. There was always a union you could join. I’ve been a member of several unions over the course of my working life. So, despite the different rules in Georgia, I started organizing. We organized with the SEIU and won a collective bargaining agreement with our employer that laid out policies in a clear fashion, including how and when to apply wage increases. We all had copies of the contract and kept the little booklets in our pockets in case the next general manager was confused. Our workplace now had rules, and together we could enforce them.

It didn’t solve everything, though. For example, unemployment was a part of the job. At the end of the school year, our managers would give us our layoff note and our unemployment number at the same time. It’s not like we had the option of getting paid over 12 months instead of nine like some teachers do. And to be frank, unemployment doesn’t exactly pay. It just keeps you from going under. But this came with the job. It was the business model—hang out for a couple months with no pay, then come back. That’s what we were told to expect. That’s why we were so shocked when it was taken away. It broke my heart to hear some of the stories. I was lucky. I had retirement and savings, and I was not responsible for feeding anyone but me. But some of the women there were caring for children all by themselves. It was a disaster, almost like a tornado had hit. People were losing their homes, their vehicles, their ability to put food on the table and pay for their prescriptions. We paid unemployment insurance, but we can’t access the benefits? Yet again the system showed its cracks and tried to leave us behind.

And it wasn’t just us at Morehouse. Food service workers throughout the state were struggling—union and nonunion. We knew the only way to fix it was to come together. We started to meet around the city and in the West End. Churches would take offerings for the women struggling the most, and we would have dinner at the meetings so everyone could eat. We started to organize ourselves to confront legislators and different agency representatives at the state level. We held a rally outside our worksites. We even went directly to Mark Butler’s house and saw how he and his family were enjoying their time comfortably while our families suffered. I guess we hit someone’s nerve because the governor overturned Butler’s decision. School workers got $8 million back in unemployment benefits. It felt like we’d gotten backpay after our wages had been stolen. It was a huge victory!

But again, it did not fix the whole problem. The trauma you experience doesn’t simply end after the trauma is over. It takes a lot more than that to keep all of us from being left behind. When a tornado hits, you might lose your home, your pictures, all of the things that have made you who you are. And now �ٳ󲹳�’s gone. For many women, after the tornado of losing unemployment, that was all gone. They’re still traumatized. They still need help.

And the business model is still the same. Annual unemployment comes with your annual layoff notice. That’s why our union is so important. We need these jobs to be good, family-sustaining jobs. None of us can do this by ourselves. We might get on each other’s nerves sometimes, just like any family might, but we have to stick together. Only together can we hold our employers accountable to the rules and policies to which we all agreed. It’s so few wealthy employers, and so many of us who work. They’re not just going to volunteer to pay us more money out of the goodness of their heart. We have to make them do it. If the manager calls one of us in, we can ask someone to go with us to ensure everything is done by the booklet. We can negotiate more hours before they hire people on a temporary basis. And if our unemployment is taken away, you better believe we’ll be ready to fight for it.

This excerpt from by Erica Smiley and Sarita Gupta, Cornell University Press (2022), appears with permission of authors and publisher.

In an Nick Tilsen, of NDN Collective said, “Everyone says, ‘I can’t wait until things get back to normal.’ There’s a part of me �ٳ󲹳�’s like, ‘Normal never did us justice.’ The normal meant injustices for Indigenous people. The normal meant underinvestment of our people. The normal meant fossil fuel industry exploiting our lands and our communities. This is a point in time for me where (I) ��Dz�’t want to go back to supporting the same old economic systems and the same old energy systems. There’s opportunity here to architect and build a new world.”

We must get used to and comfortable with people being in dedicated, committed, and prolonged uprising. 

Arundhati Roy in the Financial Times said, “Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to “normality,” trying to stitch our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the rupture. But the rupture exists. And in the midst of this terrible despair, it offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return to normality. Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.”

Well, I ��Dz�’t think anyone expected the new normal to be here so quickly, but here it is. 

Across the country and the world, people are engaged in civil disobedience, uprising, and rebellion. And we are not just showing up for one issue such as just ending police brutality, or just for George Floyd, although his killing was a catalyst. People are coming out and showing up to dismantle and tear out white supremacy from its root and demand justice for the many who have been slaughtered at the hands of police violence.

In my humble opinion, if these are our goals, we must get used to and comfortable with people being in dedicated, committed, and prolonged uprising. In fact, I believe �ٳ󲹳�’s what this “new normal” is, and I hope that these protests go well into November and beyond until we see accountability and real, tangible actions taken by cities, states, and the country to abolish racism and white supremacy. 

I see communities begin to imagine what our world looks like without police.

Prolonged uprising is not the only thing that is a part of this new normal. Here’s what I am also seeing: 

Communities continue to practice deep care for one another. We are making and distributing masks and safety equipment for each other. I see organizers and doctors talking to each other in ways that I’ve never seen before, to keep people healthy and safe from COVID-19. 

I see folks building healing justice mutual aids so people on the front lines can sustain themselves emotionally and spiritually. I see mutual aids getting stronger and more connected for both COVID-19 response work and for those protesting and organizing to #DefendBlackLives. 

I see editors from high profile media outlets offer coaching sessions on pitching articles so that more Black voices can be heard in the news cycle. I see the media industry build lists of Black photographers so they can tell their own stories about this moment, challenging extractive storytelling.

I see White folks show up in ways that I haven’t seen them show up before, ready to confront their internalized anti-blackness and eager to learn about and question white supremacy. 

I see more in the past two weeks than in previous years combined. I see policies, accountability, and institutional change with swiftness: have ended contracts with the police. The Minneapolis city council  intends to and replace the department with a transformative model for public safety. In San Francisco, to prevent the hiring of police officers with a history of misconduct. In Tulsa, Oklahoma, the Mayor has decided not to renew a live police department contract.

On a national level, to cut off access to military weapons for local law enforcement. I see momentum building to re-open cases for those who, like George Floyd, have been slain by police brutality and racism.

I see communities begin to imagine what our world looks like without police and individuals asking themselves, “What can I do instead of calling the police? How can I build trust and safety with the people around me, my neighbors, community, and so on?” 

This is the new normal.

I see Twitter finally did something about 45’s violent and dangerous tweets, (although more needs to be done, such as deleting his account.) 

I see Indigenous people and people of color being thoughtful and sensitive in messaging and narrative building so as to not erase the messages and strategies of the Black community. I see POC being cognizant of not centering their own struggles right now and respecting and honoring the leadership and vision of Black Lives Matter and the Movement for Black Lives, which is crucial for building lasting and trustworthy multiracial solidarity.

This is the new normal. Let’s keep it up.

I see civilians getting smarter and safer about digital technology and surveillance, using this technology in ways that keep our people safe, such as by blurring the faces of protesters and using secure apps for organizing.

Even during uprisings and a pandemic, I see people getting out to vote, the outcome being making it into the running for both Congress and state legislatures.

I see the distribution of wealth even during an economic recession.

I see Confederate statues being pulled down by civilians to wash their communities clean of glorifying racist historical figures that celebrate a system that has failed and oppressed so many.

Last but certainly not least, I see my people, my peers, and my comrades have hope, a feeling �ٳ󲹳�’s been hard to feel and maintain while so many of our community members have died of COVID-19, which, let’s not forget, is also a racial justice issue. Seeing and feeling that rebirth of hope, faith, and energy has been one of the greatest highlights of this moment. 

This is the new normal. Let’s keep it up. Let’s keep protesting, let’s keep unlearning and relearning, let’s keep honoring and respecting BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, people of color) leadership, let’s keep voting, let’s keep dismantling white supremacy within ourselves, our families, our workplaces, our institutions, and our government. Let’s keep moving resources from the police into Black and Brown communities. Let’s keep building the movement, making it stronger and bigger until we abolish the police and ICE and eradicate racism and white supremacy.

Perhaps it was being in our homes for months, having time to really reflect about how our systems work and ��Dz�’t work. Perhaps it was watching our government fail us and seeing how our neighbors are the ones who, at the end of the day, are the ones who really have our backs. No matter what, I believe that COVID-19 set the stage for what we are seeing now. Like Arundhati Roy said, the pandemic was a “portal” for the new normal. 

The “” promised to formerly enslaved Africans never came to pass. There was no redistribution of land, no reparations for the wealth extracted from stolen land by stolen labor.

June 19 is celebrated by Black Americans as , marking the date in 1865 that former slaves were informed of their freedom, albeit two years after the . Coming this year at a time of protest over the continued police killing of Black people, it provides an opportunity to look back at how Black Americans were deprived of land ownership and the economic power that it brings.

An expanded concept of the “Black commons”—based on shared economic, cultural and digital resources as well as land—could act as one means of redress. As professors in and , our research suggests that such a concept could be a part of undoing the racist legacy of chattel slavery by encouraging economic development and creating communal wealth.

Land Grab

The proportion of the United States has actually shrunk over the last 100 years or so.

At their peak in 1910, made up around 14% of all U.S. farmers, owning . By 2012, Black Americans represented just 1.6% of the farming community, owning 3.6 million acres of land. Another study shows a between 1920, and 1997. This contrasts sharply with an over the same period.

In , the U.S. Department of Agriculture ascribed this decline to a long and “well-documented” history of discrimination against Black farmers, ranging from New Deal and USDA dating from the 1930s to 1950s-era exclusion from legal, title and loan resources.

The lack of ownership is crucial to understanding the crippling economic disparity that has hollowed out the Black middle class.

Discriminatory practices have also affected who owns property as well as land. In 2017, was at its highest level for 50 years, with 79.1% of White Americans owning a home compared to 41.8% of Black Americans. This gap is even larger than it was when racist housing practices such as , which denied Black residents mortgages to buy, or loans to renovate, property were legal.

The lack of ownership is crucial to understanding the crippling economic disparity that has and continues to plague Black America—making it harder to accrue wealth and pass it on to future generations.

A 2017 report found that the in the greater Boston region was just $8, but for whites it was $247,500. This was because of “general housing and lending discrimination through restrictive covenants, redlining and other lending practices.”

Nationally, between 1983 and 2013, median by 75% to $1,700 while median white household wealth increased 14% to $116,800.

Freedom Farms

Land ownership today could look very different. The idea of collective ownership has a long history in the United States. Even during slavery, a piece of ground was granted by slave masters for enslaved African subsistence farming. The called this land “the plot.”

The principles of collective land ownership evolved in post-slavery Black America.

Wynter has explained how that these parcels of land were where slaves could establish their own social order, sustain traditional African folklore and foodways—growing yams, cassava and sweet potatoes. Plots were often called “,” so important was this staple food.

The connection between food, land, power and cultural survival was subversive in its nature. By appropriating physical space to support collective growing practices within the brutal constraints of slavery, Black people also demonstrated the need for common, shared mental space to enable their survival and resistance. Herbalism, medicine and midwifery, and other African American were seen as acts of resistance that were “intimately tied to religion and community,” according to historian Sharla M. Fett.

With the end of slavery, these plots disappeared.

The principles of collective land ownership evolved in post-slavery Black America. It was central to civil rights organizer Fannie Lou Hamer’s , a designed to deliver economic justice to the poorest Black farmers in the American South.

In Hamer’s view, the fight for justice in the face of oppression required a measure of independence that could be achieved through owning land and providing resources for the community.

This idea of a Black commons as a means of economic empowerment formed a focus of W.E.B. DuBois’ 1907 “Economic Co-operation Among Negro Americans.” DuBois believed that the extreme segregation of the Jim Crow era made it necessary to ground economic empowerment in the cultural bonds between Black people and that this could be achieved through cooperative ownership.

Credit Unions and Co-ops

The accumulation of wealth was not the only desired consequence of a Black commons.

In 1967, argued for a “” that would create a “new dynamic synthesis of politics, economics, and culture.” In his view, economic ventures needed to be grounded in the greater aspirations of Black communities—politically, culturally and economically. This could be achieved through a Black commons.

As the political economist in reference to Black , “African Americans, as well as other people of color and low-income people, have benefited greatly from cooperative ownership and democratic economic participation throughout the nation’s history.”

The long history of racism in the United States has held back Black Americans for generations.

The nonprofit is working to rejuvenate the idea of Black commons. In a 2018 statement, the “to serve as a national vehicle to amass purchased and gifted lands in a Black commons with the specific purpose of facilitating low-cost access for Black Americans hitherto without such access.”

Meanwhile, shared equity housing schemes and , helping Black families own property, and mitigate displacement resulting from gentrification.

Digital Commons

The disproportionate effects of the and unrest over have highlighted deeply embedded structural racism. Organizations such as Black Lives Matter and the are demonstrating a renewed vigor around collective action and a blueprint for how this can be achieved in a digital age. At the same time, Black Americans are also forging a cultural commons through events such as DJ D-Nice’s —a hugely popular online dance party. Club Quarantine’s success indicates the potential for using online platforms to facilitate community building, pointing toward future economic cooperation.

That’s what organizations such as are trying to do. The nonprofit group uses crowdsourced funding to build community spaces in inner city areas of Indianapolis and encourage collective economic development that echoes the Black commons of years past.

The long history of racism in the United States has held back Black Americans for generations. But the current soul-searching over this legacy is also an unrivaled opportunity to look again at the idea of collective Black action and ownership, using it to create a community and economy that goes beyond just ownership of land for wealth’s sake.

This article was originally published by It has been published here with permission.

Someone is worse off than you. You’ve had harder times than this and never asked for help, so how dare you do it now! Why ��Dz�’t you just be grateful for your job and education? If you’re unhappy, just leave. Do you know what I had to deal with growing up? You’re spoiled!

In the age of GoFundMe and social media, this belief continues. I have seen one too many Black people who, with their heads hung low, ask for assistance once they have acquired so much debt or displacement, waiting until it was that bad. I have seen one too many Black individuals write deeply personal tragedies under mutual aid posts, begging and thanking strangers for a buck (even when those posting tell them they ��Dz�’t have to share their stories).

But this is how society measures worthiness when it comes to support: Who is suffering so much that we cannot turn them away because they are willing to be incredibly vulnerable with desperation? It truly becomes the Hunger Games, the most marginalized or penalized fighting to have their basic needs met physically, emotionally, and mentally.

Expecting accountability for, and relief from, our suffering by way of funds is not what sells.

It deeply saddens me to know we only want to fund trauma. Our society is built on the falsehood of individualism so we refuse to care for each other in ways that prevent the worst case scenarios. We are conditioned to believe that someone has to be so far into their troubles that they couldn’t possibly get out of it alone (or at all). Even more, they have to put their pain out there for the world to see and judge, knowing anything short of death is not enough to warrant relief. You even see it in the ways that people judge those . It’s the unwritten rule of how support works—especially for Black people. We are required to be at our absolute worst and only seek survival in order to receive. If we want joy, happiness, access to “luxuries” or anything remotely close to peace—we are on our own.

To put it plainly: society would rather pay to bury us than support a life in which we are thriving.

When you’re Black, the world either wants to kill you, save you, or pity you. If the world suspects (and it always does) that you have just a little more suffering left in you to give, you’re turned away. We’re taught that Black bodies are meant to hold the weight of the world. As Black people, we’re supposedly the strongest, so we have made an identity out of our ability to prosper in the most inhumane situations. It’s a point of pride, one passed down for generations, but this “pride” is at the core of our shame and annoyance when someone calls for help. This, and how we are constantly relied on to be a beacon of hope, inspiration, and resource for everyone around us — — creates a complicated rationale around what we deserve. Nurturing and caring are from us, not for us. Our joy isn’t a hot commodity, and when we make others face their guilt or shame for perpetuating that our joy isn’t a priority, we are further on our own.

Expecting accountability for, and relief from, our suffering by way of funds is not what sells. We are expected to make our suffering specific to us to create enough distance for the reader to say “not me, but them.” Anything remotely vague or deliberate leaves too much room in the consciousness of readers to decide they feel guilty or angered by our audacity, resulting in being ignored or receiving lackluster support.

I recently created a that proves my theory. I have never tried to crowdfund for myself before, but the underlying weight of imposter syndrome was no stranger to me. Here I was, able to write up and ask for support, with the nerve to not rehash the specifics of my trauma for viewer consumption. I knew my calls for relief would go unnoticed because I wasn’t… “desperate” enough. The people reading my words would think, “but they’re so strong,” and brush me off as just “having a bad day” rather than holding my truth with respect and empathy. They’d toss me a Venmo for less than what they spend at Starbucks and a cutesy gif to show they pitied me just enough to make the effort. 

We must redistribute wealth and not look at it as a favor, but a call to action.

But why was that?

To me, it seems to come down to agency over joy, especially the joy of Black femmes/women. While white women can claim similar experiences, (the countless reports of a “Karen” is just a Google search away). Our joy as Black people, however, is not a necessity. Meaning, we aren’t meant to thrive in the eyes of the world. We must suffer for others to live freely but our happiness is, at best, a “nice to have” when it serves as a means to disregard our suffering. This is seen when our joy is used to disprove our struggle through society’s diet activism (insert Kamala Harris and Stacey Abrams). Our joy is weaponized and used to claim that we have all progressed, especially when we achieve tokens of society’s measure of success: degrees, salaries, visibility, and more. But let’s be clear: progress isn’t proximity to whiteness. Sitting in a room of people who are different from you doesn’t change their mind. Silence doesn’t solve problems. Change doesn’t happen without disruption. Most importantly, all these rules about deserving, desperation, and demand are enforced by the very people who benefit from our compliance.

And it’s exhausting to know we are only acknowledged when we become a spectacle of suffering or a diversity ad that does it all with a smile. In the eyes of the world, regardless of our extensive understanding of systems that oppress us, Black people are both individually and collectively responsible for our hardships and our recovery. If we want any “handouts” we must be willing to write compelling stories of our heroism or pain to be supported.

But my suffering isn’t for sale. I just want to live in a world where I’m unbothered. I want to walk into stores and not be followed. I want to find my shade at every makeup counter. I want Black dolls to be in stores and not cost double online. I want movies with people who are like me to not be entrenched with slavery. or steal my ideas just to have her YAS, QUEEN me later after standing up to Chad. I want to visit the country and not worry if I’m in a sundown town. I want to never hear “I know I shouldn’t ask this, but…” ever again. I want clothes that fit bodies, not constructs. I want the ability to stand up against violence at work and not fear for my livelihood.

But until then, we must redistribute wealth and not look at it as a favor, but a call to action. A reimagining of support. A dedication to healing and community that doesn’t play into trauma porn and leave marginalized people at the disposal of those who have unearned safety. Society must stop “deciding” how much someone is worth and start believing that people are owed joy, food, care, and opportunity. Most importantly, do this without the expectation of praise or acknowledgment.

Wealth redistribution isn’t just about trading your Starbucks order for someone’s aid request, but it can help to start balancing out the scales. We all know there’s more than enough to go around, but until we build a system that centers care, we will never truly progress.

Those watching Bezos might have realized just what it meant when the world’s richest man said that the public paid for the lavish goods he enjoys, especially seeing as  to the goods that the public enjoys. Maybe at a time when a raging pandemic has , people ��Dz�’t want to hear how much they contributed to the wealth of a man whose net worth jumped by  over the past 13 months, while  Americans lost their jobs in the first three quarters of 2020. 

There is no denying the connections between wealth inequality, climate change, and racial inequality, and there’s no denying Amazon’s complicity in all three.

It could also be that at a time when the  are beginning to be felt, people ��Dz�’t want to hear much from a man who has rained down  onto the Earth via his space joyride, and whose company has released as many greenhouse gases as a . Amazon in and of itself  through its championing of , , and —all while , ,  and .  There is no denying the connections between , , and there’s no denying Amazon’s complicity in all three.

Bezos seems to have realized that public opinion is souring. Not only has he announced a  contribution to fighting climate change, but he also took the time after his space flight to announce  of $100 million—pocket change for him—to various causes tied to an initiative he is calling the “courage and civility awards,” a thinly veiled attempt at public relations. The reality is that Jeff Bezos and Amazon are so entangled in a system of perpetuating inequality that no individual contribution can unwind the systemic oppression that makes such gross displays of wealth inequality possible. 

I am not slighting Bezos for his contributions, but I was all too aware of the inequality he perpetuates for me to see his space flight and donations and react with anything other than disgust. Bezos’ ugly display embodied Scott-Heron’s words, “Was all that money I made las’ year  (for Whitey on the moon?) How come there ain’t no money here?  (Hm! Whitey’s on the moon).

The poem was a scathing critique of the  and earlier space race, an act of geopolitical showboating between the U.S. and USSR whose resources Scott-Heron felt would have been better invested in fighting poverty. 

I believe that Scott-Heron used the word “Whitey” without racist intent. He was reflecting on the overlapping of racial identity and privilege in the U.S. In his eyes, the crowning achievement of the U.S. at that time solely benefited the White majority who stood to gain from the increasing prestige and privilege of landing a man on the moon. Scott-Heron, his sister, and the rest of Black America were not considered to have shared in any noticeable achievement as they continued to languish in racialized poverty. 

Maybe if we get our act together here on Earth, we won’t be in such a hurry to leave. 

Scott-Heron’s observations remain timely today, as do his solutions. As he urged his (presumably White) landlord to contact his fellow “Whiteys” to pay rent on his behalf, so too do I urge the (mostly White) American political system to make Jeff Bezos  in taxes into the public treasury. Theof the self-made billionaire is eroded by the billions of dollars Bezos’ company receives in taxpayer subsidy, which only serve to  and should be revoked.

We cannot rely on Bezos’ self-serving charitable whims to fight climate change and racial inequality, nor can we allow him to amass so much wealth without taxation that he can squander it on more lavish displays of excess. 

Systemic racism and its myriad manifestations are a difficult beast to wrangle, and the idea of significantly tackling such an issue with charitable donations from billionaires like Bezos is folly.  is hot air, especially given its history of , , and , all of which contribute to a perception by former employees that the company is  to tackling its own problems, let alone those of the wider society. 

���������Dz�’s&�Բ�����; at its majority Black fulfilment center in Bessemer, Alabama, is a perfect example of systemic racism. Its  on the threats that racial diversity poses to its model undermine any racial justice claims made by Bezos. If he really wanted to make a difference, he could start by , , and . 

Ultimately the work of  can never truly be accomplished by a company that . These are systemic problems, and they require systemic solutions. Bezos hopped off a rocket and made a fickle commitment to solve some nebulous issues, but to actually get shit done requires direct government intervention into how Amazon and other big businesses operate. 

Systemic racism can be addressed only by government action against the double disadvantage of, through the promotion of worker rights, anti-union busting legislation, and universal health care. Such solutions would remove the patronizing, dependent relationship that abusive bosses like Bezos have had over their employees by allowing them increased self-determination, by endowing them with more options, and by widening the social safety net. 

The dependency of so many climate justice efforts on the charity of individual donors could be reduced by reworking the tax code to tax Bezos and his ilk their fair share. The more than that goes unpaid each year because of tax evasion would be better served combating climate change, and there is no doubt that what would be left over would be more than enough to facilitate all the trips to space that the ultra-rich could ever desire. As for shifting the overall global economy away from the  that outsourcing and tax cuts have created, the  rate is a step in the right direction that should be accompanied by actions to  and a .

Forty-six years later, the hip-hop group A Tribe Called Quest returned to Scott-Heron’s subject matter, declaring that “There ain’t a space program for niggas.” There wasn’t one in 1969 or 2016, and it doesn’t seem like there will be one anytime soon. Maybe if we get our act together here on Earth, we won’t be in such a hurry to leave. 

The bill, , has been introduced every Congress since 1989 by U.S. Reps. Sheila Jackson Lee and John Conyers, . But this year marks the first time that its request to study and develop reparation proposals for African Americans has cleared the committee stage. 

Calls to redress the lasting impact of slavery and racial discrimination have been amplified recently because of further evidence of the impact of systemic racism—both through the�� and the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and others at the hands of U.S. police.

Disruption of Labor Relations

To many, the question is not so much whether or not reparations are in order, but what kinds of reparations might be appropriate.

Most of the conversation to date has focused on reparations in terms of payouts of some form. Prominent author , in a powerful argument for reparations, said payments must be made by White America to Black America—much as  to compensate for the persecution of Jews by the Nazis.

As a , I agree that reparations must have economic substance, because the impact of racism is inherently linked with power and money. But my  for reparations: If one of the most significant aspects of slavery—even if not the only one—was a massive disruption of labor relations, then a crucial part in the reparations discussion could involve reshaping the labor relationship between employers and employees today. 

I believe such a reshaping of the labor relationship would substantially benefit the descendants of enslaved people in the United States. Labor, as my research has argued, has implications for all aspects of life and labor reform would, I believe, address many of the problems of structural racism as well. In addition, reshaping the labor relationship would also benefit all working people, . 

Growing Racial Wage Gap

Labor relations can be considered “distorted” when one party profits disproportionally at the expense of another. In other words, it is a departure from a “”—a concept that forms a bedrock demand of the labor movement, alongside good working conditions.

This is not just a matter of money but also of power. Under the conditions of slavery, the distortion of labor relations was nearly complete. Slave owners pocketed the profits and claimed absolute power, while slaves had to obey and risk life and limb for no compensation.

Black Americans continue to be disadvantaged in the labor market today. As CEO compensation , the number of Black CEOs remains remarkably low— just  as of March 2021. In general, the wage gap between Black and White employees . Fueling these disparities, as well as building on them, is the structural racism that reparations could be designed to address.

Unionization can be a tool to rebalance labor relations and can , . But union membership in general—and among Black workers in particular—has . And a weaker labor movement is associated, studies show, with .

Another tool to rebalance labor relations is worker-owned cooperatives, which have a  as  has noted. From early on, she points out, “African Americans realized that without economic justice—without economic equality, independence, and stability … social and political rights were hollow, or actually not achievable.” Gordon Nembhard’s work also shows that such cooperatives were often fought and ultimately destroyed because they were so successful in empowering African American communities. 

A “More Permanent” Solution

Some in the labor movement are beginning to link reparations with union rights. Labor  has suggested that the proposed Protecting the Right to Organize Act, a bill before Congress that would strengthen workers’ rights and weaken anti-union right-to-work laws, should be viewed as “a practical form of Black reparations.” He argued in  that wealth redistribution through union membership is “more permanent and lasting than a check written out as Black reparations, however much deserved, and far more likely to get a return over time.”

While many disagree about the profits employers should be able to make from the labor of their employees, few disagree about the wrongness of practices like outright —which today takes the form of employers not paying part or all promised wages or paying less than mandated minimum wage. Even those who rarely worry about employers making too much profit would for the most part likely agree that wage theft is wrong. Agreement on this matter takes us back to slavery, which might be considered the ultimate wage theft.

Addressing the ongoing legacy of slavery and systemic racism requires not only economic solutions but also improving labor relations and protecting workers against wage discrimination, disempowerment at work, and violations such as wage theft that .

Reparations that fail to pay attention to improving labor relations may not achieve economic equality. The reparations paid to Israel by Germany, for instance, have not helped to achieve economic equality—the Israeli economy is still, alongside the U.S.‘s, among the , with the richest 10% of each country’s population earning more than 15 times that of the poorest.

Simple monetary payouts are not, I believe, sufficient to solve the problem of racial inequality. Wage theft can again serve as the example here. While repaying stolen wages—as  by returning $35 million to workers—is commendable, repaying stolen wages does not in itself change the skewed relationships between employer and employee that enable wage theft in the first place. Greater empowerment of working people is needed to do that.

Benefiting Others as Well

So while redistributing money can be part of the solution, it may not go far enough.

Tying reparations to the improvement of labor relations—which can happen through the empowerment of working people or the promotion of —would not only help those most affected by wealth and employment gaps, Black Americans, it would also  in employment, such as women, immigrants, and many other working people. 

Improving labor relations would address systemic racial discrimination where it is often most destructive and painful: at work, where people spend the bulk of their waking hours, and where the economic well-being of families and by extension entire communities can be decided.

This article was originally published by��. It has been republished here with permission.

Together, my parents have worked more than 58 years as custodians. So, I’ve long been aware of the pride and challenges of their work. But the pandemic made clearer than ever how overworked and  custodians are. 

It’s past time to honor custodial work with hazard pay, livable wages, protection, and care. Given that  are BIPOC—many of them are also —making these investments in custodian well-being is a critical step toward advancing racial justice. 

To show my deep gratitude to my mother and her colleagues, during much of the pandemic,  weekly breakfasts, cloth masks, and thank-you notes during their 4:45 a.m. clock-in. I collected donations and partnered with a local shoe store to provide over 200 custodians with comfortable, safe shoes. But I knew they needed more.

To learn about the health impacts of their work and shine a light on this  profession, I facilitated a  project with 16 custodians from September through October 2020. What I learned about their working conditions shocked me.

Custodians suffered from aching feet and backs. They worried about harsh cleaning chemicals and contracting the coronavirus. They mourned a colleague who died from COVID-19. They spoke of long commutes and expensive parking, and being unable to afford living in an increasingly  and  Seattle. They also shared painful stories of racial discrimination and feeling belittled by people they encounter during their shifts. 

One custodian told me, “[Just] because they [have] a higher education … it doesn’t mean that they can just … put us down just like that. I mean, we accept it! That we are custodians, but at least show us some respect, as we show them respect too. What if we don’t clean their room? And then they gonna go complain. But us, we cannot go complain how they treat us.”

Sadly, challenging work conditions are also common for the nearly  working across the U.S.

Custodians make an  of $31,410 per year, hardly a living wage. As a result, many hold second jobs. I know the toll of this firsthand. My father held a second job as a factory worker for years before he passed away. Salaries are even lower for women, and they often face an added burden of balancing work with caregiving duties. 

When I was born, my grandmother had to immigrate from the Philippines to care for me so my parents could work through the night on the swing shift, which is from 4:30 p.m. to 1 a.m. During the day, my grandmother was a caregiver for older adults. This balancing act is far  for families trying to survive custodial worker wages.

 due to  inevitably affect a high proportion of custodians. On top of that,  data show that custodians working in buildings suffered almost  involving days away from work—likely an underreporting of incidents. 

Another more recent  found that custodians routinely experienced mistreatment, including discrimination, sexual harassment, and retaliation, that led to physical and mental health strains. Additionally, the pandemic has worsened risks due to . 

Despite their challenging working conditions, the custodians I connected with through my photography project expressed pride in a job that sustains their lives, and now more than ever, the lives of others. When asked what they need to get through this challenging time, one custodian shared, “It is very important for every person to smile [at us]. They should give us a little bit [of] respect and care for the custodians so our job will be easier. … Some people, they just look at us, you know, a little bit different from them, but we are just the same too. We work hard for everybody.”&�Բ�����;

Based on my experience being raised by custodians and through my photography project, I’ve gained a deeper understanding of how to uplift custodial worker rights. Custodians need employers and policymakers to ensure social and racial equity with the following investments and changes:

•  and a livable wage ($15 per hour, or even more in expensive localities).
• End the custodian gender wage gap by ensuring equal pay across genders.
• Offer public transit subsidies, or offer free parking in regions with poor access to transportation and limited affordable housing.
• Ensure safety from COVID-19 infection, including access to effective personal protective equipment and vaccines and enforcement of universal masking policies.
• Offer opportunities for rest and rejuvenation, including adequate break rooms.
• Provide ergonomic equipment, such as lightweight, height-adjustable mops, proper harness fittings for vacuum backpacks, protection from harmful chemicals, and comfortable shoes.
• Offer paid sick leave for vaccination, symptoms of ill health, COVID-19 testing, and caregiving duties.
• Offer affordable, flexible child care.
• Offer high-quality, accessible health care.
• Protect workers from discrimination and harassment by creating a culture that promotes respect and psychological safety for all workers. Even with those changes, workers need avenues for voicing concerns to managers without fear of retaliation. UW recently launched a  where employees can anonymously make such reports. This promising solution should be available to custodial and other low-wage workers everywhere.
• Offer robust access to interpretation services and translation of health and work-related materials.
• Have ongoing safe, respectful conversations with custodians to co-create solutions that serve unique needs within their workplace context (e.g., better understand the immediate needs, supports, and obstacles faced by custodians, including those in our ).

These changes will have immediate, short-term costs. However,  is making it even clearer that private sector employers must pay a living wage to be viable. Furthermore, a progressive tax on high earners can fund compensation for workers in public sector jobs. Investing in custodians’ well-being will pay off in the long run by reducing health care costs, workers’ compensation payouts, and turnover.

Despite the tremendous stress of the pandemic, my mother’s satisfaction in her work remains, as it does with other custodians I’ve met throughout the years. The time is now for us to nurture a culture of care for those who care for our spaces, and to pay and protect them in a way that acknowledges their value as workers who are truly essential to our society.

See this piece’s accompanying photo essay, The Dignity of Custodians.

Acknowledgement: I want to thank my parents, who inspire me to lead this advocacy work; the custodians who shared their stories and lived experiences, and all custodians who keep our communities safe and healthy; and Katherine Hoerster, my graduate adviser, who provided mentorship on this essay. This piece represents the personal views of the author, and does not reflect the position of the University of Washington. 

While closing this divide is essential to achieving racial equity in this country, it’s important that we apply the right tools for the job. We can’t properly solve problems without understanding their origins. The growing divide between White wealth and Black wealth is a product of economic systems designed to extract wealth from Black, Indigenous, and other people of color and redirect it to the wealthy, almost uniformly White elite. 

The Racial Wealth Divide Exists by Historical Design

Some of this extraction is obvious in a country built on stolen land with stolen labor. The United States became the wealthiest nation in the world (today, China has earned that distinction) as a direct consequence of dispossessing Native Americans of 1.5 billion acres of land and using enslaved labor to dominate the textile industry. Consider that, as was reported in Yes! Magazine, “at the outbreak of the Civil War, the market value of slaves in the U.S. exceeded that of banks, factories, and railroads combined.” That value can’t be understated.

The official end of slavery () was not the end of policies designed to keep Black people from accumulating wealth or to extract the wealth they managed to gain. Not only did the formerly enslaved not receive the 40 acres promised by Union Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman (nor clarity on how the  would ever have sufficed for 4 million people), but many did not even receive a reprieve from free labor. That’s because thousands of Black men were rounded up as criminals so states could lease them to farmers and private businesses to perform unpaid manual labor. 

Their��crimes were violations of��,��laws passed to maintain racial hierarchy. In rural Alabama, changing employers without permission, false pretense, and “selling cotton after sunset” were all arrestable offenses by 1890. This “leasing”��of human beings—a form of slavery by any other means—continued through the mid-20th century. It is not a stretch to think of incarcerated individuals as a contemporary extension of this history, as more than half of the 1.5 million people being held in federal prisons work for a few cents per hour, often for private corporations.

“Freedpeople” who were able to avoid imprisonment were often consigned to a different type of wealth extraction: sharecropping—what  describes as “debt peonage.” In Coates’ words, this was implemented by “cotton kings who were at once their landlords, their employers, and merchants,” and who drove Black farmers deep into debt. By 1890, 75% of Black farmers were sharecroppers.

By the early 20th century, U.S. laws hindered opportunities for Black people to create wealth on multiple fronts. Jim Crow laws allowed for legal discrimination against Black people, including restrictions on the kinds of jobs they could hold and the incomes they could make. The newly established Social Security program, by design, didn’t initially apply to agricultural and domestic workers—positions disproportionately held by Black people—so, in 1935, 65% of all Black Americans and 70–80% of Black southerners were ineligible to receive checks. 

Additionally, state-sponsored “redlining”—a notorious practice in which banks refused loans to those who lived in Black communities—kept Black people ineligible for home loans, and racial covenants prevented Black people from moving into White neighborhoods. Today’s  of 43.4% is not only substantially lower than the White homeownership rate of 72.1%, but it’s also lower than it was 10 years ago.

These are just a few of the policies and practices, hardwired into the financial system dominated by Wall Street, that have contributed to the racial wealth divide. Each has made the intergenerational transfer of wealth more challenging for Black people. The website , which I run, details such wealth extraction—and exclusion—from colonization to the present day. My organization, , developed this interactive site to lay bare the extent to which our economy was designed for the needs of the elite, almost entirely White few. It reminds us of the vast scale of the problem, and underscores that the solutions must also be expansive.

How We Close the Racial Wealth Divide

The strategies we use to address these disparities should not only be structural in their nature, but they must also address the root causes of the problem. Financial literacy won’t address the wealth divide, because financial illiteracy didn’t create it; generations of wealth extraction and exclusion did. 

Reparations to address the harms of slavery and its deep-rooted legacy of systemic and institutional racism is one direct solution to the racial wealth divide. Having seen little movement on the federal level, communities around the nation are moving forward with their own reparations efforts. 

Many of those are at the municipal level—like the efforts led by —and aim to repair the harm done by generations of racist policies. There’s also a  that will release its proposal to the state legislature in June 2023, in the first-ever state-based reparations effort. 

Some reparations campaigns, however, have been initiated by the victims of racist policies themselves, such as an effort in . The town is likely the oldest of dozens of Black communities established in the state between the Civil War and the Great Depression. Once a booming community, decades of disinvestment, banking discrimination, and the enduring legacies of slavery have left Tullahassee’s residents struggling to remain financially afloat. Now, led by Mayor Keisha Currin, they are fighting for reparations, aiming to revitalize the town and establish it as a safe haven for Black people.

Another state-level effort that doesn’t necessarily rise to the level of reparations centers on undoing structural racism embedded in state tax codes. Last year, the  to identify how its tax policy harms communities of color and to examine strategies for repairing that harm. Advocates in New Mexico persuaded their lawmakers to  by, among other improvements, expanding health and education access that benefit children of color by requiring New Mexicans with more wealth to pay more in taxes as a share of their income.

Tax policy on the state and local level has typically resulted in Black, Indigenous, and people of color subsidizing benefits that are often available only to White people, from the G.I. Bill in its earliest years, to student loan interest deductions, homeownership policies, and more. In an institution-based approach to reparations, the , based in Washington, D.C., has launched a project to “illuminate the ways in which Black people’s labor and genius have been exploited and stolen to build philanthropic wealth in the D.C. region.”&�Բ�����;It intends, “by outlining the details of and quantifying harm on a foundation-by-foundation basis,” to build a case for D.C.-area foundations to engage in reparative philanthropy.

The scale of the problem of the racial wealth gap—and the harm—will ultimately require federal intervention. Communities and our elected representatives need to continue pushing for nationwide reparations for Black people harmed by generations of racist policies, while Congress can also advance targeted strategies, such as taxing the wealth, rather than merely the incomes, of the financial elite. Congress can also achieve some wealth redistribution by increasing taxes on corporations and adopting policies that improve outcomes for all, like . 

The most important thing we can do is to remember that broad-based systemic harms require broad-based interventions. That means understanding how we got into this mess in the first place so that our solutions ��Dz�’t treat the symptoms while ignoring the disease.

It’s true; I’ve had my fill of television shows and movies where people of color are either largely absent or present only as props for white leads. But there is something about Succession that makes me overlook its lack of racial diversity. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it initially, but I think I’m starting to understand its appeal, especially for people of color. 

The caucasity of a show about the casual cruelty of excess is precisely the point. 

The Invisibility of White Wealth

The white-dominated film and television industry has taken far too long to finally skewer white wealth—as Succession does—instead of glamorizing it. From the 1939 blockbuster Gone with the Wind, in which slavery was merely the gauzy backdrop of a rich white woman’s love life, to the fashion-centered 2001 smash hit Legally Blonde, where audiences were expected to empathize with the struggles of a rich white woman’s efforts to win over a man by attending Harvard Law, on-screen wealth has traditionally been an invitation for us to relate to the wealthy, not critique them for their excess. On-screen wealth has been a ubiquitous fixture of our culture—yet it has rarely been the focus. Instead, it has often been unremarkable, like the air that our favorite characters breathe.

In the years since the popular and long-running ’90s sitcom Friends aired, critics how implausible it was for white middle-class New Yorkers to effortlessly afford well-appointed roomy apartments in a city where most routinely squeeze into closet-sized spaces. Or how Sex in the City’s ’s haute couture wardrobe, presumably purchased on a writer’s salary, was so ludicrously unrealistic. For years, popular TV and film tropes centered on the trials and tribulations of (often white) people in settings where money was rarely, if ever, an issue—as though talking about money in their scripts might force screenwriters to deal with economic realities.

There are exceptions, of course, which offered more truthful depictions of the struggles of working-class people. Among them was the 1970s sitcom , which had a majority-Black cast, and , which was made in the 1980s and ’90s and had a majority-white cast. In such shows, the protagonists’ struggles to keep their head above financial water was not just ever-present, but the central point. 

Today, Roseanne, now rebooted as , alongside contemporary shows like , and (the far more racially diverse) , still offer glimpses—however rare—of the daily struggles of working-class Americans, white and nonwhite. In such worlds the perpetual hustles to make ends meet offer endless and relatable punchlines. But welcome as such tropes are, the wealthy remain largely invisible in their storylines. 

The Visibility of Black and Brown Wealth

On shows where wealth is a focus, there has been a propensity to showcase rich or upper middle class people of color: , , . The more contemporary iterations of this trope can be found in shows like or even .

There were commendable efforts, starting in the 2000s, by Hollywood’s writers to juxtapose overtly wealthy characters with middle- and working-class ones in shows like the wonderfully diverse and, later, the equally lovable . Both shows centered working-class Latinas struggling to break into worlds controlled by the very wealthy. 

But both shows also personified wealth often, though not exclusively, through characters of color—such as Vanessa Williams, who played a Black version of the real-life Vogue editor Anna Wintour in Ugly Betty, and Justin Baldoni, a Jewish-Italian actor whose complexion allowed him to portray a presumed-Latino hotel magnate named Rafael Solano in Jane the Virgin (the show’s writers  to make Solano white in later seasons.)

