The Progressive - December 2020/January 2021 by theprogressivemagazine

WE SHALL BE RELEASED: THE CALL FOR CRIMINAL JUSTICE REFORM

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December 2020 / January 2021

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JIM HIGHTOWER

Progressive in your estate plans, because the future relies on truth just as much as it relies on hope. My hope is that future readers will find a deeper understanding of the issues of the day from the thoughtful words on the pages of this magazine. Since Bob and Belle La Follette’s first edition in 1909 to the present-day publication with Bill Lueders and Norman Stockwell at the helm, The Progressive has remained an honest voice for peace, social justice, and the common good. Those are timeless virtues, and our bequests today will help ensure that the progressive voice will survive and thrive ten, twenty, and even 100 years from now.

We all want to leave the world a better place for those we care about. Since 1909, The Progressive has led the national dialogue on such critical subjects as women’s suffrage, civil rights, and LGBTQ+ rights. It has broken down barriers and torn back the curtain on political and corporate greed. The Progressive Inc. is a 501 (c) 3 nonprofit corporation. By making a planned gift, you not only give us enormous lasting support, but also perpetuate your wishes for peace and justice for generations to come. It’s easy to give a planned gift by naming The Progressive in your estate planning documents. For information, please contact our office at (608) 257-4626.

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CONTENTS

FEATURES

A Hunger for Justice Immigrant detainees are being punished for refusing to eat. RenĂŠe Feltz

Rebel Cops A look at the conscientious objectors of law enforcement. Gabbriel Schivone

34 Losing Your Health Care to COVID-19 The pandemic has forced workers off of employer-sponsored plans and into the unknown.

For Whom the Bell Curves Major U.S. companies routinely rely on racist personality tests to assess job applicants. David Lamb

Sharon Johnson

THE PROGRESSIVE | 3

18 The Graying of Mass Incarceration 46 Bad Leadership Drove Schools Prisons, ill-suited for providing health care, are facing an explosion of elderly inmates. Victoria Law

26 ‘Transformative Change’ Proves Elusive Police reform efforts falter in Minneapolis, yet hope persists. Sarah Lahm

32 My Students, the Police Eleanor J. Bader

38 Students on Strike

COVID-19 has sparked a new wave of activism. Lexi McMenamin

42 ONE QUESTION Q: How Have the Black Lives Matter Protests Impacted the Prison Abolition Movement? K Agbebiyi, Alex Vitale, Maya Schenwar

43 BOOK EXCERPT

Making Black Lives Matter at School The national movement has four key demands to eliminate racism in education.

into Crisis COVID-19 exposed how important teachers are to students and families—but politicians and policy leaders are still not listening to them. Jeff Bryant

52 Red Alert

A wolf recovery program’s failure shows how the Fish and Wildlife Service has lost its way. Stephen Nash

56 INTERVIEW ‘It’s Not a Sprint, It’s a Marathon’ Kevin Alexander Gray on the importance of organizing between elections.

PUBLISHER Norman Stockwell EDITOR Bill Lueders WEB EDITOR & AUDIENCE ENGAGEMENT COORDINATOR Kassidy Tarala ASSOCIATE EDITOR Emilio Leanza

DEVELOPMENT DIRECTOR Daniel K. Libby OFFICE MANAGER Elizabeth D. Miller POETRY EDITOR Jules Gibbs PROOFREADERS Diana Cook Catherine Cronin

EDITOR-AT-LARGE Ruth Conniff

EDITORIAL INTERNS Nuha Dolby Molly Liebergall

ART DIRECTOR Kerstin Vogdes Diehn

PUBLISHING INTERN Elise Goldstein

Jan Miyasaki

58 BOOKS

Favorite Books of 2020 Ruth Conniff, Mike Ervin, Jules Gibbs, Maeve Higgins, Emilio Leanza, Bill Lueders, John Nichols, Ed Rampell, Norman Stockwell, Kassidy Tarala, and Dave Zirin

The Progressive tackles the forces distorting our economy, corrupting our democracy, and imperiling our planet, and champions peace, civil liberties, equality, and justice.

This issue of The Progressive, Volume 84, Number 6, went to press on Nov. 18, 2020.

Jesse Hagopian

DEPARTMENTS

EDITOR’S NOTE Carrying the Torch 6 COMMENT 5

The Damage Done, the Job Ahead Bill Lueders

8 ON THE LINE

10 NO COMMENT LETTERS 11 12 BLAST FROM THE PAST 17 SMOKING GUN

American Carnage: An Index

Armed and Dangerous Zach D. Roberts

VOICES

13 SMART ASS CRIPPLE

Madison Cawthorn Is Not My Wheelchair Brother Mike Ervin

15 MIDDLE AMERICA

68 EDGE OF SPORTS

The Sound of Silence Dave Zirin

69 POEMS

A Bridge to a New Era

Saving It Is This Real

Ruth Conniff

Alicia Ostriker

66 HEMMING AND HAWING

Our Exceptionally Unexceptional Future Negin Farsad

67 MAEVE IN AMERICA How We Can Do Better Maeve Higgins

70 VOX POPULIST

After the Election, a Note of Hope Jim Hightower

Editorial correspondence should be addressed to The Progressive, 30 West Mifflin Street, Suite 703, Madison, WI 53703, or editorial@progressive.org. Subscription rates: U.S. - One year $29.70; Canadian - One year $40; Foreign - One year $45. Libraries and institutions - One year (Domestic) $50; (Canadian) $65; (Foreign) $98. Send all subscription orders and correspondence to: The Progressive, P.O. Box 392, Oregon, IL 61061. For problems with subscriptions, call toll-free 1 (800) 827-0555. The Progressive is published bimonthly with combined issues in February/March, April/May, June/July, August/September, October/November, December/January. Copyright © 2020 by The Progressive Inc., 30 West Mifflin Street, Suite 703, Madison, WI 53703. Telephone: (608) 257-4626. Publication number (ISSN 0033-0736). Periodicals postage paid at Madison, WI, and additional mailing offices. Printed in the U.S.A. Donations: The Progressive survives on donations from readers. Contributions are tax-deductible when you itemize. Mail checks to The Progressive, 30 West Mifflin Street, Suite 703, Madison, WI 53703 or visit www.progressive.org/donate. Postmaster: Send address changes to: The Progressive, 30 West Mifflin Street, Suite 703, Madison, WI 53703.

www.progressive.org 4 | DECEMBER 2020 / JANUARY 2021

EDITOR’S NOTE

CARRYING THE TORCH

simple truth of magazine publishing is that it does not decision of her college students to choose careers as cops. And take place, like so much else, at the speed of light. There Gabbriel Schivone looks at how rebels can emerge within the is a lag, especially for monthly and bimonthly periodi- ranks of law enforcement. See also our investigative report, by Minnesota writer David cals, between when an issue goes to press and when it arrives Lamb, on the use of personality tests by major companies to in subscribers’ mailboxes. That’s true even when the President’s appointee to the Postal Service isn’t trying to slow things down. make hiring decisions—tests which may be serving to screen This lag is actually one of the neat things about magazines. It out the same racial groups these businesses claim they are trying forces us to focus on the bigger picture and not merely the latest to attract. Sharon Johnson examines the plight of the millions of Americans who have thing that’s happened in lost employer-based the news. That’s a welhealth coverage due to come respite from the COVID-19. And Stebreakneck pace foisted phen Nash explores the on the national conU.S. Fish and Wildlife sciousness by a presidenService’s sorry failure to tial administration that protect the red wolf. seems intent on causing Finally, we go to a crisis a day, sometimes school, with pieces by more. Lexi McMenamin on a As this issue of The new brand of campus Progressive goes to press activism, school reon November 18, the former Jesse Hagopian presidential election is on how the Black Lives all over but the shoutMatter movement can ing, but there is plenty help propel real change of that. By the time subin schools, and Jeff Bryscribers read this, the From left: “Fighting Bob” La Follette, Kerstin Vogdes Diehn, Bill Lueders, Daniel Libby, Emilio ant, the lead fellow of defeated Donald Trump Leanza, Norman Stockwell, Kassidy Tarala, and Elizabeth Miller in a virtual gathering with the aid of The Progressive’s Public might have fired his en- computer software. (For information on how to get your own Progressive face mask, see page 71.) School Shakedown projtire administration, directed his followers to erupt in violence, and begun bombing ect, on the nation’s bungled response to COVID-19 in schools. Two honorable mentions: On October 26, writer James Goodthe blue states. Or he might have graciously conceded, congratulated the winners, and set out to ensure a smooth transition. man received the 2019 David Nyhan Prize for Political Journalism from the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy Just kidding about that last one. The prior issue of The Progressive was devoted to documenting at the Harvard Kennedy School, largely for his work in recent the sorry record of the Trump Administration on everything years covering immigration for The Progressive. The well-attendfrom foreign policy to the environment to the rule of law. It was ed virtual event, which can be viewed at shorensteincenter.org/ an appropriately depressing picture, in advance of the possibility david-nyhan-prize-for-political-journalism-webinar, was hosted that Trump might get four more years. This issue, in contrast, by Shorenstein Center Director Nancy Gibbs, the former ediseeks the light at the end of the tunnel—a new era of opportunity tor-in-chief of Time magazine. And “A Letter to My Niece” by Ariel Felton, which we proudly for progressives. presented in February 2019, was listed as a notable essay in the One focus is the reform of the criminal justice system. (The key word in this phrase, remember, is not “justice” or even just-published book The Best American Essays 2020. These are proud moments for The Progressive and its staff, re“criminal,” but “system.”) Victoria Law writes about the aging of the nation’s prison population, and the chance it creates to minding us of the torch we are called on to carry into the future. show mercy and common sense. Renée Feltz reports on the desperate use of hunger strikes by immigration detainees, and the punishment it outrageously occasions. Sarah Lahm examBill Lueders ines how and why hopes have waned for fundamental changes Editor in policing in Minneapolis. Eleanor Bader wrestles with the THE PROGRESSIVE | 5

COMMENT by BILL LUEDERS

THE DAMAGE DONE, THE JOB AHEAD

he damage done by Donald Trump will not end with his presidency. It will take years, perhaps generations, to flush out the toxins he has injected into the body politic. No, the soon-to-be-ex-President did not invent racism, xenophobia, demagoguery, or disdain for truth. But he elevated these in the national consciousness, to a level his followers will seek to sustain—if for no other reason than to affirm Trump’s perverse legacy. Trump has used racism as a tool to gain political advantage. He responded to police brutality by egging it on. He not only denied the existential threat of climate change but seemed intent on making it worse. He handled the COVID-19 pandemic by mocking mask-wearing, rebuffing experts, and hosting superspreader rallies estimated to have infected more than 30,000 people, killing more than 700 of them. His response to losing an election has been to proclaim it illegitimate, as he vowed to do if the result displeased him. Trump did not lose the election because a cabal of his enemies committed massive electoral theft. He lost because Joe Biden and Kamala Harris received the most votes and won the Electoral College. Sheesh. Yes, it’s dispiriting to see how close Trump came, drawing more than seventy million votes. Some 80 percent of the nation’s substantial white evangelical population support this known adulterer, serial sexual predator, and foul-mouthed faux-Christian. The President has disparaged broad swaths of the public—people who serve in the military, Gold Star families, immigrants, people with disabilities, Muslims, and the media. He called Harris, now the nation’s Vice President-elect, a “monster.” He has fired those who refuse to abide by his delusions—including, just after the election, Defense Secretary Mark Esper—and used his office to punish his enemies and enrich himself and his grifter family. Trump accused the doctors and nurses working heroically to save COVID-19 patients of fabricating death counts for money. He shunted aside experts including Dr. Anthony Fauci and centered his response to the pandemic on the advice of Scott Atlas, a crackpot Fox News squawker who thinks everyone in the country should contract the virus. He riled maskless acolytes into chants of “Fire Fauci!” His former adviser Steve Bannon called for the severed heads of Fauci and FBI Director Christopher Wray to be hoisted on pikes outside the White House—a threat Bannon’s 6 | DECEMBER 2020 / JANUARY 2021

own lawyer took seriously enough to drop him as a client. (Bannon is currently facing felony charges for stealing from the President’s supporters.) Perhaps worst of all, Trump has impugned the nation’s poll workers, ballot counters, and election supervisors—people who risked their health to dutifully record the votes of their fellow citizens—as being part of a grand conspiracy to deny him a second term. It is an accusation as despicable as Trump himself. And while it is likely that the absence of evidence will doom Trump’s chances of subverting the elec-

There is no reason to believe that Biden can unite the country around a common agenda. He will be met with opposition and obstruction at every turn. tion result, there is no reason to be optimistic that the Republican Party will become less cultish and corrupt. Its members have continually enabled and encouraged Trump. They stole two Supreme Court seats. They suppressed votes and used redistricting as a weapon. They will make sure that Biden is met with opposition and obstruction at every turn, no matter who “controls” the Senate after the two Georgia runoff elections on January 5. Expect Trump to keep lying from the sidelines, and for his followers to stand by him. The most un-American President in American history will not put the country or anything else above his own raging narcissism. What author Thomas Frank has called “the crassest, vainest, stupidest, most dysfunctional leadership this country has ever suffered” cannot be wiped away with a sufficient number of Electoral College votes.

et none of this means that Biden cannot achieve some successes or that the cause of building a more progressive nation cannot be advanced. It will be hard, but it can be done. Biden will always be a centrist, not a firebrand. While that’s a welcome change from Trump in terms of temperament, what the nation needs now is bold and forceful leadership. Biden likely will take decisive steps to reverse Trump’s actions that have harmed the environment and undermined the country’s national security. He can rejoin the Paris Climate Agreement, revive the nuclear deal with Iran, restore the nation’s

Bill Lueders is editor of The Progressive.

membership in the World Health Organization, stop to be a new national Voting Rights Act to protect the pointless punishment of Cuba, and end the United the ability of every citizen to vote and to have that States’ murderous complicity in the war in Yemen. He vote count. No party or state should be able to make can roll back attacks on LGBTQ+ rights and explore voting harder for political gain. reparations for Black Americans. Address climate change. No, really: We have dawBut other challenges will prove more daunting. The dled long enough, putting the planet in peril. Now we people who elected Biden must now work just as hard must work at breakneck speed to contain the damage. to push him in the right—make that left—direction. The impacts from our heedlessness will still be severe, This will allow real progress on health care, racial jusbut they can be survivable. This is an all-hands-ontice, policing, and economic fairness. deck situation that requires strong leadership and a Progressives should set specific expectations for spirit of global cooperation. And yes, that will be as the new administration. Here are some of them: hard as it sounds. Reclaim the ability to lead: Republicans have shown Reform the criminal justice system: The United no compunction about changing the rules to benefit States continues to have the world’s highest rate of themselves. They have used redistricting and voter incarceration, for which it pays enormous finansuppression to create an unlevel playing field; the cial and human costs. During the campaign, both Democrats should tilt it back. Yes, do away with the Trump and Biden broke from the once-bipartisan filibuster, especially in such a closely divided Senate. consensus that the more Americans we lock up, the Yes, let Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico have vot- better. Biden rued his support of a 1994 crime bill ing representation in Congress. Yes, add seats to the that spiked incarceration, and Trump crowed about Supreme Court. Be fair about it: Put these ideas to the baby steps he’s taken toward reform. It’s time for voters as referendums, debate the merits, and abide some big steps. by the results. Defund the police: Joe Biden won’t say it, but we No pardons for Trump: As Bill Blum detailed in The will. Too much money is being poured into policProgressive’s last issue, the most corrupt President in ing, and not nearly enough into community-based U.S. history faces a slew of potential criminal charges violence prevention and conflict resolution. Let’s refor everything from tax fraud to obstruction of jus- allocate funding from one bucket to the other. Cops tice to campaign finance violations serious enough are ill-suited to be first-responders when people are to send his personal lawyer to prison. Biden will in mental health crises. They should be trained to be urged to pardon his predecessor, as Ford did for de-escalate situations, not open fire every time they Nixon. The pressure from the other side must be feel scared. There needs to be better screening of pogreater. Trump, the Divider-in-Chief, should not be tential cops, and consequences for those who abuse able to escape justice on the grounds that it would the public’s trust. be “divisive.” Charge him, try him, and, if convicted, Protect reproductive rights: There is no reason to lock him up. believe that Roe v. Wade will withstand the enmity of End the Electoral College: This accommodation to the extremists who now dominate the U.S. Supreme slavery has diminished our system of governance Court, thanks to Trump’s three horrid picks. And long enough. It’s time for the United States to pass a securing protections for reproductive choice on a Constitutional Amendment to establish the principle state-by-state basis would be a nightmarish pursuit. of one person, one vote. There are other avenues (Only thirteen states and the District of Columbia worth considering, such as the National Popular Vote currently have laws affirming a legal right to aborInterstate Compact, in which a sufficient number tion.) What’s needed, as Biden has noted, is federal of states agree to cast all of their electoral college legislation. And it ought to come soon, before the votes for whichever presidential candidate wins the Court revisits this area of “settled law.” overall popular vote. But it would be best to fix the The election of Joe Biden as President will not put Constitution itself. an end to the spiteful intransigence of Republicans or Ensure the right to vote: The current election leaves the wishy-washy acquiescence of many Democrats. no doubt that shameless politicians will continue to A loud, proud, sustained, united front of progressive use partisan redistricting and voter suppression to advocacy is needed to help bend the arc of the nation’s hold onto, and increase, their power. There needs moral trajectory toward justice. ◆ THE PROGRESSIVE | 7

ON THE LINE by ZACH D. ROBERTS

ARMED AND DANGEROUS America was built on armed protest—it is how the nation was founded. I’ve covered protests in America for the last twenty years. But it wasn’t until 2017, in Charlottesville, Virginia, that I saw men with guns take to the streets. It blew me away. Since then, thanks to President Donald Trump’s rhetoric, I’ve watched the armed and emboldened masses of Boogaloo Bois, Proud Boys, and other far-right militias march unmasked past police who give them fist bumps and support. Leftist activists, by contrast, usually arrive unarmed. And they’re met with police violence: pepper spray, tear gas, and rubber bullets.

Boogaloo Bois, Proud Boys, and Trump supporters gather for an anti-mask rally on the lawn of the state capitol in Columbus, Ohio, on July 18, 2020.

An armed man, with the image of the comic book character The Punisher painted on his face, joins the Columbus rally.

8 | DECEMBER 2020 / JANUARY 2021

When a fake Facebook event claimed “Antifa” planned to tear down statues in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, militia members from around the country descended on the historic town to “guard” its monuments on July 4, 2020.

A protester walks away from police after being pelted with tear gas and rubber bullets following a George Floyd rally in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on May 30, 2020.

A member of the American Indian Community Development Corporation in Minneapolis stands guard outside of buildings, following rumors that farright groups were destroying property during the George Floyd protests, on May 31, 2020.

Police use pepper spray on protesters outside of the Public Safety Building in Rochester, New York, after information on the police killing of Daniel Prude was released on September 3, 2020.

Anti-fascist members of leftwing gun groups such as Redneck Revolt and the John Brown Gun Club rally in response to a planned Ku Klux Klan rally in Stone Mountain, Georgia, on February 2, 2019.

Zach D. Roberts is a photo/video journalist whose work has been featured in The Guardian, The New York Times, The Nation, and elsewhere. He frequently covers social movements, corporate crime, and white extremism.

THE PROGRESSIVE | 9

NO COMMENT

Their Best, Their Brightest

Lawyers defending the Illinois teen charged with shooting three protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin (killing two of them), are portraying their client as a national hero. “Kyle Rittenhouse will go down in American history” with other patriots, tweeted one of his attorneys, adding “A Second American Revolution against Tyranny has begun.” In a television appearance, the attorneys called Rittenhouse a “shining symbol of the American fighting spirit.”

It’s a Birdbrain, It’s a Plain Idiot, It’s Donald Trump!

President Donald Trump repeatedly proposed to staff that, on leaving Walter Reed military hospital where he received treatment after contracting COVID-19, he wanted to rip open his button-down dress shirt to reveal a Superman T-shirt. Reported The New York Times, “He ultimately did not go ahead with the stunt.”

In Other Words, He’s Lying

A federal judge threw out a defamation lawsuit against Fox News host Tucker Carlson, accepting the network’s defense that “no reasonable viewer” would take what he says seriously. “This ‘general tenor’ of the show,” the judge agreed, should “inform a viewer that [Carlson] is not ‘stating actual facts’ about the topics he discusses and is instead engaging in ‘exaggeration’ and ‘non-literal commentary.’ ”

Wonder No More

Hailed by President Trump as “the eighth wonder of the world,” a heavily subsidized Wisconsin production plant owned by the Taiwanese electronics giant Foxconn was supposed to create up to 13,000 jobs. In fact, through the end of 2019, the plant had hired just 281 people, who, according to a report by The Verge, served merely to secure tax credits and “sat in their cubicles watching Netflix.” And many of these workers “have since been laid off.”

The Right to Prohibit Marriage

Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito kicked off the U.S. Supreme Court’s current term by complaining in a filing that a narrow court majority in 2015 had wrongly “read a right to same-sex marriage into the Fourteenth Amendment.” They said this ruling “enables courts and governments to brand religious adherents who believe that marriage is between one man and one woman as bigots, making their religious liberty concerns that much easier to dismiss.”

To Serve and Protect

Florida police arrested a seventy-four-year-old dementia patient after she wandered from her nursing home. They locked her up in jail for a week on a warrant issued a decade earlier because she failed to take a two-hour online course required as part of a DUI conviction. The woman, Gwen Donahue, had paid fines and performed community service associated with the case. “My mom has no priors, she’s just this little old Catholic lady,” said her daughter.

ILLUSTRATIONS BY STUART GOLDENBERG

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LETTERS

Thoroughly Disgusted, and Still Supportive On receiving your October/November 2020 issue, I felt thoroughly disgusted by your focus on Trump’s sociopathic actions over the past four years. I, for one, don’t need a literature review of what he’s done to destroy our democracy. Like other journalists, you’ve been sucked into promoting and advertising his brand. I can’t even stand to look at his face that you plastered all over your front cover! So I refuse to read this issue’s main articles. I’m already angry and depressed enough. Nevertheless, I am donating to The Progressive to help keep you alive. —Jeanne Klein Lawrence, Kansas The ugliest, most disheartening cover in my fifty-seven-year history of reading The Progressive. When my print copy arrived, I frantically folded the cover back so no one else would have to see it. Was that a trick to make us open the issue without delay? Surely you could have found more enabling images to bolster our electioneering efforts? —Chip Sharpe Bayside, California

Cut the nonsense

Thanks, John Cusack

Nancy Churchill’s letter in the October/ November issue plays right into Trump’s narrative of the “looney left.” She says white supremacists may have infiltrated demonstrations to “inflict widespread damage . . . in order to give the protests a bad name.” The Black looters in downtown Chicago and New York were white supremacists? You aren’t helpful to our credibility when you print nonsense like that. Reflect back, if Trump wins again. —John Wiegardt Warner Creek Correctional Facility Lakeview, Oregon

I followed John Cusack on Twitter, until they suspended me for my outspoken disdain for Trump. I admired his fearless conviction against Trump, calling him out for what he is—a con, a thug, a liar, a sociopath, and yes, a gangster. He has echoed my very words at times. I am not a celebrity, so my voice doesn’t carry weight, but that doesn’t mean that I will not shout my disdain for this travesty of a President from the rooftops at every opportunity. —Kathleen Andrade Santa Barbara, California

Oceans Away Carbonic acid from runaway CO2 in the atmosphere is driving down ocean pH. Ocean acidity is up around 30 percent since 1751. This will not end well. It will end with an ocean hypoxic event or even a repeat of the end-Permian Mass Extinction. Ocean dead zones, which are increasing in size, already emit poisonous hydrogen sulfide gas. This is an add-on to rising sea levels. —Erik Westgard St. Paul, Minnesota

Correction: In the Editor’s Note in our last issue, the staff photo did not exactly match the provided caption; the correct masked-photo arrangement for the last issue’s caption appears in this issue.

We want to hear from you. Write to us at editorial@progressive.org or 30 West Mifflin Street, Suite 703, Madison, WI 53703, or speak to us online at: ! theprogressivemagazine " TheProgressive www.progressive.org

The October/November issue of The Progressive was the most difficult and saddest read I have experienced in the many years I have subscribed to your wonderful magazine. Not because of the content and analysis—which was, as usual, spot on, informative, and helpful—but rather because so little of what you published is also being said by the Democrtatic Party. Bravo to Jim Hightower (“The Better Part of Patriotism”), who offers a wonderful way to reclaim my ideals for this country. We live in a time that is difficult for one’s spirit. Whatever the outcome of this election, the times will remain hard for those of us with a passion for progressive ideals. I hope your magazine will work to serve ways of helping to heal our spirits. —Michael S. Glaser St. Mary’s City, Maryland THE PROGRESSIVE | 11

B LAST F R O M T H E PAST

A NEW PRESIDENT An editorial in the December 1960 issue of The Progressive set an agenda for the nation’s newly elected President, John F. Kennedy. Here’s a taste:

he next four months will answer some of the questions and resolve at least a few of the doubts of those who voted for Senator John F. Kennedy with hopeful hearts and troubled minds. It will take much longer than that, of course, to form a considered judgment about the Kennedy Administration. But there will be helpful clues during the next thirty days when he makes his major appointments, and thereafter during the first 100 days of his administration when, by his own judgment, he must, for the rest of the long road, chart the course and set the style of his presidency. The pressures from the far-right and the cautious moderates are tremendous. They are contending that the extraordinary closeness of the outcome robs President-elect Kennedy of a progressive mandate and demands of him the formation of something called a “national government” which would freeze the status quo for the next four years.

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We can conceive of no greater rejection of the platform on which he ran than for Kennedy to succumb to this kind of humbug, and we feel reasonably confident he won’t. The heart of his victorious appeal to the electorate was that we must “move ahead” toward progressive goals. His is now the power to lead in that direction, however slim the margin of victory, and it would be a bitter betrayal of the very forces in America that did elect him if he should be conned into believing and acting on the notion that the nearly 50 percent who voted for his opponent were opposed to the liberal program on which Kennedy staked his candidacy.

