A Dangerous Place to Be Latino

HOUSTON—Christmas was around the corner, and he needed money for gifts. As he sized up the job, though, he was worried. There wasn’t the right equipment to climb the tree and he also wanted someone to hold the ladder as he climbed. He had worked for a tree-cutting firm, so he knew about safety.

But the contractor, who had offered him the job cutting down a tree at a condo, wouldn’t agree.

And so, Raymundo Mendoza took the chance.

The ladder slipped, sending him plunging downward, landing on his back. The contractor fled the scene and has never been seen again. A passing public bus driver saw him lying on the ground and called an ambulance. At the hospital, they told him he was paralyzed.

That was 13 years ago. Today, Mendoza is a volunteer and one of the leaders at a small nonprofit here that provides free wheelchairs, medical supplies, and support to paralyzed immigrants and refugees, among them workers like him. The organization was founded about 17 years ago when Harris County was cutting its budget.

A Dangerous Place to Be Latino

Texas, the only state without universal workers’ comp, leads the nation in workplace injuries and deaths. It’s Latino workers on unregulated construction sites who fare the worst. By Stephen Franklin and Abel Uribe

Edwin Hernandez, 43, powers his way to his wheelchair-inaccessible apartment. Nine years ago, he fell from a ladder while painting and permanently injured his spine.

Fixing donated wheelchairs and handing out medical supplies over the years, Mendoza has watched a steady march of Latino workers with bodies broken like his. And hearts too.

Without papers or health insurance, Mendoza didn’t think he could survive. Depression overcame him initially—as is the case for many undocumented Latino workers injured on the job. “It’s a 360 turn on life,” he said. “I could do many things from one day to the next. Now, I can’t do anything.”

What he has seen also leaves him little hope for others like him, he explained from the offices of the Living Hope Wheelchair Association. “It’s the same thing. It’s a lack of [safety] equipment. It’s sad that so many of our people are the most common victims of accidents.”

Statistics bear out his grim observation.

The toll of Latinos killed or hurt on the job has steadily grown across the United States, particularly in low-wage jobs where Latino workers predominate—construction, meat processing, landscaping, farm work, and warehousing. They’re injured or they die in collapsed ditches; they fall off roofs, ladders, and scaffolds; they lose their lives in accidents where machines mangle their bodies. Excessive heat overwhelms them when they don’t get water or rest breaks. In meat processing plants, according to a hearing by the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis, their lives have been ended from exposure to the COVID virus.

In meat and poultry processing plants across the U.S., Latinos came down with 56 percent of the COVID cases, although they were only 30 percent of the plants’ workforce, according to a Centers for Disease Control (CDC) study in July 2020.

But disproportionate Latino deaths was a pre-existing condition. While workplace fatalities have shrunk or stayed the same for other demographic groups, the number of Latino deaths has actually increased.

The numbers:

There were 1,072 Latinos killed on the job in accidents or unsafe situations in 2020 in the U.S., a 43 percent increase over 2011.

The workplace fatality rate for Latinos nationally in 2020 climbed to 4.5 per 100,000, up from 4.2 the previous year. Meanwhile, the rate for whites was 3.3, and 3.5 for Blacks; both numbers declined in 2020.

Latinos accounted for 16 percent of all workplace deaths in 2011 nationally, but

In meat and poultry processing plants, Latinos came down with 56 percent of the COVID cases, although they were only 30 percent of the plants’ workforce.

Edgar Moreno, 39, fell from a roof over a year ago, severely injuring his heel. Despite the pain, after several months he returned to work to pay the rent and send money to his family in Mexico.

Daniel Puente, 42, with his wife Leticia Castellanos and their youngest daughter, Daniela. He was hospitalized for 100 days following his accident in 2019, and has had multiple medical interventions since.

the number steadily grew to 22.5 percent in 2020.

When reached for comment, a spokesperson for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration said, “We understand Hispanic workers play a critical role in our nation’s workforce but face an increased risk of injuries and illnesses on the job. That’s why we are placing special emphasis on our enforcement efforts to focus on underserved workers in the highest risk industries like construction. No worker should have to put their paycheck ahead of their safety, so we are committed to doing everything we can to make sure employers are doing their job so that workers can safely do theirs.”

Texas has long been a dangerous place for

all workers. From 2010 to 2019, it led the U.S. in the number of workplace deaths—5,171. In 2020, another 469 lives were lost there in workplace accidents.

In Texas, workers struggle with an unusual workers’ compensation system that leaves some workers without protection, and lets some companies set their own

5,179 workers died on the job in Texas during the decade of the 2010s—more than in any other state. Two-thirds of those who died on construction sites were Latino.

compensation rules. While employers have cut costs at workers’ expense, the state has been home to a construction boom with unchecked workplace dangers. An increasingly right-wing legislature has steadily refused to provide protections.

Texas topped the nation in 2020 with 221 deaths among Latino workers, followed by California (home to millions more Latinos than Texas) with 214, and Florida with 82. Texas has led the nation in Latinos’ workplace deaths for 13 out of the last 20 years.

As was the case throughout those years, nearly two-thirds of the Latinos who died on the job in 2020 in Texas were born outside the U.S. The data doesn’t tell us how many were undocumented.

One of the most deadly jobs for Latinos is construction, accounting for just over onethird of their workplace deaths nationally in 2020. In Texas, there were 129 construction deaths in 2020, the nation’s highest toll for construction workers. Latinos made up two-thirds of those who lost their lives on these construction jobs in Texas. Latinos account for about 39 percent of the state’s population, but make up more than half of the state’s construction job workers.

Houston is where this reality has been playing out for many years. The city’s longrunning boom has been a dream for some Latinos, but a nightmare for some of those who build the highways, malls, and upscale housing in the nation’s fourth-largest city. It’s been especially nightmarish for jobhungry Latinos who take the low-wage, high-risk construction jobs that come their

way—though these jobs may last only a few days, and getting paid is not a sure thing.

Forty-five percent of Latinos in the Houston area could not cover a $400 emergency expense, and 41 percent had no health insurance—rates that exceed those suffered by the area’s Black residents, a recent survey showed.

Many of the undocumented Latino workers interviewed by a Latino worker advocacy group said that, since they didn’t have insurance, they went to hospital emergency rooms when they were sick. Because they are denied most federally funded health services, undocumented workers in Houston rely on a “a patchwork” of health care facilities, according to the recent report by Fe y Justicia, an organization that serves low-wage workers in Houston.

At Harris Health, however, one of the Houston area’s largest health care facilities, one official said the undocumented are not turned away for care because of their legal status. The problem, he suggested, is that they fail to meet the income requirements or do not complete the applications.

One of those just scraping by is Edwin Hernandez, a migrant from El Salvador, who fell off a ladder on a construction job nine years ago, leaving him paralyzed. His life ever since has been an example of what can happen to a worker without papers and few resources.

For much of the time since his accident, Hernandez has lived in a shelter run by a church in Houston’s suburbs or in a dingy apartment. He has eked out a living fixing cars from his wheelchair, but just getting around his apartment poses challenges. He has trouble lifting up and maneuvering his wheelchair to enter the narrow doorway, and he’s had to remove the bathroom doorway so he could access that room.

The apartment—its rent paid for by the church—is in a low-income housing complex like many that sprawl across Harris County. Nearby garbage bins overflow. With high fences and gated entrances, some of these developments feel like prisons. The Houston area has the second-lowest percentage of housing available for the very poor among the nation’s 50 largest metropolitan areas, a recent study showed.

Depression has overcome him at times, but Hernandez talks nonetheless of feeling proud. “No matter what, I have never panhandled for money,” he says.

The numbers on workplace injuries don’t tally the onset and persistence of depression. They do not tell us about the lingering illnesses, or the emotional and financial losses suffered by the injured and their families and loved ones. Even the tally of the injuries themselves is incomplete: Many firms and workers do not report injuries to OSHA, government reports show. (OSHA officials could not say how many of their inspections in Texas focused on incomplete injury logs alone.) That’s why the fatality figures are such an important and horrifying gauge. But fatality numbers are only the “tip of the iceberg,” explained Kevin Riley, director of the UCLA Labor Occupational Safety and Health Program.

Jose Avalos, 36, an undocumented migrant from Mexico, can testify to the uncounted aftereffects. Renovating a house five years ago, he fell through an opening, landed flat on his back on the floor below, and was paralyzed. He has since relied on family support because he has neither health insurance nor workers’ compensation benefits. He was working for a contractor, a relative, who provided some weekly compensation to him for two years and then stopped, he said.

Not long after his accident, his marriage dissolved. He sank into depression, and family members paid for his counseling. “I still have hospital bills and I have no idea about [how to pay] them,” he said, sitting in an SUV outside Raymundo Mendoza’s wheelchair organization, where he had come to pick up some supplies. For no cost, the paralyzed can get gloves (for their wheelchairs), catheters, adult diapers, and donated wheelchairs that have been repaired.

Sitting in a car adjusted for a paralyzed driver, Avalos doubted that others like him could avoid his fate. “It’s not fair. It’s because we are immigrants that is what we end up doing,” he said.

Why do so many Latinos die on the job? The

explanations are many.

It’s the lack of English, making it harder to understand safety instructions or ask for them. It’s the lack of safety instruction, equipment, or training. It’s the need to work a huge number of hours to steadily send money back home to families that need it to survive. It’s the reluctance of men coming from traditional societies, who do not admit their limitations, or are accustomed to unsafe working conditions. It’s the fear of being deported that drives them to take risks.

It is a fear, workers in Houston say, of speaking up to bosses, who tell you that you can’t go home until the job is done but only pay you for eight hours when you’ve put in more, who don’t tell you how much you are being paid at the start of the job, or who threaten to turn you over to immigration if you make problems.

Overall, Latino workers across the U.S., researchers say, tend to be younger and more inexperienced, lack training in the job, earn lower wages, and work for small outfits. They take jobs in sectors that others avoid. They clean up after hurricanes and disasters, at their own peril. They also make up most of the nation’s roofers, a job with a well-known high injury rate. They accounted for 56 percent of roofer deaths in 2020.

