The “Immigrant Problem”: A Historical Review and the New Impacts under Trump

Posted on January 16, 2017 by Social Justice

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by Marla A. Ramírez*

Despite the widespread rhetoric that depicts the United States as a country of immigrants and a land of opportunity for all, and despite the fact that people from all over the world have made the United States their home since the nation’s infancy, immigrants have not been easily accepted in the country. Since the nineteenth century, different ethnic and racial immigrant groups—Southern and Eastern European, Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, and Mexican immigrants—have been classified as irreducible “others” and as a threat to the nation’s safety, racial purity, and cultural values. In many cases, laws have been enacted to deport specific ethnic and racial groups and prevent future immigration from certain regions. For instance, the Act of 1881 required federal inspectors to examine immigrants—who at the time were mainly Europeans arriving though Ellis Island—and deny entry to “undesirables.” Immigrants who were diseased, morally objectionable, or whose immigration fares were paid by someone else were denied admission into the United States. Only a year later, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which was renewed in 1892 and made permanent in 1902, effectively banning Chinese immigrants and making them ineligible for US citizenship for 61 years. This law was finally overturned in 1943. Filipino and Mexican immigrants have also been labeled as “inassimilable”: during the Great Depression, Mexicans and later Filipinos were perceived as highly dependent on public assistance, blamed for the economic ills of the country, and removed in mass regardless of their legal status.

Fear of immigrants and the insistence to scapegoat them for the problems of the country is nothing new. In this sense, Trump’s immigration discourse resembles and recycles weary immigration narratives that date back to the early twentieth century. In 1931, for instance, Jane Perry Clark, a political scientist and immigration consultant to the U.S. Federal Government, conducted a study on the mass deportations during the years leading up to the Great Depression and concluded that:

Deportation of aliens whose presence in the United State is believed to be undesirable is not new, but it has become increasingly emphasized as a panacea for our economic difficulties, particularly unemployment. “Send them unnaturalized aliens out of the country!” is the cry. “Let them go home so that our citizens can have their jobs!” (Clark 1931, 119)

Donald Trump delivered an almost identical anti-immigrant message to his supporters during his presidential campaign by promising to “establish new immigration controls to boost wages and to ensure that open jobs are offered to American workers first.” This rhetoric continues to create a hierarchy of “valued” citizens based on whiteness as well as gender, race, and class backgrounds.

Historically, anti-immigrant narratives have resulted in “good vs. bad” immigrant models. The “good” or “ideal” immigrants are those who immerse themselves in US culture, are not dependent on public assistance, have no criminal record, and have secured upper socioeconomic mobility. However, as several immigration scholars have argued (see further readings below), the “ideal immigrant” image is unrealistic given the structural barriers of inequality and racism that prevent immigrant minority groups from achieving upper mobility and inclusion. The “bad” or “undesired” immigrant, by contrast, is the opposite of the mythical ideal immigrant, and often categorized as criminal. As a result of such discourses, historically the imagined “ideal” immigrant has been welcomed, whereas the real “undesired” immigrant has been denigrated and deported.

It is in this respect that Trump’s presidency might signal the emergence of something new. Trump, indeed, has taken this anti-immigrant discourse to a new level by targeting both the socially constructed “good” and “bad” immigrants. He promised that if elected president, he would immediately terminate President Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). DACA grants deferred action (low priority for deportation) and a temporary work permit that is renewable every two years to eligible applicants. DACA recipients represent “ideal” immigrants because they are mostly undocumented immigrants who arrived to the United States as children, have good moral character, value US culture, and in many cases hold college and advanced degrees. At the same time, Trump has also targeted the perceived “undesired, criminal” immigrant by promising to deport 3 million undocumented immigrants with criminal records. The concept of criminal records has been broadly defined in this area, and people with traffic violations, for instance, have been placed on deportation under the Secured Communities program that Trump promises to enforce nationwide.

Donald Trump’s presidential campaign popularized a narrative that vilifies all immigrants, specifically targeting Mexicans and Latinas/Latinos, and makes little or no difference between the socially and historically constructed “ideal” and “undesired” immigrants. “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best,” he stated on June 16, 2015, during his now infamous presidential candidacy speech in which he also classified Mexican immigrants as a threat to US society and blamed them for bringing drugs, crime, and rape into the country: “They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” His proposed solution, as is well known, is the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants.

Moreover, Trump’s immigration discourse, while not new, is not entirely consistent with historical approaches to immigration. Trump has scapegoated immigrants not only for the economic ills of the nation, as seen in the past, but also for most, if not all, the nation’s problems. “We will enforce all of our immigration laws,” emphasized Donald Trump on August 31, 2016 during his step-by-step immigration plan speech in Phoenix, Arizona—a speech that was delivered only a few hours after a surprise meeting with Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto. In his immigration speech, Trump outlined 10 steps to fix what he referred to as a “terrible, terrible, problem,” and justified his proposal by stating: “We’re in the middle of a jobs crisis, a border crisis, and a terrorism crisis like never before. All energies of the federal government and the legislative process must now be focused on immigration security.” The promise that unemployment, drug trafficking, and terrorism will be solved by mass deportations is not only false and unrealistic, but also dangerous, as it incites Trump supporters to physically and verbally attack people who are perceived as undocumented immigrants. Such attacks have already been reported and documented (see, for example, here and here).

We will not know exactly what effects Trump’s presidency will have on immigrant communities until he is in office, and probably not until some years after his term is over. What we already know is that so far Trump has backed up on some of his immigration promises. For example, Trump initially promised to build an impenetrable wall along the US–Mexico border to be paid by the Mexican government; as of January 6, 2017, however, he is proposing that the U.S. Congress, and by extension all taxpayers, including undocumented immigrants who do pay federal income taxes, pay for the wall. After public criticism, he retracted in a tweet by stating that Congress will pay for the wall first and then Mexico will reimburse the U.S. government for the expenses (though he has not explained how the Mexican government will be made to reimburse the United States for these expenses).

What we also do know is that immigrant communities and allies have historically fought—and will continue to organize and resist against—oppression, hate, and exclusion. The constitutional rights and protections guaranteed by the US constitution to all people living in the United States, regardless of immigration status, income, race, ethnicity, gender, age, or sexual orientation, have been fought for by different generations; today, we must continue to strategize to protect equal rights for all. Immigrant organizers and allies have fought (and we should continue to fight) to:

Demand due process in deportation proceedings.
Launch “know your rights” workshops nationwide to inform people about their rights when interacting with immigration officials.
Establish sanctuaries for immigrant, queer, and Muslim peoples. The more cities and college campuses become sanctuaries, the harder it will be for Trump to follow through with his campaign promise to block funding for sanctuary cities.
Organize congressional visits, meetings with representatives’ local offices, and phone banks to push against exclusionary legislation.
Educate others in the workplace, school, and through social media about our country’s immigration history and the myths around immigration debates.
Listen to the concerns others face to discuss and propose solutions that center on inclusion and reject hate.

The above is not a comprehensive list, and I am sure that immigrant communities and allies will certainly develop new strategies not included here. As an immigrant myself, I am not fearful of the effects of the Trump administration. I am, instead, inspired by the power of the people who across the history of this country have come together to further inclusivity and respect across differences.

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References and Further Readings
Arredondo, G.F. 2008. Mexican Chicago: Race, Identity, and Nation, 1916–39. Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
Clark, J.P. 1931. Deportation of Aliens from the United States to Europe (New York: Columbia University Press.
Ruiz, V.L. 1998. From Out of the Shadow: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press.
Suárez-Orozco, M.M. 2000. “Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Assimilation but Were Afraid to Ask.” Daedalus 129(4): 1–30.

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* Marla Andrea Ramírez was born in Michoacán, Mexico, and immigrated to the United States at the age of twelve. She joined San Francisco State University in Fall 2016 as an Assistant Professor of Sociology. She specializes in oral history, Mexican migrations, mass forced removals, immigration law and policies since the 20th century, gendered migrations, and the “Mexican Repatriation” Program.

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Donald Trump and Immigration: A Few Predictions

Posted on January 16, 2017 by Social Justice

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by Ray Michalowski*

As the great Yankee’s baseball catcher and American philosopher Yogi Berra once said, “Only a fool would make predictions. Especially about the future.” With that caution in mind, I am going to hazard a few predictions about the likely impact of Donald Trump’s election on immigration policy.

• Prediction #1
Shortly after taking office, President Trump will rescind the executive order establishing Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), initially issued in 2014 by President Obama.

Why Trump Might Rescind DACA. Trump listed canceling DACA as his number-one priority for his first 100 days in office, a promise that was highly popular with his anti-immigrant and anti-Mexican base (Politifact 2016). Reversing DACA is a low-hanging political fruit. Trump can easily fulfill this campaign promise because DACA was created by an executive order that the new president can rescind with the stroke of a pen (NBC News 2016, Le 2015).

Why Trump Might Not Rescind DACA. Allowing Dreamers to stay in the country, and eventually become citizens, is broadly popular with the American public, if not with Trump supporters. About 66% of the public believes that youth who meet DACA criteria should be allowed to stay in the country (Pew Research Center 2014). At the moment, Trump is a minority president. Wise political advisors (if he has them) might caution him against what would be an unpopular action. On the other hand, if he allowed DACA to continue, he would have to confront an angry base that wants undocumented immigrants out of the country.

Why Rescinding DACA Might Fail. Although rescinding DACA would be easy, removing the three-quarters of a million American-looking and American-acting young people will be a logistical and public relations nightmare for the Trump administration. Efforts to deport those with deferred action will be met with a firestorm of lawsuits that will tie up actual removal of Dreamers in the courts for years. The ACLU has already promised this. Also, many DACA youth are picture-perfect “citizens” who graduated from US high schools and colleges and who are serving in the military, working, building families and so on. They will get a lot of sympathetic coverage from news media, particularly because their undocumented status was not a result of their own actions. In the face of this, Trump may find it politically difficult to deport them.

• Prediction #2
Trump will propose suspending immigration from “terror-prone” countries and implementing “extreme vetting” of anyone trying to enter the US from “terror-prone” regions.

Why Trump Will Propose This. This too was one of his promises for the first 100 days in office. He will need to be seen making an attempt to block immigration and visitations from the Middle East to keep the anti-terrorist, anti-Muslim portion of his political base on board.

Why This Will Probably Fail. The U.S. Code section governing entry into the country sets forth a number of highly detailed criteria for refusing visas or immigration status (8 U.S. Code § 1182 – Inadmissible aliens). It does not, however, authorize blanket prohibitions on immigrants or visitors from specific countries or regions, or with particular ethnic backgrounds.

Some have argued that section 8 U.S.C.§ 1182 (C)(i) grants this authority (Swan 2015). However, this section reads that entry can be denied to “an alien whose entry or proposed activities in the United States the Secretary of State has reasonable grounds to believe would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States is inadmissible.”

This section refers to “an alien,” not to a class of people (i.e. people from specific countries or regions or with specific backgrounds). This language would in all likelihood require ICE to establish the “adverse” grounds in each individual case, opening any attempt at a blanket prohibition to a wave of lawsuits.