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SMART ASS CRIPPLE by MIKE ERVIN

MADISON CAWTHORN IS NOT MY WHEELCHAIR BROTHER

MIKE ERVIN, a writer and disability rights activist in Chicago, writes the blog Smart Ass Cripple at smartasscripple .blogspot.com and writes regularly at Progressive.org.

should be ecstatic, but instead I image and agenda to Congress, it Cawthorn portrays himself as feel cheated. would be better for disabled folks the antidote for what he sees as On Election Day, the voters if he wasn’t there at all. the poisonous political agenda of North Carolina’s Eleventh ConCawthorn is so obsessed with of legislators like Ocasio-Cortez. gressional District elected Madi- Congresswoman Alexandria Oc- “She’s definitely the vanguard for son Cawthorn to the U.S. House asio-Cortez that it makes me her party right now,” he said in an of Representatives. Cawthorn, like wonder if there was a girl in his interview, “and that’s something me, is a guy in a wheelchair. And high school who looked like her I want to be for the Republican he’s only twenty-five years old, but wouldn’t give him the time of Party.” which will make him the youngest day. He has often attacked her and member of Congress! three other progressive women in s some readers may recall, Cawthorn will get a lot of at- Congress, sometimes collectively Cawthorn was a featured tention because he’s young and known as The Squad. On his cam- speaker at the Republican Nationhandsome and in a wheelchair. paign website, he says, “I decided al Convention in August. Now I He’s a good orator, too. That’s why I to run for Congress because I don’t readily admit that I didn’t watch a should be ecstatic. I should be cel- want to raise a family in a country nanosecond of that convention as ebrating Cawthorn’s rise it unfolded. I love you to as a major breakthrough death, dear readers, and for disabled folks. Here’s I will do just about anya new voice in Congress thing for you. I’ll swalto speak for us. And he low swords and wrestle knows what it’s like to alligators if it pleases navigate through life in you. But I have to draw a wheelchair because he’s the line somewhere. If been doing it every day you want to know what for several years. diabolical things went But the Eleventh Dison there, you’ll have to trict used to be representask someone else. Please ed by Mark Meadows, Photo of Madison Cawthorn from his Congressional campaign. forgive me. who gave up his seat to But fortunately (or become the latest chief of staff for run by leftwing socialists. We need maybe not), we live in an era the squatter currently still occu- leaders who will stand up and fight where videos are available on the pying the White House. It stands AOC, The Squad, and the radical Internet. So I have watched Cawto reason that his successor would left-wing mob.” thorn’s RNC speech several times, have to be as much of an over-the“My generation,” Cawthorn without having to sit through any top reactionary as he is. And that continues, “is looking for results of the rest of the cavalcade of evil describes Cawthorn all the way. socialism can’t provide. Socialism clowns. His campaign website declares, only produces shared misery.” In In this speech, Cawthorn talk“I’m ready to take on the liberals his victory speech on election ed about the terrible car accident in Congress.” night, Cawthorn said, “The days in which he was involved at the So a moment in history that of AOC and the far left mislead- age of eighteen that made him a should make me buoyant with ing the next generation of Amer- paraplegic. He said he was given a hope and elation has me filled with icans are numbered. Tonight, the 1 percent chance of survival. His dread. Damnit! I really wish I could voters of western North Carolina first public outing in a wheelchair, root for Cawthorn. But as much as I chose to stand for freedom and a he said, was to a professional basewant to be in his corner, I just can’t. new generation of leadership in ball game: “Before my accident I If Cawthorn carries his campaign Washington.” was six-foot-three. I stood out in

THE PROGRESSIVE | 13

SMART ASS CRIPPLE by MIKE ERVIN

a crowd. But as I wheeled through be considered to be health-care communities loved us. It takes way the stadium, I felt invisible.” services administered to me every more than that. A lot of us would Cawthorn likes to portray him- day by the members of my pit probably end up in nursing homes. self as a “fighter.” But for what and crew. That’s what I call the people And Medicaid would still have to whom will he fight? I’ve hired to assist me in my home. pay for that. In an appearance on the Fox What they do for me isn’t skilled But isn’t all this the socialism Business channel, Cawthorn nursing care or anything like that, that Cawthorn so fervently desaid he wants to be the “face” of but it is nonetheless essential to my cries? In his Republican convenhealth-care reform for the GOP. well-being. tion speech, he said, “Republicans, “One of the biggest failings of the They help me get dressed, get Republican Party for the past few in and out of bed, take a shower, If Cawthorn carries his campaign image decades is just that we have not and so on. And their services don’t and agenda to Congress, it would be had a real plan when it comes to cost me anything, except for some health care,” he said, adding that of my tax dollars, because their better for disabled folks that he wasn’t his vision for equitable access to wages and this program are paid there at all. health care amounts to “utilizing for by Medicaid and other public the free market and opening up funds. Private insurance never has under President Trump’s leadercompetition.” and never will offer a product that ship, want to rebuild, restore, and Cawthorn’s campaign website provides me with that amount of renew . . . . Join us as we, the party proclaims, “The problem is not indispensable assistance, especially of freedom, double down on enthat the free market has failed in for free. There’s no money in it for suring the American dream for all health care. The problem is that it them and that’s the only reason people.” has never really been tried.” the industry does anything. When But over the last four years, ReAnd so I picture young Con- I look to the private, for-profit publicans (and in particular the gressman Cawthorn shilling for market for this kind of help, that’s squatter) have repeatedly tried to the greedy health-insurance indus- when I feel invisible. eviscerate Medicaid. They’ve failed try by spewing the absurd notion largely because disability activists that health insurers are champing n his GOP convention speech, have screamed bloody murder at the bit to design packages that Cawthorn said he recovered from about it. cover the many medical expenses his accident, “thanks to the power So what happens when the Reof people with disabilities for a low of prayer, a very loving community, publicans go after Medicaid again, monthly premium, if only given and many skilled doctors.” But he which they surely will do, no matthe chance. I fear that because he didn’t say anything about health ter who’s in charge? They’ll probasits in a wheelchair, it will give him insurance. bly try to play the same game they a false credibility as an expert who I’m glad Cawthorn was able to play when they trot out someone has heavily consumed health-care bounce back. But I’m guessing he like Ben Carson to prove they’re services. must’ve been fortunate enough to not the least bit racist. It’s a strange This makes me feel an urgent have some mighty good coverage game of racial rummy, where one obligation to not only refuse to to pay for his expensive rehabilita- Ben Carson is supposed to trump embrace Cawthorn as a wheel- tion. Because if he didn’t, he would a thousand Black Lives Matter chair brother but to make it clear, have had to turn to Medicaid for voices. The rules are permanently as loudly as I can, that he doesn’t help, like millions of disabled rigged in favor of the dealer. speak for me. Americans. No doubt Republican leaders One of the harshest truths my Without Medicaid to pay for will try to prevail upon Cawthorn disability experience has taught people like my pit crew, so many to play the same role. When other me is that the almighty free market disabled people who rely on others disabled people are raising hell, usually doesn’t give a flying crap to assist us in our homes would be will Cawthorn roll out and be the about ensuring my well-being. En- stranded. We wouldn’t be able to benevolent face of cutting the hell suring my well-being cuts too deep get in and out of bed every day, no out of Medicaid? into its profits. Having a disability matter how hard we prayed or how If so, having him in Congress is too expensive. many skilled doctors were around will only make things worse for For example, I have what might us or how much the people in our disabled people. ◆

14 | DECEMBER 2020 / JANUARY 2021

MIDDLE AMERICA by RUTH CONNIFF

A BRIDGE TO A NEW ERA

e were in the back- delivered her acceptance speech as oe Biden bills himself as a “tranyard with our teenage the first woman and first person of sitional figure”—a bridge to a girls, enjoying one last color elected Vice President of the new era, as America puts Trumpwarm, socially distanced evening United States. ism behind us. with friends who also have teenage During the campaign, the How this will unfold is still undaughters, when Joe Biden deliv- Biden ticket did not go long on clear. Days after every major news ered his victory speech. All the inspiration. Partly it was the fault outlet declared Biden the winner, RUTH CONNIFF major news networks had already of the pandemic, which prevent- Trump was still clinging to the is editor-at-large declared Biden and his running ed rock-concert-style stadium bedpost. “Wisconsin is looking for The Progressive mate, Kamala Harris, the winners. rallies (except for Trump, who very good,” he tweeted, alluding and editor-inWe tuned in just as Harris strode reveled in these superspreader to his plans to demand a recount chief of the state onto the stage in suffragette white, events). Partly, it was the candi- in the state, even though prominews website to the strains of Mary J. Blige sing- date at the top of the ticket, the nent Republicans, including his the Wisconsin ing about being a beautiful queen. oldest man ever elected President Wisconsin campaign chair, former Examiner. Suddenly, unexpectedly, I had of the United States, who, with Governor Scott Walker, had adtears in my eyes. his halting style, sprinkled with mitted Trump will never overcome It’s been a long four years of “by-the-ways” and “here’s-the- Biden’s 20,000-vote lead. “Needs the misogynist, white supremacist deals,” was no Barack Obama. a little time statutorily,” Trump Trump Administration—which Biden’s denunciation of progres- tweeted. “Will happen soon!” began with chants of “lock her up” sive policies toward the end of Then he promised to hold anand moved on to embracing vio- the campaign was downright dis- other superspreader rally in Wislent white nationalists, supporting couraging—a bewildering effort consin. to depress his own base. Shamefully, Republican leaders Harris is no progressive icon at both the state and national level Attacking democracy and increasing the either—despite Trump’s efforts to allowed Trump to continue spinspread of COVID-19 and its mounting portray her as a dangerous social- ning out his fantasy, supporting death toll are now the two key elements of ist. She’s a career prosecutor and him as he ignored reality, refused a center-left Democrat. But as to concede, and cast doubt on the the Republican brand. the race was finally called, Harris entire U.S. elections process, purpolice officers who kill Black peo- brought back the goosebumps and suing frivolous lawsuits and tryple with impunity, and torturing the sense that this election is truly ing to erode the legitimacy of his immigrant children torn from historic. successor. their parents at the border. The symbolism is important, Attacking democracy and inFinally, we’ve made it to the especially after the rightwing back- creasing the spread of COVID-19 other side—to a vision of America lash of the Trump era. And so is and its mounting death toll are that includes powerful women and the sensibility of a Vice President now the two key elements of the people of color, that looks to the who talks about the lessons in so- Republican brand. future instead of wallowing in the cial justice she learned from her What about the Democrats? wounded sense of entitlement of immigrant parents, who embrac- Biden addressed the nation on the those who long for the imaginary es her Black and Indian American Monday morning after being de“greatness” of the past, when racist identities, and who made the Unit- clared the winner. He announced and misogynistic hierarchies were ed States’ scandalously high rate of his coronavirus task force of docstrictly enforced. Black maternal mortality a central tors and scientists, and urged Acknowledging “the genera- issue in her presidential primary Americans to put aside their diftions of women—Black women, campaign. ferences and put on their masks. Asian, white, Latina, Native AmerAs they watched Harris’s his“It doesn’t matter who you voted ican women—who throughout our toric acceptance speech, my kids for,” he said. “We are Americans nation’s history have paved the way were already talking about an and our country is under threat.” for this moment tonight,” Harris AOC presidency. It’s a reasonable position. And THE PROGRESSIVE | 15

MIDDLE AMERICA by RUTH CONNIFF

just clawing back a country that targeted ad from the Biden camhonors democratic processes and paign promising that the candidate observes basic public-health mea- would not ban fracking. Wrong sures will be a major step forward. number. But Biden has not addressed Disaffected rural voters did not the problems that led America to appear to be very moved, either. In elect Donald Trump in the first a prescient column on his new site, place. The Trump vote in 2016 was The Daily Poster, David Sirota, the a backlash by white people who investigative reporter who left his feel themselves losing their grip job to work for the Bernie Sandon security and power. Besides ers presidential primary campaign, an indicator of straight-up racism, wrote about his, and our, collecand a reaction against the nation’s tive panic attack as Election Day first African American president, dawned. it was a massive vote of no-confiNo matter what happens, dence in the system that has, over Sirota wrote, progressives will be the last forty years, given us grow- blamed. If Biden loses, Sirota preing economic inequality, spiraling dicted, Democrats will say he went college debt, a shrinking middle too far to the left, alienating swing class, and a tenuous gig economy voters. If he wins, “we will be told that leaves more and more workers that he won because he refused to desperately insecure. fully embrace a progressive ecoIn his re-election, Trump nomic agenda.” specifically campaigned against Democrats whom he blamed for hat was, in fact, exactly the NAFTA-related job losses and for analysis that emerged after the suffering of blue-collar workers the election, as centrist Democrats and farmers. That message reso- blamed progressives, Black Lives nated, but the Biden campaign did Matter protesters, and Alexandria not take on that suffering directly. Ocasio-Cortez for Democratic Instead, Biden acted as though all losses in the House of Represenof the nation’s problems started tatives. with Trump. The Democrats ran a It’s a silly analysis, since centrist back-to-the-future candidate who Democrats lost and Republicans represented the old establishment, painted all Democrats, from Biden and who argued for a return to the on down, as socialists, regardless pre-Trump era. of what positions they actually Biden seemed to think he took. could peel off Republican votes Meanwhile, nationwide, the by making gratuitous swipes at public is generally more progresBernie Sanders and his passion- sive than Biden on fracking, health ate, youthful supporters and by care, and taxing the rich. And, unpromising wealthy donors that he less the Democrats can figure out wouldn’t get too crazy in tackling a robust response to the rightwing income inequality. He declared populism of Trump, the Biden that “no one’s standard of living transition won’t take us very far. will change, nothing will fundaAs Ocasio-Cortez pointed out mentally change,” in a Biden pres- after the election in The New York idency. He repeatedly reminded Times, progressive House memvoters that he did not favor Medi- bers hung onto their seats in 2020, care for All. and “every single candidate that In my Facebook feed, I got a co-sponsored Medicare for All in

16 | DECEMBER 2020 / JANUARY 2021

a swing district kept their seat.” She added: “I need my colleagues to understand that we are not the enemy. And that their base is not the enemy. That the Movement for Black Lives is not the enemy, that Medicare for All is not the enemy.” We need a Biden Administration that stands up for the broad majority of Americans who believe in democracy and fairness, in science and public health, in diversity and equal opportunity, and in a shared sense of reality instead of a cult of personality based on denial and hate. Biden shows signs that he could help us get there. But it is going to take tremendous pressure from the pro-democracy, civil rights, reproductive rights, LGBTQ+ rights, and environmental justice groups that have fought so hard to overcome the dark era of Donald Trump to carve out a better future. “It’s time to put away the harsh rhetoric, lower the temperature, see each other again, listen to each other again,” Biden said in his victory speech, as he promised to bring the country together. Those remarks are futile if they are aimed at Mitch McConnell, who will doubtless do everything in his power to thwart a Biden presidency, just as he did when Barack Obama was President. But listening to each other could be fruitful if it means truly examining the shared struggles of the economically disadvantaged and the increasingly insecure middle class, confronting our challenges, and rebuilding our civil society. It could mean realizing Americans’ dreams of economic and racial justice, climate sanity, and a rejuvenated democracy. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have opened the door for this opportunity. Let’s take it. ◆

SMOKING GUN

AMERICAN CARNAGE: AN INDEX Here are some metrics of the United States after four years of Donald Trump:

Unemployment rate in January 2017, when Trump took office: 4.8 percent. Unemployment rate in April 2020: 14.7 percent. Number of Americans who were behind in their rent, as of mid-September: 8.3 million. Number of Americans who lacked health insurance in 2019: 29.6 million, or 9.2 percent of the population. Number of Americans who lost jobs with employer-sponsored health insurance as of June 2020: 7.7 million, and 6.9 million dependents. Increase in wealth by U.S. billionaires in first six months of 2020: $845 billion, up 29 percent. Increase in the number of Americans living in poverty since March: 8 million. Personal wealth of top 1 percent of U.S. population: $34.23 trillion. Personal wealth of bottom 50 percent of U.S. population: $2.08 trillion. Number of Americans who reported in September 2020 that they lost work because the pandemic made their employer lose business or close down: 19.4 million. Number of Americans who said in August that there were times during the last week when they did not have enough to eat: 22.3 million. Amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as of September 2020 (350 ppm is the oft-stated upper limit): 411.29 ppm. Amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide in 2016, before Trump took office: 402.25 ppm. Number of guns purchased in the United States from March through September: 15.1 million, a 91 percent increase from the same period in 2019. Federal deficit in fiscal year 2016, before Trump took office: $587 billion. Federal deficit in fiscal year 2020: $3.1 trillion. Number of death sentences carried out after Trump lifted the ban on federal executions: Six, which is more than the combined total of all of the Presidentâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s predecessors since 1963. Number of incarcerated people whoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve died from COVID-19, as of November 13: 1,412. Number of deaths from the 2016-17 flu season: 38,000. Number of deaths from COVID-19, which Trump has said is just like the flu, as of November 16: 246,586.

THE PROGRESSIVE | 17

Graying of The

Mass Incarceration

Prisons, ill-suited for providing health care, are facing an explosion of elderly inmates. BY VICTORIA LAW

MARY FISH turned sixty-eight in September. She did not celebrate with her sons or grandchildren. No one sang her happy birthday; nobody baked her a cake. Instead, she spent that day as she has her previous seventeen birthdays—behind bars. In 2002, Fish received two prison sentences totaling forty-eight years for assault and burglary. After entering prison, she stopped using drugs and alcohol. She’s participated in self-help groups, including Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous, and various prison programs. At age fifty-three, Fish began working in the prison’s laundry room for $11 a month. For twelve hours a day, she pushed carts crammed with clothes and sheets, loading them in and out of the institutional washing machines and dryers. “I now have two herniated discs in my back,” she tells me in a letter from prison. She also enrolled in college courses, earning two associates degrees, which helped her shave some time off her sentence for good behavior. 18 | DECEMBER 2020 / JANUARY 2021

Victoria Law is a freelance journalist covering issues of incarceration and co-author of Prison by Any Other Name: The Harmful Consequences of Popular Reforms.

Fish, who is serving her sentence at the Mabel Bassett Correctional Center, Oklahoma’s largest women’s prison, says she has eight years of prison left to go. She’s worried about catching COVID-19. Besides her back problems, she has high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and diabetes. Still, Fish considers herself lucky compared to other women aging around her. She does not have a terminal illness or a degenerative disease. She does not need a cane, walker, or wheelchair. But she knows her time is running out. “I sure don’t want to die in prison,” Fish wrote me. It’s one of her biggest fears. In 2018, the U.S. Department of Justice reported that nearly 21 percent of the nation’s prison population, or almost 300,000 people, were fifty or older. Outside prison, fifty is no longer considered elderly. But incarceration, with years of bad food, little opportunity to exercise, and inadequate medical care, accelerates the physiological aging process and often shortens life expectancy. Between 1995 and 2010, the number of prisoners aged fifty-five or older nearly quadrupled while the

number of all prisoners grew by 42 percent. At this rate, one-third of the prison population will be over age fifty by 2030. This would mean that, in the next ten years alone, 490,000 prisoners will be age fifty or older, not including people in jails. Prisons will face an explosion of geriatric needs—and the skyrocketing costs that come with it. In 2017, Oklahoma incarcerated 5,214 people over age fifty, a steep increase from eighty-five in 1980. In 2000, California locked up 4,900 people over age fifty-five; by 2010, that number had more than doubled to 13,600. At the end of 2018, 30,336 California prisoners were over age fifty, about a quarter of the state’s prison population. California spends about $138,000 annually on each incarcerated person over the age of fifty-five. In 2016, 10,140 of New York’s 52,344 prisoners were fifty and older. A 2013 study found that 69 percent of U.S. prisoners ages sixty-five and over had been sentenced to life Mary Fish after in prison. Add in the 44,311 people serving sentences participating in The of fifty years or more, or virtual life sentences, and that Messages Project, which makes 206,268 people—or one in seven prisoners— allows incarcerated people to record who face dying behind bars. themselves reading Stephanie Prost, an assistant professor at the Unibooks to their children versity of Louisville who has extensively researched or, in Fish’s case, aging in prisons, understands how decades of toughgrandchildren. on-crime sentencing has led to prison wings that resemble long-term-care settings. “Hallways are filled with rollators and oxygen tanks,” she says. “You’ve got nursing assistants who are also incarcerated flipping people so they don’t develop bed sores.” And the need for these types of units will continue to rise, in some states above the one-in-seven national average. For one study, Prost interviewed 499 people incarcerated in Kentucky. One in four had been sentenced to life without parole or sentences that exceeded a natural life span.

merica’s graying prison population is not the result of a crime spree by senior citizens but rather decades of national and state laws requiring decades-long, if not life, sentences with few chances

of reprieve, even for those who had completely turned their lives around. The “lock ’em up and throw away the key” policies of earlier years did not anticipate the challenges of caring for thousands of people who become less agile or able to navigate crowded corridors, lengthy lunch lines, and prison bunk beds—let alone the more serious medical needs that frequently accompany aging. This became even more apparent when COVID-19 hit the United States—with prisons quickly becoming flashpoints for the virus’s spread. (As of November 13, state and federal prisons reported 182,776 confirmed COVID cases and 1,412 deaths.) People in prison are at heightened risk of contracting—and dying from—this raging pandemic. Even before the arrival of COVID-19, medical care in U.S. prisons and jails has been typically inadequate, often bordering on life-threatening. It has led to dozens of lawsuits, both individual and class action. In 2010, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that California’s prison overcrowding impeded incarcerated people’s right to medical care and thus violated the Eighth Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. Still, prison health care across the nation remains deficient. “Prisons aren’t built to be hospitals,” Prost says. Prisoners, she notes, typically acquire serious and chronic health conditions at a younger age than people who are not incarcerated. That was what happened to Robert Lind, who entered New York’s prison system at age thirty-eight with no health concerns. He was given a fifty-yearto-life sentence, also known as a virtual life sentence. He remained healthy during his first three decades behind bars. But when Lind turned seventy, he began having stomach pain, his wife, Michelle, tells me in a phone interview. One night, while the couple was on a “trailer visit”—where family members can spend one or two days together in a trailer on prison grounds— he vomited after dinner. The following morning, he vomited again. This time, the vomiting wouldn’t stop. THE PROGRESSIVE | 19

Alarmed, Michelle wanted to call for medical help. But this would have ended their visit early and Lind persuaded her to wait. Later, he collapsed and was rushed to a hospital in Albany, where he underwent surgery for H. pylori, a stomach infection that can be caused by contaminated food or water. While recovering in the Intensive Care Unit, Lind was shackled by his feet to the bed, a precaution that Michelle, who was allowed to visit for a brief half hour, found outrageous. “My husband couldn’t even talk, he had so many tubes down his nose and mouth,” she says. Two years later, Lind was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. He spent a year undergoing radiation treatment five days a week at the hospital. Again he was handcuffed and shackled during the procedure. When the pandemic hit, Michelle worried about her husband’s safety. The radiation and chemotherapy had weakened his immune system. His age made him vulnerable to the ravaging effects of COVID-19. New York prisons halted all visits, but staff continued to come in and out. Lind called his wife four times a week—Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday. Normally reluctant to run up the phone bill, he wanted to reassure her that he was still alive. One Tuesday in May, Lind didn’t call. At first, Michelle didn’t worry. The prison is in a rural area and it wasn’t unusual for the phones to go out. When her phone remained silent on Thursday, she called the prison and learned that her husband had been hospitalized. She was not told more. “I was in terror mode,” Michelle says. “I know where he is—but I don’t know if he’s alive or dead.” A full week later, she learned that he had both pneumonia and COVID-19. She called every day but often could not get through. Two weeks later, Lind was returned to the prison. He must serve at least fourteen more years, before he is eligible to be considered for parole. At that point, Lind, if he’s alive, will be eighty-eight.

he graying of prison populations is happening not just in the United States but around the world. Across Europe, an average of nearly 12 percent of prisoners are over fifty. In the United Kingdom, the number rose from 7 percent in 2002 to 16 percent in 2018. In Japan, the number of prisoners aged sixty or older soared from 7 percent in 2008 to 19 percent in 2016. 20 | DECEMBER 2020 / JANUARY 2021

Michelle and Robert Lind in 2012. He has been incarcerated since 1984.

In Japan, which has the highest elderly population, per capita, in the world, almost one in five women in prison is a senior citizen. There the boom is driven not by decades of draconian sentencing but a rise in petty crimes, typically shoplifting, among elderly women, nearly half of whom live in poverty. Most are serving relatively short sentences—ranging from one to three years—but their chronic poverty drives up the recidivism rate. In response, Japanese prisons have hired specialized workers to help the elderly with bathing and using the toilet during the day; at night, these become the guards’ responsibilities. Legislators are also trying to stop elder crime. In 2016, Japan’s government passed a law designed to reduce recidivism among its senior citizens, adopting a plan to help them find jobs and housing. But recidivism among the elderly remains high. Most prison sentences in Europe are substantially shorter than those in the United States, with fewer people growing old behind bars. In Spain, for instance, less than 2 percent of prison sentences are for more than five years. In France, a 2012 tally found fewer than 500 prisoners (or 0.7 percent) were serving life sentences. And in both countries, people become eligible for parole upon reaching age seventy. Release is not automatic; inmates must successfully argue that they have earned the opportunity to spend their remaining years outside of prison. In New York State, the Release Aging People in Prison (RAPP) campaign has urged lawmakers to pass the Elder Parole Act, which would require prisoners fifty-five and older who have served at least fifteen years to get a pardon review. If the act passes, Lind, who has been imprisoned for thirty-six years, would immediately become eligible for parole. Otherwise, he must wait another fourteen years. In prison, Lind has earned his associate and bachelor’s degrees. He has helped countless other inmates with their parole applications and other paperwork. “He’s a completely different person” than when he was arrested in 1983, Michelle says. RAPP director Jose Saldaña got to know Lind during his own thirty-eight-year incarceration. He notes that Lind was among a small group of incarcerated men who developed the prison’s Transitional Service Program, which provides reentry-related services. “The most effective therapeutic programs,” Saldaña

U.S Prison Population Aged Fifty-Five or Older 2018

185,110

2013

131,500

2010

124,900

2005

66,500

2003

58,300

2000 1993

pushed her next parole hearing off for another five years. “I was truly shocked, traumatized,” Axell writes me from prison, noting that she had minimal disciplinary violations and has spent three decades “attending all kinds of self-help, getting vocations, tutoring in education.” Now she holds little hope for her next hearing: “I fear denial again because the Board says I am in denial.”

