Colin ODonnell was already rethinking the notion of what makes cities and communities function even before the COVID-19 epidemic swept through the U.S. and revealed some of the cracks in centuries-old structures of urban life.

ODonnell was part of the early wave of urban tech innovation, which began to rise about six years ago. He co-founded Intersection, a company manufacturing digital kiosks for public transportation services, which was eventually rolled up in one of the first big acquisitions from the Alphabet-owned subsidiary Sidewalk Labs .

While the initial optimism for and interest in technologys ability to reshape the built environment has stumbled thanks to both Sidewalks data collection overreach in its initial Toronto project and the financial stresses that the COVID-19 epidemic has placed on cities across the country, experiments with how to integrate technology into society more intelligently continue on the margins. And investments in real estate technology continue to rise.

ODonnells new company, Kibbo, takes advantage of both trends. The San Francisco-based startup aims to upgrade the American trailer park, making it a network of intentional communities for the remote-working, previously urban professionals (PUPs?).

To ensure that these remote working puppies (Im going with it) can navigate the American roadways in the manner to which theyre accustomed, Kibbo pitches exclusive RV parks outfitted with amenities like kitchen supplies and basic staples like coffee and snacks, a gym and recreational facilities for congregating. The company is now taking applications for membership and will be charging $1,000 per month to access its locations of sites near major national parks across the West Coast.

For members who dont have their own vehicles, Kibbo offers access to top-of-the-line Mercedes Sprinters outfitted with the latest in #vanlife amenities. The vans cost roughly $1,000 per month to rent.

Beginning in the fall, members who get past Kibbos virtual velvet rope and gain access to the companys communities will be able to visit spots in Ojai, Zion, Black Rock Desert and Big Sur. Those locations will be complemented by spots in urban cores in Los Angeles, San Francisco and somewhere in Silicon Valley, according to a statement from ODonnell.

With the pressure of months of quarantine fueling the desire for people to get out of their expensive apartments in the city to explore nature and connect with people, we now have the demand and opportunity to rethink how we live, work, have fun and find meaning, he said. We get to rethink the urban experience and define what we want cities of the future to really look like.

With Kibbos launch, would-be puppies (still going with it) attracted to its vision of a network of community spaces shared by professionals whose companies have embraced remote work can now pay $100 to apply to be part of the network.

The company is tapping into a part of the American zeitgeist thats nearly as old as the country itself. From its inception, people came (and colonized) the country in an effort to create communities that would reflect their values and beliefs and afford them an opportunity to flourish (at the expense of others).

Its also working off of the glamping phenomenon that netted Hipcamp a valuation over $100 millionand grabbed Tentrr an $11 million round of financing. Hipcamp offers a database of campsites that earns money by taking a commission from the bookings it facilitates to moe than 300,000 sites across the U.S.

Like Tentrr, Kibbo is using private land to set up sites accessible to membership. But unlike Tentrr, Kibbo owns its own real estate and is setting up its sites to be part of a community rather than just an experience for travelers looking for a different option from a city vacation or competing for campsites at national parks.

Kibbo also thinks of itself as developing a new kind of roving cities comprised of a certain kind of membership.

Unlike traditional top-down designed and built real estate developments, Kibbo is setting out to build the first of the next generation of cities: flexible, reconfigurable, designed and defined by the people that live in it, off the grid and sustainable, ODonnell said.

Thats what attracted Urban.us investor Shaun Abrahamson.

In the short and medium term, I think this looks like a specialty part of the RV market. However, our sense is that RV experience was designed for vacations or retirees and trends like remote work and van life suggest there is demand for different kind of infrastructure and experience Our longer term interest is climate and affordable housing, Abrahamson said.

Climate change and the resulting flooding, fires and rising sea levels are going to change the kinds of infrastructure to support permanent housing, Abrahamson said.