Also, this section refers to “adverse foreign policy consequences.” In other words, the government would be required to establish that allowing people from countries with large Muslim populations (and make no mistake, that is what Trump is talking about here) would somehow damage US international relations. Actually, the opposite is more likely. Denying Muslims entry is what would have negative foreign policy consequences.

• Prediction #3
Trump will make a half-hearted effort to “build the wall” and “have Mexico pay for it.”

Why Trump Will Do This. This was another thing Trump promised to do during his first 100 days as President. It was one of his most popular proposals, as can be seen in many videos with masses of supporters changing “Build the wall, build the wall.”

Why the Effort Will Be Half-Hearted. First of all, walling the US off from Mexico is a fool’s errand, and I don’t think Trump is a fool. History tells us that walls rarely work. Of equal significance, the United States has been trying to build a wall between the US and Mexico for the last 7 years. Currently, about 700 of the 2,000 miles of the border are walled off. Much of the remaining areas pose significant challenges due to terrain, as anyone who has spent time traveling along the US–Mexico border knows. According to the Department of Homeland Security, building a large and solid wall between the US and Mexico on this terrain will likely cost $10 million per mile (Global Security 2016). This comes to around 13 billion dollars, almost half again as much as the 8 billion dollars Trump quoted for his proposed wall. This is only the cost to build it. The cost of maintaining such a wall would be significant, something that is rarely mentioned by proponents of the wall.

It is my guess that cooler heads in Homeland Security and elsewhere will prevail. There will be some expansion of the current wall to make it appear that the Trump administration is keeping its promise, but the “great, great wall” between Mexico and the United States will not be built on Trump’s watch. It has taken 7 years to wall off the easiest 700 miles. There are 1,300 miles to go. Do the math.

Attempts to extend the wall along the entire border will also be bogged down by lawsuits, since much of that land is either critical habitat or Native American land. I would not be surprised to see activists creating encampments to protect these areas and/or to protest the wall. These will prove another legal and public relations headache for the Trump administration, just as the Dakota Access Pipeline protests proved for the Obama administration.

As for getting Mexico to pay for it, that was campaign bluster. It can’t be done. Mexico is a sovereign nation, and one that is more than a little concerned in protecting itself against US pressure. Mexicans will not pay for the wall unless they are given something of equal or greater value in return, which means US taxpayers will be footing the bill anyway.

• Prediction #4
Despite Trump’s promise to deport the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States, by the end of his first term the number of undocumented immigrants living in the US will be only slightly smaller or about the same as it is today.

What Will Trump Do? Shortly after taking office, Trump will order ICE to begin mass deportations of undocumented immigrants from the United States. He promised to do this, and risks significant political backlash from many of his supporters if he does not at least appear to be trying.

What Will Happen? Deportations under President Obama were higher than at any time in recent history—nearly 500,000 people a year. About half of those deported had criminal convictions, although the majority of offenders deported had not committed the kind of serious felony offenses the policy was supposed to target (Rosenblum & McCabe 2014).

Obama’s deportation efforts have strained ICE and the immigration courts. Since the majority of undocumented immigrants in the country have been here for more than five years, they are entitled to a hearing in an immigration court. People who have built lives in the United States are not likely to accept deportation easily. They will ask for hearings on their cases. Currently the immigration court backlog in many jurisdictions is running about three years (Human Rights First 2016). The present system simply cannot manage mass deportations without collapsing.

Mass deportation will require either that Congress repeal the right to an immigration hearing or provide significant new funding allocations for a massive expansion of ICE and the immigration court system.

It is my expectation (and hope) that Congress will not eliminate judicial review for immigrants. Doing so would be a fundamental strike against the rule of law and would hopefully not survive significant legal challenges. Whether or not Congress would fund a massive expansion of ICE and immigration courts is an open question, and my crystal ball is rather murky on this.

Dangers. A potential danger lurks behind calls for mass deportation. There is a possibility that emergent vigilante groups or current Three Percenter militias will take it upon themselves to round up undocumented immigrants and turn them over to ICE. This would be illegal. However, given that the Fraternal Order of Police and a union representing immigration officers endorsed Trump’s candidacy, there is the (hopefully remote) possibility that these law enforcement agencies will stand aside and let the vigilantes facilitate mass deportations. This would create a significant divide in the law enforcement community and seriously undermine the rule of law in the United States.

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References

• Global Security. 2016. US-Mexico Border Fence /Great Wall of Mexico Secure Fence. Viewed online at http://www.globalsecurity.org/security/systems/mexico-wall.htm.
• Human Rights First. 2016. “Reducing the Immigration Court Backlog and Delays.” Viewed online at http://www.humanrightsfirst.org/sites/default/files/HRF-Backgrounder-Immigration-Courts.pdf.
• Le, Van. 2015. “Snapshot of Polling and Public Opinion on Immigration Executive Action & Larger Debate.” Viewed online at America’s Voice, http://americasvoice.org/blog/snapshot-polling-public-opinion-immigration-executive-action-larger-debate/.
• NBC News. 2016. “4 Years Later: Lives Built By DACA at Risk in 2016 Elections.” Viewed online at: http://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/4-years-later-lives-built-daca-risk-2016-elections-n592121.
• Pew Research Center. 2014. “5 facts about the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.” Viewed online at http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/08/15/5-facts-about-the-deferred-action-for-childhood-arrivals-program/.
• Politifact. 2016. “Donald Trump’s campaign promises for the first 100 days.” Viewed online at: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2016/nov/10/donald-trumps-campaign-promises-first-100-days/.
• Rosenblum, Marc and McCabe, Kristen. Deportation And Discretion: Reviewing the Record and Options for Change. Washington, D.C.: Migration Policy Institute.
• Swan, Ben. 2015. “Reality Check: Trump Right About Legal Authority to Ban Muslim Immigrants.” Truth in Media. Viewed online at: http://truthinmedia.com/reality-check-trump-right-legal-authority-ban-muslim-immigrants-pres-candidates-hypocritical-muslims/.

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* Raymond Michalowski is Regents’ Professor of Criminal Justice at the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Northern Arizona University. His research areas include criminological theory, international human rights, immigration and border policy, and corporate, environmental, and political Crime. Recent publications include State Crime in the Global Age (with William Chambliss and Ronald Kramer) and State-Corporate Crime: Wrongdoing at the Intersection of Business and Government (with Ronald Kramer).

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A Queer Exemption? What Trump’s Presidency Means for LGBTQ Politics

Posted on January 13, 2017 by Social Justice

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by Clare Sears*

Donald Trump’s presidential campaign was characterized by raging rambling speeches and late-night belligerent tweets that threatened and mocked multiple groups of people. Undocumented immigrants, Muslims, disabled people, and women were frequently targeted—LGBTQ people were not. In a campaign marked by hypermasculine posturing, blatant misogyny, and sexual boasts and accusations, Trump’s decision to pass over a constituency marked by sexual and gender differences is striking. In this post, I reflect on Trump’s queer exemption and consider what his presidency will mean for LGBTQ politics. Specifically, I ask: How can we make sense of Trump’s restrained anti-LGBTQ rhetoric in relation to his persistent anti-LGBTQ actions?

Clearly, Trump’s failure to treat LGBTQ people as a political punching bag does not make him an ally, despite his occasional claims to the contrary. As presidential candidate and president-elect, Trump has consistently supported people and policies that will devastate queer and trans communities. Two examples will suffice:

Mike Pence: Trump’s selection of Mike Pence for vice-president provides a particularly stark indicator of his disregard for LGBTQ issues. It is no secret that Pence is a blatantly homophobic evangelical Christian conservative, who views homosexuality as a choice that undermines God’s will and heralds “societal collapse” (U.S. Congress 2006, p. 14796). As Governor of Indiana, Pence passed a “religious freedom law” that legalized discrimination against LGBTQ people; he also oversaw funding cuts for HIV testing sites and a state ban on needle exchange that led to one of the worst domestic HIV outbreaks in recent times. As a member of Congress, Pence took a similar stand against effective public health interventions by opposing funding for HIV prevention programs that featured queer sex-positive messages. He also opposed the repeal of “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell,” supported a constitutional amendment against same-sex marriage, and advocated “conversion therapy” for LGBTQ people. Trump will likely grant unprecedented decision-making power to Pence, making his virulent anti-LGBTQ agenda all the more terrifying.
State-Level Discrimination: Trump also backs state discrimination against LGBTQ people. During his campaign, he announced support for North Carolina’s House Bill 2, a state law that overturns municipal anti-discrimination ordinances protecting LGBTQ people and forces transgender people to use public restrooms that diverge from their gender identity. According to Pence, Trump will also rescind a White House directive that advises public schools to treat transgender students according to their gender identity, rather than the gender assigned at birth, or risk violating federal sex discrimination law. In both cases, Trump paid lip service to the goal of equality but argued that states have the right to discriminate against LGBTQ people as they see fit.

Although Trump invokes limitations on federal power to justify inaction on anti-LGBTQ discrimination, he is more than happy to exert federal muscle in other realms. When it comes to immigration policy, law-and-order politics, and health insurance coverage, for example, Trump proposes significant reforms and rollbacks that pose a deadly threat to millions, including LGBTQ people. Indeed, several of Trump’s signature proposals directly target social movements led by queer people of color.

DACA: Throughout his campaign, Trump emphasized his plan to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which provides temporary protection to certain undocumented immigrants who came to the United States as children, allowing them to attend school, obtain work permits, and receive temporary reprieve from deportation. Queer undocumented youth led the movement for this reform, mobilizing within and against mainstream advocacy organizations that often opposed their radical tactics. Their efforts paid off in 2012, when President Obama established DACA by executive order. Over 741,500 young people have signed up for the program, many of them LGBTQ. If Trump’s plans materialize, thousands of undocumented LGBTQ youth will be caught up in the dragnet, facing mass arrest by ICE officials, incarceration in immigration detention facilities, and deportation to countries they barely know.
Law and Order: As public awareness of anti-Black police violence reaches new heights, Trump has taken a stand against Black Lives Matter, the social movement founded by three black queer women. Using barely coded racist rhetoric, Trump has vowed to end “the war on our police” and propagated a dystopian vision of US cities wracked by gun-toting criminals and murderous immigrants. Positioning himself as a law-and-order leader who will “make America safe again,” Trump has promised to reinstitute stop-and-frisk policing, increase police access to military-grade weaponry, and destabilize sanctuary cities. These proposals directly threaten LGBTQ people, particularly those who are black or brown, poor, homeless, and/or involved in street economies (sex work, drug sales, unlicensed vending). Multiple studies show that LGBTQ people are overrepresented in street-based populations and suffer police harassment at elevated rates. In particular, transgender women and homeless queer youth of color will bear the brunt of Trump-era militarized policing.
Affordable Care Act: Trump has made clear his intention to repeal the 2010 Affordable Care Act, which provides healthcare to 20 million individuals, including one million LGBTQ people. If he succeeds, these people will lose health insurance as well as legal protections that are particularly valuable to transgender folks and those living with HIV. These protections prevent insurers from (a) discriminating on the grounds of gender identity, (b) denying coverage on the basis of a pre-existing condition (including HIV and “gender dysphoria”), and (c) imposing annual and lifetime caps on coverage that harm people with chronic costly conditions (such as HIV). Under Trump’s presidency, LGBTQ people will face increased discrimination, illness, and death.