Apple TV’s new show takes a similar approach by casting the talented comedienne Maya Rudolph as a cluelessly earnest billionaire. And who could forget , the 2018 smash-hit film which sold us the idea that the absurdly wealthy can also be people of color: vulnerable humans who can rely on private jets to aid them in a relatable search for love?

Casting people of color in the roles of the very wealthy allows Hollywood to paint excess wealth-hoarding with a veneer of acceptability: They’re rich, snobbish, and enjoy lifestyles we can only dream of. But they’re also Black, Brown, or Asian so it’s OK, right? 

If only it were true that there were plenty of wealthy people of color. The in the U.S. is held by white households. of all billionaires are Black. Even when considering millionaires, . The likelihood of a very wealthy person to be Black or Brown is quite low, and yet films and television seem to love showcasing wealthy people of color. 

To be fair, rich white characters with overt wealth and power have not been entirely absent from our screens. Indeed, films in particular—more so than television—have occasionally depicted such figures to great acclaim. Think Orson Welles’ 1941 film Citizen Kane, considered and loosely based on the life of media baron William Randolph Hearst. Or the 1987 Oliver Stone drama , in which Michael Douglas expertly plays greedy financier Gordon Gekko. Or Martin Scorsese’s 2013 dark comedy , which stars Leonardo DiCaprio showcasing the life of a wealthy white-collar white criminal. 

One could even argue that the 1993 hit Jurassic Park wasn’t just an action thriller, but one whose plot highlighted the . The common thread through these films is the sinisterness of wealthy white criminality. 

The Nascent Visibility of White Wealth

In the past two decades, television finally began, albeit slowly, to normalize the skewering of white wealth. Wealthy white protagonists are objects of ridicule in numerous popular sitcoms, among them Arrested Development, a show that Betsy Leondar-Wright, author of , described as one that “accurately illustrates some common maladaptive life paths of people who grow up in wealthy families.”&�Բ�����;

Then there was , a sitcom about a white family losing their wealth and being forced to live in a rundown rural town they had bought as a joke. And, of course, there is the ongoing , a wildly popular dark comedy that expertly lampoons the cluelessly privileged as they vacation in exotic locations.

What’s behind this trend? , the showrunner for HBO’s majority-Black show Insecure, told Variety, “I think what people like seeing, especially right now, is rich people getting some comeuppance or going through a lot of drama and being upended.”

Indeed, there may be an increasing public thirst for content ridiculing the rich. In a 2022 , the University of California Los Angeles’ Center for Scholars and Storytellers found that among teenagers in particular, there is a “rejection of traditionally aspirational content that valorizes higher social status and material gains.” It may be no coincidence that this is happening while economic inequality and union activity is . 

But narratives in mass media work both ways: Culture feeds the demands that shapes content, but content also shapes culture. The London School of Economics conducted a which found that “People who regularly watch television shows that glamorize fame, luxury, and the accumulation of wealth … are potentially more likely to be in favor of punitive cuts to welfare payments.” Although it’s too much to expect overtly anti-capitalist (and anti-racist) fare from Hollywood, as for better pay and working conditions, we may start to see more story lines exposing the machinations of the power players controlling our economy.

This would be bad news for the nation’s ultra-rich, who seem to prefer invisibility—not just from the Internal Revenue Service but also from the rest of us. “” is a fashionable trend among one-percenters. But “Eat the Rich” is gaining traction among the rest of us. 

Displaying the Dysfunctionality of White Wealth

In Succession, the wealthy members of the Roy family and their internecine warfare are laid bare for all to see. Writer and comedian Demi Adejuyigbe’s for the show’s signature soundtrack sums it up like this: “All the rich white folks are going to argue, and then whoever’s best is going to win a kiss from daddy.”

Central to the show is the sheer ineptness of the Roy siblings—deeply flawed people who are born into gratuitous wealth, shooting from the hip, and incessantly falling prey to “daddy issues.” Not only are they lacking in intellect, their may be why they haven’t had to exercise their brains very much. The siblings’ power stems not from clever decision-making but from having buckets of money to throw around. 

Their knee-jerk whims, manifesting via their media empire, have enormous impact on society. The siblings show for those not lucky enough to be born into wealth. Together with the show’s patriarch Logan Roy, they are racist, often misogynist, and, especially in Season 4, hardcore flirting with fascism. 

It only makes sense, then, for the show to be mostly white. The Roys are that dominate American culture: the Murdochs, the Mercers, the Waltons, and of course, the Trumps. As Bea Gutiérrez wrote in an analysis for the BIPOC collective , “To fit into the series’ satirical world, marginalized characters would almost always have to either be mistreated or share the same abominable morals that our protagonists do.”&�Բ�����;

Not only is it important for television to display the reality of white wealth and its negative impact on society, but it is critical that such depictions are not whitewashed (no pun intended) by actors of color. Making visible the often-invisible power and abuse of white billionaires can shape our culture as a whole and make it less acceptable for the uber wealthy to keep hoarding resources.

And so, like many people of color across the U.S., I deeply enjoyed Succession, perfectly unperturbed for once that in such a show, people of color were gloriously on the sidelines. After all, we’re the ones eating popcorn and watching with glee. 

Just meters away stands a library where several men either watch an educational program on television or immerse themselves in books. In a nearby carpentry workshop, three men work on furniture and model ships, while another room serves as a textile workshop. 

These diverse activities are part of Liberté, a cooperative association operating within Unit Number 15 of the maximum security complex of Batán, located in Mar del Plata, Argentina. This penitentiary facility houses approximately 1,600 inmates. But many individuals here, deprived of their liberty, have found a way to reclaim some for themselves.��

At first glance, the entrance to Liberté may appear to be just another barred gate within the prison. Yet on the other side of this barrier, things feel distinctly different.

“When we cross that gate, we forget we are in a prison. We feel free,” says Ariel, who works in the textile workshop. (Incarcerated individuals are being identified by their first names only, for legal reasons.)��

This sentiment is common among the 80-some men who make up Liberté today. They ��Dz�’t define themselves as prisoners. Instead, through work, education, sports, and cultural activities, they are people preparing to integrate into society.

“If the punitive model of punishment worked, it might be worth pursuing,” says Xavier Aguirreal, who founded Liberté. “But what truly works is restorative justice.”&�Բ�����;

A Different Kind of Opportunity

“In prison, you either become dependent or beg,” says Aguirreal, 55, who is known to everyone as Pampa. “You come in with a couple of pairs of shoes and a shirt, but when those wear out, you cannot obtain new ones unless a family member or an NGO provides them. I didn’t want that for myself,” he recalls. So in 2014, two years after arriving at Batán, he asked permission from the Penitentiary Service to launch an entrepreneurial initiative. 

The head of the Work Department told Pampa that he needed at least two people to start, so he and his cellmate made a proposal to bring in materials and produce something that they could then sell outside the prison. “We started manufacturing wall clocks,” Pampa says.

According to official statistics, last year less than half of people incarcerated in Argentina��were involved in an educational program. Only a third had paid work in prison.��

But, says Diana Márquez, a lawyer and the coordinator of Víctimas por la Paz, “Most prisoners want to leave their cells and desire to work or study.  The problem is that in prison there are very few educational options available—mostly just elementary school—and nearly no job opportunities, many of which are undignified.”&�Բ�����;

The Víctimas por la Paz association was created by people who were affected by crimes and now works to promote restorative justice. This organization has supported Liberté since 2017, thanks to Judge Mario Juliano, who believed that model was the best route to restoration. 

Liberté operates on a self-management model, where each participant is responsible for doing their own work to earn their own money. “This fosters autonomy and self-esteem, essential values for successful integration into society,” Pampa explains. 

Liberté has launched various work projects, including leatherwork, carpentry, blacksmithing, radio programming, baking, beekeeping, and organic gardening workshops. There is even a small grocery store where incarcerated people can purchase their food and a restaurant named Punto de Paz. The meals prepared in Liberté’s kitchen have received official permission from the Buenos Aires government to be sold in supermarkets outside the prison.��

In addition to these ventures, Liberté has developed educational, cultural, and sports programs—such as soccer and karate—to support personal growth and promote teamwork. 

“Liberté offers something broader than just a single workshop or course. That’s its richness: Our lives consist of various interests and needs. Everyone has different preferences, and when I enter Liberté, it feels like a small neighborhood with diverse activities,” Márquez says.

An Effective Model for Change

“If you deprive someone of their rights for decades, what do you think they learn?” Pampa asks. “That human rights ��Dz�’t exist.”

There are no official statistics regarding recidivism in Argentina. However, the Latin American Center for Studies on Insecurity and Violence at the Tres de Febrero National University estimates that seven out of 10 individuals who regain their freedom commit a crime within the first year after leaving prison.

“Prison should not be a place of punishment but of restoration. When we leave, we should be seen as people like anyone else—not as those deprived of their rights.”

Over the past 10 years, more than 1,000 people incarcerated at Batán have participated in Liberté. Of those,��104 have been released—none of whom have reoffended.

Moreover, Liberté’s vision of self-restoration involves recognizing mistakes and addressing the harm caused by those actions. This is why they created the Victim Support Fund: They donate part of their grocery earnings to organizations that assist victims of crimes.��

“Liberté has changed my life,” says Omar during a break in his carpentry work. While at Batán, he got married in a ceremony at Punto de Paz. “I’ve learned to value things I previously overlooked,” he says. “All of this will help me in the outside world.”

“Here, I can do things like I would outside; I ��Dz�’t feel like a prisoner,” says Roberto, the current coordinator of Liberté. Before arriving at Batán four years ago, he worked as a cook and played soccer for a club. Now, he cooks in Liberté’s kitchen and coordinates a soccer team. He has learned new recipes and how to manage with limited kitchen utensils. “All of this will help me in the future; otherwise, it would just be wasted time in jail.”

More than that, Roberto says he has experienced personal growth that is not always available in the environments in which people grow up. “Liberté gives us the chance to depend on ourselves and appreciate every little thing. Outside, I used to be more selfish; here, I’ve learned about solidarity,” he says.

Carlitos shares a similar sentiment. He coordinates the library, which houses more than 5,000 books and offers opportunities for discussions and screenings of educational films. “Outside, we didn’t learn to love or respect one another or how to share. Here in Liberté, we’ve come to understand that dialogue through love is essential.”

Punishment vs. Restorative Justice

Marcelo spent the day selling religious ornaments in Mar del Plata. After work, he visits the homeless to distribute food with a Christian group. After that, he’ll travel to La Plata to visit his mother.

His life was very different two years ago when he was still at Batán. He arrived with mental health issues that led him to contemplate suicide. For a time, he felt guilty and worthless.

One day, Pampa invited Marcelo to lunch with other Liberté members and brought him a plate of burgers with French fries. “I started to cry. I couldn’t remember the last time I had eaten something like that,” Marcelo recalls. “I felt I was regaining my dignity.”

An engineer and teacher, Marcelo was drawn to Liberté by its library. He soon began participating in various cooperative activities, including restoring an old laundry facility into the current Liberté space. Eventually he became the cooperative’s treasurer, managing the accounts for Liberté’s grocery store. This role gave him a sense of worth.

“When my daughter and son visited me, they didn’t have to bring food for us to share. I could offer them a cake made by one of Liberté’s bakers or invite them to drink mate with my own yerba,” Marcelo says, referring to the traditional infused beverage that holds great cultural significance in Argentina. “I ��Dz�’t know what would have become of me if I had spent all my time in the pavilion.”

That sentiment is shared. “Prison reinforces resentment and hatred, but Liberté fosters courage and helps us overcome those feelings,” explains Michael, a member of Liberté who runs the radio program. “In Liberté, you stop viewing prisoners as mere characters from movies; instead, you see them as individuals with new possibilities who can even find joy within prison walls. Because without joy, how can you move forward and experience change?”

Broader Cultural Change

Liberté’s innovative approach encourages a fundamental shift in how society at large perceives incarceration. To promote this model, Liberté launched a diploma program three years ago in collaboration with the Mar del Plata National University that focuses on restorative justice, social integration, and peaceful coexistence within prison contexts. The program is open to anyone who is directly or indirectly linked to the prison environment—from detainees to prison officers, as well as students and professionals in law, social work, and psychology. 

The program is conducted online using platforms like Zoom and a virtual campus, along with YouTube. Since the pandemic, people incarcerated in Buenos Aires Province have been allowed to use cell phones, which has also facilitated the program’s operation. The curriculum combines theory classes with practical workshops and activities, equipping participants with tools to understand and transform the penal system while promoting a vision of justice rooted in care, dignity, and reconciliation.

The program was initially designed for 100 students but has attracted more than 8,000 participants. “Preliminary data indicate changes in perceptions among those who held prejudices and stigmas. They have broadened their horizons by understanding the realities of prisoners and now see solutions as a collective effort,” stated Claudia Perlo from the Rosario Institute for Research in Educational Sciences in . She highlights Liberté as a model for policymakers regarding prison reform. And Liberté continues to innovate, now developing a Popular University based on a German model. 

Márquez attests to the impact of these programs: “Liberté has made me feel free too. It helps me shed my prejudices. When I come here, I see people—not prisoners or inmates.”

Ongoing Challenges

Despite ongoing legal blocks and bureaucratic hurdles thrown at them by the Penitentiary Service, Liberté persists. The group achieved legal status as a cooperative in 2021. “Every single piece of paperwork is difficult. For example, to create a bank account, a bank manager had to visit the prison, which took considerable time and goodwill,” Pampa explains. But the hard work is paying off.

“In 2021, the head of the Penitentiary Service told me he had received many calls from various places interested in replicating our self-managed model,” Pampa recalls. Prisons in Neuquén in southern Argentina and Rosario and Victoria in the north have expressed interest in Liberté’s work. Last year, Liberté began expanding its efforts into a prison in Rio Grande, Tierra del Fuego—the southernmost province in the country.

“We are convinced that ours is not the only model or even the best one. But it’s working, and we want to share it,” Pampa says. “If we do that, human rights and dignity will emerge.”

Today, Minneapolis is seen to be  But if you scratch away the progressive veneer of the , the  and , you find what , a Minneapolis historian,  “darker truths about the city.”

As co-founder of the University of Minnesota’s  project, Delegard and her colleagues have been shedding light on the role that racist barriers to homeownership have had on segregation in the city.

“Racial cordon”

Segregation in Minneapolis, like elsewhere in the U.S., is the result of historic practices such as the issuing of racialized real estate covenants that .

These covenants began appearing in U.S. cities from the early 1900s. Before their , the city was “.” But covenants changed the cityscape. Racist wording from  in 1910 stated bluntly that the premises named “shall not at any time be conveyed, mortgaged, or leased to any person or persons of Chinese, Japanese, Moorish, Turkish, Negro, Mongolian, or African blood or descent.”

As a result, African Americans, especially, were pushed into a few small areas of the city such as the  neighborhood, leaving large parts of the city predominantly White. Some of the city’s most desirable parks were ringed by White residential districts. The result was an .

“By design, not accident”

As a , I know that Minneapolis, far from being an outlier in segregation, represents the norm. Across the U.S., urban planning is still used by some as the spatial toolkit, consisting of a set of policies and practices, for maintaining White supremacy. But urban planners of color, especially, are pointing out ways to  by dismantling the legacy of racist planning, housing, and infrastructure policies.

Racial segregation was not the byproduct of urban planning; it was, in many cases, its intention—it was “not by accident, but by design,” Adrien Weibgen, senior policy fellow at the Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development, explained in a 2019 .

The effect was and still is devastating.

The Urban Institute, an independent think tank, noted in  that higher levels of racial segregation were linked to lower incomes for Black residents, as well as worse educational outcomes for both White and Black students. Other studies have found that racial segregation leads to Black Americans being excluded from . In Minnesota, which ranks as ,  is among the highest in the U.S. Likewise, segregation limits access to .

Income and wealth gaps

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, in Minneapolis, . After Milwaukee, this is the biggest gap of the 100 largest metropolitan areas in the U.S. Mirroring the city’s income gap is a huge wealth gap. Minneapolis now has the .

Residential segregation in Minneapolis and elsewhere is still stubbornly high despite more than 50 years since the passing of the , which prohibited discrimination in the sale, rental, and financing of housing based on race, among other factors. But while some residential segregation is now income-based, .

Zoning out

Residential racial segregation continues to exist because of specific government policies enacted through urban planning. A key tool is zoning—the process of dividing urban land into areas for specific uses, such as residential or industrial. In the introduction to her 2014 book “,”&�Բ�����; argues that zoning is about government power to shape “ideals” by imposing a “moral geography” on cities. In Minneapolis and elsewhere, this has meant —namely the poor, immigrants of color, and African Americans.

With explicit racialized zoning long outlawed in the U.S.—the U.S. Supreme Court —many local governments instead turned to “exclusionary” zoning policies, making it illegal to build anything except single-family homes. This “backdoor racism” had a similar effect to outright racial exclusions: It kept out most Black and low-income people who could not afford expensive single-family homes.

In Minneapolis, single-family zoning amounted , compared to . Buttressing this, redlining—the denial of mortgages and loans to people of color by government and the private sector—ensured the continuance of segregation.

Anti-racist planning

Minneapolis is trying hard to reverse these racist policies. In 2018, , allowing “upzoning”: the conversion of single-family lots into more affordable duplexes and triplexes.

This, together with “inclusionary zoning”—requiring that new apartment projects hold at least 10% of units for low- to moderate-income households—is part of the Minneapolis 2040 Plan. Central to that vision is a goal to eliminate disparities in wealth, housing, and opportunity  within 20 years.

In the aftermath of George Floyd’s death, Minneapolis City Council acted quickly in . Dismantling the legacy of by-design segregation will require the tools of urban planning being used to find solutions after decades of being part of the problem.

This article was originally published by . It has been published here with permission.

Maps, like the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation of Oakland map from 1937, were used by real estate agents to sell homes. They depicted the segregation of neighborhoods, which determined the areas where Black people were allowed to buy homes. The red areas on the map—hence the term “redlined” (primarily West Oakland, and portions of East Oakland) were graded “D,” which signified a “high lending risk” because of the large numbers of African Americans and other people of color residing in these locations. 

My grandparents would eventually settle for a home in West Oakland. My grandfather, Dave Campbell, who was 41 years old and a veteran of the United States Air Force, had served his country for many years, only to have it turn its back on him when he sought to create wealth and prosperity for his family, as promised to White residents.

I share this part of my grandfather’s story to illustrate the real and lasting impacts of institutional racism: The same policies that cultivated wealth for White people in the United States prohibited the accumulation of wealth for Black people. And so today, as we face the impact of COVID-19 and the racial inequities it is revealing, our leaders have an opportunity to do better. Meaning, now is an opportune time to create equitable housing policies, and other policies that can close the yawning gaps created by racial inequity. 

This issue affects low-income residents in expensive cities even more given that a larger share of their income is consumed by housing. Stakeholders should consider both short- and long-term solutions to address this crisis. 

But if policymakers fail to do so, it could be another half-century or more before the U.S. is at such a close tipping point of social, economic, and political change. 

Policy experts, advocates, and community members have been pushing our local, state, and federal governments to do the right thing with policy recommendations that could level the playing field for Black, Brown, and Indigenous peoples. 

In our country’s history, large economic crises have precipitated major policy reforms seeking to move past the status quo and prevent future catastrophe. , this relief has most often been afforded to White people, while actively excluding or failing to extend the same assistance to the nation’s Black population. 

COVID-19 is disproportionately affecting the health and well-being of people in Black and Brown communities. Infection rates are higher and health outcomes are generally worse in . These figures are unsurprising to public health experts who have been aware of persistent health disparities present in Black communities for years. However, they may be novel to. 

Policymakers at all levels of government now are able to leverage popular mobilization to push for systemic change such as equitable housing policies. And they must be wary of repeating past policy mistakes and leaving structural inequities intact.

During past crises, the federal government has created sweeping policy reforms seeking to improve social and economic conditions. The New Deal is a prime example of the potential for government to engender positive change. Social Security, the right to collective bargaining, and Wall Street reforms are just a few of the policies that emerged as the country struggled to recover from the Great Depression. These programs are now seen as a given, but they were . 

While these reforms were incredibly consequential, it’s also crucial to acknowledge the populations that were left out. For example, . This exclusion disproportionately affected Black workers, leaving an entire generation locked out of financial support and vulnerable to the capricious whims of typically White management. While Black people did benefit from the increased labor protections and wages from New Deal legislation, the potential of its impact was stifled by the racial animus of Southern Democrats, a key constituency in President Roosevelt’s New Deal Coalition. 

Years later, policymakers would make similar mistakes by failing to properly address the material needs of Black households during the Great Recession.   For the average Black family, this means that median wealth will be roughly $100,000 lower than it would have been without the recession. Further still, data from the Economic Policy Institute shows that median household incomes for African American households are down nearly  compared to pre-recession levels. Taken together, these figures show the failure of public institutions to address the hardship created by the racially biased  that contributed to the Great Recession.

To create an equitable response to COVID-19, we must ensure that Black, Brown, Indigenous, and other marginalized communities are not left out. Policymakers need to work in partnership with community leaders and policy experts from historically marginalized communities to create equitable solutions.

The  a nonprofit dedicated to expanding housing and economic opportunities, offers an example of an organization with more targeted efforts to generate racially equitable outcomes in the housing field. The Land Trust acquires properties and works to preserve affordability, prevent displacement, and support wealth-building in low-income communities with a direct focus on Black and Indigenous populations, and communities of color. Solutions like these have the potential to create lasting positive change for African American communities that have been disproportionately hit by COVID-19.

Our leaders must also work on short-term solutions given that . Local and state leaders should continue to explore relief options for low-income renters who are struggling during the pandemic. This includes the extension of eviction moratoriums to protect vulnerable low-income and working class families. Further, leaders at the federal level should work to extend the unemployment benefits initially provided by the CARES Act, which will heavily benefit low-income African American households.

These changes will not be enough to address the lasting legacy of redlining and systemic discrimination that has plagued Black communities for decades. We must do more. And future solutions must incorporate input from the communities who are most affected by COVID-19.

The ideals of the New Deal era were not flawed, the execution of those ideals were. For years, policymakers have failed to live up to these ideals by creating exclusionary laws; however, the country now has a chance to atone for its past mistakes. It is possible that our federal government can serve as an instrument of good to create well-being in the lives of all U.S. residents.

So let’s get to work building an inclusive society on the other side of this pandemic, to honor people like my grandfather, who never had the chance to live the American Dream he was promised.

This commentary was produced in partnership with the��.

Carlos Sanchez-Gonzalez, now 16, grew up in the working-class South Baltimore neighborhood of Curtis Bay. He recalls first experiencing housing insecurity when he was about 9. “My dad thought it would be better to pay the mortgage instead of the electricity, and we went four months without power,” he says.

His family spent the winter without heat, and as a result, Sanchez-Gonzalez’s father developed a bad case of pneumonia. He and his brother caught the illness, too, but the family still couldn’t afford to pay the utility bill. “It was hard to sleep at night,” he said. “We sometimes had to sleep with clothes on.”&�Բ�����;

Before the pandemic, close to were spending more than 30% of their income on housing. The spread of COVID-19 made the crisis even worse, with  urban families falling behind on rent, and as many 15 million currently facing eviction after the federal eviction moratorium expired in September. 

When Sanchez-Gonzalez was 14, he first learned about community land trusts through Free Your Voice, a youth-led activist group at his school, Benjamin Franklin High. Such trusts are a tool that empower communities to create housing that is affordable for working families. He has been advocating for community land trusts ever since, knocking on doors across the city and sharing his story at public hearings so others ��Dz�’t endure the same hardships he faced. 

After years of struggle, community land trust housing is slated for construction in Sanchez-Gonzalez’s neighborhood, and comes with other benefits besides being available at below-market rates. The units will be passive homes, which are highly energy efficient, through solar panels and designs that circulate air and regulate temperatures, resulting in 90% lower energy costs. The houses also eliminate airborne pollutants that have  the Curtis Bay community, which is near two incinerators and an open air coal pile, and Baltimore City as a whole, which has an asthma rate twice the state average. 

When a household sells their stake in the property they share the equity with the community, so the family can build wealth and so that the property remains affordable. Baltimore’s housing crisis particularly affects African Americans, who have half the median income of their White counterparts, a 2017  found. 

This racial wealth gap was created by a century of discriminatory public policy. In 1911, Baltimore became the first city in the nation to mandate. Later, New Deal policies , using redlining to prevent African Americans from accessing government-backed home loans, thereby denying them access to wealth-building that subsidized the creation of the White middle class. 

This legacy of hyper-segregation and disinvestment created what scholar Dr. Lawrence Brown calls the “,” which consists of disinvested Black neighborhoods that surround the “White L”, an area of wealthy, predominantly White homeowners who have greater access to everything from educational resources to . 

More recently, lax regulations have allowed out-of-town slum lords to charge high rents for . Wealthy developers have long  loopholes that allow them to reap tens of millions of dollars in tax breaks designed to subsidize affordable housing while not building those units. that the city give some of that money to residents instead. 

Following those demands in 2016, city voters  a ballot measure creating the Affordable Housing Trust Fund and requiring the city to use it for affordable housing. In March 2021, the fund finally made its first distribution of $2.25 million to community land trusts to create 26 units of affordable housing.

One such trust was the  which focuses on development without displacement and on transitioning the city away from burning or burying waste. The trust will use $750,000 to create its first 10 units of affordable housing in Curtis Bay; builders expect to break ground in the coming months. The housing will be available to residents who make less than $46,000 a year, through a 99-year-lease, which allows homeowners to build wealth through equity that will be split with the land trust when they sell their property. 

“Seeing how communities are affected by disinvestment, this focus on community control and development is a way to bring about real change,” explains Meleny Thomas, 36, executive director of the South Baltimore Community Land Trust. “The only way that can happen is through subsidized affordable homeownership opportunities and partnerships with other agencies.”

The passive homes will also help residents cope with the environmental racism their communities endure. “This new, affordable housing will be perfect for people and children that have asthma and respiratory conditions,” Thomas said.

When Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott announced the distribution of an additional $4 million to community land trusts in September, he framed it as a local “movement.” “The Community Land Trusts movement represents both a tangible and scalable strategy to help us build community power,” Scott  in a press release. “This work will have an added impact on community development, land use, and affordable housing and can be transformative for our city.”

Baltimore activists have looked to successful community land trusts in Boston and  for inspiration. In 2018, there were an estimated  housing units across 225 community land trusts across the U.S., and one study found that residents of community land trusts were 8 times likely to fall behind on mortgage payments and 10 times less likely to face foreclosure.

“A lot of people said they were paying $1,100 a month for a one- or two-bedroom home that had mold and the roof was leaking,” says 24-year-old Curtis Bay resident Shashawnda Campbell. 

Campbell became interested in community land trusts when she was a 15-year-old fighting against the construction of an incinerator 2 miles away from her home. Residents told her they were worried about pollution, but their biggest concern was a lack of affordable housing. Campbell wanted to ensure that demands for a cleaner, healthier community didn’t result in the displacement of longtime residents.��

Community land trusts are a tool to help hardworking families to obtain permanently affordable, decent good quality homes.

Instead of paying on average a month in rent for a two-bedroom house, future residents of the community land trust can expect to pay only $600—700 a month. 

“It’s a way for people to stay in their communities and own something and it puts subsidies in the homes itself, where it stays affordable for future families,” says Campbell, who is now an organizer with the South Baltimore Community Land Trust.

After the Affordable Housing Trust Fund was created, previous mayors dragged their feet in implementing it. But activists kept the pressure up,  and  to demand city officials use the fund to create public housing. “No one knows our communities better than us, and we will fight for them,” an outraged Campbell overseeing the trust fund in 2019 after the commission announced it would only commit $1.5 million to community land trusts. 

A testament to the success of the movement, today, Baltimore’s Affordable Housing Trust Fund has dedicated more than 30% of its funding to community land trusts, including $16 million over the next three years. 

Activists acknowledge that even the increased level of funding isn’t enough. In August,  in Baltimore were behind on rent and faced potential eviction when the Supreme Court struck down the federal eviction moratorium. and federal rental assistance helped prevent an eviction tsunami, but  are forcing families to pay a growing share of their income on housing.

In contrast to landlords who  to evict tenants during the pandemic, community land trusts also raise capital to ensure their residents can weather difficult financial times and avoid eviction, and also offer help navigating the home-buying process. “The land trust model is not only about providing affordable housing, but it’s also providing a voice in the actual governance,” says Greg Sawtell, Zero Waste Just Transition Director for the South Baltimore Community Land Trust. 

“Community land trusts are a tool to help hardworking families to obtain permanently affordable, decent good quality homes,” says Sanchez-Gonzalez. He says that helping families obtain affordable housing is a fundamental building block for a healthy community, and will keep young people from “going down the wrong path to ensure their families can make ends meet.”&�Բ�����;

“This is the thing that keeps me going, being able to prevent this from happening to other families,” he adds. 

I’ve written about my��grandfather’s story��and about how redlining affected my family. But I never fully explored how this legacy continues to impact the housing situation of my family and many others. The legacy of redlining and housing discrimination has exacerbated California’s already devastating housing crisis for the Black community. As a result, California’s major cities stand to lose community members who have made some of the biggest contributions to our state’s rich culture.��

At the heart of all this is one simple question: Does every Californian have a right to remain in the city that they call home?

My family history on my mother’s side is relatable for many African Americans. My grandfather, Dave Campbell (from Galveston, Texas), and my grandmother, Lillian Lane (from Memphis, Tennessee), both hailed from the South. Like many Black folks from their time, my grandparents and their families moved to the West Coast to escape the crushing racial prejudices of the Jim Crow era. My grandmother arrived in 1943, and my grandfather arrived around 1950. This mass exodus, known as the Second Great Migration, shepherded thousands of Black families to regions like the Bay Area, where they hoped for a better future and more opportunities. 

Sadly, in California, many of these families faced redlining, discrimination, and police brutality. Nonetheless, they settled here, helping to shape the Bay Area’s trendsetting culture, politics, and distinct sense of identity. In the decades that followed, Black residents in Oakland, where I live, created things as varied as the Black Panther Party to the musical and countercultural hyphy movement. They led America’s fight against South African apartheid, thanks to the . Black Oaklanders also set down roots by building churches, opening popular small businesses, and even creating an  that helps all Oaklanders understand the role Black cowboys played in American history. The Black community in my beloved city of Oakland has often been on the forefront of radical and cutting-edge politics and culture.

Now, Oakland is losing the identity that Black Oaklanders worked so hard to create. The city is hemorrhaging its Black population due to gentrification.

My Mother’s Story

To get a sense of how living in Oakland has changed over time, I talked to a longtime Black resident and the most reliable source I know: my mom. Karen Campbell was born and raised in West Oakland and attended McClymonds High School. When she was growing up, in the 1960s and ’70s, West Oakland was one of the few communities where working-class African Americans like my grandparents could afford to live and purchase a home. My mom hoped to do the same when she grew up. In 1990, the time came for her to leave her parents’ house, but housing prices had already begun to rise, and she found herself with limited options. 

Apartments near the centrally located Lake Merritt were far too expensive for her budget as a fast-food worker. The most affordable option was to rent in East Oakland, but my mom worried that the area—then ravaged by violence due to the crack-cocaine epidemic—would be unsafe for a single woman living alone. With a heavy heart, she left Oakland and moved in with an uncle in San Jose who needed a roommate to split the rent with. She left behind her close friends, childhood home, church, and community.

My mom continued to dream of one day owning a house in Oakland. But when she began the hunt for a home again in the mid-2000s, now with a union job in the Alameda County Superior Court system and a middle-class income, there was nothing left within her price range. She did find an affordable option in Vallejo, 30 minutes north, but backed out after a lender attempted to sneak a balloon payment into the mortgage agreement that she never would have been able to pay. 

Eventually, she did move back to West Oakland, but as a renter. Extended family had sold my grandparents’ home long ago, never imagining this would lock them out of the housing market indefinitely. Today, my mom rents a duplex owned by her childhood church, which generously keeps her rent low enough so she can afford it. 

Many of my mother’s Black friends and co-workers who grew up in Oakland have not been so lucky. Although they still work in the city, some commute 2 to 3 hours each way from as far as Sacramento for work, church, or community events. Many others have given up on the dream of homeownership and moved away for good.

An Exodus of People of Color

As I finish grad school, prepare to reenter the workforce, and plan for my future, I, too, must grapple with the issues that affected my mom, including unaffordable home prices and limited access to equitable financial support for homeownership.

The reality is that living in Oakland has slipped out of reach for many Black residents. This is happening across the state as Black Californians move from urban cores to more affordable regions. But the Bay Area is seeing one of the largest exoduses of people of color. Of all large U.S. metropolitan regions, the Bay Area has the  in education and affluence between in-movers and out-movers. People moving to the Bay Area tend to be wealthier, highly educated, and either . In contrast, a disproportionate share of low-income out-migrants from the Bay Area are Black and Latino. Over time, this type of disparity deeply reshapes the sociocultural and economic makeup of communities while also pushing historically oppressed groups to the peripheries and away from centers of economic opportunity.

It’s clear that housing unaffordability is a major factor that drives Black Oaklanders out of the city—so what can we do about it? I’ve written about nonprofit organizations like the  that seek to preserve low-income housing stock and promote wealth-building by acquiring properties and selling or renting them at affordable rates. Land trust programs are helpful, but more needs to be done to address the systemic issues that impact Black Californians.

Policymakers need to go further in protecting Black Californians from predatory financial products like the one that was offered to my mom. And they need to expand programs that promote Black homeownership and housing affordability. Research has shown that non-bank financial institutions have grown greatly in recent years,  home lenders in California being non-banks. These types of lenders are not subject to the regulations present in the Community Reinvestment Act, a law passed in 1977 to reverse redlining and shield low- and moderate-income communities from financial predation. 

Poor access to credit, predatory financial practices, and the nuances of the Bay Area housing market make homeownership challenging for many of the region’s Black residents. In California, Black residents access  of home loans despite making up more than 5% of the population. Many of the home purchase loans given to Black Californians are from non-bank lenders. 

I support efforts by racial equity advocates to increase accountability by further regulating non-bank financial institutions through a  for California. This would allow regulators to curtail racially discriminatory practices and also promote greater access to credit for Black households seeking to own or maintain their homes. Beyond this, policymakers must also continue to protect tenants and build affordable housing for low- and moderate-income Black families in cities like Oakland.

Oakland has been  for decades. Each loss represents a small tear in the rich cultural and social fabric that has held Oakland together for years. As housing costs continue to shatter the community and bleed Oakland of the rich culture that put it on the map, I fear for the city’s future. Now is the time for policymakers, housing advocates, and residents to come together and protect that diverse tapestry that makes Oakland and cities like it great. 

This commentary was produced in partnership with the .

A child of undocumented immigrants from Guatemala, Marroquin—who grew up in Los Angeles in the 1970s—worried that speaking to anyone in authority about her father’s physical and emotional abuse would put her family in danger of being separated, or get her parents deported. But she desperately wanted the abuse to stop.

“All I ever wanted as a child was somebody to talk to my abusive father and make him understand the harm he was causing,” says Marroquin, who is now 48. “I believe my father could have changed if he’d had the support he needed to believe his family when we told him he was hurting us.”

Her father never got that support, but Marroquin is now trying to help other people interrupt the types of abusive behaviors that made her own childhood difficult. Recently, she became the first California-based responder working for , a free and confidential helpline for people causing or considering causing harm to an intimate partner or other loved one. 

The helpline began in Massachusetts, but a coalition of California-based advocacy groups are promoting its use across the Golden State. Their goal is to make the helpline widely accessible to people across California and ultimately generate enough interest and funding to power a team of locally based helpline responders like Marroquin who can answer calls specifically from people in the region and offer relevant referrals when needed. 

, a network of community and advocacy organizations focused on advancing racial and gender justice, is spearheading expansion of the helpline in California. For the past several years, the network has led a campaign to create new ways of addressing intimate partner violence that ��Dz�’t involve the criminal or legal system. Network leaders and many other advocates believe alternative approaches are needed because, despite the prevalence of domestic violence—it affects approximately . Many people ��Dz�’t report incidents to the police because they fear it will make their situations worse. Their fears are not unfounded, .

Most domestic violence interventions focus on helping survivors, often requiring them and sometimes their children to upend their lives by seeking shelter and safety. Far fewer resources are dedicated to helping the people causing the harm to stop what they’re doing, says Jordan Thierry, a consultant for the Alliance for Boys and Men of Color. 

These people may realize they need help, he said. But the programs that exist, traditionally called “batterer intervention programs,” are usually court-mandated and not financially accessible or tailored to people who haven’t been convicted of a crime. Therapy is another option, but many people ��Dz�’t have the health coverage or money to afford it, or struggle to find .

That’s the gap organizers believe A Call for Change can fill.

“We know there’s a demand and a need,” says Thierry. Other than the helpline “there’s no resource �ٳ󲹳�’s available �ٳ󲹳�’s confidential and anonymous for people who are causing harm who ��Dz�’t want to submit themselves to the legal justice system and out themselves in their own community.”

A Call for Change launched in 2021 in rural Massachusetts in response to reports of growing domestic violence during the COVID-19 pandemic. It draws inspiration from similar helplines in the and , and was designed with input from a 12-member advisory board of professionals and activists whose work involves addressing domestic violence. 

The helpline is funded by the Massachusetts Department of Public Health.​ But because people can call the helpline from anywhere, about half of the approximately 1,000 calls annually come from out of state, including California, said co-founder JAC Patrissi.

Callers to the helpline talk to a responder trained in trauma-informed and transformative justice principles. That means the responder doesn’t judge or shame the caller but has a respectful and compassionate conversation that aims to help them gain insight into their own beliefs and behaviors, and recognize patterns of control, manipulation, and violence that are harming their relationships. 

Callers are not absolved of their violence, Patrissi emphasized. Responders guide people causing harm to move beyond denial and blame so that they can understand the impact of their actions and take responsibility. Responders then help callers develop strategies for being a safer person for their loved ones to be around. Often, this occurs over several hours-long phone sessions, Patrissi said. Callers frequently call back multiple times.

Patrissi said part of the problem with criminal justice responses to people who engage in domestic violence is that they replicate the same patterns of dominance and control that they’re trying to stop. That’s why the helpline offers a different approach. “You can’t shame people into stopping shaming others, you can’t control people into stopping controlling others,” Patrissi said. “We have to find a way that interrupts sexual and domestic violence in a way that doesn’t replicate dominance.”&�Բ�����;

The helpline may not be the right fit for everyone. People who are taking the time to call a helpline are generally already open to making some kind of change, even if they’re only in the beginning stages of that journey, she said. That’s why Patrissi believes no one has ever called the helpline in the middle of committing violence. Making the call is in itself a form of de-escalation and self-control.

All calls are anonymous. Because they’re routed through an operator, responders have no way of knowing who the caller is or where they’re calling from, unless the person chooses to disclose that information. This is important, said Patrissi, because most callers are very worried about being reported to the police and the impact that could have on their lives or their families. Without reassurance that their identity is protected, they won’t feel comfortable speaking freely and honestly with the responder, which would deprive them of the opportunity to get help, she explained. 

About half of the callers to the helpline are family members, friends, or professionals seeking assistance in dealing with a person engaged in intimate partner violence. Responders provide guidance on how they can talk to the person they’re concerned about and can also offer referrals to services.

The helpline is already open and available to callers from California, though most of the responders are in other parts of the U.S. Responders receive 40 hours of initial training followed by additional weekly training and debriefing sessions. Some responders are licensed therapists, but many are drawn to the work from other backgrounds. The positions are paid.

The Alliance for Boys and Men of Color, with collaboration from Patrissi’s organization, , have begun spreading the word about A Call for Change to men’s groups, local governments, youth organizations, and nonprofits working to address domestic violence, among others. Last fall, they hosted two online webinars and an in-person gathering in the Bay Area to inform people interested in the helpline and guide them on how to speak about it to those they think could benefit. 

In October, about 35 people from a variety of organizations gathered at the RYSE Center in Richmond, California, to hear presentations from Patrissi and others involved in running the helpline. They listened to a reenactment of a real call from a man seeking to understand why someone he went on a date with is accusing him of sexual assault. The responder encourages the man to look more closely at a moment during his interaction with his date in which he deliberately ignored her cues to stop. Gradually, the caller is able to identify an underlying belief that caused him to keep going, and to see the interaction from the woman’s point of view.

Attendees also practiced role-playing how to talk with people in their communities about the hotline and encourage those they think could benefit to call. Ruby Leanos, a project manager at the Contra Costa Crisis Center, which runs a crisis and suicide prevention line, said she planned to share information about A Call for Change with staff there so they could offer it as a resource to relevant callers.

“Just knowing something like this exists is great,” she says. “We have so many of these hotlines and warmlines and helplines, but really A Call for Change and the population it’s working with, I think �ٳ󲹳�’s something that we ��Dz�’t see enough of.”

Paméla Tate, co-executive director of , which offers support to women and families affected by domestic violence, said survivors have long been asking for the type of intervention that A Call for Change offers. Many of her clients still love their partners and want to be with them, but they want their partners to get help to stop their harmful behavior. The helpline offers an opportunity for people being abusive to proactively get that help without reaching the point of causing their partner to flee or call the police.

“Batterers intervention programs are because you’ve already battered, you’ve already been found guilty of battering, they send you to a class,” Tate says. “This is, ‘I’m voluntarily calling … Maybe I can talk this out and figure out how to de-escalate and not cause harm, because I ��Dz�’t want to harm my partner.’”

The question remaining for Tate is, will enough people who need the help actually call the helpline?

Ben Withers, who works for , an organization in Contra Costa County, California, that runs a batterer’s intervention program, said he was already recommending the helpline to people in his program to call for extra support between classes. Withers said he hoped the helpline would steer other people who could benefit from anti-violence programs like his to enroll in classes voluntarily.