Van life is benefiting from mobile infrastructure solar + batteries make off-grid easier. As prices come down, mobile housing and infrastructure will become more attractive. And Kibbo is filling in other lightweight pieces of infrastructure related to things like sanitation and security and, yes, theyll layer in experiences, too, he said.

Both Abrahamson and ODonnell think there will be more nomadic communities far beyond vacations and retirement, and Kibbo is the firms attempt to tap into that trend. Its a vision for a future of cities that doesnt include them, and one that ODonnell, a New York transplant living in a communal space in San Francisco, embraces.

While Kibbo offers an exciting lifestyle from day one, were making a bet that the future of cities is electric, autonomous, distributed, renewable and user-generated, ODonnell said.

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Kibbo wants to remake the RV park so #vanlife can be a life and not a lifestyle - TechCrunch

Teachers march in support of the community control board during the Ocean HillBrownsville teacher dispute, October 1, 1968. (Louis Liotta / New York Post Archives / NYP Holdings, Inc., via Getty Images)

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In late May, as the national uprising against police brutality forced on America a crash course in defunding and abolishing the police, another concept also began circulating: community control.Ad Policy

This likely drew a few blank stares, and not without reason: Community control sounds utopian, even in a federalist country like ours that leaves great autonomy to the states. But its not a new idea, and its not only relevant to our current crisis of a law enforcement regime unaccountable to the people it polices. Community control proposes that the institutions people depend upon should be controlled by community members working in cooperation, not private individuals, corporate shareholders, or government bureaucrats.

Weve known for decades that the things that our communities really need to be healthy and safe not only arent being invested in, but are actually being starved of resources, said Monifa Bandele of the Movement for Black Lives Policy Table. Thats why the Movement for Black Lives has made community control a key plank in its Vision for Black Lives platform, demanding community control of the laws, institutions, and policies that are meant to serve usfrom our schools to our local budgets, economies, police departments, and our land.

To begin building community control in the 21st century, activists can look to experiments dating back centuries that have attempted to address systemic inequality and build Black power across different areas of American life, including land, work, education, and law enforcement. Successive Black freedom movements have advocated or enacted versions of community control, from the Abolitionists through the civil rights era, the New Left and the Black Power movement.

Examining key experiments in community control from the not-so-distant pastone that attempted to build power outside existing institutions, and one that aimed squarely at the structures standing in the way of Black empowermentreveals both its potential as a tool for abolishing systemic racism and the challenges the model faces for enacting transformative change. These reflect the larger question that motivated the earlier experiments: How to end systemic racism when it is baked into every crumb of American life?

The idea, if not the reality, of direct, democratic control over the institutions that shape our lives was present at our countrys founding. Despite the varied inspirations for community control in the United StatesBritish socialism, utopian communes, intentional communitiesthe most important of these is the history of black organized communities of the nineteenth century, political scientist James DeFilippis writes in Unmaking Goliath: Community Control in the Face of Global Capital. These trailblazing efforts emerged at a time of great discrimination and oppression in order to pool the limited resources of individuals toward collective aims: surviving slavery, racial violence, discrimination, and poverty, as the political economist Jessica Gordon Nembhard describes in Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice.

Until the end of the Civil War, Black fugitive slaves ran communes where they educated themselves, made a living, managed communal farms, and organized abolitionist resistance along the Underground Railroad. Black urban communities collected dues from members to establish their own schools, health benefits, and social welfare. Turning inward and working together, these organizations were born of necessity, and similar mutual aid efforts have also emerged in other communities neglected and targeted by racist society, such as Chinese and Mexican immigrants in the 19th and 20th century.Current Issue

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The early Black cooperative organizations became a springboard for cooperative businesses and trade unions, as W.E.B. Du Bois observed in 1907. He argued that maintaining economic self-sufficiency through collective ownership and control was essential for Black peopleand all Americansto achieve racial equality in a society defined by white supremacy, and a fundamentally unequal economic system. Cooperation would weld the majority of our people into an impregnable, economic phalanx, he wrote in 1933.