Given Trump’s support of politicians and policies that will devastate LGBTQ communities, what are we to make of his decision to exempt LGBTQ people from his trademark rhetorical attacks? Moreover, what are we to make of his occasional pro-gay statements, such as the speech he delivered at the Republican National Convention, where he spoke of LGBTQ people as “wonderful Americans” who deserved to be protected from violence? Some observers applauded Trump’s words, noting that he was the first Republican to speak positively of LGBTQ people while accepting the party’s presidential nomination. A closer look at Trump’s speech, however, reveals a troubling context that sheds light on the relationship between his pro-LGBTQ rhetoric and anti-LGBTQ actions.

During his RNC acceptance speech, Trump spoke of LGBTQ people when addressing the mass shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, which had occurred the previous month. The shooter, Omar Mateen, attacked the gay nightclub on its “Latin night” and most of the 49 people killed were queer Latinx clubgoers. In his RNC speech, Trump described the victims as “wonderful Americans [who] were savagely murdered by an Islamic terrorist” and vowed to “do everything in my power to protect our LGBTQ citizens from the violence and oppression of a hateful foreign ideology.” Omar Mateen was not foreign and his connections to terrorism were minimal, but this did not stop Trump from linking his support for LGBTQ people to his anti-Islam nationalist agenda. Clearly, Trump was exploiting the deadliest act of anti-LGBTQ violence in US history for political gain, but he was also testing a particular political formation—pro-gay/anti-Muslim—that will likely resurface throughout his presidency.

In her 2007 book Terrorist Assemblages, Jasbir Puar refers to this formation as homonationalism, denoting the ways that nation-states incorporate certain queer subjects (typically white cisgender men) to mark the border between “gay friendly” Western democracies and “homophobic” Islamic nations. According to Jin Haritaworn (2015), this process is in full swing in European cities such as Berlin, where neoliberal governments adopt punitive policies against Muslim immigrants under the guise of promoting diversity and protecting LGBTQ communities. Far-right political parties in Europe are now following a similar path, promoting “Western values” such as gay rights to win support for their populist agendas rooted in white supremacy, nationalism, and anti-immigrant/anti-Muslim violence. Trump’s strategic mention of LGBTQ people in his acceptance speech suggests a similar development on the US political stage that we need to monitor closely in the months to come.

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References and Further Readings
Haritaworn, J. 2015. Queer Lovers and Hateful Others: Regenerating Violent Times and Places. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Mogul, J.L., A.J. Ritchie, and K. Whitlock. 2011. Queer (In)justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States. Boston: Beacon Press.
Puar, J.K. 2007. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Spade, D. 2011. Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics and the Limits of Law. New York: South End Press.
U.S. Congress. 2006. Congressional Record: Proceedings and Debates of the 109th Congress, Second Session. Volume 152, Part 11. Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office.

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*Clare Sears is Associate Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology at San Francisco State University. Her research and teaching interests include critical criminology, queer theory, transgender studies, historical methods, and disability studies. Sears is author of the book Arresting Dress: Cross-Dressing, Law and Fascination in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco (Duke University Press, 2015) and coeditor of a special issue of Social Justice on sexuality and criminalization.

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Orange is the New Green: The Environmental Justice Implications of Trump’s EPA

Posted on January 12, 2017 by Social Justice

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by Jordan E. Mazurek*

Let’s start by ripping that big orange band-aid off. This piece will not make you hopeful. The environmental justice movement—that is, the grassroots movement championed by people of color and the poor to address the environmental harms they are disproportionately victims of—is going to face significant challenges under Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency in particular, and his administration more broadly. Trump’s nomination to head the EPA, Scott Pruitt, is a global-warming-denying, Big-Oil-loving Oklahoma attorney general who’s made his name off leading the conservative crusade against the EPA and the Obama administration’s environmental policies. Meanwhile Trump’s wider cabinet seems to consist of a Who’s Who of the “Eco-Villains” that Captain Planet fought in the 1990s (not to mention the 1%-ers!).

Faced with such a cabinet, I think we as organizers, activists, and academics must prepare for an almost certain intensification in three key areas across-the-board:

An intensification of what Barnett (1994) describes as “regulatory capture,” or the domination of regulatory agencies by the very industries they are supposed to be regulating. This directly contributes to:
An intensification in the deregulation of private industries and defunding of monitoring agencies. This further exacerbates:
An intensification of the types of harms to communities of color and the poor inherent in historical patterns of racialized capitalism.

I use the term intensification to convey that these are not new conditions coming to bear down under Trump, but merely extensions of preexisting ones. For the sake of space, however, I will limit my analysis to how environmental justice will likely be affected by this intensification in relation to Pruitt’s EPA.

In terms of regulatory capture, the EPA has a long and sordid history of representing and defending the interests of corporate polluters, rather than regulating them; an arrangement that, at the time of writing, Simon (2000, pp. 641–42) found to pay off nicely for “20 high-ranking former EPA administrators that … left the agency [to] become millionaire waste-industry executives.” It is beyond reasonable to hope that Pruitt’s EPA will be much different in tendency given his already well-established capacity for developing secret alliances with oil and gas companies and then serving as literal mouthpieces for them, as revealed by the New York Times in 2014.

Given his cozy relationship with Big Oil and Pruitt’s track record of attacking EPA regulations, which amounted to at least 13 lawsuits against the agency to date with eight still pending, the deregulation or active non-enforcement of existing environmental policy is all but imminent. Let’s first focus on federal environmental justice policy.

The policy ground upon which the EPA and other federal agencies incorporate and address environmental justice concerns remains exceptionally vulnerable. This vulnerability is a consequence of the fact that federal environmental justice policy is based not on congressional law but on Presidential Executive Order 12898, signed by Clinton in 1994 in response to mounting pressures from environmental justice activists. EO 12898 mandated that “each Federal agency make achieving environmental justice part of its mission by identifying and addressing, as appropriate, disproportionately high and adverse human health or environmental effects of its programs, policies, and activities on minority populations and low-income populations,” with this effort to be spearheaded by the EPA.

As is often the case with policy that may positively affect people of color, little tangible progress on addressing environmental justice issues at the federal level manifested itself. For the remainder of Clinton’s presidency, the EPA had little direction on how to actually implement EO 12898, and since it remained only an EO, no following administrations or agency heads were under any legal mandate to actually pursue environmental justice objectives. George W. Bush’s administration took full advantage of this to actively shift the EPA’s focus on “environmental justice” away from minorities and the poor and to essentially ignore the topic for eight years.

Indeed, towards the end of Bush’s administration the United Church of Christ published a 20-year follow-up study on its foundational environmental justice study Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States. The conclusions, after 20 years and EO 12898, remained largely the same: race remained the predominant predictor of where hazardous waste sites would be located, with little to no tangible progress having been made. Neighborhoods hosting hazardous waste facilities were found to be “56% people of color whereas non-host areas are 30% people of color”; meanwhile, 69% of the population living in areas with close clusters of hazardous was of color (Bullard et al. 2007, pp. x–xi).

The Obama administration represented a significant departure from the previous two administrations in terms of making environmental justice an agency priority within the EPA. Under the leadership of Lisa Jackson, in 2010 the agency began developing its first systematic attempt, known as Plan EJ 2014, to incorporate the environmental justice requirements of EO 12898. This effort was greatly expanded with the development and publication of its EJ 2020 Action Agenda in late October of 2016. EJ 2020 is a robust strategic plan leading up to an EPA in 2020 “that integrates environmental justice into everything we do, cultivates strong partnerships to improve on-the-ground results, and charts a path forward for achieving better environmental outcomes and reducing disparities in the nation’s most overburdened communities.” (I would be amiss, in terms of my current organizing efforts with the Campaign to Fight Toxic Prisons, if I did not point out that the EJ 2020 plan completely ignores prisoners as a potentially “overburdened” population worth of environmental justice consideration. This was challenged by the campaign under the banner of the Prison Ecology Project and over 130 other social justice, environmental, and prisoner’s rights organizations that mobilized to influence the drafting of EJ 2020).

Considering that the EJ 2020 plan will just start to take effect as Trump steps into office and Pruitt takes the reins of the EPA, I’m highly skeptical that the agency will meet any of its 2020 goals. Perhaps the best-case scenario for existing environmental justice policy would be if the Trump administration followed in the footsteps of George W. Bush’s administration, that is, if the administration more or less ignored those goals but let the legislation in place for future, possibly friendlier administrations. Given that all the EPA’s environmental justice efforts still rely primarily on EO 12898, however, the worst-case scenario seems likely. Trump could issue an alternate Executive Order overriding EO 12898 and thus completely dismantling, instead of just delaying, what took the entirety of the Obama administration to implement, effectively cutting environmental justice out of the scope of the federal government.

Let’s not forget, however, that since 1994 federal environmental justice policy has remained largely symbolic. That is to say that, although the EPA will certainly be no ally of the environmental justice movement under Trump, this agency has failed under every administration to systematically address the structural causes of environmental injustice. Indeed, at the time of this writing it’s been 21 months since (in April 2015) the EPA Region 5 office became aware of the high lead levels in the Flint, Michigan water supply, poisoning the majority-Black population. Yet the EPA failed to take action until January 2016. Flint STILL has lead in its water. This crisis was precipitated by multiple structural factors, including a history of weak environmental regulation of the local automotive industry, local economic hardships wrought by neoliberal economic policy in the 1990s (i.e., NAFTA), and increasing levels of government defunding. Indeed, from 2010 to 2015 the EPA faced five straight years of budget reductions, losing 21% of its federal funding ($2.2 billion USD) and bringing the number of staff down to its lowest levels since 1989.

These budget cuts to the EPA under the EPA/environmental justice-friendly Obama administration (granted, lead by Republicans) point to what could possibly be the worst-worst-case scenario: that is, the possibility that Trump will hold true to his campaign promises of completely eliminating the EPA, effectively leading to total environmental deregulation at a federal level.

The harms environmental justice activists fight against are inherently spatial and direct consequence of a segregationist racialized capitalism. Pollution, like power, tends to harm the populations deemed most easily exploitable and most readily expendable. Faced with almost total deregulation, whatever little protections communities of color and the poor have built up against the sources of hazardous toxins in their neighborhoods may begin to crumble. The first casualties will most likely be the federal-level victories that grassroots environmental justice activists have achieved only in the last couple years of the Obama administration. For example, activists with the Environmental Justice Leadership Forum on Climate Change were responsible for significant changes to Obama’s Clean Power Plan in terms of protecting air quality for poor and minority communities. However, Trump has vowed to kill the Clean Power Plan, and one of the pending lawsuits that Pruitt is still involved in is a 27-state suit against the Plan. Given Pruitt’s already stated affinity with the oil and gas industry, the recent environmental justice victory of more stringent EPA regulations on petroleum refinery emissions (expected to lower cancer rates for 1.4 million people) will also likely be on the chopping block. In short, Pruitt’s EPA and related deregulation will lead to an intensification of environmental harms in poor communities and communities of color.