Currently only about 10 percent of people in the batterer’s intervention program are there because they want to be, he explained. “I’m excited for the people calling,” he says. The helpline “creates an avenue for people to enter services outside of the carceral system.”&�Բ�����;

The Alliance for Boys and Men of Color plans to do additional trainings about the helpline and is fundraising to support expanding its hours and responder staff in California. Ultimately, organizers said they hoped to get state government support for the effort.

Meanwhile, for Marroquin, the abuse she experienced as a child pushed her to pursue a career working with and advocating for survivors of domestic violence. Although she said she never succeeded in persuading her father to change his ways, she’s hopeful her work as a responder for A Call for Change will break the cycle of abuse for other families and intimate partners.  

“To be able to do this for somebody else’s parent, somebody else’s partner is deeply healing for me too,” she says.

To reach A Call for Change, call 877-898-3411 or email Help@ACallForChangeHelpline.org The helpline is open from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. PST every day of the year. It’s free, anonymous, and confidential. Language translation is available. After-hours callers can leave a voicemail and receive a call back within 24 hours. For more information visit .

If you or someone you know is experiencing domestic violence, you can also contact the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233 for support and referrals, or text “START” to 88788. Information on local domestic violence programs can be found using this online tool.

For Native Americans and Alaska Natives, the StrongHearts Native Helpline at 1-844-7NATIVE (762-8483) provides 24/7 confidential and culturally appropriate support and advocacy for survivors of domestic and sexual violence. A chat option is available through their website.

This story was produced in collaboration with the . 

is all too familiar with the sort of contradictory statements like those DeSantis spouted. Kelley, who is the Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. History at the University of California, Los Angeles, explains that he “came into the profession at the height of a battleground over history, in the 1980s, with the war on political correctness.” And although he’s lived through decades of conservative-led attacks, like those by DeSantis, he describes the 2020s as “dangerous times.”

The Origins of CRT

Kelley sees right-wing attacks on CRT—what he considers an umbrella term for the teaching of “any kind of revisionist or multicultural history”—as a measure of the success communities of color and progressive parents and teachers have had after pushing for years to ensure that educational curricula reflect racially and ethnically diverse classrooms.

The most recent movement for such education can be traced to the of the 1960s, which, in the words of educators Deborah Menkart and Jenice L. View, “were intended to counter the ‘sharecropper education’ received by so many African Americans and poor whites.” In a civil rights history lesson created for , Menkart and View explained that the education offered in nearly 40 such schools centered on “a progressive curriculum … designed to prepare disenfranchised African Americans to become active political actors on their own behalf.” In 1968, after months of pressure from student activists, established the first College of Ethnic Studies in the U.S.

A movement to offer ethnic studies courses in public schools, including colleges and universities, has gained traction nationwide. Such education is now standard fare as part of required college courses. California remains on the cutting edge of multicultural education, becoming the first state in the nation, in October 2021, to in order to graduate.

Leading African American scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, a law professor at UCLA, coined the term “critical race theory” and co-edited the book of the same name, which published in 1996, to define race as a social construct and provide a framework for understanding the way it shapes public policy. Crenshaw explained in a article that CRT, originally used by to analyze educational inequities, “is a way of seeing, attending to, accounting for, tracing and analyzing the ways that race is produced … the ways that racial inequality is facilitated, and the ways that our history has created these inequalities that now can be almost effortlessly reproduced unless we attend to the existence of these inequalities.”

Understanding the Attacks on CRT

Critical race theory is precisely the sort of nuanced educational lens that Crenshaw, Kelley, and others use in their courses and that has White supremacist forces up in arms. Attacks against CRT are taking the form of multi-pronged , as well as accused of teaching biased histories.

Kelley sees conservatives like DeSantis working relentlessly to eliminate any education that actually reckons with the history of American slavery, the genocide of Indigenous peoples and dispossession of their lands, sexism and patriarchy, and gender and gender identity. Reflecting again on the ’80s, he says the attacks on ethnic studies, culture, and race didn’t only come from the Right. “In fact,” he says, they also came from “liberals, from the Left,” and from those saying “we’re not paying enough attention to class [struggles].”

Kelley cites “classic liberal fatigue” against ongoing demands for racial justice, which he encapsulates in responses such as, “We already gave you some money, we already gave you this legislation, what else do you want to ask for? Why are you criticizing us?”

A case in point about how liberal figures are joining the right-wing war on CRT is a new venture called the , Texas, created by a group of public figures led by former New York Times writer Bari Weiss. Weiss, in an , cited unpopular ideas, such as “Identity politics is a toxic ideology that is tearing American society apart.” She expressed dismay that such an opinion—generally considered a racist one—is shunned by many academics.

To counter what Weiss considers censorship, UATX’s founders say they are devoted to “the unfettered pursuit of truth” and are promoting a curriculum that will include the “” centering on “the most provocative questions that often lead to censorship or self-censorship in many universities.”

As if to underscore Kelley’s warning about liberals joining the right-wing culture war, the nascent university’s includes figures like Lawrence Summers, former U.S. treasury secretary and former President Barack Obama’s economic adviser, who is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the left-leaning .

A Counter to the Moneyed Interests Backing CRT Attacks

Kelley sees a difference between earlier battles over political correctness and those centered on CRT today. “The Right has far more political weapons. They are actually engaged in a kind of McCarthyite attack on school teachers, the academy, on students, on families, and passing legislation on what’s called critical race theory,” he says.

Right-wing narratives have cast the backlash against CRT as a led by parents concerned about bias in their children’s education. But secretive and powerful moneyed interests are at work behind the scenes. The watchdog group recently exposed how right-wing organizations, like the Concord Fund, are part of “a network of established dark money groups funded by secret donors … stoking the purportedly ‘organic’ anti-CRT sentiment.”

Additionally, CNBC reporter Brian Schwartz how “business executives and wealthy Republican donors helped fund attacks” on CRT and that it is expected to be a centerpiece of the GOP’s campaign ahead of the 2022 midterm elections.

In contrast to the politically formidable and well-funded forces arrayed in opposition to CRT, the each year gives out unrestricted funds to prominent thinkers, like Kelley, to counter “the limited financial resources and research constraints frequently faced by scholars whose work supports social movements.”

The Foundation chose six scholars whom it as doing “leading research in critical fields.” Those include abolition and Black, Latino, feminist, queer, radical, and anti-colonialist studies, which are precisely the fields that are anathema to anti-CRT forces.

Kelley, who was named one of the foundation’s 2021 Freedom Scholars, agrees that such funding can help level the playing field for academics working to expand educational curricula that challenge White supremacist and patriarchal histories.

Going beyond defensive countermeasures against the right-wing attacks on CRT, such awards can help fund the study of histories of social justice movements that are thriving. “We’re beginning to break through the narrative of civil rights begets Black Power, [which] begets radical feminism,” says Kelley, citing grassroots change-making groups that have been active over the past 50 years through today and that have not gotten enough attention, such as the , the , the , , and . “Just in the last two decades, we’re seeing so many amazing movements whose history is being written as we speak,” says Kelley.

He is heartened by what he calls “new scholarship” that is “thinking transnationally, thinking globally, and moving away from a focus on mostly [White] male leadership and thinkers,” giving way instead to the “political and intellectual work of those who have a different vision of the future.”

How Teachers Navigate Texas Laws 

The laws banning or curtailing history education vary by state. Texas and Florida, two Republican-dominated states, have been early proponents of these policies. For some of these legislators, Black and diverse history appears to not be a valuable part of the U.S. educational curriculum. In early 2023, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida  the College Board’s new AP African American history class, claiming it “lacks educational value.” Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas, who seems to agree with DeSantis, signed Senate Bill 3, a law that would prohibit the teaching of current events without “deference to both sides,” into .

Jesse Arrieta, a high school history teacher at the Young Women’s STEAM Research and Preparatory Academy in El Paso, Texas, says she struggles when teaching about race. “Some of my colleagues were nervous at the beginning of last school year due to declarations by Greg Abbott that [he] would crack down on teachers in this anti-CRT moment.” But, she adds, “my goal as a  has always been to disrupt the ‘grand narrative,’ to be inclusive, and to help students understand that their history, whoever they are, is part of U.S. history.”&�Բ�����;

Anti-CRT laws have only increased Arrieta’s resolve to teach what’s being denied to students. She says, “The revolution is in the classroom, and it is up to teachers to resist oppressive bills and bans, as it does not coincide with our job as state employees who have to follow a certain curriculum.” She explains, “ [Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills] state what we are to teach, not how. Teaching about race, racism, sexism, etc. is not Critical Race Theory. It is simply part of the reality of life and of history.”&�Բ�����;

Although Arrieta is committed to teaching through such a lens in her classroom, other teachers may not do the same. She points out, “Those teachers who never cared about the ‘isms’ and never cared to highlight Black History Month or any other month will continue to ignore it. Unfortunately, I have worked with many of those teachers too, over the years.”

Chandra Woods, another educator at the Academy, relates her experience, saying, “I just had a conversation with a really good friend of mine about how I can appropriately implement Black history into my classroom while not going against state law. It is truly upsetting and unfortunate that this is happening in today’s world, especially with so many racially charged situations happening all around us.”&�Բ�����;

For Woods, talking about race in the classroom doesn’t violate the law. This month, she is focusing on “Black excellence” specifically centered on her all-female school. She says, “Although very limited in what we can cover, I think that discussing influential Black women in high spaces, such as former First Lady Michelle Obama, Oprah Winfrey, Shonda Rhimes, Viola Davis, etc. are just a few starting points on still being able to provide impact during February while also keeping with the theme of my school—women who succeed.”

Students Speak Out 

Students across Texas worry that their education is going to remove them from the realities of the past and present. Jahzara Wheaton, a high school junior attending the same school where Arrieta and Woods teach, says there was a lack of diverse perspectives in Texas education even before these laws: “When I was younger, I, as most children, was taught a very one-sided version of history. And in this version, the role that Black people played was largely that of a victim.”&�Բ�����;

Now, she is concerned that accurate depictions of her community’s past will be even more elusive. “It is very challenging to get an accurate picture or an account of history.” Wheaton speculates that the bans are in place because “if educators were allowed to teach students about the reality of oppression throughout history, it would go against everything this country prides itself on.”

Otitodilichukwu Ikem, another high schooler from Coronado High School in El Paso, shares that she has had similar experiences: “I go to school in Texas, so the topic of Black history is very filtered. I try my best to learn more on my own, but it is very discouraging when schools paint what I’m learning in a different light.”

Ikem believes the educational system is undermining Black voices, saying, “It’s very hypocritical and harmful. We learn about European, Spanish, French, Italian, and even Japanese history. Why is African American history the one �ٳ󲹳�’s banned?” She says, “The message they are sending to everyone is, ‘Hey, you can learn everything in school, but learning about African American history is too much.’” 

When asked how this is changing the way her classes function, Wheaton explains there is fear among students and teachers. “Many teachers have been intimidated into teaching what others feel should be taught and not what needs to be taught. Even those teachers I’ve had who were not afraid to challenge what is accepted had to do so in secret.”&�Բ�����;

Such secret conversations on social issues seem to be a new normal for students. Worse, some worry it changes the way they navigate their lives outside of school as well. According to Wheaton, “The impression that it left on me was that of fear. Not just for me, but for anyone willing to learn about social issues outside [the classroom] for themselves.”

Raeyun, a queer Filipino trans student, was carefully navigating the stairs down and paused midway. He was looking for me. Most lighting work had to be done during blackouts, so often Raeyun did not have much to do during regular rehearsals. Instead, we sat in the tech booth and hung out.

Sometimes he wrote fan fiction, which he referred to as his “gaymances”; other times he drew on his phone. Mostly, we talked.

Up in the booth, Raeyun pulled out his phone and started scrolling through photos of his favorite K-pop artists. He wanted me to see what he saw: beautiful, idolized, masculine men who were wearing skirts, crop tops, and eyeliner.

Raeyun loved K-pop. He had a singer from NCT as the backdrop on his phone. Raeyun’s adoration was not just about the music. He described K-pop as a world in which men of color could engage with their gender expression and each other in ways that felt distant and not quite possible to him.

As he was flicking through photos of all the fashion styles he admired and limning the possibilities of femme masculinity, I felt acutely aware of my recorder tucked into my backpack downstairs in the auditorium seats, turned off and unhelpful.

Got Trans?

East City High is an imposing building that encompasses a full city block and enrolls around 1,800 students. It has four floors, several outbuildings, an auto shop, a turf field, a track, and tennis courts. A local nonprofit runs a community gardening program from the grounds, and in the spring, local elementary school children regularly gather there, learning about seeds and plants.

East City High occupies the unceded lands of the Tsleil-Waututh, Musqueam, and Squamish Nations. This area, which is now known as the Lower Mainland of British Columbia, has been split into several neighborhoods, though it is often simplified into the east and west side. The west side is associated with wealth and understood as having better schools and opportunities. The east side is positioned as grittier and more politically progressive.

I was at East City High conducting an ethnography on the ways gender-nonconforming youth navigated their genders as they moved through different spaces and relationships at school. In my year at East City High, I accompanied youth to their classes, joined in during their extracurricular activities and clubs, ate lunch with them, attended their performances, and hung out in hallways, in tech booths, and on the peripheries of classrooms.

Sometimes we skipped school together, met up in cafés, and just roamed the halls. We texted (often). They taught me how to play Dungeons & Dragons, introduced me to the world of K-pop, schooled me on what TV shows I really should have been watching all along, and read me their writing. 

Many of these young people were nonbinary and genderfluid. Sometimes they used the term “trans,” though they also struggled with not feeling “trans enough.” They talked about themselves as gay, queer, bisexual, pansexual, trans, gender-nonconforming, genderfluid, and nonbinary. These words overlapped and existed together, in sometimes seamless and other times uneasy ways. 

Therefore, I most often use “gender-nonconforming” and “trans,” an umbrella term for any person whose gender does not align with the one they were designated at birth, to signal how the youth desired to be recognized as trans and, at times, held this desire for recognition in tension.

The Labor of Gender Legibility

Over the year I spent moving alongside six youths in grades 9–12 at East City High, I noticed that youth performed myriad forms of labor throughout a school day to exist as gender-nonconforming. This labor was in response to the people, the physical environment, the curriculum, and the policies that reproduced narrow understandings of trans identity that did not have space for the capaciousness of their relationships to gender. At times, this labor was apparent and perceptible as work.

Youth corrected adults when they were misgendered and deadnamed or spoke to teachers and administrators to secure accommodations in their classes. Other times, this labor was unnoticed and devalued, as with Raeyun’s sharing of K-pop photos in the tech booth.

Though youth regularly engaged in small acts of resistance and rebellion by escaping into their own spaces or disappearing into their writing during classes, this behavior was not acknowledged as important, as valuable, or as a form of intervention.

I take seriously their daily acts of trans life as forms of labor. I consider how in the tech booth, for instance, Raeyun was engaged in not only the labor of survival but also the work of utopic world-building. He was creating another world to exist in while at East City High through the work of caring—for himself, for his gender, and, ultimately, for the burgeoning trans community he was cultivating through this labor.

During my year at East City High, I observed many teachers respond with care and concern to the idea of trans youth and to the trans youth they were aware existed. This response aligns with recent scholarship on the privileging of visibility as a metric when working with and supporting trans students in schools.

Overwhelmingly, when East City High teachers were aware of a trans student, they endeavored to support this young person. This support was framed within an accommodations approach, which has become the dominant strategy for pursuing trans-inclusivity in Canadian schools. 

Teachers assisted students in accessing workarounds in physical education classes or changing their names and pronouns. At times, this support was seamless and useful. At other times, it was awkward and halting. However, it was always reactive, compelled either by adults’ awareness of a trans student in their class or by a student making themselves explicitly known as trans to an adult.

The administrators, teachers, and staff promoted this progressive version of the school in part through visuals. As one entered, one of the first visible images was a painted land acknowledgment expressing awareness of the Indigenous peoples on whose land the school was built. Throughout the school, there were poster campaigns denouncing racism and homophobia. 

The narrow hallway leading into East City High’s theater studio was lined with posters from old productions, potted plants, and a couple of couches. In this hallway, there was also a queer and trans visibility campaign, mostly obscured by the plants, that featured photos of celebrities and asked, “Got Pansexual? Got Trans? Got Two-Spirited? Got Femme?”

Scarecrow Jones, a mixed-race, nonbinary grade 9 student, abhorred this campaign. On many occasions, they ranted about the wording of this display: “What, like, I mean, have I got the disease, do you mean? Oh man, are you coming down with the bug?” Scarecrow Jones offered, “At least it’s not blatant homophobia… They’re trying, which I guess is nice, but at the same time, it’s the bare minimum form of representation �ٳ󲹳�’s not accurate at all.”&�Բ�����;

Scarecrow Jones did not see themself in these posters, but they reckoned that it was a nice attempt by East City High to recognize that trans people might exist.

Frequently unnoticed was the labor that youth performed to construct ways of existing that were unrecognizable to the adults at the school. At times alone and at times collaboratively, gender-nonconforming youth at East City High worked not just to understand and resign themselves to the circumstances and limitations of the school but to create trap doors—spaces that did not require them to show up the same way from hour to hour or day to day.

These were spaces where they could be flamboyantly gay trans men who gushed about wearing halter tops, or long-haired, nonbinary, mixed kids who sometimes did not know if they were having a boy day until they went to bed that night. Gender-nonconforming youth created both physical and fantastical trapdoors where they could exist in relation to their genders in ways that adults in the school either did not notice or could not understand. 

Their practices of world-making were often undetected because they were intentionally happening in spaces that were tucked away, peripheral, and, at times, imaginary.

Theorizing Gender Nonconformity

At East City High, adults were quick to express care and concern for known trans youth because they believed that being trans makes a young person vulnerable, especially in a school. While educators accepted recognizable trans youth, they did not want youth to be trans.

When trans identity is associated with risk, then wanting a young person to be trans is analogous to wishing a young person a hard life. Therefore, despite adults’ care and support, no one ever expressed desire for a young person to be or grow up queer and trans.

As a result of the concern of adults at East City High, they were invested in helping visible trans students. I argue that this approach to trans-inclusivity both relied on and reproduced narrow terms of gender legibility that tethered gender nonconformity to risk, harm, and danger. It is critical to emphasize that most of the youth I worked with were not visible as trans. They were not recognized as trans because of the ways they were racialized, their fatness, their neurodivergence, and the many ways their genders did not align with societal expectations for what it “means” and “looks” like to be trans.

Many youth wanted to be understood as gender-nonconforming based on the ways they transgressed societal gender norms. However, youth also desired gender nonconformity precisely because it was confusing and uncategorizable. Being gender-nonconforming, therefore, meant that adults in the school would not be able to place them because they were intentionally unplaceable.

At times, their resistance was grounded in a fierce intention to disrupt cisheteronormative assumptions; at other times, it was others who resisted knowing them, unable to recognize the complexities of their genders.

I am not interested in making these youth and their genders stable and knowable. Rather, I ask: When educators respond to trans youth from places of risk and concern, how do youth work daily to create space to exist as gender-nonconforming young people? Though the youth I worked with regularly confronted transphobic, racist, and ableist ideas and narratives from adults, other students, the curriculum, and the physical space of the school, they intervened at East City High through their labor.

In North America, we are currently witnessing a heightened conversation regarding the bodies, experiences, and lives of queer and trans youth. There is a proliferation of fearmongering about their existence, leading to district-wide book bans, the blocking of gender-affirming health care, and legislation that criminalizes discussions of gender and sexuality in schools.

Often, this condemnation of queer and trans issues in schools is happening alongside the denouncing of antiracist teaching and learning. These intertwined denunciations are mired in widespread understandings of adolescence as a risky period of life and the belief that youth need adult protection to be safely guided toward adulthood.

However, the six youth I spent a year moving alongside did not predominantly understand themselves and their genders through discourses of risk and harm. Rather, they worked hard to build worlds at East City High where gender nonconformity was not defined by suffering. Their thinking illustrates the potential of a pedagogy of trans desire in schools, and I call on educators to turn away from concern and instead cultivate desire for trans and gender-nonconforming youth.

This adapted excerpt from by LJ Slovin (NYU Press, 2024) appears by permission of the publisher.

Since 2021, PEN America has recorded cases of book bannings—a staggering number on the rise. In just the first half of the 2022–’23 school year, PEN America saw a compared to the previous six months. A striking written for and by the LGBTQ community.��

“The real power of a book is that they open up a different world to readers. And what people want to ban is our worlds and our lives,” says Julie R. Enzser, Ph.D., editor and publisher of the lesbian literary and art journal . “Book bans are a concrete strategy [used] by folks who are interested in denying the existence of LGBTQ people and people of color who have ideas that challenge white hegemony.”

Book bans—which describe any action taken to limit access to a book—can happen through a variety of channels. On a local level, parents or an individual may decide to challenge a book in their local libraries or schools, triggering a review of the titles, and often their removal from shelves. Regardless of the motivation behind these complaints, the impact is undeniable: In Florida, following the complaints of a single man. There are also organized, large-scale efforts from far-right parent groups like Moms for Liberty, which lobbies school districts and officials to oppose curriculum and books that are LGBTQ inclusive or related to critical race theory. 

The targeting of books by and about LGBTQ people and people of color isn’t new—author George M. Johnson, who wrote about growing up as a Black queer man in the oft-banned 2020 memoir All Boys Aren’t Blue, has spoken openly about the connections between . But what is new is the of these book bans—and their symbiotic relationship with conservative and anti-LGBTQ legislation. 

“The bans and challenges are resulting in proposed legislation or [passed] legislation,” says Leigh Hurwitz, the collections manager at Brooklyn Public Library. “They are targeting lists of hundreds of books in some cases. [It’s] not just a single person coming to a PTA meeting talking about a single book.”&�Բ�����;

In 2021, the Oklahoma state senate, for example, that would ban all books that dealt with sex, sexuality, and gender identity from public school libraries. More recently in Utah, a to “objectively sensitive” materials and books—allowing public school employees to be charged with a misdemeanor if banned books are found in their classrooms. Meanwhile in Florida, some school districts are due to recent, and incredibly vague, state laws. At the same time, states that targets queer, and especially trans, access to education, health care, and other basic human rights. 

LGBTQ youth are particularly vulnerable to book bans, as they may not have the means to buy, find, or keep a book outside their school or public library. And while by publishers, authors, and advocacy groups, most young people can’t afford to wait for slow-moving legal action. Given the stakes, the role of librarians, publishers, and grassroots organizers are critical in the fight to maintain access to these cherished queer and trans stories. 

Libraries as a Lifeline

The first line of defense is libraries. For Hurwitz, there are two main strategies for protecting book access—administrative and communal. Libraries have policies to handle bans, but often these procedures aren’t being used. “In many cases, books are just taken off the shelf once someone complains, and �ٳ󲹳�’s not what should be happening,” says Hurwitz. Clear, protective policies are needed so that librarians can field complaints and point to a systemic response. And there are organizations there to help—the American Librarian Association for libraries and individuals navigating a ban.

At the same time, libraries are also urgent sites for youth organizing, which is why Hurwitz helped develop through the Brooklyn Public Library. Launched in 2022, Books Unbanned provides youth all over the country with free, no-questions-asked access to the library’s entire digital collection, as well as access to book clubs, a podcast, and intellectual freedom forums. Recently, the program also launched the training, where youth can learn hands-on advocacy skills and fight censorship through civic engagement.

“Teens are so aware that books are extremely powerful for learning more about themselves and the world. They’re a force for change,” says Hurwitz. By leveraging youth engagement, libraries and programs like Books Unbanned empower the and advocate for their right to read.

Beyond the Shelves

Still, access to queer and trans stories can’t rely solely on institutions—independent publishers, informal advocacy networks, and tight-knit social groups all create vital points of access. 

Sinister Wisdom, for example, not only publishes new lesbian writing, but also recontextualizes and redistributes rare, formerly out-of-print works through its , which has published works by banned author Audre Lorde, as well as authors like Pat Parker, Judy Grahn, and Beth Brant. In this way, access to LGBTQ texts isn’t just about fighting a wave of book bans. It’s about challenging a publishing landscape that allows vital LGBTQ books to fall out of distribution in the first place. Likewise, Sinister Wisdom offers an dating back to 1976 and free books for incarcerated women.

“What we’re really trying to do is bring people together to organize around books, to talk about books, but also to really know one another and to really expand our sense of what it means to be a lesbian in the world today,” says Enzser. “We always need to bring back stories from our history to talk about our future.”&�Բ�����;

Others look towards the internet. , an independently run online database, was launched in 2019 by Ash*, a trans woman and researcher, after she realized there was no centralized location for free, trans-related texts.

“We believe education should be free and knowledge shouldn’t be behind a paywall,” says Ash. There are dozens of volunteers who manage the growing collection of more than 2,000 texts, and the estimated 120,000 yearly visitors to the site. And the independence of sites like Trans Reads makes them less susceptible to pressure by school administrators, lawmakers, or parents to remove books. Simply put, anyone can on Trans Reads any time, for free. 

The project is dedicated to Leslie Feinberg—a butch lesbian, author, and transgender activist who released the 20th-anniversary edition of hir canonical, banned novel Stone Butch Blues for free in 2014 shortly before hir death. “The novel was a way for trans, gender nonconforming, and queer people to realize ourselves. It told us we aren’t alone,” says Ash.

Like Ash, Kayleigh Lassonde was changed by this single banned queer book. In 2023, a friend gifted Lassonde a copy of Stone Butch Blues—a text Lassonde was always drawn to, but felt hesitant to read alone. “The idea of experiencing and reading the book alongside fellow butches made the content feel significantly more approachable,” says Lassonde. Inspired by Feinberg, Lassonde launched Butch Nook in February 2024, a New York City–based book club for butch, stud, and masc-identifying folks. The first book discussion welcomed 23 people and since launch, 70 people have filled out the interest form.

“Right now in the United States we are in a moment of extreme censorship and historical erasure. There are people working at this very moment to remove as much evidence of queer and trans existence from the law as they can,” says Lassonde. “At the Butch Nook we are providing space and resources for butches to not only read and discuss censored literature, but to understand what meaningful solidarity looks like. The group may bring people together through our shared identity, but our purpose goes beyond the issues of the butch community. We believe that none of us are free until all of us are free.”

Taken together, these strategies—protective, institutional policies in libraries; intentional youth development; and independent trans- and queer-led literary projects—work to create a world in which queer and trans stories aren’t just accessible, but abundant. 

* Ash requested to use a pseudonym to protect her from professional reprisal and the risk of doxxing. Read YES!’s policy on veiled sources here.

10 Banned LGBTQ Books for Your Reading List

The author and the sources they spoke to for this article have curated a reading list of their recommendations for oft-banned books by, for, and about LBGTQ people. Bring a bit more color to your spring reading list by adding these titles:

by Maia Kobabe

Maia Kobabe’s Gender Queer is one of my personal favorite banned books. Kobabe has been at the forefront of censorship and we always need more youth-oriented comics and literature like eir graphic novel!
—Ash, Trans Reads

by Kyle Lukoff and by JR and Vanessa Ford

Although literature by, for, and about trans youth has historically been overwhelmingly white, new books like When Aidan Became a Brother by Kyle Lukoff and Calvin by JR and Vanessa Ford speak to the stories of trans kids of color. Unfortunately, these books are almost immediately targeted with bans upon publication.
—Ash, Trans Reads

by Trung Le Nguyen

This award-winning YA graphic novel roots itself in the past, the present, and the timeless realm of fairy tales. Every night since he was a kid, Tiến and his mother, Hiền, have read each other fairy tales from the local library, a tradition that continues through to Tiến’s adolescence. Told from both of their perspectives, we see them learn about each other through stories: Tiến’s grappling with how to come out as gay and Hiền’s omnipresent memories of the family she left behind in Vietnam. now at Brooklyn Public Library!
—Leigh Hurwitz, Books Unbanned

by Alison Bechdel

Bechdel’s rich graphic novel about growing up in a funeral home, coming out, and thinking about her father’s homosexuality is a romp through queer literary culture and contemporary lesbian communities. It is wonderful in every way.
—Julie R. Enszer, Sinister Wisdom 

by Alice Walker

The Color Purple is a novel written in letters about two sisters, Celie and Nettie, in rural Georgia. It is gorgeous and difficult and challenging and provocative—and it won multiple awards when it was published and continues to delight audiences today, not only as a novel but also as a film and stage play. Our lives would be diminished immeasurably if we could not read and grapple with The Color Purple.
—Julie R. Enszer, Sinister Wisdom 

by Leslie Feinberg

Originally published in 1993, Stone Butch Blues tells the life of Jess, a stone butch living a working-class life in 1950s New York. Banned shortly after its publication, Stone Butch Blues is a call to action, exploring identity, violence, trangender and lesbian community, and the power of organizing.
—Sara Youngblood Gregory

by Jonathan Evison

Lawn Boy tells the story of Mike Muñoz, a Chicano man living in Washington state, who, after getting fired from a dead-end landscaping job, is trying to figure out exactly what the American dream means for him. With humor and wit, Lawn Boy explores capitalism, class, discrimination, and sexuality. It’s the perfect coming-of-age novel for readers of any age.
—Sara Youngblood Gregory

by Malinda Lo 

This book is at the top of my list for its emphasis on historical and cultural detail—you’ll feel immersed in 1950s San Francisco, Chinatown, and the lesbian bars of the era as Lily Hu, the main character, explores her sexuality. Last Night at the Telegraph Club was also the first YA book with a queer woman as the main character to win the National Book Award.
—Sara Youngblood Gregory

by Susan Kuklin

Originally published in 2014, this book features the stories of six young trans and nonbinary youth through interviews and photography. Touching, triumphant, and sometimes heartbreaking, this book is a lifeline for not just trans youth, but also the people who care for them.
—Sara Youngblood Gregory

This suit represented a brazen attack by the state of Texas and evangelical foster parents (using fossil fuel industry lawyers) to put Native children and families in the crosshairs—but also, potentially, Federal Indian Law and as we know it. That was no accident. All the well-earned joy we feel about this monumental legal win must be tempered by three key takeaways. 

The moment colonizers came to our shores, the genocide of Indigenous people began.

First, the decision simply preserves the status quo. Second, the status quo remains hugely problematic. Finally, this fight is a long way from over, and important work remains to be done. Even if we have avoided disaster for now, the current state of affairs leaves much to be desired. A little historical context can help explain why. 

The moment colonizers came to our shores, the genocide of Indigenous people began. Displaced from their homelands through forced removal, our Native ancestors were subsequently sequestered onto reservations, which were internment camps by a different name. Later, as a way of fully dismantling the cultures indigenous to these shores, federal and state governments began specifically targeting our children.

For about a century, beginning in the late 1800s, North American governments uprooted Native children from their homes and sent them to Indian boarding schools. As the recent discoveries of mass graves of Native children on these properties make all too clear, the conditions were brutal. You’ve probably heard the , former superintendent of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania: “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.” The hard truth is that saving the man was always the lesser priority.

The weaponization of our children in order to stamp out our cultures—because, of course, a family or a nation without children has no future—continued after the boarding school era with the epidemic of of our young ones and their placement into non-Native foster care. I grew up on the Standing Rock Nation in the Dakotas, and too many of my relatives lived in fear that their children could simply vanish into a mysterious and faraway home. In South Dakota, , though we make up only 15% of the population. It’s been estimated that nationwide pre-ICWA, a quarter to more than a third of our children were from their homes.

That’s the backdrop that moved former South Dakota Sen. James Abourezk—who until his earlier this year, chaired our advisory board—to author and sponsor ICWA. Passed by Congress and signed into law by President Jimmy Carter in 1978, ICWA keeps Native children in kinship care with Native families and is considered the in child welfare practice and policy by a sizable coalition of child advocacy organizations.

In Brackeen, the petitioners challenged the law in several connected ways. In simple terms, they claimed that Congress overstepped its authority (well-established through Federal Indian Law and prior precedent) in commandeering state courts and agencies by insisting they place Indigenous children in Native foster and adoptive care. They also argued that ICWA’s placement preferences for Native adoptive children, which gives tribes, as sovereign political entities, the right to seek Native homes for them, violates constitutional guarantees of equal protection. In other words, they claimed ICWA is racist against non-Native (mostly white) people.

Native organizations and advocates have spent years preparing for this moment.

Happily, the Court ruled that petitioners lacked proper standing to present their arguments. In a nutshell, the majority said that the petitioners failed both to demonstrate that the Court could remedy harm done to them (the Brackeens, for whom the suit is named, actually succeeded in adopting two Native children) and that they sued the wrong people. The suit’s defendants—the federal government’s Department of the Interior and its secretary, Deb Haaland—��Dz�’t administer child welfare; states do.

The Court, then, ultimately didn’t even consider questions of equal protection. Importantly, however, it did leave the door open for future challenges on those grounds. In his concurrence, associate justice Brett Kavanaugh essentially invited future petitioners with proper standing back to present arguments. 

That’s a red flag. If we needed further indication that the Court won’t be consistently favoring Native communities in its decisions, less than a week after the majority opinion in Brackeen dropped, it in a major water rights case.

As for the arguments regarding congressional authority and commandeering, the Court upheld long-standing precedent. It recognized that Congress possesses a “muscular” and broad range of power on behalf of the federal government, with whom tribes have a “trust” relationship as dependent sovereigns. Put a different way: under the law, “Indian” isn’t actually a racial classification. It’s political, because tribes have a nation-to-nation relationship with other governments, including the United States.

Given some of its prior decisions, it was far from certain the Court would respect precedent, treaty obligations or the foundations of Federal Indian Law. A different ruling on these issues might have precipitated a domino effect of further decisions undermining tribal sovereignty. It’s nearly certain that more attacks will come. A coalition of special interests has worked long and hard to attack ICWA—and use any other means—to compromise the power of Native nations. And because they also have a reliable legal avenue through the courtroom of a far-right federal judge, Reed O’Connor in Texas, they can get those cases into consideration by the high court. 

I’m so grateful to all who participated in the massive organizing to protect this law. Native organizations and advocates have spent years preparing for this moment. When it came, all hands were on deck to create effective media outreach, draft scores of briefs for the justices (including from Lakota Law), and provide top-notch legal representation.

Now we must stay proactive and vigilant in all quarters. The federal government, which provides foster care funding to states, can take an active role in demanding those states create more resources to help keep Native kids with Native families. States must abide by and enforce the law. We’re also asking lawmakers to create legislation to , further buttressing its enforcement and implementation. 

In the end, the Supreme Court’s decision demonstrates that Native nations can win—even against the odds—by uniting in a collective effort with a cohesive strategy. 

However, the legacy of colonialism worked to nearly sever this symbiotic relationship by imposing barriers and invisibilizing Indigenous food systems. The Stevens Treaties of 1855, for example, led to Native nations ceding millions of acres of our ancestral homelands to the United States government in exchange for rights that would protect and continue our way of life for future generations. These obligations remain the law to this day. 

But these, like so many Native rights throughout history, have too often been undermined and broken. From land dispossession to environmental degradation, the obstacles Indigenous communities face in order to obtain access to traditional foods are numerous and deeply entrenched. 

But so are the victories. 

In the 1960s and early ’70s, numerous tribes in the Pacific Northwest led a movement to uphold treaty rights and honor our sacred responsibility to protect vital salmon populations. My mother-in-law, Georgianna “Peachie” Ungaro, spent her life as a ceremonial fisher for the Suquamish Tribe and was one of the many women who fought fearlessly during what came to be called the Fish Wars. She recalled the experience of fishing for Chinook salmon (or “king salmon”) in Elliott Bay. “When you get out on the water, you can smell the salmon,” she said. “It is a spiritually uplifting moment. And, God, I just love it. The smell always reminds us to give thanks for the salmon, and for that, we always had a good season.”

The Fish Wars represent a pivotal chapter in the history of Indigenous resistance, culminating in the 1974 Boldt decision that ruled in favor of Native rights.

This landmark case not only reaffirmed Indigenous fishing rights but also recognized tribes as equal partners in resource management. This was a watershed moment in the struggle for Indigenous sovereignty, heralding a new era of cooperation and empowerment.

The legacy of the Boldt decision extends far beyond legal victories, embodying the enduring spirit of Indigenous resilience and the interconnectedness of Indigenous rights and environmental justice. It also serves as a reminder of the ongoing struggle for food sovereignty a half-century later. 

Today, as Indigenous communities address the repercussions of historical trauma and systemic oppression, the fight for food access and restoration remains as urgent as ever. As we work hard to address the barriers obstructing our vital connection to our heritage, we are fueled by the significance of our culinary traditions, the echoes of past struggles to uphold our kinship, and the ongoing commitments to strengthen food sovereignty in our communities.

Celebrating Indigenous foodways is significant and offers profound learnings, but it also requires us to confront the barriers and threats that continue to impede us from doing the restoration work we require. Environmental degradation, loss of habitat, and the erosion of our food heritage pose daunting challenges to food access and Indigenous sovereignty. Moreover, the commodification and industrialization of food have further displaced traditional Indigenous foods, exacerbating health disparities.

To address these challenges, we must embrace a holistic approach to Indigenous food sovereignty, one that recognizes the interconnectedness of land, culture, and community. This entails reclaiming ancestral lands, revitalizing traditional food systems, and fostering partnerships with allies committed to honoring sovereignty, as well as environmental and social justice. By centering Indigenous voices and experiences, we can amplify the call for systemic change and build a more just and sustainable future that truly feeds us all.  

Chinook Salmon in Parchment

This cooking method locks in the salmon’s natural flavors and also pays homage to ancestral Coast Salish culinary techniques, which use various seaweeds and waxy leafed plants in place of the parchment. As Ungaro describes cooking salmon, “Their beautiful meat is dripping with good fat, and that is their medicine.”&�Բ�����;

• Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F
• Season a 4-to-6-ounce salmon fillet with salt, pepper, and garlic powder��
• Lay the seasoned fish on a sheet of parchment paper large enough to fully envelop the salmon
• Add a tablespoon of water or vegetable broth to enhance moisture and flavor��
• Seal the parchment paper securely, perhaps with a silent acknowledgment of gratitude
• Place the wrapped fish on a baking sheet and put into the oven
• Bake for 15 minutes. Makes one serving.��

They didn’t want law enforcement involved.

Their situation isn’t uncommon. In Marroquin’s work as the director of programs for the California Partnership to End Domestic Violence, she sees families who don’t want to send their loved one to jail or separate from their partner who has been harming them.

Involving law enforcement can extend the trauma of partner violence, especially for communities of color who already . Mandatory arrest policies that were created to protect victims from their abusers can trap families within the criminal-legal system, —.

A , which focuses on the rights, needs, and wishes of the survivor, means providing other options.

“In order to prevent and end domestic violence, we have to start talking to folks on the other side,” Marroquin said, referring to the people who are doing the harm.

The Healing Together Campaign by the Alliance for Boys and Men of Color is working to spark that conversation on a national level. The campaign, launched in October, Domestic Violence Awareness Month, aims to end intimate partner violence by advocating for policy changes. The campaign also promotes separation from the punishment of the criminal-legal system and promotion of community healing through accountability, specifically by including those doing the harm——in the healing process.

Involving men in the movement to end domestic violence isn’t a new idea—scholars have been for more than 20 years— but including the “batterers” and “wife beaters” is an innovative approach that embraces the healing process of both the survivor and the person who’s harmed them.

“We’ve received a ton of pushback,” said Marc Philpart, principal coordinator for the Alliance, referencing people in the movement to end domestic violence, as well as the general public. “There is a belief [among some] that some people are deserving of healing and others are not.” But, he says, they’ve also received a lot of support. 

Philpart described the need for healing as a continuum, not a binary. Boys who have been harmed are more likely to turn into men who harm others. Strictly punishing domestic violence with incarceration does nothing to end that cycle.

Complicating the conversation happens at the community level.

The campaign identifies the root causes of intimate partner violence as policies that create economic insecurity and community fragmentation, harmful norms about masculinity that limit men and harm women, and childhood exposure to partner violence that increases the risk of partner violence in adulthood. The Alliance for Boys and Men of Color is a national network of more than 200 community organizations aiming to advance race and gender justice through policy and community activism. Many of the organizations were already implementing types of community healing before the campaign, so the official launch acted as a way for the partners to have a wider-reaching impact.

To address policy issues, Alliance coordinator PolicyLink, a national research and action institute for racial and economic equity, . Some of the initial suggestions focus on funding prevention efforts, shifting the responsibility of intervention programs to public health departments, and expanding “restorative responses” to intimate partner violence to decrease contact with law enforcement.

Philpart, who is also a managing director for PolicyLink, said that if programs want to prevent intimate partner violence, the conversation must include racism, sexism, slavery, colonialism, and patriarchy.

“When we start to look at violence against women more broadly, it really is a vestige of all of societal ills of a nation that has birthed those ills,” Philpart said. In essence, Philpart and the other alliance partners believe it’s time to “complicate the conversation” around domestic violence.

Complicating the conversation happens at the community level, he says.

In Stockton, California, Fathers & Families of San Joaquin, an organization for racial justice and community healing, has always looked at the intersection of gender justice and racial equality as a way to treat violence in its community.

Last year, stemmed from Stockton.

“The issue of violence is an epidemic in our city,” said Samuel A. Nuñez, executive director at FFSJ. “These are not normal behaviors, but we’ve normalized them because of what we’ve been exposed to.”

Nuñez believes the cycles of abuse and violence in his community make it ground zero for implementing a more comprehensive approach.

The organization holds regular community conversations for victims of all kinds of violence, and also offers parenting classes, youth mentorship programs and has a trauma recovery center that offers free mental health services. The programs are building towards a culture shift, not a quick fix, Nuñez said.