44,200 26,300

50,000

100,000

150,000

200,000

SOURCE: BUREAU OF JUSTICE STATISTICS, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE

says, “were developed by and for incarcerated people. Most have languished in prisons across the state for up to three to four decades, and some even longer. They could safely return to their families and home communities.” Saldaña, who was released in 2018, has encouraged the Linds to join the fight for elder parole. And that’s what Michelle has been doing. Before the pandemic, she and other RAPP members met with state legislators in Albany to share their stories and advocate for the bill. Now she works from home, participating in virtual press conferences and media interviews. In Oklahoma, the law now allows people aged sixty and older who have served at least ten years or onethird of their sentence to apply for a parole hearing. But it excludes anyone convicted of violence, including Fish, whose eight-year sentence stems from a fight over a stolen baby monitor. California law now requires parole hearings for incarcerated persons age fifty and over who have served at least twenty years. Commissioners are supposed to consider the person’s advanced age and diminished physical condition. Prisoners who have been sentenced to death or life without parole are not eligible. Between 2014 and 2020, only 28 percent of the 4,232 Californians granted elder parole hearings were approved. Linda Axell, an inmate at the California Institution for Women, had served thirty years in prison by 2018, when she was sixty-four, and had already been denied parole six times. The commissioners noted that she had no prior record and acknowledged that her advanced age made it unlikely that she would commit another crime. But they still denied her release and

The COVID19 pandemic is far from over and continues to create a greater sense of urgency. For the most vulnerable, death is still around the corner.

nother way elderly prisoners can find release is through clemency. This can take two forms: a commutation, which shortens a prison sentence, or a pardon, which overturns a conviction. In many states, including California and New York, a governor can grant clemency to anyone convicted of a state crime. In Oklahoma, the pardon and parole board must first recommend a person for commutation before the application goes to the governor. In every state, clemency is a long shot. In California, through June, Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom had issued forty-one pardons and sixty-five commutations, most during the pandemic. Even before COVID-19 struck, advocates have been pushing governors to issue clemencies to aging people in prison. But the pandemic—and its rapid spread behind bars—adds urgency to their demands. In New York, the RAPP campaign has organized rallies, vigils, and phone campaigns demanding that the governor step up his use of clemency. “If the risk is low, let them go” is their rallying cry, reflecting that most people age out of harmful behaviors, including criminal acts. “For some men and women, who have already languished in prison for decades, a commutation of their sentence [or the passage of the elder parole bill] is the only hope they have of not dying in prison,” Saldaña says. That is where the Linds have placed their hopes. In 2016, Lind applied for commutation. He received a letter from Governor Andrew Cuomo’s office notifying him that he was a candidate for pro-bono legal assistance. That was the last he heard about his application. Cuomo has granted twenty-four commutations during his three terms in office, and just three after the pandemic hit U.S. prisons in March. “The COVID-19 pandemic is far from over and continues to create a greater sense of urgency,” Saldaña says. “For the most vulnerable, death is still around the corner.” Michelle Lind lives every day with the fear that her husband will die in prison. “What does he have— five good years left?” she asked. “Let him spend that time with his children and grandchildren. Send him home.” ◆ THE PROGRESSIVE | 21

SAIYARE REFAEI

Hunger for

Justice Immigrant detainees are being punished for refusing to eat. BY RENÉE FELTZ

In March, a man detained at the Tacoma ICE Processing Center in Washington State began showing COVID-19-like symptoms. He was vomiting as guards removed him, and others in his unit took notice.One called the local grassroots immigrant rights group,La Resistencia,and said simply: “We don’t want to die.” Washington State was, at that time, an epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic. After some discussion, about eighty detainees launched a short hunger strike to protest their lack of protection, including guards who neglected to wear masks. Joining with activists on the outside, they successfully called attention to the unsafe practices of GEO Group, the private prison company that runs the 1,575-bed facility for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). 22 | DECEMBER 2020 / JANUARY 2021

But, despite their efforts, little changed. In early June, La Resistencia shared a video on social media of a maskless guard walking behind a detained man around the same time that two more people tested positive and an entire unit was put under quarantine. A woman in a different unit was asked if “the guards wear masks and gloves,” and responded: “The majority, no.” Staff at the Tacoma ICE Processing Center so rarely masked-up that in October, when one guard decided to cover his face, detainees in his unit became suspicious. When they asked why, they learned he had tested positive for COVID-19. “When we got the call about the guard being positive, people said they might want to do another hunger strike,” La Resistencia’s founder, Maru Mora-Villalpando, tells The Progressive. But fear of retaliation changed their minds. “They know they could be sent to the hole,” says Mora-Villalpando, using a slang term for what ICE

Manuel Abrego stands in front of GEO Group’s Tacoma ICE Processing Center, where he says guards put him in “segregation” for participating in a hunger strike to protest inhumane conditions.

Renée Feltz is an award-winning investigative journalist and Democracy Now! News Co-Director. This work is supported by a grant from the Solitary Confinement Reporting Project, with funding from the Vital Projects Fund.

LA RESISTENCIA

Immigrants in ICE jails nationwide say they are punished with solitary confinement when they refuse to eat food that is rotten or still-frozen and sometimes has screws in it.

euphemistically calls the administrative, punitive, or even medical “segregation” areas of its Special Management Units. Many detainees “are afraid they’re not going to be able to handle” further isolation after COVID-19 restrictions limited their recreation time, she notes. “My understanding is the entire detention center has become a hole to them.” As cases of COVID-19 have festered throughout ICE’s sprawling network of 200-plus jails and detention centers, with sometimes deadly results, detainees have turned to hunger strikes to protest conditions that violate the agency’s own guidelines. The abuse of solitary confinement in response has prompted legal action from the American Civil Liberties Union. “Participation in a hunger strike is a protected form of expression,” says Eunice Cho, senior staff attorney at the ACLU National Prison Project. “It is vitally important to support the First Amendment rights of everyone, including immigrants in detention.”

anuel Abrego tries to be as reassuring as possible. “When I get a call from somebody in segregation, I always tell them they are not alone,” says Abrego, who leads La Resistencia’s phone support system for people detained by ICE. Abrego was fifteen years old in 1999 when his family fled violence in El Salvador and were granted Temporary Protected Status in the United States. After struggling to adjust, he eventually got married and had two daughters before a dispute with an acquaintance led to a conviction for assault. At the end of his prison sentence, Abrego was transferred to the Tacoma ICE Processing Center (then called the Northwest Detention Center). He was shocked at the miserable conditions, which he felt were meant to encourage people to give up on their cases.

“They want to push to get you deported, and that’s it,” Abrego says in an interview at his family’s home in Seattle. Guards soon labeled him a troublemaker for being involved in hunger strikes over food quality. “The reason it started was we weren’t getting fed right,” Abrego tells The Progressive. “Sometimes, in the morning for breakfast, your food comes frozen. There is no way to eat it. Dinner comes the same way.” Other times, he says, detainees found worms in their “mystery meat.” After he helped organize a hunger strike at the detention center in 2017, Abrego was put in administrative segregation, where he was kept in his cell for twenty-three hours a day. “A room in segregation is six-by-ten feet, with a bed and a toilet and sink, a blanket, and one set of clothes,” he recalls, adding that the rooms are bound by a solid door with only a small window and a slot to push a meal tray through. “When you are in there, it is like being dead because you are not in contact with people on the outside,” Abrego says. He describes his time in solitary as “psychological torture,” and remembers how guards would often taunt detainees with threats of deportation to “try to make you snap.” Abrego’s ordeal was echoed in a report released this September by the Senate Committee on Homeland Security, which followed a year-long review of conditions at eight ICE detention centers. Investigators interviewed migrants and staff, several of whom recounted how segregation was “used as a tool” to punish people on hunger strikes. A man detained at the River Correctional Center, run by LaSalle Corrections in Ferriday, Louisiana, said guards put him in isolation soon after he went on a hunger strike, because they perceived him as the leader of the protest. At the Otero County Processing Center in Chaparral, New Mexico, the report noted that migrants “indicated that they had been placed in segregation as punishment for engaging in a hunger strike.” Officials with Management & Training Corporation, which operates the facility, “acknowledged that such individuals had been held in segregation for up to twenty-eight days, but they claimed that the discipline was for other reasons.” ICE guidelines require an initial finding by a disciplinary review panel before someone is put in segregation, but this step is often skipped. For example, in 2018, the Department of Homeland Security’s internal watchdog agency found that guards put detainees in disciplinary segregation prior to such review at the massive Adelanto ICE Processing Center in California. THE PROGRESSIVE | 23

n 2014, 1,200 people detained at the Tacoma ICE Processing Center stayed in bed through breakfast and refused lunch and dinner. Their list of demands included better food, an end to abusive treatment by guards, and a higher quality of medical care. “We opted not to eat so that our silence would be heard,” explained a participant named Cipriano, in a video released by La Resistencia. “With our silence, they began to hear us.” Meals got better for a while, but many of those who refused them until the end of the fifty-six-day protest were put in disciplinary segregation. When spoiled and uncooked food was served again, Mora-Villalpando said, detainees tried to raise their concerns through ICE’s grievance process, only to be ignored. In a July 2015 grievance form obtained by the University of Washington Center for Human Rights, a center detainee said he was served meat “already in a state of decomposition.” A food service manager dismissed the complaint as “Unfounded.” A year later, another person held at the same facility declared, “I am officially refusing to eat until your kitchen staff start treating me as a human being and not some kind of caged animal deservant of partially cooked and uncooked meals.” This was officially determined to be “Not a grievance.” On April 10, 2017, GEO reported to ICE that approximately 490 detainees in seven housing units refused their lunch, launching a hunger strike in protest of their treatment at the detention center. The “Event Status” was marked “Routine.” 24 | DECEMBER 2020 / JANUARY 2021

The ACLU National Prison Project obtained this report through a Freedom of Information Act request that also yielded a batch of emails from officials discussing how to downplay the hunger strikes. As it often does, ICE acknowledged some detainees were refusing meals, but emphasized they could still purchase food from the commissary. By April 13, ICE’s enforcement and removal field officer wrote that the number of participants had

SAIYARE REFAEI

Once in segregation, the process of getting out can drag on indefinitely. Abrego’s requests for release were reviewed and denied every thirty days. Sometimes, he was told, “you’re an instigator.” Other times, he says, “ICE would say, ‘GEO says you cannot go out.’ Then GEO would say, ‘ICE says you cannot go out.’ ” The United Nations special rapporteur on torture has said solitary confinement should be banned except for “very exceptional circumstances,” calling isolation longer than fifteen days “inhuman or degrading treatment.” Abrego says ICE held him in isolation for a devastating eight months. He was released in 2018 with help from the ACLU. But he still feels the effects. “I have been out for two years and I still cannot get situated,” Abrego laments. Abrego now checks in regularly with the ICE office in Seattle as his case proceeds. He supports his family by working as a maintenance man, and spends much of his free time volunteering with La Resistencia. “I’m doing better than most people because I have a lot of support, but it’s hard,” Abrego says. “I don’t wish it on anybody.”

fallen to twelve. The next day, an ICE spokesperson replied, “OK . . . but the wolves are at the door. Maybe I can come up with something fuzzy . . . using a round number.”

dvocates have tried to stop ICE from retaliating against hunger strikers with solitary confinement by documenting the abuse of the agency’s own standards. But oversight of violations is notoriously lax. Almost all inspections of ICE detention centers and jails are preannounced and scheduled weeks in advance. When a U.S. Senate committee toured California’s Adelanto ICE Processing Center, they noticed one of the housing units smelled of fresh paint, and CoreCivic officials “instituted a major clean up” at another facility in Louisiana. People held in solitary cells at New Mexico’s Otero County Processing Center “were returned to the general population just prior to the Committee’s arrival.” ICE pays a private auditor called the Nakamoto Group to conduct annual inspections, which are considered “useless” and “very, very, very difficult to fail,” according to ICE officers interviewed by the Department of Homeland Security’s internal watchdog agency in 2018. Another investigation led by the office

La Resistencia wants ICE to release immigrants from detention where COVID-19 spreads easily, and those who demand safer conditions face what they call “the hole.”

of Senator Elizabeth Warren complained that neither the private prison companies like GEO Group nor Nakamoto have taken “responsibility for the numerous failures identified” with compliance with ICE’s safety and quality standards.. GEO Group responded to Warren by citing its score of 99.6 percent from the American Correctional Association accreditation as proof of its compliance with ICE standards. But critics note the ACA has also accredited a detention center in El Paso where detained people were reportedly forced to drink water from toilets, and the Essex County jail in New Jersey, where health inspectors found spoiled meat and moldy bread in the kitchen, “which has led to potentially contaminated food being served to detainees.” In December 2019, ICE weakened its detention standards, making it easier for companies like GEO Group to pass inspections and maintain their lucrative contracts, for instance, by removing requirements that new detention centers have an outdoor recreation area. Meanwhile, ICE halted annual inspections from April through August, citing, “CDC guidance and restrictions” related to the pandemic. Despite the dangers posed by COVID-19, ICE has ignored calls from its own medical experts and a former acting director to exercise its authority to release immigrants and asylum seekers from civil detention. Instead, advocates like the group Freedom for Immigrants have received reports from people in ICE detention centers in California, Louisiana, Texas, Alabama, Colorado, and Arizona who were placed in solitary confinement after being suspected of having the coronavirus. Oscar Perez Aguirre, a fifty-seven-year-old immigrant with hypertension, told the Southern Poverty Law Center he contracted COVID-19 in an ICE processing center in Colorado, run by GEO Group, and was sent to the hospital when he started vomiting. Upon returning to detention, he said he “was moved to the pod that is known . . . as the Hole, where people go for disciplinary reasons. . . . My cell was filthy and freezing and I had nothing to clean with.” In July, after a nurse tested positive for COVID-19 at GEO Group’s Mesa Verde ICE Processing Center in California, detainees organized hunger and labor strikes to demand cleaner conditions, healthier food, and a halt to transfers. A seventy-four-year-old man named Choung Woong Ahn joined in the hunger strikes and sought release due to his lung disease and diabetes. Instead, he was placed in medical isolation, where he took his own life two days later. “Our brother did not deserve to die, and he did not need to be

locked up,” his family wrote in an editorial published by The Sacramento Bee. The Northwest Immigrant Rights Project and the ACLU sued in March to win the release of medically vulnerable detainees at the Tacoma ICE Processing Center. But ICE refused because no one there had yet tested positive. “Public health officials are in agreement—it is not a matter of if there is a COVID-19 outbreak in immigrant detention centers, but when,” responded the ACLU’s Eunice Cho. “ICE should heed their warning.” Within a week, ICE reported the first infection in detention.

n August, the city council of Tacoma, Washington, passed a resolution calling on ICE to “address health and racial equity issues impacting individuals” at the Tacoma ICE Processing Center. Among the city’s recommendations was that the facility’s operations be suspended “for the duration of the COVID-19 pandemic.” But ICE and GEO say the population of the center is now low enough that people detained there can keep six feet apart. In legal filings, they describe how immigrants who have been transferred from other detention centers are now held in separate units for fourteen days to see if they develop symptoms. An ICE spokesperson said those who test positive “receive appropriate medical care to manage the disease.” Tacoma has also committed to “continue to explore the city’s authority at the local level for regulatory oversight of the private detention center.” Colorado lawmakers approved similar legislation in July that states public and private facilities that house or detain “noncitizens for purposes of civil immigration proceedings” qualify as “penal institutions” subject to unannounced inspections. Civil rights advocates like the ACLU’s Cho remain concerned that ICE regards detention centers as “Constitution-free zones.” Despite this, Cho vows to continue to defend the right of detainees “to participate in these hunger strikes without fear of retribution.” At the end of October, the third employee in less than a month tested positive for COVID-19 at the Tacoma ICE Processing Center. Several pods were placed in quarantine and some people were removed for medical monitoring, including one who was in contact with detainees who work in the kitchen. A man in the unit told La Resistencia he asked about a test and a guard responded: “No, you don’t need to get tested unless you are showing symptoms.” People at the facility have debated their next move. “You can go on a hunger strike,” Abrego noted. “But when you do it, they may punish you.” ◆ THE PROGRESSIVE | 25

Police reform efforts falter in Minneapolis, yet hope persists. BY SARAH LAHM

FARRINGTON LLEWELLYN

‘Transformative Change’ Proves Elusive

Robin Wonsley Worlobah at a Justice for Jamar Clark rally in 2016 to demand the indictment and conviction of the Minneapolis Police Department officers responsible for Clark’s murder.

ROBIN WONSLEY WORLOBAH has an incredibly busy schedule these days. The Chicago native,

who has lived in Minneapolis since 2014, is not only a full-time community engagement coordinator for the statewide teachers union, Education Minnesota, but she is also working on a Ph.D. in gender, women, and sexuality studies at the University of Minnesota.

Still, her eyes light up often with laughter and police department seemed more possible than ever— warmth. before they quickly collapsed. Wonsley Worlobah is running for a seat on the Any “transformative changes” in Minneapolis, she Minneapolis city council next year, as the city’s first says, whether they involved recent pushes for fair Black, female Democratic Socialist candidate. Her wages, paid sick time, or tenants’ rights, came from candidacy is fueled in part by the years she has spent the community up—and not from “any proactive as a grassroots activist in Minneapolis, working on work from city leaders.” campaigns for racial and economic justice. She aims to change that. All of these facets of Wonsley Worlobah’s life— scholar, union employee, activist—coalesced on May mmediately after Floyd’s murder, the streets of Min25, 2020, when George Floyd was murdered. neapolis erupted in protest. The police department’s Floyd, a Black man, was arrested over his alleged Third Precinct building, home to Chauvin and the use of a counterfeit $20 bill. When officers tried to fold other involved officers who were there when Floyd his six-foot, four-inch frame into the back of a squad was killed, was burned to a shell on May 28. car, Floyd resisted, saying he was claustrophobic. For many outside observers, it seemed like a waHe ended up face down on the street, his wrists tershed moment. Vicky Osterweil, writing for The shackled together. A white Minneapolis police officer, Nation in June, expressed awe at the way events in Derek Chauvin, knelt on Floyd’s neck for more than Minneapolis had quickly led to calls to abolish or, at nine minutes while two other officers helped pin him a minimum, defund the police. down. A video taken by a young woman at the scene There had been riots and protests after other went viral, sparking a summer of unrest in Minneap- high-profile police killings of Black and brown peoolis and around the world. ple, Osterweil notes, including the 2014 unrest that But it wasn’t Floyd’s death, exactly, that prompted took place in Ferguson, Missouri, after Michael Brown Wonsley Worlobah to run for office. It’s what hap- was shot by police while walking home from a conpened afterward, when efforts to reform the city’s venience store.

Sarah Lahm is a writer based in Minneapolis. Her work has appeared in various local and national publications, including In These Times and The Progressive, where she writes the Midwest Dispatch column.

26 | DECEMBER 2020 / JANUARY 2021

We are going to dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department. And when we’re done, we’re not simply gonna glue it back together. We are going to dramatically rethink how we approach public safety and emergency response.

But none resulted in widespread support for police reform, Osterweil declared, until protesters breached Minneapolis’s Third Precinct building and destroyed it. “I cannot recall another time when protesters took over and burnt down a police station,” she wrote. In October, a wrinkle in this story developed, however, when federal charges were brought against Ivan Harrison Hunter of Boerne, Texas. Hunter has been accused of inciting violence at the Third Precinct in May, as a member of the rightwing extremist group the Boogaloo Bois. The Boogaloo Bois are a loosely-knit outfit that many experts see as driven by a white nationalist and anti-government ideology. Members of the group have appeared at protests across the country in recent months, including those in Portland, Oregon, and Kenosha, Wisconsin. United States Attorney Erica MacDonald has accused Hunter of firing multiple rounds from an AK-47-style assault rifle into the Third Precinct building on May 28, before it was evacuated by police, in hopes of inspiring a riot. (A heavily armed Hunter also turned up at a George Floyd protest in Austin, Texas, in early June. He was questioned during a traffic stop but not arrested.) The developing Boogaloo Bois connection aside, it’s fair to say that the destruction of the Third Precinct inspired immediate action in Minneapolis. Shortly after the building fell, a rally held at a city park featured pro-police reform statements from several City council members, including its president, Lisa Bender. “Our commitment is to end our toxic relationship with MPD,” Bender told the crowd gathered before her, “and to end policing as we know it to recreate systems of public safety that actually keep us safe.” Bender’s revolutionary-sounding language was echoed by another city council member, Steve Fletcher, who represents a ward in downtown Minneapolis. In an opinion piece published by Time magazine, Fletcher called for “dramatic structural change” to the city’s police force. He counted himself among others on the council “who are publicly supporting the call to disband our police department and start fresh with a community-oriented, non-violent public safety and outreach capacity.” Other council members, including Jeremiah Ellison, who, as the son of former Minnesota Congressman and current state Attorney General Keith Ellison, has bona fide progressive credentials, readily chimed in to support the movement. “We are going to dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department,” council member Ellison tweeted. “And when we’re done, we’re not simply gonna glue it back together. We are going to dramatically rethink how

we approach public safety and emergency response. It’s really past due.” By late summer, however, it was clear that Fletcher, Bender, and their fellow council members were not going to deliver on this call for dramatic change. Wonsley Worlobah believes she knows why.

irst, there was a procedural hiccup. On June 26, a month after Floyd’s killing, the city council voted unanimously to put an amendment to the city’s charter to the voters in November. The amendment called for replacing the city’s mandated police force with a new “Department of Community Safety and Violence Prevention.” But a somewhat obscure city charter commission stood in the way. This unelected body (whose members are appointed by a Hennepin County District Court judge) must approve any proposed changes to the city’s charter before the public has a chance to vote on it. When charter members reviewed the city council’s proposal, they decided it wasn’t ready to be put before voters in 2020, meaning no structural changes would be coming to the Minneapolis Police Department any time soon. To Wonsley Worlobah, this was disappointing, but not unexpected. The authority of the charter commission provided cover for city council members, she says, by preventing them from having to actually follow through on their stated support for radical police reform. “The charter process is there to give cover to [city officials] when they do not want to move forward with transformative practices,” she argues, recalling a campaign to raise Minneapolis’s minimum wage to $15 that she was a part of in 2016. When an amendment to the city’s charter was proposed in that case, the charter commission blocked it. This gave city council members a reason to also reject the amendment. The city leadership, Wonsley Worlobah learned, is “not there to authorize progressive changes.” The difference then, she says, was that the movement around the Fight for $15 had anticipated the charter process being used as a blockade against progress. And so activists took the city council to court and won the right to have the amendment for a wage increase placed on the ballot. In 2017, the Minneapolis city council passed a $15 minimum hourly wage. But the push for police reform has largely stalled. Wonsley Worlobah thinks it is because activists were not as prepared this time around. “Some of the groups leading the charge, I think, felt that, because we had nine city council members declare nationally that they were looking to do an THE PROGRESSIVE | 27

alternative model, that they could partner together to create those solutions,” she recalls, before pointedly adding that this hoped-for collaboration “did not happen.”

REINING IN THE COPS While comprehensive police reform efforts have stalled in Minneapolis, where George Floyd was killed, other U.S. cities have made significant gains:

lthough organizations such as MPD 150 and Black Visions Collective had been working on Houston, Texas: George Floyd grew up here. At his Houston funeral, campaigns to abolish the police in Minneapolis for the city’s mayor, Sylvester Turner, said the local police would no longer some time, Wonsley Worlobah believes the sense of be allowed to use chokeholds in the line of duty. urgency after Floyd’s death overtook their organizing Portland, Oregon: In June, Mayor Ted Wheeler pledged that upwards capabilities. of $12 million would be reallocated from police and city services When city council members declared their willbudgets and put into programs identified by communities of color. He ingness to radically alter the Minneapolis Police Dealso expressed interest in other reforms, such as banning chokeholds partment in June, many saw it as the opportunity they and limiting police gun use. had been waiting for, to finally dismantle—or at least defund—the police. San Francisco, California: Mayor London Breed announced in July that In July, however, Wonsley Worlobah and Ty Moore, around $120 million would be cut from the city’s police and sheriff a 2013 Socialist Alternative candidate for the Minbudgets over the next two years, with the savings moved toward neapolis city council, raised a note of alarm. The two addressing racial disparities in areas such as housing and workforce wrote a cautionary article for CounterPunch magazine, programs. warning that the Minneapolis city council should not Washington, D.C.: The city council passed a host of police reform be allowed to take the lead on police reform. measures in early June. These include a ban on hiring officers with Citing a growing disconnect between the city records of misconduct in other departments and more transparency council’s bold talk and a subsequent lack of concrete around the release of names and body-camera footage when an action steps, Wonsley Worlobah and Moore urged the officer-involved incident takes place. public to “push back against every attempt to narrowly —Sarah Lahm define the problem—and therefore the solutions—as limited police reform.” They feared—and rightfully so, it seems—that the Just months after council members so boldly conversation would get lost in procedural red tape declared their interest in dismantling the police, a and promises to tweak (but not radically alter) po- committee within the same council voted to allocate lice operations. What was missing was a clear policy $4.8 million toward a new, temporary Third Precinct platform, crafted by people on the ground who had building, a few blocks from the one destroyed in May. been seeking reform long before Floyd’s brutal death This was done, Braley says, without any communiwas broadcast to the world. ty input—nor any attempt from the police to make That policy platform must include more than sur- amends with neighborhood residents. face-level reforms, the two wrote. As police officers She describes a community meeting convened by already wear body cameras in Minneapolis, Wonsley current council member Cam Gordon, whom WonWorlobah and Moore called for a plan that addresses sley Worlobah is set to run against in 2021. Representhe “deep structural racism and class inequalities em- tatives from the police and city works departments bedded into American capitalism.” These structural had been invited, and Braley recalls them going over injustices, they argued, lead to police brutality and a matter-of-fact details regarding the proposed new profoundly flawed criminal justice system. precinct building. “If we would have had a clear proposal, we could This approach caused her “blood to boil,” she inhave won people over and expanded our options,” sists, because it felt like even the very public murder Wonsley Worlobah insists. This, in turn, could have of Floyd was not enough to disrupt business as usual. allowed those pushing for real change in MinneapoAnd so Braley, Wonsley Worlobah, and others orlis to avoid the bureaucratic quagmire of the charter ganized to stop the Third Precinct from being rebuilt, process. forcing—at least for now—the police department and But hope is not lost. In September, Wonsley Wor- the city council to rethink their next steps. lobah and other local activists, including Michele When it comes to the future of public safety in Braley, a leader in restorative justice practices, helped Minneapolis, Wonsley Worlobah has a vision for what block the city council’s efforts to rebuild the Third that should look like: “We want something life-afPrecinct. firming, that does honor people’s basic humanity.” ◆ 28 | DECEMBER 2020 / JANUARY 2021

Rebel Cops A look at the conscientious objectors of law enforcement. BY GABBRIEL SCHIVONE

At six feet four inches and 290 pounds, Thomas Owen Baker looks the part of a hulking riot cop. On November 30, 2011, he was assigned to provide crowd control at the Westin Kierland Resort and Spa in Scottsdale, Arizona, for a protest at a conference of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), an influential group of private sector representatives and rightwing politicians who draft state legislation to promote their interests. That day, Baker’s black uniform was soaking up the desert heat of the Arizona winter. At the protest line, his baton firmly in hand, dozens of protesters are looking him in the eyes as they shout: “WE! ARE! THE 99 PERCENT!” Watching the protesters stoically through the plexiglass visor of his helmet, Baker found himself agreeing with them. “Baker!” a voice calls behind him. He turns to see his supervisor, leaning in to be heard above the raucous chants. “If you want to eat, they have chow for us,” he tells him. Baker walks past a gaggle of mostly white executives

gathering to smoke outside the front of the fancy hotel. He is directed to a side door and down a shaded ramp into the hotel basement, where food is being made for the officers on the scene. He sees chefs in freshly soiled white aprons. Custodians in gray jumpsuits. Bussers and maids. All the Black and brown workers who keep the hotel running. Now Baker is among them in his police uniform. Resentment starts to well up deep inside him. “I was representing the interests of these rich people upstairs who are making decisions,” Baker recalls, “and I was risking my life to clean up their mess on the street and

Gabbriel Schivone (@GSchivone) is a writer from Tucson, Arizona. The Forgive Everyone Collective helped fund this story. Maxie Adler provided research assistance.