They face dangers others won’t.

For Vanessa, her past five years as a drywall finisher have been full of dangers and exploitation. (At her request, we’ve changed her name to protect her, as she explained, from “being blackballed” by contractors.) A contractor had recently fired her for raising

Austin and Dallas have required rest breaks for construction workers, who work outside during scorching Texas summers. Republicans in the state legislature have tried to nullify those ordinances.

Vanessa (not her real name) holds some of the tools she uses for taping drywall. Last year, she fell from her metal stilts and injured her shoulder, which still hurts when she works.

complaints at a safety meeting, she said, and she could not afford to lose more jobs.

Last year, standing on several foot-high metal stilts so she could reach higher spots while doing drywall, she fell down and hurt her shoulder, an injury that still pains her. She fell, she explained, because debris covered the construction site and she stepped on it while wearing the stilts. Stilts are banned on construction jobs in California and Massachusetts.

“I’ve seen people bleeding, but they don’t say anything because they are afraid of getting sent home,” Vanessa said. Not long ago, she worked a 16-hour day and, exhausted, felt as though her head was in a dangerous fog by the time she quit.

Edgar Moreno, 39, mainly works as a dry-

waller, but as a day laborer he takes whatever he can get. That’s why he was working on the roof of a house in November 2020, when he slipped, fell, and badly injured his heel. He pulled out a photo to show how badly swollen his heel was at the time. The contractor didn’t have the commonplace equipment such as a harness that would have prevented the fall, he said. Since the accident, he said, he has tried reaching the contractor to ask for help with his medical bills, but he’s been unsuccessful.

An emergency clinic told him he needed surgery, but he doesn’t have insurance and cannot afford it. Worse, he hasn’t been able to work for the last few months. “The only thing I can do is rest,” he said, sitting in a ramshackle small house near a row of refineries where he rents a bed for $300 a month. When he is working, he sends money home to his wife and three children in Mexico. He’s eager to get back to work, he said, even though his foot hurts him.

Going home to Mexico, where he was a miner, is out of the question, he added. “Those mines pay less, and they are much more dangerous,” he said.

He is like many workers in Houston, who say they are victims of bosses who vanish as soon as someone gets hurt. It’s a familiar situation to Ruben Rendon, a longtime workers’ compensation lawyer in Houston.

“Those are the guys who really get railroaded,” Rendon said. “Instead of putting them on an ambulance they put them on a plane to go home. I had a client who was in the hospital, and the employer sent his brother to the hospital. He said, ‘Wouldn’t it be better to send him home?’ The doctors protested … the airline wouldn’t accept him because he was bleeding, and his sister called me and put him back into the hospital.”

Going after employers who abuse their workers isn’t easy, said Sean Goldhammer, director of employment and legal services for the Workers Defense Project, a nonprofit that serves immigrant construction workers across Texas. He said many immigrants work for contractors who don’t provide workers’ compensation—largely because of the downward pressure to subcontract in order to cut costs and minimize any responsibilities toward their workers. “As you go down the line of contractors, you will almost never see workers’ compensation. You will

see wage theft and not providing safety equipment,” Goldhammer said.

The Workers Defense Project often pursues employers who fail to pay their workers. But workers represented by the organization get their money in less than 50 percent of their cases, he said. “They [contractors] will change their names and disappear, and then there’s no hope of judgment,” Goldhammer said.

An official with the Texas Workforce Commission said in an email that the agency had ruled that $11.8 million in unpaid wages was due workers in 2020–2021. But in a reply to a public information request for this article, the state admitted it was able to collect only 7 percent of “total unpaid claims” in 2021 of claims dating back to the 1990s because the businesses no longer existed and claims not paid in full are considered uncollected.

Being stiffed on pay feeds into a down-

A taper uses metal stilts to reach the ceiling at a residential worksite. ward spiral that leads workers into ever more vulnerable lives. Without money, they sink into depression and bad decisions come fast. They take whatever job they can get—and that often means the riskiest jobs. They don’t eat well or rest and their health declines. “As long as these conditions exist, you’re going to have the problems of workers exposing themselves to dangers, without safety precautions, because they need to support themselves and their families,” said Maria Eugenia Fernández-Esquer, a professor at the University of Texas School of Public Health in Houston.

In this system, being a conscientious contactor can still leave you vulnerable to being exploited by other contractors. Eliezer, 39, a short, muscular immigrant El Salvadoran, has suffered from falls and cuts on the job. Eliezer, who asked that his full name not be used here, has found some success, however, by becoming a contractor himself. That has enabled him to find work for 13 family members and friends. They do drywall installing and tapering. Lately, however, he himself has been stiffed, he said, by two contractors, who owe him about $13,000.

He has paid his workers by taking the money out of his own savings. He doubts that he will get the money owed him. He said he had talked to a lawyer, who didn’t want to take the case. He tried everything he could think of, he said, but nothing could help him get the money he was owed.

What are the chances of workers winning

more on-the-job protections in Texas?

In a state that prides itself on being business-friendly, workers can’t expect much help from state agencies, the state’s business groups, or its Republican-dominated legislature, say union officials and worker advocacy

Texas is the only state where employers can set their own workers’ compensation rules. One state study showed that a full quarter of those employers don’t pay death benefits to families of workers who died on the job.

groups. And while the state’s largest cities have become increasingly liberal, the legislature and the courts have frequently blocked their attempts to make workplaces safe.

In the last few years, Austin, Dallas, and San Antonio all passed ordinances requiring sick pay for employees. The ordinances were quickly challenged by business groups with the support of the Texas attorney general. The issue worked its way up in the Texas courts until a federal district court judge in Texas struck down the Dallas ordinance last year, leading the way for undoing the other ordinances.

Republican lawmakers had also pushed unsuccessfully in 2021 to sweep away local ordinances in Austin and Dallas that require rest breaks for workers. Publichealth experts, unions, and worker advocacy groups have campaigned for rest break regulations across the state. Nine states today require rest breaks.

Austin passed its rest break ordinance in 2010, and Dallas followed in 2015. Citing the extreme summer heat in Texas, safety advocates point to the high rate of workers overcome by heat; they cite in particular the death of Roendy Granillo, a 25-year-old Latino worker, who had put in 14 hours in blistering heat installing a floor in a house in a Dallas suburb. His contractor had reportedly turned down his request for a water break.

Dr. John Corker, an emergency room physician, told the Dallas City Council in a letter at a hearing for rest breaks that he had regularly treated construction workers suffering from heat distress, and that regular water and rest breaks would easily solve the problem. Corker, who has since moved to Ohio, said recently in an interview that by the time he saw Granillo, his organs had shut down and he could no longer be saved.

A frequent opponent to rules such as rest breaks is the Texas Public Policy Foundation, an influential conservative group with views often warmly embraced by Gov. Greg Abbott and the state’s conservative Republican lawmakers. But Robert Henneke, executive director and general counsel for the organization, rejected complaints that workers’ interests get a low priority in the state. “Texas is a pro-worker state in that it allows the freedom for workers to negotiate for terms that are best suited for them instead of mandates that fit all,” he said.

Henneke led the lawsuit to strike down the sick pay ordinances in Austin, Dallas, and San Antonio. He described the campaign for rest breaks as a “red herring, fear mongering tactic.”

But government statistics and research indicate otherwise.

Last fall, in the first year of the Biden administration, OSHA began the process of creating a standard to protect workers in excess-heat situations, a protection long sought by unions and public-health experts. Spelling out its reasoning for the rule, the agency noted that there had been “31,560 work-related heat injuries and illnesses involving days away from work” between 2011 and 2019. It added that the figures on heat-related illness and deaths are considered underreported.

In Texas, unions and worker advocacy groups have called for the state to set up its own OSHA, as 22 other states have. They say a state plan would do a better job than the federal government’s, and some research shows this to be the case. At best, they say the federal government isn’t doing the job. The effort, however, has gone nowhere in the legislature, according to the Texas AFL-CIO.

The federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration has about 99 inspectors in Texas, according to estimates from the AFL-CIO. Dean Wingo, a former OSHA inspector in Texas and currently a publichealth consultant, says the federal effort there is overwhelmed and unable to do preventive work. “It is like a doctor trying to practice preventive medicine in an emergency room.”

An OSHA official in Dallas said that the agency has not carried out any studies focusing on the high rate of injuries or deaths among Latinos in Texas, but added that the agency had reached out to consulates in Texas that help immigrants and several years ago set up a regional effort to help employers and employees impacted by heat-related health problems.

Workers’ compensation in Texas neither

saves nor protects workers, say unions and worker advocacy groups. Texas is the only state that doesn’t require employers to provide workers’ compensation. The result is a stew of options that saves money for employers at workers’ expense.

One option is for employers to sign up for a state-supported system and to follow its rules and regulations. About 70 percent of the state’s employers belong to this system. Another option allows employers to operate outside of the state system and set their own rules. Texas doesn’t monitor these employers. Their benefits are reportedly more limited, and the criteria for employees to qualify more strict. One-fourth of employers in this group do not pay death benefits to decedents’ families, according to a state study in 2018.

And then there are the employers who do not offer any workers’ compensation whatsoever to their employees. A 2018 study by the state estimated that about 6.5 percent of the state’s private-sector workers had to cope with this reality.

A major flaw with the setup is that few employers outside the state-supported system comply with a requirement to report all worker injuries, according to the state Division of Workers’ Compensation, a part of the Texas Department of Insurance. This makes it difficult to measure the extent of worker injuries and set up prevention efforts.

Saying that Texas workers need more protections, the Texas AFL-CIO has pushed to make workers’ compensation mandatory for all workers. But Rick Levy, a lawyer who serves as the group’s president, said that is highly unlikely “until we make some political changes.” Unions have little political clout, he explained, in a right-to-work state,

and in fact only 3.8 percent of Texas workers belong to unions, a number that has steadily declined in recent years.

Richard Pena, a longtime workers’ compensation attorney in Austin, bemoans the workers’ compensation system’s burden on workers. “One time I went to a hearing, and I made an argument about fairness. I said this is not fair and the judge said don’t use that word again in court,” recalled Pena, a former president of the State Bar of Texas and the Travis (Austin) County Bar Association.