But by the 1960s, it was obvious that America still wasnt meeting the basic needs of Black Americans. In 1968, a global influenza was killing 100,000 in the United States, cities across the country were roiled with mass disturbances following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., and Richard Nixon was riding a wave of pent-up white rage to the White House. In this volatile climate, the civil rights, Black Power, and New Left movements revisited the notion that cooperation, collective ownership, and community governance could give poor, marginalized people more control of their lives, and by extension, more power.

In Southwest Georgia, civil rights activists had been registering Albanys Black voters and organizing sit-ins, boycotts, mass meetings, and demonstrations against the citys segregated bus stations through the 60s, but by decades end, they hadnt yielded many concrete improvements in Black peoples standard of living. The activists began building islands of Black self-determination to strengthen their position within the seas of white supremacy. We were trying to organize people in the rural area, and we knew the struggle, one of the activists, Shirley Sherrod, told me for a story I reported for Harpers Magazine.

The Black community lacked wealth, and farming is hard, low-paying, capital-intensive work. It was even more difficult for Black farmers who were discriminated against by banks, the USDA, and other institutions. Waves of Black farmers lost their land and went out of business during this era, as the historian Pete Daniel describes in Dispossession: Discrimination Against African American Farmers in the Age of Civil Rights. Sherrod knew that racial equality would remain elusive so long as Black people lacked economic clout and stability. In 1968, after visiting Israel to study different land communities, Albanys civil rights activists began a cooperative venture on collectively owned land. We were thinking that we would develop something so that we would never lose the land, Sherrod said.

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New Communities, a Black-led, multiracial cooperative farm, broke ground in 1969 on 6,000 acres of land near Albany. It is widely considered to be the first Community Land Trust, a model of landholding that places the land in a trust that is governed by a board of community members, managed by a nonprofit, and used for whatever the community chooses, whether thats housing, small businesses, cultural spaces, gardens, parks, or farms. Maximizing the communitys resources and spreading the risks across the collective, community control of land ensures that the land remains in the communityand for the communitybeyond the lifespan, efforts, whims, or fate of any one individual. New Communities was then the largest tract of Black-owned land in the United States.

This was not an intentional community, those enclaves of like-minded individuals that were popular in the 60s. Enmeshed in the civil rights movement, collective ownership and control was a way to buttress the economic power of its members. Collectively, they grew soybeans, peanuts, corn, peas, strawberries, collard greens, okra, and eight acres of muscadine grapes. They sold some of it in the New Communities store, along with syrup they made from their own sugarcane, and ham, bacon and sausage they cured in their own smokehouse, from the hundreds of hogs they raised. You can sustain better because its a group thing, said Gerald Holley, the resident storekeeper and meat-smoker, who later ran his own shoe business. Its not an individual companyone man holding up the company.

Robert Christian, the former treasurer of New Communities, examines some of the muscadine grapes that he grows on his farm outside of Albany, Ga., in 2001. The muscadines are siblings of the original vines grown at New Communities, once the largest Black-owned tract of land in the nation. (Ric Feld / AP Photo)

The collective spirit of New Communities also protected them against the hostility of their white neighbors. They didnt want to see the new community succeed, Holley told me, but the white racists still bought cigarettes and gas from their store. But they were still a relatively small Black-run outfit in a hostile white-run state. In 1969, the government reneged on a grant they had promised to help New Communities buy the landSherrod believes they caved to white oppositionand the farmers were forced to take out a private loan. When severe droughts began in 1981, the USDA denied them a loan to install irrigation, despite approving nearby white farmers for similar financingpart of a pattern of racial discrimination that became the focus of Pigford vs. Glickman, the Supreme Court case that produced the largest civil rights settlements in US history. Within their 6,000 acres, New Communities farmers had achieved a measure of autonomy that mightve eluded them as individuals, but their island wasnt completely protected from the whims of the wider world. Unable to pay their mortgage, they foreclosed in 1985.