I know that all sounds a bit doom-and-gloom, but I warned you, didn’t I? If you want hope, looking from the top-down isn’t the place to find it. The strength and resiliency of the environmental justice movement, and the ability of communities of color and the poor to force governmental structures to meet their needs over corporate interest, have always derived from the bottom-up. Look to the roots, get involved, and I look forward to meeting ya’ll in the streets!

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References and Further Readings
Brook, D. 1998. Environmental genocide: Native Americans and Toxic Waste. American Journal of Economics and Sociology 57(1): 105–13.
Bullard, R.D., Mohai, P., Saha, R. & B. Wright. 2007. Toxic Wastes and Race at Twenty: 1987-2007. New York: United Church of Christ.
Commission for Racial Justice. 1987. Toxic Waste and Race in the United States: A National Report on the Racial and Socioeconomic Characteristics of Communities with Hazardous Waste Sites. New York: United Church of Christ.
Friedrichs, D.O. 2006. Trusted Criminals: White Collar Crime in Contemporary Society. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.
Kolinsky, D., ed. 2015. Failed Promises: Evaluating the Federal Government’s Response to Environmental Justice. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Pinderhughes, R. 1996. The Impact of Race on Environmental Quality: An Empirical and Theoretical Discussion. Sociological Perspectives, 39(2): 231–48.
Rebovich, D.J. 1992. Dangerous Ground: The World of Hazardous Waste Crime. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction.
Saha, R. & P. Mohai. 2005. Historical Context and Hazardous Waste Facility Siting: Understanding Temporal Patterns in Michigan. Social Problems 52(4): 618–48.
Simon, D.R. 2000. Corporate environmental crimes and social inequality: New directions for environmental justice research. American Behavioral Scientist 43(4): 633–45.
Szasz, A. 1986. The process and significance of political scandals: A comparison of Watergate and the “Sewergate” episode at the Environmental Protection Agency. Social Problems 33: 200–17.

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*Jordan E. Mazurek is an Erasmus+: Erasmus Mundus Joint Doctoral Fellow pursuing a Doctorate in Cultural and Global Criminology from the University of Kent and the University of Hamburg. His research interests include prison abolition, green criminology, organizing/activism, visual theory, and the photodocumentary tradition. His work can be seen in The Routledge International Handbook of Visual Criminology, The Palgrave Handbook of Prison Tourism, and The Palgrave International Handbook of Animal Abuse Studies. He currently serves on the Steering Committee of the Campaign to Fight Toxic Prisons.

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Social Justice, Environmental Destruction, and the Trump Presidency: A Criminological View

Posted on January 12, 2017 by Social Justice

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by Michael J. Lynch, Paul B. Stretesky,
Michael A. Long, and Kimberly L. Barrett*

We represent three generations of scholars who study environmental crime, law and justice, and the enforcement of environmental regulations. Our work focuses on how the politico-economic organization of capitalism promotes ecologically destructive behavior by profit-driven corporations, exploits nature and human labor, generates ecological destruction/disorganization, and furthers the unequal distribution of wealth and ecological resources. With respect to how the Trump administration and proposed cabinet selections will affect social and environmental justice and any effort to study environmental crime by corporations, we expect a return to the conditions that existed during the G. W. Bush Administration and that some of us witnessed firsthand.

For starters, under the Bush administration the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) reduced publicly available data relevant to the study of environmental crime and the enforcement of environmental regulations. For example, we were often frustrated to learn that environmental crime data that were available under Clinton’s EPA were no longer reported and/or had been removed from the EPA’s website during the Bush administration, and could now only be obtained through a Freedom of Information request. Moreover, the Bush administration’s emphasis on market-based solutions to improve environmental performance pushed environmental regulation research away from examining state interventions, thus curtailing criminology’s potential (albeit generally conservative) contributions to the study of environmental issues.

As we enter the era of the Trump administration, we expect to once again encounter problems gaining access to important environmental data. Notably, we believe we will see EPA budget cuts impact the availability of environment-related crime data. After all, conservative politicians often view data reporting and environmental regulation as pointless burdens for corporations and businesses. Trump has made no secret of his belief that environmental regulation—much of which deals with reporting requirements—is economically harmful to business. Consider for example the following exchange between Donald Trump and Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday (October 15, 2015):

Far from being a disgrace, in our view environmental protection is a necessary part of ensuring that the ecosystem is protected for future generations, and that ecosystem inhabitants—from humans to wildlife—are protected from the ecologically destructive behaviors of corporations. It is no disgrace to take environmental concerns seriously and to pass and enforce regulations that protect public and ecological health. Rather, the disgrace is believing that if left to their own, corporations will protect the ecosystem. In fact, the history of environmental regulation is a demonstration of how the state, as a representative of the people and public health, must force corporations to protect the ecosystem, countering their proven tendency to favor the bottom line over ecosystem health and stability.

Based upon Trump’s first statements on this matter, we believe the Trump administration will do away with important data reporting programs, producing a rupture in the historical record of important environmental data and a significant reduction in the enforcement of environmental regulations. It should also be noted that, even when environmental data are collected, EPA appointees can limit access to those data. One example of this problem was reported by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) in their review of mercury emissions rules during the Bush administration. Citing numerous sources pointing toward “unusual” approaches for crafting mercury pollution regulations during the Bush administration, the UCS noted that “political appointees at the EPA completely bypassed agency professional and scientific staff as well as a federal advisory panel in crafting the proposed new rules.” The Washington Post reported that the “Bush administration’s proposal for regulating mercury pollution from power plants mirrors almost word for word portions of memos written by a law firm representing coal-fired power plants.”

We can certainly expect similar tactics during the Trump administration as Trump appointees, many of whom will push efforts for environmental deregulation as a mechanism to expand economic production, will ignore relevant research on this subject [such as the association between improved environmental corporate performance and increased corporate financial performance demonstrated over a 35 year period (1975–2011) by Elisabeth Albertini (2013)]. We can expect that the ideology of economic growth rather than science will guide the Trump administration’s environmental policies, and furthermore that those policies will benefit the owners of large-capital industries rather than the populace base that supported Trump.

One of the most critical issues we face is the Trump administration’s (already apparent) misperception of science, its indifference to what scientists know about things such as climate change, pollution, and public health, and its insistence on “making America great again” by returning to the conditions of an earlier era—long ago banished by the globalization of corporate capitalism—that relied on reduced environmental regulation and increased fossil fuel production and consumption. Besides Trump himself, his proposed cabinet includes climate skeptics, fossil fuel industry executives, and political leaders from states with strong fossil fuel connections. This is similar to what happened with G. W. Bush’s cabinet; thus, in contrast to the idea that a Trump presidency will be unique because it is influenced by Washington outsiders, we already see tendencies that have characterized prior administrations. (By the way, for those who think that federal policies are too restrictive, let us remind them that US EPA has failed, through decades of policy, to meet the federally mandated requirements of many federal laws, including, for instance, the provision in the Clean Water Act to make US waters fishable and swimmable by 1985, a provision that has yet to be met since that legislation was passed in 1972.)

Trump’s proposed cabinet includes several officials who will adversely affect environmental policy and enforcement, and therefore the quality of the US ecosystem. As head of EPA, for instance, Trump proposed Scott Pruitt, former attorney general of Oklahoma. Pruitt’s position on the EPA is similar to Trump’s. For instance, in 2014 Pruitt’s office told the New York Times: “It is the job of the attorney general to defend the interests and well-being of the citizens and state of Oklahoma … This includes protecting Oklahoma’s economy from the perilous effects of federal overreach by agencies like the EPA.” Pruitt denies the existence of climate change (calling it a hoax or fraud), and at one time he announced his intent to force the Obama administration to repeal ALL of its newly imposed environmental regulations. In the pursuit of this goal, Pruitt has sued the EPA on various occasions in an effort to: limit the Regional Haze Rule, which regulated air quality in National Parks; rescind ozone pollution restrictions; cancel EPA coal-fired power plant mercury emission regulations (the Clean Power Plan); and limit the Waters of the United States rules and regulations. None of these suits have been successful, and thus one could argue they have been a waste of taxpayer dollars as Pruitt strived to protect the interests of his wealthy supporters, including the oil lobbies that have funded his political career (e.g., he received funding from Harold Hamm of Continental Resources, a fossil fuel company, and later joined a suit by Continental, Oklahoma Gas & Electric and the Domestic Energy Producers Alliance against climate change regulations). Pruitt has sued the federal government on many other matters, and has also sued California over its caged hen egg-laying rules (California Proposition 2)—an issue that seems hardly related to the governance of Oklahoma. As Kenneth Kimmell, President of the Union of Concerned Scientists has noted, the selection of Pruitt to head EPA should be considered unusual in light of his “clear record of hostility to the EPA’s mission.” For instance, as Oklahoma Attorney General, Pruitt sent a letter that challenged EPA estimates of air pollution caused by energy companies in Oklahoma; the letter was signed by him but composed by employees of Devon Energy who had donated money to his campaign.

Trump’s choice to head the Department of Energy is Rick Perry, someone who once said he would abolish the agency (in a well-known instance during a presidential debate in which he couldn’t actually identify the agency by name). Perry believes that climate change is an unproven scientific theory—scientifically speaking, of course, theories are proven by testing hypotheses, and a theory emerges when significantly related hypotheses cannot be rejected, but perhaps it is too much to ask that people placed in charge of federal agencies dealing with science should know such things. Perry, who has held the longest term of any former governor of Texas, obviously has deeply embedded connections to the fossil fuel industry (Texas is the foremost producer of fossil fuels in the United States), so one can easily imagine that his energy policies will favor fossil fuels over alternative energy, which is the same condition found in the Department of Energy during the G. W. Bush administration (headed first by Spencer Abraham, who was also part of Vice President Cheney’s Energy Task Force, and second by Samuel Bodman).

As the proposed head of the Department of the Interior, Trump named Ryan Zinke, a Montana congressional representative. In that role, Zinke will influence national policy related to drilling for oil and gas on federal lands and the construction of national oil and gas pipelines. He has already established a congressional voting record favoring the destruction of federal lands for fossil fuel exploration, supporting the Keystone XL pipeline (vetoed by President Obama), and removing protection for endangered species in order to promote the above policies. At one time a supporter of climate change policy, he now denies the science behind climate change, perhaps, as Tim Murphy implies on Mother Jones, after receiving political contributions from the fossil fuel industry.