He complained as well that the system was redesigned years ago to “drive out lawyers and to limit payments.” A 2017 study pointed to a higher rate of injuries among uninsured workers and widespread underreporting of injuries. Hispanic workers were more likely than others to be uninsured, and their workplace injuries wrongly recorded by hospitals, according to the study.

The failure to win statewide changes for workers hasn’t stopped some activists from trying. There have been wins, big and small.

“We recognized that it is incredibly difficult to pass things at the state level,” said Jessica Wolff, deputy director of Better Builder and policy for the Workers Defense Project (WDP). So the WDP turned to cities.

After a campaign by the WDP, Austin in 2016 and Travis County in 2018 approved the Better Builder program, which requires city-funded projects to boost workers’ wages, requires builders to meet federal safety standards, trains workers and employers to meet those standards, and relies on the WDP and local government employees to monitor construction projects.

Last fall, Harris County officials agreed to set up an Essential Workers Board, the nation’s first public body that gives workers a role in determining health and safety policies. The workers will come from the WDP and other worker advocacy groups.

Whatever changes will come, they may be

too late for Daniel Puente.

Puente, 42, is a strapping, muscular man, six foot, five inches tall, who fills his wheelchair. An undocumented immigrant from Monterey, Mexico, he had been working in Houston for over 15 years, mostly on regular jobs, and was on a new job for a few weeks in October 2019 at Turner Coatings, in the city of Spring, a small community about 20 miles north of Houston. Given a few minutes’ notice, he was asked to take a job in a sandblasting booth to work on a crane boom, he said.

According to an OSHA report, the boom, weighing about five tons, “was placed on horses that sat on the uneven surface of the booth. The load was not secured from movement to prevent it from coming into contact with an employee.”

It flipped over and pinned him, Puente said.

“The floor of the sandblasting booth is not level and is in need of repair,” said notes from an OSHA inspector after the accident in a report obtained by a FOIA request. A company official told the OSHA inspector that “the issues with the floor in the sandblasting area have been brought up to him by employees” and that the company was “planning to move to a new location and did not have plans to repair the floor.” The report added that “the floor in the sandblast booth has needed repairs for years.” The company was fined $9,446, but that was reduced to $6,612. Another inspection nearly a year later found other violations totaling $20,781, but again, in a settlement with the company, the amount was reduced to $8,906.

Despite emails and phone calls to the company’s office, it has not replied to requests to comment on the situation.

Life quickly unraveled for Puente after the accident. He lost his savings, his truck, his furniture, and his house. He and his wife moved with their five children into his mother-in-law’s small bungalow. He hired a lawyer to file a claim with the state’s workers’ compensation system, but he eventually let the lawyer go, saying he could not afford the lawyer’s fee. The attorney’s law firm would not discuss the case.

Puente said he has looked for another lawyer and admits he doesn’t understand how the system works. Workers’ compensation lawyers typically take their fees out of the compensation payments given to workers. Puente grumbled that he gets about $600 a week. “How can we people live on that?” he asked, lifting his arms.

He spent 100 days in the hospital after the accident, and his woes began to spiral. He was depressed and thought about taking his life. He developed lesions and then blood and urinary tract infections. He lifted his shirt to show where he has had repeated surgeries. “I’ve lost track of how many times we’ve gone back to the hospital,” said his wife, Leticia Castellanos, 36. She gave up a job as a school custodian to look after him.

Puente developed diabetes, but the company’s insurer wouldn’t cover the medical expense, he said. Attorneys explain that insurance companies in Texas will only pay for expenses they consider related to workers’ accidents.

He wanted the insurer to pay for a new doorway to fit his wheelchair, but it refused to. He was in a hospital for 20 days in December for health problems, when apparently he had a stroke, although he is not sure what happened. Leticia said he sometimes cannot remember words. He knows that he needs a complex heart operation, but he does not know what kind. His physician told him that it cannot take place until his blood infection is healed. His physician has also urged him to seek counseling, but Puente said the insurer rejected that too.

“It feels like I’m a child, not a man,” he said in a low voice, as his wife sat close by, tightly clutching his hand. n The Sidney Hillman Foundation provided support for this reporting. Abel Uribe is an independent Mexican American photojournalist based in Chicago, where he specializes in long-term projects, editorial, and food photography, and teaches a photojournalism class at Loyola University Chicago. He was previously a staff photographer at the Chicago Tribune and the Santa Fe New Mexican. Stephen Franklin is a former labor writer for the Chicago Tribune and has been an adjunct instructor at the School of Labor and Employment Relations at the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign. A Pulitzer Prize finalist, he is the author of  Three Strikes, an account of global corporations’ efforts to destroy worker agreements and protections.

CULTURE

A Personal History Along Route 28

Danica Roem, the nation’s first openly transgender state legislator, triumphed by owning her story and focusing on what voters care about.

By Toby Jaffe

Burn the Page: A True Story of Torching Doubts, Blazing Trails, and Igniting Change By Danica Roem Viking Roem in the introduction to Burn the Page, her new memoir. “The question is: Are you going to tell your own story about them, or are you going to let other people do that for you?”

In an age of celebritized digital mass media, where just about anyone can define and perceive you, there is something audacious and even a little subversive about a politician such as Roem so honestly revealing herself the way she does in Burn the Page. She writes with real vulnerability about her hard-drinking, hard-rocking twenties; about her sex life; about her lifelong struggles with gender dysphoria before her transition in 2012; about nuanced familial tensions and trauma. It’s the kind of stuff most holier-than-thou public figures would get “canceled” for.

In America, Roem argues, it is possible to succeed “because of who you are, not despite it.” Not that succeeding is easy, especially in a political environment where personal stories can come into conflict with artificial narratives about “electability.” But Roem is a living testament to overcoming such obstacles. She won as a trans woman and first-time candidate in a district represented by a Republican for 25 years. Roem has now held that seat for three terms, making history as the first openly transgender individual serving in any legislature in America, while helping to flip a region Democratic in an enduring way.

“[Electability] keeps so many people who have been historically unrepresented in our politics—LGBTq+ people, women, Black and Brown people, non-Black or Brown people of color—out of power,” Roem writes. Given this, she argues, telling one’s personal story and owning it is a deeply political act. But that’s not the only reason why Roem has been so successful; she’s been able to find what can move voters and colleagues to her side, even in the most banal or unglamorous corners of politics.

Roem was born in Manassas, Virginia, in

1984, the younger of two children. When she was three, her father committed suicide in the family’s backyard. Roem was told at the time that he was killed in an accidental fire, and she would not learn the truth for many years. Roem’s mother was left to take care of Danica and her sister alone, as well as Danica’s maternal grandparents.

In all, Roem’s mom Marian had to take care of four people, pay a mortgage, and work a “full-time job that was twenty-plus miles away with a horrendous commute,” as Roem puts it. Despite whatever personal and political tensions would develop between them, Roem makes clear that her mother’s resilience, patience, and toughness were hugely influential to her.

It is in these early descriptions of her childhood and adolescence where we get some of Roem’s best writing, a treat for anyone feeling nostalgic for the 1990s,

Books heavy metal music, or the culture of Northern Virginia (one really gets the sense, reading this book, that Roem bleeds NoVA). In particular, we learn about Roem’s early-life gender dysphoria.

As she writes in Chapter 2, “I wish I could look like her … was the lamenting, driving thought in my head all day, every day, as I saw my classmates in skirts and wearing their hair long.” Roem notes that she spent her middle-school years alone in her room in agony, desperately plotting strategies to avoid having her pantyhose showing embrace our flawed humanity not in shame but as something that connects us. There is an organic populism to Roem, embedded in the underground, DIY culture of the music scene, that is heartening. It is the flip side of the ugly, hypermasculine braggadocio practiced by figures like Donald Trump.

That said, whereas the intersection between Roem’s personal story and a larger political narrative is clear in the early chapters, it could be difficult at times to find overt political value in the hard-rocking middle chapters. As entertaining and salacious as they may be, there are just so many sex, drinking, and rock ’n’ roll stories in this section of the book that after a while they can begin to feel redundant and muddled.

Roem had never sought elected office before 2007, and was asked to do so after becoming active in lobbying for trans rights in Richmond.

during recess (solutions were hard to come by) or how to wear makeup without getting “caught” (the answer, for a while, was to wear colorful Chapstick). She became a sports obsessive as a way of hiding her queer- and transness from boys and men. Baseball, in particular, connected her to her maternal grandfather, a die-hard Yankee fan from the Bronx who idolized Joe DiMaggio.

Whether in her Catholic school classroom, on the baseball diamond, or at home in her bedroom, Roem encountered a culture of normalized—and sometimes internalized—homophobia, misogyny, and bigotry, which she took part in as an act of survival. “If someone asked you what you thought of fill-in-the-blank girl’s looks,” Roem writes, “you either agreed that she was hot or you put her down. You didn’t describe how her French braids looked or even remark on her personality … Doing that neither helped nor hurt me. It just kept me from outing myself, insofar as a child internalizing toxic masculinity to achieve that objective allowed.”

Roem credits metal music and the early internet for beginning the process of free-

ing herself from the shackles of a violent culture that sought to erase her. Metal finally allowed her a sense of individuality, to let her hair down, so to speak. On the internet, Roem found other like-minded metalheads and was not constrained by gender expectations.

Not many (if any) politicians with a national profile would so openly admit to the kind of drunken, bloody debauchery that Roem does. She challenges us to

The most egregious example of this may be Chapter 6, entitled “Vagabond,” which brings to mind the famous helicopter sequence toward the end of Goodfellas. Roem writes about a tour of the U.K. and Ireland her metal band Cab Ride Home embarked on in 2012. The play-by-play includes minute descriptions of Scottish bars and Northern Irish hotels, in frenzied, tense, and woozy detail. Roem concludes the chapter by encouraging readers to live out their wildest

Roem credits her journalism career as a “hack” for giving her the tools to understand intricate issues and events.

dreams, doubters be damned. One understands the temptation to tell entertaining stories, nor should an autobiography merely focus on the depths of agony and trauma. It just takes too long to get there through the tawdry information overload, and you wonder why you had to wade through it to reach that understanding.