As an experiment in building power apart from existing institutions, New Communities shows the often-insurmountable barriers such efforts at self-determination face. But it has proved even more difficult to establish community control over existing institutions head-on. Following Brown vs. Board of Education, New York City failed to integrate its public schools: Black children bused into white neighborhoods were greeted with fierce white opposition, schools in Black and brown neighborhoods were overcrowded and underfunded, and the mostly white teachers union, the United Federation of Teachers, blocked efforts to encourage the best teachers to take assignments there. Parents also saw the mostly white teachers and principalsonly 1 percent of principals and 8 percent of teachers in the citys schools were Blackpunishing their children for being disruptive, rather than treating them with patience, empathy, and care. So instead of waiting for complacent white politicians and administrators to change the system, they began seeking a more formal role in hiring, firing, and day-to-day management of their schools.

Their organizing worked. In 1967, the city set up three experimental community control school districts: one in Harlem, one in lower Manhattan, and one in Ocean Hill-Brownsville, a Black and Puerto Rican neighborhood in Central Brooklyn. Under community control, parents in each district elected a governing board that could hire superintendents and principals, decentralizing powers once concentrated in the Board of Education. Though supported by the citys liberal elites and shaped by the Ford Foundationcommunity control would boost the self-esteem and boot-strapping capacities of Black people without threatening the power of white communities, they thoughtthe plan soon drew the ire of the UFT. It threatened their control over the citys schools, including a contract clause they were seeking from the Board of Education to allow teachers to remove disruptive children from schools. So in May 1968, when the Ocean HillBrownsville community control board transferred 19 teachers and administrators out of their district, claiming they were hostile to community control, the UFT objected. And when classes started in September, the union called a citywide teacher strike, shutting down all of New York Citys public schools for ten weeks.

The events stoked deep, long-lasting racial divisions in New York City and Americas progressive movements. For the UFT, the communitys reaction to the strike was just union-busting. In Ocean HillBrownsville, the multiracial teaching staffhired by the community control board, and backed by Black and brown parents, the Ocean HillBrownsville community, civil rights leaders, and the Afro-American Teachers Associationcrossed the picket line each day to keep their schools open. The daily spectacle of activists, community members, journalists, and police became a flashpoint of racial tensions in the city, as New Yorks white middle-class rallied around the union, and Black and brown New Yorkers coalesced around Ocean HillBrownsville leaders. But the UFT didnt let up. Only once the city reinstated the transferred teachers and ended the community control experiment in mid-November was the strike called off.

A skirmish between community members and police during the Ocean HillBrownsville teachers strike, October 9, 1968. (AP Photo)

For the Black Power movement, the Ocean Hill-Brownsville struggle was yet another instance of a progressive white institution reversing course on its civil rights commitments the moment it meant giving up any power. Echoes of community control still exist, if watered-down, in the citys school districtsin 1969, New York State passed a UFT-backed decentralization bill that created 30 new elected school boards without giving them much control. But for Mark Winston Griffith, cohost of School Colors, a podcast that examines the afterlives of Ocean HillBrownsville, and an organizer who has helped to launch a community-controlled bank and grocery store in Central Brooklyn, Ocean HillBrownsville also highlighted the immense challenges of establishing community controland negotiating varied, sometimes-clashing aimswithin large, diverse communities.

Its a challenge that any community control experiment will face in taking on an entrenched institution. Powerful white opposition can quash any new community control experiment, as it did to New Communities and Ocean HillBrownsville. Governments and institutions can co-opt community control rhetoric or structures without redistributing real power to the people, like the 1969 decentralization law.

Shirley Sherrod at the Department of Agriculture in 2010. (Mark Wilson / Getty Images)

Yet New Communities was also an unlikely success. After its end, Shirley Sherrod spent two decades assisting countless black farmers through the Federation of Southern Cooperatives/Land Assistance Fund, a nonprofit association of Black farmers and cooperatives founded in 1967. Under Obama, she became the USDAs first black rural development director in Georgiaa radical shift for the agency she once sued. (Sherrod was infamously forced from her position at the USDA after the Obama administration caved to outcry over a doctored video clip. When the full clip was made public, the USDA offered Sherrod a new job, which she declined).