THE PROGRESSIVE | 29

providing them security—but I wasn’t fit to eat in the same place as them. I was the help.” In 2014, the year protests erupted in Ferguson, Missouri, following the police killing of Michael Brown, Baker quit the force and entered graduate school, where he’s currently completing his Ph.D. in criminology, focusing on police violence, at the University of Missouri–St. Louis. “If [we are] thinking about the world we want to see,” Baker says in an interview, “we think about a world without the police.” But in the meantime, he says, present-day police should have limited contact with the public, be subject to rigorous accountability methods, and be given intensive competence training. Most of all, Baker believes addressing the basic causes of socioeconomic inequality to be a comprehensive solution. The institutions that could make police obsolete are those we do not invest in enough: education, medical and mental health care, economic security, housing, community centers, and youth athletics, dance, and art programs. “What we need to do is take a more holistic approach to understanding community safety, and recognize that these other institutions create the public safety that’s required to no longer force public order with the threat or actual use of violence,” Baker says. There is plenty of evidence to suggest the U.S. policing system is incorrigible, virtually since its inception. Numerous commissions by U.S. Presidents and by police departments themselves—the Chicago Crime Commission in the 1920s, President Hoover’s Wickersham Commission in the 1930s, President Johnson’s Kerner Commission in the 1960s, the Knapp Commission in the 1970s, all the way up to President Obama’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing following the Ferguson uprisings—have detailed widespread, fundamental flaws and suggested desperately needed reforms. All have failed. It’s not hard to see why. Violence, racism, corruption, and abuse of authority are all baked into the batter of the system. Even one of Obama’s handpicked task force members, Yale Law School professor Tracey Meares, asserted two years after she and her colleagues released their 2015 report: “Policing as we know it must be abolished before it can be transformed.”

POLICE ARE CHARGED with preserving the

existing social order, observes historian Sam Mitrani, author of The Rise of the Chicago Police Department: Class and Conflict, 1850-1894. “I suspect that police who openly side with rebels or revolutionaries—or with abolition today,” he writes via email, “cannot remain police for very long.” 30 | DECEMBER 2020 / JANUARY 2021

This was the case for Atlanta patrol cop Tom Gissler, who quit the force in July 2020. Gissler had groused about his orders to shake down the Black tenants of the Bedford Pine apartment complex, which provides Section 8 housing, and write up any legal offenses he could find, such as parking tickets and outstanding warrants. Anything to make it easier for the Bedford Pine developers to evict the current tenants and replace the complex with more expensive housing. In turn, the developers promised office space to the police department. His supervisors admitted to the arrangement and derided Gissler’s moral compunctions. “There was something about that that made me think now, when I clock into work, I’m not doing any good,” Gissler told Mother Jones. “I’m actually doing harm.” The experience jaded Gissler. “It dawned on me that the entire system, the entire thing, was just a shitty mafia system.” Rebel cops have long been part of the police mix, long before the story of Frank Serpico, whose whistle-blowing on New York Police Department corruption led to the Knapp Commission, was made into a film. In 1885, a year before the momentous Haymarket rally, the McCormick Reaper Works company had employed a group of Pinkerton private security agents who fired on strikers. After the strikers managed to drive off the Pinkertons, police arrested eight of the Pinkertons, for firing on the strikers. In 1937, a number of Chicago Police Department officers quit in protest following the “Memorial Day Massacre” when fellow officers gunned down ten strikers, wounding dozens, during the opening days of a massive strike against steel companies across the Midwest. In the 1919 Boston police strike, almost the entire city police force deserted their posts to protest a ban on organizing a union, as well as unfair pay and squalid working conditions. Today, some activists balk at the thought of cops supporting rebel causes. A statement published on Medium this past July by an account called “Copfreenyc” asserted that “there is no room for law enforcement of any kind in our movements.” Days earlier, Nabil Hassein, an organizer with the Brooklyn-based antiprison group No New Jails NYC, wrote, “I could perhaps have been persuaded that in the progressive movement from here to abolition, there is some space for cops to turn against their own role.” But there are more structural issues at the root of the problem. As Shannon Jones, co-founder of the New York City police abolitionist group Why Accountability, also known as Bronxites for NYPD Accountability, noted in an interview with Gothamist in June: “[Y]ou have a lot of Black people who are cops,

work for social services, work for [the New York City Housing Authority]. But if you look at any city agency, the top levels of city agencies are white people.” Woods Ervin, an organizer at Critical Resistance, a California-based prison abolition group, agrees. “Policing is harmful to communities, so it doesn’t surprise me that people with firsthand experience in policing would come to that conclusion as well,” Ervin says. “As abolitionists, we’re not centering on individual cops. It’s about the movement of community members seeking to dismantle a system and build up structures that actually keep communities safe, simultaneously.” Meanwhile, a debate is seething in the modern labor movement about what to do about police within their ranks. Several groups have expelled police unions since the summer 2020 protests, while others remain. Some labor leaders like Bill Fletcher Jr. have argued that organized labor in the United States must address police unions head-on, member to member. “Any moves to eliminate police unions will cer tainly be followed by calls to elimin ate other public sector unions, including firefighters, postal workers, and teachers,” he wrote.

FOR JAN BARRY, a longtime activist who co-founded Vietnam Veterans Against the War in 1967, police dissenters may be just a few steps behind active-duty military and veterans who have spoken out against an unjust system. But one difference between soldiers at home and police at home is that soldiers have managed to organize themselves and carve out a place in social justice movements in past decades, while police dissenters remain isolated and atomized. Barry left the Army in 1965 and entered the anti-war movement at a time when the nation’s first S.W.A.T. team was created, soon spreading to nearly every police municipality. Later, the 1033 Program administered by the military’s Defense Logistics Agency delivered hand-me-downs to police in the form of surveillance aircraft, vehicles, and weapons. Seeing police use armored personnel carriers like those he used to see in Vietnam made Barry realize that “they’re treating us like we’re in some other country that has been occupied.” It also made him more determined to speak out and learn to organize at home. The anti-war movement allowed Barry—who received political education through attending teachins, developing organizing skills, and networking—to find other like-minded soldiers and activists. But not everyone was welcoming at first. Barry remembers that some activists called him and fellow soldier-organizers hurtful names like “baby killer.” “Some people in the peace movement would say things like that and didn’t really want to learn any-

thing about other people,” Barry says. “So you really just have to keep reaching out and find people who are willing to understand: If you’re going to have a wider movement, you’re going to have to be inclusive of people who otherwise are thinking in a different perspective—and change their minds.” Francisco Cantú’s time as a U.S. Border Patrol agent gave him grisly night terrors, leading him to quit the agency rather than continue to participate in violating migrants’ rights. But it wasn’t the stereotypical post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms of jumping at loud noises or experiencing flashbacks. Cantú refers to the “moral injury” of his Border Patrol tenure, an affliction familiar to some military veterans who turned into anti-war activists. “Moral injury is very quiet,” Cantú says in an interview. “It’s something you sit with that changes you from within.” Cantú came out publicly for abolition in a recent article for The New York Review of Books. “The idea of abolishing immigration detention and other cornerstones of border enforcement may sound radical, but it is the only legitimate starting place for negotiation,” he wrote. The movement seems to be opening up. Former Border Patrol agent Jenn Budd, a fierce advocate of abolishing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Border Patrol, was invited by Maria Puga, the widow of Anastasio Hernández Rojas whom Border Patrol agents beat to death at the San Diego-Tijuana border crossing in 2010, to speak alongside her in front of the border wall in late October 2020. It was the first time Budd had been asked to speak at an activist event like that. “For me, that was a lot. That makes coming forward about the truth of the Border Patrol worth it,” she says. “Moral injury is as much an individual responsibility problem as it is a social problem,” says Garett Reppenhagen, a former U.S. Army sniper and executive director of Veterans for Peace. Reppenhagen was the first active-duty soldier to speak out, through then-anonymous blogging, about his experiences in Iraq in 2004, during the U.S. occupation. Through organizing in Iraq Veterans Against the War and now Veterans for Peace, as well as organizing mutual aid in his neighborhood outside Colorado Springs, Colorado, Reppenhagen has changed course from being exploited as a stalk-and-kill predator for the state, to opposing state violence and convincing others like him to rebel and help build a new society together. “Hopefully,” he says, “these cops and border agents will also find that through activism service, real service, they can get some of their soul back.” ◆ THE PROGRESSIVE | 31

First-Person Singular

BY ELEANOR J. BADER

My Students, the Police

t’s the first day of the semester at Kingsborough Community College in Brooklyn, New York, and everyone is tense and a little scared. The professor, in this case me, hands out a syllabus and then describes the course—a basic English comp class— pointing out deadlines before asking the students to introduce themselves.

It’s a familiar but nerve-wracking ritual. I know, of course, that careers in criminal justice, Typically, my classes consist of twenty-eight stu- while not lucrative, are union jobs with health benefits, dents between the ages of eighteen and forty-some- paid vacation, tuition reimbursements, and pensions. thing. As they take turns saying their names, majors, This has to appeal to many of Kingsborough’s 19,000 and countries of origin, other students nod their students, folks with a median household income of heads in recognition or approval. By the end of the $47,996, a full 70 percent of them low income. go-around, I’m racing to pin names to faces and in“Historically, government jobs are the route to the tended fields of study. middle class, especially for African Americans,” Stuart But here’s another truth: After sixteen years of Parker, assistant professor of sociology at Kingsborteaching, I’m continually stunned by how many stu- ough, tells me. “A lot of our students are looking for a dents cite criminal justice, and policing, as their career job that appears to be steady. They’re trying to figure goal. out what to do in an environment that seems to offer When I ask them to explain, they invariably say a dearth of choices.” they are driven by a desire to help people. This group of American dreamers—from countries as diverse as nder the NYPD’s current contract, rookie offiAzerbaijan, China, the Dominican Republic, Egypt, cers earn a starting salary of $42,500. Five-andHaiti, Jamaica, Mexico, Palestine, Russia, and Syria— a-half years down the road, they’ll make $85,292. and a smattering of the U.S.-born—say that wearing This is a far cry from the minimum wage that most the badge of the New York Police Department and Kingsborough students—almost all of whom work taking an oath to serve and protect would be an im- full time while attending school—are currently paid. measurable honor. But the decision to become a police officer is not I am both humbled and horrified. How, I wonder, just about money, says my former student, NYPD ofcan these seemingly mild-mannered people show ficer Jonathan C., who asked that his full surname not such reverence for law enforcement? be used. I’ve known Jonathan, now a married father Over the years, I’ve seen students weep over the of one, for more than a decade; we’ve stayed in touch fate of a character we’ve met in a novel, lament the through Facebook. He’s a good man: thoughtful, kind, unfair treatment of a fictional person, and share their smart, empathetic, and hard working. joy when justice is served. They’ve written essays that An NYPD officer since 2016, he tells me that he describe hardships in their countries of origin, then loves the job because it is never routine. I then ask if language barriers, a lack of access to medical care, he is bothered by the many cases of excessive force and immigration woes once they emigrate. Still, they and other police misconduct that have repeatedly ocusually see these obstacles as temporary and express curred, drawing protesters to the streets. faith that they will succeed. Attending an American “It doesn’t matter if you’re an officer or not, the law college like Kingsborough, they tell me, is the fulfill- should be upheld, and the violators should be brought ment of a dream long nurtured. to justice,” Jonathan tells me. “Most of my co-workers This makes their desire to join the New York City saw the video of George Floyd being killed and we felt Police Department or work for other law enforcement disgusted because that situation makes all officers look agencies, all the more baffling. I ask myself: Can they bad, even the good ones.” possibly be unaware of the never-ending cascade of Jonathan further believes that Derek Chauvin and unprovoked police shootings and incidents of brutal- his Minneapolis police colleagues should be held acity that have become heinously routine? countable. Nonetheless, he draws the line between

Eleanor Bader is a freelance writer from Brooklyn, New York, who writes about education, domestic social justice movements, books, and art.

32 | DECEMBER 2020 / JANUARY 2021

Floyd’s horrific death and the demands of Black Lives Matter and police abolitionists. “Black Lives Matter groups fuel hate and disdain for police officers and authority,” he says. “I get their intentions, but defunding the police means that highcrime communities all over the country will suffer. Like many fields, policing includes good people and bad people, good cops and bad cops.” For Jonathan, as for many police defenders, it’s a matter of weeding out a few “bad apples”—officers who are hot-headed, impulsive, or racist—while leaving the overall system intact. Hearing this, I bristle at the lack of recognition of the systemic problems that let racism, sexism, homophobia, ableism, and transphobia go unchecked, and allow brutality to flourish. Still, I’d like to think that I can play a small role in turning out better officers, that helping people interested in law enforcement earn a college degree, with exposure to classes in the liberal arts, is worth the effort. Perhaps it’s naïveté, but I hold onto research that suggests that having a college diploma—regardless of major—can have a demonstrable impact on stemming police abuse and violence. One 2010 study, in fact, found that college-educated officers are 40 percent less likely to use force and 30 percent less likely to fire their guns than those with less education. What’s more, the study affirmed that college-educated officers demonstrated better critical thinking, were more open to diversity, and exhibited better moral reasoning than those without a degree. But completing college does not guarantee that police will behave responsibly or without rancor. Derek Chauvin, after all, earned a degree in law enforcement in 2006 from Minnesota’s Metropolitan State University.

t’s unsettling, all of it. But no matter my reservations, the so-called criminal justice system is a major employer, and students who want to work in this field deserve respect and need to be seen as the individuals they are. Whether I like it or not, millions of Americans will continue to be employed in criminal justice agencies for the foreseeable future; last year alone, 697,195 were police officers. I believe they should be well trained. And well educated. Unfortunately, the requirements for entering law enforcement do not reflect this—with most police departments requiring nothing more than a high school diploma or GED. According to the National Police Foundation, fewer than a third of sworn officers have a four-year degree, although slightly more than half have a two-year degree.

Chauvin notwithstanding, I steadfastly believe that attending college—which is about more than simply preparing someone for the job market—is a social good. As my Kingsborough colleague Jason Leggett, an assistant professor in the department of history, philosophy, and political science, points out, new ideas can sway students to consider previously unimagined fields of study. It can also help to demystify policing and criminal justice more broadly. Along the way, racist ideas and white supremacy can be deconstructed, prodding those who listen well to consider the ways that prejudicial ideas about people of color and the poor have been undermined and intimidated by law enforcers. “Students who watch a lot of police shows on TV see situations and responses that don’t exist in real life,” Leggett explains. “After 9/11, a lot of people wanted to become firefighters and police officers to fight terrorists, and I continue to see the hangover from that. Plus, some students have family in the police department and may want to continue that legacy.” “It’s worth mentioning,” he continues, “that as they study, many students change their minds about joining the police force and instead go on to become social workers, teachers, or health-care professionals.” Hearing classmates talk in personal terms, about what it was like to be stopped, frisked, or arbitrarily questioned by police, Leggett adds, can upend their plans, causing them to seek other ways to contribute to bettering their communities. We can hope. But I also have to believe that even for those students who are not dissuaded, the experience of attending college, including taking literature classes like mine, will make them better cops, prison guards, or probation officers. Experience tells me that when students immerse themselves in a text, they begin to understand other worlds and other realities. Imagined borders disappear. In addition, college-educated students see the ways psychology, ethics, history, politics, and language intersect. I’ve seen this rattle many a worldview, including my own, and tear previously held biases asunder. Indeed, books can nudge us toward greater compassion, empathy, honesty, and integrity. They can also encourage us to use our emotional intelligence to benefit others. As another semester draws to a close, I hope my students will remember the novels and essays we’ve read and incorporate the values we’ve discussed into their personal and professional lives. My hope is that even if they opt to join the NYPD, their education will have given them a better-developed ethical foundation on which to hook their badges. It’s the only optimism I’ve been able to conjure. I hold it dear. ◆

Completing college does not guarantee that police will behave responsibly or without rancor. Derek Chauvin, after all, earned a degree in law enforcement in 2006 from Minnesota’s Metropolitan State University.

THE PROGRESSIVE | 33

Losing Your Health Care to

COVID-19

The pandemic has forced workers off of employer-sponsored plans and into the unknown. BY SHARON JOHNSON

FOR MORE THAN FORTY-FIVE YEARS, Shirley Smith has been a dedicated member of the workforce. A can-do woman, she helped customers select furniture and trained legions of salespeople at Art Van in Taylor, Michigan. Steady paychecks enabled her to support her son, buy a home, and manage her diabetes. But in March, Smith’s world collapsed when the retailer, where she had worked for twenty-three years, announced that it was going out of business. “I was frantic,” recalls Smith in a phone interview. “Jobs aren’t easy to come by in the Detroit area, which has battled unemployment for decades. But the worst blow was the imminent loss of health insurance.” Like many people with diabetes, sixty-year-old Smith depends on insulin and other medications to prevent heart attacks, strokes, and kidney failure. Diabetes ravages eyes and limbs, so she requires regular check-ups with physicians. “Art Van had an outstanding medical plan that covered my medications, one of which costs $1,500 for thirty pills,” she says. “As a result, my out-of-pocket costs for medical care totaled only $80 to $90 a month.” Smith realized that she might die without her medications, so she called her physician, who provided some free samples. Her cataract surgery was postponed because Smith feared that the cost of the operation and follow-up care would sink her budget. 34 | DECEMBER 2020 / JANUARY 2021

Sharon Johnson, a frequent contributor to The Progressive, is a New York City-based freelance writer who is now writing a book about how COVID-19 has changed the U.S. workforce.

“Last spring was an agonizing time,” Smith says. “My medical expenses soared because I had to spend $900 a month on medications.” In June, Smith landed a new job as a sales manager at another company. Its health insurance plan is not as good as what she had at Art Van, but, she says, “I’m more fortunate than many of my former co-workers.” United for Respect, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit organization that advocates for economic justice for retail workers, has rallied to the support of the 3,100 employees of Art Van. Its September 28 letter urged Thomas H. Lee Partners, a Boston-based private equity firm which took over Art Van in 2017, to give former employees $1,500 each to cover three months of out-of-pocket insurance so they could weather the COVID-19 pandemic. The letter argued that the $400 per worker payments provided by the company’s hardship fund were woefully inadequate. “[F]ormer employees are facing astronomical hospital bills, unable to afford prescriptions, surviving a pandemic as immune-compromised, and recovering from contracting COVID, among many other circumstances,” the letter stated. A spokesperson for United for Respect says the letter drew no response. The experience of the Art Van workers is becoming increasingly common as the pandemic continues to ravage the U.S. economy. An estimated 164 million Americans under age sixty-five—nearly half the entire U.S. population—were covered by employer-provided insurance plans, as the Commonwealth Fund reported in November 2019.

The group recently estimated that, as of June 2020, some 7.7 million workers with employer-sponsored insurance had lost their jobs due to the pandemic-induced recession. These plans also covered 6.9 million of their dependents, pushing the total to 14.6 million people. “Only with time will we know how many job losses are ultimately permanent,” the group said.

A GOVERNMENT SURVEY cited in an August

report from the Economic Policy Institute found that for every 100 workers who lose employer-provided insurance, eighty-five retain access to some form of coverage. (See sidebar on page 36 for details.) The Labor Department reported in October that 787,000 Americans filed for state unemployment benefits for the first time that week, roughly 40,000 fewer than the previous week but still roughly four times the weekly claims from before the pandemic. Since February, nearly 700,000 people have left the workforce. In October, unemployment stood at 6.9 percent, down from a record high of nearly 15 percent in April. The nation has lost nearly eleven million jobs to COVID-19. Many are gone for good. The newly jobless must find other ways to obtain health care. Sorting through insurance options and figuring out what is best can be a daunting task. People who have lost their employer-sponsored insurance must find ways to cover medications and treatments, find new provider networks, and choose deductibles. Fortunately, grassroots groups, unions, legal aid societies, and others have launched extensive public awareness campaigns to advise unemployed workers like Kathy Vanco of Avenel, New Jersey. Vanco, who lost her job as an accounts receivable clerk in March, has high blood pressure and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. She was “terrified when I learned my insurance would end in five days.” A friend suggested that she contact New Jersey Citizen Action, a statewide grassroots organization. The staff explained Vanco’s options and helped the sixty-three-year-old widow enroll in a marketplace plan under the Affordable Care Act, which provides subsidies to help pay for premiums. “I am very grateful because they helped me find a plan that has the benefits I need, so I don’t have to worry every day that I will become incapacitated by going without regular medical care,” Vanco says. “My share of the premiums is $128 a month, which I can afford, even though I lost my job.” Unemployed workers like Vanco must think about health insurance in ways they never did before, because this is the first economic crisis, in recent history, triggered by a public health emergency.

“During previous recessions, workers were focused on getting back to work, but now they must also consider whether they will survive the pandemic,” says Maura Collinsgru, health care program director of New Jersey Citizen Action. Uninsured workers who skip routine care for chronic conditions like diabetes and hypertension risk dying of a heart attack or stroke, she explains. Accident victims who forego emergency treatments may be left with permanent disabilities. Although the majority of people who get COVID19 have mild symptoms, those who develop complications like pneumonia and require hospitalization may face thousands of dollars in out-of-pocket expenses. “Many unemployed workers without insurance must make draconian decisions,” Collinsgru explains. “Do they spend their meager funds on feeding their families or do they seek medical treatments for themselves? Most workers put their families first.”

During previous THE SPIKE IN the loss of employer-provided inrecessions, surance could exacerbate workers’ long-term finanworkers were cial security, says John R. Keller, supervising attorney of Legal Aid of North Carolina, which established focused on a navigator consortium. The group of health care, getting back social services, and legal aid organizations provides to work, but free help to state residents to enroll in the health now they insurance marketplace plans offered under the Affordable Care Act. must also “Replacing health insurance is usually not the first consider concern of people when they lose their jobs,” he says. whether they “But it soon tops their list of worries because it can will survive lead to crushing debts and even bankruptcy if they the pandemic. become ill.” Before the pandemic, one in three Americans said they were unable to pay a $400 medical bill without selling their belongings or borrowing money. About 530,000 Americans were filing for bankruptcy each year because of medical bills or the loss of income due to illness. Historic unemployment during the pandemic has shed a light on how many people live just one paycheck away from losing everything, says Karen Pollitz, senior fellow of health reform and private insurance at the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, a San Francisco-based nonprofit. “The Affordable Care Act is a lifesaver for the millions of Americans who face the double whammy of a loss of a job and health insurance,” Pollitz tells The Progressive. “Our studies show that nearly half of the 27 million who lost job-based benefits from March 1 through May are eligible for Medicaid and an additional 8.4 million qualify for marketplace plans.” Unfortunately, Pollitz says, “many unemployed THE PROGRESSIVE | 35

workers won’t qualify for Medicaid because they fall in the coverage gap of having incomes above Medicaid eligibility limits but below the poverty level for the lower levels of marketplace premium tax credits.” Unemployed workers in Texas and eleven other states that have not expanded Medicaid are finding themselves in dire straits. “We are receiving frantic calls from people who have lost their job-provided health benefits and cannot afford the medications and therapy that enable them to function and even survive in some cases,” says Greg Hansch, executive director of the National Alliance on Mental Illness Texas. Levels of anxiety and depression have spiked during the pandemic, Hansch says. In addition to the loss of income and savings, many people have had to homeschool their kids and live in situations that test their ability to cope. Unfortunately, at the time they need therapy and counseling the most, many people with mental conditions cannot afford it. “Paying for a drug that costs $1,300 a month is impossible for many workers with middle-income jobs, let alone someone who earns the minimum wage,” says Hansch, whose organization is working with pharmaceutical companies and therapists to provide free or reduced-cost care. “Some people are going without eating to pay for medications. Others are going off the drugs, which increases their risks for ending up in a hospital or even the criminal justice system.”

Some people are going without eating to pay for medications. Others are going off the drugs, which increases their risks for ending up in a hospital or even the criminal justice system.

The persistent coronavirus and record unemployment have heightened calls to reform or replace employer-provided health benefits. Progressives including Senator Bernie Sanders, Independent of Vermont, have called for Congress to enact a governmentfinanced, single-payer system like Medicare for All. Meanwhile, some progress is occurring at the state level. Georgia ordered all health insurers to refrain from canceling health policies because of nonpayments during the pandemic. In New Jersey, the state has waived prior authorization before hospitalization as well as premiums for individuals enrolled in Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP). As Dena Mottola Jaborska, associate director of New Jersey Citizen Action, noted, “These changes will encourage parents of the estimated 80,000 uninsured children in New Jersey to enroll their children in these life-saving programs.” Wendy Chun-Hoon, executive director of Family Values @ Work, a nonprofit group of twenty-seven state and local coalitions that promote family friendly workplace policies, predicts that the loss of jobs and employer-provided benefits will have a profound impact on future economic policies. “COVID-19 has shown that the old economy doesn’t work for anyone,” she says. “We need a broader socialinsurance system that provides basic protections like health insurance, child care, and sick days so that the United States can become a caring economy.” ◆

If You Lose Your Employer-Provided Health Insurance . . . Family Members’ Policy: You may be eligible to join

the employer-sponsored plan of your spouse or partner. Those who are under age twenty-six may join their parents’ plan.

Medicaid: Many people who lose their health coverage—

especially those who live in the majority of states that expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act (ACA)— can qualify for Medicaid, depending on their income. Unemployment compensation counts as income, but savings and other assets are not factored in. Some states allow adults with higher incomes to qualify; all states set lower eligibility levels for children and pregnant women.

Marketplace: Marketplace plans under the Affordable

Care Act offer premium subsidies to those who expect their 2020 income to be 200 to 400 percent of the federal poverty level ($12,490–$49,960 for an individual and $25,750–$103,000 for a family of four). Marketplace plans have high deductibles, but cost-sharing subsidies are available to people with incomes up to 250 percent of the poverty level.

36 | DECEMBER 2020 / JANUARY 2021

COBRA: This program permits workers of companies

with twenty or more employees to continue their employer-provided insurance for up to eighteen months. Workers must pay the employer’s portion as well as their own, which makes COBRA prohibitively expensive for many unemployed workers.

Short-Term Health Plans: An executive order by

President Trump in 2018 permits individuals to purchase short-term health plans with an initial duration of a year and a renewal option that allows the plan to remain in force for three years. But these plans do not cover preexisting conditions and impose maximum benefit limits. Many states prohibit them or impose strict restrictions.