By contrast, Roem writes about her transition with refreshing vulnerability. She resists the temptation to self-aggrandize or go Hollywood on the reader, instead portraying the whole experience as a beautiful, complicated, and messy process that enabled her to live her truth. “I’d love to tell you that it all clicked for her and she gave me a big hug and told me she loved me for who I was,” writes Roem of the tense evening she came out to her mother as a trans woman. “[I]t was hard for her, as it is for a lot of parents … But in some way, that moment started us on a path to a bigger understanding.” Mom gradually came around, and Roem pleads with queer people for patience with parents who may not initially understand them, unless parents are aggressively toxic and abusive. At the same time, Roem writes, “Parents of queer and trans kids need to recognize the courage of their children and the trust they’re placing in them by being authentic and real to them.”

Another important aspect of Roem’s story

is her professional history, which is sprinkled throughout the book. She worked in various small newsrooms in Northern Virginia, often covering local politics. To make ends meet, she often worked multiple jobs, sometimes even working full-time for two newspapers at once. Roem credits her journalism career as a “hack” for exposing her to the ways of politicians and for giving her the tools to understand intricate issues and events. But it was a tough road; by the time Roem decided to run for the Virginia House of Delegates, she was supplementing her meager income by working as a delivery person for an Afghan restaurant.

Roem had never sought elected office before 2017. She only ran because she was looking for a career change and “was asked.” During the mid-2010s, by then out as a trans woman, Roem became active in lobbying for trans rights in Richmond, while still working as a print journalist. She caught the attention of statewide organizers such as James Parrish, then of Equality Virginia. In particular, a successful effort led by Roem to overturn a discriminatory policy by the Prince William County school board convinced both Roem and local Democratic Party organizers that she had a talent for organization, strategy, and policy.

Roem knows her political strengths and how to implement them. “Quality conversations. Quality conversations. Quality conversations. It’s a mantra I repeated over and over in the campaign,” she writes. Outhustling and outorganizing her Democratic Party opponents, she emerged from the primary with an 11.5 percent victory. Up next in the general election would be Bob Marshall, a notoriously anti-transgender delegate who had represented the district for well over two decades.

Starting off as a heavy underdog, Roem sought to build personal connections with voters and run a persuasion campaign, something seen as a lost art in American politics. Roem wasn’t going to win in a traditionally Republican district by sticking to Democratic Party boilerplate. Instead, Roem strictly campaigned on matters that directly affected the voters of her district— traffic, jobs, schools, and health care. (Especially traffic: fixing Route 28, a highway that bisected the district, became such a mantra that after the victory Roem remarked to reporters, “We’ve now made Route 28 worldfamous.”) Roem and her team of staffers and volunteers hit as many houses as humanly possible for one-on-one conversations. All the while, Marshall and his campaign went through the motions, not bothering to make nearly the same kind of effort and putting out lazy, transphobic rhetoric that only served as a negative contrast to Roem’s disciplined style and focus on the issues that mattered to voters. The bet paid off; Roem won by nearly eight points.

The book’s final chapter details Roem’s experiences in the Virginia House of Delegates. She spent the first two years in the minority party and describes being put on a GOP “kill list”—a list of newly elected Democratic delegates from swing districts whose bills were to always be killed in committee. Roem describes the trauma that comes with such legislative games. She writes about a woman named Kim Fleming, who had fought for a bill that would require suicidal ideation training for teachers after her son committed suicide. When the bill went down in committee, Fleming cried in Roem’s arms.

Roem took those first two years as a big learning experience. She went above and beyond to work with her Republican colleagues, even driving three and a half hours to one of her GOP colleagues’ homes to discuss a bill. Though such hard work did not necessarily pay off immediately, it enabled Roem to get a lot done after Democrats won the majority in 2019. A particularly proud accomplishment came in 2020 when Roem helped pass a major LGBT equality bill, giving a passionate, fiery speech on the debate floor in the process. And though the wheels of policy move slowly, a Route 28 widening project has begun and a four-lane bypass is now in the design and engineering phase. Roem helped to kick-start these efforts.

I completed Burn the Page longing for more. I would love to read a more overtly political book by Roem, in which she outlines her overarching philosophies and specific thoughts and solutions about the crises we face. It is not sufficient to just be open and vulnerable about your personal journey, you must also speak your political truth. I didn’t always sense that Roem felt comfortable doing that, certainly not on wider issues like U.S. imperialism or the climate crisis, and it undermined the overall message of the book. She references drawn-out school board meetings, localized anti-trans discrimination, and the need to fix Route 28, but she never quite gets into the nittygritty of policy.

That is not to take away from Roem’s story or Burn the Page. There is a lot of value in the book. It is a worthwhile read for LGBT folks wishing to find their voice, as well as anyone interested in running for local office. There is power in storytelling and more so in the conviction that persuasion and conversation is still possible in American politics. n Toby Jaffe is a writer from New Jersey and has appeared in The American Prospect, The New Republic, and The Progressive magazine.

What Common Good?

Adrian Vermeule has a new constitutional theory that hides its religious foundations.

By Micah Schwartzman and Richard Schragger

Common Good Constitutionalism By Adrian Vermeule Polity

Just as the Supreme Court is poised to

achieve many of the stated aims of the conservative legal movement, including overturning Roe v. Wade and striking down affirmative action, leading conservative thinkers are hotly debating alternative approaches to interpreting the Constitution. Originalism—the notion that the words of the Constitution should be read according to some version of their origi-

Books nal historical meaning—has been the standard-bearer for decades, promoted initially as a strategy to undermine national economic regulation and limit the protection of civil rights.

But a conservative competitor to originalism has recently emerged in “common good constitutionalism.” For its leading proponent, Adrian Vermeule, a Harvard law professor, the point of constitutional interpretation isn’t to discern what the Founders thought or what some legal text meant to ordinary readers when it was enacted. Instead, the aim is to promote the “common good.” Vermeule claims that within the “classical legal tradition”—which extended from the Roman Empire through early modern Europe—political officials, including judges, understood that the purpose of the state is to secure the goods of “peace, justice, and abundance,” which he translates now into “health, safety, and economic security.” But in Vermeule’s telling, American conservatives have lost sight of that tradition and its influence on our own legal system. They have been blinded by originalism, which has become a stultifying obstacle to promoting a “robust, substantively conservative approach.”

In criticizing originalism, Vermeule borrows rather liberally from what he calls “progressive constitutionalism”—the view that the Constitution should be read with its purposes and principles in mind. He argues that progressives get some important things right about the nature of legal interpretation. Indeed, throughout his book, Vermeule relies heavily on Ronald Dworkin, the most influential American legal philosopher of the 20th century and a liberal critic of originalism. Dworkin argued that our legal system comprises much more than the Constitution, statutory texts, administrative regulations, and executive orders. All those different types of laws are created against the backdrop of often unwritten legal principles, which are drawn from our best understanding of political morality. When judges interpret the law, they are always trying to explain its meaning in a way that is justified by those principles.

Vermeule thinks that Dworkin was right about the importance of moral principles in understanding the law. He just thinks Dworkin had the wrong principles. Vermeule claims that progressive constitutionalism is motivated by a liberal political

morality that misconceives the common good in favor of an ever-expanding conception of individual autonomy. His primary examples here involve gay rights. Vermeule heaps scorn on the Supreme Court’s decisions in Obergefell v. Hodges, which constitutionalized a right to same-sex marriage, and Bostock v. Clayton County, which read federal law to protect against workplace discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. These opinions, in his view, reflect a “liberal political theology” that works tirelessly to dissolve the traditional moral foundations of political and legal institutions in the West.

For Vermeule, then, originalism is fatally flawed because it is cut off from political morality. Progressive constitutionalism doesn’t make that particular mistake; its sin is to idolize individual autonomy at the expense of the community’s general welfare. Vermeule argues that the classical tradition solves both problems by connecting law to a political morality of the “common good.”

But what, exactly, is the “common good”?

Despite declaring repeatedly that promoting the common good is a “proper function of the political authority,” Vermeule never adequately explains what it is. He tells us that it is not a matter of aggregating individual preferences or satisfying demands for individual autonomy. He does cite the ragion di stato (“reason of the state”) tradition, which describes “justice, peace, and abundance” as the legitimate ends of government, but that explains precious little. No one is opposed to those ends, abstractly stated, and Vermeule doesn’t offer an interpretation of them. Instead, he claims to provide a “framework” rather than a “blueprint’ for thinking about the common good. And yet, almost entirely without argument, he insists that these ends require some specific policy outcomes, including a constitutional right to life for “unborn children,” most likely a prohibition on gay marriage, bans on pornography and perhaps blasphemy, and restrictions on various forms of dangerous or false speech. We know what policies Vermeule likes and dislikes, but the moral basis for his views—beyond vague invocations of the “common good”—remains obscure.

That is because Vermeule’s “substantive vision of the good” is tied to a specific religious view that he nowhere mentions in this book. It is a striking and telling omission, about which Vermeule seems rather defensive. He says that nothing in his account turns on “supernatural” or “ultimate ends,” but it’s difficult to take this claim seriously. Reading Vermeule’s efforts to avoid stating his own conception of the good is like listening to the director of Hamlet offer justifications for failing to cast the prince. Why leave out Hamlet? Because most readers are likely to reject Vermeule’s religious views as quixotic and reactionary. In recent years, Vermeule has written extensively in defense of Catholic integralism, a radical view that calls for the establishment of a religious and explicitly Catholic confessional state. He has spoken favorably of illiberal Christian regimes like those of Hungary and Poland. And he has been vague when asked about how an integralist state might treat religious minorities, saying only that “nothing bad” would happen to them. But that is far from reassuring. What might seem bad, or unreasonable, to religious minorities—denials of equal citizenship, coerced conversions, suppression of public expression of faiths deemed to be heretical or blasphemous— might be “good” within Catholic integralism. Incredibly, Vermeule says nothing in his book about religious liberty and its place, or lack thereof, in his account of the common good.