Also, New Communities birthed a new model of landholding that other communities continue to modify, strengthen, and adapt. Two hundred and sixty CLTs are thriving in the United States today, meaning that the experiment never truly ended.

In a way, the current push for community control over police is an amalgam of the inside-outside approaches: defunding police departmentstargeting an existing institution that is harming Black communitiesallows people to build their own institutions to meet their needs. Control is essential to our platform, because thats about self-determination, the Movement for Black Lives Bandele explains. If you dont control the institutions that are critical to your life, to your existence, then you cannot survive. You cant thrive.

Activists are divided on the real meaning of community control when it comes to law enforcement, and how such control would relate to the calls to defund or abolish the police. In 1971, the city of Berkeley voted down the Black Panther Partys program for community control of police, which proposed the formation of elected civilian review boards to investigate police shootings, in a referendum. This version of community control of police remains the most well-known, and civilian review boards have been criticized by the abolish camp as largely symbolic, vulnerable to cooptation by pro-police interests, and attempting to tweak a fundamentally oppressive institution without giving the people any real control.

But its not the only program. After the Ferguson uprising in 2014, Max Rameau and his Pan-African Community Action (PACA) began formulating a proposal for Community Control of Police that has since become a central campaign of the National Alliance Against Racist & Political Repression. It proposes a directly elected, all-civilian council with full or final authoritynot just the right to offer inputover police policy, budgets, disciplinary measures, hiring and firing (including of the police chief), full access to all investigations, and negotiations with police unions. By granting real power over these essential functions to the civilian council, communities can choose to completely overhaulto abolish and remaketheir police. Whats missing from this brief, skeletal proposal are answers to the litany of questions that people often raise: How will communities handle violence? Can I send my children to the playground and expect them to return unscathed? How do we deal with the barrage of fireworks exploding through the night on our block?

We need you to reimagine public safety in your communityRameau and PACA give this directive to communities they engage on the proposal. Its a prompt for people to figure out what safety would mean outside of a world that only knows to punish people for social violations, and an indication that this program might be more accurately described as community control of public safety. Imagine that you have 100 organizers. They all have cars. They have walkie-talkies. They could have guns. They dont have to have them, but they could have them. Its up to you, he continues. Theyre all wearing uniforms. You know who they are. How would you use them to improve your community?

No one ever suggests catching truant kids and putting them in jail, he reports. No one says they need military-grade weapons or tanks. Most envision safety and security as someone picking up elderly people from the supermarket in the winter, so theyre not waiting for the bus in the cold, or someone finding out why a homeless person is on the street, and then helping them to address the root cause.

These answers still leave conspicuous blank spaces in the same spots where our collective imaginations usually fail, but the point of sticking with the exercise is to fill them in. We have good answers for why you shouldnt call the police, Rameau says. Namely, that they are instruments of terror for poor communities, even if they are also sometimes protectors. But we dont have an answer for what to do when somethings legitimately happening to you, and you need some help and support. And we need to build that, he said. We need to get people to a viable alternative.

That is what New Communities created: not just a commitment to reimagine the world but an actual model that, despite its limitations, has allowed hundreds of communities to fill in the blanks, improve on the model, and collectively build a different system for the nation, one plot at a time. Im not opposed to the idea of defunding, said Rameau. Defunding is a crucial step to achieving public safety, but in the era of New Communities and Ocean Hill-Brownsville, police budgets were half what they are today, and police were still abusive because of who held the power, he said. Yet power is the reason Rameau doesnt use the term abolition, even if his end goal sounds suspiciously abolitionist: a system of public safety controlled by the people most brutalized and oppressed by police today, and so radically different from existing police that it shouldnt be called police. The real question is: Has power shifted?