Community Health Centers: These clinics have been

providing primary care to patients regardless of their ability to pay since the 1960s. Now they are ramping up their efforts to serve low income individuals and families

who have been devastated by the COVID-19 pandemic and have no other place to turn. —Sharon Johnson

We are livin

g at a uniqu e moment o of severe cr f history, a ises: enviro moment of nmental de confluence threat of nu struction, s clear war, d erious and growing eterioration much more o f f u n ctioning de . The crises mocracy, an h a v e d e ep roots, no d have been r t easily extir aised to im pated. Crise pending ca Trump Adm tastrophe b s y the malev inistration, olence of th but even if leadership e that cancer that might can be excis be responsiv ed by new urgent chall e to popula enges will r r a ctivist pres emain. The sures, the opportunitie r e are feasible s have to be solutions, b grasped an ut the There has n d p u rsued, and ever been a without dela time when y. more neede s o b e r a nd informe d as a guide d analysis w to action, th as has been pr e k in d that The Pr oviding sin ogressive ce its found Fighting Bo in g m o r e t han a centu b La Follett ry ago by e. Please help

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Noam Chom

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Please use th e enclosed en velope or call 608-257-462 6 to make a ta x-deductible donation to su pport The Pro g ressive. Thank you.

STUDENTS ON STRIKE COVID-19 has sparked a new wave of activism.

GABBY ESTLUND

BY LEXI MCMENAMIN

From public institutions like the University of Iowa and the University of Massachusetts Boston, to private ones like the University of Chicago and Rice University, students across the country are coalescing around a novel idea: a tuition strike. The massive mismanagement of the coronavirus pandemic has forced college students to question the cost of their education, as schools that charge tens of thousands of dollars in tuition per year transition to online instruction. “Students are really angry at the way that we’re being treated right now,” says Dulce Escorcia, a senior at the University of Iowa and a member of Iowa Student Action. “We were already being taken advantage of by rising tuition costs.” And now, there’s the pandemic, which forced students back into classrooms or into spaces where COVID-19 protocols aren’t followed. “It all comes together into all the energy that’s buzzing around campuses right now.” 38 | DECEMBER 2020 / JANUARY 2021

“American students pay so much money,” says Miranda Dotson, a senior at American University in Washington, D.C., and an organizer with the nascent national organization United Student Front. “If they withhold their dollars, there are a lot of universities that are tuition-dependent [which] would be forced to listen to, or in a position to negotiate with, students who strike en masse.” Broiling in the background is the rise of labor activism in education, including campaigns for unionization within university graduate departments as well as the #Red4Ed strikes of K-12 educators that made headlines throughout 2018 and 2019. The push for tuition strikes has also drawn strength from the mo-

Iowa City, Iowa: Student Action members protesting the Iowa Board of Regents decision to reopen campuses in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Lexi McMenamin (@lexmcmenamin) is a reporter from Philadelphia who writes about politics, identity, and activist movements.

bilization for the Black Lives Matter movement that The University of Chicago fundraised $5 billion in has brought tens of thousands of people to the streets 2019, on top of its $14 billion investment portfolio that around the country. includes an $8.2 billion endowment. Advocates see Early this year, Americans hit a record-breaking this as evidence of the university’s ability to provide total of $1.6 trillion in student debt. While the coro- relief for its student body. navirus pandemic has led to some loan relief, this “A bunch of people were being thrown into really has not solved the problem but merely held it at bay. volatile situations, either with their family back home The goals of the tuition strike vary depending on or with just trying to figure out what the hell is going each school’s unique issues, but all of the organizers on here in Chicago, and we just saw the university I spoke to see a clear connection between the move- doing very little to support students,” recalls Rubio. ment for racial justice and the fight against student “That was really frustrating. I mean, for myself, I needdebt and college costs. ed resources from the university that [it] didn’t give “If I’m fighting for other people, I really am fighting me. And that was the situation for thousands of stufor myself,” says Luis Rubio, a junior at the University dents across campus.” of Chicago and member of UChicago for Fair Tuition. More than 1,800 students and UChicago commu“I am really convinced that that is one of the most nity members signed a petition backing the 50 percent powerful ways to make change in this world, to see tuition cut. By mid-April, the university committed to other people’s struggles as your own, in a way.” a tuition freeze for the undergraduate college and at The organizers of the United Student Front are least one graduate program, without addressing the focused on leveraging a student strike to push universities to acquiesce to student demands around racial justice, such as targeting campus police budgets. “If I’m fighting for other people, I really am “Not paying tuition because I’m not getting the service that I was promised is one thing, but not paying fighting for myself.” tuition because my money in some way is going to the subsidization of one of the most lethal institutions in the country is a different thing,” says Charles H.F. other demands. Campaign organizers rallied students Davis III, assistant professor of higher education at around withholding their tuition payments due at the University of Michigan. “There’s something there the end of April. Ultimately, more than 200 students that has to be understood about what all these rela- withheld their payments. tionships are, when we think about not just how the A similar tactic paid off in Iowa, where Iowa Stuuniversity makes money, but what it spends its money dent Action, a chapter of the national Student Action on and why.” network, spent nearly two years prior to the onset Villanova University education professor Jerusha of the pandemic fighting against planned statewide Conner, whose book The New Student Activists was tuition hikes. released in February 2020, ties this into the increased “Student Action nationally is building the movesocial awareness of current and incoming college stu- ment for free college for all,” says Sara Castro, a senior dents. Across her research, racial justice was the top at Grinnell College, a private college in Iowa. “A stuissue area in which student organizers were engaged. dent movement, and the way that is related to the work “In my book, the data for which was collected in that we do in Iowa, is really challenging the decision 2015 and 2016, I found that nearly half of the students makers in Iowa, specifically around education.” who saw themselves as activists in college had arrived Iowa’s three public universities—University of on campus with that identity well-formed,” Conner Iowa, Iowa State University, and the University of says. “I am certain that number has only grown since.” Northern Iowa—are controlled by the state’s Board of Regents. Iowa Student Action consistently held dihe first student strike actions took place early in rect actions protesting the tuition hikes, most recently the pandemic. In April, at the University of Chi- in February. cago, student organizers brought together existing “[Tuition hikes] definitely hurt students and their student groups to form the coalition UChicago for families,” Castro says, adding that “when tuition goes Fair Tuition. up, campuses get wealthier and whiter. [They get] Initially, the campaign demanded a 50 percent re- more dangerous for working class folks, and queer duction in tuition expenses for the spring semester, a folks, and Black and brown people. There’s a real cost tuition freeze, increased transparency about university and a danger to that, too.” budgeting, and cost adjustments for graduate students. The campaign was sustaining momentum when

THE PROGRESSIVE | 39

the coronavirus pandemic struck. Student workers on campus, who relied on their university jobs to get by, were suddenly laid off, leaving them scrambling to pay rent and stay safe. On May 1, Iowa Student Action released a list of demands, calling for tuition reductions throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, a five-year tuition freeze, and a 50 percent refund for the spring 2020 semester. A few days later, the Board of Regents announced a tuition freeze for the fall 2020 semester, replacing a planned increase; the plan was approved at a Board of Regents meeting in early June.

“There’s a certain understanding by folks that being a college student or having a bachelor’s degree isn’t going to save you from the injustices of the world.” One strength for college organizers, notes Conner, who wrote the book on student activism, is their tech literacy. As shutdowns drove students to organize online, “the pivot to digital organizing was seamless; indeed, many groups were already meeting online,” using platforms like Slack and Instagram to stay connected, she says. Online organizing also created space to connect across geographic areas, students interviewed for this article said. But the work didn’t happen only online; throughout the summer, students joined in the Black Lives Matter protests against police brutality. “Campus-based organizing suffered some setbacks last spring when schools closed, particularly in places like [University of California] Santa Cruz, where grad students were picketing, and Syracuse [University], where #NotAgainSU students were in the midst of an occupation and negotiations with administrators over their demands,” Conner says. “However, [the tuition strikes] have shown the power of student activists to adapt to the constraints of the current circumstances.”

hile the spring brought a rash of immediate reactions to the pandemic and changes to schooling, the summer and fall have brought new conflicts and concerns to students nationwide. Schools spent August and September handling messy in-person reopening processes, many going remote soon after due to COVID-19 outbreaks. As a part of this transition, universities have placed a ridiculous burden on students to avoid the spread of COVID-19 on campuses. Government officials and 40 | DECEMBER 2020 / JANUARY 2021

university administrators alike have blamed young people for new cases, insinuating that they aren’t doing their part to stop the spread. “We’ve literally never let students determine policy. Ever. And all of a sudden you’re going to leave it up to people who we already know are going to do what they’re going to do?” asks Davis of the University of Michigan. “People are underage drinking. They’re engaging in, you know, various activities without the use of protection, they’re just doing all of these things that people do, and you’re gonna say a pandemic is left up to students wearing masks?” As Davis observes, those very colleges now struggling to transition to online learning spent years demeaning online education and valorizing the “campus experience.” There was an obvious financial incentive to do so, but now they’re struggling to maintain that economic set-up without risking lives. At best, campuses are assuming some modicum of risk: As I reported for The Progressive earlier this fall, Cornell University relied on a “science-based model” that assumed a percentage of the university community would become infected. Left out of this conversation is the fact that no college truly exists in isolation. “It’d be different if we all lived on these islands of universities and it was a bubble,” says Davis. Citing his own campus, he says, “You’ve got folks from all across the state of Michigan coming to and from campus however they so choose any given weekend.” Even if the campuses shut down, “Ann Arbor will still be here, Ypsilanti will still be here, Detroit, for people that are going for their cultural excursion from the university, will still be here.” Several campaigns, including at Rice University, sought to prioritize the surrounding community’s safety. “People understand that something like campus police isn’t just about how it affects the students that are on campus, but it affects a lot of the communities within which they’re situated,” Davis says. “There’s a certain understanding by folks that being a college student or having a bachelor’s degree isn’t going to save you from the injustices of the world.” “Maybe it makes more sense to be in the right relationship with people that are outside those campus walls, because in essence you’re fighting for the same thing, because the same thing is fighting you.” American University student Miranda Dotson started observing these developments from far away: When COVID-19 began, she was studying abroad in Paris, France, and ended up staying there to ride out the pandemic. While in Paris, she witnessed the national strike over President Emmanuel Macron’s proposed pension reform plan, which began in December 2019 and continued into 2020. Simultaneously,

France’s university system experienced student strikes in solidarity with professors and researchers. “[Striking] was in the air in France,” Dotson says. “What was really mobilizing and empowering was to see the level, the extent to which strikers were able to mobilize as a united front, and have demands, and choke the system for a period of time.” Between the winter strikes, spring quarantine, and the United States’ summer of unrest (that she was forced to witness from a distance), Dotson began thinking about how a student strike could transfer back home. At American University, conversations about racial justice were linked to those about sexual assault on campus, and movements around both had brewed for years. Over the summer, she created a survey to suss out others’ interest in the idea. “Every university is different: I know that there are some universities [that] don’t have deep endowments, and there are universities who are like, Harvard, who have $40 billion,” Dotson says. Throughout the fall, the group that coalesced around this idea, now the United Student Front, has been working to spread into as many campuses as possible. The goals of individual campus campaigns have many common themes, Dotson notes. These include wanting to abolish police from campuses, and reinvest those funds into student and staff wellness on campus. As she puts it, “There’s a lot of idea sharing and resource sharing that’s going on right now as a growing student network.”

hroughout 2020, campaigns popped up at campuses all over, such as Duke University. The spread of the idea is ongoing. On a mid-October evening, organizers at UMass Boston invited Dotson to a meeting to discuss pursuing such a tactic. I was able to attend. “As students who pay tuition, we’re stakeholders in our universities, much more than our administrations would like us to believe that we are,” stated Dotson, addressing the group. “One of the biggest calls to action this year is divestment from police, and anything attached to policing, including prison and surveillance systems. So for our universities to continue to invest in prisons or industries that have links to prisons is in direct contradiction with any claims to anti-racism that the university has.” Participants including facilitator Izabel Depina, an organizer with PHENOM, a Massachusetts statewide group organizing for free college, expressed excitement at the idea. In the meeting, organizers strategized how best to address their immediate concerns, like union organizing at UMass Amherst, and also considered how and when they could feasibly roll out a tuition strike. For Depina, the urgency was palpable.

“There’s a lot of things that need to be happening because systematic racism exists, and our Black and brown students are suffering the most,” Depina said in the meeting. The group agreed to keep talking. The student tuition strike movement is growing, and growing fast—but also trying to grow smartly. “The striking tactic is most effective when there is a critical enough mass participating that it grinds business-as-usual to a halt,” Conner says. “The question for organizers to grapple with is whether they can mobilize a large enough base with the identity-based approach, or whether they need to erect a broader tent that includes all those affected, as well as their allies, in order to effectively disrupt the system and challenge the taken-for-granted assumptions of those in positions of power.” Davis speculates that the pandemic has created an opening for intersectional, identity-based organizing that is united for racial justice, with a tuition strike as one tactic. “[COVID-19] has so much cross-cutting impact that it forces folks to think about the things they have in common, more so than the things they have that are different,” he says. “You get a clear understanding of how class dynamics intersect with issues of race, how that also intersects with issues of gender [and] who the essential workers are in a variety of spaces. “That revelation presents more opportunities for the coalition building, which I think we’re seeing.” ◆

Our connection to stuff is broken. Let’s ﬁx it. Fixation

How to Have Stuff without Breaking the Planet Sandra Goldmark “A sturdy argument that small choices can lay a foundation for larger collective shifts. . . . Carefully researched and closely reasoned critique of consumerism, resource depletion, cheap labor, waste, and the ruinous belief in unbridled growth.” —Kirkus Reviews $27 • 9781642830453

Available at your local independent bookstore or islandpress.org

dec-jan20.21.indd 1

10/28/2020 1:32:30 PM

THE PROGRESSIVE | 41

ONE QUESTION

Q: How Have the Black Lives Matter Protests Impacted the Prison Abolition Movement? K AGBEBIYI Organizer, social worker, and co-author of the 8 to Abolition platform. As I was introduced to organizing a little bit before the first wave of BLM protests (2013–2014), I’ve noticed that activists now have more support and networks for political education than they did back then. Activists today tend to have a deeper analysis of the Prison-Industrial Complex. And that, combined with the radicalizing effect of COVID-19, has allowed us to push for more radical demands. The latest BLM protests have also plugged more people into the movement for prison abolition by directing them toward local efforts around defunding the police, getting cops out of schools, and consuming and creating popular education materials around abolition. But, for organizers, the question remains: How do we make radical concepts more accessible to the masses while not diluting them? These protests have given us another chance to come up with an answer.

ALEX VITALE Professor of sociology at Brooklyn College and author of The End of Policing. The police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor have forced us to come to terms with how America’s reliance on policing has become a major engine of inequality. Prison abolition organizing and discourse have always contained an analysis of how racial capitalism relies on incarceration as a tool of social control. But the current focus on policing has revealed that criminalization occurs not just in prisons but also in millions of violent, demeaning, and unnecessary interactions between the police and the public. Putting more money into reform will not address the fundamental injustices of police violence. The current wave of protests is rooted in this analysis. And, as such, it presents a much more direct challenge to leaders in both parties who continue to build political power through the criminalization of the most vulnerable communities in our society.

MAYA SCHENWAR Editor-in-chief at Truthout, author of Locked Down, Locked Out, and co-author of Prison by Any Other Name. The movement to defund the police that emerged this year is grounded in decades of Black feminist and anti-capitalist abolitionist organizing. It takes seriously the words of Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “Abolition requires that we change one thing: everything.” Thanks to this year’s protests, many more people are being energized by that vision. Organizers are emphasizing the necessity of abolishing policing, not just the police. Cutting police funding isn’t enough. Resources must also pour into housing, health care, education, child care, the arts, and youth programs. Abolition is a life-affirming thing, a “growing thing,” Alexis Pauline Gumbs has said. It is a practice of building the life-affirming, flourishing world we want to live in. 42 | DECEMBER 2020 / JANUARY 2021

BOOK EXCERPT

Making Black Lives Matter at School The national movement has four key demands to eliminate racism in education. BY JESSE HAGOPIAN

times the rate of white students nationally and Black girls are suspended at six times the rate of white girls. While Black girls make up only 16 percent of the female student population, they account for nearly one-third of all girls referred to law enforcement and more than one-third of all female school-based arrests. Howard Zehr, a professor of restorative justice at Eastern Mennonite University, explains that punitive approaches to discipline, known as retributive justice, ask these questions: With this understanding, Black Lives Matter at School nationally has issued four core de• What rule has been broken? mands to disrupt this anti-Black web of policies, • Who is to blame? practices, and beliefs in the education system. • What punishment do they deserve? The first demand is to end “zero tolerance disciBy contrast, the Black Lives Matter at School pline” and replace it with restorative justice. movement has called for the funding and imBlack youth have been disproportionately plementation of restorative justice practices to suspended and expelled from school since the replace retributive and zero tolerance approaches. explosion of so-called zero tolerance policies modeled on the racist “war on drugs.” As Mi- These restorative practices are used proactively chelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow, in schools to build healthy relationships, not just reactively after a conflict arises. explained in an interview: Some of these restorative practices include “Many people imagine that zero tolerance the use of peace circles, peer mediation, comrhetoric emerged within the school environment, munity conferencing, and trauma-informed apbut it’s not true. In fact, the Advancement Project published a report showing that one of the proaches to teaching. Zehr explains that when earliest examples of zero tolerance language in conflicts do arise, a restorative justice approach school discipline manuals was a cut-and-paste asks these questions: job from a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administra• Who has been hurt and what are their tion manual.” needs? “The wave of punitiveness that washed over • Who is obligated to address these needs? the United States with the rise of the drug war • Who has a “stake” in this situation and and the get-tough movement really flooded our what is the process of involving them in schools. Schools, caught up in this maelstrom, making things right and preventing future began viewing children as criminals or suspects, occurrences? rather than as young people with an enormous Asking these questions holds the potential to amount of potential, struggling in their own ways and their own difficult context to make it build nurturing communities rather than to just react to disruptions of community and resort to and hopefully thrive.” Black students are suspended at almost four punishment.

Advocates for justice know that racism in the schools isn’t only a product of openly racist and bigoted people. It is an institutional problem, rather than a merely individual one. As Black Lives Matter co-founder Opal Tometi has pointed out, “Anti-Black racism operates at a society-wide level and colludes in a seamless web of policies, practices, and beliefs to oppress and disempower Black communities.”

From Black Lives Matter at School: An Uprising for Educational Justice, edited by Denisha Jones and Jesse Hagopian, published December 1, 2020, by Haymarket Books and excerpted with permission. Excerpt is from the introductory chapter written by Hagopian. The book is available for purchase at https://www. haymarketbooks.org/books/1607black-lives-matter-at-school. Jesse Hagopian, an editor for the magazine Rethinking Schools, teaches ethnic studies at Seattle’s Garfield High School and is a member of the national Black Lives Matter at School steering committee.

THE PROGRESSIVE | 43

BOOK EXCERPT

he second demand of the Black Lives Matter at School movement, besides reforming the use of discipline, is for schools to hire more Black teachers. Nationally, around 80 percent of teachers are white. Additionally, there has been a dramatic displacement of teachers in recent years. As an article in Mother Jones pointed out, since 2002, “26,000 African American teachers have disappeared from the nation’s public schools—even as the overall teaching workforce has increased by 134,000. Countless Black principals, coaches, cafeteria workers, nurses, and counselors have also been displaced.” The closing of schools in Black and brown neighborhoods has been one of the biggest drivers in pushing out Black teachers, who are more likely to “Patterns of Immigration,” as if Africans came to the teach at those schools. In Chicago, for example, in United States looking for the American Dream, rather 2013, then-mayor Rahm Emanuel led the effort to than in chains at the bottom of slave ships. This is just one example of the humiliation and close nearly fifty schools where the vast majority of dehumanization that Black students experience students were Black and Latinx. Chicago has also from corporate curriculums on a daily basis. Anlost nearly half of all its Black teachers in the past other common problem is that Black history is often fifteen years. The vital necessity of hiring more Black teachers reduced to teaching primarily about slavery, as if was made clear in a 2017 study from American Uni- the African American experience can be reduced versity, which found that “having just one Black teach- to oppression. As Malcolm X once said: “When we send our er in third, fourth, or fifth grade reduced low-income Black boys’ probability of dropping out of high school children to school in this country they learn nothing about us other than that we used to be cotton pickers. by 39 percent.” Why, your grandfather was Nat Turner; your grandThirdly, the movement demands that Black history and ethnic studies be mandated in every school, father was Toussaint L’Ouverture; your grandfather was Hannibal.” Echoing Malcolm’s words, Black kindergarten through twelfth grade. Ethnic studies is a pedagogical approach fought for Lives Matter at School student organizer Israel Presand won by students, beginning in the late 1960s. But ley said in an interview about today’s movement, since that time, ethnic studies programs around the “Why don’t you ever teach me how we fought back, country have been underfunded and attacked, leaving because I know my people are strong.” The power of ethnic studies to transform eduyoung people increasingly vulnerable to corporate cation has been well documented. A 2016 study by curriculums that minimize racism and Black history. Take, for example, the textbook that fifteen-year- researchers at Stanford University found strong posold Coby Burren exposed in the fall of 2015. Coby itive associations with adding ethnic studies to the was in geography class at Pearland High School, near curriculum: students’ GPAs improved on average Houston, when he read an assigned page of his text- by 1.4 grade points, attendance rose 21 percentage book and noticed something disturbing: a map of the points, and class credits earned increased by 23 United States with a caption claiming the Atlantic points. slave trade brought “millions of workers from Africa n 2018-19, Black Lives Matter at School added a to the southern United States to work on agricultural fourth demand to its list: Fund counselors, not cops. plantations.” Coby took a picture of his textbook and texted it Security officers and cops outnumber counselors in to his mother, Roni Dean-Burren, adding, “We was three of the five largest school districts in the United real hard workers wasn’t we,” along with a sarcastic States. Today, 1.7 million children go to a school in the emoji. Not only had the McGraw-Hill textbook used the term “workers,” instead of “enslaved African peo- United States where there is a police officer and no ple,” but they had placed the chapter on the enslave- counselor—and some 14 million students attend a ment of Africans within a section of the book entitled school where there is a cop but no counselor, nurse,

44 | DECEMBER 2020 / JANUARY 2021

The core demands of Black Lives Matter at School.

psychologist, or social worker. Police are a huge drain on resources. When school districts fund police officers, they are choosing not to fund other vital support staff. According to a 2017 ACLU report, schools in Washington State pay on average $62,000—and as much as $125,000—per full-time equivalent officer per year. This is money that could be used to increase the number of school counselors, psychologists, teachers, and other student support services. During the past twenty years, the number of police officers in schools has exploded, from only a handful to an estimated 17,000 police officers on school campuses nationwide. And, as the ACLU states, “The rise in school policing cannot be attributed to a rise in dangerous crime in schools. Particularly in Black and brown communities, school police have historically gone well beyond addressing serious criminal activity, instead targeting perceived disorder or rowdiness.” One of the reasons for the dramatic increase of police in schools is that from 1999 to 2005, “the federal COPS [Community Oriented Policing Services] program awarded in excess of $753 million to schools and police departments to place police officers in schools.” Moreover, students are not being targeted at random. A joint issue brief from the Advancement Project, the Alliance for Educational Justice, Dignity in Schools, and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund revealed: “Although students of color do not misbehave more than white students, they are disproportionately policed in schools: Nationally, Black and Latinx youth made up over 58 percent of school-based arrests while representing only 40 percent of public school enrollment.” Despite these glaring inequalities, U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has rescinded the guidance issued by the Obama Administration directing schools to reduce racial disparities in how they discipline students. Black high school graduate Marshé Doss describes the pain and humiliation of being targeted for a “random” search by the police in school: “They’ll pull you out into the hallway and they’ll ask you to empty your bags, but moving too slow causes them to rush you and dump it all out on the floor anyway. And then sometimes they’ll briefly check through it after they dump everything on the floor, and then they’ll be like, ‘OK, pack up your things and go back to class.’ And for me, after they’d dumped everything, they took my hand sanitizer, and they were like, ‘You’re going to use it to get high and sniff it.’ ”

Increasingly, school discipline issues that used to be handled by administration and parents are now being treated as criminal issues to be dealt with by police officers. Take the case of a high school student in Pierce County, Washington, who was sent by school police to the prosecuting attorney on suspected charges of assault in the fourth degree for pouring chocolate milk on another student in the school lunchroom (thankfully, the prosecutor declined to file charges in juvenile court). The United States is one of a few countries that stations police in schools, and the resulting arrests have terrible consequences for students. A first-time arrest doubles the odds that a student will drop out of high school, and a first-time court appearance quadruples the odds. Juvenile arrest also increases students’ chances of future imprisonment.

he four demands of Black Lives Matter at School expose the racist narrative that lower academic outcomes and graduation rates of Black students are due to lack of motivation or the dysfunction of Black families. The four demands also stand in stark contrast to the agenda of the massive corporate education reform effort led by billionaires who attempt to disrupt, dismantle, and profit from public education. These efforts—led most notably by Bill Gates, Eli Broad, and the Walton family (owners of Walmart)— have pursued a strategy for the schools consisting of ramping up the use of standardized testing, privatizing public education, closing schools serving Black and brown students, and opposing teachers unions. Each of these efforts has only exacerbated the most entrenched aspects of institutional racism in the schools, and for all the money that they have poured into these initiatives, the major indicators for outcomes for Black students have not improved. Will Black lives ever truly matter in the education system? The answer to that question will not be determined by political elites or billionaire corporate education reformers. In 1857, the great abolitionist Frederick Douglass made the observation that we must remember today if we are to achieve an emancipatory education system: “Who would be free, themselves must strike the blow. . . . The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.” The answer, then, to whether we will someday see a school system worthy of Black students lies in the hearts of educators, students, parents, and antiracist organizers everywhere who tire of inequality and rise up to strike the blow for freedom. ◆ THE PROGRESSIVE | 45

Bad Leadership Drove Schools into Crisis COVID-19 exposed how important teachers are to students and families—but politicians and policy leaders are still not listening to them. BY JEFF BRYANT

Michael Barbour, a professor at Touro University California and an expert on K-12 online learning, believes that more than half of the nation’s school superintendents “should be fired.” His blistering criticism stems from the fact that, deep into the 2020–2021 school year, many schools are still struggling with virtual learning during the pandemic. Stories of school districts’ online learning systems crashing are widespread. Teachers complain about being excluded from decisions regarding online curriculum and pedagogy. Alarming numbers of students are not engaged or not showing up, especially in low-income areas and among communities of color. The chaos is especially concerning given that 76 percent of parents say their children are attending school remotely, either full or part time. “Any school leader who didn’t reach out to teachers to ask what had worked well and what didn’t and then use that [to prepare for the fall reopening],” Barbour tells me, “committed a dereliction of duty.” Barbour’s ire might be justified. In California, for example, fewer than 10 percent of school districts offered more than sixteen hours of training for teachers during the summer, when schools could have been preparing to reopen with online learning. Improving remote learning, many experts agree, would mean creating spaces for teachers to collaborate and share models of effective online instruction and lesson planning. “The disregard of teachers’ shared professional expertise and practical knowledge is no accident,” wrote Diana D’Amico

Pawlewicz, an education policy historian and author of Blaming Teachers, on the debacle of fall school reopenings. This disregard is all the more galling given the #Red4Ed wave of teacher rebellions that took place in 2018–2019, when educators—mostly in politically red states—held sickouts, walkouts, and street demonstrations to protest a lack of funding, attacks on teacher professionalism, and threats to close and privatize public schools. The teachers’ actions led to increased teacher pay, smaller class sizes, and more nurses and counselors in schools. But during the pandemic, when support for teachers would seem to matter most, their wisdom has too often been overlooked. “In the spring, we had to come up with creative ways to support our families,” says Milwaukee, Wisconsin, educator Glenn Carson. He describes an intense effort to deliver devices and hotspots to homes, learn new technologies, and conduct family outreach. “I video-recorded my lessons and arranged one-on-one virtual meetings with students,” says Kathy Dorman, a high school teacher in Providence, Rhode Island. Despite these innovations, online learning has never been as effective as in-person classes. The rapid switch to going virtual made that mode of instruction even more challenging, especially for low-income, Black, and Latinx students.