All month long, the alliance has been encouraging organizations to host men’s circles to discuss ideas of healthy manhood and men’s role in ending violence in their community. Interested organizations and advocates who sign up to facilitate a men’s circle will receive a two-page guide from the alliance with tips on how to foster productive conversations. The tips include establishing ground rules such as keeping shared stories confidential and using “I” statements when sharing experiences, as well as potential questions for the participants, like, “What were you taught about women and girls growing up?” and “What is your role in preventing violence from occurring in your home, family, and community?”

While groups could request to be connected with a more experienced facilitator in their area, like a leader at an alliance organization, Philpart said there is a fine line between ensuring an expertly led conversation and the conversation becoming too professional and no longer accessible.

If people don’t see themselves reflected in the leadership of the circle, they will resist participating.

“We don’t want people to recklessly engage in these dialogues,” Philpart said, which is why the alliance provides the tip sheet. But, the risk of an ineffective conversation by an unskilled facilitator is worth the reward of having stronger buy-in from community members and popularizing these discussions.

While the campaign is informed by the intersection of racial inequality and intimate partner violence, Philpart said, the circles aren’t strictly for boys and men of color. In line with the goal to create a healthy community, he hopes the circles have participants across the gender and race spectrum.

Of course, the people who take advantage of men’s circles and their local alliance organization’s support are the people who are interested in making a change. While it may start with a few committed community members, the alliance envisions a chain reaction of healing that spreads through the communities the 200 partner organizations serve and breaks the cycle of generational violence.

“We’re in the midst right now of an evolution in the domestic violence field,” said Marroquin, at California Partnership to End Domestic Violence. “These are options survivors have been asking for.”

Those numbers do not account for unreported and misreported murders, or trans people who have unexpectedly died under suspicious circumstances, but whose deaths have not been determined to be homicide.

While the number of individual deaths is low, Mic’s “Unerased: Counting Transgender Lives” project in 2016 estimated that, while the overall murder rate for the U.S. was 1 in 19,000 per year, the , more than seven times as high as that of the general population.

Many institutional factors are at play in this trend, and while there is no clear solution to ending the violence, some activists argue for direct financial support of trans women of color—paying them.

“Even small bits of economic security can help keep us away from unsafe situations,” Renee Jarreau says. Jarreau is a Seattle-based musician, DJ, and producer who runs a Twitter account called “Pay Black Trans Women” (@PayBlkTrnsWomen) and uses this platform to amplify disparate calls for financial support.

Trans people are a demographic highly at risk of being victims of violence and discrimination. The Human Rights Campaign has estimated that , and the vast majority of the victims are Black. Trans people often are denied work or fired when they come out as trans, present as their true gender, ask to be called by a different name or pronouns, or when their employers otherwise find out their gender identity. For this reason, many trans women turn to the dangerous underground economy of sex work because it has historically been a place where trans women have been able to make a living and even found acceptance in a community of peers.

But the financial burdens they face are considerable: common health care practices for trans people, such as hormone replacement therapy and gender-affirming surgery, are also costly. According to the American Journal of Psychiatry, undergoing , but the , according to the Human Rights Campaign. And when being passing as a cisgender woman can mean the difference between life and death, many trans women are left with little choice but to try to find the money anyway they can.

Take the example of : Her trans identity was rejected by her family, and she was kicked out at the age of 16. Houseless and desperate, she had little choice but to engage in sex work. Eventually she found work outside the underground economy and engaged in sex work less often. She got engaged to her boyfriend and had found a community outside of her blood family. However, she and her fiancé still struggled to find an apartment they could afford. At age 27, Carmon was found shot dead on a street in Fairmount Heights, Maryland, known to be a gathering place for sex workers and trans women.

When a trans person dies, the police reports of their deaths often are inaccurate, listing the individual’s “deadname,” the name the individual stopped using once they came out as trans, or misgendering them or using incorrect pronouns. This makes it more difficult for communities to be informed of a trans woman’s death, and also for groups such as the Human Rights Campaign to get accurate data on deaths.

Jarreau says there are unique ways that trans women of color, and specifically Black trans women, are disenfranchised. “We [Black trans women] sit at the intersection of anti-Blackness and transmisogyny,” Jarreau says.

“Having that [financial] security so we’re not worried about what’s going to happen at every moment of our lives gives us the opportunity to do other things that either helps us to sustain ourselves more or organize to help combat some of the issues we face,” she says. Financial support means trans women of color can support themselves in fighting the violence they are subjected to.

“A lot of the legal progress is becoming undone, and a lot of that legal progress has never protected us anyway. The system, the courts, the police, they ��Dz�’t support us. They often use their powers against us even when the letter of the law says otherwise,” Jarreau says.

However, the ultimate goal isn’t money, but the security that money can help provide. “Don’t just give money to Black trans women,” Jarreau says. “Give us jobs, support our work. Support us if we’re artists, if we have businesses, if we have regular jobs. Check on us if we say we’re not doing well. Provide emotional and mental support. Provide in any way you can. Listen to the things we’re saying and center our words especially when we’re talking about issues directly related to us. Amplify our voices. It goes deeper than just money and economic security.”

Formed in 2018, The Trans Women of Color Solidarity Network is a Seattle-based organization that collects money from the community through its Patreon page and redistributes it to . The group distributes up to $250 per person per month with no strings attached.

“Trans women and femmes of color are still fighting for the right to live,” says Lourdez Velasco, a founding member of the volunteer-run network. “We haven’t seen something modeled in this way specifically for trans women of color.” It all started when one of the group’s founding members was planning for gender-affirming surgery. The operation ended up being covered by their insurance, and so they decided that they would use the fundraiser they’d planned to instead support the larger community.

The fund is not where the team’s work ends, however. Looking to the future, Velasco says, “we’re hoping to build a housing solidarity network.” Access to housing and safe places to stay is another large concern in the trans community, specifically when it comes to trans women of color.

Devin Lowe launched the Black Trans Travel Fund in June 2019 to provide Black trans women with funding to pay for safer ride-share services through Lyft or Uber. The group�� operates in the New York City metropolitan area, including New Jersey, but Lowe hopes to expand to a larger reach. “I would like to expand to more high-risk areas, places like [Washington,] D.C., Baltimore, Dallas. Places where there have been lots of encounters of violence against Black trans women,” Lowe says. “No one is free until Black trans women are free and safe.”

“Trans women and femmes of color are still fighting for the right to live.”

Lowe started the project after becoming frustrated with the lack of response to the killings of Black trans women across the country. He says he was inspired by his partner, who is a Black trans woman. “Very often, she spoke about issues regarding harassment every day while walking down the street, trying to use public transportation, and issues with men on the train,” he says, adding that many of his friends and other people in his community who are Black trans women have expressed similar sentiments.

United Territories of Pacific Islanders Alliance, or UTOPIA Seattle, is an organization that serves queer and trans Pacific Islanders (or QTPIs, pronounced “cutie pies”). Taffy Johnson, the organization’s executive director, describes the organization as, “a trans and �ڲ�’a�ڲ��ھ��Ա�-led member-based organization,” explaining that, “��’a�ڲ��ھ��Ա� is a cultural gender identity native to Samoa, which translates [as] ‘in a journey between masculinity and femininity.’” The organization has many programs to support QTPIs and many of them are tailored to trans women, including a sex worker support group, HIV prevention/screening resources, employment education, workers rights workshops, tenant housing rights workshops, and a program called Mapu Maia, which supports trans people with name changes, health insurance, and obtaining access to trans-affirming health care such as hormone therapy.

Johnson says that legal obstacles that the trans community faces are compounded by the way society treats trans people. “Our undocumented siblings, they could face incarceration and possibility deportation,” she says. A 2018 Washington state law passed ostensibly to target sex trafficking in reality has made sex work more dangerous by making it more difficult to screen possible clients. In addition, an arrest could affect a trans woman’s ability to find housing and employment, and if they seek shelter in temporary housing, they will face additional structural barriers and discrimination.

Donato Fatuesi, UTOPIA’s operations manager, says that trans women of color are at risk for violence for many reasons, not just in sex work.

“There are often times that trans women of color, especially Black trans women, face violence, and in a lot of cases that violence is bred through toxic masculinity and it also comes from their partners,” she says. “Sometimes it can be hard to navigate safe spaces in order to be able to receive resources, especially when that violence is coming from somewhere close.”

Violence towards trans women often occurs when cis male partners feel that their masculinity is threatened, Fatuesi says. “We really need to have pressing conversations around toxic masculinity that continues to stigmatize trans women.”

While paying trans women of color will not put an end to systemic transmisogyny or racism, advocates of the practice say it can be a step in the right direction toward more equity and safety. “It’s not going to alleviate the trauma of discrimination, criminalization, personal and state violence that trans women of color face,” Velasco says. “It is one radical way in which we can resist all types of oppression and violence. … There’s going to be so many ways collectively that we can create community and collective care.”

Cultural queerphobia is nothing new. In many ways, this recent wave of legislation is an overt escalation of the long-standing and long-normalized homophobia and transphobia in U.S. culture, not unlike ” of the 1950s.

Queer and trans people are deeply familiar with the myriad, relentless ways they experience daily discrimination, erasure, and misrepresentation interpersonally, institutionally, and through dominant beliefs and values. The cultural platforming of these values creates an environment for bigoted, discriminatory politics to be framed as legitimate, logical, and even “necessary.” Cultural attitudes build the stage that anti-LGBTQ politicians love to preach from.��

However, there’s nothing inevitable or permanent about anti-LGBTQ sentiments or cultural beliefs, according to , a queer studies and education scholar and professor at California State University. “Restrictive, binary understandings of gender and heterosexuality as the ‘norm’ are ideas that ��Dz�’t start out ‘naturally,’ but rather get reinforced through repetition, social stigma, or restrictive policies,” says Mattheis. “We can just as ‘naturally’ direct people to expand their perspectives rather than restrict them.”

There are many ways cultural beliefs “happen.” The American educational system, and in particular K–12 public schooling, is one of the most prominent places where young people learn what’s considered normal, desirable, and valuable—and what isn’t. In this sense, education is both a window and a mirror, reinforcing certain worldviews and creating space for alternative perspectives. 

Because students are a captive audience and spend a significant portion of their formative years in the classroom, schools are, logically, a key site to change—or codify—cultural attitudes. Modern , , and anti-LGBTQ activists have been working to ensure schools mirror the existing power structures and exclusionary attitudes that benefit them, at the expense of everyone else. As a result, much of the recent anti-LGBTQ legislation targets youth and public schools, including book censorship, , and other and administrators, , and exclusions . And this list doesn’t even touch on the predatory that disproportionately targets youth of color and youth with disabilities.

As devastating as it is for the LGBTQ community, this legislation pales in comparison to Project 2025—a sweeping initiative developed by former Trump officials and the Heritage Foundation, a shadowy, conservative, . Project 2025 is a for the next conservative president to overhaul the federal government and implement an authoritarian regime of widespread surveillance, mass censorship, and discrimination. Project 2025 would dismantle the Department of Education, eliminate Head Start and other programs designed for low-income youth, revoke federal protections for LGBTQ students, and threaten schools that protect trans kids or develop inclusive curriculum with lawsuits. Public education would .

In short, queerphobic attitudes and increasingly prevalent anti-LGBTQ policies form two sides of one toxic bridge, mutually reinforcing one another and making life hellish for queer and trans people of all ages. Project 2025 merely scaffolds itself onto existing queerphobia and takes anti-LGBTQ policies in education to new heights. 

Still, schools can be a window. For every horror story, there is a knowing English teacher who slips a queer kid a life-changing book. There are the no-nonsense coaches who ensure trans kids are welcome on and off the field. And there are the lessons, friendships, and classes that offer all students a chance to connect, collaborate, and think critically across differences. Schools are sites of incredible potential—and spaces that can effectively intervene against homophobia and transphobia.

Sparse Support for Teachers—and Students

Creating an environment where homophobia and transphobia are challenged—and where LGBTQ youth feel seen, safe, and valued—requires understanding the challenges facing many students and educators on the ground.

Rebecca* is a third grade teacher in Florida—ground zero for much of the country’s anti-LGBTQ legislation, given the state’s proudly regressive political leadership. (Editor’s note: Rebecca asked to use her first name only, out of concern about professional retaliation for speaking candidly. Read YES!’s policy on veiled sources.) She says teachers in her district lack the support they need to navigate both age-appropriate conversations around identity and a provide culturally responsive, LGBTQ-affirming curriculum (which is ). 

At 8 and 9 years old, Rebecca says her students are already starting to use the word “gay” as an insult and parrot reductive gender stereotypes. In her experience, students ��Dz�’t always have the social-emotional skills to understand corrective discussions. Educators are often left to address issues of identity or name-calling ad hoc—and Rebecca says many aren’t equipped or ��Dz�’t feel comfortable with the responsibility.

“Some of my own teammates will get into [these situations] and they’re like, ‘Oh, well, “gay” means happy, so consider it a compliment,’” Rebecca says. Educators who know better, meanwhile, are caught in an impossible bind—trying to support students, teach kids and colleagues how to respond to these incidents, and not run afoul of state laws that in some cases prohibit the very mention of sexual orientation or gender identity.��

Though her school’s administration has been supportive of her personally, as a lesbian teacher, Rebecca says the school district does not invite discussions about LGBTQ issues, figures, or history in or outside of the classroom. Instead, LGBTQ topics are swept up under the umbrella of teaching “respect” and anti-bullying efforts. Rebecca sees her district as mostly reactive to bullying rather than proactive about inclusive curriculum, culturally responsive staff training, and social-emotional learning opportunities for students.��

In the absence of any meaningful presence of more inclusive, expansive cultural models, many students are absorbing restrictive, queerphobic norms by default.

Even in states with , there’s little direction on how to actually enact inclusion-focused policies. As a result, many of these responsibilities end up falling through the cracks or onto well-intentioned but overburdened teachers. “In California, state education code describes multiple aspects of school life in which teachers are expected to actively support and include queer and trans youth,” says Mattheis. “However, most teachers receive little to no introduction to state laws and policies as part of their preparation and are unfamiliar with these protections and requirements.”

Taken together, these factors—from top-down policies and lackluster curriculum to underresourced teachers and underprepared students—create an environment where all kids can struggle to shine and grow.��

Shaking Up the Syllabus

Building an LGBTQ-affirming classroom starts early, according to Erica Castro, MSW, a facilitator and educator at , a Denver-based organization serving queer youth. A large part of Castro’s job is going into schools, summer camps, and nonprofits—anywhere kids are growing up—and providing educator training and organizational audits.

“Particularly in elementary, there is this stigma and idea that talking about gender and sexuality does not belong,” says Castro. But Castro says that by the age of 2, kids are and differentiate between boys and girls—meaning the adages that kids are “too young” or “can’t understand” age-appropriate conversations around gender and sexuality just ��Dz�’t hold up.��

“Being able to get into the elementary schools and do these workshops has been, I think, transformative for the ways that teachers are able to build foundational, cultural, and policy-level structures [from the] first day of school,” says Castro. 

In shaping workshops for all ages, Castro works directly with youth to identify what resources they want and the types of training their educators need—including using and respecting pronouns, creating gender-support plans in the classroom, and connecting to free or low-cost therapy and mentorships for LGBTQ youth. Castro also partners with educators to diversify and update curriculum. (As a jumping-off point, Castro recommends .)

Aside from comprehensive, and above all, consistent education for students, educators, and their families, it’s also important to consider two more factors: the physical environment and policies at a school.

“Am I seeing visual cues of queerness [or] that the school is openly accepting?” asks Castro when making an assessment of a school environment.  “And beyond it looking safe as a checkbox, what does it look like for our young people to actually feel safe?”

The implementation of many of these resources occur at the intersection of physical space and policy. Gender-neutral bathrooms, for example, are —but the policy doesn’t necessarily guarantee the resource is in place. At one Denver high school, Castro says a group of queer students were forced to cross a busy road to access a bathroom at a local library. “[LGBTQ students] were just holding it all day, or they would just go home and stay home. There were attendance barriers that impacted their education tenfold.” Access to sports, too, can be make-or-break for many queer and trans kids.��

To truly support their LGBTQ students, most schools need a major shake-up when it comes to the variety, consistency, and depth of resources they offer queer and trans youth, their families, and communities. The good news is that, by and large, these tools already exist. As their own program faces closure largely due to , Castro believes a school district’s budget and priorities must reflect .��

“What made us want to become an educator in the first place is to protect all students,” says Castro, who taught high school for five years themselves. “[LGBTQ youth] are experiencing so much at home, in addition to homophobia and transphobia, and it is our responsibility to be that safe place for them.”

Beyond the Classroom

In an ideal world, every school administration and teacher nationwide would hitch their wagon to the potential and needs of LGBTQ students and families. But as Nereyda Luna, a community organizer and former case worker for the gender-expansive community in New York City, points out, trans youth can be bullied at the kitchen table just as easily as in the classroom. 

“People often think that youth exist in this whimsical world. And no, I think that youth are very aware of what is happening around them,” says Luna. “They know that ‘If I come out, if I present myself to the world for who I am, this is going to be hard.’”

Community spaces often provide much-needed educational opportunities for caregivers to disrupt a queerphobic culture. Outreach to cisgender and heterosexual parents—particularly those with misconceptions about LGBTQ people or those unaware of the impact of anti-LGBTQ legislation—is especially important, because these adults vote, raise queer and trans kids, and take their values to all areas of public and private life.

“The most effective way to help families and ensure people break through cultural norms is through personal connection and stories,” says Rev. Ray McKinnon, in North Carolina. “The most effective way to reach people is not with data; it’s not going to be some incredible argument. It is humanizing the person, it is taking these means and scare tactics and [putting] a face on it.”

Through PFLAG, McKinnon and his colleagues offer peer-to-peer support and workshops for adults—primarily the parents and grandparents of LGBTQ kids. Last year, PFLAG Charlotte offered 29 workshops to more than 1,200 total participants. More than 600 people—ranging from their 20s to 70s—used PFLAG Charlotte’s peer-support services. To better serve their community, McKinnon says they’ve recently launched Apoyando con Amor, a Spanish-speaking peer-support group, and plans to start groups for Black and gender-expansive families as well. “We also firmly believe that it is not the responsibility of queer people to educate straight people on these things, and it especially isn’t the job of queer kids to do that,” McKinnon adds.��

Though the organization is nonpartisan, PFLAG Charlotte also offers voter outreach and education on local legislation and policies that target LGBTQ people. “Advocacy, allyship must always have an action,” says McKinnon. “You are not just accumulating information when you come to the workshops … it’s for a purpose. It’s to give you tools so that you can become an accomplice who is walking lockstep with us.”

Those accomplices—in schools, churches, community centers, and culture-setting institutions nationwide—will be integral to cementing a culture shift that not only makes U.S. society safe for LGBTQ people, but welcoming and affirming. Building an LGBTQ-affirming culture requires a healthy dose of imagination, problem-solving, and critically, the willingness to become a life-long learner (and un-learner) to help map out a more just culture—in and out of the classroom.

“It is critical for us to bring a disability perspective when we talk about Cop City,” says Atlanta-based Dom Kelly, co-founder of the nonprofit (NDS), “because the construction of this facility will disproportionately harm disabled people.”&�Բ�����;

Almost three years after Bottoms’ announcement, Cop City, officially titled the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center, is under construction on an 85-acre plot of forested land owned by the City of Atlanta in DeKalb County. If completed, the campus will be the , equipped with military-grade facilities and a mock city for urban police training. 

Many who have mobilized against the project have highlighted the adverse environmental effects of clearing dozens of acres of the South River Forest to make way for the development. Indigenous-led groups also and its wildlife habitat.

Meanwhile, racial justice groups foreground the fact that police violence disproportionately harms communities of color, and abolitionist organizations reject any expansion of policing and incarceration. They argue that Cop City would further militarize the police force. “Police here have already responded to protests with militarized tactics, chemical weapons, and domestic terrorism charges,” Atlanta organizer Micah Herskind . “Cop City would only further provide police with training and equipment to suppress dissent and terrorize Black and working-class communities.”��

According to disabled organizers, each of these issues affects their community in unique ways. The framework of disability justice helps reveal these intersections.��

“Destroying any portion of that forest is going to have an impact on our ability to fight climate change, and then that will disproportionately impact the disabled community,” says Kelly. Disabled folks are by climate change, including experiencing worsening health conditions due to changing weather or being left behind . 

Many disabled people also live on fixed incomes, making it equipment to help navigate the effects of climate change, like air conditioners to survive a heatwave or backup generators to get through a blackout.

Disabled people are also especially vulnerable to police violence and are overrepresented in the nation’s incarcerated population. “Disabled people, especially disabled people of color, are disproportionately harmed by police and the carceral system,” says Kelly. 

NDS, which works across the southern United States, partnered with in six Southern states including Georgia, examining sentiments on law enforcement encounters for disabled people in the region. The survey respondents agreed that disabled people experience discrimination during law enforcement encounters due to their disabilities. 

Among Black and disabled respondents, rates of agreement were higher than among White and non-disabled respondents, pointing to the important difference between lived experience and outside perception of law enforcement encounters. Over 50 percent of Black survey respondents said they believe disabled people experience discrimination when interacting with law enforcement. About 34 percent of White respondents agreed that disabled people face discrimination in these encounters. More than 46 percent of all disabled respondents and about 37 percent of all non-disabled respondents agreed that disabled people experience discrimination when interacting with law enforcement. 

Further, according to data from the Survey of Prison Inmates, in the U.S. report having a disability. Studies have also found are disabled.

Black people are already three times more likely than white people to be –disabled or not. Additionally, they are and less likely to have access to .

Often, become violent because officers make assumptions about so-called normal behavior. If an individual does not speak, move, or behave as an officer expects or demands, rather than considering that they might be disabled, the officer may assume noncompliance and react with force. 

“A lot of the Black men that Atlanta police or [those from] other police departments in the metro area have killed were disabled,” says Susi Durán, chair of the Atlanta chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, another group .

In 2015, police in Chamblee, Georgia, just northeast of Atlanta, , a Black man with bipolar disorder who was experiencing a mental health crisis. In 2021, in a similar incident, a DeKalb County officer killed . His family later told reporters he was having a mental health crisis, and they wished the police would have gotten him help. 

Experts suggest that a training facility such as Cop City would worsen the criminalization of disabled people rather than lessen the issue. Studies show that training programs, even those intended to reduce implicit biases against marginalized groups, with those communities. Research also shows that the increasing militarization of the police . 

Kiana Jackson, Research and Coalition Organizing Manager at NDS and a co-author of the recent NDS and Data for Progress survey, says people have been connecting the dots between the discrimination they’ve seen in their communities and police militarization. “It is important for disabled people to get out on the forefront of these issues and say, ‘Hey, we are victims of this. We are the ones being killed,’” she says.

Many disabled folks in Atlanta and DeKalb County have been doing just that as an outspoken contingent of the Stop Cop City movement. When the Atlanta City Council on an ordinance for funding Cop City at a council meeting in June 2023, hundreds of community members showed up to make their voices heard at a public comment session that . 

“Disabled people are a part of the Atlanta community,” said Barry Lee, an Atlanta-based disabled artist who spoke at the meeting. Lee then urged the council to “allocate the proposed funds toward creating better accessibility for the city of Atlanta.”

The city consistently for its disabled residents, partly because of , inaccessible transportation, and lack of health care facilities. “There are parts of the city where it is difficult to walk on some sidewalks,” says Durán. “Plus, we lost our Level I trauma center when .”

When to the recent NDS and Data for Progress survey were asked whether their state had adequate resources, such as medical or mental health resources for disabled people when interacting with law enforcement, only 31 percent said they thought so.

People are frustrated, Durán says, because rather than the Atlanta City Council allocating funding for repairing infrastructure or shoring up the city’s health care, “They’re spending it on policing.” Slogans like “Defund the Police” and “Care, Not Cops,” heard at Stop Copy City protests capture this sentiment. Like Lee, many others who spoke at the public comment session also called on the City of Atlanta to allocate funding to infrastructure, housing, or youth programs rather than policing.

Despite the mass opposition at its meeting last June, the Atlanta City Council in funding for the construction of Cop City.

When the Stop Cop City movement launched its next front, disabled organizers were again at the fore. The referendum campaign began soon after that council meeting, aiming to get a vote on Cop City’s construction on an upcoming ballot. One of its two fiscal sponsors was (NDRS), NDS’s political arm. 

Kelly says backing the referendum campaign “aligned with the work [NDS was] already doing” as part of the organization’s mission to support efforts decriminalizing disability and ensuring disabled people have access to the democratic process. 

As fiscal sponsor on the campaign, NDS worked behind the scenes processing and disbursing contributions. Kelly says the organization also helped ensure that communications and canvassing were inclusive of disabled Atlantans.

Between its launch in June and September 11, 2023, the referendum campaign collected and submitted . That number is well over the threshold needed to get Cop City on the ballot. But the City of Atlanta has questioned it and made a , which Stop Cop City organizers claim are stalling tactics undermining Atlantans’ right to vote on the issue.

As the referendum petitions and direct action to stop Cop City’s construction continues, disabled organizers say they’re committed to continuing their work. “If we want to see collective liberation in our lifetimes, we have to fight back against the further militarization of police and destruction of our already precious forest environment to ensure that future generations have a planet to live on and won’t be murdered by police,” says Kelly. “Cop City is one piece of that struggle.”

But as we face the prospect of another potential Trump presidency, the architects of Project 2025 have made it clear that overturning Roe was just the first in a multistep plan to eradicate access to safe abortion. Though the Republican Party removed a federal abortion ban from its official party platform, there’s something more sinister �ٳ󲹳�’s been hiding in plain sight for 150 years.

, signed into law in 1873, made it a federal offense to disseminate contraceptives, abortifacients, and information about either across state lines or through the mail. Named after Anthony Comstock, an anti-obscenity crusader who inspired the title of the biographical book , the Comstock Law had far-reaching tentacles. Even married couples who used contraception could be sentenced to up to one year in prison.

Over time, various challenges to the Comstock Act, including in 1936, which made it possible for physicians to distribute contraception across state lines; in 1964, which established the constitutional right to contraception; and, of course, in 1973, essentially made it unenforceable. However, the law was never repealed and has instead become a “zombie law,” a term used to describe laws still on the books that have been overruled by other legal cases. Take, for instance, Arizona’s 1864 abortion ban, a zombie law that became legally viable after the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade. Though , it still remained on the books long enough to instill fear in those .

Now, after the fall of Roe, Project 2025 plans to revive the zombie Comstock Act and make it workable. Since it’s already on the books, Congress isn’t required to pass the Comstock Act. Instead, a president and appointed judges can choose whether to enforce it. Project 2025 architects hope that, if given another term, Trump will do just that.

A Significant Threat to Abortion

in the U.S. Since Roe fell in June 2022, every single time the issue has been on the ballot, even in traditionally conservative states like Kansas, Montana, and Ohio. While a national abortion ban could threaten congressional seats for Republicans, it would also require control of both houses of Congress and the executive branch, a higher threshold than simply winning the presidency. So, it seems, the architects of Project 2025 have developed a workaround to meet their aims.

After Roe was overturned, issued guidance about whether the Comstock Act could be used to criminalize someone who receives mifepristone and misoprostol through the United States Postal Service. “We conclude that section 1461 does not prohibit the mailing, or the delivery or receipt by mail, of mifepristone or misoprostol where the sender lacks the intent that the recipient of the drugs will use them unlawfully,” the memorandum opinion states. “Federal law does not prohibit the use of mifepristone and misoprostol,” the memorandum continues. “Indeed, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (‘FDA’) has determined the use of mifepristone in a regimen with misoprostol to be safe and effective for the medical termination of early pregnancy.”

But under a Trump presidency, the DOJ would likely have a different view, especially since Project 2025 explicitly calls for “against providers and distributors of [abortion] pills.”

Additionally, the spate of radical, far-right judges Trump appointed during his first term have already proven their willingness to to curb access to abortion. In 2023, , who has deep ties to the anti-abortion movement, defied court precedent to suspend the approval of mifepristone. “The Court does not second-guess FDA’s decision-making lightly,” he wrote in his decision. “But here, FDA acquiesced on its legitimate safety concerns—in violation of its statutory duty—based on plainly unsound reasoning and studies that did not support its conclusions.”

If Trump is able to appoint even more partisan judges like Kacsmaryk to the federal bench, it’s possible they would use the Comstock Act to criminalize folks sending or receiving mifepristone and misoprostol (or even information about it) through the mail. “If the Comstock [Act] were enforced, it would seriously impact the work we do,” says Sneha S. Nair, partnerships coordinator at , a collection of online platforms that provides abortion and contraception information and services. “We rely on digital platforms to share [sexual and reproductive health] content worldwide, and restrictions like the Comstock [Act] could lead to significant censorship and suppression of vital information.”

But even the threat of Comstock being enforced is concerning for abortion advocates and providers. “What people believe the law to be is just as important, if not more so, than what the law actually is,” says Farah Diaz-Tello, senior counsel and legal director at , a legal organization that aims to transform the policy landscape to make reproductive justice a reality. “When people have to second-guess what their options are and they just know that there’s a sort of vague and looming fear of criminalization … that is not a risk that everybody has the privilege to tolerate.”

For Black and Brown people, who have already for pregnancy outcomes, even the threat of an enforceable Comstock Law could be enough of a deterrent to prevent them from seeking necessary care.

Refusing to Be Silent

While Project 2025’s architects may be banking on the Comstock Act, they will have to contend with a network of providers and advocates refusing to put the genie back in the draconian bottle. For example, ’s post-Dobbs campaign, “,” promotes information about and access to medication abortion online.

Similarly, the , a DIY medical collective, has literally turned into medication abortion. Embedded in the cards are three doses of misoprostol, which can be used on its own to induce an abortion, and since it’s a paper card, the pills are harder to detect.

Others believe the best way to combat Project 2025’s insidious ploy to use the Comstock Act as a backdoor abortion ban is to refuse to be cowed into silence about the revolutionary power of being able to terminate a pregnancy in your own home.

Today, the in the U.S. are induced through medication, most often a combination of the drugs mifepristone and misoprostol. Telehealth for abortion care, in which a provider virtually prescribes these drugs to patients, has become , even in states with abortion bans.

“The number of people served through telehealth has just grown exponentially since the pandemic,” says Elisa Wells, co-founder and co-director of , which promotes access to medication abortion online. “[When people find out] that you can get an abortion by the mail, which is a really new idea … they think, ‘Wow, �ٳ󲹳�’s amazing!’”

Research from the revealed that in the second half of 2023, more than 40,000 people in states that restrict telehealth or ban abortion were able to receive medication abortion from providers in that protect providers from being criminalized. Plan C’s website traffic has surged since Dobbs; Wells says they now receive approximately 2 million visitors annually.

There’s also the option of self-managing abortion with abortion pills. For people in states with severe restrictions or bans, self-managed medical abortion with pills has become an option for many who otherwise wouldn’t have access to abortion care. Plan C, for example, showcases many sites that prescribe and mail medication abortion to folks directly, including and .

There is a vast digital ecosystem of medication abortion information and services that abortion seekers can have mailed right to their door—unless Project 2025 goes into effect.

“​​What we are most concerned about is that people have access to accurate information about how to get the pills, how to use the pills, and the fact that in some states there might be legal risks associated with using the pills,” says Wells. “Every day is a risk assessment, and people can make good decisions about their lives. It’s not for me to say about somebody else’s life. What’s the best choice for you?”

But that progress is likely invisible to a casual media consumer, as coverage of these myriad efforts in mainstream media has been cursory, at best. That’s why YES! has created “Realizing Reparations,” a six-part series of deeply reported stories that illuminate the rich ecosystems of reparations already growing throughout the country. We are proud to present this series, funded by a grant from the , during Black History Month. 

As Torsheta Jackson explains in her examination of local reparations efforts, cities such as Evanston and Chicago in Illinois, as well as Asheville, North Carolina, are carrying out their own versions of reparations, paving the way for other cities around the nation to do the same.��

But in Tulsa, Oklahoma, home to arguably the clearest incident of racial harm deserving of compensation, formal reparations efforts have stalled. In a powerful report centered on Greenwood and the aftermath of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, Anneliese Bruner, who has deep roots in that community, explores how the descendants of survivors are rebuilding economic power.��

Meanwhile, the politically powerful state of California has gone the furthest of any state in realizing reparations. As Erin Aubry Kaplan reports, the California legislature is considering a bill based on careful recommendations by a reparations task force that it appointed some years ago. Yet the big question remains: Will there be cash compensation?

Because reparations are not restricted to compensating for the harms of slavery, they must also include recognition of the myriad lost opportunities that slavery’s legacy and ongoing systemic racism continue to deny Black people in the U.S. Torie Weiston Serdan knows firsthand the impact on Black youth who have been deprived of generational wealth. In a report that spans the nation, she examines how Black youth-centered spaces can be a form of reparations for a new generation, and explores the edges of what is possible in an economy that continues to marginalize young people of color.��

There is an urgent need for a cultural shift on reparations at a time when right-wing forces are attacking history education. Given Hollywood and social media’s outsized impact on the public discourse, Jonita Davis scours through pop culture narratives on reparations and finds that young Black influencers are pushing the envelope on how to talk about the issue in simple terms. Our series opens with a forward-thinking report, where Trevor Smith explores what it means to identify as a “reparationist.” Examining how identity politics can further social justice, he raises comparisons to distinct identities such as abolitionist or feminist and leaves readers to consider becoming reparationists on the road toward realizing reparations.

The (Identity) Politics of Reparations

Can “reparationist” be a distinct identity, akin to feminist or abolitionist, a label worn with pride by progressives who believe in reparative compensation for Black people?

By Trevor Smith

How Pop Culture Shapes Reparations

As the movement for reparations gains steam, mainstream and independent content creators continue to find new ways to advance the idea of reparative damages for Black people on screen.

By Jonita Davis

Spaces as Reparations for Black Youth

Investing in programs, resources, and physical spaces by and for Black youth is critical to narrowing generationally inherited disparities in wealth, health, and beyond.

By Torie Weiston-Serdan

Beyond 40 Acres and a Mule

Cities like Evanston, Illinois, and Asheville, North Carolina, are paving the way for local reparations in the absence of a federal plan.

By Torsheta Jackson

Will California Do Reparations Right?

California is closer than any other state to realizing reparations for Black people. Now, the state faces a make-or-break moment.

By Erin Aubry Kaplan

Rebuilding Tulsa With or Without Reparations

Tulsa’s Greenwood District is measuring its wealth in bonds between people and generations, even as reparations for the 1921 massacre remain elusive.

By Anneliese Bruner

More to Explore

YES! was privileged to be the media partner of the inaugural —a historic and unprecedented national convening on reparations hosted by the Decolonizing Wealth Project. For three days in June 2023, hundreds of activists, organizers, politicians, and funders gathered in Atlanta, Georgia, to connect, collaborate, and take action to make reparations a reality in our lifetimes. On the final day of the conference, DWP announced a to support the reparations ecosystem with a new round of direct grantmaking of $3 million to be deployed in 2023, in addition to other resource and education programs to support the reparations movement over the next five years. YES! Senior Editor Sonali Kolhatkar was on location in Atlanta, and had in-depth conversations with more than a dozen leaders in the reparations movement—including elders who have dedicated decades to this fight, and young people who are bringing fresh energy and momentum to the movement.

Watch these exclusive video interviews below:

This series was funded by a grant from Liberated Capital, a fund of the , which is led by Edgar Villanueva, of the Lumbee tribe, and works globally to disrupt the existing systems of moving and controlling capital using education and healing programs, radical reparative giving, and storytelling. Reporting and production of the series was funded by this grant, but YES! maintained full editorial control of the content published herein.Read our editorial independence policy.

While the first ethnic grocery stores—food retailers catering to a migrant or diasporic culture—in the U.S. opened up during the 19th and early 20th centuries in urban minority neighborhoods in major cities, today, such grocery stores have mushroomed around the country, wherever new migrant communities have sprung up. And often, the communities surrounding these businesses are growing more diverse and globalized, even as their storefronts serve as hubs of cultural tradition.��

An Authentic Experience

At , a “Mexicatessen” nestled in San Francisco’s historic Chicano neighborhood, the Mission District, generations of Latin American families have come for enchiladas and tamales that taste homemade for nearly 70 years. The current co-owner, Aida Ibarra, purchased it with family members in 1983 after working for years in the hospitality industry.

The work of managing a specialty kitchen and catering and wholesale operation that supplies local restaurants, with just a handful of employees, is grueling. When the city was largely shuttered during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Ibarra recalled how she felt an obligation to , even though their business had suffered as the restaurants they usually supplied had closed. To limit the number of shoppers inside the store, customers had to line up outside, which frustrated some, but in the end, she recalled, “a lot of our customers thanked us for staying open. I guess they knew that it was a risk for us, too.”&�Բ�����;

Although La Palma’s retail offerings are not as unique as when it was one of the city’s only Latino-owned businesses in the 1950s, Ibarra says it’s still the best spot in town to buy handmade tortillas, completely sourced in-house, right down to the corn kernels they painstakingly grind into masa. Compared with mass-produced tortillas from the supermarket, the taste is “a world of difference.”

“I think you have to experience, one time in your lifetime, a handmade tortilla or a handmade ,” she says. “Just because you ��Dz�’t know what you’re missing, you really ��Dz�’t, until you try it. … Ask them to give it to you from the grill.”

A Cultural Epiphany

In a Twin Cities suburb, the aromas of roasted lechon belly and fried fish cut through the frigid Minnesota winter air, comforting local Filipino immigrants, for whom Watson Fong founded his 2,000-square-foot grocery store several years ago.  draws Filipinos from as far as South Dakota and other neighboring states, because, unlike coastal cities, the Midwest has few grocery stores that specialize in Pinoy items, like pancit noodles, banana ketchup, and ube ice cream. 

Asian Mart is also , many of whom work in local health care facilities; Fong says it’s not unusual for friends to bump into each other after years of separation. The store has also been a local hub for the Philippines’ remittance economy by serving as a shipping point for boxes of American goods gifted to loved ones at home. 

Besides offering nostalgic items, like  and shampoo powder, Fong tries to provide a homey ambiance for Filipinos in an unfamiliar landscape. “We even play Filipino music so it feels like home, especially wintertime like this. We have snow. So, it’s really kind of very depressing compared to our weather, which is a very tropical climate,” he says, noting that for mixed Filipino and native-born American couples, “the Americans appreciate [us], because now they said their wives, their spouses, are not lonely now or homesick because of this store.”

Keeping up with the times, Asian Mart’s website takes online orders. But Fong thinks the brick-and-mortar store’s strength is the power of epiphany, when customers discover the things they did not know they were looking for. Customers might come in saying, “Oh, I just came here for a fish sauce,” he says, but leave with much more: “They can see a lot of things, the things that they can’t see from other stores. So they grab it.”

Culture as Comfort

Having grown up in a Vietnamese immigrant household, Maddie Nguyen felt a sense of familiarity in the Asian grocery stores she researched for her . Although the owners were Chinese, she was surrounded by foods common to both cultures, like fish sauce, coagulated blood, and rice flour, sometimes sold loose with handwritten signs, like a classic street market. But, in addition to helping communities meet their practical needs, she found that the Asian grocers in New Haven, Connecticut, also created cultural safe spaces. 

When browsing the stores, she felt “relaxed and comfortable being able to hear other people speak languages that weren’t English. Even though it was Chinese, and I ��Dz�’t speak or understand Chinese. It was still comforting to hear that, because now I just felt safer, like, in my own skin. And �ٳ󲹳�’s something that I ��Dz�’t feel in the white American grocery stores.”

Nguyen’s auto-ethnographic research found that in addition to contributing to local cultural development, ethnic mom-and-pop shops can deeply enhance food security in working-class immigrant communities that otherwise have limited healthy food options. Public-health authorities should recognize the vital role ethnic grocery stores play in providing access to foods that are both nutritious and culturally relevant, she says, “because nostalgia plays such an important role in our relationship with food. And if [consumers] are not invoking some sort of emotional reaction when it comes to food, why would we really want to invest in that? If it’s a food that we have no idea how to cook or use, or it doesn’t elicit some form of comfort or happiness, why would we choose that?”

Eating Like Their Ancestors

Moses Ufomba started  in the Bronx 17 years ago for immigrants who longed for yams and cassava in the land of potatoes. Part of his mission, Ufomba says, is to source natural ingredients for traditional African cookery that can be difficult to find in the U.S., such as ugba (fermented oil bean seeds), dried smoked fish, and imported frozen African vegetables. 

Ufomba, who migrated from Nigeria to attend graduate school at Columbia University before starting his own business, sees his store as an opportunity to preserve ethnic foodways that are healthier than the typical American diet.

“The average diet of the African and African family is not sugar coated,” Ufomba says. “The average meal in America is [full of] sugar. … Sugar is a poison.” He believes that, in contrast to a place like New York City, the food and environment in Africa helps keep the body in balance, “because in Africa we sweat. You eat, you sweat, and you remove some toxins. But here, six months in the year, you’re not sweating, because it’s cold. And then you load your body with sugar. You’re killing yourself. So �ٳ󲹳�’s why Africans want to eat their own food, the food they know.”

Of course, Western influence still manifests in his inventory. Many items reflect the influences of colonization and globalization that link the peoples of the Caribbean and Africa, like Heinz Baked Beans, Nestlé milk drink powder, and instant ramen packets that have become a ubiquitous convenience meal across the Global South. And, with an inventory that encompasses multiple African and West Indian cuisines, and customers who also include white and Spanish-speaking people, he is not too much of a purist when it comes to serving the tastes of the diaspora. 

“Any wise African that comes here must be open minded to learn, mix with people as much as possible, but not to give away your identity,” he says.

Safe Spaces

Every Ramadan, during Muslims’ month-long fast, Anas Dabbour helps his parents, immigrants from Syria, , rice, and other traditional homestyle foods daily, inviting everyone—fasting or not, regardless of religion—to an iftar at the . The food is always free, sponsored by an anonymous donor.

