by Neil Harvey*

Image by Radio Zapatista (radiozapatista.org).

On October 14, the National Indigenous Congress (CNI) and the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) issued a communiqué entitled “May the Earth Tremble at Its Core.” The communiqué has the merit of centering attention on struggles in defense of land, forests, water, and all that is threatened by large-scale development projects and the dispossession of common resources. It also represents a call to society to organize in support of a new political initiative that would lead to the selection of an Indigenous woman, a delegate of the CNI, as an independent candidate in the presidential elections in Mexico in 2018.

The communiqué was issued at the end of the Fifth National Indigenous Congress, held at CIDECI-Unitierra, in San Cristobal de Las Casas, Chiapas, which marked the 20th anniversary of the CNI and another anniversary of Indigenous resistance to conquest and colonization over the past five centuries. The CNI continues to be an expression of hope for change and a new Mexico, despite the government’s failure to implement the San Andrés Accords on Indigenous Rights and Culture, signed in 1996 between the EZLN and the Mexican government. Struggles to resist the current economic model have continued and involve the difficult construction and defense of autonomous spaces by Indigenous groups who now form the social base of support behind this new joint initiative.

Although the proposal of the CNI and Zapatistas is rooted in these experiences of struggle, it is not limited to demands of Indigenous peoples but also includes civil society more broadly. The novelty of the initiative is that it proposes another perspective on national politics in Mexico—that is, it is an invitation to rethink the nation from the experiences of those who resist dispossession and repression in the countryside and in the cities. The proposal does not seek to win power (in the sense of exercising public office within the existing institutions of the state) but rather to build a more solid, connected, and national defense against large-scale development projects and dispossession throughout the country.

The proposal will be discussed by members of the more than 30 Indigenous peoples and tribes that sent delegates to the CNI meeting, as well as the Zapatista communities that comprise 27 autonomous municipalities in Chiapas.  If approved, the proposal would not only ensure the presence of an Indigenous woman as an independent candidate in the 2018 presidential election, but would also establish a new political platform to highlight old and new problems that were expressed at the Fifth Congress of the CNI, which refer to a long list of acts of dispossession and ecological damage throughout the country. The communities engaged in these resistance struggles are, in the words of the joint communiqué, “the power from below that has kept us alive.”

It should also be noted that the method for selecting the independent candidate is based on this “power from below.” The CNI and Zapatistas declared that they will take the proposal to each of their “geographies, territories and paths.” Their goal is to carry out a consultation regarding the creation of an Indigenous Governing Council, “whose will would be manifest by an Indigenous woman, a CNI delegate, as an independent candidate to the presidency of the country under the name of the National Indigenous Congress and the Zapatista Army of National Liberation in the electoral process of 2018.”

The proposal is also different from other experiences in Latin America in which Indigenous peoples who decided to participate in the electoral arena in alliance with political parties have not seen favorable results. In Ecuador, for example, in the mid-1990s, the Coordinating Council of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE) decided to participate in the elections, taking advantage of an electoral reform passed in 1994 that allowed independent organizations to run candidates and removed a previous law requiring registration of members in at least 10 provinces and registration of candidates in at least 12 provinces. In this new context, CONAIE decided to form a political party, known as the Pachakutik Plurinational Unity Movement (MUPP), which participated in alliances with other parties to remove corrupt presidents, winning spaces in the government led by Lucio Gutiérrez in 2002. However, Pachakutik ended up being marginalized by this same government, which, once elected, decided to implement austerity policies and other anti-popular measures that led to the resignation or firing of Pachakutik’s representatives from the administration. This situation had a negative impact on the Indigenous movement and led to a revaluing of local and community-based organization as opposed to strategic alliances with candidates of national political parties who tend to impose their own agendas, as happened with the government of Rafael Correa. A similar process has occurred in Bolivia, where the rise of the Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) as a political party, which was based in large part on the mobilization of Indigenous peoples, has led to several tensions and contradictions between the impetus given by the MAS governments to extractive industry and the resistance to this model due to its harmful effects on autonomy and environment in Indigenous territories.

In the case of Mexico, the new initiative of the CNI and EZLN does not include the formation of a political party or alliances with existing parties, but rather the creation of an Indigenous Governing Council and the promotion of its proposals through an Indigenous woman, a delegate of the CNI, as an independent candidate in 2018. It is an initiative that seeks to ensure a close relationship between the candidate and the communities represented by the council, one that would avoid cooptation. It is a different approach to the political dilemma of how a popular movement can gain national presence without losing ties to its social base of support. As we may expect, the proposal will compete with those of other candidates and their parties, which could end up in mutual disqualifications among different opposition groups or in a necessary debate over the direction that Mexico should take and the role of Indigenous peoples, communities, and neighborhoods in defining this direction. We do not know yet what reception the proposal will receive. For the moment, we can say that the initiative ensures that the problems of dispossession, impunity, violence, and repression expressed by the CNI and EZLN will be unavoidable topics for national debate and, for this very fact, constitutes a timely and welcome contribution.

• • •

* Neil Harvey (nharvey@nmsu.edu) is a professor and head of the Department of Government, New Mexico State University. He has conducted research on rural social movements, the Zapatistas and political change in Mexico, including the book The Chiapas Rebellion: The Struggle for Land and Democracy (Duke University Press, 1998). This article is a translated and edited version of “CNI, EZLN y el poder de abajo,” La Jornada (Mexico), October 17, 2016.

In light of recent controversies among progressives and radicals concerning Prop. 62, which would abolish the death penalty in California and replace it with life without parole, we are hosting two pieces that look at the hard issues surrounding the death penalty and explain the reasons for voting Yes or for voting No. Below is the “Yes” piece by Hadar Aviram; you may find the “No” piece by Josh Meisel here.

by Hadar Aviram* 

Image: Lance Page / t r u t h o u t, via Flickr.

It’s unsurprising that the Prop 62 campaign, which calls for death penalty repeal, aims its rhetoric primarily at centrist voters; its two main arguments, the obscene costs ($150 million a year) and the risk of wrongful convictions, have strong bipartisan appeal. But lately I hear qualms about voting yes on 62 from progressive and radical voters.

If you are such a voter, I hear you—your frustration with the slow pace of criminal justice reform, your concern that unacceptable punishments will become retrenched, and your genuine, urgent desire to move things faster and farther for vulnerable populations.

But when you tell me you might be voting against repeal, it frightens me.

In my twenty-one years of thinking about criminal justice reform I have learned this: in criminal justice, the perfect is the enemy of the good. My fear is that in our quest to attain a perfect criminal justice system we will miss an essential step toward that goal.

• Entrenchment of Life without Parole

You fear that death penalty abolition will normalize and entrench life without parole—a hopeless, soul-destroying punishment, that offers no hope or prospect, and especially brutal for people incarcerated at a young age.

I agree with you. Life without parole is, indeed, an extreme form of punishment. Like you, I am committed to a struggle to open a window of hope for all prison inmates.

Unfortunately, the struggle against life without parole cannot begin until we win the struggle against the death penalty, which is within reach. This is, unfortunately, how political reform works: incrementally, with bipartisan support, and supported by a coalition. As I explain in Cheap on Crime, incrementalism produced the considerable reforms that occurred since 2008, and this one will be no exception.

Consider same sex marriage. Radical activists sought marriage licenses in the 1970s, when such acceptance was unthinkable. Then, the movement regrouped, advocating for lesser protections (domestic partnerships, workplace protection). These incremental steps led to a gradual change in public opinion between the mid-1990s and the early 2010s, ending in legal triumph.

More pertinently, the recent revolution in juvenile justice started with Roper v. Simmons (2005), in which the Supreme Court abolished the death penalty for juveniles in light of new findings in neuroscience and developmental psychology. Subsequently, in Graham v. Florida (2010) the Supreme Court relied on the same arguments to abolish life without parole for non-homicide crimes. In Miller v. Alabama (2012) the Supreme Court relied on that logic to abolish mandatory life without parole for all juveniles, and then felt comfortable making that ruling retroactive in Montgomery v. Louisiana (2016). We are now within striking distance of abolishing life without parole for juveniles, which would not be possible without death penalty abolition.

Finally, consider marijuana legalization. Recreational marijuana would not be within our grasp today if progressive voters at the time rejected medical marijuana as insufficient reform.