Trump has also proposed Rex Tillerson to be the Secretary of State. Tillerson is the former chairman and CEO of ExxonMobil. Tillerson, at least, does not deny climate change and supports a carbon tax. However, his company consistently lobbies against climate change regulation and is being investigated by the State of New York for providing misleading statements about climate change.

Many other Trump’s cabinet nominees also deny climate change but will hold positions where perhaps climate change policies are less vital. One exception here is the nominee for the Department of Human Health and Services. For this office, Trump proposed Tom Price, a climate change skeptic who has signed a pledge from Americans for Prosperity, funded by the Koch Brothers, to oppose climate change legislation.

As green criminologists, our concern is that the changes to federal policy that we can expect from the Trump administration will be deleterious to the majority of Americans, to people in other nations, and to the health of the global ecosystem (not to mention the health of the US ecosystem), and that they will exacerbate environmental racism and environmental injustice in the United States. We anticipate:

an increase in environmental pollution and in exposure to environmental toxics, which may be especially problematic in urban areas;
diminished efforts to enforce environmental regulations against corporate polluters, creating a context in which corporations will increasingly violate pollution permits and regulations that are no longer enforced;
an increase in the unequal distribution of pollution and exposure to environmental pollution in impoverished areas, communities of color, and Native American Indian reservations, which will aggravate the health of residents and will be exacerbated by a reduction in federal health care policy;
reductions in penalties for corporations that violate environmental laws;
a deterioration of air and water quality in the US, generating additional public health problems; and
rising rates of animal extinctions, a trend already of scientific concern.

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References and Further Readings
Albertini, E. 2013. Does Environmental Management Improve Financial Performance: A Meta-Analytical Review. Organization & Environment 26(4): 431–57.
Bullard, R.D. 2000. Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Downey, L. and Hawkins, B. 2008. Race, Income, and Environmental Inequality in the United States. Sociological Perspectives 51(4): 759–81.
Kosmicki, S. and M.A. Long. 2016. Exploring Environmental Inequality within US Communities Containing Coal and Nuclear Power Plants. In Hazardous Waste and Pollution: Detecting and Preventing Green Crimes, edited by Tanya Watt, pp. 79–100. New York: Springer.
Lynch, M.J., R.G. Burns, and P.B. Stretesky. 2010. Global Warming as a State-Corporate Crime: The Politicalization of Global Warming during the Bush Administration. Crime, Law and Social Change 54(3): 213–39.
Lynch, M.J., M.A. Long, K.L. Barrett, and P.B. Stretesky. 2013. Is it a Crime to Produce Ecological Disorganization? Why Green Criminology and Political Economy Matter in the Analysis of Global Ecological Harms. British Journal of Criminology 53(6): 997–1016.
Lynch, M.J. and P.B. Stretesky. 2012. Native Americans and Social and Environmental Justice: Implications for Criminology. Social Justice 38(3): 104–24.
Parenteau, P. 2004. Anything Industry Wants: Environmental Policy under Bush II. Environmental Law and Policy Forum 14(2): 363–404.
Stretesky, P.B., M.A. Long, and M.J. Lynch. 2013. The Treadmill of Crime: Political Economy and Green Criminology. Abingdon, UK: Routledge.

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*Michael J. Lynch is Professor of Criminology in the Department of Criminology at the University of South Florida; Paul B. Stretesky is Professor of Criminology in the Department of Social Sciences at Northumbria University; Michael A. Long is Associate Professor of Social Sciences in the Department of Social Sciences at Northumbria University; and Kimberly L. Barrett is Assistant Professor of Criminology in the Sociology, Anthropology and Criminology Department at Eastern Michigan University.

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Donald Trump and Race

Posted on January 11, 2017 by Social Justice

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by Jason Williams*

The ascendency of Donald Trump to the highest office in the United States was for some a surprise, and for others something that could have been expected. Trump’s battle to victory was like anything we’ve ever seen before. Trump ran his campaign using well-known tactics that many would consider artifacts of the past, though seemingly they have never gone away. He propelled himself into the White House with the help of racism, xenophobia, and exclusionary white supremacist tactics. During his campaign he uttered racist and xenophobic remarks against Mexicans (and the broader Latino community), referring to them as rapists and criminals. He also delivered hatred against the Muslim community, stating that he would institute a barring of Muslims into the United States. One of his first commentaries to the Black community was delivered to a crowd of mostly whites, where he spoke to Blacks as caricatural, stereotypical helpless urbanites in need of protection against the constantly lurking criminals in their communities. Oblivious to his obvious disconnect from the reality of Black life in the United States, Trump continued on with this mantra, iterating to Blacks, “What do you got to lose?” He faced immediate backlash regarding his uninformed, badly crafted pivot to the Black vote.

On the Reemergence of Pre-1960s White Supremacy

A key hint toward the rise of pre-1960s white supremacy came in the immediate aftermath of President Obama’s election. During a speech to the Heritage Foundation, high-ranking GOP Senate leader Mitch McConnell explicitly noted that his top priority was to derail Obama’s Presidency making him a one-term president. Meanwhile, a series of vicious, racist campaigns aimed against President Obama in many GOP-dominated jurisdictions displayed a diametrically opposed reality to the notion of post-racialism so often claimed in the aftermath of the election. The biggest grassroots group in opposition to President Obama’s election was of course the Tea Party, which was essentially a neo-racist political operation for the reemergence of a white prosperous America. In the midterm election following President Obama’s election, the Tea Party did great damage to establishment GOP politics by managing to get dozens of their own representatives into the Capitol. The ascendency of the Tea Party into the Capitol increased and dramatized the divides between the president and the GOP, thus leading to many conflicts and inactivity in Washington. To many racialized individuals, that conflict illuminated the racial disdain the GOP held against President Obama, as their refusal to work with him was unprecedented.

Also stirring in the backdrop of the Tea Party was the now President-elect, Donald Trump himself. Along with other birthers, Trump continuously iterated his confusion and disbelief regarding President Obama’s citizenship, and thus his fitness to be president. Trump’s vicious campaign against the legitimacy of President Obama’s election to the White House traveled great lengths. For instance, he frequently bragged about hiring individuals who traveled to Hawaii, and he questioned President Obama’s attendance at Columbia and Harvard while issuing an award to anyone who could retrieve his college transcripts. Even though the birther movement was at best a racist attempt to delegitimize President Obama’s election, most mainstream sources failed to conceptualize it as such, thus normalizing the birther movement.

The normalization of birtherism is what led to the Trump presidency. As mentioned above, Trump utilized countless racist tactics to galvanize support while on the campaign trail. His most prominent thoughts, of course, were against Mexicans and for the building of a wall along the Southern border. Trump played to white economic insecurity to gain the offensive on immigration, claiming that Mexicans were coming to the United States to steal jobs from hardworking Americans—a tactic that has always worked with working poor and middle-class whites and that is of course a legacy of slavery, when the capitalists turned working-class whites against their African American counterparts. For centuries, sadly, this tactic has continued to push working poor and middle-class whites to vote against their own interests. However, Trump for these individuals represents a great-white-hope, a person who could return America to the good old days and “Make America Great Again.” Certainly many African Americans could not conceive of a period in which America was great, given their racial-ethnic positioning throughout America’s history. Thus, Trump’s very campaign represented a kind of racism that many thought to be long gone but that was in truth still alive, just sidelined and awaiting to be reactivated. Trump especially gained the loyalty of GOP supporters in the aftermath of the Dallas shooting of police officers by a Black man, when he claimed to be the “law-and-order candidate” and thus sparked the fire of a GOP tactic used in the not-so-distant past.

Backlash against Black Lives Matter

The future of race relations in the United States can easily be conceptualized based on Trump’s response to the Black Lives Matter protests that erupted during the primaries. Trump casted Sen. Bernie Sanders as weak after BLM protestors crashed one of his rallies during the primaries. He explicitly stated that BLM would never come to one of his rallies and take over because he would not give up his mic. Such a comment gives one an inside look into how Trump understands the BLM protests. Nevertheless, his indifference to BLM came with scores of dog whistle statements that would further galvanize his base. Soon after his comments there were countless episodes in which Trump supporters physically attacked BLM protestors who would show up at Trump rallies.

Trump’s response to these incidents was hardly a disciplining of his supporters. Rather, he seemed to encourage his supporters to continue physically attacking protestors. In fact, at a rally in Las Vegas Trump lamented that he would like to punch a protestor in the face, also mentioning how in the good old days, protestors would be treated differently. The reference clearly was to how African Americans were treated during the Civil Rights struggle—physically beaten, dehumanized, and casted beyond the margins of democracy. Trump does not try to hide his racist intentions; rather he boasts about them, and in return he is able to galvanize his base and gain additional support for his platform. During a rally in Ohio, Trump also stated his belief that BLM had instigated some of the killings against police—once again exacerbating some of the already existing hateful rhetoric against BLM.

His comments against BLM added to the increasingly baseless rhetoric used with regards to many of the easily provable claims boasted by BLM protestors. In many ways Trump’s campaign ushered America into a post-truth society, as facts and sensible debate became artifacts of a past America that once embraced intellect and the pursuit of truth.

The Anti-Minority Presidency

Immediately following Trump’s election to the White House, the number of anti-minority incidents spiked throughout the nation. For instance, in late November 2016, Newsweek reported 900 hate incidents in the aftermath of Trump’s victory. The Southern Poverty Law Center also published a report, titled “Ten Days After: Harassment and Intimidation in the Aftermath of the Election,” which also illuminates the extent of the increase in hate-oriented incidents against minorities. The report cites cases of harassment against Blacks and those perceived to be immigrants in K-12 schools, religious buildings, and other public spaces. Many individuals subjected to this post-election harassment indicated that these experiences were somewhat unimaginable to them—that in 2016, they would have never expected to see or experience such terroristic attacks.

The election of Trump has emboldened white racists to publicly showcase their intentions against minorities. In fact, many white nationalist groups explicitly supported Trump, and continued to do so even after he disavowed them because of the pressure by the media. Vox reported that Trump’s win was largely due to racism and sexism. Citing from an academic paper, the article concluded that race was more significant than economic dissatisfaction, thus concluding that racism was the clear factor that determined the election.

Given Trump’s birther beginnings and his historical distaste toward minorities (i.e., see the cases of Central Park Five, of housing discrimination, etc.), one can predict with near certainty that his presidency will be unmatched in the modern era of American politics. His election seems to emanate a kind of old white resentment against scapegoated minorities that have little to do with the contemporary state of white insecurity and more to do with the fact that capitalists have given up on them too. As a result, a Trump administration will not only continue to scapegoat the vulnerable for its own political gain, but it will also remain silent against the countless expressions of racism now emanating as a result of his hateful campaign. To make matters worse, Trump decided to appoint Sen. Jeff Sessions to the United States Attorneys General position. Sessions, himself a bigot with a racist past, is unlikely to take up (or take seriously) causes regarding civil rights and equality. He has a colorful past of being ferociously anti-Black and shares Trump’s anti-immigration sentiment. Civil rights activists and grassroots organizations have begun campaigns to block Sessions ascendency to the top law enforcement position in the land. Sadly, appointees like Sessions illuminate what the future will look like if Trump is able to confirm his cabinet.