And at least seven million students with disabilities and learning impairments were being left behind due to school closures. This is on top of the nearly sixteen million students who had no reliable Internet connection when the pandemic began. But school superintendents aren’t solely to blame—policy leaders have also completely failed schools, teachers, and families. In March, when Congress passed the CARES Act with $13.2 billion for schools, it was widely acknowledged that it was insufficient to meet most schools’ needs. It wasn’t enough to pay for free broadband access and laptops for students, hire more teachers and school staff, and overcome school budget cuts. Yet President Donald Trump and the Republican-led Senate spent months doing nothing. Most of these top-down failures, in turn, trickled down to teachers. And now, in schools that have decided to reopen in-person (either full time or partially), 86 percent of teachers say they must purchase their own personal protective equipment, and 11 percent buy it for their students. What the pandemic revealed about public education is that schools have become the essential safety nets for families, that access to education services is grossly unequal, and that the education process, at its very core, is about the relationships between teachers and their students. If education policy leaders want to improve the way they run schools during a pandemic, maybe they should start with that. ◆

Jeff Bryant is a communications consultant, freelance writer, advocacy journalist, and the lead fellow for The Progressive’s Public School Shakedown project.

46 | DECEMBER 2020 / JANUARY 2021

For Whom the Bell Curves Major U.S. companies routinely rely on racist personality tests to assess job applicants.

PETE RYAN

BY DAVID LAMB

A former book editor at Scribner and Hachette Books, David Lamb is a Minnesota-based writer who focuses on corporate and government misconduct. He is also the editor of St. Paulâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Community Reporter newspaper.

Steve Karraker pulled into Chicagoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Midway Airport, twenty minutes early. He took a long drink of water, wondering what he was missing at his stores. Karraker oversaw ten Renters Choice locations across Illinois, ensuring the store managers met sales targets in the cutthroat rent-to-own furniture industry. In practice, that meant shepherding some four dozen people as they hurtled from crisis to calamity. He terminated employees who stole from the company, riding a roller coaster with revenue that spiked and dove like a peregrine falcon. Karraker was a friend to those under him going through divorces and other personal struggles. After five years at the company in a management role, confronting those challenges was second nature. THE PROGRESSIVE | 47

The part of the job that still made Karraker sweat was what brought him to the airport so early on this blistering August morning. He was picking up his boss, Bill Nitt, a regional vice president from Renters Choice’s corporate headquarters, for his quarterly tour of Karraker’s stores. The man who eventually emerged through automatic doors, wearing a fitted wool suit and one of his trademark paisley ties, was almost jogging. “I need you to take us to the Roadhouse restaurant in Aurora,” Karraker recalls Nitt saying, as he climbed into the car. “But first, I need you to tell all the managers in the region to get their butts there for a meeting. And then we need to get to O’Hare to pick two people up.” As they carved their halting path across the gridlocked city, possibilities shot through Karraker’s mind. He was being fired; no, they were all being fired. His boss explained that they were picking up two others for a big announcement. Karraker had no idea who those people were and what they would announce. Finally, about ninety minutes later, in a crowded private meeting room in a restaurant outside Chicago, Nitt shared the news. He told a group of the state’s store and regional managers, including Karraker, that the company had merged with Rent-A-Center to create the nation’s largest rent-to-own retailer. It would dominate the furniture market for those with low incomes. Nitt produced packets, passing them around to the workers. They were personality tests for every store and regional manager, something Rent-A-Center required to evaluate new hires as well as existing employees’ potential for higher roles. Karraker and his colleagues were told to find a place to fill them out. He recognized the test as one he had taken two years before, scoring badly. Months later, Karraker learned that he had more than twelve deviations on the test, the maximum they allowed for workers to be considered for promotion. Some of his highest-performing store managers fared even worse, and Karraker wondered if the stress from being suddenly compelled to complete these highstakes evaluations had affected the outcomes. After the test, Karraker, who had risen steadily through the ranks at the Aurora store to become the regional manager, would not receive another promotion. Karraker hated having to rely on an algorithm he didn’t trust for hiring decisions. He became disturbed by conversations he had with the psychologist who oversaw the testing program about potential hires Karraker brought forward. The psychologist, he later recalled, made oddly specific predictions, in one case 48 | DECEMBER 2020 / JANUARY 2021

mentioning that a job applicant’s test results suggested he might be a sexual deviant who could pose liability risks. In 2002, Karraker and his two brothers filed a lawsuit against Rent-A-Center, the name that the post-merger company took on, in federal court. It would be three years before Karraker won a summary disposition, with the judge citing “attitudinal barriers resulting from unfounded stereotypes and prejudice,” and then another two years of litigation before he would finally triumph. In that time, Karraker would return to a former career as a property manager, earning less than half what his salary at Rent-A-Center had been while he helped raise his fourth child. He would also coach baseball, football, and wrestling. He says he received two offers for settlements, declining each without consideration, as settling would forbid him from talking about the company’s misconduct. In 2004, three years into his new life and three years before he prevailed in court, Karraker filed for bankruptcy. When it was all over, Rent-A-Center was forced to overhaul its hiring procedures to comply with the law and pay Karraker’s legal bills, worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. As the victorious complainant, he was awarded $5,000 in damages.

he 2005 Karraker v. Rent-A-Center case, a landmark decision in employment law, is one of several in recent decades that sparked a group of industrial and organizational psychologists at the University of Georgia and Western Kentucky University to last year declare their concern regarding the use of workplace personality tests. Considering recent breakthroughs in psychology, the study said, “the ‘line in the sand’ between normal and abnormal personality models may be nonexistent,” potentially making such evaluations medical examinations, and therefore ADA violations. “As scientific understanding of personality progresses,” the researchers noted, “practitioners will need to exercise evermore caution when choosing personality measures.” In 2015, Target Corporation agreed to pay $2.8 million to settle a class-action lawsuit that alleged its use of personality testing to gauge fitness for different roles discriminated based on race and sex. In 2018, Best Buy agreed to stop using personality tests in its hiring processes in a deal that ended an investigation into the discriminatory effects of its testing by the federal body charged with enforcing fair hiring practices. That same year, this same body, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, settled a case alleging that the drugstore chain

CVS Pharmacy had used personality tests in a way Other dimensions measured may also be keeping that “adversely impacted applicants based on race and Black employees out of companies’ executive ranks, national origin.” despite perennial vows to diversify upper manageIt is impossible to know the names or even the ment. One of the metrics on the Hogan Assessment, numbers of people who have been discriminated a Big Five-based test that its owners claim is “trusted” against by personality tests. Perhaps because of the by 75 percent of the Fortune 500, is “intellect,” a trait length of the fight and the meagerness of the award said to predict success at leadership jobs. in Karraker’s case, no one has opted to follow his lead. According to the creator of the test, the psycholoToday Karraker is fifty-two and living in Kankakee, gist Robert Hogan, one can assess a test-taker’s level Illinois, where he likes to play flag football with his of “intellect” by measuring “the degree to which a pergrandchildren. He says in an interview that he does son enjoys chess, opera, and trendy cuisine.” In other not regret refusing the settlement offers Rent-A-Center extended to him. “The most important thing,” he says, “was that they got their black eye.” Nationally, the personality testing industry is marching past $500 million in annual revenue. The tools it sells pervade hiring and promotion practices across the nation’s largest companies, even as psychologists have questioned the tests’ validity. Now, as the titans of corporate America squawk about wanting to diversify their workforces, they are using tests that may present an obstacle to that goal— or could even be the reason that large businesses have failed to meet previous targets. Connections between race and life experiences underlie the discriminatory potential of personality tests. Elizabeth Brondolo, a psychology professor who runs the St. John’s University Social Stress and Health Research Unit, explains that repeated exposure to racism can become a stress that surfaces in answers to personality test questions. words, if Wagner isn’t a hallmark of your background, “Navigating experiences in which others mistreat perhaps you would be a better fit for the register. you because of their racist perceptions is a frequent Hogan, founder and president of the company occurrence for Black people in America,” Brondolo that makes the personality test most commonly used tells The Progressive. “I imagine that most Black people in hiring, has made other statements that raise queshave developed a range of coping resources to deal tions about whether corporate America should sowith internal concerns about mistrust.” licit his social engineering. For instance, his theory When tests evaluate people based on dimensions of personality builds from what he referred to in such as “adjustment”—measured as part of the “Big his 2001 magnum opus, Personality: Theories and Five” personality traits on which most of today’s tests Applications, as the “important contributions to the are based—the skills that Black job candidates have study of personality” of Franz Joseph Gall, the racist been forced to develop to survive could become liabil- skull-measurer who founded the pseudoscience of ities flagged in their personality profiles. A 1991 paper phrenology. published by the American Psychological Association found that “adjustment” tends to reflect whether subhe history of categorizing people through stanjects are “anxious, unhappy, and emotionally unstable,” dardized tests—and structuring society in the but what adjustment to one’s circumstances looks like process—begins with ambitious intentions and ends, in reality depends on those circumstances. all too often, with discrimination run amok. If one candidate grew up having mostly positive Carl Brigham, a eugenics enthusiast and psycholexperiences with strangers and another grew up at ogy professor at Princeton, was celebrated for finding times the target of strangers’ racist prejudice, it is easy a way to adapt a U.S. army intelligence test to apply to to understand why the candidates might bring differ- high school graduates seeking admission to college. In ent amounts of anxiety to interactions with people 1924, Brigham published a paper called “A Study of they don’t know. American Intelligence,” a far-reaching social analysis

Mock-up of applicant questions used by CVS prior to a 2011 settlement with the American Civil Liberties Union of Rhode Island.

THE PROGRESSIVE | 49

lamenting that “American intelligence is declining, the SAT had been teaching Black students for generaand will proceed with an accelerating rate as the racial tions: That the American economy, with a gifted white admixture becomes more and more extensive.” elite calling the shots and a dull but diverse workforce Two years later, he released his test for objective- of manual laborers and pencil pushers powering their ly measuring the intelligence of students across the ideas, was the natural order, the way it was supposed nation that he feared nonwhite races were debasing. to be. Brigham called it the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), The Bell Curve transformed its authors from litand it is still administered in its current form to more tle-known professors into icons, reviled by many, if than two million students each year. admired by some. They were disowned by much of Like other standardized tests, the SAT has been academia, with a visit from Charles Murray to Midrepeatedly criticized for racial bias. Recent research dlebury College to discuss an entirely different book has shown that not only do white and Asian Ameri- twenty-three years after the publication of The Bell can students outperform those of other groups by 14 Curve inspiring protests so violent that administrators percent on the test but scores overall correlate strongly canceled the event. And The New Republic’s editor, with family income, leading many to wonder whether Andrew Sullivan, who had overruled his writers’ proit should be used at all. tests to publish excerpts from the book in 1994, could Two 2019 lawsuits filed by California’s Compton not salvage his relationships with his colleagues. Less Unified School District, which is less than 1 percent than two years later he left the magazine where he had white, allege that the University of California sys- spent his career. tem violates civil rights laws by requiring the SAT or But the book found a dependable contingent of ACT for admission. The lawsuits claim that standard- fans among experts whose careers relied on standardized tests “unlawfully discriminate against disabled, ized testing. One such group of professors in intellow-income, multilingual, and underrepresented ligence and related fields published a full-throated minority students.” defense of The Bell Curve’s central conclusions. One of those lawsuits won a preliminary injunc- Among the article’s fifty-two signatories was Robert tion in court on August 31, requiring all schools with- Hogan, creator of the eponymous test that has become in the largest state college system in the country to a ubiquitous tool for hiring and promotion at compaimmediately suspend use of the tests. Mark Rosen- nies small and large. baum, a lawyer prosecuting the case, proclaimed that the “racist tests that deprived countless California stun the weeks after George Floyd’s killing at the hands dents of color . . . of a fair shot” were “dead and gone.” of Minneapolis police and the renewed focus on The SAT’s owner, the College Board, had attempt- racist violence that resulted, the CEO of the eponyed last year to address discriminatory problems with a mous testing company Hogan founded, also called so-called adversity score, which the testing company Hogan, grew reflective about the connection besuggested would capture a student’s socioeconomic tween Hogan tests and discrimination. He seemed background. But the effort disintegrated amid contro- to decide that if racism was the problem, Hogan versy over whether it is possible to reduce to a number tests were the solution, perhaps the only means of the impact of hardship experienced over the course measuring job candidates and employees with true of a lifetime. objectivity. Still, even after the SAT’s sordid history and more In the CEO’s June blog post on the Hogan comparecent troubles have been weighed, the best-known ny website, he outlined the company’s commitment racism scandal in the world of testing remains that of to “social justice, antiracism, and equal opportunity psychologist Richard J. Herrnstein and social scientist for all,” stretching back to its founder. He argued that Charles Murray’s 1994 book, The Bell Curve. The 845- standardized tests are not discriminatory in their efpage lightning rod argues that low intelligence has fects, but instead, a weapon to be wielded in an epic caused many of America’s social ills, from involve- quest against racial bias in the workforce. The blog ment in crime to children born to unmarried parents post highlighted Robert Hogan’s lifelong “focus on to financial struggles. research to improve social justice.” Among other things, the book analyzed the averIn response to inquiries for this article, the comage intelligence of Americans across racial lines, using pany’s chief science officer, Ryne Sherman, also conIQ test results that purport to show the average white tended that recent findings questioning the validity of American to be more intelligent than the average personality traits across diverse groups are “directly Black one. For many outraged critics, the implication refute[d]” by the company’s own research, which uses seemed to be the same one that standardized tests like larger samples of people from more countries and

50 | DECEMBER 2020 / JANUARY 2021

Who’s Doing It? Companies reported to use standardized testing in hiring as recently as last year, according to JobTestPrep:

Personality tests

Personality tests used for tellers

Hogan personality test required for “General Manager” positions

Personality test for customer service associate and brand specialist position

Listed as companies that Hogan is “Trusted by” on its website:

Personality tests used as part of hiring process

Cognitive ability test for system administrator positions

is “free from a host of methodological inadequacies.” Yet in ignoring the testing question, the CEOs’ He argued in an email that the research from psy- statement echoes so many similar initiatives that chologists who declared “concern” over workplace have failed. Four years after Intel’s 2015 pledge to personality tests “is contradicted by the data” as well. spend $300 million to recruit a more diverse workHe sent The Progressive a non-peer-reviewed and un- force, the percentage of employees from underreppublished paper he had co-authored as a response to resented groups at the firm had ticked up by just 3 the findings, which you can link to from this article percent. And while Apple pledged in 2015 to comon our website. mit $50 million toward increasing the pipeline for Other research, however, tells a dramatically dif- underrepresented groups in tech, its share of techferent story. A 1975 article, co-authored by Hogan nical workers who are Black remains unchanged at in The Journal of Psychology, claimed to suss out the 6 percent, less than half the percentage of African characteristics shared by good police officers in Oak- Americans in the U.S. population. land, California. Among the nine traits it identified As venture capitalist Freada Kapor Klein obwas “masculinity.” One can only imagine the kind of served in response to the latest round of pledges discrimination that finding could have justified in a trumpeted across Silicon Valley, the companies’ faildepartment that was in the process of giving women ures at diversity are astonishing given their organithe full rank of “officer” for the first time in decades. zational prowess. “Despite all the words, despite all On August 11, twenty-seven CEOs from the na- the money, despite all the platitudes and initiatives,” tion’s largest companies, including JP Morgan Chase, she told Wired magazine, “it’s hard to say that the Citigroup, Amazon, and Google, came together to companies are really taking it seriously.” announce plans to work with New York City’s public Like the fish that got away, the companies’ promcolleges to recruit 100,000 people from low-income ises seem to grow with every passing year. But given and minority communities by 2030. They call them- that nearly all of the twenty-seven companies that selves the New York Jobs CEO Council, and their make up the New York Jobs CEO Council still rely announcement was hailed as a victory in “confront- on standardized tests—including Hogan’s—to evaluing [an] injustice” by New York Governor Andrew ate candidates, is it even possible that this time could Cuomo. be different? ◆ THE PROGRESSIVE | 51

T R E L A D

th w o h s show . e r u l i fa ay s ’ w m s t a i r t rog los p s y a r h e v e reco ife Servic f l o w A ldl i W d n Fish aNASH HEN BY STEP

Not long ago, I rolled into windblown Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge, seeking to renew an old acquaintance—with a program aimed at rescuing the red wolf, a critically endangered species, from extinction. The refuge is in a boggy and buggy section of coastal North Carolina, a wide amber floodplain of tall reeds and scrub trees. It is only sparsely inhabited—unless you count otters, cottontails, raccoons, and a long list of shorebirds. There’s a significant population of black bears here, too. One stared me down along a dirt road in the refuge before it made a leisurely pivot and ambled off into a thicket. This is also home, just barely, to Canis rufus, the rarest kind of wolf on the planet. I called the offices of the refuge, whose website invites visitors to occasional “wolf howlings,” but I was told that the program has been discontinued. Indeed, wild red wolves may themselves soon be discontinued. Fossil evidence indicates that red wolves inhabited the region from Florida to New York and west to the Mississippi River for nearly all of the past ten thousand years. But they’ve arrived at the edge of extinction in the wild now because of a derelict federal agency, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Paradoxically, it is the same agency that once rescued them. The program’s near-collapse is emblematic of a hunkered-down Service, its upper-level administrative culture long broken. Through several national administrations, the agency has been chronically allergic to controversy about endangered species, often ready to kneecap its own mission with delays, evasions, and capitulations. Stephen Nash, a visiting senior research scholar at the University of Richmond in Virginia, is the author of Grand Canyon for Sale: Public Lands versus Private Interests in the Era of Climate Change.

52 | DECEMBER 2020 / JANUARY 2021

Along U.S. Highway 158, on the way to Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge, North Carolina.

“What we’ve seen is that the [Washington,] D.C., In a 2019 survey of Fish and Wildlife Service emoffice has, over time, purged everyone with an inter- ployees conducted by the Union of Concerned Scienest in endangered species,” says Kierán Suckling, ex- tists, a quarter said they were asked or told to avoid ecutive director of the Center for Biological Diversity. work on topics deemed politically contentious. More “Those people are gone. The ones who are left look at than half reported the diversion of funds or staff endangered species as just a headache.” time away from work viewed as politically contenThe last seventeen wild red wolves that could tious. More than two-thirds said political interests be found were captured by the Fish and Wildlife are a burden to science-based decision-making at Service in Texas and Louisiana in the 1970s. In the the agency. 1990s, I talked with exuberant biologists who were It may be tempting to blame all of this on the beginning to reintroduce some of their captive-bred outgoing Trump Administration, which has taken descendants to the wild. All that promise has now sweeping measures to roll back protections in the dissipated. Endangered Species Act. But the problem predates “While wild red wolves have faced a number of Trump. The Obama Administration’s Fish and Wildthreats, the biggest threat in recent years has been life Service chief, for instance, championed an epic the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service itself,” a group of abdication of federal responsibility. litigants has charged. The Service is supposed to be The red wolf is smaller than the Western gray wolf, the national custodian of nonmarine endangered but a bit larger than a coyote. It is shy and avoids huspecies and the lead agency for attempts to pull these mans. There are only six documented cases, over the species back toward sustained survival. decades of the reintroduction program, of these anThe remnant wild red wolf population at Alli- imals preying on chickens or other livestock. Nonegator River represents an investment of decades of theless, gunshot mortality is the most common cause inspired, science-based restoration work and tens of red wolf deaths by far—fifty-two wolves in the past of millions of dollars. At its highest point, around ten years. Sometimes, they are mistaken for coyotes; 2004, the program boasted an estimated population other times, it’s likely to be out of local hostility. of as many as 150 wolves. By late 2020, only seven Three wolves have been shot in the past two years. radio-collared wolves and a small number of others The Fish and Wildlife Service declined to tell me remained in the wild. In 2019 and again in 2020, no about the progress of any investigation into recent new pups were born, the only time this has happened wolf deaths. Despite multiple requests, the agency in more than thirty years. refused to discuss any aspect of its red wolf program.

THE PROGRESSIVE | 53

Estimated Wild Red Wolf Population 150 120 90 60 30 0 2020

2019

2018

2017

54 | DECEMBER 2020 / JANUARY 2021

2016

In surveys, as wildlife biologist Joe Hinton told me, enjoined the Fish and Wildlife Service from giving a heavy majority of local landowners expressed either private citizens permission to kill red wolves without support for or indifference to the program. Most al- cause, and declared the agency to be in violation of lowed biologists access to their property to check on the Endangered Species Act, for failing to conserve the wolves. There was a measure of local opposition, the plummeting wild wolf population. however, and in 2018 the Fish and Wildlife Service The agency has produced little but word salad proposed cutting back the reintroduction area, made since that court order. In September, the Southern Enup of public and private lands in the Alligator River vironmental Law Center gave notice that, once again, area, by nearly 90 percent. it intends to file suit to try to force the agency to follow In a stunning move, it had also begun to issue per- the law. Since the order, “the remaining wild red wolf mits to disgruntled private landowners to kill endan- population has been halved yet again and has fallen gered wolves on their property, whether or not they to an unprecedented and dire state,” the notice says. had been shown to cause harm. Reintroductions of captive wolves were halted, as were other highly effec- The Fish and Wildlife Service declares on its website tive practices that had been introduced to bolster re- that, even if the red wolf reintroduction project in production over the years. Program staff were also cut. Eastern North Carolina ends, “the Service will contin“Wild red wolves now face a perilously high risk of ue to work towards the recovery goal,” which calls for extinction,” says wildlife biologist and wolf specialist three wild and self-sustaining populations throughout John Vucetich of Michigan Technological Universi- the species’ historical range. ty. “The Service’s recent actions seem consistent with There are still about 250 captive red wolves at coabandoning red wolves rather than recovering them.” operating zoos and wildlife parks around the United Vucetich’s work was cited by a group of forty-one States but the calamitous failure at Alligator River will biologists, geneticists, and other conservation scien- make other initiatives far more difficult. tists who signed on to a July 2018 letter protesting the Maggie Howell, executive director of New York’s program’s disintegration. Wolf Conservation Center, has protected and bred When the Fish and Wildlife Service attempted captive red wolves for twenty years. “Being a part of to defend its actions in court, a federal judge, in a this program and seeing the population rise and be scathing ruling, reminded the agency of its own dic- replicated by other programs and then to see it just tum: “Wildlife are not the property of landowners fall apart has been pretty devastating to witness,” she but belong to the public and are managed by federal says. “This was a program that was working. It would and state governments for the public good.” The court just be heartbreaking if it was all done in vain.”

2015

2014

2012-13

2011-12

2010-11

2009-10

2008-09

2007-08

2006-07

2005-06

2004-05

2003-04

2002-03

2001-02

2000-01

1999-00

1998-99

1997-98

1996-97

1995-96

1994-95

1993-94

1992-93

1991-92

1990-91

1989-90

1988-89

1987-88

SOURCES: U.S. FISH AND WILDLIFE SERVICE, WOLF CONSERVATION CENTER, ANIMAL WELFARE INSTITUTE, NATIONAL WILDLIFE FEDERATION

Howell would want any new efforts at reintroduction to avoid the mistakes of the past, like taking away most of the red wolves’ habitat and allowing them to be shot for no reason. “The whole purpose is to have them be functioning, viable wolves on a wild landscape,” she says. “Doing what they do—hunting, having pups, and having their impact on their native ecosystem.” But achieving that goal runs counter to the Fish and Wildlife Service template of caving in to special interests and their Congressional allies at the expense of endangered species—also including bats, wolverines, lynxes, Florida panthers, and grizzly bears. The cost in terms of lost and diminished species is incalculable. In the Southwest, the reintroduction of Mexican gray wolves has seen years of delay, temporizing, and litigation. (In late October, the administration of Don-

With the new administration, prolonged pushback from the public could be marshaled against the myopia, sniping, and pandering of those in Congress for whom extinction of species that have been on the planet for millions of years is less important than the next election. ald Trump removed the Northern gray wolf from its list of endangered species.) Another example is the magnificent jaguar, which could once be found from California to Louisiana. A few have reentered the United States from Mexico since the 1990s despite walls, traps, and rifles, but the Fish and Wildlife Service has thrown no welcoming parties. For years, it resisted declaring the jaguar an endangered species until forced to do so by an adverse court ruling. Then it dragged its feet on designating critical habitat and preparing a recovery plan. And in 2014, after that was finally accomplished, a Fish and Wildlife Service administrator overruled his agency’s own biologists and approved an eight-squaremile copper mine, owned by a Canadian company, within the newly “protected” jaguar habitat. (That project is pending.) The Fish and Wildlife Service’s innovative and endlessly patient front-line biologists have scored many successes, heralded and otherwise. The increasingly robust bald eagle population is the agency’s poster child. But its mission might be better served by sending those biologists to a new agency, freed from the enmired administrative culture of the FWS.