Progressives are ready for change, and already know that reformed, aging inmates are not a public safety risk. But for that to happen, a consensus must develop among larger constituencies that are not ready for it yet, and it will not develop before the death penalty is repealed.

• Life without Parole as “the Other Death Penalty”

The horrors of life without parole notwithstanding, being on death row is an appreciably different experience. 747 people live in solitary confinement, without access to social and educational opportunities, in a dilapidated facility. Moreover, constant litigation pressure is fending off executions for the time being, but can you imagine living with the uncertainty of whether you’ll be executed by the state some day? In Jones v. Chappell (2014), Judge Carney found the death penalty unconstitutional for precisely this reason: the delays and uncertainty about one’s own fate. Although Jones did not prevail in the Ninth Circuit, the reasoning behind it is sound: it is very different to be a death row inmate than a lifer.

Even if you truly have no preference between the death penalty and life without parole, shouldn’t the annual $150 million price tag tip the scale toward repeal? Is it conscionable to maintain a punishment that has no virtue, when the savings could improve education, health care, welfare, and infrastructure?

Finally, think about the impact of repeal in California on other retentive states. California has the biggest death row in the country and has been the vanguard of penal innovation, for better and for worse: we pioneered determinate sentencing, enhancements, and the most punitive version of Three Strikes. But we have also pioneered important change in the opposite direction, with realignment, Three Strikes reform, and Prop. 47. The death penalty isn’t different across states, but abhorrent in all of them. Reform in Texas begins here, with you.

• Deprivation of Due Process

The California Constitution awards death row inmates free post-conviction representation. But losing these theoretical due process advantages would have very little meaning in practice: as of August 2016, 356 inmates lack habeas representation, and 46 of them don’t even have appellate representation. The average wait time for an attorney on death row is 16 years. Any effort to train and introduce more lawyers (as Prop 66 supporters propose) would require hundreds of attorneys just for cases now pending, cost tens of millions of dollars, and create speedy proceedings that would increase the risk of wrongful executions.

Would death row inmates wish to retain these so-called advantages for the price of years on death row with a possible execution? Don’t look for answers in the methodologically circumspect survey that surfaced four years ago, which, for all we know, might have been answered by a few represented inmates on death row rather than by the hundreds who languish without representation. Instead, ask Shujaa Graham, who spent 16 years in San Quentin for a crime he did not commit. For that matter, ask all 150 death row exonerees, who are passionately campaigning for Prop 62. Have you heard a single exoneree praising his good luck in being sentenced to death?

Or, you might consider the perspectives of lifers. I teach lifers in San Quentin, and what I hear from them is wall-to-wall support of death penalty repeal, a solid understanding of the incremental nature of reform, and a desire that an issue involving 747 inmates be resolved sensibly so that we can turn our attention to reforming life without parole.

• Prison Labor  

The origins of prison labor—namely, as an exception to slavery abolition—make us uneasy; prison labor perpetuates, in a new guise, abhorrent forms of coercion and racial domination.

But abolishing prison labor is not on the ballot. Abolishing the death penalty is.

Some progressive voters bristle at the campaign’s emphasis on prison labor and victim compensation, but prison labor is not a novelty—it has existed for a very long time under Section 2700 of the Penal Code, which requires that inmates work, and which is completely unaffected by Prop. 62. The outcome of repeal would be that Section 2700 would apply to a few hundred more lifers—simple because they would now be lifers, not death row inmates.

The only modification would be an increase of the maximum restitution withholding from wages (not family donations) from 50% (which is already in effect) to 60%. Is objecting to this minor increase in victim restitution a worthy progressive cause? Remember: this increase in restitution is included in the proposition to make sure that a majority of Californians—not just progressives—vote Yes on 62. It also ensures the support of victim families, an important constituency. This minor compromise is part and parcel of political achievement.

• Dissatisfaction with the Initiative Process

I agree: the initiative process is extremely problematic, plagued by economic interest deceptive ads and easily manipulated voters, especially in an extremely polarized state. But compared to propositions laden with complex policy details, Prop. 62, which presents voters with a yes/no question and has clear implications, is one of the least objectionable uses of the referendum method.

Moreover, voting “no” wholesale here would be a grave mistake. Repeal advocacy has not succeeded so far in the legislature, the courts, or the governor’s office, and not for lack of trying.

The only one who can repeal California’s death penalty is YOU.

When you look back at this election, which value will you be proud you upheld: your qualms about initiatives, or your opposition to the death penalty?

In Summary

Sometimes, even with the best intentions, overthinking can lead us astray. Listen to your heart and your common sense. Are you against the death penalty? Good. So am I. For the reasons the campaign highlights, but also for all the traditional, good reasons to be against the death penalty: because it is barbaric, inhumane, risky, racially discriminatory, and obscenely expensive.

Are you against the death penalty? Then vote against the death penalty.

Vote Yes on 62.

• • •

* Hadar Aviram holds the Harry and Lillian Hastings Research Chair at UC Hastings College of the Law and is the Vice-President and President-Elect of the Western Society of Criminology. She is the author of Cheap on Crime: Recession-Era Politics and the Transformation of American Punishment (UC Press, 2015) and the owner of the California Correctional Crisis blog.

In light of recent controversies among progressives and radicals concerning Prop. 62, which would abolish the death penalty in California and replace it with life without parole, we are hosting two pieces that look at the hard issues surrounding death penalty and explain the reasons for voting Yes or for voting No. Below is the “No” piece by Josh Meisel; you may find the “Yes” piece by Hadar Aviram here.

by Josh Meisel*

Image: Lance Page / t r u t h o u t, via Flickr.

Among the slew of statewide ballot measures facing California voters this November 8th are two competing measures: Proposition 62 would eliminate the death penalty, whereas Proposition 66 would speed it up. Voters in two other states, Nebraska and Oklahoma, will also be deciding on the future of the death penalty. Assuming both California propositions have a majority of yes votes, the one with the most yes votes will prevail and override the other proposition.

As a professor and community activist who opposes the death penalty on principle, I will certainly oppose Proposition 66. But after considerable soul-searching and research, I will also vote no on Proposition 62 on the grounds that its mandatory requirement of life in prison without any chance of parole for a capital offense is another kind of death sentence. As Tom Murton, the one-time superintendent of the notorious Cummins State Prison Farm in Arkansas, once said, “When you sentence a man to life in prison, with no chance of getting out, he’s going to die one day at a time because he knows he’s doomed to walk the halls of purgatory for as long as he’s alive.”

The death penalty is the punishment to which all other criminal sentences are compared. Proponents of the death penalty argue it provides retribution and deters future crime. Research shows that its deterrent effect is limited to preventing specific condemned prisoners from committing additional crimes. Not only is there weak evidence of its capacity to act as a general deterrent, research suggests that crime rates actually increase following the publicized execution of an offender, suggesting a brutalization effect from the death penalty.

The death penalty is viewed by many as legalized lynching, both as a violent sentence and in its racist application. According to U.S. Department of Justice nationwide statistics, African-Americans were eight times as likely as whites to be executed for rape between 1930 and 1964. Though the death penalty is now largely restricted to cases involving murder, we know that it is disproportionately applied to African-Americans. In fact, a death sentence is far more likely to be imposed when the killer is black and the victim is white.

The use of the death penalty in cases involving juveniles was ruled unconstitutional by the United States Supreme Court in Roper v. Simmons (2005) as a violation of the 8th Amendment barring cruel and unusual punishment. In writing the majority opinion, Justice Kennedy referenced “evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society.”  Hopefully, the Court will mature in how it views the death penalty and call for its abolition. Currently, the United States’ stance conflicts with the sentencing practices of the world community. Among developed democracies, it stands alone with India and Japan in their steadfast refusal to abolish the death penalty.

The vast majority of the 749 inmates on death row in California are male (97 percent) and at least 40 years old (86 percent), well beyond the age when violent crimes are likely to occur. Some prisoners are as old as 85, and some have been on death row for as long as 37 years. Communities of color are overrepresented on death row. Sixty percent of death row inmates are African-American (36 percent) or Hispanic/Latino (24 percent), and well over half were sentenced out of Southern California courts. The mental health of California’s death row inmates has deteriorated due to horrific housing conditions, lack of adequate health care, and chronic neglect by state prison officials.