“Just to be able to hand those platters out,” Dabbour says, “[to] see the happiness on the face of the people who are getting the food … we’re part of something much bigger than just people coming to eat, you know?” 

The Al-Amana Grocery Store, which his parents have run for about two decades, is a cultural fulcrum within Al-Aqsa. Serving Middle Eastern staples, like kufta, shawarma, and falafel, the shop also provides meals to students at the Islamic Society’s school, the Aqsa Academy.

Dabbour began working at the store as a child, around the time his father enrolled him in the academy in order to keep him safe. After the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, with anti-Muslim sentiment raging across the country, his parents decided to transfer him from the local public school to a place where his cultural identity would be embraced instead of shunned. 

After school, he would stay in the store as his parents worked late, translating between English and Arabic for customers, bagging groceries, and discovering how gratifying it was to relieve his parents of even a little bit of the daily burden of running the business. 

Dabbour still sees his role in the store as helping the Al-Aqsa community interface with the outside world. When he welcomes new customers, he says he is “able to explain to my neighbors, ‘Hey, our doors are open. We’re very friendly. [Ask] any questions you guys have, whether it’s about the store, the school, the religion, the Friday sermon, the call for prayer.’ … Sometimes, people will be like, ‘Oh, man, I heard this beautiful voice reciting something in Arabic. I have no clue what it is.’” For Dabbour, “just to have the opportunity to be able to speak about it … is a very, very wonderful thing.”

Plant-Based, Before It Was Cool

Sometimes, a store stumbles upon a tradition that has become trendy again. , one of California’s most established emporiums for South Asian snacks and sundries, began as a nondescript storefront in Culver City that Raj Kumar Jawa purchased in the early 1980s with money he had scraped together from doing odd jobs, like dishwashing and selling swimsuits on Venice Beach. Over the next 20 years, he launched a string of sister stores across California (and one branch in Oregon), catering to the region’s growing Asian immigrant communities.

Since Jawa started producing homemade hot foods, like samosas, to sell for “a dollar a dish” to desi university students, the store’s deli section has since become a go-to for local plant-based eaters, featuring a fulsome menu of dals, curries, chaats, dosas, and Indian sweets by the pound (plus, a more modern addition, the veggie burger). Jawa estimates that his eatery now attracts mostly non-South Asian customers.

“It used to be when you say vegetarian food, people say, ‘Ugh, vegetarian food—you’re feeding us grass,’ and they … go out and leave,” he recalls. “Now, �ٳ󲹳�’s changed [in the] last 20 years. People are looking for vegetarian food. They are looking for vegan food. … They appreciate it.”

The hot foods keep foot traffic coming through his doors even as e-commerce threatens to lure away customers who can buy a multitude of South Asian ingredients online. 

“Amazon is hurting the small businesses and medium businesses right now because they have almost everything. You can order anything there,” he says. But he’s confident that people will always want to experience his store in person, so they can ask questions about the spices they’re buying, or simply sit down to a hot meal served by real people: “For a business like mine … people come to eat food. They ��Dz�’t want to eat through Amazon.”&�Բ�����;

The Future of the Ethnic Grocery Store

As much as the ethnic grocery store has historically served as a cultural pillar of immigrant communities, in many U.S. cities, the rising cost of living, competition from online food delivery services, and displacement of non-white neighborhoods through gentrification could undermine long-standing immigrant-run retail stores and markets.

These stores must also grapple with the question of succession. Overall, over half of private firms in the U.S. today (which are mostly small businesses) are . Only a small percentage of these are passed down to family members; others may struggle to find a buyer or simply close down when the owners retire. Since their main aim in business was always earning a living rather than cultural preservation, owners of small ethnic groceries might be happy to see their children move onto a secure professional job, instead of the messy, exhausting work of running a store.

Ibarra has been thinking about the future of La Palma in a rapidly gentrifying San Francisco. Earning enough revenue to keep up with their fixed costs is “very hard, because the city requires a lot of rules … and the cost of living is so high. But then, if you look at a store like ours, we can only sell a burrito for so much, you know?” She worries about how “we have to work harder now and serve more people, so that we can make the wages that we need for the people.”

There are not many businesses of La Palma’s vintage left in the Mission. Ibarra fears what would happen to the community of loyal customers that it has built over the decades if it closes. But she is not sure who could take over the business; the day-to-day management of such an idiosyncratic, personal enterprise has consumed most of her life—15 years without a vacation—and it will be difficult to find a successor. 

As for her children succeeding her, she says, “We told them, ‘You have to love this business to stay here. You have to really love it, and you have to learn every corner of it. Because when [the staff] call in and say they’re sick, you better know how to run that machine. You better know how to step in the kitchen.’”

For Dabbour, his family store’s kitchen seems to be his fate. He says his parents have always encouraged him to pursue his own career path, and he did go to community college to train in hospitality management and culinary arts, but he still gravitated back to the shop, helping to nourish a new generation of schoolchildren in the diaspora community that his parents helped create. He looks forward to his parents being able to retire comfortably at some point, though he is not sure when that will happen, because they remain so committed to the store. “Being in the food business for as long as we’ve been, it is something that comes to mind: Man, are we going to do this for the rest of our lives?” Nonetheless, he adds, the daily toil “keeps my parents young,” giving them a sense of spiritual purpose.

Dabbour believes he will eventually inherit Al-Amana, though he is wary of all the labor involved in running the store. “I have no problem with taking over the business,” he says, but asks himself, “Do I want to keep busting my butt for a few dollars?”

Still, he is driven to follow his parents’ path, shepherding the continuity of the community that raised him. “Seeing the people we interact with, seeing the little ones grow up to be young adults now, it is something that makes you feel like, you know what, it’s not really work. It’s more of a service.”

CORRECTION: This story was updated at 11:30 a.m. PT on Dec. 28, 2022 to note that several major cities, including those not on either coast, had immigrant-run grocery stores in the 19th century. Read our corrections policy.

This story is part of Building the Block, an original YES! series supported by a grant from the , which encourages the development of burgeoning alternative economies and fresh social contracts in ways that can help artists and cultural communities achieve financial freedom. Reporting and production of this story was funded by this grant, but YES! maintains full editorial control of the content published herein. Read our editorial independence policy.

The context is challenging: According to the Ministry of Health of Santiago del Estero, 31.1% of children under 5 in the province suffer from chronic malnutrition. At the same time, poverty among children between 0 and 14 years of age is 56.2%, according to 2023 data from the National Institute of Statistics and Census (INDEC). 

Housing is precarious, many residents lack access to drinking water or sanitation, and unemployment and under-employment abound. “My husband is away on a trip,” say almost all the women I visit. Most of the men are seasonal workers: They are hired seasonally by rural companies in other provinces and leave their homes and families for several weeks at a time.

“The combination of comprehensive care of the child by specialized professionals and the training of the mother in daily care is the best strategy for the psychomotor recovery and the recovery of the children’s weight and height,” says Gabriela Rao, who leads early development for the NGO Haciendo Camino.

Haciendo Camino has 12 centers in Santiago del Estero and Chaco, two of Argentina’s poorest provinces. Last year, 1,646 children (most under age 5) received comprehensive care and 2,947 children underwent growth controls. In addition, 1,413 mothers participated in health education talks, received family support, and were empowered to become agents of change in their communities. Of these mothers, 120 attended the center located in Herrera.

More than two years passed between when Demir was in his mother’s womb and the day he received his nutritional discharge. During that time, his mother, Cinthia Farias, age 31, regularly took him to the Haciendo Camino center in Herrera, where the organization works with mothers of children suffering from malnutrition. There, Farias learned about the importance of incorporating vegetables, fruits, and proteins in her son’s diet and how to establish a bond with him focused on his needs through play. 

“I made my baby’s first baby blanket and changing table at the Haciendo Camino center. They also taught me how to breastfeed and start feeding him. I learned things I didn’t know with my first daughter, Ivana, like avoiding sodas and juices and instead giving her lots of fruits,” she tells me as she leaves her consultation with nutritionist Greta Willi, who also suggested that Demir start eating with a plate more similar to the rest of the family.

“We took an integrated care model from CONIN, the Argentine foundation dedicated to combating child malnutrition. That is, providing nutritional assistance with social support and a focus on early development. We noticed that it worked for the mothers to have spaces such as handicraft or education workshops in addition to coming for check-ups,” says Cecilia Lecolant, director of the Herrera center, after making rice pudding for the afternoon snack during a break in the early education at home program’s biweekly meeting.

“The Haciendo Camino programs aim to provide nutritional treatment and accompany the families in their homes,” adds Natalia Fernández, who leads the nutrition program.

During the 3-hour program, participants learn practical aspects of parenting at home. This afternoon, Lecolant leads the workshop. She proposes that they make posters to prevent childhood accidents based on their own experiences. One idea they came up with is keeping medicine out of children’s reach.

About 19 women are usually invited to each meeting, and about 12 attend, most of them in their 20s and 30s.

“Once the nutrition program was up and running with the integrated methodology, we noticed that even families with children without malnutrition wanted to stay connected,” says Lecolant.

Haciendo Camino thus added the early education at home service, which follows a logic similar to that of nutrition but with a greater emphasis on promoting parenting, a set of practices centered on respectful treatment and adapted to children’s interests. 

Beatriz Gómez, 26, has a shyness that is not seen in any of her three children: Sebana, age 8, Valentina, 6, and Gael, 2. They play in and around the house, surrounded by chickens. Gómez attended the Haciendo Camino Center with the three of them. She works cleaning a church, and her partner assembles bags of charcoal in the village when he’s not a seasonal worker.

“I participated in talks and sewing workshops. For example, I learned what to give them when [they are] sick or have a fever. It helped me in the development of my children,” she says. However, not everything started well: “It was hard for me to adapt; I thought they were going to be mean and that they were going to challenge me because my daughter was underweight, that they were going to ask me why I hadn’t taken her [to the center] earlier. But instead, they congratulated me for taking her,” she recalls.

Trust is an important pillar of Haciendo Camino’s work.

“Some [of the women] are waiting to meet you to open up. And it’s good for them when we sometimes open up and tell them things like ‘This happened to me too,’” adds Silvia Burgos. She is one of the leaders at the center in Herrera. “I like how they treat us and what they teach us about how a child should develop. For example, I learned not to sit her down so early,” says Fabiana Maldonado, 33, after reviewing a booklet on baby behavior. Her daughter, Larisa, a year and a half old, sits off to the side looking withdrawn. Maldonado tells us she just stopped breastfeeding.

At Haciendo Camino, many women are able to meet professionals and other mothers whom they can trust. According to an impact evaluation of the NGO’s programs carried out last year by the Argentine Catholic University, “The deficit of social support perceived by the women mothers is greater in the participating group because they do not have someone who can help them in the preparation of meals, they do not have someone to talk to, or to help them with the care of the children.”

Knowing this, the women’s wary (perhaps even fearful) faces make even more sense.

“Mothers lack a lot of knowledge about their rights and those of their children, and we put a lot of emphasis on teaching them that, especially through workshops and talks,” Mendoza says. “For example, we work with many women who suffer gender violence. We try to empower them, show them that it is not normal, and that they should not allow certain situations in their homes.”

In addition to assisting with paperwork (for example, with the municipality, the Health Post, or obtaining subsidies or documents), the social program also works on hygiene and safety habits. Although the program is not exclusively for women, in practice, it is mothers who attend. Fathers usually spend a large part of the day out of the house working, and it is important that mothers take care of their upbringing. “I’m happy that my wife and children go to the center,” Mario, 27, the father of Alejo (6 years) and Neythan (15 months), tells me. He is the only adult male I came across during my visits to the homes of those who attend the center.

Siesta (nap) time has been over for a while, but the peaceful rhythm in the rural area of Herrera is not disturbed as Flavia Pérez, 30, excuses herself and takes a basin with clothes hanging a few meters away. We wait for her, sitting in front of Giovanni, her 6-month-old son, and Romeo, her oldest son, who is 5 years old, with whom Pérez started attending Haciendo Camino.

Valeria Carabajal, the referent in charge of the visit, takes out a bubble box to show to Giovanni. Pérez brings the textured blanket she assembled for her son to sit on the floor. Carabajal teaches Pérez songs and emphasizes the importance of her child looking in the mirror.

“The A-B-C of what we want to transmit at [the early education at home program] is the importance of playing with the children, bonding with the baby, talking to him, and paying attention to his needs. We see progress in families when they have a daily space for play and bonding,” says Lecolant.

“They teach us to play and enjoy the moments with them,” says Marisol Paz, 24, mother of Neythan and Alejo. Meanwhile, Maldonado laughs, saying that her daughter Larisa “looks in the mirror and pretends to be pretty.”

For many, this playful part of parenting is a real discovery. “Many moms have told us, ‘[My parents] didn’t play with me.’ So we have to try to make the idea click and invite them to try how it feels for the child. That’s where the differences are noticeable,” says Lecolant.

“During visits, you sense when there is someone else in the house, especially the mother-in-law,” Burgos tells me. “‘I have raised [children] like this and like that’ is the grandparents’ catchphrase.”

Poverty and under-employment in the area are just some of the challenges in raising children in small towns in Argentina. “On the one hand, perhaps there are recommendations that clash a lot with what the family thinks, and they are not convinced. It’s not that they ��Dz�’t believe what we propose is correct, but sometimes they seem offended when we insist on some aspects, such as the importance of breastfeeding or a varied diet,” says Lecolant.

Lecolant also points out that at the nutritional level, “Many habits are rooted in the local culture. For example, the iconic food is the stew, which is a response to an economic issue, because you disguise the meal for the whole family with a little piece of meat or some chicken giblets. But perhaps with the same ingredients, you can make a less overcooked dish or use a legume to make it more nutritious. And at snack time, mate cocido (mate tea) with bizcochos (biscuits) is very popular.”

Another challenge for the organization is achieving frequent attendance of mothers at the center. Many are often absent due to their lack of mobility to travel from their homes in remote areas, or the fact that they take care of their children alone.

“These days of humidity make the floor very ugly,” says one mother.

“You can put cardboard on the floor,” says Coria Olivera. She also asks her to create a mobile by hanging different objects so the child can reach them.

“The main lesson they teach you is to adapt to what is available, both in the activities and the meals. Sometimes they ask us to incorporate an ingredient that I ��Dz�’t have, and they give me ideas to replace it,” Pérez tells me at her home. After hanging up the clothes, she unfolds a blanket for Giovanni to play on.

Gómez shares another example of how the integrated care model takes different forms. “It’s hard for me to do the activities in the booklet because I can’t read or write, but they told me that if I forget, I can send an audio message.”

“We try to make sure that the work with each family is tailored to them. There are no prefabricated recipes of what the family should or should not do. For example, we will not ask them to buy beef every five days. We try to get them to replace these proteins with cheese, eggs, or legumes,” explains Lecolant. 

The center’s director also says they sometimes work with other civil and state organizations. For example, the Civil Registry processed ID cards for children who were still undocumented. And the Health Post helped to complete the vaccination schedule for those who are behind on their vaccinations.

Photos stand in for trophies in the office where Willi, the nutritionist, interviews mothers with their children: Photos of the children who were discharged after being admitted with signs of malnutrition, along with the height and weight at which they entered the program and at which they were discharged.

The impact on parenting is, a priori, less quantitatively measurable, says Lecolant. 

In 2023, the Argentine Catholic University’s Social Debt Observatory conducted an impact evaluation of Haciendo Camino’s programs. “The programs evaluated have positive effects on structural aspects of a child’s first years of life, such as weight, and developmental aspects such as communication, expression, and problem-solving skills,” says one of the reports from the evaluation.

“Many families point out that the children who participated in the program have an easier time or are more receptive to the activities in kindergarten. Especially those with older children who did not go through the program notice the difference,” says Lecolant. I think of Alejo, Paz’s son, who proudly showed me the medal he received at the end of preschool. His mother told me how what she learned in the Hacienda Camino programs and put into practice had helped the boy to stand out in his classroom. 

Participants expressed enthusiasm for Haciendo Camino, according to the reports: “The evaluation in terms of satisfaction with the program is excellent in 33%, very good in 35%, and good in 29%. About 2.6% rated it as fair or bad. What stands out from experience is having learned aspects of baby care and stimulation (81%), issues related to feeding (66%), aspects of baby development (62%), handicrafts (58%), health care (55.6%), and to a lesser extent aspects of hygiene, sex education, and human rights.” What these indicators say is echoed to me by the mothers themselves during our spontaneous conversations.

As we walk with Lecolant along the main street of Herrera, the only paved street in the town, a mother from the early education at home group approaches us and explains to the center’s director that she cannot attend in the afternoon. They agreed that she should come the next day when the mothers from the nutrition group were there. Lecolant emphasizes, “It is very gratifying that the families show such interest in attending.

Hours later, Pérez will summarize why many moms like her choose to maintain the link with Haciendo Camino: “It’s a place where they help us with what each one needs, where we can always come.”

This story was (Argentina) and is republished within the program, supported by the ICFJ, .

To Anderson, the question epitomizes the problem she’s trying to solve as founder of Free Food Fridge Albany: A prevailing attitude that poor, Black, Indigenous, and people of color, as well as others who disproportionately face food insecurity, deserve only leftovers, day-old bread, or scraps. The Free Food Fridge flips that idea on its head.

“[Food] seemed so inaccessible to me because food insecurity is something that I dealt with, and because we live in a city, you ��Dz�’t really see where the food is coming from,” Anderson says.

The problem is not only an economic one, or one of food scarcity, but also of food accessibility.

“This is all fresh food from the earth that people who are going food-insecure should be able to have.”&�Բ�����;

A community activist, yoga teacher, and doula, Anderson launched Free Food Fridge Albany last summer, at the height of the pandemic and resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement. As a Black woman, she wanted to push herself, and White allies, to be less performative and more action-oriented when it came to addressing systemic inequities. That’s when she started thinking about food. 

Food insecurity in the United States,  as the consistent lack of food on a household level, severely increased during the spring of 2020 when the coronavirus swept across the globe. The pandemic exposed the tremendous faults in our structural systems—specifically our economy. Anderson knew the problem would only worsen as neighborhoods already cut off from resources were disproportionately harmed by the economic shutdown, and millions across the country lost their jobs. In the Albany metro area,  compared to the previous year. 

The problem is not only an economic one, or one of food scarcity, but also of food accessibility. Enough food is produced around the globe to feed every human, , yet hundreds of millions go hungry every day. 

“What can I do? What gap can I fill? How can I make something like food more accessible to people in the neighborhoods where there aren’t grocery stores?” Anderson recalls asking herself.

So she put out a call to her , and someone suggested starting a free fridge. The concept is simple: In cities all over the country, vibrantly painted fridges sit on city sidewalks, stocked daily with donations of fresh food. Anyone is welcome to take as much as they need, no questions asked. 

Within a few hours, Anderson had a contact at Lowe’s and a new fridge on her hands. A single location on Elm Street in Albany has since grown to  across the metro region. They’re stocked and supported by a local grocery store, nearby farms and restaurants, and individual volunteers—as well as more than 500 people who donate funds monthly via Patreon.

Fridge beneficiaries can retrieve anything from milk to veggies and prepared meals. It’s impossible to count just how many people have benefited—the system is anonymous by design—but Anderson says it’s been “extraordinary” to see the impact: residents enjoying fresh okra for the first time in decades because it’s been mostly unavailable in Albany; neighbors forming relationships with local farmers; even some folks who relied on the fridges earlier in the year now have the resources to donate to it.

“That’s been a really beautiful turnaround,” Anderson beams.

Anderson’s effort is only one of a global network of community fridges known as the Freedge movement that has expanded during the pandemic. , a database and resource provider for community fridge networks, counts hundreds of locations across the U.S., . Many of these efforts sprung up to meet an acute need: increased levels of food insecurity during the pandemic. But the leaders in this movement see the fridges as part of a larger, long-term mutual aid effort that can solve systemic issues.

“A fridge by itself is just an individual action, but [with] many fridges, many projects, all of these other mutual aid groups together, �ٳ󲹳�’s now a collective,” says Ernst Bertone Oehninger, a founder of Freedge.

Bertone Oehninger sees the fridges as a visible reminder that many people ��Dz�’t have access to enough food, and also a gateway that could create enough food for all through larger efforts that include the people power of mutual aid projects.

“The fridge doesn’t solve food insecurity. What it does well is start a conversation about food insecurity,” Bertone Oehninger says. And that conversation can lead to a new urban farm, or more urban kitchens, or even systematic changes on a policy level.

A Global Problem

The world , but there are big problems in distribution, access, and waste, explains Nancy Roman, president and CEO of the Partnership for a Healthier America, and a “food systems champion” for the United Nations Food Systems Summit 2021. In the U.S., a half-eaten hamburger might end up in the garbage can, while in other parts of the world, crops may be left rotting in the field because there’s no infrastructure to get them to market. And even in countries where food is plentiful, it can be unaffordable for some and difficult to access for others.

That leaves nearly 10% of the global population—746 million people—, according to 2019 data from the United Nations. In the U.S., that number was about 35 million in 2019, .

With hunger and undernutrition, we know exactly what we need to do. It’s simply a matter of making it a priority.

“It’s gotten much worse because of COVID-19, because the people who lost their jobs were disproportionately the lowest income,” says Roman. “People who were living on the margins got pushed into abject hunger.”

Permanently fixing these complicated barriers to food access—financial or otherwise—will come down to political will, Roman says.

“With hunger and undernutrition, we know exactly what we need to do. It’s simply a matter of making it a priority,” she says. 

That’s why her organization is calling for a cabinet-level position on food, and wants to see food infrastructure incorporated into President Joe Biden’s $2.6 trillion American Jobs Plan. But in the meantime, the nonprofit, which works to increase access to healthy food, has multiple programs distributing meal kits to families in need around the country, in an effort to build the habit of cooking at home with fresh foods.

A Grassroots Solution

The community fridge networks offer a more immediate solution. 

“The existence of mutual aid is an expression of that frustration with the system. We’re not getting the things that we need, therefore we must do it ourselves,” says Christine Tran, executive director of the Los Angeles Food Policy Council. 

Tran locates the need for community fridges in the same problem that Roman sees: A lack of equitable distribution of the abundance of food we already have. 

“We grow food for the world but can’t feed ourselves. And that says so much about the disconnections that exist within and across our food system,” Tran says.

And so the community fridge networks take matters into their own hands, helping communities to help themselves and build systems of support.

Bertone Oehninger realized this back in 2014 as a graduate student at the University of California, Davis. He was inspired by mutual aid efforts he saw while living and traveling in Europe. Concerned about food insecurity in his own community, he plopped a fridge in his front yard and started offering free food to his neighborhood. 

It only lasted two months before the fridge was impounded by health inspectors. But Bertone Oehninger and his friends kept trying, moving the fridges around and eventually figuring out how to comply with health regulations. By 2016, the group had started fridges all over the U.S., some more successful than others.

“We realized that the fridges that really work well are the fridges that are started by the community, not by an outsider,” Bertone Oehninger says.

So the Freedge website was born as a resource center that could support a decentralized network of fridges started by folks in their own communities. 

Tran, who was a “free lunch kid” growing up, didn’t start the L.A. community fridge network, but she quickly came to support it as part of her organization’s work “connecting the dots” of the local food system. 

There is little evidence on the impact community fridges have had on food insecurity—in large part because the system is anonymous and decentralized—but Tran said it has had a positive impact locally.

“It really destigmatizes what support looks like,” Tran says of the fridges. Anyone in the community can come to grab free food, with no strings attached.

It is also shows there is enough healthy food available for those who are most in need.

Successes and Limitations

Anderson was not an expert in food policy when she started putting fridges around Albany. While she sees the benefits of the project, she also realizes it does not solve the problem entirely.

“We are taking away many barriers, and we’re putting it right in your face, but it’s still not enough,” Anderson says. “I shouldn’t have to put Band-Aids on things like food insecurity. It’s the systemic part of it. Yes, I am putting a Band-Aid on, but if you look at the whole wall, it’s all cracking. It’s about to come down.”

If we truly want everyone to have enough food, Anderson says, we need to look at the bigger picture, which includes making sure people have enough money to buy the food they need, making sure the abundance of food we already have is distributed effectively, and making sure young people are learning how to grow and cook their own food.

“It seems like a privilege to be able to grow your own food. And it’s not. It’s a human right. It’s a basic need, it’s a necessity to be able to grow your own food and eat it,” Anderson says.

Even as the pandemic ebbs and momentum for the Black Lives Matter movement slows, Anderson hopes communities can continue the cycle of exchange they developed during the past year.

“This is a wake-up call. We need to stop placing the blame on the people who need the things, and realize that we all are living in abundance,”&�Բ�����;Anderson says.

Palestine is a nation in pieces, pockmarked and cut up by the Israeli occupation through borders, walls, checkpoints, and siege. The Gaza Strip, a tiny segment of land that lies along the Mediterranean Sea, is the clearest manifestation of what absolute domination looks like. Gaza has been cut off from the rest of Palestine by a 15-year Israeli-Egyptian blockade.

In 2014, Israel carried out Operation Protective Edge that brought ever further devastation to this beleaguered strip. In response, the late Michael Sorkin gathered his team at Terreform—designers, environmentalists, planners, activists, and scholars—to think through productive interventions for Gaza. The result was , which I co-edited with Michael.

Open Gaza is a book that engages this space beyond the logic of bombing and blockade. It considers how life could be improved in Gaza within the limitations imposed by Israeli oppression and aggression but also reaches beyond this framework of endless war to imagine Gaza in a future without conflict. The work, however, toward a post-conflict Gaza in which Palestinians are able to live in freedom, equality, and dignity remains.  

In May 2021, Gaza was once again the focal point of global attention but one firmly fixated on the logic of bombing and blockade. Following Israeli attempts to evict Palestinians from the neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah in Jerusalem and Israeli police breaking into and desecrating the al-Aqsa mosque, Hamas gave an ultimatum to Israel to evacuate these places.

Israel ignored the warning and Hamas fired a barrage of rockets from Gaza. Israel subsequently launched Operation Guardian of the Walls, the fourth major assault on Gaza in the past decade. In 2012, the United Nations famously published a report that questioned whether Gaza would still be .

Today, Gaza remains inhabited but in conditions that are uninhabitable and unjust. However, spaces of hope continue to exist in this beleaguered community. This latest round of conflict has illustrated the extent to which Palestine and Palestinians, from Gaza to Jerulsalem, remain a connected people despite the divisions that have been imposed upon them. —Deen Sharp

The Importance of Everyday Life

In 1968, the eminent American urbanist Lewis Mumford published a scathing critique of a proposed Israeli master plan for Jerusalem. For Mumford, the Jerusalem master plan, as , “exhibited the disciplinary hubris that in his view marked so much mid-century urban design thinking—the technocratic belief in data, a valorization of quantifiable progress over immeasurable cultural and ecological values.”

Almost 50 years later, Gaza in 2021 is facing a similar set of issues to those identified by Mumford. In the aftermath of the latest Israeli siege, once again numerous statistical summaries and infographics are being published by international organizations about the dire reality of the Gaza Strip. These technical studies will turn the everyday realities and the suffering of the Palestinian people into mere abstractions requiring technical interventions that sidestep the questions of justice, equality, and social values.

In my contribution to Open Gaza, I stress the importance of everyday life, the individuals, the culture of the extended families and the children, as well as the donkey and the chicken. I offer a visual analysis of the existing objects that surround Gaza’s inhabitants and the buildings in which they—and I—live. It considers the capacity and adaptability of architectural design and spatial reorganization in Gaza to provide relief in situations of scarcity.

I respond to the expectations of various beneficiaries, while at the same time integrate a design component and aesthetic that acknowledges the possibilities of a different and improved future, albeit imagined at this stage. The contribution further draws on my architectural background, linking emergency and architectural site-work to fieldwork research and thus exploring the potential of social and physical mapping as research tools.

To identify the fundamental reconstruction constraints for low-income extended families in rural and marginalized areas, a design-based case study of the Rehabilitation of Damaged Houses project is featured as a critical appraisal of one of my related projects undertaken in the Gaza Strip.

In terms of developing a new and longer-term reconstruction methodology, I argue that examining Gaza’s current sociocultural context through the lens of the “architecture of the everyday” not only restores personal agency, but also reveals future creative possibilities for built environments where few exist. The aim of my contribution is to make a sustainable form of self-build architecture that families can build themselves. This also challenges, if not contradicts, the well-intentioned but ultimately demeaning “eat to survive” approach that informs the work of many international aid organizations in Gaza.

This research is a contribution toward the reconstruction process in Gaza, in which I see myself as a facilitator, a bridge to transfer knowledge back and forth, challenging the siege. But most importantly, I see my work as contributing to change on the ground that lays the foundation for future efforts by the inhabitants of Gaza themselves.

The goal is to empower Gazans, making them self-sufficient and able to make use of existing resources without having to rely on Israel or any other external sources for building materials. Although the focus of this research is on Gaza, its findings will benefit reconstruction efforts in other conflict zones in the Middle East—Syria, Iraq, and Libya—where human displacement is a defining problem and post-conflict reconstruction of the built environment is an urgent need. —Salem Al Qudwa

The Ability to Dream is Fundamental to Liberation

As Gaza was being barraged by Israeli bombs earlier this year, I felt completely numb. Glued to my phone, I was following every minute and every image of death and destruction. I wandered about my day in New York in a dissociative sense of disbelief, wishing I was in Jerusalem with my family.

In Jerusalem we obsessively long for Gaza because Gaza is the one stretch of Palestine that Palestinians from Jerusalem are barred from visiting. I have never once stepped foot in Gaza. And likewise, many Gazans have never stepped foot in Jerusalem, a mere 45 miles away. Geographic proximity coupled with this immeasurable distance between our two cities results in our inability to see Gaza for what it is.

We instead opt to mythologize each other in the hope of forming a connection. This distance also leads to a paralyzing inability to think about Gaza, to imagine it beyond the Israeli blockade and the incremental genocide of its people. A goal of the Israeli blockade is to fragment the Palestinian psyche and to limit the ways in which we imagine our future liberation. If an entire generation cannot see Gaza, how will they know it exists? 

In my co-authored piece for Open Gaza, “Timeless Gaza,” we unlearned Gaza as a strip, an enclave, a territory, and a periphery; all terms favored by colonial regimes. Instead we wanted to learn, and dream, about Gaza as a center, a connected node, a focal point. The 1880 Conder, C. R. and H. H. Kitchener Map of Western Palestine and other British Ordnance Surveys and military maps from 1917, 1918, and 1925 all studied Gaza and its environment as one of Palestine’s central nodes, integral to the rest of the country.

Setting the British maps’ obvious violent disposition aside, they provided us with evidence of a connected Gaza, reachable by land, air, and sea. “Timeless Gaza” proposes an alternate timeline collapsed into a singular frame that obliterates the Israeli blockade, at least from our psyche. This is a Gaza that has never been severed from its hinterland or from its past: all of Gaza’s eras, monuments, and roads are alive and well, the city serving as a regional hub on the Mediterranean. At times the exercise felt futile but what became abundantly clear is that our collective ability to dream of decolonization is fundamental to forming a path to liberation.

The Palestinian popular revolt of 2021, an ongoing effort to reimagine, reconnect, and strengthen communal and familial bonds between Palestinians across Palestine, is evidence of Israeli failure to fragment Palestine. The blockade on Gaza failed at severing Gaza from Palestinians in the West Bank, Jerusalem, and 1948.

Palestinians think and talk about Gaza daily. The Israeli siege on East Jerusalem—a multiheaded plan that uses apartheid laws, de-development policies, settler expansionism, and the separation wall—has also failed to cut off and transform Jerusalem’s Palestinians into a subdued labor force. It has instead mobilized them to organize and strengthen their political consciousness. —Mahdi Sabbagh

, edited by Michael Sorkin and Deen Sharp, is published by Terreform and AUC Press. Read an essay about the book, Gaza, A Surprising Model for Urban Living, in the Fall 2021 issue of YES! magazine.

The court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson may have been designed to send pregnant people back to the 1950s, but the oral arguments surfaced an idea that could only be at home today. It was the idea that abortion was no longer necessary. Things had changed since 1973, one Supreme Court justice pointed out in their only question. There may have been a time when women needed the right to abortion, but not now. Today women were free.

The source of this “freedom” was about as ghastly as it gets. “Safe-haven laws” allow birthing people to abandon their newborns in places like fire and police stations without facing criminal prosecution. If it was so easy to abandon a newborn, wasn’t the ability of abortion restrictions to “hinder women’s access to the workplace” … “take[n] care of”?

Much of this argument—its erasure of the pregnant body and trivialization of the experience of pregnancy and the adoption decision—was straight out of the conservative playbook.

But what hit me was not the familiar misogyny. It was hearing a staunch abortion opponent claim that women were free. Since when were conservatives saying that women were free? And since when did they seem to be conceding that we should be?

The idea that women deserved freedom was decidedly not from the conservative playbook. The conservative side in the abortion debate had long been spouting versions of the idea that women needed to stay where we belonged, whether that meant accepting the “consequences of our decisions,” remaining in the kitchen, or as the alt-right would have it, accepting that “America belongs to its fathers and is owed to its sons.” But instead, here was an abortion opponent suggesting that “forced motherhood” (yes, she used that term, and yes, it was a she) was not something women should have to undergo.

The only way I could make sense of this seeming about-face was to think about the person who had argued that safe-haven laws respected women’s “bodily autonomy” in the first place. She was a pearl-wearing mom of seven, drafted to the Supreme Court from a Catholic law school, known for seeming to weave a very demanding form of motherhood seamlessly into a high-powered career. It was these bona fides of traditional white femininity that made her popular with her conservative Christian base.

But Justice Amy Coney Barrett and her supporters had long been presenting her as something other than traditional. Barrett, in the eyes of her supporters, represented a new kind of woman.

Barrett was the type of woman who made her own rules. She showed up to her confirmation hearing in a fuchsia-colored dress, as though to make a statement about how femme presentation belonged even in the halls of power. The conservative theater surrounding her confirmation hearing portrayed her as a gender warrior, someone who should be celebrated for not fitting into the conventional mold of what a Supreme Court justice looks like. Never mind that she had been part of a religious group that

Barrett’s embrace of freedom for women wasn’t from the conservative playbook. She was taking pages from the feminist playbook now. And any long-term strategy feminists were going to craft after Dobbs was going to have to face this fact.

Feminist ideas are powerful, perhaps more powerful than they have ever been. This means, on one hand, that my daughter gets to grow up in a world where there are children’s books full of women, including queer women of color, doing amazing things. It also means, though, that there are plenty of women who, like Barrett, are doing amazing things without my or my daughter’s interests in mind. Seemingly feminist ideas can be harnessed for causes like misogyny and white supremacy, and it’s not always obvious when �ٳ󲹳�’s happening.

When Barrett argued that the illegality of abortion was compatible with women’s freedom, she was using a feminist idea to justify throwing the majority of women under the bus. When she portrayed herself as brave enough to defy sexism, and when her supporters painted her as the victim of regressive gender stereotypes, they affirmed the idea that “representation matters.” The price the rest of us have to pay for that representation is not just lack of control of our bodies, but also judicial decisions that have eroded protections for workers, immigrants, and defendants.

If we want to understand how we got here—to a world where abortion is illegal in 14 states, where the final nail in the coffin was hammered by the “ultimate dystopian girlboss,” and where public support for feminism is at an all-time high—we need to understand that lines of reasoning like Barrett’s are not so dissimilar from those advanced by actual feminists.

Feminism has always included more conservative and more radical strands. It has contained within it, at the same time, people who believed that a feminist reproductive agenda was about keeping the “unfit” from reproducing, people who believed it was about keeping the government out of the doctor’s office, people who believed it was fundamentally about wresting control of our lives from men, people who believed it was about the right to parent, and many, many other things.

There have been people who believed that specific work protections for pregnancy and childcare were politically regressive because they undermined the idea that women could do any job men could, and people who believed that they were dismantling the assumption that men’s work was the only socially valuable work, and all kinds of people in between. Feminists converge on the idea that there is gender injustice and that we should fight against it, but we have not always agreed on what this injustice consists in or what should be done about it.n

But sometimes we have to agree on some fundamentals about what feminism is, and this is one of those times. It is either a goal of feminism to demand abortion rights or it isn’t; it is either a goal of feminism to fight for choice alone or to fight for more; it is either a goal of feminism to tell individual women to dream big or to question the economic system that makes dreaming big so important to begin with. In all of these cases, and many more, what feminism is depends largely on what we decide right now. 

In this moment when we are finally talking about the fact that many feminists have been active supporters of oppressive systems, we should feel very keenly that we ��Dz�’t get to pick and choose. Many of the same feminists most of us were taught about in history books were at some point allies of white supremacy, colonialism, capitalist exploitation, ableism, cissexism, and homophobia, even producing as feminist goals ideas that supported keeping these other systems of oppression in place.

From Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Carrie Chapman Catt’s very public statements that women’s suffrage was compatible with (and could perhaps even strengthen) white supremacy to Betty Friedan’s claims that women needed to free themselves from “biological living,” as though no one would have to pick up the slack of caring for children or cleaning houses, feminisms for the few have been with us for a very long time.

But freedom feminism is not our only option. We can think toward something else—a feminism for the many. If there have always been many strands in feminism, this moment is an invitation to pick up another strand.

Excerpted from by Serene Khader (Beacon Press, 2024). Reprinted with permission from Beacon Press.

For more than 150 years, the Wôpanâak language was silent. With no fluent speakers alive, the language of the Mashpee Wampanoag people existed only in historical documents. It was by all measures extinct. But a recently established language school on the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe’s reservation in Massachusetts is working to bring back the language.

The threat of extinction that faces the Wôpanâak language is not uncommon for indigenous languages in the United States. Calculated federal policy, not happenstance, led to the destruction of Native American languages such as Wôpanâak.

But today, Native language schools are working to change that by revitalizing languages that have been threatened with extinction.

In the 19th century, federal policy shifted from a policy of extermination and displacement to assimilation. The passage of the in 1819 allocated federal funds directly to education for the purpose of assimilation, and that led to the formation of many government-run boarding schools. Boarding schools were not meant to educate, but to assimilate.

Tribal communities continue to be haunted by this history. As of April, UNESCO’s listed 191 Native American languages as “in danger” in the United States. Of these, some languages are vulnerable—meaning that children speak the language, but only in certain contexts—to critically endangered—meaning the youngest generation of speakers are elderly.

Today, the education system in the United States fails Native American students. Native students have the of any racial group nationally, according to the 2017 Condition of Education Report. And a shows that in the 12 states with the highest Native American population, less than 50 percent of Native students graduate from high school per year.

Thousands of buildings were burned down, and more than $1 billion worth of property was damaged. A consisting of tens of thousands of local, state, and federal law enforcement agents, including from the U.S. Border Patrol, was mobilized to end the rebellion and arrest more than 16,000 people.

It was a stunning chapter in Los Angeles and United States history, one that continues to mark local decision-making around issues of race, policing, inequality, community investment, gentrification, and political representation.

A Backdrop of Inter-Community Tensions

King’s beating ignited a fiery debate about police brutality and race in the early 1990s in the city. Communities of color, especially Black residents, had long charged that police brutality was commonplace, but city officials ignored them. The nearly all-White jury that eventually acquitted King’s assailants believed the victim had resisted arrest and that the police had acted reasonably to subdue him.

“What prompted the unrest was just anti-Blackness, to be frank,” says Johnson.

Less than two weeks after King was beaten and a year before the uprising, Soon Ja Du, the Korean American owner of Empire Liquor in South L.A., shot and killed a young Black teenager named , who Du believed was stealing orange juice. Although convicted of , Du did not serve a prison sentence for the shooting, and anger over the incident simmered within South L.A.’s Black community, where convenience and liquor stores were largely owned and operated by .

When jurors in Simi Valley acquitted King’s assailants, hundreds of protesters in the San Fernando Valley, near the site where the assault took place, and marched to the local divisional headquarters of the Los Angeles Police Department.

In South L.A., anger spilled out into the streets centered on the corner of , an intersection that is now considered “ground zero” of an uprising that went on to spill into neighboring areas. There was a collective rage at the injustice of the acquittals, exacerbated by Black–Korean tensions. Residents , , and .

Korean American immigrants, many of whom in the early 1990s were relatively recent arrivals to the U.S. and L.A., were deeply impacted by the uprising: 40% of economic losses during the five days of violence were borne by Korean American businesses, according to Edward Chang, a professor of ethnic studies and founding director of the Young Oak Kim Center for Korean American Studies at the University of California, Riverside.

The date was such a momentous incident for the Korean American community that it is still referred to as “Sai-i-gu,” which means April 29 in Korean, “just like 9/11,” says Chang. He calls it a “watershed event,” and “one of the most important historical events for more than 100 years of Korean immigration history.”

“They had to leave, they had no choice,” says Chang of South L.A.’s Korean American store owners. “Many of them decided to relocate to other cities, such as Las Vegas, Seattle, or even Atlanta.” Others who decided to stay restarted their businesses as stores in indoor swap meets. 

Although there has been less attention paid to the , Chicanos, and Latin American immigrants, the uprising directly affected them as well. Latinos were of violence, in addition to comprising . Many Latinos also lost businesses in the uprising.

Local Communities and Leaders Are Rebuilding South L.A.

Eunisses Hernandez was only 2 years old when the uprising happened, and in adulthood, she went on to become the co-founder of , an abolitionist organization tackling mass incarceration in L.A. To Hernandez, the horror of the ’92 uprising highlighted systemic social problems in the city that persist even today, and that are “a constant reminder that not many things have changed,” she says.

“We have taken some steps toward progress,” Hernandez says, “but the systems that have harmed us—law enforcement, special interest groups, corporations—have continuously beat all the efforts that we have made.”