A march against police violence through the West End of Detroit on July 11, 2020. (Matthew Hatcher / Getty Images)

One thing hasnt changed since the late 60s, or even the 19th century: power remains concentrated in Americas wealthy white communities. But since that era, proponents of neoliberalism have also steadily strengthened the power of corporations, at the expense of collective and public institutions. Prisons have been privatized. The private security industry is ballooning, globally and in the United States, with bodyguards and private patrols protecting shopping malls, luxury hotels, gated communities, and the 1 percent. Without a viable alternative like the one Rameau seeks, its not hard to imagine this industry absorbing the functions of public police, but with less accountability, fewer restrictions, and, by extension, more brutality. Walmart is not going to say, Well, theres no police here, I guess well take whatever losses come.

The divergence between community control of public safety and abolition seems to reflect the same question that animated the movements of the late 60s: Do we get to our goala world structured by principles of justiceby targeting, outwardly, the oppressive system, or by building our own power and, through it, our own alternative? Yet if theres a lesson to draw from the earlier community control experiments, it is that each approach also requires the other. Decentralization, a goal shared by right-wing libertarians, leaves intact the seas of white supremacy, while community control mechanisms, like civilian boards, risk being corrupted or co-opted by reformist agendas. If abolish doesnt carry this risk, thats because it doesnt offer a formal alternativea proposed roadmap, how ever imperfect, that doesnt just lead away from injustice, but toward a more fair society.

With no models of community-controlled public safety at a large scale in the United States, we are ultimately limited by the road maps we create. We want to be visionary and think about things that can and should work, says Rameau. Not to say, Were going to limit ourselves to the things that weve seen already work.

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Building Community Power in a White Supremacist Country - The Nation

Enter the six Black farmers and CSA programs below.

Theyre not just filling the gaps for their communities by growing culturally relevant produce and making it available to consumers. Theyre also working to restore food sovereignty, connect communities with healthy options, and increase access to and skills for growing food.

Black Farmers Collective in Seattle started 5 years ago in the Yesler neighborhood.

Yesler is connected to a historic Black neighborhood and used to be an affordable housing project, maybe for about 50 years, says Hannah Wilson, volunteer farm manager of the Yes Farm urban farm project, an urban farm and partner of Black Farmers Collective.

Were now seeing the development of downtown, units being knocked down, and new units going up and being sold at market rate, so we are witnessing gentrification, says Wilson. Its becoming coveted property and Black people are being pushed to the south end.

The Black Lives Matter movement has raised the profile of organizations, like Black Farmers Collective, that advocate for reconnection to our food source. They also call attention to the ethics of food, including farm worker conditions, pay, and the distribution chain.

Food deserts are a reality for Black people and people of color. People have to leave their neighborhoods for fresh, organic produce, and this is the result of environmental racism, redlining, and unsustainable development, Wilson says. It then leads to disparities in health.

Black Farmers Collective is focused on intentional engagement with the community. When starting community gardens, its founders noticed that many Black people werent able to use them, due to barriers like location, transportation, and time.

Wilson emphasizes the need for more farms, noting that funding would help the collective acquire the space and skills needed to run successful projects.

Yes Farm is a baby of the collective, and we hope to do more. Were now focused on building community and running education programs for schools, Wilson says. A class can grow in a row or a bed, take food home, and learn to cook with it. These are skills they will have for life.

Kale, collard greens, mustard greens, peas, beans, squash, radishes, turnips, and chamomile are among the crops on the 2-acre farm. In the near future, when funding allows, CSA boxes will be available on a sliding price scale, if not free of charge.

Wayne Swanson, also known as Farmer Wayne, runs Swanson Family Farm in Hampton, Georgia. He, his wife, and his son raise cows, sheep, goats, and pigs on their farm. They also run a buyers club that connects directly with consumers.