The use of the death penalty in California is also extremely expensive. It costs far more to execute a prisoner than impose a life sentence without parole. This is due largely to the length of time inmates are caged on the more expensive death row and the costly legal process state and federal laws required to be followed.

In response to this situation, Proposition 62 would repeal the death penalty and replace it with what Barry Feld terms a “slower form of death”: life imprisonment without the possibility of parole, otherwise known as an LWOP sentence. In part because of its permanence, a death sentence has historically provided death row inmates with essential legal protections that an LWOP sentence will eliminate. Proposition 62 also adds penal labor to the sentence by requiring inmates to work, with 60 percent of their earnings and trust fund balances going towards victim restitution. The support family members and friends on the outside provide death row prisoners would be targeted by this initiative for victim restitution. Beyond a sentence of death in prison, inmates would now face forced labor for the rest of their natural lives.

Supporters of converting the death penalty to LWOP include a wide range of progressive civic, legal, human rights, and religious groups: ACLU, California Catholic Conference, Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, Youth Justice Coalition, and Equal Justice Initiative. Death Penalty Focus and other groups in favor of Proposition 62 present themselves as death penalty abolitionists, as do many state and national Democratic leaders, including Senator Bernie Sanders.

There is also a long list of academics lending their support to the passage of Proposition 62, including Harvard law professor Charles Ogletree, Jr., who previously wrote about the injustice of converting death penalty sentences to LWOP. In Life Without Parole: The New Death Penalty, Ogletree and his coauthor, Austin Sarat, provide a powerful critique of the national trend towards converting the death penalty to LWOP: “While conservative support for LWOP seems consistent with a tough-on crime politics, support for LWOP among abolitionists requires some explanation.” They make the case that despite the 170 percent growth of the LWOP population nationwide between 1992 and 2003, the death penalty population still grew by 31 percent. The shift to greater use of the LWOP option has not ended the use of the death penalty. Instead, and perhaps more ominously, it has served to normalize LWOP as a supposedly humane alternative to the death penalty. Research into LWOP experiences by Robert Johnson and Sandra McGungigall-Smith shows that “death by incarceration is just as final, just as painful, and just as worthy of the careful scrutiny to which we subject traditional capital sentences.”

Rather than repeal the death penalty, Proposition 66 would curtail the rights of the accused by accelerating the application of the death sentence through a speeded up appeals process; moving challenges to death penalty convictions back to trial courts from state courts; and establishing timelines for death penalty reviews. Taken together, these judicial changes dramatically erode due process protections against wrongfully executing an innocent person. As with Proposition 62, it also includes a penal labor clause that increases to 70 percent the proportion of inmate earnings and trust fund monies going to victim restitution. This forced labor sentence in both propositions ups the ante of the punitive state.

Voter opinions on the death penalty are coming into clearer focus as the proportion of voters who are undecided shrinks. Whereas a Field Poll conducted last month showed Proposition 62 slightly ahead of Proposition 66, there were still 42 percent of voters who were undecided. The most recent poll available, conducted by CALSPEAKS, shows 51 percent of likely voters supporting Proposition 66 (with 29 percent undecided), whereas only 37 percent support Proposition 62, with 18 percent still undecided. What seems clear from this most recent poll is that Proposition 62 is likely to lose, while Proposition 66 has gained considerable support and seems likely to pass. However, with such a high number of undecided voters, there is still an opening to defeat the pro-death penalty initiative. It is imperative that those opposed to Proposition 66 educate friends and family, neighbors and coworkers about why this ballot measure must be defeated.

As their lives will most directly be impacted by the outcome of this election, death row inmates who responded to a questionnaire sent by The Campaign to End the Death Penalty reveal opposition to both initiatives. Of the 46 inmates who responded to the questionnaire, a little over half are opposed to Proposition 62, while a clear majority oppose Proposition 66. Death row inmates who reject the Propositions see LWOP as no different than a death sentence and are concerned about losing access to the appeals process. As one prisoner writes, “both propositions are designed and constructed to further harm me, restrict my appellate rights, and deny me Justice! Therefore, I prefer to maintain my access to the appellate courts even at the risk of being murdered by the state.” Though the sample of responses from prisoners is small, it indicates that the people who stand the most to lose do not support LWOP or a speeded up death.

I stand with condemned inmates on California’s death row and reject the false assertion that LWOP sentences are an acceptable alternative to the death sentence. I therefore plan to reject Propositions 62 and 66 this November 8th.

• • •

* Josh Meisel, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Humboldt State University where he is the coordinator of Criminology and Justice Studies. He is also the co-director of the Humboldt Institute for Interdisciplinary Marijuana Research.

by James Kilgore*

Image: “2015, We Charge Genocide: Year 1,” by Monica Trinidad (www.monicatrinidad.com).

I lived in South Africa during the 1990s, a period of transition from apartheid to some form of democracy. During this restructuring, much of the political debate centered on compensation for the violence and inequity of the past. With the rise of the Movement for Black Lives and other anti-racist groups in the US today, those debates reverberate through current politics, in particular in regard to the major focus of my own social justice work, mass incarceration.

One method that has gained increasing traction as a way to contest dominant power is storytelling. Indeed, the stories of individuals impacted by imprisonment or police violence often provide the inspiration that keeps us going. The brave words of the daughter of Eric Garner standing up for justice steel our own determination to act. The personal testimony of Darrell Cannon, who was tortured by Chicago police into confessing to a murder he did not commit, has touched me deeply on the several occasions I have heard him speak. Cannon spent 24 years in prison as a result, about a decade of them in solitary in the notorious Tamms supermax facility.

Perhaps the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) provides the greatest English-language example of the use of storytelling to both recreate a historical narrative and lift up the voices of the victimized. Over the course of three years, the TRC held dozens of hearings around the country where victims of police torture and state violence told their stories. In cities and towns across the country, mothers came forward and talked about how their sons had gone missing; young women reported sexual assaults by members of the defense forces; some survivors spoke of having desk drawers slammed shut on their testicles, of being subjected to a South African version of water boarding, of watching family members murdered in front of them. Many of the hearings were on live national TV, and nightly news provided frequent updates. These broadcasts not only gave voice to the previously unheard, but often put perpetrators on screen. Torturers like Eugene DeKock, nicknamed “Prime Evil,” and Jeff Benzien sat in hearings as their most heinous acts were described in detail.

Ultimately the TRC had an enormous impact on the popular understanding of the apartheid years, giving presence to the experiences of the victims and survivors and naming the names (and in some cases prosecuting) the perpetrators. In this regard, the TRC was a public process of attempting to heal wounds through truth-telling and reconciliation. Nonetheless, 20 years later the TRC process looks somewhat barren: the stories and prosecutions were not backed up by the reallocation of resources to address poverty and inequality. Although a few people did benefit financially from the TRC, the society remains more unequal today than it was at the end of apartheid. In particular, the South African TRC never paid significant attention to extracting confessions and compensation from the mining and industrial corporations that oppressed cheap Black laborers to amass profits during the apartheid years. Hence, telling stories can empower people but can also be used to placate the survivors. The family of famed Black South African leader Steve Biko refused to participate in the TRC, arguing that it merely served “political expediency” and denied justice for victims.

To be truly transformational, such truth-telling must be combined with a fundamental restructuring of the political economy. This restructuring must benefit the poorest sections of the working class while remaking the physical and social infrastructure of their communities. The old streets merely populated by monuments and parks named after fallen heroes are not enough.

At present a number of US initiatives directed at the contemporary criminal justice system are grappling with similar issues to those tackled by the TRC. In fact, Dr. Mutulu Shakur, a political prisoner for more than two decades, has proposed a TRC to address the historical oppression of Black people in the US.  Perhaps some version of this that included both truth-telling and punishment of the architects and benefactors of mass incarceration could provide some impetus for transformation. Several attempts to link this to redistribution have been made under the heading of Justice Reinvestment. Following this principle, decarceration and cutting of corrections spending should be paired with the reinvestment of the money saved into the communities that have been affected by police and judicial abuse. One of the most interesting of these initiatives is the Truth and Reinvestment program recently begun by the Ella Baker Center in Oakland. Truth and Reinvestment focuses largely on redefining the nature of public safety, aiming to “build safe communities where public resources are reinvested from a wasteful criminal legal system to long-term solutions.” Though still in its early stages, Truth and Reinvestment offers the opportunity to expose police and criminal justice abuse while diverting funds into positive community building.