Now more than ever there needs to be solidarity amongst marginalized peoples and allies. Since the November 2016 election Trump has shown an unlikelihood of changing his ways and his inability to be a president for all Americans. Instead, he has embraced the vicious and inhumane policy aspirations of the GOP, which will disproportionately affect minorities, women, and poor people. He has vowed to get rid of the Affordable Care Act, increase support for law enforcement, and strengthen the so-called free market. Trump’s promise to America is one that will further concentrate political power into the hands of powerful rich white men, and his cabinet appointments have shown just that. Such a presidency will send race relations into an unprecedented frenzy. Many people are reporting to be fearful, and frankly they have every right to be afraid. But such fear should not lay dormant; it should be used as fuel to resist Trump and his party every step of the way.

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Jason M. Williams (Williamsjas@mail.montclair.edu) is Assistant Professor of Justice Studies at Montclair State University. He is also involved in several public research and information forums, such as The Hampton Institution, where he serves as chair of the criminal justice department. Most recently, he as coedited (with C. A. Jones) A Critical Analysis of Race and the Administration of Justice (Cognella Academic Press, 2015).

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Header image (left): “Demilitarize the Police, Black Lives Matter” by Johnny Silvercloud, used under CC BY-SA 2.0 / Cropped and modified.

Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss: Bracing for Trump’s Anti-Worker, Corporate Agenda

Posted on January 10, 2017 by Social Justice

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by Colin Jenkins*

Rich people don’t have to have a life-and-death relationship with the truth and its questions; they can ignore the truth and still thrive materially. I am not surprised many of them understand literature only as an ornament. Life is an ornament to them, relationships are ornaments, their ‘work’ is but a flimsy, pretty ornament meant to momentarily thrill and capture attention.
—Sergio Troncoso

In a February speech on his campaign trail, then-candidate Donald Trump lambasted his opponents for their cozy relationships with Wall Street bankers. “I know the guys at Goldman Sachs. They have total, total control over [Cruz],” Trump said. “Just like they have total control over Hillary Clinton.” Trump’s campaigns for both the Republican candidacy and the US Presidency were heavily themed on this inside-out approach to posing as a whistleblower of the elite, a billionaire businessman gone rogue, eager to feed other members of his exclusive club to the lions. Americans by the tens of millions—ravaged by decades of predatory loan schemes, joblessness, and unfathomable debt—gathered in the den, fevered by this angst-ridden anti-establishment message, thirsting for the flesh he was to heave from the castle on the hill.

Nine months later, Trump was elected to the office of President of the United States. Taking a page from George W. Bush, Trump successfully packaged his billionaire, elitist self into an average dude sitting on the bar stool across from us. Taking a page from Ronald Reagan, Trump successfully molded the chronic economic woes of the American working class into avenues for racial and xenophobic hatred. Trump’s infamous wall is the modern-day version of Reagan’s mythological “welfare queen”—both masterful mind tricks designed to avert the attention of the understandably ravenous working-class lions away from the ringmasters and toward others in the den. The oldest trick in the book: divide and conquer. The end result: a billionaire businessman buoyed to the highest office of the land by 63 million working-class voters during a time of unprecedented poverty and wealth inequality.

Predictably, Trump’s ascension to the presidency has ended his inside-out shtick. Much like Barack Obama in 2008, Trump’s anti-establishment marketing assault has culminated into an uber-establishment cabinet. Within six weeks of his election victory, Trump has proceeded to form what some have referred to as the General Billionaires Administration. As of December 7th, Trump’s prospective cabinet topped a combined personal wealth of $14 billion, “more than 30 times greater than that of even President George W. Bush’s White House.” And that represents only half of the total appointees to come. Instead of “draining the swamp” as he promised to do on the campaign trail, Trump has called on his real-estate instincts to expand the swamp into a gargantuan monstrosity of a cesspool. For working-class Americans, this means the President and those surrounding him are even more out of touch with the common struggle than ever before.

Although personal wealth does not necessarily imply the embracing of a blatant anti-worker ideology, it almost always sets this tone through efforts to legitimize said wealth, promote false meritocracies, and push unrealistic narratives rooted in “personal responsibility” and “pulling up boot straps,” all of which ignore the material realities of working-class people. Taken on their words and actions, there is no reason to believe that Trump and his cabinet will be anything but disastrous for working-class Americans.

Betsy DeVos, Trump’s pick for Education Secretary, wants to privatize education and treat it as an industry among others in a competitive capitalist market. “Let’s not kid ourselves that [public education] is not an industry,” she told a crowd in Texas, “we must open it up to entrepreneurs and innovators.” In other words, run it as a for-profit venture, which inevitably means lowering pay, benefits, and standards for employees (teachers) in order to maximize the bottom line. Not good for working-class Americans who teach for a living, and not good for working-class children whose educations will take a back seat to profit margins.

Andrew Puzder, Trump’s pick for Labor Secretary, has proven to be fiercely anti-worker in his role as CEO of CKE Restaurants. NY’s Attorney General Eric Schneiderman referred to this appointment as a “cruel and baffling decision by Trump” due to Puzder’s presiding over a fast-food chain “that repeatedly stole workers’ hard-earned wages.” As an employee at one of Puzder’s restaurants, Rogelio Hernandez called Puzder “one of the worst fast food CEOs,” adding that his appointment “sends a signal to workers that the Trump years are going to be about low pay, wage theft, sexual harassment and racial discrimination.” Not good for tens of millions of working-class Americans who are desperate for living-wage employment.

Ben Carson, Trump’s pick to run Housing and Urban Development, has been consistently opposed to government assistance programs like the one he is about to oversee. Rather than viewing such programs as necessities in a capitalist system that leaves many people without the means to fulfill basic needs, Carson sees them as “socialist experiments” that “attempt to infiltrate every part of our lives.” Carson even said that trusting the government “to use housing policy to enhance the opportunities available to lower-income citizens” can be “downright dangerous.” Ironically, he is now entrusted to do just that. Not good for the millions of working-class Americans who rely on public housing programs to shelter themselves and their families.

While most of Trump’s own plans have been hidden in vague political rhetoric (“Making America Great Again,” “create a dynamic booming economy” with “pro-growth tax plans” and “new modern regulatory frameworks”), they are mostly taken from the same neoliberal agenda that has shaped American policy for the past three decades, merely repackaged with Trump-speak. If his own business dealings are any indication of how he feels about working people, the Trump presidential agenda will most certainly be anti-worker. Workers have filed numerous lawsuits against Trump over the years, alleging everything from anti-union intimidation to paying below-minimum wages. “In one case, the Trump Organization paid $475,000 to settle a claim with nearly 300 Los Angeles golf club employees in a class-action suit alleging unpaid wages and age discrimination, among other offenses.” In another case, the Trump Organization “settled for an unknown sum” regarding the employment of undocumented Polish immigrants who “were paid $5 an hour or less when they were paid at all,” and “worked 12-hour shifts, seven days a week with no overtime.” Earlier this year, workers at Trump’s Las Vegas hotel filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board, alleging they were “interfered with, restrained, and coerced” in an effort to avoid unionization. Dozens of similar complaints against Trump businesses have come to light over the years, including alarming trends of misogyny against women employees.

Like most marketing slogans, “Make America Great Again” has no real meaning in regards to concrete plans. Its call on some glorious past allows for an embrace of generic change, and its purposeful vagueness speaks to whatever is important to each individual who embraces it, essentially allowing for a wide range of beauties in the eyes of a wide range of beholders. Trump’s “pro-growth tax plan” draws on the same neoliberal ideology that was implemented by Reagan and survived by every administration since, proclaiming that lowering corporate tax rates will incentivize American companies to stay in the US, which will create more jobs, and will inevitably allow the increased corporate wealth to trickle down to the rest of us. The only problem is that never happened. Ironically, the implementation of such policies actually paralleled the mass exodus of American companies, partly due to free trade agreements like NAFTA and partly due to the globalization of the capitalist system, which allowed for the formation of an international labor pool to replace the industrialized, unionized labor pools that once existed in countries like the US.

Between 1986 and 1988, Reagan lowered the corporate tax rate from 46% to 34%. To put this move in perspective, this rate had stayed between 46% and 52.8% since 1951. The Reagan rate has barely moved since, despite 16 years of Democratic administrations. And it has done nothing to keep American companies home; rather, it actually complemented massive outsourcing of American jobs. In fact, “manufacturing employment collapsed from a high of 19.5 million workers in June 1979 to 11.5 workers in December 2009, a drop of 8 million workers over 30 years. Between August 2000 and February 2004, manufacturing jobs were lost for a stunning 43 consecutive months—the longest such stretch since the Great Depression.” This trend has continued as the US lost 5 million manufacturing jobs between 2000 and 2016. According to the Center for American Progress, “US multinational corporations, the big brand-name companies that employ a fifth of all American workers… cut their work forces in the US by 2.9 million during the 2000s while increasing employment overseas by 2.4 million.” All of this despite historically low corporate tax rates. Trump’s solution: double down by cutting corporate tax rates even more.

Remaining consistent with the neoliberal agenda, Trump has also promised to “scale back years of disastrous regulations unilaterally imposed by our out-of-control bureaucracy.” Yet another failed policy direction, tried and tested for decades, being recycled to give already reckless corporations even more maneuverability. Trump plans to repatriate trillions of dollars of corporate money that has been hidden in foreign banks for years. By allowing special immunity to these corporations (which have essentially evaded taxes through loopholes) with a temporary reduction in the tax rate (from 35% to 10%), Trump believes roughly $5 trillion will return to the US (although reports estimate closer to $2.5 trillion). Unfortunately, the last time such immunity was granted, in 2004, “a congressional report noted that some companies used more than 90 percent of the repatriated cash to enrich shareholders, generally through stock buybacks. Corporations that brought home the most cash, in fact, cut jobs.”

Trump’s recycled economic agenda has proven time and time again to boost corporate wealth at the expense of working-class interests. The widely reported deal made with Carrier recently, which was facilitated by Trump and promises to keep 800 jobs in Indiana, is a perfect example of this misguided approach. The Carrier deal was said to include a tax giveaway, the main tool in Trump’s corporate welfare tax plan, which stands to cost about $6.2 trillion in lost federal revenues over a decade. Not only does this approach “starve the beast,” as originally intended by Reagan, it simply does not create American jobs as promised. The past four decades have proven this. The corporate tax rate in the US (which is actually on par with G7 countries, whose rates average over 30%) is not a tremendous factor in why companies move elsewhere. They avoid taxes because they can. There is no reason to believe they wouldn’t avoid them just the same with a lower rate. They also relocate for the “cheap labor,” which is near chattel-slavery levels in some places, and for preferable infrastructures. As the New York Times reported shortly after the Carrier deal, “Carrier’s parent company, United Technologies, never mentioned taxes as the reason for the offshoring move. Instead, it cited its ‘existing infrastructure’ and ‘strong supplier base’ in Mexico. More revealing, United Technologies says it can save $65 million a year by moving operations to low-wage Mexico.”