“Paying more people to have guns and badges in our communities doesn’t make us safe,” she says.

In addition to her work with , which helped to push for the of the Los Angeles County Men’s Central Jail and to stop the expansion of new jails, Hernandez was co-chair of , a countywide ballot measure passed by voters in November 2020 to divert funding from incarceration into a “care-first-jails-last” approach to social problems.

Activists have identified community-based needs on which the county can spend money freed from the building of jails. Hernandez explains that the ballot measure stipulates moving “10% of locally generated tax dollars into two buckets: community investment, such as youth, minority-owned businesses, and housing, and the second bucket, which is alternatives to incarceration.”

Those alternatives include (such as conducting needs-based assessments, trauma support, and alternatives to pre-trial incarceration), mental health services, drug treatment, and job creation. The first year of funding under Measure J has already been distributed toward projects aimed at mental health and youth services that serve primarily “Black trans women, elders, young people, LGBTQ communities,” says Hernandez.

Johnson’s organization has a similar approach. “We want to see investment in prevention,” she says. Today, Community Coalition is working on a campaign with other organizations to explore enforcement of traffic stops. What should be a routine interaction often starts with of Black and Brown motorists and, far too often, results in violence and even death. But the city’s transportation department has been accused both by activists and the City Council of dragging its feet on completing a promised study as a first step toward implementing alternatives to policing in traffic stops.

In the meantime, Community Coalition is building a Center for Community Organizing that, in Johnson’s words, will help “train up more organizers from across the country to be well-versed in the strategies and methods that have proven to be successful.”

Johnson’s definition of rebuilding her city includes expanding access to arts and culture for low-income communities of color. Community Coalition’s “” is based on the premise that “art is power.” Musical concerts and art exhibits provide opportunities to engage local communities in progressive causes and to encourage civic duties, like registering to vote. Moreover, she explains, “Black and Brown people … are interested in changing the community around them and the outcomes for their families. We also want joy. We appreciate beauty.”

“What does a human being need to thrive and to be happy?” Johnson asks. The answer to that—public safety, affordable housing, living wages, health care, arts and culture—is what she and other local activists are demanding for their community. “It’s not so radical, it’s not so different than what anyone else would want for their family.”

Solidarity Between Communities of Color

While Hernandez sees little progress by city authorities to rebuild South L.A. since 1992, she says, “We have grown in certain areas, like around solidarity between Black, Brown, and Indigenous people of color and other low-income communities.” Hernandez, who is , cites the strong multiracial coalitions she works with as integral to making progress on such issues as transitioning L.A. County and L.A. away from a carceral system.

Another example of solidarity between racial groups was the evolution of , a grassroots organization that was launched two months before the uprising as Korean Immigrant Workers Advocates, and years later renamed itself the Koreatown Immigrant Workers Alliance. The organization’s new name reflected the growing evolution of an area where Korean Americans had traditionally lived into one that has become increasingly populated by Latinos and other immigrant groups.

According to Chang, Asian Americans have been part of this cross-racial solidarity. “There is a conscious decision made, particularly by the 1.5 and second-generation organizations, that are trying to reach out to other communities,” he says, calling younger Korean Americans the “children of Sai-i-gu.”

Alongside KIWA, Chang cites , an organization founded in 1975 to serve primarily new Korean immigrants, as another example of a Korean American-led community group that pivoted to multicultural organizing. According to its website, “After the L.A. civil unrest in 1992, KYCC expanded from being an ethnically focused agency to one that included the surrounding community, aligning with its evolving needs.” Another local grassroots group, , has similarly evolved, and, according to Chang, its main activities now are centered around “building coalitions with African American and Latino communities.”

The Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 were a stunning display of in L.A., where young people of color, starkly aware of ongoing systemic racism, marched together against racist police brutality.

“In 1992, South L.A., Koreatown burned down,” says Chang. “But in 2020, they made a conscious choice to protest in Beverly Hills, Santa Monica, and West Hollywood, White affluent neighborhoods.” Chang sees that decision as “a signal that racism is part of White America, and White America needs to take ownership and participate in eradicating racism.”

Johnson agrees, saying, “The only way that we’re going to achieve what we want is together.”

More than a century before, Ford overcame the setbacks and complexities of the two strikes against her—her race and her gender—by opening a home medical practice in the heart of Denver’s Five Points neighborhood. Known as , this thriving African American neighborhood in downtown Denver dates back to the late 19th century. An economic and cultural center for the community, Five Points was filled with entrepreneurs, artists, musicians, and licensed educators, lawyers, and doctors. 

As part of the African American professional class, Ford intentionally used her knowledge and skills to meet the needs of African Americans, who experienced health disparities due to limited access to health care and financial resources to pay for medical services. By the time of her death in 1952, “the Lady Doctor,” as she was widely known, had delivered more than 7,000 babies. 

It was two of those “Ford babies,” Moses and Elizabeth Valdez, father and daughter, who catalyzed the memorial movement to save her home and practice nearly a century after it was built in 1890. 

After years of organizing and advocacy, in February 1984, the two-story house was removed from its foundation and transported 13 blocks on an oversize platform to 3091 California Street in downtown Denver. Since that time, it has remained the official site of the . In this way, Ford, one of the most renowned medical professionals in Colorado’s history, has remained a beloved beacon of the African American community, in life and death.

The successful campaign to preserve and restore Ford’s home exists as part of a larger narrative of the evolution of African American women’s memorialization, or the process of commemoration. Its origins in the United States date back to the early 19th century, when free Black communities in the North organized festivals and parades to celebrate emancipation, promote abolitionism, and disseminate Black history. They used these public venues to also herald the contributions of Black women through commemorative oratory, trumpeting their legacies through speeches. 

After the Civil War, public festivals and parades spread to the South. African American clubwomen began creating named memorials—public memorials attached to a person’s legacy—for women like Phillis Wheatley. At , the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) was instrumental in establishing a nationwide infrastructure for named memorialization to expand in the 1890s, all while Jim Crow laws increasingly restricted the parameters of Black citizenship. At the same time, white organizations like the Daughters of the Confederacy began to that supported false narratives of the Civil War and conveyed dehumanizing myths about enslaved Black people. 

With limited to no control of the public landscape domain, African American communities employed named memorials as strategic resistance against the erasure and caricature that existed among white public history memorials, race pseudoscience, and published historical narratives. In the absence of statues, monuments, and museums, African American women sparked the era of named memorials, which spread across the United States and manifested in domestic and Pan-African organizations, public libraries, public housing, and even commercial ventures.

As the ruling power of Jim Crow laws began to lessen in the 1960s, the prominence of named memorials ebbed as the ability to erect traditional public history sites, such as museums and statues, increased. Integration decreased the visibility of named memorials as constituencies of public buildings and African American neighborhoods began to change.

In the midst of the civil rights, Black Power, and Black Studies movements, African American communities had more access and negotiating power with local and national bureaucracies to influence the public history landscape. They advocated to save buildings and create new spaces to celebrate Black heritage and culture, ushering in a new era of African American traditional memorials. Though urban renewal at times galvanized memorializers to save meaningful cultural places, it irrevocably restructured African American communities. 

Still, by developing public and private partnerships, a new generation of memorializers, African American preservationists, and public historians and organizations resisted erasure of their communities from the physical landscape when they established the first traditional public history sites.

In the 21st century, memorializers’ ability to create and sustain traditional memorials has only increased, with web-based technologies and social media platforms expanding memorials for African American women even further. Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter/X posts, along with Google Doodles and digital humanities projects, have become integral to how Black history is disseminated to public audiences. The internet has provided a new public history terrain shaped by memorializers of all backgrounds. Community advocacy for more visible multicultural representation has broadened the scope of museums, statues, and historical markers in locales across the United States.

Despite all the national and regional representation, significant underrepresentation of African American women memorials still remains. With the addition of the Harriet Tubman National Historic Park in 2009, there are now three African American women represented in units of the National Park Service—less than 1% of all designations.

The silence of underrepresentation and unseen memorials has been countered by the national movement of African American public memory crafters to resist erasure and cultivate historical narratives that can withstand generations. Operating with unprecedented savvy, African American memorializers have been at the forefront of establishing a national public history landscape. The civil rights, Black Power, and Black Studies movements created a political and social landscape for African American communities to establish public history sites using public federal and state funding.

The legacies of Black women continue to be celebrated in named and traditional memorials, by generations of memorializers and public memory crafters, through a continuum of commemoration manifested in a vibrant public history landscape throughout the United States.

This excerpt, adapted from by Alexandria Russell (University of Illinois Press, 2024), appears by permission of the publisher.

While navigating this unjust system, Flanagan felt out of her depth, so she began reaching out to other families who have experienced police violence. Those conversations inspired her to found the protest group (MAPB). “I just felt compelled,” Flanagan says. “[I wanted to] start a group where moms [who have lost a child to police violence] could meet. I remember feeling so isolated. I just couldn’t break through that grief.”&�Բ�����;

Now, more than a decade after Allen’s death, MAPB focuses on advocating for better policy around police brutality—like —and training mothers to advocate within their local communities. 

On May 14, 2014, Johnatha de Oliveira Lima, 19, left his house in Manguinhos, a community in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to walk his girlfriend home and drop off dessert at his grandmother’s residence. While walking home, Lima encountered the police having a confrontation with residents of his community. Amid the chaos, policeman in the back. By the time Lima’s mother, Ana Paula de Oliveira, arrived at the hospital, her son had died.

During Lima’s funeral, Oliveira met Fátima Pinho, whose son, after being asphyxiated by a cop. During that conversation, Pinho invited Oliveira to fight for justice for both of their sons. “The only thing I was sure of was that I wanted to fight for my son’s memory and for the truth,” Oliveira says. “That’s how the Mães de Manguinhos movement emerged.”

That same year, Oliveira and Pinho founded Mães de Manguinhos (Mothers of Manguinhos), a collective that organizes protests against police brutality, helps mothers report their children’s state-sanctioned murders to the appropriate channels, and supports families in the aftermath of losing a relative to police violence.

“[Our] objective was to denounce police violence in Manguinhos, but we started moving away from Manguinhos [and] started meeting mothers from outside the community,” says Oliveira. “[That’s when] we noticed [many of] those families are also Black.”

Though they are separated by more than 5,000 miles, Oliveira and Flanagan are connected in myriad ways. They have both been left to pick up the pieces after the Black men they birthed were brutally murdered. Neither of them received support, monetary or otherwise, from their respective governments. And both have founded movements aimed at advocating for better policy around police brutality and teaching mothers who lost their children how to get justice.

Every year, , while due to police interventions in 2023 alone. In both countries, most of the victims are Black men and boys whose mothers are often forced to dispute the idea that their sons were disposable or responsible for their own deaths.

Both Mães de Manguinhos and MAPB aid mothers seeking accountability for the state’s violence against men and boys of color—a labor they are thrust into with little resources. After their children are murdered, these mothers can experience and , and yet, these mothers still devote their lives to seeking justice for their children and others. But, as they fight for their children’s legacy, we must ask ourselves: Who takes care of these mothers?

Connected by Struggle

In Rio de Janeiro, the Mães de Manguinhos collective pressured the state to prosecute the officer who killed Lima. Oliveira gathered testimonies and evidence to prove her son wasn’t a drug trafficker, as the officer claimed. When , Oliveira argued that her son was not a threat to police. Ultimately, the officer was convicted of manslaughter rather than murder, so Oliveira has appealed the verdict and requested a new trial. The second trial has not yet been scheduled.

“Most investigations into cases like this do not go anywhere because they are based on the character of the victim, investigating what the victim was doing at the time of the shooting,” explains Etyelle Pinheiro de Araujo, a sociologist at Unigranrio University in Rio de Janeiro who researches the narratives of mothers who lost their children to police violence. “When [these] mothers tell their stories in the public sphere, they are breaking with this narrative. They are combating these discourses and humanizing victims of police violence.”

Oliveira alchemized her grief into care for other mothers by providing them with a road map for pressuring authorities. “This project was born with the intention of denouncing police violence and the murders of our children,” Oliveira says. “But there’s also a need to welcome, embrace, and care for these mothers, to show them that we are also victims and that we won’t die despite the pain, that we manage to stay alive through the purpose of the struggle.” Finding similarity in their struggles, these mothers become stronger in numbers, even when they are separated by oceans. 

While fatal police violence is common in both countries, there are also no protections or aid—monetary or legal—for families who lose a loved one to state violence.��

That’s one of the reasons MAPB began running a two-year fellowship program in Dallas in 2021 where mothers who lost their children to police brutality are trained to be agents of change. Flanagan says the fellows learn how to organize for change; how to engage effectively with policymakers, district attorneys, law enforcement agencies, and media; and how to effectively collaborate with other organizations.��

Some of those fellows include Sheila Banks, whose son Corey Jones was fatally shot by Palm Beach Gardens police officer Nouman Raja in 2015. After a five-year battle, by culpable negligence and attempted first-degree murder with a firearm in 2019 and sentenced to 25 years. Another MAPB fellow, Dalphine Robinson, founded , an organization that supports families affected by police brutality.��

“We have 20 powerful women who know who their representative is, who know legislation, and who know who their city officials are,” says Flanagan. “They are a force in their community, and I think �ٳ󲹳�’s how we get the change collectively that we need.”

According to Flanagan, MAPB is also advocating for a change in policy in Texas that would make these families eligible for the state’s Victim’s Compensation Fund, which currently aids police officers involved in the killing and not the families of the victim.��

By leaning on each other and learning through their grief, these women have become change advocates. “Social movements teach the people that exist within them,” Pinheiro de Araujo says. “It’s the pedagogy of the streets. The mothers themselves say they become investigators, they go after evidence, [and] some of them go to law school. And they teach one another through solidarity.”

After a , a network of mothers in Rio who lost their children to police brutality, including Oliveira, created RAAVE. Since 2022, RAAVE has been providing mental health services to the families of victims and conducting research on the impacts of fatal police violence. This year, a partnership with the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro provided scholarships to mothers across the state to be trained as researchers and develop public policy proposals to combat police violence, including monetary aid to victims’ families and mental and physical health care for the mothers.��

The RAAVE project pays these mothers for their expertise and participation in the project to counteract the economic impact state violence has on families. Often, after the victim is killed, families experience a sudden loss of income either because the victim was the primary earner or the victim’s mother has to stop working due to grief. 

“Many of these mothers die without seeing justice for their kids’ murder, they die of depression or other illnesses,” says Pinheiro de Araujo. “There’s the financial question too. These women lose their jobs and end up in very vulnerable positions.”

As a result of this project, Oliviera will receive a degree in psychiatry while also influencing policy on how to care for families after the fact. Taking the project as instructive, Oliveira wants the state to provide general care and political education for the families of victims. “Our intention is that this project grows into other results and that our contributions become public policy,” Oliveira says. “We think it’s fundamental to care for the body and mind, but there’s also a need for political education.”

Demanding Care From the State

Since the right to raise children in a safe environment is , Oliveira argues that this also has to be addressed as a dimension of justice for police violence. The murder of Black boys and men by the police is the more extreme manifestation of this lack of rights, Oliveira said, but the state’s infringement on Black boys’ existence is everywhere, starting with low-quality education and lack of access to leisure.��

“We are denied access to many spaces like the cinema, the theater, which are spaces of culture, and we ��Dz�’t see people having the right to these spaces [because of policing and racial profiling],” Oliveira says.��

While both Flanagan and Oliveira have dedicated their lives to filling a gap of care for other mothers, the question still remains: Who takes care of them? Oliveira says the women in Mães de Manguinhos take care of each other through companionship, cooking for each other, organizing and going to protests together, and helping each other find the right channels to get justice. If the state isn’t there for them, they are there for each other.��

Oliveira sees this work as a continuation of her care for her son, so the sacrifices feel worth it. “The struggle is a space where I can still care for my Johnatha,” Oliveira says. “Where I am still his mother. That’s something I agonized about. What’s it going to be like now? How will I speak about him? What will my relationship with my son be like?”

For Flanagan, who recently took a break from MAPB due to health issues, this question is more complicated. “I threw myself at the work, and the work just really helped me but also caused me a lot of health problems,” she says. “A lot of the moms in the movement have never been to therapy. You have to make it healthy for you at the same time, [while] honoring their space and pain.”

Across the world, grieving Black mothers have organized themselves to clamor for justice, to care for one another, and to advocate for their murdered children. Through their grief and pain, these mothers build support networks, help each other gather evidence, study legislation and advocate for better laws, and hold space for one another’s  loss—a model for how states around the world should approach the consequences of state violence with care, solidarity, and an integral concern for  those who survive.

Peltier’s freedom is priceless in its own right. But just as his wrongful imprisonment symbolized the systemic oppression of Indigenous peoples, his release embodies the liberation �ٳ󲹳�’s possible through intergenerational organizing. It speaks to the possibilities of collective Indigenous power. 

Peltier’s entanglement with carceral systems began at the age of 9 when he was forcibly taken from his grandmother’s home and sent to a federally funded boarding school hundreds of miles away—a traumatic displacement that was part of a broader policy of cultural genocide against Indigenous peoples.

Decades later, while fighting on the front lines for Indigenous rights and land—and against federal agents trying to suppress the American Indian Movement—he was wrongfully convicted in the deaths of two of those agents. Peltier’s story is a microcosm of the systemic injustice Native people have endured—a reminder of the United States’ dedication to exploiting, incarcerating, and attempting to erase Indigenous peoples.

Yet, despite nearly half a century behind bars, Peltier never gave up. He maintained hope and fought for his freedom by staying connected to his spirituality, culture, and people. His resilience inspired generations to join the movement for Indigenous justice, underscoring the power of intergenerational activism grounded in ceremony and community.

The fight to free Peltier was long and arduous, fueled by grassroots organizing and high-level political advocacy, and ultimately kept alight by people who know and love him. Many doubted his release would ever be possible. But Indian Country proved them wrong by bridging the gap between frontline activism and decision-making at the highest levels of government.

A significant turning point in the campaign to free Peltier came when the U.S. government began to reckon with its role in the boarding school era. As more truths emerged about these institutions’ devastating impact on Indigenous peoples that fueled generations of trauma, Biden’s perspective began to shift. Learning that Peltier was a boarding school survivor deeply moved the former president, humanizing Peltier’s story and adding urgency to the clemency request.

The federal government’s formal acknowledgment of these historical injustices helped pave the way for Peltier’s release. In October 2024, Biden apologized for the government’s role in the boarding schools. This apology was the result of decades of unwavering advocacy by Indigenous peoples who insisted that the U.S. confront this dark chapter in its history and work to repair the harm caused.

While his apology itself was an important step, freeing Peltier was one meaningful action to address the ongoing impacts of the boarding schools policies. Yet the work is far from over, and continued efforts—such as passing the U.S. Truth & Healing Commission Bill—are needed to ensure large-scale reparative justice for the devastation caused by boarding schools. 

Peltier’s freedom is also a testament to the growing presence and influence of Native leaders in the U.S. government. Figures like former Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland have played a crucial role in amplifying Indigenous voices and bringing frontline issues to the attention of those in power, and her direct advocacy to former President Biden was invaluable in Peltier’s release. 

One critical piece of the collective efforts to free Peltier was countering the false narratives perpetuated by institutions like the FBI and Department of Justice, who were using Peltier as their own symbol—one of punishment to Indian Country for the 1975 shootout in which two FBI agents were killed. Though the other two American Indian Movement members charged for the same shooting were found not guilty due to self-defense, Peltier was used as an example, touted by law enforcement as a threat of what could happen if Indigenous people dared to resist. 

Getting clemency for Peltier took a long time and immeasurable effort. But through organizing, advocacy, and storytelling, we dismantled decades of misinformation and mobilized a powerful coalition of allies. Peltier’s story resonated with people across the world, awakening a shared sense of justice and humanity that transcended political and cultural boundaries.

The fight for justice in Peltier’s case is tragically echoed in more recent struggles, such as the by police in Atlanta. Tortuguita was defending forest land against the construction of “Cop City,” a proposed police training facility on Muscogee forest land, when they were shot and killed by 57 police bullets. Their death highlights the ongoing violence and criminalization faced by those who put their bodies on the line to protect sacred lands. 

Like Peltier, Tortuguita was accused of shooting at officers, though zero evidence of this has been found. Like Peltier, Tortuguita’s story illustrates the lengths to which state power will go to suppress dissent and silence defenders of justice. 

Unlike Peltier, Tortuguita is not alive to tell their story. 

As we celebrate Peltier’s release, we must honor the memory of activists like Tortuguita by continuing to fight for justice—from fighting the current assaults on the LGBTQ community to making sure peoples’ basic needs aren’t stripped away overnight to refusing to let our school curriculums be defined by racism, queerphobia, and fear. No matter who is in office, Indigenous peoples will continue to protect our lands, cultures, and ways of life against the forces that seek to destroy them. Peltier’s freedom is not just a symbol but a call to action—a reminder that even in the face of insurmountable odds, we have the power to create change.

Now, as the Trump administration aggressively pushes forward with drilling and oil extraction plans, withdraws from the Paris Agreement, and freezes Inflation Reduction Act funding critical for combating the climate crisis, the need for mass mobilization has never been clearer. 

Since the U.S. government will no longer be contributing its share of the UN climate body’s budget, Michael Bloomberg . While this is not an ideal or complete solution to new climate threats, it does represent incremental progress toward the wealth redistribution and action needed to protect our shared planet. Other philanthropists must follow Bloomberg’s precedent by directing substantial funding and resources into frontline climate justice organizations immediately. Indigenous-led movements are at the forefront of defending our planet, and they need robust support to succeed.

From the American Indian Movement of the 1970s to the land and water defense movements of today, Indigenous organizing and power-building has remained steadfast against all odds. Peltier’s release shows us what is possible when we stay rooted in our values, connected to one another’s humanity, and committed to organizing for the liberation of all people. We will continue to expand our power and mobilize for our collective future—the next four years and beyond demand nothing less.

Lupe and Manuel, who requested the use of anonymity because of the personal information they shared, were participating in a restorative justice circle, the final stage of their work with (CHAT) Project. Housed in the Family Justice Center in Richmond, California, Lupe and Manuel met with facilitators for months in a series of sessions aimed at healing their family and helping them find a way forward from the pain they’ve endured, both individually and together. The CHAT Project’s restorative justice model served as a beacon of hope, one that gave them the tools they each needed to co-parent effectively while mending their own relationship.

Restorative justice, according to The CHAT Project, is a community-based, nonpunitive approach to harm that encourages accountability, healing, and repair. The work emphasizes healing, not punishment, and asks participants what they need in order to move forward. Rooted in Indigenous practices, restorative justice invites in communities and builds and strengthens relationships.

Lupe and Manuel are two of nearly 100 people whom The CHAT Project has served in Contra Costa County. The program’s participants are 84 percent people of color and 49 percent Spanish-speaking, and all of their services are free.

Lupe reached out to The CHAT Project in fall 2023, after struggling to find a way forward in her relationship with Manuel. The two share a young son, and they’d practically grown up as a couple. Lupe and Manuel met in their early 20s, working at the same restaurant in San Francisco. They didn’t typically work the same shifts, but one day, Lupe covered for a coworker. That night, she met Manuel and was instantly captivated by his smile. She wanted to get to know him, and they took a walk around Bernal Heights. They bonded immediately, and two years later, their son was born. The problems in their relationship started soon after.

The couple started arguing regularly; sometimes Manuel would leave, sometimes it would be Lupe. Their relationship was in turmoil. And even though Manuel never did anything to make her feel in danger, Lupe was afraid for her son and the environment their relationship was creating.

“I wanted to be that parent, that adult that I wish I had when I was little,” Lupe said. 

Over the next five years, the couple’s relationship fluctuated between the occasional happy period and periods of immense stress. They struggled in family court to determine a custody schedule for their son. Manuel desperately wanted to change his ways and be there for his family, but he was always drawn back to old, unhealthy patterns. Then, in the summer of 2023, things escalated. In a moment the two describe as an “extreme invasion of privacy,” Manuel crossed a line with Lupe, and they both knew it was time to try a different approach.

At first, Lupe felt like an imposter seeking help at the Family Justice Center. She knew that her relationship was unhealthy, but she wasn’t sure she was ready to classify her experiences as domestic violence. But after reading about The CHAT Project’s mission to “help families and communities connect with each other and to learn (or relearn) practices for moving through conflict, reducing violence, and strengthening connections,” she was excited to try.

“I went in with zero expectations,” said Lupe. “I had never heard of restorative justice.”

The first part of working with The CHAT Project is an initial assessment to make sure that both the family and the project are a good fit. The CHAT Project Co-Director Camila Robayo Durán explained that in this first step, she wants participants to think clearly about their goals. After hearing what the program can offer, some potential participants “have the wisdom on their own” to know it’s not what they’re looking for, said Robayo Durán.

“It’s not a crisis-intervention type of service,” said Robayo Durán. “It’s something that you do for your healing and to strengthen relationships.”

Lupe and Manuel agreed that their shared goal was to learn how to coparent effectively; they weren’t necessarily looking to mend their own romantic relationship, but they were open to it. After the initial evaluation, both Lupe and Manuel started on their individual journeys. They worked with therapists and their CHAT Project facilitator, Alejandra Escobedo, to address some of the root causes of the problems in their family. It became clear quickly that they both were being triggered by childhood sexual abuse, something that Manuel had never shared with anyone before.

“The first time that I saw my therapist, it was very, very difficult for the words to flow,” said Manuel. “I was afraid of feeling judged.”

Manuel explained that throughout his relationship with Lupe, she had struggled with his inability to express himself and his feelings. “All my life, I was used to ‘Listen and shut up,’” said Manuel. Lupe agreed: “I would communicate when something was upsetting or when he hurt me in any way, and he just shut down.”

But, Manuel said, therapy was starting to give him new tools to address not just his past trauma but his present-day struggles. At the same time, Lupe’s therapy experience was giving her the tools she needed to have more empathy and understanding for Manuel’s incredibly different upbringing. As a couple, they were able to bring these skills together and begin communicating more openly and freely than they ever had, getting to know each other on a deeper level and sympathizing with each other’s experiences.

For Robayo Durán, Lupe and Manuel’s experience with this element of The CHAT Project is a great example of how the court system often stops short of helping families move forward. Lupe and Manuel had been working out some of their childcare logistics in family court, but nothing there was preparing them to ever co-parent effectively again, let alone heal their own relationship.

“What is interesting is that systems tend to label people in a certain way,” Robayo Durán said. But at The CHAT Project, said Robayo Durán, “We ��Dz�’t label people ‘the survivor’ [or] ‘the person causing harm’ right away. We try to explore with people ‘What is your role, what was the situation, what was your past life, how did you come to this situation?’”

On top of participating in therapy individually, a key element of The CHAT Project’s work is accountability. And in the case of Lupe and Manuel, that meant realizing, for both of them, that Manuel wasn’t the only one who needed to be held accountable, even though it was his actions that brought them to the program.

“Something that CHAT did for me was help me realize that I wasn’t just a victim, right? That I also had a part in everything that was happening in my relationship, which is also very hard to do because I definitely went in with a 100 percent victim mentality, and that wasn’t 100 percent accurate,” said Lupe. She began to see that healing her own past traumas could help her show up more fairly and compassionately in her relationship.

Lupe and Manuel met individually with their facilitator for several sessions before deciding they were ready for what The CHAT Project calls a restorative justice circle. Lupe and Manuel were told to clear their schedules for a whole day of a “soup of emotions,” said Lupe.

Joined by people close to them, Lupe and Manuel’s circle was a time to bring all the work they’d been doing individually, together. They shared, listened, and cried, learning about themselves and each other. They agreed to ways they would work together moving forward, and by the end of the hours-long session, they knew things had changed. “When we left the circle that day, we left with a clear idea of what we were wanting to continue to work on,” said Lupe.

Communication, Lupe said, was at the top of the list. The CHAT Project facilitators helped them develop tools for communicating more clearly and respectively, and in the months since their restorative justice circle, they’ve cemented these practices into their everyday lives in ways that have completely changed their relationship. They’ve been able to manage their anger and impulsivity better, and they’ve both continued in their personal therapy practices.  ”We work on ourselves to be able to bring the best version of ourselves to the relationship,” said Lupe.

“We have many ways to measure success,” said Robayo Durán, “and our priority, most of all, is safety.” Success looks different for all their participants; for some, taking the first step to ask for help is a success in itself. Not everyone who contacts them is ready for a dialogue with their partners like Lupe and Manuel were, but there are still services The CHAT Project can offer them. “Having a circle is not always the goal, but to be able to provide the support they need to make a change in their life,” Escobedo said.

For Lupe and Manuel, the change was felt immediately. They’ve surpassed their goals, and in addition to finding healthy ways to co-parent, they’ve also restored their own romantic relationship. They’re living together, rebuilding relationships with their families, and using the tools they gained through the program every day. 

“I  honestly do feel like we wouldn’t be where we are as a family without having received that resource when we did,” Lupe said.

Domestic Violence Support

To find your nearest family justice center, visit the .

If you or someone you know is experiencing domestic violence, you can also contact the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233 for support and referrals, or text “START” to 88788. Information on local domestic violence programs can be found using this online tool.

For Native Americans and Alaska Natives, the StrongHearts Native Helpline at 1-844-7NATIVE (762-8483) provides 24/7 confidential and culturally appropriate support and advocacy for survivors of domestic and sexual violence. A chat option is available through their website.

This story was produced in collaboration with the.

“They’re not trying to impose dictatorship from a position of strength, they’re trying to impose it from a position of weakness and fear.” —

“In the midst of discontent, talk, theoretical discussions, an individual or collective act of revolt supervenes, symbolizing the dominant aspirations.” —Peter Kropotkin

The start of 2025 has been unsurprisingly chaotic. As a surge of wildfires engulfed the Los Angeles area, stealing people’s homes and livelihoods, the news broke that the world’s lands and oceans recorded the  in 2024. 

Even before his inauguration this week, President Donald Trump floated invading Greenland, retaking the Panama Canal, and making Canada the 51st state. While pointing his “America First” policies toward expansionism and imperialist ends, he threatened the  justifying Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza. He also sought a public health justification for shuttering the southern border, much like the  that once inspired the Nazis. 

Since being sworn in, Trump acted on many of his statements immediately and  redefining birthright citizenship and gender as well as reversing climate regulations, among other terrible things. These issues alone paint just a portion of the picture of what’s coming to those of us who plan to fight back. 

The truth of these moments and many others is that if we plan to defy the order of the day, we must decide between what’s worth fighting about and what’s not the best use of our time. 

Often, the fights we choose to take up may not reflect the urgency other issues demand. Those emergencies can become so great that they choose us when we can no longer deny the need for our full participation. Now is the time to commit ourselves rather than wait to be forced into action by circumstances;  between proactively planning instead of waiting to see what happens and reacting to it. 

Resistance based on reaction may operate from the point of disadvantage if it usually requires an antagonism or a spark to mobilize a response. So we’re forced to admit that we have priorities if we understand this and then decide what to do about them. 

Some fights are over issues that concern life and death, while others may be about much more trivial things. Internalizing awareness here will provide needed wisdom and precision about what makes the best use of our time during compounding crises. The nonstop news cycle, personal conflict, and the weight of survival make it hard to figure out where to focus our energy. However, as recent years have shown, it’s of the utmost importance to figure this out so that we ��Dz�’t exhaust ourselves from pointless ventures. 

The political moment we’re in, where fascism is wearing us down, demands intentionality that should disrupt nonsense. Therefore, if we find ourselves amid unserious squabbles, it’s a testament to the unseriousness of the parties who choose to remain entangled. It’s not that we cannot multitask and focus on multiple issues simultaneously or that we should use dismissiveness to avoid accountability by labeling it a “distraction.” It’s that an unending circus of self-centeredness, celebrity drama, and political theater disrupts our focus and degrades our perspective. 

Unimportant fights are disagreements like those that center the famous and influencers as representatives people attach themselves to. They’re the conflicts that become inundated with pitfalls of disempowering political representation. That’s how the public ends up arguing for politicians who ��Dz�’t care about them and stars who ��Dz�’t share their class interests.  

This means that people must overcome the draw to participate in celebrity worship, symbolic issues, and other quarrels like the “petty ideological struggles”  once spoke about. He said we have to “look at the substance,” and �ٳ󲹳�’s what’s always missing from so much of the messiness capitalist culture inundates us with. If more of us had genuine, deep relationships, too, many of the insignificant spats among us might subside. We can have our differences and even dislike one another while recognizing the gravity of this time we’re trying to survive. 

The oft-quoted psalm of revolutionary and author George Jackson to “settle your quarrels, come together, understand the reality of our situation, understand that fascism is already here” rings hollow among much of today’s “left.” Anti-intellectualism, conservatism, and egos, among other things, make disputes a feature and not a flaw of bickering denominations. Siloed, powerless people fighting over who gets the most influence while those with actual power pummel them all is undoubtedly a goofy scene. 

This reality may overshadow another one of Jackson’s��: “Each popular struggle must be analyzed historically to discover new ideas.” Accepting dogma and making movements past into prescriptive guides regurgitates old tactics, offering us new defeat. Bitter unity isn’t the answer; it’s often disastrous, too, but we have to answer something.��Who is fed, housed, given health care, safety, and security by what we’re fighting about? Does the fight we’re in lead to a change that can alter people’s lives for the better or advance us toward a revolutionary shift?��

What are the most important fights, then? That may depend on where you’re at and what the conditions say at a given moment. Someone fighting an actual fire knows that putting out the flames around them supersedes everything else at that time.

The beauty of the Black Panther Party’s intercommunalist proclamation “survival pending revolution” is that it recognizes that we have to sustain ourselves to have any struggle whatsoever. It’s what led them to strategically confront problems about health care, housing, food, environment, and state violence. And while the Party was certainly not free from petty drama and avoidable conflicts, the model they established still matters today. 

Nonsensical, repetitive debates on social media and posturing keep tiring us out. We need as much energy as possible to challenge the dominant status quo of capitalism. It’s one of the main reasons we have to be able to differentiate between disputes that happen for dispute’s sake or because people or entities around us want to create problems.

Our efforts should abandon self-aggrandizing optics, clout chasing, and content creation that doesn’t constitute a counterforce against oppression. The way we wage confrontation should be a threat to whomever or whatever is putting our lives at risk. Threats have to become kept promises too. 

When Black Power–era theorist and former member of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers  reflected on the successes and failures of that time, he arrived at a conclusion �ٳ󲹳�’s important now. Mohammed stated that we needed to “reorganize our thinking.” That reorganization “of our political thinking,” he said, “is necessary because it has become too narrow, limited, and elitist. Unless we immediately begin to expand our vision, we will constantly find ourselves submerged in cynicism, pessimism, and despair.”

He continued, “a feeling of hopelessness and powerlessness has already begun to surface. … But that particular feeling can easily be overcome. … Not only must our analyses show our accomplishments, they must also show our failures and mistakes. If such analyses are properly done, we will have the type of transmission fuel needed to transcend feelings of hopelessness and powerlessness.” One of the main mistakes generations have made in recent years is the sort of radical tourism and spreading of ourselves too thin. Focus is necessary to beat back everything that needs to be destroyed enough to gain new ground. 

Our enemies and the oppressive elements we know all too well may not be as strong as we imagine. Teen hackers have made breaching federal authorities into . We saw this tyrannical president  when we rose against state violence in response to the killing of George Floyd. Even now, we’ve seen that  with something to prove has sent shockwaves throughout the ruling elite. These aren’t distant memories; these things all tell us a lot about what’s possible in today’s world. 

A call to focus and concentrate our efforts is not necessarily a plea for centralization. Instead, it’s about being led by what the world around us is showing us our primary concerns should be. Sometimes, the stakes are so high it’s not even a question or a debate; it’s an immediate action that happens without question. You’re supposed to duck when someone throws a punch, but if you’re too preoccupied, the blow will hurt that much worse. We can look around and see who’s hitting us and who wants to knock us out of the frame completely. Instead of waiting for them to swing on us again, let’s evolve and hit them first.

This story was originally published in .

CORRECTION: This article was updated at 4:55 p.m. PT on Jan. 27, 2025, to change the term “rejecting dogma” to “accepting dogma.”��Read our corrections policy here.��

I’m a biographer of Hendrix, and he was proud of his Native background. Wray’s “Rumble” was one of the first songs Hendrix learned to play. He almost certainly had no idea of Wray’s background, just as most casual fans didn’t know about Hendrix’s genealogy, which included Native roots on both sides of his family tree as well as his African American ancestry (and many Hendrix fans didn’t know that his song “Cherokee Mist” was in part a homage to his grandmother). Wray’s history also surprised Robbie Robertson. “‘Rumble’ made an indelible mark on the whole evolution of where rock ’n’ roll was going to go,” Robertson observes in the film. “And then I found out [Wray] was an Indian!” It could be argued that Robertson, a Mohawk, is one of the most important rock musicians of all time. Backing Bob Dylan with the Band when Dylan went electric, Robertson played an essential role in shifting popular music from folk to rock, but even his ethnic background was almost never talked about in the press.

Cultural appropriation is the central theme of Rumble, which pairs short bios of a dozen Native musicians with commentators who explain why so much of this story has never been told. “Our peoples were part of the origin story of blues, jazz, and rock of American music, but we’re left out of the story consistently from the beginning,” says Native musician Joy Harjo. Within colonialism, and within the slave trade, music was seen as a threat, which is why plantation owners banned slaves from owning drums, a prohibition that often was also applied to Natives, as well. Rumble does an excellent job of explaining how the histories of African slaves and Natives were intertwined, as slave traders bred male slaves with female Natives from tribes they conquered. This is one of the most horrific chapters in the history of the United States (and part of the reason Hendrix had Native blood, as do many African Americans).

Music has always been central to Indigenous culture in North America, but it was often taken away by a U.S. government seeking to control. “[Music] was seen as dangerous,” says historian John Troutman. “Singers and dancers were incarcerated for performing this music.” The film asserts that the Wounded Knee massacre of 1890 began with the killing of Ghost Dancers. “It was cultural genocide,” observed the now-deceased Native activist and musician John Trudell. The career of Buffy Sainte-Marie, born on the Piapot Plains Cree First Nation Reserve in Canada, shows how both Natives and women struggled to be respected as musical artists. Sainte-Marie tells how she succeeded when she started off with folk music, but as soon as her songs became overtly political, and anti-Vietnam War, she was banned from radio.

Even White male superstars like Johnny Cash found that they lost their platform when they spoke or sang about the plight of Natives. Cash’s 1964 album Bitter Tears: Ballads of the American Indian was boycotted by radio. Cash responded by taking out ads in music trade papers shaming radio (lore has it he was later to honor his activism).

Rumble��centers on an important lost part of history, a history rooted in a different, less socially aware America.

Cash’s now-iconic album came out long before the age of social media, which now quickly serves to draw attention to many incidents of overt racism. When headdresses became fashionable at music festivals in the last decade, a few festivals responded by banning them.��Powerful deterrents have been shame hashtags and social media infamy. Musician Pharrell Williams sparked a Twitter firestorm after he wore a headdress on the cover of Elle U.K. in 2014. He defended it saying he had Native background, but that didn’t calm critics like , which argued that “having an American Indian ancestor or relative isn’t a license to use that relative’s culture spontaneously and without context.” (Williams later apologized.)

Rumble addresses these topics and more, and despite the importance of the story, the documentary falls short in places. While most of the commentators are Native, a number are not, and the contrast is confusing as it leaves a viewer wondering whether their tribal affiliation was mistakenly left off the title card. For example, Martin Scorsese is not who you would expect to see in this documentary. His comments lack the insight that activists like Sainte-Marie bring, but clearly he was brought in simply because he directed The Last Waltz, which is hardly a qualification on the level of the ethnomusicologists included, many of whom are Native. And when it comes to Jimi Hendrix, his adopted step-sister Janie Hendrix, quoted extensively—saying things like Native background is “part of who you are, and what you want to respect and represent”—is not blood-related to Jimi, which the film implies. There are plenty of Native Hendrixes who could have spoken instead, and this appropriation is exactly what Rumble rails against. Nonetheless, Rumble centers on an important lost part of history, a history rooted in a different, less socially aware America. The times, we hope, have changed since Wray started, though we’ll really know there has been a shift when Wray finally gets into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Rumble is ultimately about the power of music to transcend. When the Native band Redbone perform their hit “Come and Get Your Love” wearing headdresses, in a song that uses Native rhythms and puts them into a context that is appropriate and not exploitative, it’s powerful. Redbone scored a top-five hit with the song, which includes a tribal beat and a classic guitar riff. Their moment onstage, in traditional dress, feels like triumph. “Come and Get Your Love” is also, like the rest of the music honored by Rumble, just plain great rock ’n’ roll.

Generally left out of the discussion of American cuisine, though, are the Indigenous foodways, which enabled early settlers to survive, as well as the influence of enslaved Africans that shaped our culinary heritage, particularly in the South. The latter is something Black food historians such as journalist Donna Battle Pierce, and -winners Michael Twitty and Adrian Miller, are helping to change. 

The narrative that emerges is complex and inextricably tied to place.

In his book, The Cooking Gene, Twitty explores these complexities, while sharing how his personal ancestry intertwines with American and African food traditions.  He cites the research of historian Stephen D. Behrendt, who documents the relationship between those who were enslaved and the crops they planted grew and harvested that contributed to the wealth of the United States—crops that were mostly transported to the New World via the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Behrendt even suggests that enslaved Africans were trafficked here at intervals that corresponded to the seasonal growing season.  