Perhaps activists in Chicago have had the most success in linking truth-telling to reinvestment. Groups fighting police torture in Chicago adapted the term “reparations,” which has been mostly applied to the enslavement of people of African descent, to their own situation.  In a campaign that lasted over two decades, a constellation of grassroots organizations, torture survivors, and legal experts won a complicated series of victories and a multifaceted set of reparations. The main focus of their actions was initially to gain compensation for survivors like Darrell Cannon as well as to instigate some kind of legal prosecution of police torturers. In 2010 they won a key legal victory, securing the indictment and eventual incarceration of Detective Jon Burge, alleged to have orchestrated or carried out the torture of about 120 people, almost all of them Black men, whose fate mirrored that of Cannon—decades in prison, often in solitary, for crimes they did not commit. The campaign won payouts for some of the survivors as well. But ultimately, the campaign was not limited to legal concessions. Rather, in 2014, as the mobilization of anti-racist forces grew, the vision of the Chicago Torture Justice Memorials activists and their grassroots allies—Project NIA, We Charge Genocide, and BYP 100—expanded to include public education, benefits for family members of survivors, and a formal ordinance from the city council acknowledging the wrongdoing of the police. The ordinance ultimately included a promise by the city to build a memorial to torture victims and the mandatory inclusion of the history of police torture in local school curricula.

These gains were won because of the imagination and militancy of the people on the ground, especially Black youth post-2014. Perhaps the highlight of this process was the visit to Geneva by the We Charge Genocide group, where they presented the case of Chicago. They walked in the historical footsteps of a 1951 delegation of African Americans who presented the case exposing Black genocide in the US at that time.

Having born witness to both the South African TRC and the Chicago Reparations campaign, I think it is important to recognize that storytelling is a necessary but not sufficient step in pressing for transformation. Storytelling lights the fire, but the flames only keep burning if there is effective mobilization and participation from those directly affected and a clear-cut, realistic, and flexible plan for success. In South Africa, there was little follow up to a massive storytelling exercise. In Chicago, albeit on a much smaller scale, the stories of the survivors inspired organization and a creative set of demands that will have a lasting impact. Still, though some reparations have been won, the major portion of the economic pie remains in the hands of Mayor Rahm and his ruling class circle. A much bigger round of reparations will be necessary to fundamentally reshape Chicago and all the other communities that have been devastated by police violence and mass incarceration.

• • •

* James Kilgore is an activist, educator and writer based in Urbana, Illinois. He is the author of four novels, all drafted during his six and a half years in federal and state prisons in California. He has written widely on mass incarceration as well as on the struggle for freedom in South Africa, where he lived for eleven years. His most recent works are Sister Mercy’s Revenge (politically charged crime fiction) and Understanding Mass Incarceration: A People’s Guide to the Key Civil Rights Struggle of Our Time. Contact him @waazn1 or waazn1@gmail.com.

James Kilgore, “From South Africa to Chicago, Lessons in Truth and Reconciliation.” Social Justice blog, 09/28/2016. © Social Justice 2016

by Tony Platt*

I’m lucky to be here in Washington, D.C. with Cecilia O’Leary to celebrate a new Smithsonian museum that has been a long, long time in the making. Cecilia donated her historical smarts and passion for social justice for five years; Lonnie Bunch and his staff worked on it for eleven years, starting with no artifacts, no building, and the need to raise more than half a million dollars to realize the project. And one hundred years ago, African American veterans of the Civil War started the campaign for an African American museum in the nation’s capital.

The result is a museum that explains and describes the complex, unfinished struggle of African Americans for freedom and equality; and makes clear the centrality of African American history for American history, something that no other Smithsonian museum tries to do. Visitors of all backgrounds will no doubt feel the weight of this history, but also a sense of people’s resiliency, creativity, and joy. This is a museum for everybody. We are all invited into the call for urgent action here and now.

Ericka Huggins remembers as a child being taken to visit the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History; she was so alienated by its omissions and celebratory patriotism that she could not imagine an American museum doing justice to her reality. But here she was, a few days ago (September 17th), back in Washington, D.C. for a donors’ preview of the National Museum of African American History and Culture with her partner, Lisbet Tellefsen, who has donated several items from the Black Power movement. Ericka is not only a visitor to the museum, she’s also in it: a flyer includes a photo of a young Ericka with a big Afro, announcing a giveaway of 10,000 bags of groceries to Oakland residents, organized by the Black Panther Party in 1972.

The museum gets it that the Panthers should not be reduced to men in black jackets with guns. The women are there in the history of the ‘60s, more than holding their own, as they are throughout every single exhibition on every floor. So, there’s no need for a special section on “Famous African American Women.”

The museum celebrates the first African American president, but does not end on a celebratory note. There’s also a prison cell from the notorious Angola prison in Louisiana, built on a former plantation that profited from slave labor, and that now houses mostly African American men, many for life; a banner in solidarity with the Attica revolt; and one of the last exhibits in the history section includes artifacts from the Black Lives Matter movement. As we gather to welcome a museum that persisted against all odds, we also mourn the killing by police of yet more African American men, this week in Tulsa and Charlotte, and witness righteous anger on the streets of our segregated cities. This is a museum that recognizes how the past bleeds into the present.

Ericka gladly returned again to Washington, D.C. for the formal opening on September 24th to celebrate with family and friends a museum that, finally, does justice to her history, to African American history, and to American history. Her hair may be shorter and greyer, but her commitment to the struggle is just as strong.  As Lonnie Bunch, the museum’s director announced to Ericka and thousands of people from all over the country, “Welcome home.”

• • •

*Tony Platt is a founding member of the editorial board of Social Justice, and a Distinguished Affiliated Scholar, Center for the Study of Law and Society, UC Berkeley.

Tony Platt, “The National Museum of African American History and Culture: A Homecoming.” Social Justice blog, 09/24/2016. © Social Justice 2016

by Juan José Gutiérrez*

Source: Twitter @NYC_Patch

A los tiranos no se les apacigua, a los tiranos se les enfrenta
Tyrants are not to be appeased, but confronted.
Enrique Krauze, on the recent visit of Donald Trump to Mexico

The rather abrupt visit of Donald Trump to Mexico on the last day of August 2016 was as unwelcome and damaging as the Zika virus. The trip was made official in Mexico only the day before it happened—possibly to avoid thousands of protesters who would have made the job of the secret service and the Mexican security forces difficult to handle. Why did President Peña Nieto arrange for such an encounter?

Peña Nieto and Trump held a private conversation for about an hour and then walked into the big press hall of the Mexican presidential palace known as Los Pinos. News outlets in the US made little reference to the key message that Peña Nieto was trying to convey to both sides of the border: his conviction that the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) “has been good both to Mexico and the US.” Peña Nieto tried to lecture Trump on how Mexico is the most substantial economic partner to the US, and urged the two countries to continue working together to keep jobs within the NAFTA region. Peña Nieto’s position was a weak and subdued challenge to Trump’s rhetoric that jobs are being unfairly exported to Mexico. He agreed with Trump that it is time to revisit and modernize NAFTA in order to make North America a more prosperous region, suggesting that the border could be transformed into a more efficient, safe, and active asset under NAFTA.

It is painfully evident that Peña Nieto’s representations to Mr. Trump did not come even close to addressing the strain and suffering NAFTA has imposed to millions and millions of people from impoverished rural areas, many of whom have resorted to out-migration as the only alternative for survival. NAFTA created a colossal market of more than 450 million people. It is calculated that as a result of the new conditions in the agricultural sector in Mexico, approximately 15 million peasants have been forced out of their communities. Given that the new industrial jobs never materialized for the migrants in the cities, the last of the Mexican peasantry ended up leaving the country throughout the 1990s and 2000s. They resorted to the only logical alternative, which was traveling north, where there were plenty of agricultural jobs available for those willing to take meager salaries and long workdays. The outstanding ethnography by Seth Holmes, Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies, comes to mind here: small village in Mexico, a long trek to Oregon, exhausting work and suffering.