There is precedent: After the Deepwater Horizon oil spill nightmare in 2010, the Obama Administration

dissolved the thoroughly corrupted Minerals Management Service, moving its regulatory work to new agencies. It is legitimate to wonder, of course, why that new venture would have any greater success, if our national administration continued to be indifferent and conflict-averse. Or if it were implacably hostile to wildlife, like the Trump squad. Then, too, it seems unrealistic to suppose that all but a few career civil servants will fall on their swords on behalf of rare species—that they’d risk damaging battles with abraded locals and faint-hearted higher-ups. Are chances better than fair that you and I wouldn’t, either? That kind of official courage at the FWS has to be provoked by loud, tenacious public support. Now is a good time to begin thinking this through. According to a 2019 Gallup Poll, public support for endangered species remains extraordinarily strong. Eighty-eight percent said they worry about the extinction of plant and animal species to some degree; 68 percent “a great deal or a fair amount.” With the new administration, prolonged pushback from the public could be marshaled against the myopia, sniping, and pandering of those in Congress for whom extinction of species that have been on the planet for millennia or millions of years is less important than the next election. In late 2019, North Carolina’s Democratic Governor Roy Cooper warned Trump’s Interior Secretary David Bernhardt that, with regard to the red wolf, “the continued decline of this critically endangered species is unacceptable.” On October 27, 2020, Representative Donald McEachin, Democrat of Virginia, and twenty-three other members of Congress sent a letter to Bernhardt urging the agency to “commit to the preservation and protection of our nation’s imperiled species by taking the actions necessary to ensure a prosperous future for the American red wolf.” We assumed our role as protectors of the growing list of nearly extinct plants and animals almost half a century ago, with the passage of the Endangered Species Act, the first of its kind in the world. Since then, the prospect of mass extinctions has grown far more immediate—a million species worldwide, according to a recent United Nations report. “Nothing is more priceless and worthy of preservation than the rich array of animal life with which our country has been blessed,” Republican President Richard Nixon said on signing the act into law in 1973. But if we want to keep that promise—it’s ours, not his—we’ll have to find a national government and a Fish and Wildlife Service that will fight for it. ◆ THE PROGRESSIVE | 55

INTERVIEW

‘It’s Not a Sprint, It’s a Marathon’ Kevin Alexander Gray on the importance of organizing between elections. BY JAN MIYASAKI

evin Alexander Gray, a contributor to and longtime friend of The Progressive, was Jesse Jackson’s South Carolina campaign manager in 1988 and Tom Harkin’s Southern campaign coordinator in 1992. He is the former president of the ACLU of South Carolina, where he still lives.

Gray is the co-editor of Killing Trayvons: An had window stickers that said “Vote, we’re in this Anthology of American Violence and the author of together,” for when people walk into those stores. Waiting for Lightning to Strike: The Fundamentals of And of course, here in South Carolina with Jaime Black Politics and T h e Decline of Black Politics: From Harrison, I had written an article in The Nation Malcolm X to Barack Obama. We spoke in a live in- and said that Jaime had to get Obama numbers, terview on WORT-FM, a community radio station in which he did, but the downward trend of LindMadison, Wisconsin, on the day after the November sey Graham’s voters would have had to keep going 3 election. Here’s an edited transcript. down, too. His last election, he won with 665,000 votes, this Q: What did election day look like for you in South time he got 1.3 million votes. Even if Jaime Harrison Carolina? had gotten all the nonwhite registered voters, which is right at 1.1 million, you would still have to have a Kevin Alexander Gray: Well, I had gone out and significant white vote for Harrison. did a little project in some select counties with an Now, there are a couple of things that happened Indian American friend of mine that focused on in this election. One is the coronavirus, the other is neighborhoods serviced by Indian American or organizing. The Democrats did the responsible thing. Arab American businesses. You have a lot of poor They weren’t doing door-to-door canvassing, and communities and you have all these little stores in they didn’t have a lot of big rallies. Trump came into those neighborhoods, so we just put out signs that the state and [Graham’s supporters] weren’t afraid to said “Vote, our lives depend on it.” And then we meet with their people despite the virus. 56 | DECEMBER 2020 / JANUARY 2021

Jan Miyasaki hosts a weekly morning talk show on WORT-FM community radio in Madison, Wisconsin.

Q: What could have been done differently? Gray: While there was massive October early voting, the ground game for the Democrats wasn’t as strong as it could have been. And when you look at the local elections, the house races and the senate races here in South Carolina, the Democrats lost at least three state senate seats and two house seats. So now we are going to have to deal with the issue of gerrymandering with an empowered state senate. The organizing that needed to be done wasn’t. Campaigning just against Trump, instead of campaigning on issues, has backfired on people a little bit. It’s a sign of how divided this country is, and really how racist, that half the people would vote for someone who hopes to be an autocrat. And there’s a huge body of people in this country who have had the skin privilege most of their lives, thinking that these darker-skinned people, these nonwhite people, are taking something from them, who buy into the Trump message.

about being against something or against somebody, they’ve got to stand for something. Q: With the election over, where should these efforts be focused? Gray: Because so much of the country is red, we need to look at these down-ballot races, to look at the state legislatures. Because the next battle is going to be about redistricting and whether or not the people that are in these state legislatures— for the most part Republicans—are going to keep redrawing people out of power. That’s the next big fight. We must try to deal with reapportionment and redistricting. Republicans draw everyone out of power that believes in equal rights, that believes in holding police accountable, that believes in the fair distribution of resources in the community. Q: I guess the demographic that I am interested in is the young people. I have hope in the young people.

Gray: Young people came out seriously, in huge numbers. You’ve got to give it to them that the movements and all the protests have energized them. And they came out and voted, Gray: I’ve always said to Democrats in the state—most of the more than they voted in past races. So what do you do with cities are Democratic cities across the country, and you have that? Someone might have to go home and organize their a huge Black vote in those cities. If you’ve got elected officials parents and figure out why their parents believe what they in those cities and counties in which they’re not engaged believe, and maybe that would be a wake-up call to some with the citizens, and when you see the resources distributed of the young folk. in those communities not coming to your community—the But as they say, it’s not a sprint, it’s a marathon, and in this bad roads, no trash being picked up, infrastructure being fight it’s been ongoing. The main thing I keep falling back on neglected, no support for minority-owned businesses on is that you have to keep organizing. I don’t want to go back an ongoing basis. If you’re not taking care of people every and talk about the past and talk about how Democrats have day, then it’s hard to come to them [on Election Day], es- done in the past, but I do look at the eight years of Obama pecially people who don’t traditionally vote, who think it’s when Democrats felt pretty comfortable and didn’t do any not worth it. organizing in the community. Organizing never stops. You meet people at their needs, Q: What’s the organizing message across the board? not at their fears. There’s fear of Trump. No question I voted against Trump, but I still believe that when you’re talking Gray: The message is to go into these communities, and about getting people out to vote, you have to have a ground rebuild communities, and let people see who’s rebuilding game beyond fear. You have to organize between elections. them. You have to get people where they are and bring them You have to engage people who don’t agree with you and to where you need them to be. That’s how you organize. You try to win them over to your side. You don’t take anybody don’t expect everybody to agree with you. for granted. You have to find some common ground and have conThe Democrats have a habit of not wanting to have a versations with people instead of just vilifying people. Now, fifty-state campaign; they want to focus on the big states. that doesn’t mean that this isn’t a very racist country and the In order to build, you have to build your entire infrastrucworld is seeing what a lot of us have been saying probably all ture across the country, and every state is important and our lives, but how do you organize around that? How do you every vote is important. I’m hoping that that’s a lesson for find common ground and change the perspectives of people? the Democratic Party or whoever has the right message. I You have to engage them and that you have to do even think ‘pro-people and pro-rights,’ that’s the message that when Donald Trump isn’t in office. Campaigns just can’t be they’ll have to carry forward. ◆ Q: What did you learn from this election?

THE PROGRESSIVE | 57

Favorite Books of

2020

58 | DECEMBER 2020 / JANUARY 2021

BOOKS

Ruth Conniff

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson’s epic account of the Great Migration, The Warmth of Other Suns, was the deeply reported history of people who came north during the Jim Crow era. Her second book, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (Penguin Random House), is more of an extended personal essay where she weaves together personal anecdote and history to create a profound analysis of the fundamental injustice upon which our country is built. Slavery, she writes, is not a stain that has been wiped away but a critical component of Americanness, creating uniquely dehumanizing and rigid categories of people that have lasted to this day. Upending America’s good-guy self-image, Wilkerson spends significant time on the Nazis’ fascination with segregation, documenting the Germans’ careful study of the way America kept the races separate. She quotes historian George M. Fredrickson’s observation that, when German Jews were stripped of citizenship, “American laws were the main foreign precedents for such legislation.” “As cataclysmic as the Nuremberg Laws were,” Wilkerson writes, they didn’t go as far as the American commitment to racial purity. The “one-drop rule,” by which members of the disfavored caste were denied the benefits of white citizenship if they had the tiniest amount of lower-caste ancestry, “was too harsh for the Nazis.” Wilkerson develops a kinship with members of the lowest caste in India, the Dalits, who endure a familiar, casual disrespect designed to keep people in their place. And she brings her insights about caste to the demonization of America’s first Black President and the rise of Donald Trump. Dismissing the familiar liberal lament that white, working-class voters who support Trump are “voting against their own interests,” she diagnoses white people’s attachment to an upper-caste status so precious to them that they are willing to endure personal hardship in the short term to sustain their long-term domination of others. Despite the heaviness of the history Caste covers, and some truly enraging anecdotes, Wilkerson is optimistic about the expansive potential of the human heart. Near the end of her book she describes a visit from a plumber in a MAGA hat who arrives at her house and treats her contemptuously. Wilkerson makes a connection with him over their shared losses, and the two develop an unlikely bond.

This sort of extraordinary generosity is cleareyed, not sentimental. Wilkerson dismisses saccharine white fantasies about all-forgiving, noble Black people that merely reinforce caste roles. She approvingly quotes a nine-year-old boy who, after being wrongly accused of assault by a middle-aged white woman, is asked by local reporters if he forgives her. No, says the boy, he certainly does not, adding “That lady needs to get help.” So do all of us. Wilkerson is offering it. Ruth Conniff is editor-at-large for The Progressive and editor-inchief of the Wisconsin Examiner.

Mike Ervin

Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century (Vintage) offers an eclectic and authentic view of disability culture. It’s edited by Alice Wong, a wheelchair user and founder of the Disability Visibility Project, which, according to its website, is “an online community dedicated to creating, sharing, and amplifying disability media and culture.” The Disability Visibility Project has helped 140 disabled people record oral histories for StoryCorps, which collects, preserves, and shares people’s stories. It also hosts a podcast, Twitter chats, and more. The group, Wong writes in the book’s introduction, “has always been a one-woman operation, but this doesn’t mean I do everything alone. Collaborating and partnering with disabled people is something that brings me epic, Marie Kondo–level joy.” One standout essay is “For Ki’tay D. Davidson, Who Loves Us,” a eulogy written by Talila A. Lewis for the Black, disabled trans man who, Lewis says, “is my life partner, my mentee, my mentor, my dearest friend, and the one who showed me precisely what the meaning of love is.” There’s also “If You Can’t Fast, Give,” by Maysoon Zayid, a comedian who has cerebral palsy. She writes, “One of my symptoms is that I shake all the time, just like Shakira’s hips.” This essay relates how difficult her disability makes it for her to fast during Ramadan. There is also an essay by Sky Cubacub, creator of Rebirth Garments, a line of “gender non-conforming wearables and accessories for people on the full spectrum of gender, size, and ability.” “Cultural norms don’t encourage trans and disabled people to dress stylishly or loudly,” Cubacub writes. “Society wants us to ‘blend in’ and not draw attention to ourselves. But what if we were to resist society’s desire to render us invisible? What if, through a dress reform, we collectively refuse to assimilate?” THE PROGRESSIVE | 59

BOOKS

Disability Visibility includes a transcript of Wong’s podcast interview with activist Lateef McLeod, about how disabled people can use communication technology such as apps to speak up for ourselves. “These stories do not seek to explain the meaning of disability or to inspire or elicit empathy,” Wong writes. “Rather, they show disabled people simply being in our own words, by our own accounts.” Reading this book deepened my pride to be a part of the vibrant, dynamic, and wonderfully defiant disability community.

The risk is considerably greater for one party of these conversations than the other, and perhaps none of it solves anything. But by holding a space for moments from which most of us recoil, Rankine extends conversations about race past their usual terminus, past anger and hurt and silence, past white fragility and defensiveness. As Whitman once said, she puts a second brain to the brain, second eyes to the eyes, and second ears to the ears. The result is a work of perfect attentiveness, rendered with dedication to an expansive truth that might just be within our reach.

Mike Ervin is a columnist for The Progresssive.

Jules Gibbs, a poet and professor of creative writing at Syracuse University, is poetry editor for The Progressive.

Jules Gibbs

The most salient book I read this year was Claudia Rankine’s Just Us: An American Conversation (Graywolf Press), the third in a trilogy that follows her critically acclaimed volume of poems, Citizen: An American Lyric. Just Us (hear: “justice”) is comprised of poems and essays that document, parse, and grapple with Rankine’s racially charged encounters with white people, including everyone from close friends to teachers to her husband to strangers on an airplane. I found these scenes gripping and familiar, as though I were eavesdropping on my own whiteness, but with the benefit of knowing what Rankine thinks of the way I construct and participate in white privilege, and how that does real harm to people of color. Just Us puts white liberal guilt and denial of racism into sharp focus. Even if you consider yourself “woke” to racial injustice, Rankine points to our persistent and often willful refusal to face certain truths. As I read one riveting scene after another, I found myself recalling past conversations that I would now very much like to revise. But rather than wallowing in our own wrongness, Rankine gives us, not a pass—if anything, she holds white people more responsible than we would like to believe—but a way through. In some cases, she sends a draft of her essay to the people she’s writing about, and then invites and includes their responses. These encounters plumb volatile and unresolved territory, and yet there’s something curative in reading what happens when people enter faithfully into these conversations. From her poem, “liminal spaces ii”: To converse is to risk the unraveling of the said and the unsaid. To converse is to risk the performance of what’s held by silence. 60 | DECEMBER 2020 / JANUARY 2021

Maeve Higgins

I used to consider myself an avid reader but, as with so many other things, 2020 changed that. Now it’s difficult for me to focus on anything longer than an Instagram post. In fact, the one book I did manage to finish with no great effort, I found on Instagram. The cover of The Undocumented Americans by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio (One World), with its gothic font, provocative title, and deep red flowers, caught my attention, and the book easily held it. It’s part memoir, part reportage, and part fiction. Cornejo Villavicencio is bossily upfront about this blend of writing, insisting it allows more truth to be revealed; she had me convinced within a few pages. Our hero’s quest begins when Donald Trump is first installed in the White House, and she realizes she needs to document and understand her own life and the lives of other “undocumented Americans”— meaning those who lack legal immigration status.

Before getting status through her marriage to a U.S. citizen, Cornejo Villavicencio was one of these “undocumented Americans.” She sets out to connect with people still in this situation, now that the threat against them is greater than ever. Her journey takes her to botanicas and bars in Miami, Florida, to see the lengths people go to to stay healthy and dignified, and to Flint, Michigan, to witness the underreported issue of needing a state ID (an impossibility for undocumented people) to get clean water. In New York City, she meets 9/11 first

From the nation’s founding to the Civil War, the inherent contradiction between the Constitution’s proclamations of freedom for all and its endorsement of Black enslavement was never directly addressed, but instead, repressed through compromise. responders struggling to get what they are due, and in Connecticut she meets two girls whose father has taken sanctuary in a church. This is a book that contains lots of contradictions. It’s funny and raw at the same time as being angry and sophisticated. Cornejo Villavicencio brings her whole self to the page and fights to do the same for the people she writes about. She embraces complexities and does not try to make something pretty out of humanness. I will always want to know what Cornejo Villavicencio has got to say; her voice and her intellect are consistently enlightening and often quite thrilling to experience. The skill and spirit of her writing propelled me from scene to scene and person to person in this book, through landscapes and relationships that felt at times unreal and other times all too real. Maeve Higgins is a columnist for The Progressive.

Emilio Leanza

On October 25, following months of protests, Chileans voted overwhelmingly to rewrite the country’s constitution, enacted in 1980 by U.S.-backed dictator General Augusto Pinochet to bind the country to a free-market economic model. Chile’s initiative raises an important question: Is our own Constitution, written in 1787 largely by slave-holding elites, worth preserving? Of course, ditching the U.S. Constitution isn’t a mainstream political demand. But for Richard Kreit-

ner, a journalist at The Nation and author of Break It Up: Secession, Division, and the Secret History of America’s Imperfect Union (Little, Brown), it’s the Constitution that’s fueling the deep political rifts that have erupted in recent years. At multiple points in U.S. history, Kreitner argues, the systemic flaws of the founding document have driven the country to the verge of collapse—and may do so again. The Constitution established a system of minority rule, whereby states, regardless of their population, are given equal weight in the Senate, while the Electoral College allows for a handful of electors to decide presidential elections. These provisions, intended to limit the popular will and placate a Southern aristocracy intent on preserving chattel slavery, serve to remind “how odious the compromises to hold [the Union] together were and still are,” Kreitner writes. From the nation’s founding to the Civil War, the inherent contradiction between the Constitution’s proclamations of freedom for all and its endorsement of Black enslavement was never directly addressed, but instead, repressed through compromise. And while most historical accounts trace the war to Confederate secessionists, Kreitner argues that Northern abolitionists also played a key role. Seen as “the real disunionists” by Southerners, figures including Sojourner Truth, John Brown, and William Lloyd Garrison viewed breaking up the Union as necessary to be “free of the old one’s original sins.” Underscoring his belief in the Constitution’s fundamental corruption, Garrison burned a copy of it during an 1854 abolitionist rally protesting the Fugitive Slave Act. Today, these flaws in the Constitution continue to undermine democratic ideals. Wyoming, the country’s least populated state, has three times the voting power of twenty-two other states, including California. And the fifty-two Republican Senators who confirmed Justice Amy Coney Barrett collectively represent more than thirteen million fewer people than the forty-seven in the Democratic caucus (and Republican Susan Collins of Maine) who voted against her confirmation. Perhaps, like Chile, it’s time to embrace a massive Constitutional overhaul. As Kreitner concludes, “Nineteenth century abolititionists predicted, correctly, that either slavery or the Union might endure, but not both; the same might be said today of the Union and minority rule.” Emilio Leanza is the associate editor for The Progressive.

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BOOKS

Bill Lueders

Each year, hundreds of books arrive at The Progressive. Some are from major publishing houses, some from the writers themselves. Some we review, some we excerpt, some I just read. Here are some finds from that last category. Shelter from the Machine: Homesteaders in the Age of Capitalism, by Jason G. Strange (University of Illinois Press). This well-written book offers a judgment-free assessment of the core reasons for our nation’s cultural divide, along lines created by disparate access to education and opportunity. Strange, an assistant professor at Berea College in Kentucky, meets people in Walmart stores and owner-built shacks, shedding light on their lives. “To fight ugly, fake stories,” he writes, “we have to tell stories that are beautiful, and true.” And that’s what he does. Waking Up on the Appalachian Trail: A Story of War, Brotherhood, and the Pursuit of Truth, by N.B. Hankes (self-published). This is a crunchy, authentic account of one young man’s effort to process his experiences as a soldier in Iraq as he confronts the daunting physical challenge of through-hiking the Appalachian Trail. It’s a journey of not just self-discovery, but political awakening, as Hankes is forced to acknowledge the tawdry motivations for militarism and war. May his life’s journey continue to make him an agent of positive change. The Fragile Earth: Writing from The New Yorker on Climate Change, edited by David Remnick and Henry Finder (Ecco). It was The New Yorker, arguably, that broke the story of global warming in publishing Bill McKibben’s shattering 1989 article, “Reflections: The End of Nature,” later a book. The collection includes two more McKibben articles, as well as riveting pieces by Elizabeth Kolbert, Michael Specter, and Christine Kenneally. McKibben quotes a GOP consultant who urged fossil fuel companies to “continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue.” The weight of this hefty book comes down on the other side. Is Wildness Over?, by Paul Wapner (Polity Press). This slim volume convincingly argues that humankind has made a devastating error in pushing wildness out of our ordinary lives, and that we must “open ourselves to wildness . . . and invite more of it into our lives.” Wapner, a professor at American University, explains how this would be better than thinking we can engineer our way out of the problems we’ve caused: “Engaging wildness with a conquering spirit is precisely what created unstoppable 62 | DECEMBER 2020 / JANUARY 2021

extinction, accelerating climate change, and other disassembling threats.” No, wildness is not over. It just needs to be rediscovered. Nature Underfoot: Living with Beetles, Crabgrass, Fruit Flies, and Other Tiny Life Around Us, by John Hainze (Yale University Press). This wonderful book, part of which began as an article on The Progressive’s website, champions living things often seen as invaders and pests. Did you know silverfish— those nasty little bugs you find in attics—are smart enough to learn complex mazes? “These plants and animals,” writes Hainze, an entomologist, “bring a richness to our daily lives that is readily accessible in our living rooms and lawns.” Lucky us. Bill Lueders is editor of The Progressive.

John Nichols 2020 was a year of urgent and often overwhelming news. So much came at us so fast that it was easy to lose perspective. But, as she has done so often over many years, Rebecca Solnit provided us with a touchstone text. The finest essayist of our era produced a brilliant memoir, Recollections of My Nonexistence (Viking), that is at once both of the moment and timeless. This is an honest, elegant exploration of Solnit’s development as a writer and activist. It is also a deeply considered examination of the feminist sensibility that gave us the eponymous 2008 essay, “Men Explain Things to Me.” In a key passage of her book, Solnit refers to “a Buddhist phrase about the work of bodhisattvas: ‘the liberation of all things.’ I see feminism as a subset

of that work.” Recollections of My Nonexistence is all about liberation. And it invites us to think more broadly about what is possible in challenging times. So, too, does Jonathan Bate’s Radical Wordsworth: The Poet Who Changed the World (Yale University Press), an engaging new examination of the poet who figured so powerfully in Solnit’s groundbreaking 2000 work, Wanderlust: A History of Walking. There are plenty of biographies of romantic poets, but Bate has given us something else altogether. Radical Wordsworth is about a writer and his places, particularly the natural places where he invited each of us to consider the “glimpses that would make me less forlorn.” The radicalism that Bate explores is literary and political, and this book reminds us that the greatest literature often inspires the greatest activism. That inspiration, Bate explains, created a space for social and environmental liberation. Another 2020 book that spoke of liberation was Ernest Freeberg’s A Traitor to His Species: Henry Bergh and the Birth of the Animal Rights Movement (Basic Books). Bergh, a diplomat who was appointed by Abraham Lincoln to serve as secretary of the U.S. legation to Russia, was moved by European initiatives to end animal cruelty. He returned to the United States and in 1866 incorporated and provided the initial funding for the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Today, the ASPCA is seen as a necessary and vital organization. It was not so in Bergh’s time. Freeberg, a distinguished professor of humanities and head of the history department at the University of Tennessee, impresses upon readers the scope and character of Bergh’s accomplishments as a builder of movements inspired by a deep and abiding compassion. John Nichols, a frequent contributor to The Progressive, writes about politics for The Nation and is associate editor of The Capital Times newspaper in Madison, Wisconsin.

Ed Rampell

Multiple Oscar winner Oliver Stone’s Chasing the Light: Writing, Directing, and Surviving Platoon, Midnight Express, Scarface, Salvador, and the Movie Game (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) is thrilling, thoughtful, visceral, compassionate, and action-packed. In other words, reading this autobiographical 352-pager is like watching an Oliver Stone film. And man, can Stone—who won a screenwriting Academy Award for 1978’s Midnight Express and was nominated for five more scripts—write. For the first time ever in nonfiction, the Purple Heart–awarded Stone shares his heart-thumping

Vietnam combat experiences, which fed fuel to the fire that ignited in 1986. That’s when Stone’s anti-war classics Platoon, the bombshell Best Picture–winner, and Salvador both hit the screen. This behind-thescenes movie memoir vividly captures the exhilaration of one of Tinseltown’s all-time bravest, brightest, most blazing bursts of radical cinema. I saw Salvador the year it came out on the island of Java in Indonesia, back when that nation’s pro-Washington tyrant General Suharto was still in power. I invited my becak driver to join me in watching Stone’s Central American thriller, depicting massacres by U.S.-backed death squads. Afterward, looking around to make sure he wasn’t overheard, the Javanese driver whispered, “It was like Indonesia in 1965.” That’s when nationalist President Sukarno was overthrown in a CIA-backed coup, and up to a million people were slaughtered. That atrocity is the centerpiece of Vincent Bevins’s The Jakarta Method: Washington’s Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program That Shaped Our World (PublicAffairs). The former correspondent for The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times traces these genocidal coups beyond Indonesia to other hotspots, such as Brazil and Chile, exposing that, for Third World nations, “Pax Americana” was more of a “Pox Americana.” Bevins’s bone-chiller reminds us that the United States needs not just a racial reckoning but an imperial one, to radically alter a reactionary, coercive, and meddlesome foreign policy. During the Watergate scandal, Senator Howard Baker, Republican of Tennessee, famously asked: “What did the President know and when did he know it?” Rage (Simon & Schuster), the new insider account by Bob Woodward—whose Watergate reportage with Carl Bernstein helped oust Nixon—attained instantaneous notoriety for posing a similar question, when Woodward revealed that Trump had talked about how “deadly” the coronavirus was, contrary to his public pronouncements. But there’s much more in this 480-page book on Trump’s presidency. Woodward, the chronicler of Presidents and two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, has sweeping access to high-level sources and hardto-get info, including a treasure trove of “love letters” between Trump and Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un. Once again, the journalist who helped topple Tricky Dick has written the first draft of presidential history about another “wrong man for the job.” Ed Rampell is a Los Angeles-based film historian and critic, and a frequent contributor to The Progressive.