None of this should be surprising. In prior work, Vermeule has been clear about his “Christian strategy,” which aims to capture existing political and legal institutions and to “reintegrate [them] from within.” And that is harder to do if people equate Vermeule’s theory of law with his anti-liberal religious views.

Readers should not be gullible about what common good constitutionalism represents. It is not merely a revival of an ecumenical “classical legal tradition.” Nor is Vermeule’s argument merely for a moral reading of the Constitution—an argument progressives have been making for some time. It is an argument that underwrites a dangerous shift in jurisprudence on the right, and one that serves Vermeule’s larger goal, which is the establishment of a state integrated with—or, more accurately, subordinated to—religious ends.

The emergence of common good constitu-

tionalism raises two further questions: First, why is this happening now? When conservatives control the Supreme Court, why is Vermeule busily undercutting their most successful theory of interpretation? And, second, how should readers—especially liberals and progressives—respond to a theory proposed by an author who has advised acting strategically to advance an esoteric theory of the good?

The answer to the timing question—

The late justice Antonin Scalia was the intellectual godfather of originalism, which Vermeule deems fatally flawed and cut off from morality.

and one Vermeule is explicit about—is that originalism has “outlived its utility.” It was instrumental in casting doubt on liberal precedents, like Roe v. Wade, and in convincing the American public to support the appointment of conservative justices. But now that the Court is firmly in conservative hands, the justices don’t need to talk the rhetoric of originalism or walk its supposedly restraining walk. They can remake the state in service of the common good, defined, ultimately, in terms of religious authoritarianism.

But there is another and more profound reason for Vermeule’s rejection of originalism. Modern originalism was born in the Reagan era, and it was used to fight against the administrative state. Social conservatives and libertarians worked together to fight the welfare state, limit the power of unions, curtail civil rights, eliminate environmental protections, and so on. With Trump, the conservative legal movement has achieved success at the Supreme Court. It now has an overwhelming 6-3 majority, which is already moving into a deregulatory posture, invalidating vaccine mandates, restricting the president’s immigration authority, and hinting at far-reaching limits on administrative agencies.

The originalist program of deregulation is, however, less appealing to a new intelligentsia on the right that calls itself “postliberal” and that includes Catholic integralists like Vermeule. What postliberals want is more government, not less. They want to use the administrative state to promote patriarchal family policy, protectionist labor and economic policies, morals/vice legislation (bans on porn, blasphemy, offensive speech), restrictions on LGBTq rights, and public support for religious observance, including the reinstatement of blue laws—all explicitly modeled on the illiberal Christian democracies of Poland and Hungary. (It’s no accident that Tucker Carlson has been broadcasting from Budapest. His brand of conservatism is a crude popularization of this postliberal intellectual vanguard.) And “common good constitutionalism”—as developed by Vermeule, the postliberals’ legal theorist—will be the newest front in their assault on the conservative legal establishment built by Reagan-era originalists.

So how should liberals and progressives respond to all this? As postliberals war with originalists, some progressives may be attracted to Vermeule’s defense of a moral reading of the Constitution and to his arguments for deference to the administrative state. They might also view the conservative legal movement’s fragmentation over the legitimacy of big government as an opportunity. As conservatives fight, why not use postliberal arguments to protect against deregulation and the dismantling of the social welfare state?

Other liberals and progressives might decide to throw their lot in with libertarian originalists. Although libertarians are no friends of progressive economic policies, at least they don’t favor a religious state and are less enamored of government impositions of morality. What liberals might get from a “liberaltarian” deal is a check on the ambitions of the far right, and what libertarians would get is the same. Both have a common enemy in authoritarian, populist, and theocratic government.

Which option should liberals and progressives choose? Neither is attractive. The first would be a highly speculative and unstable dalliance with religious antiliberalism, with outcomes that are morally dubious and that risk legitimating extreme factions within the conservative legal movement. It would mean jettisoning most of the civil rights protections that progressives have spent generations defending. Trying to find common ground with common good constitutionalism—in effect, the legal arm of Catholic integralism—is a form of political and intellectual appeasement, pinning the hopes of the administrative state on compromising with authoritarians and praying that they don’t succeed. If one had to choose, the option to side with oldfashioned, Reagan-era libertarians might be morally preferable, but it faces the very real danger of legitimating and thereby capitulating to the threat posed by the current Supreme Court.

The problem, of course, is that legal progressives are on the sidelines. The Supreme Court will be deeply conservative for the next generation. So, too, the intellectual apparatus that justifies and legitimates the work of that Court will partake of whatever theory of interpretation does its bidding. The more likely outcome is a politics that marries the worst of both originalism and common good constitutionalism—an administrative state that is increasingly corporatist and authoritarian. That is the pattern we have seen play out in repressive and autocratic regimes around the world, including in the states that postliberals seem to admire most.

When it comes to progressive politics, the old saying is wrong. For liberals and progressives, the enemy of my enemy is not my friend. Instead of throwing in with postliberals or accepting an alliance with libertarians and originalists, liberals and progressives should abjure these false friendships and make their own case for a moral reading of the Constitution that points to a more open, humane, tolerant, and decent society.

Trying to find common ground with common good constitutionalism is a form of political and intellectual appeasement.

Vermeule’s book has a striking cover that

depicts three ancient gold coins. Each has some standard abbreviations from Roman imperial currency, including one marked with the phrase fides publica (“public faith”). If you look closer, the first coin shows a bespectacled man holding a glass vial; the second a concrete mixing truck; and the third has two hands cradling a plant or tree sapling. These are reassuring images, much like those adopted by Roman emperors as propaganda for their coinage. Perhaps Vermeule’s coins represent scientific expertise, industry, and “environmental stewardship”—all domains in which he counsels deference to the administrative state in its efforts to promote the common good. But if the front sides of those three coins stand for the temporal ambitions of secular empire, we can’t help but wonder about what religious images are on the other side of them. It’s those symbols—the ones that integralists and postliberals don’t want readers to see—that are crucial for understanding what the “common good” really means in their constitutionalism. n

Micah Schwartzman is the Hardy Cross Dillard Professor of Law at the University of Virginia School of Law. Richard Schragger is the Perre Bowen Professor of Law at the University of Virginia School of Law.

The Cure for Hate Speech Is Not More Speech

A new book considers how colleges and universities should deal with committed racists.

By Ryan Cooper

It’s Not Free Speech: Race, Democracy, and the Future of Academic Freedom By Michael Bérubé and Jennifer Ruth Johns Hopkins University Press

For the last several years, American colleges

and universities have been one of the principal culture war battlegrounds. We’ve all heard stories of how students, who lean to the left in most schools, have mobilized in various ways to confront their schools’ history of complicity with slavery, white supremacy, colonialism, or other atrocities. This sometimes takes the form of ostracizing faculty or guest speakers deemed to be offensive or insensitive. Conservative writers like Bari Weiss, Thomas Chatterton Williams, and Ben Shapiro have seized on a handful of such events in which students

Books demonized their opponents to craft a narrative in which “woke” college “snowflakes” are carrying out “cancel culture” instead of debating scholarly topics using facts and logic.

Even the most exaggerated version of these protests doesn’t bear comparison to what conservative state legislatures are doing to suppress discussion and research, however. Across the country, Republicans are proposing or passing sweeping legislation that attempts to prohibit teaching which examines the history of racism or sexism, or calls into question the nobility of the American founding, or promotes LGBT equality.

It’s Not Free Speech: Race, Democracy, and the Future of Academic Freedom, a new book by Michael Bérubé and Jennifer Ruth, offers new insights about academic freedom and free speech that are both incisive and broadly relevant to American society as a whole. Both authors are professors, the former at Pennsylvania State University and the latter at Portland State University.

Bérubé and Ruth were motivated by the Trump years and the George Floyd protests to reconsider their previous views on free speech and academic freedom. They carefully elaborate and rebut several unsatisfactory positions on these questions. One bad argument (often heard within the academy itself) is that the two things are identical— that tenured professors should be protected from any consequences of speech, no matter what they say. As they note, this view doesn’t survive contact with the case of James Tracy, a former communications professor at Florida Atlantic University who loudly promoted the conspiracy theory that the Sandy Hook school shooting was a false flag, and took to harassing the victims’ parents before he was finally canned.

Another argument, coming from Martha Nussbaum and others, is that academic freedom has nothing at all to do with free speech. By this view, academics should be protected when they are commenting on their area of specific expertise, and be treated as private citizens otherwise. This doesn’t work either—first, what counts as expertise is necessarily a subject of debate; second, scholars often develop real expertise outside their areas of explicit training (like Noam Chomsky); third, such a standard would mean scholars fearing for their jobs every time they said anything not strictly relevant to their field.

Instead, Bérubé and Ruth argue that the way to think about speech and academic freedom is by judging comments both inside and outside the classroom by whether they cast doubt on a professor’s fitness to participate in intellectual life. Academic freedom should protect professors’ ability to say controversial things and start hard discussions, but it comes with an equally important responsibility that those statements be grounded in serious thought and research—and in reality. The authors suggest the “purpose of institutions of higher education is not to ensure that all views be heard, but to determine, by careful and impartial review, which views merit a hearing and which serve no conceivable educational mission.”

So what does that mean in practice? The authors draw on the work of scholars like Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Charles Mills, who have showed many ways that racists have exploited ostensibly liberal norms to perpetuate bigotry. They combine that work with the critique of free speech from literature scholar Ulrich Baer, who argues that when free speech protects “speech that proposes that some humans are innately inferior to others, and thus undermines the baseline assumption of human equality … free speech degenerates into an exercise in domination.” Explicit racism, defending slavery or colonialism as good for the subjected peoples, arguing that homosexuality is a disease, or similar bigoted views thus have no place in the university.

Many liberals instinctively resist this idea. It sounds like censorship, and in a sense it is. But virtually no one actually believes schools should always consider every idea under the sun. Aside from Professor Sandy Hook Truther above, there are dozens of ideas that are de facto banned from the academy: flat earth theory, geocentrism, phlogiston, and so on. The authors provide a handy list of additional indefensible guest lecture topics, like “the Jews had it coming,” “vaccines cause autism,” “climate change is a hoax,” and “phrenology has much to teach us.” (For the latter lecture they offer to measure the skulls of audience members to determine “who among us is most likely to become a perpetrator of violent crime.”)