In truth, however, the visit was irrelevant to the future of the bilateral relationship. Indeed, Trump clearly did not visit Mexico to learn or listen to what Peña Nieto (a loser) had to say. He was in Mexico to show that he, Donald J. Trump (a winner), can be presidential. And there he was, standing tall, side by side with a foreign leader. And although the American flag was conspicuously absent as a sign that Peña Nieto was putting up a symbolic fight, it was painfully evident that Trump was happily exploiting Peña Nieto as a presidential prop—whom he now refers to as mi amigo.

The only reason Trump accepted the invitation was to advance his political agenda, improve his presidential image, and show that he can cut a deal: How much of the wall will be paid for by Mexico? Can they pay in installments? With the sense of humor that Mexicans usually display when confronted with preposterous situations, they indicated their willingness to pay for the wall only if señor Donald builds it along the lines of the map Mexico proposed in 1847 when negotiating the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that ended the Mexican-American war.

Mexico in 1847
Source: University of Texas at Austin, Historical Atlas by William Shepherd (1911)

Trump’s focus on the border has no rational foundation: Current data from the Pew Research Center and corroborated by other independent sources show that more Mexicans are now leaving the US each year than are entering it. At the same time, what makes the border such a big concern to Mexicans is the immense American drug market that provides weapons and billions of dollars in cash to Mexico’s drug lords, making cartels the most formidable enemy and the most critical threat to the viability of the Mexican state. To stop such unrestricted flow, what is needed is an integrated approach that conceptualizes the border not as a site of chaos and danger that can only be averted by building a big tall wall, but rather as an asset to further security and trade for both countries.

Instead, a misguided Peña Nieto insisted with Trump that Mexico and the US share the common risk of Central American immigrants traveling through Mexico and creating a humanitarian crisis. In this respect, the record of Peña Nieto’s administration has been one of systematic violation of the basic human rights of the immigrants traveling through Mexico, serving de facto as the Obama administration’s main instrument of immigration control and enforcement. We need to denounce the contradictions in Peña Nieto’s discourse, whereby on the one hand he cries foul about the indeed terrible conditions faced by Mexican immigrants, and on the other he allows the dehumanizing treatment of Central American migrants in Mexico.

Peña Nieto has been a mediocre politician, who for the most part has been busy covering up scandals related to the inexplicably sudden wealth of his wife, coupled with a lavish lifestyle commensurate with the worst days of political corruption in the 1970s and 1980s. The poor handling of this ill-conceived visit has only added to the deteriorating image of the Mexican president. With bleak economic prospects and mounting social issues waiting to be tackled by the administration, the visit has only generated constant criticism from both the right and the left, as well as the harshest public rebuttals by a long list of journalists and scholars that a sitting Mexican president has ever faced.

Overall, the visit was a remarkable showcase for Trump’s ignorance about international issues and for Peña Nieto’s incompetence in leading a nation. This is why people in the streets of Mexico City asked for the humane deportation of their unwelcome visitor: Trump, apologize, and take Peña Nieto back with you.

• • •

* Dr. Juan-José Gutiérrez is a professor of Cultural Anthropology at California State University, Monterey Bay (CSUMB). He has been the director of the Institute for Mexican and Mexico US Studies and vice president of the International Oral History Association. Currently, he is a member of the International Board of the Oral History Journal and Director of the CSUMB Global Service Learning Program in Spain.

Juan-José Gutiérrez, “Trump’s New Amigo.” Social Justice blog, 09/14/2016. © Social Justice 2016

 by Laurindo Dias Minhoto*

“The Exclusion Games” protest prior to Rio 2016 Olympics Opening Ceremony. Image by Catalytic Communities via Flickr.

In Rio de Janeiro—the “marvelous city”—there is an old port where slave ships that brought captive workers from different parts of Africa to the center of the colony docked. The port area has been recently named (not that creatively) the “Marvelous Port” (Porto Maravilha) after a reconversion process that is paradigmatic of a broader gamut of urban interventions designed to prepare the city for hosting sports’ mega-events, such as the Pan American Games (2007), the World Cup (2014), and the Olympics (2016).

Formally referred to as a beneficiary of the Olympics legacy, Porto Maravilha is the result of the biggest public-private partnership (PPP) in the country. It covers a total area of five million square meters, including the city’s docks, the old slave market, its first favela, some samba school warehouses, and the famous Praça Mauá, which now houses the Santiago Calatrava–designed Museum of Tomorrow (Watts and Douglas 2016).

This so-called partnership has opened up a new market in urban development in Brazil. Contractors have taken control of running services traditionally provided by the municipality, such as garbage collection, public lighting maintenance, and traffic management. In the next 15 years, it is estimated that the city will transfer U$ 2.3 billion to the private sector for these services alone. This type of state operation is both decisive and subordinate, as it co-produces a privatized neighborhood to be put under the complete control of capital.

If today’s global sporting events, a “society on steroids” in the words of one critic (Graham 2012), illustrate broad social trends, particularly the “new military urbanism,” then the Rio Olympics are the closest we get to a materialized, neoliberal dystopia. The production of a maximum-security urban enclave for the sanitized carnival of consumption and entertainment of global elites in one of the world’s most beautiful and unequal cities is a unique corporate, military, and mass media spectacle, requiring massive doses of state violence, urban intervention, and exceptional legal measures.

In an authentic war-like operation, the security apparatus of the Games involved soldiers, helicopters, naval vessels, and some 85,000 personnel, doubling the number of security officials in place during the London Games in 2012. Defying the classical legal separation between police and military functions, 20,000 soldiers were on the streets of Rio during the event, with 18,000 personnel also based in São Paulo, Manaus, Salvador, Brasilia, and Belo Horizonte to cover football matches. The Brazilian state stockpiled 18,000 rubber bullets, 4,500 stun grenades, 4,500 tear gas grenades, 900 pepper sprays, and 900 ginger sprays to be used by security forces during the Olympic Games.

If preparing for the Olympics is tantamount to waging war, in Rio it was a very specific war against the poor. It is estimated that, in the name of the Games, 77,000 favela residents were  evicted and many more  forced to leave through gentrification. Several community sporting facilities were shut down around the city and replaced with elite facilities from which local people were excluded. According to Amnesty International, by the month prior to the opening ceremony, more than 2,500 people had been killed by the police since 2009, when Rio de Janeiro won its bid to host the Games. The communities most affected by this violence by the security forces are those located around the main access routes to and from the international airport and competition arenas.

A decisive component of this warfare business has been the so-called UPPs (pacifying police units), a highly selective security policy designed to “pacify” through military incursions urban territories long controlled by drug gangs. Geographically concentrated in some of Rio’s most notorious favelas, the UPPs are “an integral part of Rio’s entrepreneurial city strategy centered around the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics” (Freeman 2012, 95). They facilitated a set of neoliberal accumulation strategies at four levels: (1) the marketing of the games; (2) the business of building and preparing the mega-event city; (3) real estate valorization; and (4) the production of the favelas themselves as commodities and markets for commodities (Freeman 2012, 106 ff.). Complementary to the UPPs, since 2009 the municipal government has run a program called Choque de Ordem (shock of order), a zero-tolerance program that targets minor infractions in the wealthy zones of Rio de Janeiro: irregular parking, street vending, non-permitted construction, minor drug offenses, sleeping on the street, and public urination (Gaffney 2016, 234).

Taken together, the forced removal of sections of the poor from their neighborhoods, the military occupation of certain favelas near the wealthy regions of the city, the privatization and cleansing of entire neighborhoods, the military enforcing of behavior in urban areas, and the adoption of exceptional legal measures are practices that lie at the heart of neoliberal strategies of accumulation: war-like social control programs linked to the expansion of business interests. They represent “tactics of shock and awe to stage the city as a laboratory for various forms of neo-liberal bio-politics” (Gaffney 2016, 234); they also constitute a case of what David Harvey calls “accumulation by dispossession,” through which the state engineers the military conquest and control of territories and the capture of assets by force in order to create outlets for the expansion of private capital (Freeman 2012, 95). In Foucauldian terms, these dynamics express the coexistence of different power technologies through which the sovereign control of territories, the disciplinary gaze, and the risk-based government of populations articulate the production of neoliberal governmentality.