“This does not start with race and end with commodities, it starts with commodities and ends with race,” Twitty says, in a phone interview, referencing those cash crops such as rice, sugar, tobacco, and others. “These crops shaped the way that people [the enslaved and their owners] lived. They shaped the diet.”&�Բ�����;

Throughout the regions where enslaved Africans were concentrated, certain culinary “common denominators” emerged, Twitty writes in his book. These dishes formed the basis for Southern cuisine and “soul food,” an umbrella term used to describe Black people’s home cooking which, Pierce says, was popularized in the 1960s.

“As a culture, we had lost our language. We had lost our family… all of the things that bind a culture together,” Pierce explains of the African diaspora in America. During the Black Power Movement of the 1960s and ’70s, the term soul food was embraced because it was a way “to talk about what we shared. And that sharing felt so good to have something in common with all of us with brown skin,” she adds. 

Soul food may unite Black people but its iconic dishes, including fried chicken, chitterlings, pigeon peas, collard greens, sweet potatoes, and cornbread—once an Indigenous staple—are really a fusion cuisine.

“I think that soul food, and you can argue Southern food as well, is the fusing of West Africa, Western Europe and the Americas,” says Miller, author of , The President’s Kitchen Cabinet: The Story of the African Americans Who Have Fed Our First Families, from the Washingtons to the Obamas, and a former lawyer and policy adviser to the Clinton administration. His research included visiting 150 restaurants in 35 cities and reading 500 cookbooks and thousands of digitized historical newspapers. “These things all come together, and there are dishes that are created that remind people of a precursor.”

African American food culture is an especially fitting lens with which to explore African American history because, like DNA—which Twitty goes into detail about in his book, it is one of many aspects of African American identity that represents an unbroken line from Africa to present-day America. “There’s so many of our customs, so many of our ways of looking at seasoning and food and everything else, �ٳ󲹳�’s just straight up from Africa,” he says.

One of these customs is the concept of “teranga,” a West African idea of neighborliness and hospitality, which became a defining tenet of Southern gentility.  

“These are… values that were taught to White kids raised by Black women,” Twitty says. “[W]e were taught to believe that Southern hospitality was grounded in some sort of, like, medieval pass down. It was this thing that we… inherited from our African side mixed with a little bit of European and Native concepts of hospitality and neighborliness.”

This kind of misattribution erases the Native and Black identities that helped shape the iconic aspects of Southern cultural heritage, from country manners to cookery, leading us to equate “Southern” with “White” and creating a false dichotomy between “soul food” and “Southern cuisine,” which belong to the same tradition, Miller says. 

“Within the American South, the difference between soul food and Southern food is so blurred, it’s almost indistinguishable,” he continues. In terms of flavor, “soul food, over time, has tended to be more intense in its seasoning” and plays with sweet and savory more than White Southern variations. Another key difference: soul food remains stigmatized. It is characterized as “slave food,” an unhealthy diet that “should come with a warning label.” In actuality, Miller explains, enslaved Africans ate a largely plant-based diet, with richer sweet and meat dishes savored on special occasions. The stigma is so pervasive that when soul food dishes such as  go mainstream, African American cooks are not credited. 

“We’re now in a phase where restaurants menus will tell you [everything about] what you’re eating, where it was grown or raised, [the animal’s] personal hobbies, whatever,” Miller jokes. “So why can’t they just say, ‘this is an African American specialty’? Just give a shoutout to where you got it from. Just acknowledge the source.”

Miller, Twitty, and Pierce have made it their mission to do just that.

Twitty’s��The Cooking Gene safeguards against cultural appropriation. Rather than writing recipes and techniques—look to Donna Pierce’s website,��—he focuses on food as part of the lived experience of enslaved Africans and as an element of our shared Black American cultural DNA.��
������
“I deliberately said to myself, [White people] will not be able to appropriate these three things: our Africanness, our experience on the plantation, and our blood,” Twitty says. “No one will be able to take these things away from us.��I was telling a Black story that cannot be appropriated.”

This article has been updated on June 7, 2021, at 3:30 PST to reflect that African American food culture is one of many (the article previously stated “the only”) aspects of African American identity that represents an unbroken line from Africa to present-day America. Read more about our editorial policies and standards.

I ��Dz�’t think anyone really knew when I was sentenced in 1992 what “life without parole” meant. There was a lot of speculation. The courts said I would probably do 30 years before I went up for some sort of review. That time has passed.

I remember not being able to grow a beard when I first came in. I was so naïve, ignorant, and undereducated. As I was growing up in prison, some of my mentors told me, “Hey, get comfortable. You’re gonna be here for a while.” They were right. We, as a society, sentence people like me when we’re really young to die in prison because we are seen as incorrigible. 

When you are sentenced to life without parole, there is a loss of autonomy. You are constantly being controlled. You are . There is no hope. Either you become resilient and continue to grow and push yourself or you can view life with a fatalistic perspective and be destructive. And I’ve chosen—and most of the people I know who are serving this sentence have chosen—to better ourselves. The rebellious part of us says, “We’re not incorrigible, so we’re gonna do well, and we’re gonna show the system that we are not the worst things that we’ve ever done.”

I was raised in a house with domestic violence and verbal abuse. My dad called me “stupid” and “dumb” for doing childhood things that are pretty normal, so I grew up not having a lot of self-esteem. I gravitated toward materialism to feel like I was worth something.

When I was sent to prison, I was encouraged by people who saw my natural talents and said, “Hey, you have some really good critical-thinking skills.” My attorneys told me the same thing during trial, including, “You could have been an attorney.” I wasn’t exposed to that on the outside. I wasn’t exposed to some of the professions I know I could do today, so I gravitated to the underground economy.��

In prison, once I was mentored and encouraged to do better, my first accomplishment was a few years after I had been sentenced: I earned my first paralegal certificate and got pretty good grades. I continued to get encouragement from people around me—teachers and sometimes some of the correctional officers. And as the opportunities arose, I continued to take advantage of them. 

I have learned I can do so many different things. I have good analytical skills and a great ability to synthesize different topics. I’m good at helping people heal. I’m very good at business. There’s a number of things I could have been had I had the opportunities others have had. Nevertheless, I do take responsibility for responding in a negative way to my environment. 

It was pivotal for me to recognize my worth and my potential. It sparked the idea that if I can do this, what else can I do? I have since earned four Associate of Arts degrees, a doctorate in ministries, and a Bachelor of Arts in Communication Studies from Cal State University in Los Angeles.��

I was fortunate enough to start a program at Lancaster State Prison when I was held there. The facility was called the Progressive Programming Facility, and the administrators were open enough to allow us to create our own program. Most of us—about 600—had sentences of life without parole. We agreed nobody could join the program who had a gang membership or used drugs. 

For nearly 18 years while I was there, we ran classes, and sometimes we ran a group called Men for Honor. We had 19 different classes at the height of our group, and we had guys cycling in and out, about 150 guys a month. We were just training each other to be better people. It was almost like a college campus, other than the physical layout, and that helped us a lot.

I was selected to teach creative writing, and our group decided to publish an anthology of our stories, of how we came to prison. We thought it would be a good way to give back to society and give kids an admonishment of how we came to prison, either through rebelliousness, not listening to our parents, or listening to older homies who were guiding us in the wrong direction.��

Our book was called Horrors From the Hood for Kids to Beware. It’s part of the bigger picture of us trying to show we are redeemable and we’re not the worst decision we ever made.��

It’s been phenomenal to contribute to other people’s growth, to watch each other grow in here, because we’re basically growing up together. Even with a life without parole sentence, having an education has kept us out of trouble, kept us productively busy. 

I think accountability is really important, because we’re being punished and there’s an aspect of revenge to that. But our punishment does nothing for the people who we’ve harmed. I know victims and survivors want to understand what happened to them. They want to have questions answered, such as: Why did it happen? Why were they chosen? Will it happen again? Do we realize the impact and chaos we’ve created in their life, the losses we’ve caused them to suffer? Are we remorseful?��

Those of us with LWOP aren’t allowed to go before parole boards. And because of that, we can’t be examined and have experts tell us where we stand or give us some kind of feedback on our rehabilitative efforts. Our victims ��Dz�’t get to have accountability. 

Therefore, before I even talk about me getting out of prison, I want to acknowledge that accountability is really important for us and our growth. It’s a measuring stick, and it’s a motivation to do better. But it’s also important for people who’ve been harmed.��

One of the things I study is trauma. We have a lot of systems that are well meaning, and they might have worked well in the 14th or 15th century because we didn’t understand trauma. But today we understand it, and what I see is we just keep harming one another.��

�±�’v�� come a long way with recognizing trauma in the legal system. For youth offenders and anybody who doesn’t have LWOP, trauma is considered a mitigating factor. People consider the fact that trauma survivors ��Dz�’t have great impulse control or ��Dz�’t think through consequences. But people with LWOP are excluded from such considerations. Had I not had that sentence, I would have been given a chance to go to the parole board and make my case.

I’m almost 60 years old now, and there’s also , which is another mitigating factor. Behaviorists have said our chances of recidivism are much lower. But, again, people who are sentenced to LWOP are excluded from that.��

If I could design a better system, I would want us to at least be heard so we’re not constantly and eternally invisible, which is a kind of trauma in and of itself. We’re existing but not existing. 

I hope that if I am able to earn my freedom, I can help my family through a current crisis. I have a 13-year-old nephew who is going in the same direction I was going in. He is curious about street life and hustling. I talk to him over the phone and I write him letters and do the best I can to steer him in the right direction. He’s really phenomenal, a smart kid with a lot of potential. But too often I feel like it comes off as me preaching to him.��

In here, we model good behavior to one another, and that really works well because situational learning is key. You can tell someone in abstract terms all day long about different philosophies of living, but when you can actually show it and model it, I think �ٳ󲹳�’s what makes the difference. And I can’t do that for my nephew while I’m in prison. 

I think that �ٳ󲹳�’s one of the reasons why we have a generational problem of people coming to prison and making bad decisions. There is a “brain drain.” People who are educated and affluent move out of neighborhoods and ��Dz�’t come back. So I didn’t have the mentors I needed. And then there are people who educate themselves and transform themselves while in prison, but then we’re stuck in here and can’t give back to our community and be models and mentors in our communities.��

My family is harmed with me being in prison all this time, even though they consider me rehabilitated. My nephew is suffering. So you have this continual cycle. I wish we could be more oriented toward helping people heal.

I wish we could design our systems to be more restorative justice oriented and to focus on healing, because it is possible. They say “hurt people hurt people,” and a lot of that is because of traumatic reenactment. But “healed people can heal people.” And �ٳ󲹳�’s what I try to do in prison, �ٳ󲹳�’s what I do through the phone with people in the community.��

I hope one day society will open its mind to the possibilities of such a world instead of the philosophy of punishment and revenge. 

What could my life have been had I lived in such a world? Throughout history Black people have always had to prove they’re human. Remember ? We need to live in a world where there’s more compassion, where there’s more empathy, and where we all see each other as human beings.

As told to Sonali Kolhatkar

The impetus for this protest came two days earlier, when NYPD officers confronted 37-year-old Derell Mickles for hopping a turnstile at the Sutter Avenue station. Mickles allegedly “charged” at officers with a knife, which police say led them to fire their guns in self-defense—though body cam footage shows

Officers shot Mickles, a fellow officer, and two bystanders. Mayor Eric Adams, himself, by citing Mickles’ arrest record and the necessity of fare enforcement. “If lawmakers want to make the subways and buses free, then fine,” Adams said. “But as long as there are rules, we’re going to follow those rules.”

Incidents such as these reflect a long history of dangerous, and even fatal, interactions between NYPD and “fare evaders.” Authorities have long conflated fare evasion with dangerous criminal behavior—using race- and class-based assumptions that minor infractions create an environment for violent crime (sometimes referred to as “broken windows” policing). Demands to reform fare enforcement have been a frequent part of the discourse around improving New York’s transit system. But some abolitionist groups go further in calling for free fares as a step toward removing police from public transit entirely.

Militant protest against fare enforcement is part of an abolitionist struggle that often goes unnoticed and highlights how transit safety has shaped the look of modern policing.��

Fare Boxes and Broken Windows

New York’s Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) is in the midst of two connected crises: long-running fears about crime, and . MTA’s budget woes have a number of causes, such as declining tax revenue and a controversial , but the agency has long portrayed Fare box revenue represents . According to recent MTA data, as much as board without paying, leading to hundreds of millions of dollars in lost revenue each year. 

MTA has tried a number of strategies to reduce fare evasion, including redesigned infrastructure and aggressive messaging. But over the past five years, increased policing has become a catchall solution to stop fare evaders—and to make transit feel safer in the process. In 2023, NYPD issued , and arrests have “more than doubled” during Adams’ administration. Meanwhile, police raids have become increasingly common. In March 2024, NYPD announced an 800-officer surge at subway stations (dubbed “”), while MTA has used (with assistance from NYPD) to check bus fares in the past two years.

In 2019, a group of riders founded , a community network that uses social media to crowdsource alerts about police presence on public transit. Inspired by grassroots campaigns against fare enforcement in Montreal and Chile, Unfare’s work reduces contact between officers and riders to promote a vision of “a ride without fares and a world with no police.” Unfare member Daria says transit is an obvious place for abolitionist struggle: “It’s a site where the city’s working class is forced into contact with a police presence that keeps getting bigger and bigger.” (Unfare members are using pseudonyms to protect their identities.)

Another group, , has been offering “a grassroots community response to broken windows policing” since 2016. They encourage riders to share fare cards.

For decades, New York’s transit police have used turnstile hopping as a marker of dangerous or undesirable populations. Teams of officers began in the 1990s, sometimes posing as civilians in “decoy operations.” Former transit police chief Bill Bratton who served from 1990 to 1992, outfitted the force with new patrol cars, “,” and, controversially, semi-automatic handguns. Bratton later served two non-consecutive terms as commissioner of the NYPD. As though foreshadowing the Sutter Avenue shooting, critics argued in 1990 that “would not only increase the risk of bystanders being shot but also of police officers wounding themselves or fellow officers.”

“Law and Order” at the Turnstiles

In 1982, criminologists George L. Kelling and James Q. Wilson proposed that visible signs of neighborhood disorder (such as graffiti, public intoxication, and vagrancy) could and cause community members to retreat from public spaces. This so-called “broken windows” theory has become one of the most important frameworks of modern policing, especially in New York City. “Fare evasion has been the most common thing that someone gets arrested for in New York, I believe, for [more than] 20 years,” says , program director at New York University’s Marron Institute of Urban Management.

Elected officials, police leaders, and pundits—conservative and liberal alike—continue to use “broken windows” rhetoric to justify greater fare enforcement. Manhattan Institute senior fellow Nicole Gelinas recently wrote in the that “the only thing that will change people’s minds is if they know that a penalty will be swift, certain and actually collected.” New York Times columnist that “many progressives are still loath to admit that broken windows policing works,” while suggesting that police abolition reflects “an elitist attitude that betrays a lack of experience with crime-ridden environments.”&�Բ�����;

Who does fare enforcement benefit? Studies by the and the have found that fare enforcement occurs more frequently in low-income and majority-Black and Latinx neighborhoods. In 2023, nonwhite New Yorkers represented , and criminal justice reformers have consistently pointed to .

In response to these critiques, community groups, politicians, and consultants have proposed reforms aimed at reducing race and class disparities in fare enforcement. In 2022, the , a grassroots organization of MTA users, published “,” which recommends unarmed civilian personnel to check fares and expanded eligibility for fare discounts. A commissioned by MTA leadership calls for “precision policing” that uses data to identify fare evasion hotspots and a “warnings-first approach to summonses for first-time evaders.”��

It’s not clear whether punitive enforcement tactics actually reduce fare evasion. In , MTA acknowledged that “these costly and sometimes controversial methods have had limited success in reversing the upward trend in riders who do not pay.” What such tactics are effective at is sending large numbers of vulnerable people through the criminal justice system each year. They can trap people in , even .��

Increases in transit policing have, in turn, energized abolitionist calls to remove police from MTA. When former in 2019, groups like Swipe It Forward and , an anti-imperialist protest coalition, . Anonymous activists called for fare-free, cop-free subways and put up dozens of

Abolitionists have often grounded their critiques in the history of American policing, which is intertwined with chattel slavery and settler colonialism. A Swipe It Forward organizer recently that “the NYPD … are fixated on slave patrolling and quotas, and they use the transit system as one of their main iterations to do so.” , a Palestinian solidarity coalition, echoed this language in : “The NYPD protects property and capital, it funnels black and immigrant populations into endless cycles of immiseration and poverty and modern enslavement.”

From Affordable Transit to Free Transit

There is precedent for free transit. for months in 2020 as a COVID-19 mitigation tactic and recently ended an 11-month pilot program suspending fare on five bus routes. According to MTA, that pilot led to “ and 38 percent on weekends.” But the idea has yet to catch on as a permanent solution. 

While transit agencies across the country have in recent years to reduce congestion, encourage higher ridership, and address economic inequality, . “The idea of fare free transit is worth debating, and the more experiments the better,” says Kafui Attoh, Ph.D., associate professor of Urban Studies at the City University of New York. “At the same time, we [shouldn’t] gloss over the potential drawbacks, in terms of funding and ridership.”

Perhaps the biggest hurdle to a fare-free MTA is replacing fare box revenue in its budget and finding political support to do so. Research on fare-free transit tends to focus on smaller cities with lower ridership that ��Dz�’t rely heavily on fare box revenue. “There’s something of a paradox here,” says Attoh. “Where it is feasible, its impact will be limited, and where its impact would be the greatest, its feasibility is the most questionable.” Goldwyn adds that without substantively addressing the budget gap, a move toward free fares could lead to service cuts, creating “even less frequency and worse reliability” for those who rely on transit. 

In other words, if cities such as New York want to invest in making public transit free and accessible—in the same way that libraries and public schools are—they need to make it a priority in their budgets. Abolitionist groups advocate reductions in police funding to do so. MTA’s “fiscal cliff” suggests a fundamental imbalance between expanding police and fully funding public services. Indeed, New York’s fare crisis reflects a broader debate about the basic function of police in a city where . 

The website , a resource of “non-reformist reforms” compiled in 2020, cast free public transit with investments in health care, education, and community-based food providers as two sides of the same coin. It is a way to “invest in care, not cops.” , a former grassroots campaign to close the Rikers Island jail complex, echoes this, calling for removing all NYPD officers from the MTA and decriminalizing fare evasion to “pay the annual fares of all New Yorkers who cannot afford [it].”

Last year, when Gov. Kathy Hochul and Mayor Adams’ sent more than 1,000 extra officers to patrol subways, —and the state reimbursed the city for less than half that amount. Meanwhile, to libraries, parks, early childhood education, and more, many of which were reversed after public outcry. Unfare member Lou argues that fare evasion’s outsized role in MTA’s budget crisis reflects a “long history of stripping funding for these services and shifting the blame to ‘crime’ and the poor.”

In fall 2024, the Sutter Avenue shooting sparked a new wave of , , and “.” As abolitionists scrutinize NYPD for , , and , they are using transit issues to advocate for a transformative vision of community safety—with a fare-free MTA at the center. A city without fares is “deeply connected to our collective freedom of movement more broadly,” says Lou. “Being free to move through our city together means being free from police harassment and violence, from fines and incarceration.”

By removing a key incentive to police subways and buses, transit agencies could meet the demand surging through New York’s subways and realize the abolitionist call to “Live free, ride free.”

As an outspoken abolitionist, Abdullah has championed defunding the police using a concrete, practical, and deeply democratic method of participatory budgeting in which city residents decide how their tax dollars should be spent.

In a conversation in January 2024, Abdullah pointed out how BLMLA was poised to prove that defunding and abolishing police were not impossible. , conducted prior to the May 2020 police killing of George Floyd, revealed that, when given the opportunity to allocate city funds, most people choose public well-being, health, and safety, rather than law enforcement and punitive measures.

Sonali Kolhatkar: Where did the idea of participatory budgeting come from, and was it always a pathway toward reimagining public safety?

Melina Abdullah: Some people think that Black Lives Matter came up with participatory budgeting, that it’s some new thing that was developed in order to defund the police. We do want participatory budgeting to be used to defund the police, but the concept goes back many, many decades. It’s very deeply rooted in the concept of democracy.

When you talk about participatory budgeting, you’re talking about people having an investment in how their tax dollars are spent. And so, rather than having policymakers or elected officials determine without any public input where the dollars go, people actually have a say-so and a voice in where their dollars go.

We know that without the voice of the people, special interests tend to influence local, state, and federal budgets to spend an exorbitant amount—often the lion’s share of the budget—on policing and militarism. By special interests, I mean lobby groups like police associations, which are not unions but which wield tremendous power, as well as defense contractors.

Kolhatkar: How have participatory budgeting processes been applied toward defunding police in Los Angeles specifically?

Abdullah: In 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic first hit Los Angeles, we started looking around and asked why they were still spending upward of 50 percent of the city’s general fund on police. Nobody was even outdoors. What we needed were resources for people staying in their homes and mental health support. We’re still in the midst of the worst public health crisis in global history and need resources to address it. That’s where our funds should be going, but upward of 50 percent of the city’s general fund is spent on police. We should be spending money on services, not police.

We convened a meeting with virtually every Black organization in greater Los Angeles, and we all agreed that we wanted to fund services, not police. If we as organizers felt that way, what did Black Los Angeles feel? To answer that question, we launched the People’s Budget survey. What came back was that people’s top two funding priorities are mental health and housing. The top two things they wanted to cut funding to were police and traffic enforcement.

Those priorities intensified in May 2020 when there was a worldwide uproar following the state-sanctioned lynching of George Floyd. People started asking: What would police abolition look like? What would new systems of public safety look like? We had collected two to three months of data before Floyd’s murder, and then after May 2020, people wanted to defund the police even further. That’s what the People’s Budget sought to amplify.

Since 2020, we’ve done that survey every single year. �±�’v�� organized town hall meetings, workshops, work groups, and focus groups to figure out how we can get to where most people want to be. Black women most intensely want to move away from oppressive models of policing and toward this resource-rich, community-focused, system of public safety.

Kolhatkar: How has the People’s Budget been received by elected officials, such as the mayor and city councilmembers?

Abdullah: Former L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti refused to receive the People’s Budget presentation. We were able to present it to the L.A. City Council because then City Council President Herb Wesson invited us to do so. One of the things that we believe cost Wesson his reelection in 2020 was a complete turn in how he viewed public safety.

One of his most famous quotes from that time was, “I won’t always be an elected official, but I’ll always be a Black man, a Black father, and a Black grandfather.”

As he ran for his next seat, he actually rejected the endorsement of the Police Protective League and the Association for Los Angeles Deputy Sheriffs. He sent the endorsement back saying, “I ��Dz�’t want it anymore.” And we think that probably cost him that seat.

After Floyd was lynched, there was a Black Lives Matter uprising and a period of racial reckoning. In order to kind of appease that movement, many elected officials were willing to hear us out. That year we gave our presentation inside city council chambers, and it was particularly compelling. By 2021, a backlash had begun, and we weren’t invited back by the full city council. We had to push Herb Wesson’s successor, Nury Martinez, who we later found out was not a fan of Black people, to allow us into that space to give a presentation.

By 2022, very few elected officials or city councilmembers would hear our presentation. So, city councilmembers who see themselves as allies like Mike Bonin and Marqueece Harris-Dawson were eager to receive that information. When Karen Bass was elected mayor in 2023, we were able to give the People’s Budget presentation to the mayor.

The mayor of Los Angeles didn’t invite us to City Hall. Instead, she came to our ’hood and our home: the Center for Black Power in Africatown, which some people call Leimert Park, the birthplace of Black Lives Matter. She came there and, before a packed room of hundreds of mostly Black Angelenos, we gave the People’s Budget presentation to her.

Unfortunately, when we gave that presentation, it was toward the end of the budget process. So even though she received the information, she’d already gone along with what many advisors told her to do and had, in fact, increased the police budget.

In 2024, we’ve been invited to present her the results of the survey and the results of the entire People’s Budget process earlier in the budget process. We hope that it’s considered as she builds the new budget. Hopefully, she’ll consider us as deeply as she considers police interests.

Kolhatkar: Can you put the Los Angeles effort around participatory budgeting into a national context? Is L.A. further along than other cities? In addition to Minneapolis, we’ve seen flashpoints in cities like Detroit, Oakland, and Seattle, where there’ve been efforts to defund the police.

Abdullah: Sure. Since 2020, we’ve been convening with groups located everywhere from Santa Clara, California, to Des Moines, Iowa, to discuss a People’s Budget process. There are now between 30 and 50 cities replicating this process. And there are some groups whose participatory budgeting work predates our own.

It’s gaining traction. People, no matter what their political stance, believe in the concept of democracy. They say, “Taxes are our money. We should have a say in how they are spent.” We’re able to get lots of folks on board around that.

In fact, what we see also is that, regardless of political persuasion, people tend to lean toward defunding the police. They may not like that term “defunding” anymore, but when they see a simple pie chart presented to neighborhood councils in Los Angeles, they see in red that 54 percent of the city’s general fund goes to police. Everybody—from the Howard Jarvis tax people to Black folks in South Central Los Angeles and Watts—knows �ٳ󲹳�’s too much money for police.

That’s true in Los Angeles, and it’s true in Oakland, where I know people like Cat Brooks and the Anti Police-Terror Project are also working toward defunding police. It’s also true in Minneapolis, where the organization Black Visions is working on issues like this. These are just a few of the 30 to 50 municipalities that have been part of these People’s Budget calls.

Kolhatkar: When we look at the results of the People’s Budget surveys, people were happy to designate a mere 1.64 percent of the entire city’s budget to police, which is quite remarkable. As an abolitionist, do you want to see something on that order or zero percent?

Abdullah: I say zero! There are very few Black people who feel safer when a police cruiser pulls up behind them in traffic. So, when we think about that, we know intuitively as Black people that police ��Dz�’t keep us safe. . They might respond to a crime after it’s happened, but they are only successful in solving the most egregious crimes less than 2 percent of the time.

We have to do a better job talking about alternative models, particularly ones that have already proven to be successful. Newark, New Jersey, for example, has invested deeply in community safety programs. Phenomenal work is also being done by people like —cofounder of the Community Based Public Safety Collective in Watts. These efforts have been much, much more successful in making communities safer than policing.

The most brilliant economist that I know, Dr. Julianne Malveaux, says that budgets are moral and ethical documents. If we spend almost $4 billion on police in the city of Los Angeles, �ٳ󲹳�’s $4 billion that could have provided housing, health care, and mental health care for all. We have to be willing to take funding from oppressive forces and invest in the things that actually make us safe.

So, yes, my position is let’s completely abolish police and use those funds to invest in forms of public safety and wellness that are rooted in community.

Kolhatkar: What will it take to spread this idea of participatory budgeting in cities around the country? It’s one thing for it to work on a local level. It’s another thing to realize that vision nationally. And even though cities like Minneapolis and Oakland are working on defunding, the U.S. is a huge country. Are you hopeful that this idea of deciding budgets in a participatory way is catching on?

Abdullah: Yes. People like it, and it’s going to catch on. Participatory budgeting is not abolition, but it is one way of pulling masses of people into a process and engaging them in ways that empower communities to radically re-envision and reimagine the world and work toward the world of our greatest hopes and dreams.

This excerpt, adapted from (Seven Stories Press, 2025), appears by permission of the publisher.

According to Cherry, a PPFA worker who requested a pseudonym out of fear of retaliation, unionized PPFA workers were “really upset” by their employer’s public and internal statements on Israel’s aggression on Gaza. A Signal group was created to work on an that circulated later that month.��

The Dec. 5 statement was PPFA’s first public comment about Gaza, but Cherry says, “[PPFA] had sent a couple of internal all-staff emails before that one that very much deprioritized the historical context and experience of Palestinians over the last nearly a century.” Cherry adds, “As workers, we wanted to demonstrate that the PPFA statement does not necessarily reflect those of us in the national office.”

The collectively written open letter was drafted by both unionized and non-unionized PPFA workers, as well as workers from PPFA affiliates. Letter writers urged for an immediate and permanent ceasefire in Gaza and unequivocally called Israel’s aggression on Gaza a genocide. Signed by more than 500 patients, volunteers, organizers, health care providers, donors, supporters, and workers, the letter also called out the hypocrisy of the organization’s stance.

“For PPFA to ignore the Israeli government’s war crimes against the Palestinian people stands antithetical to their purported mission to fight for the dignity, safety, and rights of all people,” the letter reads. “We urge PPFA’s leadership to follow the lead of other reproductive health, rights, and justice organizations in calling for a ceasefire and an end to the U.S. funding of the Israeli government’s occupation and genocide in Gaza.”

According to the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF), who were displaced to shelters in Gaza suffered from thirst and malnutrition, and health care and vaccinations for newborns were scarce. Though PPFA is a member of the IPPF, the latter has no governance power over the former.

In July 2024, the Palestinian Family Planning and Protection Association estimated that since October 2023. If PPFA leadership and its affiliates—independently incorporated local Planned Parenthood clinics supported by PPFA—refused to take a stance for a ceasefire, the letter signers wanted to make clear that not all workers and supporters of the organization were content to be silent in the face of a genocide. 

“The other thing that bothered me and made me want to write and sign the letter is that we’re a reproductive rights organization and we were completely out of step with the IPPF,” says Emma, a worker in the national Planned Parenthood office who also requested a pseudonym out of fear of retribution. Emma felt PPFA should be more supportive of the international organization, which , citing the violation of women and girls specifically. 

“The IPPF is a global reproductive rights organization that has been very vocal about , the lack of period sanitation products, [and] how people have to experience C-sections without anesthesia,” says Emma. “Just all these things the PPFA is supposed to be an advocate for and is just completely ignoring, and then when it stopped ignoring what’s going on, it chose to just spout propaganda.”

For some workers at PPFA and its affiliates across the U.S., the lack of reproductive health care in Gaza was difficult to ignore in day-to-day operations. The PPFA’s official statement on Gaza and the lack of internal discussion of the issue was what pushed Aseel Houmsse, research and clinical training coordinator at the Planned Parenthood League of Massachusetts (PPLM), to organize with other workers, sign the open letter published last December, and send a letter to their affiliate’s equity department. 

Houmsse, a first-generation immigrant to the U.S. who is of Middle Eastern descent, says they expected conversations about Palestine to happen in Planned Parenthood employee affinity group meetings due to the organization’s commitment to diversity, equality, and inclusion. Houmsse expected those conversations to be “geared toward advancing equity and advancing the idea of health care for all,” but was surprised to encounter complete silence about the issue at their affiliate. “That’s when I decided to organize with others who were concerned about the silence,” Houmsse explains.

Houmsse and other workers wrote an internal letter to the equity division of PPLM that they say was “rejected immediately with no feedback.”&�Բ�����;Houmsse felt not only the organization-wide silence and its general chilling effect, but its particular impact on workers with roots in the Middle East and North Africa. Houmsse found PPFA’s response “incredibly disappointing,” before adding that it “goes against the idea of how we need to talk about the uncomfortable things.”

This continues a pattern Houmsse has witnessed all their life: a systemic refusal to discuss Palestine in left-wing and liberal spaces. “[T]hese… groups… are meant to tackle uncomfortable conversations in a way �ٳ󲹳�’s functional.”

That is the reason Houmsse thought it important for unions and workers to come together and sign the open letter to PPFA leadership. “What I love about unions is that they provide, ideally, a sense of psychological safety,” Houmsse says. “I think especially when we work in areas that are highly stressful like an abortion clinic, for instance, I think it’s really nice to know that there is an entity out there that has your back, that is able to keep your security, safety, all these things in mind.” (Neither PPFA nor PPLM responded to YES! Media’s requests for comment.)

Autonomy and Cybersecurity

PPFA leadership ignored the first open letter. In May 2024, I wrote a Prism Reports feature breaking the news that PPFA had , a notorious corporation that, according to the , makes “missiles, bombs, components for fighter jets, and other weapon systems used by the Israeli military against Palestinian civilians.”&�Բ�����;

The story raised questions about whether liberal nonprofit organizations defending human rights should work with a company that manufactures military weapons. In addition, PPFA workers were concerned about their lack of participation in the hiring of a company that handles data essential to the daily operations of reproductive health care. 

“Seeing [the connection between Planned Parenthood and Raytheon] laid out so directly was devastating,” says Casey, a unionized worker from an East Coast affiliate who requested a pseudonym. “I can speak for my fellow union members and workers [that], generally, we love this work. To know that our labor was, in this very direct way, going to this frankly evil company was just horrible. The next day in the clinic, we were all crying and were like, ‘Alright, what can we do?’” 

The collective despair motivated PPFA workers to in July, this time demanding PPFA’s divestment from Raytheon as well as “full transparency about its business dealings with cybersecurity companies.” Workers requested a say on the cybersecurity company hired to handle highly sensitive data that could, in some cases, further marginalize Planned Parenthood clients who are undocumented or could be criminalized for getting an abortion. The letter also charged the organization with “co-opting the language of freedom and self-determination while maintaining relationships with warmongers and military arms profiteers.”&�Բ�����;

For Emma, PPFA’s contract with Raytheon exposed a gap of values between workers providing on-the-ground reproductive health care and PPFA leadership. “I won’t deny that Planned Parenthood affiliates provide so many health care services, but it’s the workers who … are on the ground doing that,” Emma says. “There definitely should be a distinction, but as a larger institution, I’m not even disappointed. I’m furious.”

The fractures over Gaza and the Raytheon contract made distinctions between leadership and workers clearer. While leadership seemed preoccupied with putting out neutral messaging on Israel’s siege on Gaza to protect the organization, workers were watching videos of children, men, and women being massacred and disabled by weapons closely related to their workplace’s choice of cybersecurity provider.

According to Casey, organizing with unionized and non-unionized workers, as well as Planned Parenthood supporters and donors, has offered PPFA workers opportunities to learn from each other and clarify how workers in the U.S. can show up in solidarity with Palestine. 

“It really gave us learning and growing opportunities to better understand the idea of solidarity and what unions do,” Casey says. For them, this movement was evidence that unions are more than an “insurance policy for workers—they exist to build our working-class power.” And it made them realize how workers have “so much power collectively, but we have to get to that place where we believe that and can mobilize it.”

This can be true for unions across the U.S. “We can [all] mobilize to make material changes for Palestinian liberation,” Casey says.

The Palestinian solidarity movement within Planned Parenthood is an example of how working-class power can be used to clarify connections between struggles, even when they seem to be disconnected from our own workplace, geographically or otherwise. Through organizing and community building, Planned Parenthood workers helped expose the nonprofit-industrial complex operating within the U.S. empire, demonstrating how diversity, equity and inclusion efforts fail when imperialism and colonialism aren’t tackled head on.

By reminding their employer of the organization’s own mission, organized workers and unions pushed for rights and justice outside U.S. borders. 

“No more lunch tickets,” he said to a woman standing in the hallway. 

When Walz held up the signed bill in the crowded school cafeteria, the room erupted into applause as children hugged the former coach’s neck. “As a former teacher, I know that providing free breakfast and lunch for our students is one of the best investments we can make to lower costs, support Minnesota’s working families, and care for our young learners and the future of our state,” on the legislation. “This bill puts us one step closer to making Minnesota the best state for kids to grow up, and I am grateful to all of the legislators and advocates for making it happen.”

The law reimbursed public school districts, charter schools, and non-public schools for meals purchased through the National School Lunch and the School Breakfast Programs. The state-funded Free School Meals for Kids program also provides reimbursement for meals served to students who do not qualify for free or reduced-price meals so all students receive the meals at no cost. The program is estimated to over a two-year budget period.

“Based on the latest data from the Department of Education, lunch participation was up about 19 percent and breakfast participation was up 41 percent,” says Sophia Lenarz-Coy, executive director of the Food Group, which is focused on increasing access to healthy, locally grown food in Minnesota. “We can see that students are just better prepared. They’re better able to learn and focus.”

Minnesota could be setting the framework for adoption on the federal level. In 2023, Rep. Ilhan Omar, who also represents Minnesota, Rep. Adam Schiff, and Rep. Jahana Hayes introduced the . The law would provide students with free breakfast, lunch, dinner, and a snack each day, without needing to prove eligibility.

It would also raise , the amount of money the federal government provides to states for lunches, afterschool snacks, and breakfasts served to children participating in the National School Lunch and School Breakfast programs. The bill would also increase the national average payment for free lunch from $4.01 to $4.63 and include additional payments to schools using locally sourced food.

“Minnesota has a long history of good coalition work around food,” says Lenarz-Coy. “When we look at what got us to universal school meals in Minnesota, [the health sector] was involved, food producers were involved, public health was involved, education advocates were involved, and anti-hunger advocates were involved. It really was a coalition.”

It is going to require that level of coalition-building to bring Minnesota’s approach to universal school meals to the national level. But now, with a Republican president-elect and a Republican majority in the Senate and the House, Project 2025 is a real possibility.

With its implementation comes the removal of many protections provided to school children across the country, including calling for an end to the community eligibility program (CEP), which, beginning in the 2014-2015 school year, allowed high-needs schools to begin providing free lunch to all their students and receiving reimbursement based on the percentage of students eligible for those meals. Schools are designated as high needs if a significant percentage of its student population qualifies for free or reduced-price meals.

The Food Group notes Project 2025 and similar proposals do not acknowledge or the need of many students who are above the CEP free or reduced-price eligibility threshold but are still unable to afford school meals. Since Barack Obama signed the into law in 2010, which aided the creation of the CEP, children in the U.S. have at school, and breakfast participation has increased by nearly 25 percent.

While feeding all children in schools is an expensive endeavor, Lenarz-Coy says it’s an essential element of education that shouldn’t be overlooked. In July, Food Research and Action Center (FRAC) compiled studies showing the value of free school meals for all children, including improved physical and emotional health among students, increased attendance rates, improved test scores among marginalized student groups, and reduced discipline infractions.

“[In Minnesota], we’ve made sure to continue talking to school nutrition associations about how we can keep improving the quality of the lunch along with getting lunch to everybody,” says Lenarz-Coy. “It’s not an easy lift, so the key is to have champions. [You need] several stars to align. Having a champion in the governor’s office was really important to getting a policy this big over the line.”

Hunger Is a Health Problem

Healthy meals for the nation’s children is not a new concept.

In 1946, to low-income students. The Child Nutrition Act of 1966 then condensed control of the school lunch program from several government agencies to the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), established the School Breakfast Program, and authorized the Special Milk Program, which provides milk free of charge or at a reduced cost to children in schools who do not participate in other child nutrition programs.

The USDA piloted the Child Care Food Program and Summer Food Service Program (SFSP) in 1968 to provide food and resources for local sponsors who want to combine a feeding program with a summer activity program. In response to reports of hungry children, out of churches and community centers, eventually expanding to 36 cities across the United States by 1971.

During the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, supplying school meals became an even more urgent priority. In 2020, Congress passed the , which gave the USDA authority to issue nationwide waivers making meals free for all students in participating school districts. More than 5 million children were served during the summer of 2020, nearly double the number of children who received meals through the program in each of the five previous summers. The move led to a record drop in food insecurity among families with children, from nearly 12 million in 2020 to 9 million in 2021.

“It was a huge success,” says Crystal FitzSimons, interim president of the Food Research and Action Center (FRAC), an organization that aims to improve the nutrition, health, and well-being of people facing food insecurity in the United States. “Schools loved it, parents loved it, kids loved it.”

Though the program ended on June 30, 2022, when Congress failed to extend the waiver, at least eight states, including California, Colorado, Michigan, and New Mexico, have now passed legislation to provide free school meals to students.

Other bills such as the , the , and the would expand free meals to students, an idea the majority of people in the U.S. support. A found that 63 percent of voters nationwide support legislation that would provide free meals to students.

Free Food Without Shame

Despite this widespread support, Project 2025 suggests , which it refers to as a “major welfare agency” and removing references to “equity” and “climate smart” in the USDA’s mission statement. Besides the devastating overall effects of this move, conflating free meal programs with welfare discourages students from participating in free meal programs.

This framing continues the stigmatizing of free school meals as “welfare” that began during . In a 2023 interview on , Jennifer Gaddis, Ph.D., an associate professor of civil society and community studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, said that before the pandemic, 30 million children participated in the school lunch program on a daily basis. However, about 20 million more had access to the program but chose not to participate, partially because of the stigma.

“I think shame [was a reason people didn’t participate],” Gaddis said. “And just the stigma of this being like a government handout versus something that you expect to be part of the school day.”

Universal school lunch eliminates the visibility of who is receiving assistance. Consequently, more students are likely to participate in the lunch program. When students feel comfortable participating, they are more likely to consume healthy nutritious meals, which can positively affect their health and academic performance. Eliminating the negative connotation associated with school lunch also fosters a more inclusive learning environment and a decrease in disciplinary actions, while also alleviating stress on families that may already be resource-strapped.

“Families are struggling with increased food costs and housing costs,” FitzSimons says. “[Universal school meals] reduce the household food budget and make it easier for families to make ends meet. It’s much easier when [parents] ��Dz�’t have to worry about making sure their kids have lunch, and it helps ensure that students have access to the nutrition they need so that they ��Dz�’t show up in class hungry or get hungry in the afternoon.”

When the School Doors Close

As the push for free healthy school meals increases, so does the discussion about how the U.S. can reduce child hunger once the last school bell rings. Since the Families First Coronavirus Response Act expired, the number of children living in hunger has increased. Today, in the United States.

Some schools currently supplement school-day breakfast and lunch with weekend meals for students with an identified need, while other families are reliant on care food programs offered through local organizations. “If there is a weekend program, like at a rec center, a YMCA, or a Boys and Girls Club, they can serve meals through the child and adult care food program,” FitzSimons says. “They ��Dz�’t reach as many kids, obviously, as school meals.”

But this isn’t a new problem, though there are old solutions: In 1995, a school nurse, who has remained unnamed, in Little Rock, Arkansas, observed that many of the students she treated for illness or fatigue were hungry because they did not have enough to eat at home. So she created a backpack meal program, where she partnered with a local food bank to provide bags with food for students to take home over the weekend.