Once one has admitted that certain

beliefs are out of bounds in an academic setting, the only question is where and how the boundaries should be drawn. Critically, they argue that a thorough commitment to anti-racism is important in an academic context not because racism harms minorities (though it does do that), but because it leads to poor scholarship. For instance, for the majority of the 20th century, the historiography of the Reconstruction period was dominated by the Dunning School—a the South were more or less full voting citizens—a status protected by federal power. This power was eventually withdrawn by Northern white elites, and Black citizenship in the South was then destroyed by white supremacist terrorism. That in turn set the stage for Jim Crow: an apartheid system enforced by a constant threat of psychotic violence to any Black person who stepped out of line (and many who didn’t).

White intellectuals then made up a ly preposterous and baldly racist delusion invented to assuage the conscience and ego of white society.

One of the reasons that W.E.B. Du Bois’s book Black Reconstruction is so impressive is that he almost single-handedly took on an entire hegemonic historical consensus supported by dozens of academic departments and hundreds of practicing scholars, and eventually prevailed. But the fact that it took half a century, with his

College classrooms have become one of the main battlegrounds of the culture wars over the past several years.

straightforward racist fraud. This school of thought, advanced by Columbia University’s William Dunning and his acolytes, advanced a white supremacist view of the period after the Civil War.

In reality, as is now fairly common knowledge, from about 1865 to 1876, Black men in bunch of comforting lies that Reconstruction was a mistake and a failure because the multiracial governments were corrupt, thanks to the influence of ignorant Black voters who didn’t deserve the franchise. This wasn’t a contestable interpretation, or a different angle on events, but a completeargument being reinforced by several brilliant white academics (most notably Eric Foner), for that victory to be consolidated, is also telling. It proves that an academic system can be set up on putatively open lines where anyone can advance any argument, and then total crackpot nonsense

that doesn’t survive a moment’s hard scrutiny can be held up as consensus truth for 50 years.

In short, the truth will not out, at least not by itself, because of racism. An academy open to any question gives a golden opportunity for bigots to worm their way into the discourse and establish a false consensus through the use of power. Just consider the University of Pennsylvania Law School’s Amy Wax, an open racist who also insists that her Black students get worse grades than her white ones. It’s not hard to imagine how this might have happened. The reason the Dunning School survived for so long is the same reason why it’s seemingly impossible to stomp out quack neo-phrenologist arguments from people like Charles Murray: racist bias.

The authors’ solution for how to approach academic freedom is typically academic: a faculty committee. This sounds a little ridiculous, but I was convinced that it’s the best possible approach. The foundation of the modern university is tenure and peer review—a collective process whereby one’s peers critically judge each other’s fitness and work, from a sternly anti-bigotry standpoint. As they write, “this is what differentiates academic freedom from free speech: this horizontal work of peers policing one another.”

No doubt there would be many problems with such committees in practice. But at the very least, they would be a huge improvement on the extant “diversity, equity, and inclusion” offices that exist in most schools on the administrative side. These simultaneously tend to be heavily influenced by the diversity consultant industry, whose borderline-abusive seminars have been shown to backfire in some studies, and subject to the cowardice of administrators who are a lot more concerned with money and reputation (and hence fear deep-pocketed white professors with political connections) than with academic freedom. And DEI doesn’t address, much less solve, the fraught question of which crackpot or racist views should be excluded.

This is relevant for lay readers for a few reasons. First, campus politics and the associated discourse about racism, free speech, and “wokeness” are going to be with us for the foreseeable future. As I was writing this piece, yet another New York Times op-ed about allegedly censorious campus leftists was published. In addition to providing a concrete, realistic way to process these questions, the authors deserve great credit for thoughtfulness and plain common sense throughout. In the social media age, it is entirely too easy for writers and scholars to fall into inflamed thinking and hysteria over events that are shorn of context, exaggerated, unrepresentative, or simply invented out of whole cloth. And a lot of events that spark huge controversy, like professors insisting on saying the N-word in class, could be avoided with some simple common courtesy.

What’s more, as the authors note, their points about speech are not limited to the academy. The most widely applicable part of the book is a more general consideration of free speech itself. Baer’s case against libertarian free speech dogmatism holding that any restrictions on speech whatsoever are prima facie illegitimate, and that more speech is always the best cure for hate speech, is highly relevant today. The Trump years and social media have proved that false beyond any question. If one doubts the power of propaganda, just consult the many websites dedicated to archiving the social media feeds of conservatives who post anti-vaccine Facebook memes and Fox News clips only to catch COVID and die in gruesome agony.

The increasing prominence of fascist and open neo-Nazi groups poses an even more stark challenge to free-speech absolutists. It is simply naïve to think that argument will convince people intent on leveraging liberal tolerance to seize power and murder their political opponents.

If I had to levy a criticism of Bérubé and Ruth, it would be here. On the question of whether there is any hope for even modest government action on speech, they throw up their hands. “There is, we are finding to our collective horror, a destructive and potentially murderous libertarianism baked into the country’s very foundation,” they write. But this is entirely too pessimistic. While it surely is hard to imagine any kind

Free speech and free discussion are public goods that require regulation to preserve just like any other kind of public good.

of speech regulation akin to the ban on publishing Holocaust denial or Nazi slogans in Germany (and several other nations) in the U.S., there are quite a few more modest measures that are much more consonant with American history. There are still considerable regulations on political spending, for instance, and the Supreme Court decision that gutted the previously more-strict regime is deeply unpopular.

Indeed, it’s quite plausible to argue that such regulations are necessary to ensure the American people actually enjoy the benefits of free speech. The idea that the best argument will naturally win out in the “free marketplace of ideas” is every bit as ridiculous as saying that financial deregulation will improve the efficiency of investment. Free speech and free discussion are public goods that require regulation to preserve just like any other kind of public good. Absent regulation, ruthless ultra-rich monopolists and their flat-earth allies will barge in and befoul the collective speech commons.

For instance, we might consider antitrust policy to break up vast social media or broadcasting empires as a sort of indirect speech regulation—not directly affecting individual speech, of course, but greatly limiting the propaganda reach of malevolent billionaires. Increased taxes on the rich would have the same effect.

Or we might consider reforming Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, and thus allowing people to sue large platforms for content posted on them by third parties, which would force them to radically scale down their operations or heavily moderate inflammatory content or both. As Josh Marshall has written, “Facebook is like a scofflaw nuclear power company that makes insane profits because it runs its reactor in the open and dumps the waste in the bog behind the local high school.”

At any rate, this is a minor quibble. Bérubé and Ruth have written a great book that does what conservatives say they want: take on a sacred cow of liberalism with facts and logic. I look forward to them being canceled by Fox News. n Ryan Cooper is the Prospect’s managing editor, and author of How Are You Going to Pay for That?: Smart Answers to the Dumbest Question in Politics. He was previously a national correspondent for The Week. His work has also appeared in The Nation, The New Republic, and Current Affairs.

A socially distanced homeless encampment at San Francisco’s Civic Center, from May 2020

Homelessness Meets Cluelessness

Michael Shellenberger applies conservative culture war clichés to the housing problem.

By Peter Dreier

San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities By Michael Shellenberger Harper

Americans love people who find redemption by acknowledging their sins, see the light, and change their lives. Michael Shellenberger claims to have once been a progressive, but that the failure of so-called progressive cities (particularly San Francisco) to solve the crisis of homelessness turned him into a conservative. Now he’s become an evangelist for conservatism. San Fransicko is his confession.

Despite its many endnotes, this is not a scholarly book. The author distorts and misuses facts when it suits his arguments. San Fransicko is a tirade against permissiveness—cities that allow homeless people to live and sleep on sidewalks, in parks and tent encampments in residential neighborhoods and business districts, polluting those spaces with drug needles, urine, feces, empty bottles of alcohol, and unkempt people unmoored from reality.

Shellenberger argues that homelessness is not primarily the result of poverty and the shortage of affordable housing. It is, he claims, really a problem of mental illness and substance abuse. He blames what he calls “pathological altruism”—progressive municipal officials and do-gooders who refuse to enforce vagrancy laws that would bring order and civility to urban streets.

Shellenberger made a name for himself as a critic of the environmental movement for its opposition to nuclear power and fracking.

In 2016, he started Environmental Progress, which launched campaigns to keep nuclear power plants in operation, testified in Congress in favor of nuclear energy, and worked with the

Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry lobby group. In a TED Talk, Shellenberger argued that switching to renewable energy sources like solar power and wind is destroying the environment. In 2018, his unsuccessful campaign for California governor garnered only 31,692 votes. Three years later, he backed Kevin Faulconer, San Diego’s Republican former Books mayor, in his failed bid to unseat Gov. Gavin Newsom. Then on March 10, he announced that he’s running as an independent candidate against Newsom.

No big city in America—whether governed

by conservatives, liberals, or progressives—has solved its housing crisis. According to the National Low Income Housing Coalition’s “Out of Reach” report, “In no state, metropolitan area, or county in the U.S. can a worker earning the federal or prevailing state or local minimum wage afford a modest two-bedroom rental home at fair market rent by working a standard 40-hour work week.”

Rents have been rising faster than incomes, especially at the bottom half of the labor market. According to a report by Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, in 2019 (the latest data available) more than 80 percent of renters earning less than $25,000 paid more than 30 percent of their incomes just to put a roof over their heads. Most paid more than half of their income for rent. Even 70 percent of renters earning between $25,000 and $34,999, and nearly 50 percent of renters earning between $35,000 and $49,999, paid more than 30 percent of household income for rent.

Before the COVID pandemic, more than a quarter of all unhoused Americans lived in California, which has 12 percent of the nation’s population. Almost three-quarters of the state’s homeless people—and 73 percent of San Francisco’s 8,124 homeless residents—are unsheltered, a higher share than in any other state.