During the Olympics, a cruise ship, the Silver Cloud, docked in Porto Maravilha. In it the golden US basketball dream teams hoped to be better protected against some of the major risks that lurk in the marvelous city, such as crime, terrorism, zika virus, and other pollutants. The area close to the liner was guarded round the clock by 250 policemen. Two boats of the Federal Police patrolled the waters around the pier to prevent navigation in the vicinity of the luxury liner. Transportation during the events was conducted through special lanes across the city, guaranteeing the isolation of the participants. Both in its literal materiality and metaphorical power, the cruise ship as urban space represents the segregationist logic and state-supported logistics inherent in organizing a spectacular public event for private profit.

References

Freeman, J. 2012. “Neoliberal accumulation strategies and the visible hand of police pacification in Rio de Janeiro.” Revista de Estudos Universitários 38(1): 95–126

Gaffney, C. 2014. “The mega-event city as neo-liberal laboratory: the case of Rio de Janeiro.” Percurso Acadêmico 4(8): 217–37

Graham, S. 2012. “Olympics 2012 security: Welcome to lockdown London.” The Guardian, March 12. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2012/mar/12/london-olympics-security-lockdown-london

Watts, J. and Douglas, B. 2016. “Rio Olympics: Who are the real winners and losers?” The Guardian, July 19. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/jul/19/rio-olympics-who-are-the-real-winners-and-losers

• • •

* Laurindo Dias Minhoto (lminhoto@gmail.com) teaches legal sociology and sociology of punishment at the University of São Paulo. He is a former visiting scholar at the Center for the Study of Law and Society, UC Berkeley (Fall 2015).

Laurindo Dias Minhoto, “Rio 2016 Olympics: Security and Segregation in the Marvelous City.” Social Justice blog, 09/06/2016. © Social Justice 2016

by Cliff Welch*

Image from brasileiros.com.br. See caption below.

While Olympic athletes faced victory and defeat along the putrid shores of Rio de Janeiro’s Guanabara Bay, on the shores of sparkly Lake Paranoá in Brasilia, Brazil’s 36th president, Dilma Rousseff, faced only defeats as her enemies moved to impeach her. The most recent contest was lost on August 10, when more than two-thirds of the federal senate voted to schedule the start of her final impeachment trial on August 25. Within the story of Dilma’s political fortunes is another chapter in the saga of the rise and fall of social justice in Latin America’s largest and most populous country.

Dilma’s presidency marked the fourth mandate of executive branch control by the Workers Party (PT, in its Brazilian acronym). Soon after her reelection in 2014, the opposition mobilized street protests, judicial challenges, congressional blockades, and relentless media criticism that undermined her second term of office until the opportunity arose to initiate impeachment proceedings in April, effectively ending the PT’s reign in its 13th year.

The party arose from working-class struggles with large corporations that supported the military regime that ruled Brazil from 1964 to 1985. It also took shape in opposition to the Brazilian Communist Party (PCB), which tried to restore its historic sovereignty over the left as the military regime transitioned out of power. Oriented by upstart labor union organizers, black power activists, feminists, PCB dissidents, and activists schooled in Catholic Liberation theology, the PT mobilized around the ideals of democratic socialism, supporting radical reforms. Led from the beginning by the charismatic union leader Luis Inácio Lula da Silva, the PT finally established its dominance when Lula won election to the presidency in 2002.

Benefiting from a strong global economy, Lula completed his second term with favorability indices breaking records at 80 percent. President Lula paid off Brazil’s foreign debt, lessened inflation, increased the minimum wage, expanded small welfare grants to the poorest families, expanded free public higher education, invested in public health, implemented land reform, and, perhaps most important of all, opened the halls of power to unions and social movements. After Dilma’s 2010 election, the 2008 global financial crisis began to affect Brazil, forcing her to change Lula’s recipe. When it came to land reform, for example, emphasis was placed on increasing the productivity of new peasant farmers while the settlement of new peasant families dropped precipitously, causing peasant organizations to rise up in protest against the government. Some former allies left the PT to join competing left-wing parties. Many of these parties had gained force during Lula’s presidency, when it was revealed that the PT had bribed center and right-wing politicians in order to win legislative support.

The bribery scandal revealed several essential elements that explain the current crisis. It divided the left into pragmatists and idealists. Some agreed that obtaining social justice legislation required buying off the opposition. Others held fast to the idea that positive ends do not justify negative means. The scandal documented the culpability of bribers and bribed, leaving no doubt as to the corrupt core of Brazilian political culture.

Lula’s second campaign for president exposed the sharp class, racial, and regional divisions in the country. In the central and southern states, where the descendants of European immigrants predominate and middle-class values hold sway, the press constantly invoked the bribery scandal and the PT lost support. In the meantime, Brazil’s northeastern region, where indigenous and African influences are stronger and middle-class values weaker, the PT gained in support. Lula’s reelection and Dilma’s double victories, based on huge majorities in the north and northeast, profoundly aggravated opponents, provoking the unswerving envy of elitist opposition politicians who detested being defeated by supposedly inferior northerners.

In fact, the significance of the PT’s conquest of political power cannot be overemphasized. Brazil is a country where ruling class families have jealously guarded their privileges for hundreds of years. These Brazilians compliment themselves on avoiding violent conflict, such as a bloody civil war to end slavery; but they know that conflict avoidance has allowed them to maintain hegemony and limit social justice. Many of those who fought for democracy have been silenced or killed, allowing dominant figures to display their largesse by granting benefits of their choosing.

Symbolically and structurally, the PT offered the greatest challenge to the ruling class in the nation’s history. By learning to play by the elite’s rules, the PT advanced a social justice agenda. Since the country’s post-dictatorship constitution charged the state with providing quality health care and education for all and mandated the appropriation of unproductive estates and their distribution to peasants, its mere implementation threatened concentrated power. Under Dilma, for example, millions of long-exploited domestic servants —undereducated poor women, with few opportunities—gained legal recognition, implying access to labor courts, retirement benefits, and overtime pay. Indeed, the growing complexity of the economy compelled the ruling class to accept that the increasing number of technically capable workers required investments in education, transportation, and health care. For a time, the PT was the darling of the international financial community for its skill in reducing “extreme poverty” and expanding the middle class in an “emerging market” nation-state.

But resistance to change has been fierce, and Dilma is paying the price not only for representing the PT, but also for challenging paternalism as Brazil’s first female leader. Her gender and image have been used to deride her as an emotionally imbalanced scolding mother, and even to threaten her with rape. But the most unjust of the injustices she faces is her relative innocence in the face of a deluge of charges of corruption against political leaders of nearly all parties. In the meantime, her opponents’ own fact-finding commission determined as groundless more than half of the so-called impeachable “crimes of responsibility” she has been accused of committing. The remaining accusations are limited to three budget decrees she signed in 2015, at the request of the judiciary branch and with the advice of her staff. The alleged crime was to have signed these decrees without the prior consent of the legislature. The accusations are so weak that her accusers spend most of their time criticizing the PT for numerous charges levied against it by an investigation called Operation Jet Wash.

But Dilma’s opponents in congress decided not to incorporate the evidence from this investigation into the impeachment charges. For one thing, the evidence against her direct involvement in corruption is very weak; no charges have been filed against her. For another, many of her leading opponents—from vice president Michel Temer, who now serves as interim president and is her principal antagonist, to the leader of the senate and former leader of Brazil’s house of deputies, Eduardo Cunha—have all been implicated in the Jet Wash investigation.

Without doubt, excluding the Jet Wash allegations allows Dilma’s opponents to protect themselves from hypocrisy charges, as it would have allowed her defense to reverse the tables. Impeachment appears as a vendetta against the PT, especially when one notes how strident Jet Wash prosecutors and the media have been in stressing allegations against the PT while nearly ignoring equally damning evidence against Temer, Cunha, and a host of other leading opposition politicians. With Temer, the ruling class has a cabinet composed almost exclusively of white men with an authoritarian neoliberal agenda. In other words, the final injustice of placing Dilma in the crosshairs of a constitutionally “justified” impeachment process is not the victimization of President Dilma, but her use as a scapegoat to help cover up and legitimize a coup d’etat that promises to consolidate the “ancient regime.”