Trump’s economic plan does nothing to stray from the corporate-friendly neoliberal agenda of the past three decades. In many cases, it doubles down on it. These strategies have never benefited the working-class majority, and they will continue to represent an abysmal failure for those of us who depend on wages and salaries to live—a reality that Trump and his cabinet have never faced. Their out-of-touch, fairy-tale lives will undoubtedly amount to out-of-touch policies, leaving most of us entrenched in our ongoing struggle for living wages, affordable housing, reliable healthcare, and meaningful educations for our children. This struggle must take place in our communities, at our jobs, and in our children’s schools. Rejecting the corporate agenda embraced by Trump will not be easy—but it is a struggle we’ve inherited from decades ago, only with a new face at the helm.

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*Colin Jenkins is founder and Social Economics department chair at the Hampton Institute: A Working-Class Think Tank. He is an anarchist, a member of the Socialist Party USA, and a Wobbly.

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Neoliberal Authoritarianism: Notes on Penal Politics in Trump’s America

Posted on January 9, 2017 by Social Justice

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by Alessandro De Giorgi*

I have a message for all of you: The crime and violence that today afflicts our nation will soon—and I mean very soon—come to an end. Beginning on January 20^th, 2017, safety will be restored.
—Donald J. Trump, Presidential Nomination Acceptance Speech, Cleveland, OH, July 21, 2016

The more of those that are in jail serving time, the less people are going to get murdered. It’s mathematics. And that’s really what happened since 1980 with the increasing number of people that were incarcerated. It worked.
—Jeff Sessions, Address to US Senate, Washington, DC, October 3, 2015

After 40 years of unabated penal expansion, a wave of reforms initiated in the mid-2000s under the bipartisan banners of “smart on crime” and “evidence-based” criminal justice policies have produced modest but consistent reductions in the size of the US prison population. Although targeting almost exclusively those fractions of the criminalized population identified as non-violent (and often at the cost of ramping up punishments for other categories of offenders), these reform initiatives attest to the recognition by the nation’s power elites of the problematic nature of mass incarceration—at least in terms of its compatibility with the neoliberal tenets of fiscal austerity and budget responsibility. Over the past few years, this reformist moment has created a few dents in the American carceral machine and in the law-and-order consensus that had dominated all levels of US governance since the punitive shift of the early 1970s. In this sense, the 2016 election of Donald Trump as the first president to run on a law-and-order campaign in several years may well forebode the premature end of the current season of reforms. Is this going to be the case?

Although any detailed plan for criminal justice (as for most other issues) has been conspicuously absent from Trump’s campaign, it is not hard to grasp the president elect’s views on the matter. An instructive read in this regard is Trump’s 2000 book The America We Deserve, a prescient compendium of policy proposals for a hypothetical Trump administration. Among other things, in this publication Trump nominates James Q. Wilson (one of the strongest supporters of mass incarceration in conservative academic circles) as his favorite criminologist (pp. 93-94); predicts that “when the population of adolescent males rises early next century, we’re going to have wolf packs roaming the streets, and not only downtown” (p. 99); laments that “no, the problem isn’t that we have too many people locked up. It’s that we don’t have enough criminals locked up” (p. 102); celebrates the wonders of zero tolerance policing, a position he has reiterated in the 2016 campaign by supporting the racially discriminatory practice of stop and frisk; and finally dismisses as “ridiculous” any sociological explanation of criminal behavior that attempts to connect it to “poverty, lack of opportunity, or early childhood mistreatment” (p. 94). As far as capital punishment is concerned, a good source of information on Trump’s views is the full-page ad he published on four different newspapers on May 1st, 1989, in the aftermath of the brutal rape and beating of a female jogger in New York’s Central Park. In the ad, titled “BRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY! BRING BACK OUR POLICE!” Trump invoked the execution of the five teenagers, all of them minors between the ages of 14 and 16, who were falsely accused of the crime—a point of view he has maintained as late as 2014, after the city of New York settled with the men for their wrongful convictions and a total of 40 years spent in prison.

Overall, Trump’s political posture—his calls for law and order, his xenophobic attacks on undeserving immigrants and dangerous refugees, his evocation of an imagined “people” betrayed by a clique of self-serving and corrupt politicians, his virulent anti-intellectualism, and his promise to restore a fictional golden age of cultural homogeneity, racial hierarchy, gender normativity, and obedience to authority—falls squarely within the coordinates of what in 1979 cultural theorist Stuart Hall defined authoritarian populism: an autocratic form of power that, unlike classical fascism, is compatible with the existence of representative institutions and is sustained by an active popular consent (Hall 1979, 15). Historically, a strong emphasis on law and order and national security has been an integral part of authoritarian-populist platforms—from Margaret Thatcher’s rise to power in 1979 to the more recent electoral exploits of Marine Le Pen in France, Norbert Hofer in Austria, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, and Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, to name just a few. And indeed, it would be reasonable to expect that the incoming Trump administration will attempt to capitalize on the punitive sentiments it has fueled during the presidential campaign and follow the all-too-familiar path to penal populism paved by the likes of Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan.

And yet, I will hazard the prediction that the Trump administration might not engage in a full-fledged campaign of penal expansion and carceral buildup. Penal populism is indeed a very expensive enterprise—as even a cursory glance at trends in criminal justice expenditures since the unfolding of the punitive turn in the US will reveal. If Trump were to jump on the wagon of populist punitiveness, his strategy would involve a significant expansion of the state sector—something hardly feasible without a sharp increase in public spending (and consequent tax increases) or a substantial investment of resources in already overfunded correctional departments—and this is something that Trump’s electoral constituency would most likely reject. On the other hand, large-scale experiments with private prisons in the past—especially following a series of financial mismanagement scandals in the 1980s and 1990s—have proven to be an expensive and overall ineffective alternative to state punishment.

The broader issue here is that while Trump’s populist ascendancy emerges as a conjunctural phenomenon, the US power elite’s commitment to the neoliberal dogmas of deficit reduction, fiscal austerity, and budget conservatism is of a structural nature. Particularly in the post-2007 recession environment, those principles provide the structural coordinates with which any political enterprise must be compatible. After all, the infamous taxpayer protection pledge introduced in 1986 by Americans for Tax Reform—an anti-tax lobbying group directed by Grover Norquist, one of the main crusaders of right-wing criminal justice reform—which commits elected officials to reject any tax increase under any circumstance, has been signed by 49 Senators and 218 House Representatives in the current US Congress, as well as by 13 incumbent governors and approximately 1,000 incumbent state legislators. In the end, neoliberal austerity could well represent the main obstacle to Trump’s authoritarian dreams, at least as far as penal expansion is concerned.

This does not mean, however, that Trump’s peculiar mix of authoritarian rhetoric and neoliberal measures will not have a profound, and harmful, impact on penal politics. At the state level, where most criminal justice policy is formulated, the rhetoric of criminal justice reform might well continue, as long as it can be framed as part of a broader cost-saving—rather than rights-granting—agenda. Here we might witness a lukewarm continuation of the piecemeal reforms aimed at reducing the number of low-level drug offenders in prisons, possibly in conjunction with a toughening of penal measures against more serious crimes. At the same time, however, it is likely that right-wing criminal justice initiatives such as Right on Crime will set the tone of the public debate on penal reform, with the effect of further narrowing the path towards any real decarceration for common offenders (while at the same time shielding corporate criminals from prosecution, for example by decriminalizing several financial crimes, deceptively defined as “regulatory offenses,” and by loosening strict liability rules for businesses). Moreover, it is likely that we will witness a strong acceleration of the (ongoing) privatization of broad sectors of extra- or post-carceral penal control—such as community supervision, probation and parole, electronic monitoring, prisoner reentry, and drug rehabilitation—with the related shifting of increasing portions of the costs of such “services” onto their “clients.” Finally, Trump’s vicious rhetoric—which has liberally drawn, and will continue to draw, from the racially coded language of crime and safety—will have profound and potentially long-term effects on the very way punishment is talked about, imagined, and ultimately administered in the courts, in prisons, or on the street. It may not be Clinton’s disgraced “super-predator,” but some version of that racialized imagery that may please Trump’s white supremacist base is likely to gain a renewed prominence in public discourse. Independently of how many new prisons are built or stricter laws are passed, that image is what prosecutors and judges will have in mind when executing the law and the police will look for when patrolling the streets. The consequences of this in a period of increasing evidence of police brutality and racial bias across all levels of the penal system cannot be underestimated.

As John B. Judis argues in a recent book, unlike left-wing populisms, which are based on a binary opposition between the people and the establishment, right-wing populisms “champion the people against an elite that they accuse of coddling a third group … Rightwing populism is triadic. It looks upward, but also down upon an out group” (Judis 2016, 15). Authoritarian populism is sustained by the ongoing production of undeserving “others” against whom ordinary citizens can be mobilized. Today, the quintessential image of the undeserving other pampered by the authorities at the expense of law-abiding citizens is most likely that of the undocumented immigrant, and the president-elect will hurriedly join his neo-fascist European partners in their ongoing crusade against refugees from “terror-prone” countries, against Muslim communities in the US, and for the deportation of as many “criminal aliens” as feasible. Although it is unlikely, as Raymond Michalowski argues in his contribution to this blog series, that Trump will be able to round up the estimated eleven million undocumented immigrants living in the US, it is likely that immigration raids, detentions, and deportations will increase, precipitating immigrant communities into an age of deep insecurity and fear: after all, the mass-deportation infrastructure has already been successfully tested by President Obama, under whose administration immigrant deportations have reached all-time highs.

To the extent that the immigration issue can be framed in the language of a moral panic about border security, immigrant crime, and global terrorism, the field of immigration control is where I surmise we will witness Trump’s authoritarianism unfold in its most unbridled form. Based on the first declarations of the new members of his administration, immigration control will be one of the very first policy areas the president will put his hands on, if only to score easy points and perhaps earn a few credits with major sectors of his constituency. His approach to penal politics will probably be, as I suggested above, less straightforward, though not necessarily less pernicious. As we wait for the next tweet to indicate the future of penal politics in the biggest carceral state in the world, we should get ready to defend the most vulnerable and oppressed fractions of the population against the combined attack of authoritarian control and neoliberal neglect.

References
Hall, Stuart. 1979. “The Great Moving Right Show.” Marxism Today, January: 14–20.
Judis, John B. 2016. The Populist Explosion: How the Great Recession Transformed American and European Politics. New York: Columbia Global Reports.
Trump, Donald J. 2000. The America We Deserve. New York: Macmillan.