California has the nation’s highest “housing wage”—the income needed to afford a typical apartment. The typical monthly rent for a two-bedroom apartment in California is $2,030, so a family needs to earn $39.03 per hour to avoid paying more than 30 percent of its income for rent. In San Francisco, that wage is $68.33.

Typical of Shellenberger’s disingenuousness, he writes that “Palo Alto and Beverly Hills have mild climates and expensive housing but don’t have San Francisco’s homeless problem.” But both are wealthy suburbs with few low-income residents who are likely to fall into homelessness.

Contrary to Shellenberger’s argument, a recent Harvard report found direct correlation between median rents and the size of the homeless population.

The combination of low wages and rising rents leads many working people to wind up sleeping in their cars, on friends’ couches, on the streets, or in shelters. A recent survey I co-authored of over 10,000 grocery workers in Southern California, the Seattle area, and Colorado discovered that 14 percent had been homeless during the previous year; even 9 percent of full-time workers suffered that fate.

America’s homeless crisis is not primarily a

problem of personal pathology. The initial surge of homelessness in the 1980s resulted from the combination of closing the nation’s mental hospitals (without providing the promised funding for communitybased treatment settings) and the Reagan administration’s cuts in federal funding for low-income housing. When more lowrent housing was available, including many rooming houses since lost to gentrification, even people on society’s margins could afford a roof over their heads.

Contrary to Shellenberger’s argument, San Francisco, like most California cities, has been run by business-friendly Democrats, not progressives. Since the late 1970s, San Francisco has only had one progressive mayor—Art Agnos, who served from 1988 to 1992.

Most cities have pursued a strategy of promoting construction of new office buildings and hotels, often via tax breaks, to encourage high-tech, finance, insurance, health care, and tourism businesses. The huge influx of highly paid employees, along with many low-wage workers, exacerbates the widening income divide. These cities also priori-

San Antonio St. Louis Detroit Dallas Houston tize new luxury housing, hoping that the increase in supply will trickle down to help low-income renters find decent apartments.

But that approach never works. Instead, rents trickle up, as owners of existing properties raise rents closer to the levels of the newly built apartments. Landlords evict lower-income renters, many of whom wind up on the streets or in cramped and overcrowded quarters. A 2019 report found that 70 percent of San Francisco’s homeless people once had a home in the city.

The only way to create new housing that secretaries, garment workers, day care workers, janitors, nurses, schoolteachers, and hotel housekeepers can afford is to provide government subsidies to builders, homebuyers, and tenants. Cities don’t have that kind of money and Congress has not come close to restoring the federal HUD budget to pre-Reagan levels. Today, only one-quarter of households eligible for federal rental assistance receive it, due to funding limitations. Unlike food stamps, housing assistance—such as subsidized apartment buildings or housing vouchers—is not an entitlement. It is more like a lottery. In most cities, there are long waiting lists for housing aid—so long that many cities have stopped accepting applications. Most poor families are at the mercy of the private rental market.

Shellenberger seems unaware of various state laws that preempt California cities’

Tampa

Phoenix

Chicago Orlando

0.5 0.4 0.3 Portland, Or.

0.2 Baltimore Miami

0.1 Riverside

0.0 $700 900 1,100 1,300 1,500 1,700

Seattle Boston

Homelessness Is Especially High in More Expensive Rental Markets

New York HOMELESS RATE (PERCENT) Minneapolis Los Angeles San Diego Washington, D.C. San Francisco Median Rent SOURCE: “THE STATE OF THE NATION’S HOUSING,” HARVARD JOINT CENTER FOR HOUSING STUDIES

ability to address their housing crises. He decries California’s “high taxes,” but doesn’t even mention Proposition 13, a 1978 ballot measure that dramatically limited local governments’ ability to raise property taxes on homeowners, landlords, and businesses, depriving municipalities of revenues they need for basic municipal services, let alone subsidies for affordable housing.

Nor does Shellenberger mention the Ellis Act, a 1985 state law, sponsored by the real estate industry, that allows landlords to evict tenants in order to remove housing units from the rental market. As California’s housing market has heated up, speculators have abused the law by purchasing and then demolishing older buildings in order to build newer, expensive market-rate projects. Under the law, San Francisco has lost 4,576 rent-controlled units, while Los Angeles, with almost five times as many residents, has lost 27,000. For years, housing activists have tried without success to get the state legislature to repeal the Ellis Act.

Even more glaring is Shellenberger’s failure to mention the 1995 Costa-Hawkins Act, another real estate industry–backed law, that prohibits cities from regulating rents when a unit becomes vacant. This creates a perverse incentive for landlords to evict tenants, often by illegal means, including harassment, so they can raise rents on new tenants. The result: a steadily declining number of apartments covered by rent regulation in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and other cities.

Progressives have successfully pushed some cities to adopt inclusionary zoning laws and linkage policies to require developers to help mitigate the cost of rising rents caused by market-rate development, but these are Band-Aids, not fundamental solutions. In contrast, a coalition of Los Angeles labor, housing, and social service activists recently launched a campaign to

Shellenberger refuses to acknowledge that mental illness and addiction are often caused or at least made worse by being homeless.

increase taxes on real estate transactions over $5 million. This would raise over $800 million a year to fund permanent affordable housing and to provide emergency relief for renters at risk of eviction. The measure will go into effect if more than half of voters approve it on the November ballot.

Shellenberger claims that “homelessness

exploded” in California around 2009 after the state stopped making housing assistance conditional on sobriety. But he ignores the reality that California, like the rest of the country, was then reeling from the biggest housing crash since the Depression—a catastrophe caused by banks’ reckless and illegal behavior. Many middle-class and low-income people lost their homes.

Echoing Reagan, Shellenberger argues that most homeless people are homeless by choice. He thinks the poor, homeless, or addicted should make better choices. And progressives should stop making excuses for them by blaming their plight on broader economic and social forces.

Shellenberger condemns “housing first” approaches that offer homeless people a secure roof over their heads, without requiring them to first get sober or get treatment for mental illness. He wants local police to arrest homeless people who use drugs, abuse alcohol, and beg on the streets. In fact, a growing number of cities have recently begun removing homeless people from encampments and other public spaces in response to complaints from business groups and local residents. When San Francisco Mayor London Breed announced a crackdown on street crime and drug dealing last December, Shellenberger claimed vindication. He even urges California to create a new agency, Cal-Psych, which would institutionalize people who live on the streets. To make his case, Shellenberger claims that European countries have moved away from progressive “harm reduction” approaches to utilizing arrests and mandatory treatment in dealing with homeless people, but he gets that wrong, too, as Maia Szalavitz and others have shown. Coerced treatment and criminalization don’t work, said Laura Thomas of the San Francisco AIDS Foundation. “We don’t have enough services, we don’t have enough housing, we don’t have enough shelter beds.”

Shellenberger ignores the evidence that people with addictions and mental illness are more likely to improve their situations when they have unconditional access to stable housing. For example, that approach has cut chronic homelessness among military veterans by about half. Of course, “housing first” is easier to adopt in cities without sky-high rents, such as Houston, where the approach has been successful.

For the 32 percent of unhoused Californians who are chronically homeless, and whose plight is exacerbated by disabilities, the solution is stable housing with wraparound support services, according to a justreleased study by the California Budget & Policy Center. In recent years, Los Angeles has moved about 9,000 homeless people into hotel rooms, but the overall homeless numbers didn’t decline because an even larger number of people fell into homelessness after getting evicted. The same is true in San Francisco, where the head of the city’s Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing pointed out that for every person who exits homelessness, three fall into it.

Shellenberger refuses to acknowledge that mental illness and addiction are often caused or at least made worse by being homeless. Losing your job, getting evicted, and winding up homeless and living on the streets, or moved from shelter to shelter, are traumatizing experiences.

Similarly, as one research team recently found, “the association between homelessness and drug use is bidirectional, and homelessness itself plays a role in drug use and overdose risk.” Consider West Virginia, which ranks first in drug overdose deaths and is ground zero in the opioid crisis. That state has one of the nation’s lowest rates of homelessness, mostly because housing is inexpensive (the typical monthly rent for a two-bedroom apartment was $771), and a housing wage of $14.83.

Religious zealots are not persuaded by facts and rational arguments. Shellenberger had a conversion experience and now he wants to convert liberals and progressives to atone for their sins. Shellenberger, meanwhile, has violated one of the most important commandments: “Thou shalt not lie.” n

Peter Dreier is the E.P. Clapp Distinguished Professor of Politics at Occidental College and co-author of two new books: Baseball Rebels: The Players, People, and Social Movements That Shook Up the Game and Changed America and Major League Rebels: Baseball Battles Over Workers’ Rights and American Empire.

cow Mules. Sure, they’re spicy and delicious, but what if Kacy posts a selfie to IG and there you are in the background sucking down the enemy’s cocktail? Same goes for White Rus -sians. They may have been the Dude’s favor -ite, but even he agrees this aggression will not stand, man. If you own a business and serve these drinks, simply rename them the “American Mule” or the “White American.” The latter will most definitely attract a new kind of clientele, so be sure not to ask for their vax cards.Russian nesting dolls. Sorry, those tchotchkes collecting dust on your Nana’s mantel must be tossed. Except for the little one. She did nothing wrong.Fur hats. Not sure if they’re Russian but they make you look Russian, so close enough.The Nutcracker. Written by Russian com -poser Pyotr Tchaikovsky, so that’s out. No more Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy, no more weird sexually charged obsession with inani mate walnut-cracking wooden dolls.Russian roulette. Henceforth it will be known as “American roulette,” which makes way more sense. What could be a higher-stakes game of life and death with gunplay than simply going into any public space in the United States?Method acting. It was developed by Kon -stantin Stanislavski to help actors become fully their characters as well as intolerably self-serious human beings. Looking at you, Jared Leto. This one will not be missed. The helicopter. Sure, it may seem like a great invention—whisking trauma victims and high-powered celebrities alike from destina tion to destination—but the first mass-pro -duced version was developed by Igor Sikorsky in 1939 and is therefore a creation of the enemy. Same goes for the cargo parachute, developed by Gleb Yevgeniyevich Kotelnikov. Let’s learn how to land on our own two feet already! From now on when we travel, we will use the gondola—lift or boat—both developed by Italians, who are safe, for now.The periodic table. Chemist Dmitri Men -deleev laid it all out in that overly complicated scrambled alphabet that I am now glad I never properly memorized. Looking back, perhaps the periodic table was a long con to hypno -tize the world with shiny metals and strange gases. Plus, if we’d never discovered the mix of hydrogen or carbon, we would’ve never discovered fossil fuels, and Putin’s petro-funded war (not to mention most American wars) would’ve never been possible. Blame the table! If we can implement these simple steps to rid ourselves of excessive Russianness, Putin’s aggression will not last the week. Soon enough, we’ll all get back to guzzling cheap gas, exporting tar sands oil to Europe, and investing in F-35s rather than pre-K throughout the rest of humankind’s waning time on Earth.