• • •

Image caption: “Fica, querida” literally means “Stay, darling,” or “Don’t go, dear.” The Jet Wash investigation had a wire on Dilma and Lula in which Lula closed a phone call by saying “Tchau, querida.” The opposition appropriated “Tchau, querida” to mean “Good riddance, Dilma!” Thus Dilma’s supporters responded with the hashtag “Fica, querida.” Dilma’s picture in the image is taken from her arrest record after she was captured and tortured for joining the armed struggle against the Brazil’s dictatorship (1964–1985).

* Cliff Welch is a former San Francisco longshoreman, ranchhand, reporter, and co-founder of the National Writers Union. He teaches contemporary Brazilian history at the Federal University of São Paulo (UNIFESP).

Cliff Welch, “Brazil’s Constitutional Coup: Dilma in the Crosshairs.” Social Justice blog, 08/24/2016. © Social Justice 2016

by Michelle Brown*

Source: Social Justice Education Movement @ tcedfair.org (modified from original).

University administrators, colleagues, liberal progressive politicians, and all of us whose positionality is safely constituted within systems of white supremacy more often than not actively resist unlearning dominance even as we lay claim to a knowing expertise of and paternalistic benevolence for the oppressed. At the University of Tennessee, where I work, we will begin the Fall 2016 school year with a defunded Office of Diversity and Inclusion, the abrupt closure of our Pride Center, a new law allowing weapons on campus, and ongoing efforts to privatize the university system, all against the backdrop of a Title IX lawsuit that exposes long-term administrative and athletic dismissals of campus sexual assault and rape culture.

I seek to remind us of the intentional manner in which the political and administrative work of misrecognition is done, where the conditions of the violence all around us are overlooked and plausible strategies for the reduction of harm are ignored and denied—a politics of brutal disregard. This process depends upon the perpetuation of inaccuracies, omissions, the exclusionary selectivity of facts and sources, and more significantly, upon overt practices of mis-naming landscapes of violence. In few disciplinary spaces is this double life of the undercommons more apparent, its liberating potential less possible, than in my own professional field, known as criminology or criminal justice.

One essential problem of the contemporary political moment is not simply the resurgence of law-and-order conservatism and its fascist underpinnings, but the fact that liberalism-as-refuge has always facilitated these formations, whether in the form of the neoliberal university or the rise of mass incarceration and police power.

The need to critically look at and change the very foundations of neoliberalism as practiced within the university is made all the more urgent in the face of endless repetitions of police killings, mass shootings, vitriolic racism, trans- and queer-phobia, and incoherent national responses to violence against vulnerability in the United States. From the churches of Charleston to the Pulse night club in Orlando, historic sanctuary spaces for black, Latinx, queer and trans communities are ongoing sites for deadly mass shootings, while simply attempting to exist in neoliberal economies is a systematic site of black harassment and death by police.

The work of slow death continues as well. Across the US South, a dramatic rise in state efforts to limit LGBT rights converges with intersectional forms of racial and gender oppression amid rising rates of targeted violence and suicide. It has culminated in the perfect storm of bathroom bills; religious exemptions for mental health providers, schools, and businesses as well as marriage refusal; concealed weapon and gun rights protections; anti-black racist “Blue Lives Matter” legislation; and legislative attacks on university governance directed at diversity.

In the academy, white methodological myopias have culminated in a lack of accountability in theorizing our own place in the production and maintenance of abject vulnerability. Disciplinary boundaries cannot limit the needs of understanding survival against harm and violence. In the absence of accountability, we produce and sustain abstractions that kill: racism, criminalization, heteropatriarchy, and even criminal justice, a system best understood in Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s terms as “the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.” Reforms and tactics produced in the neoliberal university add up to a tenacious culture of compromise that leaves the most vulnerable even more precariously positioned and the carceral state further entrenched.

Although the university has been a significant site of struggle in key historical moments, its present salvageability and the terms of its future, like those of criminal justice, are subject to foreclosure. The only way I can see forward is the rigorous work of naming, analyzing, and destroying the conditions of heteropatriarchal academic raciality and its foundations in white supremacy.

Stefano Harney and Fred Moten remind those who have imagined the university as a safe haven, a space in which our own politics were mobilized, where tactics and tools of survival materialized, that to “abuse its hospitality, to spite its mission, to join its refugee colony, its gypsy encampment, to be in but not of—this is the path of the subversive intellectual in the modern university.”

Their call for an undercommons is grounded in the lived experience and fugitive history of the oppressed whose physical, psychic, and intellectual labors have been a chronic site of violent extraction, exhaustion, disappearance, and, simultaneously, a perpetually generative living archive of rich underground strategies of survivability centered upon abolition and freedom. Derived from a politics of blackness and queerness, these forms have most recently manifested in new sites of visibility, including student uprisings and the organizing efforts of Black Lives Matter.

Before abolition is even allowed to the table, it is too often construed as destructive and aimless, as opposed to practical life-giving survivability in the present and a visionary space for imagining locally determined flourishing lives in the future. Rarely is it recognized as a way to begin the hard conversations that become the long-term processes of making the world we want to live in. The hypervigilance of trauma becomes a source of energy for transformation. Study becomes life-extending sustenance—not a space of capital, licensure, hypermasculine one-upmanship, or unending debt. Abolition is a space, as Meghan McDowell writes, of “insurgent safety” that privileges emergent forms of counter-carceral communication. It manifests itself in prefigurative political projects invested in interdependence, mutual aid and reciprocity, collective subsistence, and play and joy as strategies to reduce and respond to harm.

And it happens everywhere all the time around us. It happens in intentional living spaces; in the living rooms and kitchens of friends, scholars, activists, and loved ones; in the classroom outside of official university use; in the plotting of nascent organizers at office hours; at the jail after a sobbing friend phones; in the pride parade where an abolished university center marches anyway to the cheers of unprecedented crowds; in the life support of Black Lives Matter initiatives and the care of battered bodies and minds that return from the line. It is a mode of intellectual life that reconsiders action, freedom schools, social justice commitments, and forms of intellectual and practical life support amidst a burgeoning groundswell of blogs, commentaries, social media campaigns, crowd-sourced syllabi, toolkits, and websites for revolutionary forms of learning and organizing outside of the university.

Abolition recognizes that sustainable action takes shape through organizing within, without, and against the university, the prison-industrial complex, and the institutional structures of neoliberal capital that will always offset the possibilities of flourishing lives, communities, and knowledges. It seeks to address immediate suffering always everywhere—in the classrooms and hallways of the university, the visitorless jail tanks and dehumanizing prison cells of neoliberal capitalist formations, with an unwavering faith in the spaces that are possible beyond. Let’s take seriously the requirements of freedom and the work that eventually leads to transformation. Let’s make this school year different, unrecognizably so.

• • •

Recommended Readings

Radical Political Action Reading List
Abolition: A Journal of Insurgent Politics
“Black Study, Black Struggle”
Undercommoning
Welcome to the Freedom School
Police Violence and Mass Incarceration Syllabus
#Fergusonsyllabus
#Charlestonsyllabus
#Orlandosyllabus
#PulseOrlandoSyllabus

Further Readings

Camp, J. T. 2016. Incarcerating the Crisis: Freedom Struggles and the Rise of the Neoliberal State. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Camp , J. & Heatherton, C. 2016. Policing the Planet: Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black Lives Matter. New York: Verso.

Davis, A. 2015. Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement. New York: Haymarket Books.

Gilmore, R.W. 2007. Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Harney, S., & Moten, F. 2013. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study. New York: Minor Compositions/Wivenhoe.

James, J. 2013. Seeking the Beloved Community: A Feminist Race Reader. New York: SUNY Press.

Kelley, RDG. 2002. Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination. New York: Beacon Press.

McDowell, M. 2016. “The police are not keeping our communities safe”: Theorizing safety beyond the criminal justice system. Unpublished manuscript presented at the New Directions in Critical Criminology Conference, May 2016, Knoxville, TN.

Rodríguez, D. 2016. “Disrupted Foucault: Los Angeles’ Coalition Against Police Abuse (CAPA) and the Obsolescence of White Academic Raciality.” In Active Intolerance: Michel Foucault, the Prisons Information Group, and the Future of Abolition, edited by A. Dilts and P. Zurn, pp. 145–68. New York: Springer.