Over time, programs such as Feeding America’s BackPack Program, Blessings in a Backpack, and Operation Backpack have cropped up in schools and districts all across the country. benefit from food backpack programs on any given weekend.��

The BackPack Program works with food banks and schools to provide healthy, easy-to-prepare food for weekends and school breaks. The program feeds more than 450,000 children each week by sending backpacks of groceries home with students. A study of the program in Urbana, Illinois, found that meals provided to families beyond the school day . Thirteen percent of families surveyed moved from “low food insecure” to “food secure” between October and December, and schools reported , school attendance, literacy and math test scores, and interest in school.

If we want to bring universal school meals to all children, regardless of income, it’s going to take a combination of imagination, tolerance for criticism, and a shift in how we consider this issue. “On test days, schools feed all kids well. Every day is a good day to do well in school,” she says. “We’re really trying to make the case that in the same way we cover books and other things about school, we should make sure all kids going to public schools are fed.”

The result is both symbolic and produces plants with tangible uses, says jackie sumell (who does not capitalize her name), who conceived the project; plants with healing properties will be redistributed to people who need them through what sumell calls a “prisoner’s apothecary.” The solitary beds are eventually overrun with plant life, a visual representation of a world without prisons, an idea that forms the project’s core mission.

Typically, a volunteer gardener on the outside will send a list of plants to an incarcerated gardener. The list provides plenty of options but is limited to what will thrive in the climate and season. They collaborate on a gardening plan and a calendar, often with a small floor plan filled in by the incarcerated gardener laying out the positioning of plants.

Once plants get chosen, a plant bed is constructed from tobacco, cotton, and indigo grown on-site, which is mixed with lime, water, and clay, a concoction sumell calls “revolutionary mortar.” Those plants were chosen because of their role in chattel slavery, meant to evoke the connection between the slave trade and the prison system. Then the volunteer plants the incarcerated person’s chosen plants to the best of their ability. Because the beds are only 6 by 9, sometimes not all the plants will fit, and they’ll have to wait until they’ve harvested what they now have.

Many choose plants with healing properties. sumell says one gardener is interested in adaptogens, plants like ginseng and holy basil that are believed to reduce stress levels, and which sumell says can help with internalized trauma. “Their garden was specifically designed thinking about ways that would have prevented getting them in prison to begin with,” sumell says.

The idea behind the gardens began through a dozen-year-long collaboration between sumell and Herman Wallace, who, along with Albert Woodfox and Robert King is one of the “Angola Three,” former Black Panthers who served decades in solitary confinement at Louisiana State Penitentiary and whose convictions were later overturned. Their conversations and sumell’s quest to imagine a home where Wallace could return home from prison led to an art project called “The House That Herman Built,” also the subject of a .

Wallace was released from prison Oct. 1, 2013, and died from liver cancer three days later. sumell began the solitary gardens project to continue his legacy, inviting Albert Woodfox, who was released in 2016, to be one of the inaugural gardeners.

The garden has been funded through grants from about a dozen organizations over the years, and now gets most funding from the New York-based nonprofits Creative Capital and Art For Justice, but it relies heavily on the support of dedicated volunteers.

Christin Wagner, a volunteer who has lived in New Orleans for nine years, is partnered with an incarcerated gardener named Jesse, who is being held at ADX Florence, a maximum security federal prison in Colorado. Solitary Gardens requested that Jesse’s last name not be used for fear of retaliation from prison officials.

Jesse’s requests were for plants that people could find useful, according to Wagner. “He likes the idea that it can come from the ground and nourish someone,” Wagner says. Jesse also asks for pansies, for the color and because his mother loves the plant.

Wagner’s letter writing with Jesse led her to develop a friendship with Jesse’s wife, who along with Jesse’s mother, aunt, and cousins visited the garden he had planned from prison. “It was really, really, incredible, it was very heavy too,” Wagner says. “None of us at the garden have ever met Jesse, but we feel he’s part of our extended family.”

Two solitary gardeners were recently released from prison and now volunteer in person. Ricky Teano, 30, was incarcerated for 10 years and released in January. Teano says he’s served a few stints in solitary, with the longest being two weeks. He got involved with the garden from prison about 18 months ago when an incarcerated mentor—who also has a garden bed at Andry Street—connected him with sumell. “It was a way of healing the bridge between me being incarcerated and individuals in society,” Teano says.

“When I grew up, my dad was big on old school remedies and stuff,” he says. This led him to choose plants with healing or medicinal properties, including mint and sage. Since his release, he says volunteering with the garden has helped him transition into society. “It’s a form of therapy for me,” he says.

The concept of solitary gardens have been reproduced across the country, including garden beds in Philadelphia and Texas. “The solitary gardens are open source and totally replicable,” sumell says. She is not involved in all the gardens, but does help with some, including a . This garden bed is curated by Tim Young, who is incarcerated at San Quentin State Prison.

Young answered questions over the phone via an intermediary, because San Quentin limits his phone contacts to a pre-approved list. “I think it was a matter of the stars and the universe coming into perfect alignment,” Young says about connecting with sumell and the gardens. Young had seen sumell in the “Herman’s House” documentary in 2012 and wrote her letters for years, he said, not receiving a response. In 2019, he received a letter asking him to participate in the solitary gardens project, to which he replied yes. Two months later, sumell visited him in San Quentin and asked him to be the solitary gardener for UC Santa Cruz.

“I think it’s a crime to encase people in concrete cages and deprive them of nature,” Young said. “What the garden has done is give me a greater appreciation of all the things that I am no longer able to feel, touch, or enjoy. I haven’t touched the earth or leaned upon a tree in over 22 years,” he said from prison. Young wanted plants that could heal the body and mind, he said, and chose mugwort as well as a favorite, stinging nettles.

Young has received letters over the years from people visiting the garden, including students and their parents on campus tours. “Many of them wrote about how it had changed their lives, it had served as an epiphany for them,” he said.

“To my surprise, much more has sprouted up than plants and herbs,” Young said of his experience with the project. “There have been friendships and alliances and collaborations and, you know, general support.”

sumell wants to create a more permanent space in New Orleans to host the prisoner’s apothecary, and hopes to eventually provide jobs with living wages to formerly incarcerated people working at the gardens.

This story was originally published by , and appears here as part of the SoJo Exchange from , a nonprofit organization dedicated to rigorous reporting about responses to social problems

Clearly, what happens in a child’s early years matters. But there are a to early childhood development opportunities, including the exorbitant costs of childcare in the United States, miles-wide childcare deserts in rural areas, underpaid and burnt-out educators, and under-resourced facilities that can’t meet the overwhelming demand for their services.

Amid this already-uphill battle for early childcare, Project 2025—the , former Trump officials, and right-wing think tank the Heritage Foundation—plans to make these barriers even higher.

Though Project 2025 aspires to overhaul nearly all aspects of the federal government under Donald Trump, its and family care are particularly brazen. Not only does Project 2025 intend to strip reproductive rights through federal abortion bans and restrict family-planning options such as IVF and contraceptives, it would also eliminate , a federally funded childcare and early-development program for low-income kids, pregnant people, and families.

Launched in 1965, Head Start was designed to disrupt, and ultimately end, intergenerational poverty by providing free, wraparound early-development services to children from infancy to age 5. Head Start offers education, full-time childcare centers, medical support, and social services to families in need. Since its founding, .

Even those who may never access or qualify for Head Start benefit from it. In the South, for example, local Head Start programs became spaces for . In the ’70s, for childcare centers and caregivers across the country and has since set the standard for innovative childcare methods and research. Head Start even funded the much-loved children’s TV show Sesame Street.

“Programs like Head Start serve majority-Black and Brown communities, and I think it’s just racist to defund these programs,” says Liz Bangura, a doula, social justice coordinator, and former educator at Jump Start, a national nonprofit partner program for Head Start. As a doula, Bangura works exclusively with Black and Brown mothers and says they’ve seen firsthand how Head Start changes families’ lives.

“Head Start plays a huge role in caring for the child after labor … when [families] are able to be in these programs, I visibly see the relief in [mothers] when they’re able to go to work and also drop their kid off somewhere where they know they’re being taught how to read, [where] they’re socializing with other students.”

Project 2025’s overt targeting of Head Start is about more than just early education and childcare centers. It’s about creating a country where generations of low-income children and families are left behind. But rather than fighting only for the preservation of Head Start, it’s equally important to understand its limitations and work toward a society where all families have access to the consistent, high-quality care they need—regardless of who sits in the White House.

Without Early Care, a Cascade of Harm

Head Start is a critical program, but it simply isn’t reaching all the families who need it. Access to Head Start is determined by , and as a result many families are caught in the welfare gap: scraping by, living paycheck to paycheck, but still making too much to qualify for Head Start. A (NIEER) found that in the 2020-2021 school year, Head Start and its sister-program, Early Head Start, did not reach even half of all eligible children living in poverty.

Likewise, many families who ��Dz�’t meet Head Start’s eligibility requirements are left to make do on their own.

For Ymani Blake, a lower-middle-class mother living in Chicago, accessing quality childcare for her 3-year-old has been a challenge from Day 1. Despite applying for funding and assistance multiple times, Blake has always been denied support “because we’re either making too much money or our schedules are not aligned [with the programs].”

Timing, too, is a challenge. Last year, Blake applied to a program that would give her daughter, who has a speech delay, access to occupational therapists, speech therapists, and other resources the family couldn’t otherwise afford. But by the time program coordinators got in touch, Blake’s daughter was only a month away from aging out of the program. “No services were rendered because she aged out,” Blake says. “It’s a lot of advocacy and labor that is falling back on parents to get quality education and childcare.”

With limited options, Blake put her daughter in a private daycare program—but pulled her out after less than a month due to the cost. According to data from the Center for American Progress, the attending a childcare center was more than $13,000. For two children under 4, that number jumps to more than $23,000.

Blake was then drawn to a sliding-scale Montessori school with a progressive approach to early-childhood education. “Unfortunately, there was a situation where they left the gate open, and my daughter got out and crossed the street on her own,” Blake says. “It was so hurtful because that was the only option that I could find … but then it’s not safe.”&�Բ�����;

Caught between age and income restrictions, the high cost of private care, and a concern for her daughter’s safety, this lack of childcare support has led to a cascade of harm for Blake. Without assistance, the family can’t afford daycare or private speech therapists, so Blake is forced to stay home from work and look after her daughter, who loses out on critical social-emotional and development opportunities with kids her own age. And without two parents in the workforce, the family’s income is ultimately lowered even more. 

Everybody should have access to these programs like Head Start, Blake says. “Daycare should be free.”

It Takes a Village

Without accessible childcare, many families must instead rely on their own creativity, grit, and communities to ensure their children have the support they need.

After separating from her husband in late 2021, Hattie Assan, a mother living in Ohio with her two children, ages 5 and 7, began relying more and more on the support of friends—mostly other moms in the process of divorce. The following year, one friend, Rachel, mentioned her landlord was increasing her rent, and Assan offered to share her own home. By August of 2022, Rachel and her three children moved into Assan’s three-bedroom house, forming a new household with two adults and five kids. 

“[Shared living] has always been a seed, and it really only started blossoming after my marriage ended,” says Assan. “I felt more free to just live the way that feels more compatible and sustainable and supportive to the realities of living in late-stage capitalism. I think we’re probably all designed to be more interdependent than an individualist society sets us up to believe.”

Eventually, Rachel moved directly across the street from Assan. This past fall, Assan welcomed in another single mom, Carli, and her three kids. (Rachel and Carli both requested their last names be withheld to protect their privacy.) In each situation, Assan and her housemates worked out equitable house payments and utility costs, and shared in the labor of cooking, babysitting, and running a household.

Assan opens her home to her wider community as well. Twice a month, Assan hosts “spaghetti nights” in her front yard, a free meal and welcoming space for families and kids of all ages. After Assan’s mother had a stroke in 2022 and was no longer able to help with babysitting, Assan says spaghetti night attendees banded together and raised $9,000 in less than 24 hours—enough to cover childcare costs for more than six months.

Blake, too, is finding success through mutual aid. Using her background as a doula and birth worker, Blake is working twice a week at a local play- and nature-based daycare in exchange for her daughter’s enrollment. “I do not get paid a lot for this position, but [my daughter] will have access. And �ٳ󲹳�’s because me and the owner are centering community care,” says Blake. “I love being there because it also gives me the tools that I need to help parent my child.”

Still, no matter how important or inventive an individual workaround is, both Blake and Assan believe wider, systemic changes are needed to ensure all children and families have access to childcare and early-development resources. These solutions require not only defending Head Start, but also investing in programs not dependent on income.

Some politicians are already answering this call. In 2014, former New York City Mayor for all 4-year-olds, and then launched 3-K for All in 2017 to provide free childcare and education for all 3-year-olds. In 2023, New York City Council members proposed legislation that would aged 6 weeks to 5 years old—a dramatic expansion of early-childhood programming for all families in the city, regardless of location, income, or citizenship. (This legislation is especially important as the city’s current mayor, .)

Other countries, too, have long recognized universal childcare as a key strategy to support families, address inequality, and simply raise healthy, happy young people. in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, and are well known for their generous parental leave policies and well-run national childcare systems. Both at home and abroad, these initiatives provide a working model for the United States—and prove that universal childcare programs, at both the state and federal level, are attainable.

Given the , federal solutions to the country’s childcare struggles are unlikely under the incoming Trump administration. While states and cities can implement smaller-scale solutions, the reality is that many families will need to follow the community-care models embraced by Assan and Blake: fortify and expand existing networks, lean on their neighbors, and get creative when it comes to housing, childcare, and early-learning opportunities. 

In 2015, after four decades of attacks on Roe v. Wade, a new wave of the pro-choice movement hit social media. Seattle feminist Amelia Bonow posted her personal abortion story in defense of funding for Planned Parenthood, writer Lindy West reposted it under #ShoutYourAbortion, and a campaign erupted as tens of thousands added their own stories to the collective demand for accessible and affordable abortion.

That phenomenon is now rendered as , a colorful, zine-inspired coffee table book with portraits of a wide variety of people who share their abortion stories. It’s creative and courageous, a counter-narrative to the conservative framing of abortion as shameful and secret.

As West writes in the book’s introduction, “one in four people who can become pregnant will have an abortion at some point in their lives.” Abortion is normal, she writes, but beyond that, it is a matter of individual liberty. “Anti-choice legislation is a form of unconstitutional government intervention that undermines personal freedom. This country is ours just like our bodies are ours. Telling our abortion stories is a form of resistance.”

The collection also includes interviews with abortion providers like Alabama OB-GYN Dr. Yashica Robinson. Whether she helps patients have a child or have an abortion, Robinson aids their emotional and physical health, “helping women celebrate life in either capacity.” Abortion as a celebration of life. The pro-choice movement has moved on from “no coat hangers.”

��

Dr. Yashica Robinson. Illustration from PM Press.

Dr. Yashica Robinson is an OB-GYN with a private practice in Huntsville, Alabama, as well as an abortion care provider at the Alabama Women’s Center.

Amelia: Between providing abortion and your work as an OB-GYN, you see people through all sorts of different situations. Did you start out as an OB-GYN and then get into abortion care, or vice versa?

Dr. Robinson: I initially decided that I wanted to be an obstetrician-gynecologist, and I wanted to work primarily with teenagers. I was a teen mom myself, and I felt like the medical professionals that I interacted with at that time really had the power to make me or break me. The people around me at that time could have either lifted me up and told me that I could have a child and still achieve my dreams, or they could have been like all the naysayers and told me that continuing my pregnancy would basically mean that my life was over. I wanted to be in the position to lift somebody up who is in a similar situation, so I went into obstetrics and gynecology and, incidentally, abortion care is part of that. And I respect that. Women have the right to choose what they would like to do, I’m just there to help them make that decision and get through it safely. I’ve come to realize that in just listening to patients, respecting their decisions, and helping them to get through that choice without judging them … you can really empower someone deeply in a life-changing way.

Amelia: You’re seeing all sorts of people, from people who might have come a very long way to have an abortion to someone who is joyfully celebrating a birth. You must see and experience a huge range of emotions day to day.

Dr. Robinson: Yes, it is a range, but also it all feels connected. I guess the best way to describe it is that I feel like I’m helping women celebrate life in either capacity, either in the abortion clinic or when somebody is having a baby. Often when somebody has an abortion, it’s the same celebration, it’s the same joy, it’s the same relief that is present when I’m helping a woman have a baby. Being able to be there for women, allowing them to exercise their right to choose, and then seeing their relief and their gratitude when they leave the clinic … it’s overwhelming.

Amelia: Abortion is a radical act of self-care for a lot of people. And I think for a lot of people, especially young people, choosing to have an abortion is the first time that they’ve ever been allowed to make a choice �ٳ󲹳�’s completely self-determined. How incredible that no matter what somebody chooses to do, you get to say to them, “You can do this, and I’m going to help you.”

Dr. Robinson:��One of the things that I think that I enjoy the most—a good example of this was a young lady that I took care of just yesterday. She came through the clinic, and she’s talking to me and I can see that she feels like she’s already been judged so much. Maybe she’s even judging herself more harshly than the people around her are judging her. However, just being with her, releasing her from that, and letting her know, “This is your decision, you ��Dz�’t owe anybody any explanation, and what you choose is absolutely OK.” And just in that moment, she decided she could just be quiet, have her procedure done, and leave with dignity.

This excerpt from edited by Amelia Bonow and Emily Nokes with a foreword by Lindy West (PM Press, 2018), appears by permission of the publisher.

Amid ecological collapse, rising authoritarianism, genocide, and widening inequality, the urgent need for these stories and tools is clear. The challenges we face often feel overwhelming, but we are not starting from scratch. Across history and geography, people have responded to injustice and hardship with ingenuity, laying the groundwork for solidarity economies and imagining new systems that can work for all of us.��

The stories that follow illustrate how community-driven approaches can challenge entrenched institutions, foster collective well-being, and create tangible solutions to pressing global challenges.�� served the cuisine and culture of nations in conflict with the United States, sparking meaningful dialogue across political and geographic divides. ��transformed its cooperative network during COVID-19 to produce essential medical supplies, proving that mutual aid and collective ownership can outpace traditional business models. Meanwhile, the push for��publicly owned pharmaceutical systems demonstrates how prioritizing health over profit can lower costs, reduce shortages, and ensure equitable access to life-saving medications.��

These stories are part of a larger collection we call  (OR Books, 2024), a rallying cry for those ready to resist repression, reimagine thriving in our current conditions, and keep building a better world. The future we deserve isn’t a distant dream; it’s in the seeds already being sown in our communities. This collection inspires us to nurture that future, together. Written collaboratively by more than 70 contributors, and born from the lived experiences of grassroots organizers, solidarity economy practitioners, and communities on the front lines of climate and economic crisis, Beautiful Solutions demonstrates that a more just and democratic world is not only possible—it’s actively under construction.

Conflict Kitchen

Written by Sydney Arndt

Believing that the quickest way to a person’s heart is through their stomach, Conflict Kitchen sought to promote peace and build cross-cultural understanding by introducing people to the food and culture of places with which their government is in conflict. Based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and the brainchild of artist-activists Jon Rubin and Dawn Weleski, Conflict Kitchen used a simple takeout window framed by a colorful facade to serve up the cuisine, and celebrate the culture of a succession of countries, including Iran, Afghanistan, Cuba, North Korea, Venezuela, Palestine, and the Haudenosaunee Confederacy.

The takeout window functioned as a platform for public dialogue, and the food line became a space for hungry Pittsburghers to engage with people and places the media consistently distorts and misrepresents. The takeout counter was staffed by chefs and public artists trained to facilitate conversations about the featured country. Each food wrapper was printed with personal profiles of people who live in the country being celebrated, as well as articles on the country’s food, art, religion, culture, and government.

To extend the experience beyond the takeout line and further encourage cross-cultural dialogue, Conflict Kitchen also organized public events that centered around food. Pittsburgh locals and Iranians in Tehran shared a meal via webcam in a virtual, city-to-city dinner party. Both groups made the same Persian recipes, then sat down to eat together. Other events have included informal lunch-hour discussions on food and politics, dinners with invited speakers, and live cooking lessons through Skype. 

In November 2014, a series of death threats forced Conflict Kitchen to close down for nearly a week. In response to the threats and allegations of being anti-Israel, the directors of Conflict Kitchen emphasized that their purpose is to hold a loudspeaker to the voices and historical experiences of people from across the world—Palestinians and Palestinian Americans included. The backlash they received is proof that this type of work is necessary.��

Conflict Kitchen offered the public many points of entry, from the taste of a new dish, to interactions with employees or fellow customers, to the interviews printed on the food wrappers, and the intimate meals with people far away. Cultural exchange was central to the project; the organizers prioritized facilitating a space for locals and people overseas to express their respective points of view.

The webcam meals between Pittsburgh and abroad provided a temporary glimpse of what it can mean to share cultures, politics, and, of course, food. By creating a zone of open dialogue and cross-cultural understanding for at least one meal, Conflict Kitchen made a world where we listen to each other and draw our own conclusions seem possible. It used food as a vehicle for cross-cultural understanding—and also provided delicious takeout.

Carolina Textile District and COVID-19

Guided by Marciela Lopez

Written by the Industrial Commons Team

Western North Carolina has long been a center for manufacturing, especially of textiles and furniture. Despite free-trade agreements, which stripped jobs from communities on both sides of the U.S.–Mexico border, one in four people in North Carolina’s Western Piedmont region still work in manufacturing. Many Guatemalan Mayan immigrants have settled in the area to work in textiles and furniture production. Over the years, they have shaped the region by campaigning for dignified workplaces. Organizer Molly Hemstreet witnessed their struggle to unionize a production facility in Morganton, North Carolina, and began to wonder: Could workers own and operate their own companies?

In 2008, Hemstreet and leaders from the Mayan community co-founded a sewing cooperative, Opportunity Threads. They drew on inspiration from Frank Adams, an early architect of the Highlander Folk School (now the Highlander Research and Education Center). Opportunity Threads has become one of the largest immigrant-led sewing co-ops in the United States, with more than 50 workers as of 2020.

Aiming to expand cooperativism across the textile industry and strengthen local supply chains, Hemstreet collaborated with the area’s economic development association and a textile research and development center to establish the Carolina Textile District (CTD). Fueled by its mantra, “Be big by being small together,” CTD is a network that brings together over 30 small manufacturers, including Opportunity Threads, and is led by nine partners, representing 1,500 workers in total. Members cooperatively govern, train new workers, share contracts and contacts, develop strong ethical standards for the industry, and share their struggles and joys.

When the COVID-19 pandemic struck the United States in early 2020, CTD was well-positioned to produce personal protective equipment and cloth face masks. Pivoting its textile and furniture member-companies to manufacture medical supplies was a challenge with many moving parts. It required consulting with doctors and public-health professionals, navigating ever-changing federal guidelines, prototyping masks and gowns, sourcing medical-grade materials, organizing the cohorts of manufacturers, connecting with markets and sponsors, developing a cohesive warehousing and distribution center, upscaling production, and overseeing quality control. As factories in Western North Carolina were shuttering, CTD was not only safely keeping open their plants, but hiring as well. The pandemic underscored the need for CTD and accelerated the network’s growth.

Opportunity Threads was the hub for CTD’s sewn goods during the pandemic. Worker-owners responded quickly, putting their technical skills to use in developing market-ready goods. Other CTD members came on board to help. Since CTD members had several years of “coopetition” under their belts, the network rapidly developed new products and increased production. At one point, they were producing 50,000 units per week, which kept more than 60 mills humming. “We have achieved so many things that we probably would not have been able to accomplish in a company owned by one person,” says Maricela Lopez, a worker-owner at Opportunity Threads. 

Through this project, CTD supplied 190,000 sanitary gowns to North Carolina’s Department of Health and Human Services and more than 500,000 face masks and other personal protective equipment to frontline workers. Additionally, it generated $2 million in revenue for its textile and furniture manufacturers. According to Sara Chester, CTD co-founder and Industrial Commons co-executive director, “When weekly mask production hit 40,000 units, [we] realized something tremendous was being achieved.”&�Բ�����;

Instead of communities having to wait for companies to come in and to solve economic, health, and social problems, cooperative industry networks can solve critical problems quickly and creatively. This model is one replicable example of how rural communities can actively build an industry ecosystem where workers own a secure supply chain, collaborate in mutually beneficial ways, and solve their communities’ most pressing problems.

Public Pharmaceuticals

Written by Dana Brown

The global medicines market is dominated by large private drug companies responsible for a decline in meaningful innovation as well as skyrocketing prices, recurring shortages, troubling safety issues, and corruption in the institutions that are supposed to regulate them. These trends are harmful to our health, economies, and democracies—and they are inevitable outcomes of an industry driven by profit maximization.

So-called “Big Pharma” companies spend less than one-fifth of their revenue on research and development, but half of their revenue on marketing. Many also regularly distribute more than 100 percent of profits to shareholders by selling off assets, taking on more debt, and downsizing production—inefficient and extractive practices in an industry we depend on for our health and well-being.

To get different outcomes, we need a different design. Democratic, public ownership of pharmaceutical institutions at scale would remove the profit motive and help reclaim medicine for the common good. Public ownership of pharmaceuticals can exist at any or all points in the supply chain, from research for new medications to manufacturing and distribution services. Since they are not beholden to shareholders and have some insulation from market pressures, they can focus on goals other than maximizing profits—like contributions to public health, scientific advancement, and local economies.

From Massachusetts to the U.K., Thailand, India, and beyond, there are many existing examples of states turning to public ownership of pharmaceutical companies in efforts to combat high prices, medicine shortages, and political interference by multinational corporations. 

Since 1960, Cuba’s entire pharmaceutical sector has been public. It produces both low-cost generic drugs and first-in-class discoveries, while providing thousands of good jobs and educational opportunities in the national economy. Known principally for its innovations—like the world’s first lung cancer and meningitis B vaccines—the industry also manufactures most of the domestic supply of medicine and shares its technology with numerous low- and middle-income countries, lessening those countries’ reliance on Big Pharma to meet health care needs.

When properly resourced, Public Pharma can lower drug prices, reduce inefficiencies, and ensure broad, equitable access to new drugs. Public control of manufacturing, wholesale distribution, or retail pharmacies can serve as the basis for large-scale investments in public health, creating educational opportunities and decent jobs and increasing resilience in supply chains. South Korea, for instance, supports small and medium pharmaceutical companies with publicly owned manufacturing facilities, which generate local jobs and purchasing power that broadly benefit the economy.

Public Pharma can also assure that medications most essential to public health are prioritized for development. State-owned pharmaceutical companies in both Cuba and Brazil operate with explicit mandates to develop medications ignored by the market, like those for neglected tropical diseases, while Big Pharma companies prioritize medications that generate the most profit—often copies of existing products.

Public Pharma can contribute to the creation of a biomedical commons in which life-saving technologies, and the information needed to produce and improve upon them, are treated as collective resources for all of humanity. Large-scale public ownership and control of the benefits of pharmaceutical innovation, for instance, could help facilitate programs in which the wealth created by the industry could prioritize serving historically marginalized communities, rather than perpetuating neglect in the name of business imperatives. Public Pharma is a vital tool for reorienting the purpose of health care from profits to human needs.

Successful examples from around the world can inform the design and development of a robust Public Pharma sector for any country. Sweden’s state-owned Apotek Produktion & Laboratorier AB has found a niche in specialty pharmaceutical manufacturing, selling products to dozens of countries, and directing any profits it earns to its only shareholder: the Swedish state. China’s and India’s state-owned drug companies have long produced a significant portion of the world’s supply of active pharmaceutical ingredients. Brazil’s state-owned labs produce more than 100 essential medications that allow its national health service to offer free and reduced-price medications to low-income patients.

Around the world—even in the United States—public-sector labs were historically responsible for the development of most vaccines. Insulin as a treatment for diabetes was developed in a public lab in Canada and the subsequent sale of the rights to produce insulin to private United States manufacturers remains a powerful cautionary tale about the harm that can happen when privatizing public goods. Despite being a century-old drug, insulin prices in the U.S. have skyrocketed in recent years as the three companies that control virtually the entire insulin market make small tweaks on their products in order to take out new patents and continually raise prices. This trend has produced a uniquely American epidemic of cost-related deaths because of people rationing insulin.

Because of the U.S.’s outsized role in global trade talks and the utter dominance of its Big Pharma firms in the global medicines market, developing a public pharmaceutical industry in the U.S. in particular would be decisive in global efforts to roll back Big Pharma monopolies and reclaim medicine as a public good. It would reduce regulatory capture and shrink corporate lobbying, opening up political space for much broader input into the priorities and outputs of this critical industry. With democratic, public-sector institutions innovating and producing medications at scale, Big Pharma’s interests would no longer dominate, and public institutions would have incentives to cooperate instead of competing in times of public health crises.

Communities around the world are grappling with the growing number and intensity of climate-related disasters because of climate change. Immediately after one of these disasters in the U.S., federal, state, and nonprofit agencies frequently pour financial resources into the communities affected by the latest fire, flood, or earthquake. But these emergency support systems are usually unable to address the long-term needs of those affected, and all too often, these structural support systems entirely overlook those of us who live at the intersection of multiple oppressions: race, class, gender, disability, and sexual orientation, to name a few.

There are endless stories: During Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, queer and trans communities lost access to medical necessities such as psychiatric medicines and hormones, and many faced discrimination and violence. During the fires in Northern California, a black queer environmental justice activist with asthma went into respiratory distress and now lives with permanent brain injury. From homeless encampments to local jail cells, the social, political, and economic disparities among disabled queer and trans people of color put our communities at the frontlines of ecological disaster.

The forces of capitalism, racism, ableism, transphobia, and homophobia may have cornered us into a vulnerable position in this unprecedented moment in our planet’s history, but the wisdom we’ve gained along the way could allow us all to survive in the face of climate chaos. The history of disabled queer and trans people has continually been one of creative problem-solving within a society that refuses to center our needs. If we can build an intersectional climate justice movement—one that incorporates , that centers disabled people of color and queer and gender nonconforming folks with disabilities—our species might have a chance to survive.

Let’s start by openly, joyously proclaiming that we are natural beings, not aberrations of nature. We find healing and justice in the realm of queer ecology, a burgeoning field exploring the vast diversity of gender and sexuality that exists in nature, such as the more than 50 species of coral reef fish that undergo one or more sex transitions in their lifetime, completely transforming their behaviors, bodies, and even reproductive organs.

When we begin to see the planet through this lens, we remember that the entire world has biodiversity that is precious, necessary for our survival, and deeply threatened. Whether we’re looking at ecology, society, or our human culture, biodiversity is our best defense to the threats of climate change. When we begin to see our own diversity reflected in the ecology of this planet, we can also recognize that the same forces threaten both. It’s not difficult to see parallels in the havoc that capitalism and the drive to hoard wealth has wreaked on our bodies as queer people, gender nonconforming folks, and people from colonized lands, and how that capitalism has abused and exploits the land.

Performance artist India Harville crouches to pour water from a pink conch shell into her hands for a 2016 Sins Invalid performance titled “Birthing Dying Becoming Crip Wisdom.” Sins Invalid is a performance project led by people with disabilities and intersecting identities. Photo by Richard Downing.

Just as capitalism is one of the biggest threats to biodiversity on this planet—seen in the clear-cutting of forests to plant monocultures for fuel—it is also the driving force behind the violence towards multiply marginalized people with disabilities, because our bodies are not perceived as being “productive.” This drive to hoard wealth is beyond anything we can conceive, and it has already cost our species so much loss. What we’re seeing in the climate chaos �ٳ󲹳�’s erupting is the Earth’s resistance. The question is: How can we ally with this Brown, queer, disabled, femme planet to support her survival, and the survival of all who depend on her?

Each of us have an essential role to play in sustaining our communities, our environment, our planet.

In the face of so much institutional apathy, it is left to those living squarely at the intersections of all of these injustices to tear down the centuries-old silos among climate justice, disability justice, and queer liberation organizing. ��are already preparing for the survival of their communities through oncoming disasters, teaching each other skills in resilience-based organizing to strategically create the changes that we need for queer and trans futures.

During the fires and floods of 2017, queer disabled organizers in the Bay Area , while in Puerto Rico, communities banded together to share generators to refrigerate insulin. At the 2018 Solidarity to Solutions grassroots summit, held alongside the government-organized Global Climate Action Summit, trans Latinx organizers affected by the North Bay fires led a healing justice workshop for queer and trans people of color environmental justice activists from around the world to connect and learn from one another. This burgeoning movement may be invisible, but it should not be surprising.

We have to know our worth to value others. In this historical moment, we have to fight for the valuable lives of butterflies, and moss, and elders. Because our lives—and all life—depends on it. We must move beyond our cultural beliefs that tell us we are only worth as much as we can produce. Just as each component in Earth’s ecosystem plays a vital role in supporting everything around it, so do each of us have an essential role to play in sustaining our communities, our environment, our planet. In this time, people need strength models. Strength isn’t just about momentary power to jump building to building, it is also endurance to handle what is less than ideal. It’s the gritty persistence that disabled people embody everyday.

Even in the moments when we’re in pain, when we’re uncomfortable, when the task ahead feels overwhelming, and we feel defeated by the sheer scope of everything �ٳ󲹳�’s wrong in the world, we ��Dz�’t have to give up on life or on humanity. Queer and trans disabled people know that, because �ٳ󲹳�’s how we live. At this moment of climate chaos, we’re saying: Welcome to our world. We have some things to teach you if you’ll listen, so that we can all survive.

It was a charge, el-Hakim says, by Minister Louis Farrakhan at the Million Man March in 1995 to men to go back to their cities and “join a community organization and try to make some type of contribution to our community,” that was the catalyst to start a mobile museum.

El-Hakim went from having tabletop displays at meetings of the local organization he joined to setting up exhibits for various organizations and institutions—first throughout the city and then across the state and nationwide.

His Black History 101 Mobile Museum travels throughout the year from coast to coast sharing African American history through the ages—from the trans-Atlantic slave trade to the Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the civil rights and Black Power movements, hip-hop and Black Lives Matter—with artifacts he’s collected from around the globe.

“I came to learn that not only are my students missing Black history, but there’s a whole bunch of people who have not been exposed to Black history,” el-Hakim says. “As word spread about the museum and the visibility grew on a national level, the audience grew well beyond my expectations—in size and diversity.”

Today, the mobile museum’s attendees get to experience the exhibits free of charge at the expense of host institutions that bring in el-Hakim at a nominal fee.

Before the museum’s , which began last month and will exhibit artifacts from 1968, el-Hakim and I chatted briefly about the museum, its significance today, and the impact he believes it’s making.

Zenobia Jeffries: What made you start collecting?

Khalid el-Hakim: I started collecting in 1991 after taking a sociology class with David Pilgrim at Ferris State University. He’s the one who started the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia. I took his class, prior to him starting his museum. He was just a collector at the time, and he was using artifacts to teach about the history of racism in America. I found that his methodology of using artifacts to teach about very controversial subjects like racism was an effective way of teaching about racism.

But to teach that without the context of other people at the time and seeing how they were responding to White supremacy and racism, it just made more sense to include other material.

So, I took it to a different level [to show] what Booker T. Washington or W.E.B. Dubois or other individuals were doing during the Jim Crow era. It just made more of a powerful impact for me to see Aunt Jemima imagery next to somebody like a Paul Laurence Dunbar, and what he was doing at the time. So, I just started collecting everything that had something to do with the Black experience in America.

Jeffries: How do you decide what items you’re going to exhibit?

el-Hakim: So, the exhibits are tabletop exhibits. They’re usually about 10 tables of 150–200 artifacts. Themes have emerged over the years based on the growth and diversity of the collection.

In the early years it was just a wide array of material in one big exhibit. I decided to make thematic exhibits to be more nuanced in my approach to teaching history and to amplify the artifacts that may otherwise be overlooked in a larger exhibit. Currently, we have the following themes: women, hip-hop, Jim Crow, civil rights/Black Power, music, leadership, sports, and science/technology.

For ’68, it’s the 50th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King’s assassination, so there’s a lot of King material in the exhibit. Also you have the 1968 Olympics with Tommie Smith and John Carlos, as well as musical performers of that year, like Sly and the Family Stone, Jimmy Hendricks, James Brown’s “Say it Loud I’m Black and I’m Proud.”

Aretha Franklin, Ike and Tina Turner.

Shirley Chisholm runs that year [becoming the first black woman elected to the United States Congress]. I got Angela Davis pieces, Adam Clayton Powell pieces. In terms of sports, we got Arthur Ashe, Muhammad Ali. So, it’s material that represents music, politics, it’s a very diverse collection of material.

We build on the historical context of the time, starting with the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

Jeffries: Where do you get your pieces?

el-Hakim: The majority of the pieces come from me going into antique shops and used bookstores, and record shops—not just in the Detroit area. One of the ways I was able to travel to so many different places [and pick up so much material] is because I worked in the entertainment business for 20 years touring with hip-hop groups and poets.

So, anytime I was on tour, around the United States, or overseas—in Europe, Australia—I was able to go into different antique shops when those guys were out doing whatever.

Jeffries: What would you say has been your most impactful exhibit, or is your most impactful artifact?

el-Hakim: All of them are. We build on the historical context of the time, starting with the trans-Atlantic slave trade. So, there’s original shackles in the exhibit, and there’s original advertisements for the runaway enslaved Africans.

There’s Jim Crow-related material. There are things from the Reconstruction era. There are original photos of lynchings, and postcards of lynchings that are very emotional. The Mammy images, the alligator bait phenomenon in America is represented. There’re a lot of different types of material.

Jeffries: What is the rarest? Something where folks are like, “Oh my God, how did you get that?”

el-Hakim: A lot of the exhibits are original documents signed by historical figures. So, I have documents signed by Frederick Douglas, Booker T. Washington, George Washington Carver, Carter G. Woodson. W.E.B. DuBois, Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, Mary McLeod Bethune, Angela Davis.

And then from hip-hop: Ice T, Chuck D, KRS-One, MC Lyte, Yo-Yo, Ice Cube. I have original photographs of Tribe Called Quest. Everybody from Busta Rhymes to Redman and Method Man.

There’s a lot of rare material. I have a collection of hip-hop photography from Ernie Paniccioli, who’s considered to be hip-hop’s pioneer photographer. I guess he would be the Gordon Parks of hip-hop, if you can say that. I have about 60 or 70 original photographs from him, of everybody from Queen Latifah to 17-year-old Jay Z and young Kanye West.

I have a lot of stuff from the Black Panther Party: original photographs, newspapers, coats.

Original artifacts and photographs from the Nation of Islam—early years. Letters written by the Honorable Elijah Muhammad. I have a very early letter written by Minister Farrakhan from the ’50s when he was still Louis X, a minister in Boston.

There’s a lot of very unique material. I even have clothing items. I have a hat from Aretha Franklin. I have one of Minster Farrakhan’s suits.

I have some things from the Jackson 5, stuff signed by Michael Jackson. Michael Jackson dolls. Things from just about every era, from slavery to hip-hop.

Having that social-political context in hip-hop is what informed me, informed my work.

Jeffries: Why is there such a heavy focus of items on hip-hop? 

el-Hakim: Hip-hop is what informed me in the ’80s growing up. My sense of Black history came from listening to groups like Public Enemy and KRS-One, and Queen Latifah, and Ice Cube. Having that social-political context in hip-hop is what informed me, informed my work.

I wouldn’t have known who Assata Shakur is if I didn’t listen to Public Enemy. If I didn’t listen to KRS-One’s By All Means Necessary album, I wouldn’t have picked up and read the Autobiography of Malcolm X back in the ’80s. So, I see a direct connection between my experience, listening to hip-hop, then reaching back studying Black history.

Jeffries: Are the responses you’re getting now any different from what you were getting before Trump?

el-Hakim: I think it’s more real to people now that Trump is in office. Prior to Trump you could see some of this material and you would think that you were kind of disconnected from it. Because I have a lot of White supremacist and KKK material. I have an original Klan hood, and Klan bumper stickers, business cards, original photographs from the Klan.

But over the past year, you have a lot of people seeing it and making that connection between Trump and his supporters, and how there’s very much of a White supremacist undertone to a lot of the campaigning that went on, and what you’re seeing at some of the rallies and in some of the speeches that he’s doing. His response to Charlottesville. So you see it. It’s more real to people now.

Jeffries: Do they make that connection on their own by seeing the artifacts, or do you make that connection in your program/lecture?

el-Hakim: Really it’s just me presenting the materials so that people can make their own interpretations through their own lived experiences.

I can’t dismiss somebody’s lived experience. If your experience is based upon the fact that you’re a Black man and you have been a victim of police brutality, or you have been a victim of some type of racism, I can’t deny that. So if you see this material and the way you respond to it is based on your lived experience, then we can use that as an opportunity to talk about your experience and how it relates to those artifacts.

And then on the flip side, if you walk through that exhibit, like [what] happened in Pennsylvania just a few years ago, and you’re a White female college student, and you walk into that exhibit and you start crying because you see KKK material. And because of your lived experience of seeing your father and your grandfather as Klansmen, and this material that you see represented in this is exhibit is what you see at home every day. I can’t minimize or disregard that being your lived experience.

Jeffries: What do you hope your attendees take away?

el-Hakim: I want us first and foremost to become critical thinkers, which is key.

I ��Dz�’t want this to be just information that I’m giving people and they getting my opinion. I want them to see the material interpret it for themselves. Ask critical questions and have dialogue with me, and other people who are in the space.

I also want to spark people to go out and start their own research. If you see a name that you haven’t seen before, or an object that just resonates with you—and one thing I’ve learned is that different artifacts will resonate with different people based on their lived experience—I want you to walk away and do your own research, and learn something that you did not know about history already.