I was always outdoorsy, Swanson says. I love the woods, and I spent summers with my grandparents on their farm. My farm has been a hobby for 14 years and a business for 5 to 6 years.

The farm has a wide consumer base, with people who come from all over Georgia and even out of state to get their meat.

Farmer Wayne has always been determined to run a sustainable farm. He credits his ability to remain strong during the COVID-19 pandemic to his farm having better conditions than the big businesses where workers are in small spaces and more susceptible to contracting the virus.

As those businesses shut down, people turned to local farmers.

The animals are my staff. I started with chickens, then cows, then sheep and pigs. The system we have here mimics how the animals want to live. They want to move, graze, access ponds, and access clean water, says Swanson. The neighbors must have thought it was ridiculous, but I would stand in the field with cows, watching them to see what they want.

Swanson Family Farms best seller is ground beef. But along with livestock, they also raise bees for honey. The success of this small business is in its simplicity and attention to the natural ecosystem.

Really, were grass farmers, and animals help with that, and the byproduct is honey, he says. Its about the ecosystem, being very sensitive and in tune to that.

The Swansons plan to open another farm in New Jersey at the end of the summer in 2020.

Promote, document, and improve: These are the stated goals of Farms to Grow, Inc., a farm in Oakland, California, that was co-founded by Dr. Gail P. Myers and Gordon Reed in 2004.

Its focus is on preserving the local environment while helping Black and underserved farmers create and maintain their own farms to grow food for their communities.

Projects include the Freedom Farmers Market, hands-on in-school programs, after-school cooking classes, and connecting people to farmers within their communities. Its CSA program also encourages farmers to donate 10 percent of crops for meals for unhoused people.

The driving force of Soul Fire Farm a Black-owned farm in Petersburg, New York is to uproot racism in the food system through justice, ecology, and healing. They see the environmental impact of unsustainable practices that disproportionately affect Black people, as well as the potential for reconnecting with the land to heal communities.

One of the ways they hope to do that in 2020 is by building at least six urban gardens for the Capital District, which is the metropolitan region surrounding Albany, New York. They also aim to train at least 130 new farmer-activists through 1-week programs.

Samantha Foxx owns 2.5 acres in Charlotte, North Carolina, and is leasing more land to expand production of Mothers Finest Family Farm. She started the farm after deciding to be what she never saw as a child: a Black farmer wearing lipstick.

Foxx includes her crops in 14-week CSA boxes, along with products such as honey, shea honey butter, healing salves, and elderberry syrup. The farm includes bees, mushrooms, worms, and a variety of produce.

Foxx is a beekeeper and has a certification from 4-H, a program originally started by the U.S. Department of Agriculture to teach kids life skills like farming and animal care. Mothers Finest also offers beekeeping classes for those interested in it as a business or hobby.

Foxx often teaches classes herself. And shes involved all of her children in the business, including her 6-year-old son, who goes along with Foxx when she checks on her beehives.

Through her work, Foxx is reclaiming the land and encouraging other Black people to renew connections to the earth, transforming the narrative from one of slavery to one of community building.

In Atlanta, Georgia, community organizer Abiodun Henderson has been running an agribusiness training program for at-risk and formerly incarcerated youth for 4 years. Its called Gangstas to Growers.

In a 3-month program, trainees participate in yoga classes, attend seminars, and work on a cooperative farm. The program integrates life skills with sessions ranging from financial literacy to cooking.

Participants earn wages and gain skills in production and business management. They not only grow and harvest peppers themselves, but transform them into a retail product. Sweet Sol hot sauce, named by program participants in a marketing class, is sold to help the project become self-sufficient.

Upon completion of the program, participants find job opportunities in the food business with Hendersons assistance. The goal is to reach and assist 500 young people by 2025, giving them an alternative to the limited prospects often facing Black youth.