Spade, D. 2015. Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

• • • 

* Michelle Brown is associate professor of Sociology at the University of Tennessee. She is the author of The Culture of Punishment (NYUP, 2009), co-author of Criminology Goes to the Movies (with Nicole Rafter; NYUP, 2011), and co-editor of Media Representations of September 11 (Praeger, 2003). She is currently co-editing the Sage journal Crime Media Culture; The Routledge International Handbook of Visual Criminology; the Oxford Research Encyclopedia on Crime, Media, and Popular Culture; and the Palgrave MacMillan Crime, Media and Culture Book Series.

Michelle Brown, “Back to Academia, in Struggle.” Social Justice blog, 08/15/2016. © Social Justice 2016

by Sunaina Maira*

In 2016, a bill targeting organizations that choose to divest from Israel, AB 2844, was proposed in the California state legislature. In 2015, New York Governor Mario Cuomo also issued an executive order creating a blacklist of organizations that support Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel. This legal backlash, or “lawfare,” against the BDS movement is a direct response to the threat it represents to a powerful status quo.

Something unthinkable has happened in the United States in recent years: The boycott of Israeli academic institutions has expanded rapidly, with one major academic association after another endorsing the boycott or voting on boycott resolutions. Just as recently as in 2010, it was unimaginable for many, including Palestine solidarity activists and Palestinians themselves, that the academic boycott could win support in the United States. Our government, after all, is the most powerful ally of Israel and has provided unconditional military, political, and economic support to the Israeli state. Concomitantly, the issue of Palestinian liberation has historically been suppressed and subjected to censorship in the US academy and public sphere, representing what many describe as a new McCarthyism.

The boycott has been key to challenging this lockdown on the open discussion of Palestine, Israel, and Zionism and to the transformation of the Palestine question into a central node of progressive academic organizing and campus activism. So what is significant is not just the adoption of boycott resolutions but the larger political and intellectual shifts in the United States. The systematic silencing of criticism of Israel, including on the left, has generated a political tendency that some label PEP (Progressive Except on Palestine). The Palestine national question could only be framed—if discussed at all—through a state-sanctioned discourse about “the conflict” and a critique limited to the Israeli military occupation and the Palestinian territories conquered in 1967. The rise of the BDS movement has been accompanied by a new framework that, first, centers Palestinian rights as integral to movements for social justice, and second, uses the discourse of human rights, settler colonialism, and apartheid to challenge foundational narratives of the Israeli state—a state that systematically privileges one racial and religious group and was built on the displacement of indigenous Palestinians.

The boycott is thus an antiracist, anticolonial movement that rests on the principle of refusal of collaboration with Israeli academic institutions, given their embeddedness in the Israeli regime of settler colonial and racial governance (see guidelines for Palestinian Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel). The boycott has also been the site of significant interracial and cross-movement coalition building, linking issues of colonialism, militarization, policing, antiblackness, indigeneity, borders, and labor.

The BDS movement was launched in 2005 by Palestinian civil society organizations, including over 170 political parties, activist organizations, trade unions, and women’s groups. The call for an academic and cultural boycott of Israel was actually issued a year earlier, in 2004, highlighting the centrality of the academic and cultural front to the Palestinian struggle. It took five more years for US-based academics to launch a national campaign to mobilize support for this call, forming USACBI (US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel) in the midst of the 2008–2009 Israeli war on Gaza.

The political principles of USACBI, on which BDS is based, is that there should be an academic and cultural boycott of Israel until it complies with international law by: 1) Ending its occupation and colonization of all Arab lands occupied in June 1967 and dismantling the Wall; 2) Recognizing the fundamental rights of the Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality; and 3) Respecting, protecting and promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties, as stipulated in UN Resolution 194. These principles address the three segments of the fragmented Palestinian nation, i.e., refugees; those living under illegal military occupation in the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem; and Palestinians within the 1948 borders of Israel, who live as second- or third-class citizens.

The boycott paradigm thus unifies these displaced and segregated Palestinian groups and foregrounds a return to an autonomous grassroots mobilization, beyond the language of statehood and neoliberal democracy promoted by Western powers and the Palestinian Authority. In Palestine, the BDS movement represents a revitalization of mass politics at a time of political disillusionment since the Oslo Accords of 1993. BDS represents a rejection of the Oslo paradigm that was a major factor in the pacification of Palestinian national resistance, as well as the fragmentation of the Palestinian nation with the expanding Wall and illegal settlements. It is important to note, however, that the global BDS movement does not aim to supplant grassroots organizing in Palestine but is an act of solidarity with the Palestinian people that puts external civil society pressure on Israel, given its refusal to comply with international human rights and end the longest military occupation in modern history.

The historic Association of Asian American Studies and American Studies resolutions, both adopted with overwhelming support in 2013, led to a flood of boycott organizing in different fields. Since then, the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association, Critical Ethnic Studies Association, National Women’s Studies Association, and the National Association of Chicano and Chicana Studies, among others, have endorsed the academic boycott. In 2015, the American Anthropological Association’s members voted by a stunning majority to endorse a boycott resolution; this was put on the ballot in spring. Even though the boycott failed to be adopted by a very narrow margin of votes, this referendum in a major academic association and a core social science discipline is tremendously significant.

What is important is not just the formal adoption of resolutions but the intellectual and political space that has been enlarged in the US academy as part of this process of academic boycott organizing. It is also significant that graduate students have been highly engaged in these campaigns, signaling a generational shift. UAW 2865, which represents graduate student academic workers (e.g. teaching assistants, graduate instructors) in the University of California, passed a historic BDS vote in 2015, including individual pledges for academic boycott, becoming the first mainstream labor union in the United States to endorse BDS and underscoring the links between the boycott and academic labor organizing.

The boycott movement is on the frontlines of the struggle to democratize the neoliberal university by contingent academic workers, scholars, and student activists; it has generated a network of solidarity for dissident academics who have been denied tenure, lose employment, or face harassment and smear campaigns for criticism of Israel. The firing in 2014 by the University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign of Steven Salaita, a Palestinian American scholar and advocate of the boycott (also a USACBI organizer), evoked an outpouring of solidarity among academics, including many who boycotted the university in protest. This dramatic example of the new McCarthyism highlighted the confluence of powerful Zionist organizations (such as the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the Israel on Campus Coalition) and university administrations that have eroded faculty governance and academic employment rights.

Finally, the BDS movement is central to the war of legitimacy that has ruptured the image of Israel as a democratic, multicultural Western state. The boycott is not just a threat to the Israel lobby and Zionist state, but also to US imperial hegemony, which has relied on Israel as a proxy force; hence, the anti-BDS legislation proposed in various states (e.g. New York, Maryland, Illinois, and California) and State Department initiatives to delegitimize criticism of Israel as anti-Semitic have trickled down to repress campus activism. The enduring US-Israel alliance has been shored up by a network of racist, Islamophobic, and right-wing organizations (see The Business of Backlash). The boycott is thus central to the contemporary culture wars, and is an important site for academic activism and struggles for emancipation.

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Further Readings  

Apartheid Israel: The Politics of an Analogy (e-book, Africa is a Country), https://africaisacountry.atavist.com/apartheidanalogy.

Angela Davis, Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement (Chicago: Haymarket, 2016).

Ashley Dawson, and Bill Mullen, eds., Against Apartheid: The Case for Boycotting Israeli Universities (Chicago: Haymarket, 2015).

Steven Salaita, Uncivil Rites: Palestine and the Limits of Academic Freedom (Chicago: Haymarket, 2015).

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* Sunaina Maira is Professor of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Davis. She is the author of  Jil [Generation] Oslo: Palestinian Hip Hop, Youth Culture, and the Youth Movement and co-editor of The Imperial University: Academic Repression and Scholarly Dissent. Maira is a founding organizer of the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USACBI) and was involved with the academic boycott campaigns in the Association of Asian American Studies and the American Studies Association; she is cofounder of Faculty for Justice in Palestine-Davis.

Sunaina Maira, “Academic Boycott and Academic Activism: Progressives for Palestine.” Social Justice blog, 08/01/2016. © Social Justice 2016