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*Alessandro De Giorgi is Associate Professor at the Department of Justice Studies, San Jose State University (e-mail: alessandro.degiorgi@sjsu.edu). He received his PhD in Criminology from Keele University (United Kingdom) in 2005. Before joining the Department of Justice Studies, he was a Research Fellow in Criminology at the University of Bologna (Italy) and a Visiting Scholar at the Center for the Study of Law and Society, University of California, Berkeley. His teaching and research interests include critical theories of punishment and social control, urban ethnography, and radical political economy. He is the author of Rethinking the Political Economy of Punishment: Perspectives on Post-Fordism and Penal Politics (Ashgate, 2006). Currently, he is conducting ethnographic research on the socioeconomic dimensions of concentrated incarceration and prisoner reentry in West Oakland, California.

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Punishment and Policing in the Trump Era

Posted on January 9, 2017 by Social Justice

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by Michelle Brown*

In the days to come under the Trump presidency, the United States will move toward the end goal of any carceral regime: dehumanizing repression. This end is what Judith Butler names in Trump’s appeal as a “murderous desire” that thrills in its arrogated power to command, for instance, the building of walls and the deportation of millions. While many commentators have emphasized the ways in which Trump’s presidential campaign modeled the Nixon-era law-and-order playbook, it also deviated significantly from it. Its unabashedly white misogynistic nationalist platform left much of 1960s racial coding behind in order to overtly emphasize neo-fascist “correctives,” zealously promising intensified conjunctures of policing and punishment. What must we anticipate at such a nexus?

In the convergence of police, punishment, and authoritarian power, we should, of course, expect the worst. More police. More punishment. More state violence. Fewer constitutional protections and civil and human rights handholds (although these were only limited to begin with). More continuous erasure of the structural conditions necessary for life. But, if we truly seek to alter the future, we should 1) think carefully about how these kinds of convergences repetitively take shape and under what historical and structural conditions, in order to 2) engage in new modes of analysis that set the stage for meaningful challenges and transformative alternatives to carceral regimes.

In the beginning, much of the Trump administration’s efforts are likely to take the form of politically symbolic rollbacks against the Obama administration in statewide and national efforts toward criminal justice reform. For instance, it is likely that we will see the political weakening of legislative efforts directed toward reduced imprisonment and policing, a move of support away from “reform” efforts within prisons and police practice, as well as new strategic efforts from the Right to counter decarceration and growing abolition efforts. The most impactful of these actions will borrow from the visually symbolic elements of Trump’s campaign: for instance, efforts to build up the Southern border are less likely to take the shape of a wall but are likely to ignite new regulatory forms of mass detention and deportation across everyday life. Alongside of this, we must expect a less visible, more ordinary, systematic set of developments: a revalorization of prisons, police, drug wars, and the man- and fire-power of criminal justice systems; the unbridled development of various shadow markets of growing injustice technologies, registries and tracking systems; and a deep criminalization of everyday life through an enlarged predatory justice system made up of fines, fees, debt, arrests, and detention. Furthermore, the collusive growth of progressive and conservative criminal justice think tanks that lay claim to expertise, policy, and change in a post-truth era expose our institutional lexicon for social transformation as defunct and obsolete.

Imprisonment in the Trump era is clearly marked for growth and capital investment. I stood on corrections trade floors ten years ago and listened to vendors eagerly explain how, anticipating the evisceration of black communities, immigrant women and children, youth, and the rural poor would represent the next boom industries. Private prisons are more likely to expand under Trump, particularly given their control over federal immigrant detention. And while private prisons experienced an immediate shock wave of growth in the aftermath of the election, it is the larger project of neoliberal investment in the prison system (and criminal justice more broadly) that is most pressing. In fact, the intersection of reform efforts with new net-widening possibilities remains one of the most pernicious sites of venture capital and security rebranding in surveillance, “community corrections,” E-carceration, rapidly developing police technologies, and “mass incarceration lite.” As James Kilgore has argued, carceral humanism defines the progressive reform agenda and promises to recast cages as social service sites and jailors as civil servants and reform-minded advocates. Given that most major corporations and the nation’s banks have deep financial roots in the carceral state, it is Trump as business man, not just as an authoritarian leader, that looms large in his administration’s penal impacts.

There are a wave of correlative capital punishment shifts as well. California was poised to abolish the death penalty, but instead Proposition 66 sped its practice along. Nebraska brought back the death penalty after a historical ban, and Oklahoma added an incredible amendment that forecloses constitutional challenge, simply stating that the death penalty itself “shall not be deemed to be or constitute the infliction of cruel or unusual punishment.” We must also expect an uptick in executions at the federal level. While capital punishment remains a definitively local practice in the United States (50% of all executions occur in 2% of US counties), and one that faces serious impediments in its ongoing practice, these election outcomes reveal punishment as riven with contradiction, its proclivities always toward authoritarian displays of power.

Furthermore, the Trump administration brings an enlarged public and cultural space for the performance of punishment. Punishment circulates frequently in Trump’s everyday discourse, from tweets to speeches. He has advocated for “some form of punishment” for women who obtain abortions, framing reproductive justice through carceral logics. He and his supporters have brought back the public spectacle of punishment with misogynistic “lock her up” chants and racist, circling mob attacks of protestors. Trump is seemingly at his most successful when heightening the affective, subjective life of punishment: humiliation, degradation, hitting, pushing, grabbing, cruelty. It is this punitiveness and resentment against various forms of vulnerability that culminates in the discriminatory and dehumanizing practices at the affective core of carceral regimes and police states. These tactics cleave to the criminalization of existence and resistance among the most vulnerable: people of color; Muslims; immigrants; queer and trans communities; the mentally ill; the poor and homeless; drug users and addicts; political prisoners, organizers, and protesters; and any one of the million people who have an unpaid fine, a parking ticket, a trash can lid that has fallen to the sidewalk.

The engine that drives criminalization in a carceral regime is the police. Trump promises the return of the most authoritarian and criminologically disproven forms of policing in modern history—policing with no connection to crime. Against scientific evidence and moral and ethical appeal, his obsession with stop-and-frisk/broken windows policing demonstrates his larger principle: racial control. As my colleague Victor Ray writes, “The singular accomplishment of stop-and-frisk was the worsening of racial inequality: 85 percent of those stopped were innocent black and Latino men.” Policing in the Trump era is, as it has always been, about the lowering of thresholds for the violent interruption of specific groups of people’s lives. It is likely to be revalidated as rightfully predatory, explicitly biased, and highly discretionary, thereby allowing for the elimination of police oversight mechanisms and federal investigations. Trump-era policing is emblematic of a militarized culture of war that is foundational to the prison-industrial complex, situating itself in an intoxicating form of deadly self-pity. From watch lists to registries, the Trump administration promises a shifting of political focus away from state violence and its attendant structural inequalities and toward the criminalization and destabilization of social movements that are naming alternative ways forward to social goods. In particular, we must anticipate and plan for an open attack on the most transformative justice policy platform of our era, the Movement for Black Lives.

Finally, the Trump era heralds the end of labor through the arrival of the “fastest growing government job sector”: homeland security and criminal justice. This is an amazing neoliberal feat, one where labor is transformed into the daily machinery for the disposability of surplus life. But against lethal forms of capitalist economies, carceral regimes, and truncated emancipatory claims, neoliberal hegemony can only unravel. We should anticipate new social movements and solidarities. The project now is abolition. Starting strategies?

Lay claim to the local. Criminal justice is profoundly local, with variability across states and regions. Local plans of action and advocacy for community control of police, courts and prisons are essential. And they are happening. Find them. Watch the cops. Pack the courts and the legislature. Show up at the jail. Organize.
The power of assembly. Strategic alliances and coalitions at the level of the local and their gatherings are crucial: Spaces of assembly driven by the directly impacted; spaces to educate, to dismantle white privilege and supremacy, to share ideas and testimonies, to brainstorm first responses, interventions, divestments, and interruptions.
Sanctuary. Universities, churches, community centers, cities have a rare moment in which to ensure safety, protection, hospitality and dignity to targets of the carceral state. Sanctuary allows for study, strategic response, keeping one’s family and loved ones intact, and survival. It is a political strategy against criminalization and criminal justice.
Rebel cities. Municipal power, anti-fascist coalitions, people’s movements… right where we are. Start at home. Network out. We are hardly alone.

A commitment to multi-perspectival vision and new modes of analysis is urgent to survival. Alongside of a focused, deadly serious pragmatism, we must engage relentlessly in generative efforts to imagine how we will resist the carceral present and its futures we abhor.

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*Michelle Brown is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology, The University of Tennessee. Her research interests include carceral studies; law & society; feminist perspectives; media, theory, and culture; and transformative justice. She is the author of The Culture of Punishment: Prison, Society, & Spectacle (NYUP 2009) and coauthor of Criminology Goes to the Movies (NYUP 2011), among other publications. She is working on a series of articles and a book manuscript examining the production of death in American criminal justice and life-extending alternative forms of justice.

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Statement of the SJ Editorial Board on the Election of Donald Trump

Posted on January 8, 2017 by Social Justice

Dear Readers and Friends:

We all started 2017 with a heavy heart. The election of Donald Trump has cast a shadow on the days ahead of us, and his first appointments to the highest offices in the country have fueled our indignation and confirmed our fears.

We fear the retrenchment of civil rights and women’s rights we hoped we would struggle to expand, not to defend; we fear a war against the oppressed communities in our country, along the Southern border as well as in our neighborhoods; and we fear a further reduction in all forms of social welfare, a growing inequality, an imperiled environment, and an unconscionable, uninformed foreign policy in a world marked by bloody conflicts and an unbearable amount of human suffering.

At the same time, the election of Donald Trump has forced us all to pause, and reflect. Why did a significant part of US voters—although not the majority, as we know—choose Trump? Was it the reaction of working-class whites abandoned by Washington (and by the market) against the financial and political elites represented by Hillary Clinton? Or was it a backlash from the white suburban middle class against the growing diversity in our cities? Was it simply a tactical defeat—the price the Democratic Party had to pay for sacrificing Bernie Sanders to the interests of the neoliberal elite—or the expression of more visceral tensions underlying social and racial relations in the United States?

The election of Donald Trump has also prompted an immediate outpouring of initiatives and mobilizations locally and nationally, including a series of actions and protests planned for January 20 and the Women’s March in Washington, DC on the day after the Inauguration. Expressions of solidarity with immigrants, refugees, and other communities directly targeted by Trump’s hateful rhetoric have populated social media as well as our streets; meetings of all kinds, from academic conferences to political gatherings, have brought us together to analyze the challenges to come and strategize for them.

So we also look ahead with a hopeful, and combative, heart. Trump—the interests he represents, the beliefs he embodies, and the powers he will soon have—is a threat to everything we struggle for. However, if we can turn our fears into a call to action; our questions into the pursuit of critical knowledge; and our emerging mobilizations into the seeds of political organization, then we’ll have the opportunity to turn this treacherous moment into a chance for a different future. The struggles we participate in or advocate for began well before Trump (or Obama, for that matter), and will continue well after him. Within this long arc—that, as Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. famously taught us, inexorably bends toward justice—this is our time. We didn’t choose it, but let us use this moment in time to organize and struggle collectively to build a more just future for all.

In solidarity,
SJ Editorial Board

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