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BOOKS

Norman Stockwell

Sarah Blaskey cut her journalistic teeth in Madison, Wisconsin, working at The Clarion student newspaper at Madison College and volunteering at WORT Community Radio, where I previously worked for more than twenty years. She even wrote a couple of articles for The Progressive. Blaskey went on to land a job as a reporter at the Miami Herald, where she joined with three colleagues—Nicholas Nehamas, Caitlin Ostroff, and Jay Weaver—to crack the nut that is Mar-a-Lago, the Florida resort that owner Donald Trump has called “The Southern White House.” Based on a year of interviews with current and former staff, The Grifter’s Club: Trump, Mar-a-Lago, and the Selling of the Presidency (PublicAffairs) tells the inside story of policy and protocol gone awry. This includes the strange case of Yujing Zhang, the Chinese woman caught trying to enter the club in March 2019 with a laptop and a thumb drive containing malware, as well as the story of a woman who was entertaining Trump and then-Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe when they received news of a North Korean missile test. “ ‘Mister President, I shouldn’t know this,’ someone heard the performer say. Trump shrugged. ‘It’s just nukes,’ he said. ‘Sing us a song.’ ” Scott Anderson, a journalist, novelist, and a veteran war correspondent, provides another tour-deforce history based on four years of research into dusty archives, along with interviews with participants and family members who remember the details of the CIA’s early failed efforts to “keep the world safe for democracy.” The Quiet Americans: Four CIA Spies at the Dawn of the Cold War—a Tragedy in Three Acts (Doubleday), whose title is an homage to Graham Greene’s novel of early CIA actions in Vietnam, tells the story of numerous incidents when, through stubbornness and ideological blindness, the CIA often, as Anderson puts it, “managed to snatch moral defeat from the jaws of sure victory, and be forever tarnished.” Dissidents of the International Left (New Internationalist), by Andy Heintz, is based on seventy-seven interviews conducted over several years with such prominent leftwing figures as Noam Chomsky, Meredith Tax, Amartya Sen, and Progressive contributor Stephen Zunes. The author’s goal, he says, is to “play a minor role in bringing the world we wish to live in closer to becoming a reality.” Finally, I’m Gonna Say It Now: The Writings of Phil Ochs (Backbeat), edited by David Cohen, brings together two decades of writings by the late politi64 | DECEMBER 2020 / JANUARY 2021

cal folk singer, some drawn from previously printed sources, others from handwritten notes and journals. The book, with a title taken from one of Ochs’s early songs, provides a much deeper insight into the man who turned his keen observations into pointed barbs and passionate anthems during the civil rights and anti-Vietnam war movements. It concludes with a pearl of Ochs’s wisdom, “Ah, but in such an ugly time, the true protest is beauty.” Norman Stockwell is publisher of The Progressive.

Kassidy Tarala I was working in a newsroom in St. Paul, Minnesota, on election day in 2018. Though we were primarily covering local and state elections, I had my eye on two particular gubernatorial elections: Wisconsin and Georgia.

“The fight to defend the right to vote begins with understanding where we’ve been and knowing where we are now. Only then can we demand a fair fight and make it so.” As a Wisconsin voter, I was glad to see my vote play a small role in removing Republican Governor Scott Walker from office and electing Democrat Tony Evers. The other race I was watching played out in Georgia. There the gubernatorial race was between former Republican Secretary of State Brian Kemp and Democrat Stacey Abrams, former minority leader of Georgia’s House of Representatives who went on to found Fair Fight. In an election rife with active voter suppression efforts, Kemp was declared the winner. Abrams demanded a recount, which also resulted in a slim victory by Kemp. In Abrams’s newest book, Our Time Is Now: Power, Purpose, and the Fight for a Fair America (Henry Holt), released June 2020, she details the Republicans’ voter suppression tactics from complicating voter registration to restricting access to polling places. “The fight to defend the right to vote begins with understanding where we’ve been and knowing where we are now,” Abrams says. “Only then can we demand a fair fight and make it so.” Our Time Is Now doesn’t focus just on the act of voting, but on representation as a whole. Abrams discusses why the electoral college should be abolished, and the unfair census counts leading to underrepresentation, specifically in communities of color.

As a Black woman, Abrams also addresses how her identity has largely determined her political views, as it does for almost everybody. But, as Abrams notes, “ ‘identity politics’ has become a hostile phrase for some and a rallying cry for others, though the concept is as old as our nation, just like voter suppression.” “I believe we must embrace identity politics if we are to save our democracy and thrive,” Abrams writes. In Our Time Is Now, Abrams clearly spells out how voter suppression has been used throughout our history, how it is implemented today, whom it harms and benefits. But the book isn’t just meant to be an overview of everything wrong with our election system, it is also a call to action; Abrams is asking her readers to join the fight to make change happen. During an election year unlike any other, this is certainly a welcome message.

almost cost him everything. The Spencer Haywood Rule is a hell of a story about the ways that greatness can be thrust upon unsuspecting athletes who then need to “answer the bell” in moments of heightened struggle. The other book that aided my understanding of what’s been exploding around me was Loving Sports When They Don’t Love You Back: Dilemmas of the Modern Fan (University of Texas Press), by Jessica Luther and Kavitha A. Davidson. The book by two leading sports journalists explores sports’ great contradiction: It at times amplifies bigotry and avarice yet can also be the source of poetry and resistance. In a year where athletes challenged the injustice that exists in the real world, Luther and Davidson remind us that sports can be not just a reflection of our society but a force that can help make our world a better place.

Kassidy Tarala is the web editor and audience engagement coordinator for The Progressive.

Dave Zirin is a sports columnist for The Nation and The Progressive.

Dave Zirin

This has been a year of unprecedented athletic activism, from the August strike wave for Black lives that cascaded through almost every major sports league, to the jocks who have protested the police murder of George Floyd. Two sports books published in 2020 captured this collision of sports and politics in different ways, even though they were both written months before any of this took place. Both gave me some much-needed perspective on what’s been going down. The Spencer Haywood Rule: Battles, Basketball, and the Making of an American Iconoclast (Triumph Books). This incisive biography was written by Gary Washburn and Marc J. Spears, but Haywood’s voice is on every page. The hoops Hall of Famer, 1968 Olympic gold medalist, and one of a kind personality has led a remarkable life. Raised in abject poverty in Mississippi, he built his muscles in the cotton fields before embarking on a journey that took him around the world and into one of the most important sports labor struggles of the twentieth century. It was Haywood who fought the NCAA all the way to the Supreme Court, winning the right for generations of basketball players to go straight to the pros without having to suit up for four years of unpaid exploitation at the collegiate level. His life then careened between NBA stardom, marriage to the model Iman, and a serious cocaine addiction that

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HEMMING AND HAWING by NEGIN FARSAD

OUR EXCEPTIONALLY UNEXCEPTIONAL FUTURE

t’s May 2021. Joe Biden has been Twitter isn’t rollicking from President for four months, pre- the insane turpitudes of a chaotic siding over a somewhat divided federal government. Joe Biden’s government. There’s a frisson of Twitter feed is . . . well, it’s ecstatiecstatic boredom in the air. cally boring. He often remembers Ecstatic. News. Boredom. the troops. He strikes a sympaThere’s so much stability you end thetic tone with families who are NEGIN FARSAD up speaking with your friends and struggling. He announces utterly (@NeginFarsad) neighbors. You’re forced to re- quotidian events like the Easter is the host of the treat to other pastimes, like Ping- Egg Roll at the White House. political comedy Pong, needlepoint, and diet fads. Sometimes, when he’s really crazy, podcast Fake the Nation and author “Should I try keto?” you might he posts a recipe for a pasta dish. of the book How to hear someone say on the street. The guy likes pasta. Sometimes, Make White People Ya know what? It’s 2021, try the Internet is in a full rage over Laugh. keto! Or try the one where you eat his choice of seasoning. COVID-19 has not magically like it’s biblical times. Or the one where you eat every three hours. disappeared but it is finally under control. The stock market is just It’s a new era, try them all! In 2021, the nerds have re- fine. Notably, Biden doesn’t talk claimed their rightful place as about it much. He doesn’t talk guardians of political minutia. No about the border with Mexico, one knows the name of the head either. And tariffs—we have all stopped talking about tariffs. Kim Jong-un and the U.S. Joe Biden likes pasta. Sometimes, the are no longer trading Internet is in a full rage over his choice of President bromantic letters. But Kim has seasoning. publicly admitted that he enjoys of the General Services Adminis- the predictability of his relationtration. In fact, people have gone ship with the White House. Even back to not knowing there is a dictators like predictability! And General Services Administration. Angela Merkel seems lighter on The Environmental Protection her feet and Emmanuel Macron Agency has gone back to simply is positively glowing. He even lets protecting the environment. The himself have that second baguette. people who run it aren’t secretly Sadly, in 2021, we still talk the type who don’t want to pro- about Brexit. It’s one of those tect the environment. The EPA hugely bureaucratic nightmares isn’t helmed by dudes who spend with a million pieces of papertaxpayer money to fly first class work that nobody wants to take or to buy expensive fountain pens. on and about which everybody Nor is it helmed by someone who is confused. There’s a lot of talk sends an aide to get their wife a about fishing quotas and internal Chick-fil-A franchise. market bills and Scotland really

66 | DECEMBER 2020 / JANUARY 2021

can’t handle it. Google lists “Is Brexit still happening?” as one of its frequent search terms. But one thing has changed forever. The people know when elections are. When an election lurks in the middle distance, our spidey senses tingle. We’ll soon be summoned to the New York City mayoral race or the gubernatorial race in New Jersey or the House of Delegates race in Virginia. And then our sights turn to the midterms soon thereafter. The excitement of having our voice heard—of doing democracy! Of wearing stickers!—gets activated. We’re no longer low-propensity voters, low-information voters, or low-turnout voters. No, no, we’re simply voters. It’s one of our routines, like brushing our teeth or clipping our nose hairs. It has to be done or else there are little hairs coming out of democracy’s nostrils. In 2021, we’re both ecstatically bored and calmly energized. As mundane as the news of politics has become, Americans know that once you go vote, you can’t go back. ◆

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MAEVE IN AMERICA by MAEVE HIGGINS

HOW WE CAN DO BETTER

t has long been known that of slavery humanity has known, or able-bodiedness, will not do the American exceptionalism is little yet it has for far too long been job. more than a marketing ploy, yet erased from the American disBlack Lives Matter is an inthe world cannot look away from course. tersectional social movement. Its this troubled, young country. This “The story of the African Amer- mission statement states: “We afyear’s presidential election had ican is not only the quintessen- firm the lives of Black queer and millions around the globe glued tial American story but it’s really trans folks, disabled folks, undocMAEVE HIGGINS to the results. As day after agoniz- the story that continues to shape umented folks, folks with records, writes for The New ing day crept by, the fascination who we are today,” said Lonnie G. women, and all Black lives along York Times and only grew. Bunch III, secretary of the Smith- the gender spectrum. Our network co-hosts the climate From Senegal to Finland to sonian Institution, in The New York centers those who have been marjustice podcast New Zealand, the world did not Times’ 1619 Project. The legacy of ginalized within Black liberation Mothers of Invention. hold its breath, but it certainly in- slavery has to be interrogated, un- movements.” Her most recent book haled sharply a number of times derstood, recorded, and constantly After the June revival of the is Maeve in America: throughout the tense week be- considered. BLM protests, it has become the Essays by a Girl from tween the election and the result. As Friedrich Nietzsche wrote largest movement this country Somewhere Else. The day Joe Biden was an- about critical history: “From time has ever seen, according to numnounced as the winner, a friend to time, however, this same life, ber crunching by The New York in Iran messaged me saying the which uses forgetting, demands Times. The movement has started U.S. presidential election results the temporary destruction of this to see success in reducing some may have more effect on his coun- forgetfulness. For it should be try than ours. The United States, made quite clear how unjust the through a combination of military existence of something or other is, The legacy of chattel slavery needs to might, neoliberal capitalism, and a right, a caste, a dynasty, for ex- be destroyed. cultural exports, still dominates ample, and how this thing merits much of the world. destruction.” police forces and in changing Am I falling into the hero Surely the legacy of chattel slav- how they operate. It is deliberately complex so often exploited by ery is such a thing; it needs to be diffuse in both its leadership and Americans when I insist our re- destroyed. Instead, the racial op- goals. BLM seems to take a multisponsibility to do better is not just pression codified into the forma- pronged approach, not a prescripfor ourselves, but for the world? tion of the United States has been tive one, and this offers the whole Our slide toward total fascism has tinkered with, modified, lessened, nation a map. been halted. Is this temporary? I but still rules the land. There is much to do, and many hope not. As law professor Dean Spade ways to do it. In any case, I do have an idea has written: “We have moved toBLM also invests time and of how we can do better—perhaps ward formal legal equality and energy into a “healing justice,” even, in the words of our Lame purported neutrality in law and defined as a framework for Black Duck First Lady, “be best.” It’s not policy, yet the racial wealth divide people to “holistically respond complicated but it is difficult: To has grown, racialized-gendered to and intervene on generational have a better future, we must reck- criminalization has skyrocketed, trauma and violence, and to bring on with the past. and immigration enforcement is collective practices that can impact Critical history can illumi- more significant a state project and transform the consequences of nate so much about the moment than ever.” oppression on our bodies, hearts, we are living in today. The histoThe destruction of these sys- and minds.” ry I am thinking about critically tems, as Nietzsche tells it, will lead This is what the United States today is one of the foundational to the creation of something better. needs, and if it can achieve it, the horrors of this nation. Chattel Dividing up oppression into sin- whole world will do better, and slavery is unlike any other form gle-axis issues, like race or gender maybe even “be best.” ◆ THE PROGRESSIVE | 67

EDGE OF SPORTS by DAVE ZIRIN

THE SOUND OF SILENCE

DAVE ZIRIN writes about sports for The Nation and The Progressive and hosts the Edge of Sports podcast.

AP IMAGES

n May, sportswriter Jane McMa- cy, but it’s usually more disquieting the bleachers and people tuning nus tweeted that “sports are the than comforting. It often sounds out precisely because we are not a result of a functioning society,” a like a white noise machine that functioning society. This raises the comment quickly echoed by oth- plays at the same pitch no matter question: What are sports withers. It is only when you can clothe what is happening on the field. out fans? If a windmill slam dunk and feed yourself, when you’re not According to a recent Marist happens in an arena and no one is trying to stave off rampant disease, College study, 46 percent of sports there to cheer, did it even happen? that you can think about the many fans are watching fewer games. Then there is the quality of play uses for round, spherical, and ob- Ratings are down dramatically. itself. How much does it suffer belong objects. Leagues are enacting layoffs. And cause of the absence of authentic Our society at present is not the reason is not that sports have crowd noise? Are the playoffs refunctioning. We have an out-of- gotten “too political”—a common ally the playoffs if every series is control pandemic, with a quarter accusation from the right—but be- played in a hermetically sealed million deaths as of presstime, cause the social fabric of sports has bubble? many millions more who have lived been frayed by the coronavirus. I asked this of one former NBA through infection, player. He estimatand eight million ed that the roar of people who have the crowd, and the moved into poveradrenaline it proty in the last year as vides, improves a the economy has player’s ability by been wrecked. about 20 percent. Students are And it’s not just learning at home cheers, it’s boos, and illness stalks too. Players feed t he he a lt hiest off of a dialectical among us. We are relationship besick, divided, and tween what they The Seattle Mariners play the Houston Astros in an empty Minute Maid Park decaying. By Mcdo on the court during a baseball game on Friday, July 24, 2020, in Houston, Texas. Manus’s theorem, and the response there should be no sports. Instead, There are, thank goodness, in the stands. we should be single-mindedly fo- fewer folks going to people’s It’s a tribute to the professioncusing on controlling COVID-19. houses and meeting in bars to alism of the players that the games And yet, the games have some- watch games. There’s no tailgating haven’t been more of an intramuhow gone on, albeit in a profoundly outside of stadiums. There is no ral slack-fest and that they actually distorted form. We have had basket- connectivity with family. Watching resemble professional sports. ball, football, baseball, tennis, golf, sports—the closest thing we have Yet resembling professional soccer, and NASCAR races take to a national language—in isola- sports is not the same as actually place with no fans, holograms for tion doesn’t satisfy the consumer being professional sports. We are a fans, cardboard cutouts for fans, because there is little appeal in long way from becoming the kind or a smattering of real people that talking to yourself. of functioning society that gets to only draw attention to how few are Yet the sports industry cares play without the stress of being in actually in the seats. little about the existential ennui a pandemic. Sports are taking place in a of the fan, because their money Until we’re functional, it is scenescape that looks post-apoc- comes from broadcasting rights understandable that fewer fans alyptic, against the fevered, caf- more than human beings. And are watching. After all, sports are feinated energy coming from the while fewer games and smaller supposed to inspire us to think announcers. Crowd noise is piped audiences mean less money, it is about what we could accomplish, into the stadiums to give television still money that is driving the show. not sadly remind us of what was, viewers the impression of normalWe are left with mannequins in and is no longer. ◆

68 | DECEMBER 2020 / JANUARY 2021

POEMS by ALICIA OSTRIKER

SAVING IT Some think the world can be saved by love some think it can be saved by intelligence It is the old quarrel of the heart and the head each of which would be dead without its rival and although I am of those who doubt it can be saved too many people greedy too many in the kind of pain that perpetuates itself generation after generation who cannot save themselves from the chokehold of anger or from chasing oblivion long enough to do the world any good some say that is what bodhisattvas are for but regarding tikkun olam, I hear the rabbis say It is not incumbent on you to finish the task neither are you free to give it up

IS THIS REAL Let me see, is this real Let me see, is this real Let me see, is this real This life I am living. —Navajo prayer Nose in that book/ white lightning but/ no eagle no galloping horse/ I was twenty lacking enough silence/ no spacious cactus vista/ nevertheless yes yes white lightning this question ozone year chases year wishing I had a tribe to tell me the answer no answer/ asking myself no answer/ asking God asking in my pajamas aching/ asking in my silks lifting the cocktail asking sidewalk sycamore is this real/ men foraging in wastebaskets is this real the suffering and anger in city air thickening every year is it real my white apartment/ is it real my sixty year marriage asking if the sky’s headscarf is real if the Hudson sturgeon a highway away is real is this real my life/ fool teacher poet/ mother lover wife/ tulip now wilting Is this real/ now mask and distance/ it is my life/ let me see before death gathers me please let me finally see Alicia Ostriker is a poet, critic, and activist whose most recent collection of poems is The Volcano and After: Selected and New Poems, 2002–2019 (University of Pittsburgh Press).

THE PROGRESSIVE | 69

VOX POPULIST by JIM HIGHTOWER

AFTER THE ELECTION, A NOTE OF HOPE

New York Herald, “we will go to Washington and assassinate him before his Inauguration.” It was a campaign of demonic fury. Mobs attacked and wrecked Lincoln’s campaign offices in Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, Maryland, Populist author, and ten Southern states wouldn’t public speaker, and even put his name on the ballot. radio commentator JIM HIGHTOWER Despite the vitriol and violence, writes The Lincoln won, stayed calm yet firm Hightower Lowdown, in a time of dangerous turmoil, a monthly newsletter and not only held a bitterly divided chronicling the nation together, but expanded our ongoing fights by democratic ideals and advanced America’s ordinary the possibilities for ordinary peopeople against ple to achieve them. He didn’t wear rule by plutocratic a silly red cap arrogantly proclaimelites. Sign up at ing “Make America Great Again”— HightowerLowdown he did it. Indeed, he died for it. .org. The point is that Lincoln didn’t preserve the noble idea of America by rewriting the law, but by altering the culture, pushing people to act on their better natures. So, 160 years after that toxic election, Lincoln didn’t preserve the noble idea here’s another one, and there’s no of America by rewriting the law, but by Lincoln in sight. That means that We the People have to do the healaltering the culture, pushing the people ing ourselves. to act on their better natures. Good grief, cry many progressives. How has America turned so It has been the worst and most far to the right that a narcissistic, divisive election ever, right? wannabe-dictator like Trump was No. That horror belongs to the even in the running? 1860 contest, a four-way race that But wait—aside from a miLincoln won with 39.8 percent of nority of racist, xenophobic, mithe vote. Rabid racism, furious sogynistic voters, plus a bunch of intimidation of voters, blatant uber-wealthy corporate profiteers manipulation of ballots, personal making a killing from his richattacks so vicious they’d even make man’s agenda—many of Trump’s Trump cringe, and daily death rank-and-file voters are not rightthreats not only from the goofball wingers at all. To see evidence of “proud boys” of the day, but from this, look at the multitude of overtSouthern elected officials and es- ly progressive ballot issues that tablishment newspapers. won majority support on Novem“If Lincoln is elected,” a Virgin- ber 3, even in so-called “Trump ia member of Congress told the Country.” any years ago, literary critic Dorothy Parker skewered an unfortunate author with the apocryphal line: “This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.” That’s how a lot of us feel about the 2020 presidential election, distinguished by an incumbent who is so self-centered, incompetent, and both mentally and morally unsteady that he’s more dangerous than a baby who’s gotten hold of a hammer. Trump, swinging wildly, tried to win by demolishing the truth, shattering the law, smashing basic rights, annihilating fair play, trashing the common good, busting up social trust, splintering justice, and . . . well, generally eradicating the egalitarian principles that unify Americans into a functioning democracy.

70 | DECEMBER 2020 / JANUARY 2021

• Fifty-two percent of Arizona voters said yes to a tax surcharge on incomes above $250,000 a year, specifically to raise teacher pay and recruit more teachers. • A whopping 78 percent of Oregon voters approved a populist proposition to put strict controls on the corrupting power of big-money corporate donations in elections. • Sixty-one percent of Floridians voted to raise the state’s minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2026, a working-class advance vehemently opposed by corporate giants and rightwing groups. • Fifty-seven percent voted yes on a Colorado provision requiring corporations to let employees earn paid time off for medical and family needs. • Between 54 and 73 percent of voters in six states—including in such conservative bastions as Arizona, Mississippi, and South Dakota—approved initiatives liberalizing and even legalizing marijuana and other drug use. • Plus, there were some big symbolic victories, such as Mississippi replacing a Confederate symbol on its state flag with a magnolia blossom, and the people of Nebraska overwhelmingly voting to amend their constitution to excise an antiquated provision authorizing slavery as a punishment for certain crimes! The hope that resides in these progressive policy positions is the prospect that a truly great American majority might yet be forged— not around some politician, but around our people’s basic shared values of fairness, justice, and equal opportunity for all. ◆

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Recent Posts from Progressive.org DISPATCHES: Progressives Savor Historic Election - Ruth Conniff How the U.S. Became an Inferior Communication Nation - David Rosen The Trump Formula - Mark Fiore Foreign Correspondent: The Challenge for Joe Biden - Reese Erlich New Report Highlights Difficulties for LGBTQ+ Students - Eleanor J. Bader Midwest Dispatch: Protecting Our Polls Is Only the Beginning Sarah Lahm The Other Americans: United States Attacks Cuban Medics During Pandemic - Jeff Abbott ‘We Feel Like We’re Responsible for Waukegan’ - Raven Geary Is the U.S. Prepared to Resist a Coup? - Stephen Zunes Unequal Justice: Confirmation Hearings Exposed Barrett as a Hardcore Rightwing Activist - Bill Blum I’m an Eighteen-Year-Old Black Girl from Wisconsin. I Want My First Vote to Mean Something - Tziah McNair Smart Ass Cripple: Amy Coney Barrett Is a Threat to the Disabled Mike Ervin Why Police Body Cameras Haven’t Stopped Police Brutality Andrew Lee

FROM OUR PUBLIC SCHOOL SHAKEDOWN PROJECT:

Betsy DeVos’s ‘Voucherland’ Spells Disaster for Public Schools - Peter Greene Instead of Funding Public Education, Oklahoma Bankrolled a ForProfit Virtual Charter School - John Thompson As Schools Reopen, Teachers and Staff Aren’t Being Consulted Sarah Lahm Why Trump’s Myth of American Exceptionalism Is So Dangerous Rann Miller The GOP’s Plan for Education: Whatever Trump Says - Peter Greene Why We Need an Antiracist Education System - Rachael Rifkin How John Lewis’s Message of ‘Good Trouble’ Is Inspiring Change in Education - Yohuru Williams

PROGRESSIVE MEDIA PROJECT OP-EDS:

A Pandemic of Division - Dorian Warren After the Election, We Need Empathy - Elana Rabinowitz Pandemic’s Toll on Young Black Women - Annerieke Daniel, Amanda Furdge The Case for Giving Everyone a Job - Jennifer Zhang, June Hopkins Trump Has Consistently Harmed Workers - Michael Felsen Congress Must Deliver COVID-19 Relief - Karen Dolan

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Get your 2021 Calendar now! January 1993 January 1987

DECEMBER 2020 F M T W T

Great 1965 LBJ unveils his Society plan elected as 2007 Nancy Pelosi of the first female Speaker U.S. House

1878 U.S. Senate proposes women’s suffrage picket White 1917 Suffragettes right to House for women’s vote

strike 1912 Bread and Roses MA begins in Lawrence,

Party 1970 La Raza Unida founded

in 1927 U.S. troops land Nicaragua

first 1925 Nellie Ross becomes the woman governor in United States (Wyoming)

(Arkansas)

Jr. Day Martin Luther King CIA and 1991 U.S. acknowledges U.S. Army paid dictator Manuel Noriega $320k over his career

1890 United Mine Workers founded

1885 A.J. Muste born

treaty 1784 U.S. ratifies peace the with England, ending Revolutionary War

King 1929 Martin Luther

claims right 1648 Margaret Brent to vote in U.S. colonies worldwide 2017 Women’s March

fired from 1970 Angela Davis University of California, a Los Angeles, for being Communist

the new 1959 U.S. recognizes led by government of Cuba Fidel Castro

becomes 1990 Douglas Wilder first elected African American governor (Virginia)

1932 Hattie W. Carawaywoman becomes the first elected to the U.S. Senate

Thirteenth 1865 Congress passes Amendment, abolishing slavery

1941 FDR makes “Four Freedoms” speech

Cuba

Inauguration Day

first 1871 Congress repeals federal income tax (enacted by Lincoln) captures 1939 General Franco Civil Barcelona in Spanish War

protests

1973 Paris Peace Accords in end U.S. involvement Vietnam War

Saturday 1

New Year’s Day Court 1790 U.S. Supreme in convenes for first time

NYC 1831 First issue of abolitionist magazine The Liberator

with 1961 U.S. breaks ties

FEBRUARY T W T

Friday

Thursday

Wednesday

Tuesday

Monday

Sunday

6 1 2 3 4 5 12 13 7 8 9 10 11 19 20 14 15 16 17 18 26 27 21 22 23 24 25

JANUARY 2021

1 2 3 4 5 11 12 6 7 8 9 10 18 19 13 14 15 16 17 25 26 20 21 22 23 24 27 28 29 30 31

1861 American Miners Association founded

radicals 1920 6,000 suspected seized in Palmer Raids

La Follette’s 1909 First issue of Weekly (renamed The Progressive in 1929)

Jr. born

1991 U.S. bombs Baghdadzones) (based on U.S. time

legalizes 1973 Supreme Court Wade abortion in Roe v.

becomes 1907 Charles Curtis U.S. Congress first Native American 1815 U.S. Library of being Senator (Kansas) re-established after signs of 1812 2009 President Obama Pay Act burned during War Lilly Ledbetter Fair

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The Progressive - December 2020/January 2021

Articles inside

VOX POPULIST

EDGE OF SPORTS

POEMS

MAEVE IN AMERICA

HEMMING AND HAWING

INTERVIEW

BOOKS

Red Alert

Bad Leadership Drove Schools into Crisis

BOOK EXCERPT

ONE QUESTION

My Students, the Police

Students on Strike

The Graying of Mass Incarceration

Transformative Change’ Proves Elusive

SMOKING GUN

EDITOR’S NOTE

MIDDLE AMERICA

COMMENT

NO COMMENT

BLAST FROM THE PAST

SMART ASS CRIPPLE

LETTERS

ON THE LINE