DEPARTMENT OF POINTLESS EXERCISES STEPS TO DE-RUSSIANIZEThe pandemic made us scramble for ways to cope. Some of us started sourdough, Putin started a war. And you might be wondering what you can do to stop Russia and how you can make Putin pay. This official guide from the U.S. Department of Pointless Exercises (DoPE) is here to help. First off, let’s remember this is a new war for a digital age, where the threat of nuclear Armageddon is surely as costly as the threat of being canceled. So if we can purge our lives of any trace of Russianness through a round of self-sanctions, Putin’s attacks will surely come to a grinding halt: Beverages. When you’re out on the town try -ing to get sloshed with the girls, no more Mos —By Francesca Fiorentini

Ukraine’s iron will against Putin’s barbarism Ukraine’s iron will against Putin’s barbarism

By Randi Weingarten, President AMERICAN FEDERATION OF TEACHERS By Randi Weingarten, President

AMERICAN FEDERATION OF TEACHERS Ukraine has always loomed large in my life. My grandfather fled near-certain death from the pogroms that massacred Jews in Ukraine early in the last century, and he was able to bring most of his and my grandmother’s Ukraine has always loomed large in my life. My grandfather fled near-certain death from the pogroms that massacred Jews in Ukraine early in the last century, and he family from western Ukraine to America. Many was able to bring most of his and my grandmother’s

Jews who survived those pogroms later perished family from western Ukraine to America. Many in the massacre at Babi Yar by Nazi forces and Jews who survived those pogroms later perished their collaborators. In 2014, I went to Ukraine on a in the massacre at Babi Yar by Nazi forces and solidarity mission with other labor leaders shortly their collaborators. In 2014, I went to Ukraine on a after dozens of demonstrators were fatally shot solidarity mission with other labor leaders shortly there during a pro-democracy uprising. The uprising after dozens of demonstrators were fatally shot ousted Ukraine’s Russian-backed president and there during a pro-democracy uprising. The uprising ushered in a new era of freedom and democracy ousted Ukraine’s Russian-backed president and that the Ukrainian people have long wanted. ushered in a new era of freedom and democracy that the Ukrainian people have long wanted.

Like so many, I have watched with horror at Vladimir

Putin’s barbarism and with awe at the Ukrainian Like so many, I have watched with horror at Vladimir people’s determination and will. Putin’s forces Putin’s barbarism and with awe at the Ukrainian are now killing civilians—bombing kindergartens, people’s determination and will. Putin’s forces hospitals, and people waiting in line for food or are now killing civilians—bombing kindergartens, trying to flee to safety. But instead of these Russian hospitals, and people waiting in line for food or assaults breaking their will, the Ukrainian people trying to flee to safety. But instead of these Russian have confronted them with staunch resistance, assaults breaking their will, the Ukrainian people even as the carnage and suffering are mounting. have confronted them with staunch resistance,

This is a battle for people’s lives and homes, and even as the carnage and suffering are mounting. for freedom, self-determination and democracy. This is a battle for people’s lives and homes, and for freedom, self-determination and democracy.

Oleksandr Sushko, the executive director of the

International Renaissance Foundation in Ukraine, Oleksandr Sushko, the executive director of the urges, “The voices of Ukraine’s civil society sector International Renaissance Foundation in Ukraine, must be protected, as we know these defenders of urges, “The voices of Ukraine’s civil society sector democracy and freedom are high on Putin’s kill list.” must be protected, as we know these defenders of democracy and freedom are high on Putin’s kill list.”

Teachers and trade unionists are among those “defenders of democracy.” As Jeffrey Teachers and trade unionists are among

C. Isaac, a professor of political science at those “defenders of democracy.” As Jeffrey

Indiana University, Bloomington, writes C. Isaac, a professor of political science at in the Albert Shanker Institute blog: Indiana University, Bloomington, writes in the Albert Shanker Institute blog:

Education is a dangerous thing for authoritarian leaders and regimes, for it nurtures freeEducation is a dangerous thing for authoritarian thinking individuals capable of asking leaders and regimes, for it nurtures freequestions and seeking their own answers. For thinking individuals capable of asking this reason, teachers have long been on the questions and seeking their own answers. For front line of the struggle for democracy. this reason, teachers have long been on the front line of the struggle for democracy.

In the U.S., teachers are facing a wellorchestrated political campaign by the far-right In the U.S., teachers are facing a wellto limit the teaching of certain subjects and orchestrated political campaign by the far-right perspectives in public schools, all in the to limit the teaching of certain subjects and name of a “patriotism” that is manifestly perspectives in public schools, all in the hostile to a multi-ethnic and multi-racial name of a “patriotism” that is manifestly democracy and a well-educated citizenry. … hostile to a multi-ethnic and multi-racial democracy and a well-educated citizenry. … … As Human Rights Watch reports, teachers [in Russia] will be required to read out loud … As Human Rights Watch reports, teachers [in Russia] will be required to read out loud a two-page text informing students that

Russia is currently undertaking “special a two-page text informing students that peacekeeping operation” in Ukraine… and Russia is currently undertaking “special that the Russian government is committed peacekeeping operation” in Ukraine… and to “peace” and “freedom,” and “is not going that the Russian government is committed to impose anything on anyone by force.” to “peace” and “freedom,” and “is not going to impose anything on anyone by force.” Countering that kind of disinformation is part of the fight for self-determination and democracy. Countering that kind of disinformation is part of the fight for self-determination and democracy. Amid the chaos and carnage of war, Ukrainian teachers have continued teaching their students in Amid the chaos and carnage of war, Ukrainian any way they can—in basements and subways as teachers have continued teaching their students in they seek refuge from bombings, using messaging any way they can—in basements and subways as apps like Telegram, and in refugee resettlement areas. they seek refuge from bombings, using messaging apps like Telegram, and in refugee resettlement areas. According to the United Nations, nearly every second since the atrocities began, a Ukrainian child has According to the United Nations, nearly every second become a refugee. The teachers union in Poland has since the atrocities began, a Ukrainian child has turned its conference center into a home for more become a refugee. The teachers union in Poland has than 100 Ukrainian orphans and unaccompanied turned its conference center into a home for more children and converted its offices into temporary than 100 Ukrainian orphans and unaccompanied residences for women and children. Teachers children and converted its offices into temporary in Poland, Germany, Romania and Slovakia are residences for women and children. Teachers preparing to integrate refugee children into their in Poland, Germany, Romania and Slovakia are preparing to integrate refugee children into their school systems, implementing a dual-language model used to educate students fleeing the war in Syria. school systems, implementing a dual-language model used to educate students fleeing the war in Syria. The AFT is raising funds to help resettle teachers and children displaced by the war in Ukraine. The The AFT is raising funds to help resettle teachers generosity of our members, many of whom are not and children displaced by the war in Ukraine. The paid a living wage, has been tremendous. Every generosity of our members, many of whom are not cent we raise will go directly to these refugee paid a living wage, has been tremendous. Every efforts. In addition, many AFT pension trustees are cent we raise will go directly to these refugee divesting pension funds from Russian investments. efforts. In addition, many AFT pension trustees are divesting pension funds from Russian investments. Much of the world is in turmoil—from COVID-19, to climate catastrophes, to humanitarian crises in Much of the world is in turmoil—from COVID-19, Afghanistan, Central America, Haiti, South Sudan, to climate catastrophes, to humanitarian crises in Yemen and elsewhere. As Ukrainian President Afghanistan, Central America, Haiti, South Sudan, Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in his address to the U.S. Yemen and elsewhere. As Ukrainian President Congress last week, we need new alliances to stop Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in his address to the U.S. conflicts and keep peace. World leaders must call Congress last week, we need new alliances to stop for an end to hostilities in Ukraine and other conflict conflicts and keep peace. World leaders must call zones, and they must work both to stabilize countries for an end to hostilities in Ukraine and other conflict so citizens are not forced to flee and to resettle zones, and they must work both to stabilize countries refugees whose only recourse is to leave their homes. so citizens are not forced to flee and to resettle refugees whose only recourse is to leave their homes. I think many Americans believe that the survival of our democracy is a given. But today democracy I think many Americans believe that the survival is imperiled not only in places like Ukraine, but by of our democracy is a given. But today democracy forces here that are working to limit voting rights, is imperiled not only in places like Ukraine, but by spread disinformation, manipulate the outcome forces here that are working to limit voting rights, of elections and prevent the peaceful transfer spread disinformation, manipulate the outcome of power after legitimate elections. Zelenskyy of elections and prevent the peaceful transfer reminded us that “democracy, independence and of power after legitimate elections. Zelenskyy freedom” are the foundation of the United States reminded us that “democracy, independence and and are not to be taken for granted. Defending freedom” are the foundation of the United States democracy is not something we can leave to others, and are not to be taken for granted. Defending as Ukraine’s freedom fighters are showing us. democracy is not something we can leave to others, as Ukraine’s freedom fighters are showing us.

Democracy, independence and freedom Democracy, independence and freedom are not to be taken for granted. are not to be taken for granted.

Photo: Michelle RinguettePhoto: Michelle Ringuette Weingarten in Kyiv’s Maidan Square in March 2014, after pro-democracy demonstrators were killed there. Weingarten in Kyiv’s Maidan Square in March 2014, after pro-democracy demonstrators were killed there.