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6 Black-Owned Farms and CSAs Doing Revolutionary Work - Healthline

July 24th has officially been designated Self-Care Dayand although you might be inclined to snicker at such a twee, made-up festivity, this may be one holiday we should take time to truly mull over this year. Given the social challenges that continue to test us globally and individually, looking internally to better ourselves and our communities doesnt hurt, especially now.

Its clear that the worlds of self-care and wellness are tied up in a persons social, racial, and economic standings. So notable beauty brands and businesses have stepped up to ensure inclusion and diversity within their organizations and for their clients. New York City retail beauty space Knockout Beautys founder Cayli Cavaco is one of themher business has expanded the products it stocks to include more Black-owned brands. It has been proven that diversity in a population makes us more creative and more innovative, so I have always sought a diverse community of clients, Cavaco said. Expanding to include more black founders is a natural, yet intentional, extension of our mission. In an ongoing effort to provide much-needed visibility and inclusion, we have profiled below some of the most standout, exceptional beauty products essential for this summer from our favorite Black-owned beauty entrepreneursall of which are available at Knockout. Treat yourself on this day of self-care, which, in 2020, should include a healthy dose of introspection.

This lightweight, daily moisturizing cleanser from beauty veteran Lesley Thorntons skin care line Klur is a favorite among beauty junkies for its non-greasy formulation, which effectively removes makeup while not stripping your skin of essential oils. Dandelion is the star ingredient here, which acts as a regenerative healing component for skin while maintaining an essential moisture balance on the surface.

Brooklyns most in-demand oculofacial plastic surgeon, Dr. Chaneve Jeanniton, spent four years researching the perfect scientific formulation to create this powerful collagen-boosting growth factor serum. The peptide serum uses cultivated growth factors from human adipose (fat) cells, which are then sorted to ensure the highest-quality growth factors to promote glowing, plump skin as well as lactic acid to help gently refine the surface.

Hyper Skin was formulated as a skin savior specifically for women who suffer from acne scarring, melasma or sun-damaged skin. Founder and beauty industry alumni Desiree Verdejo created Hyper Skin out of a skin care necessityshe often came into contact with high-end beauty products that failed to address skin issues that persist during hormonal shifts.The Hyper Clear Vitamin C Serum uses gentle but high-grade, effective ingredients such as kojic acid, turmeric and Bearberry.

The brainchild invention of Yale scholar Adiya Dixon Wiggins, Yubi is the intelligently designed, grip-less makeup applicator created not just to provide the convenience of time with its handheld fingertip application, but an end to streaks and unblended makeup fiascos. Another plus: the vegan bristles help reduce bacterial growth or product absorption to provide clean beauty with each application.

A legit last -all-day lipstick. Leave it to Harvard Business grad and Stanford Fellow, Aishetu Fatima Dozie, to create a calculated lipstick formulation that is applied initially as a liquid, then turns matte but still manages to stay on creamyall day. Just launched from this vegan, cruelty-free liquid lipstick line is also the Power Woman Essentials colors named for the five essential attributes that embody powerful women: wisdom, faith, courage, bravery, and of course, hustle.

These on-the-go makeup wipes created by former Hollywood makeup artist Lauren Napier are individually packaged. Each satchel gently removes summer grime accumulated on skins impurities with no filmy residue left behind. Aside from containing soothing aloe and chamomile, Napiers line is rich with good karma: all wipes are ethically manufactured under solar energy, recyclable, cruelty free and Napier has partnered with the Foundation for the Handicapped, employing disadvantaged and disabled adults for her products.

An ideal solution to treat skin blemishes, especially during summer when skin tends to be oilier and clogged. Rose MD Blemish Control Booster helps control skin inflammation and breakouts with two main anti-inflammatory ingredients, niacinamide and turmeric. This treatment also uses gentle fruit acids (malic acid, lactic acid and citric acid) to help exfoliate and unclog the pores.

Related: Essential Summer Hair Treatments Prescribed by Celebrity Hair Experts

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The Must-Have Summer Products From Black-Owned Beauty Brands - W Magazine

Kate Starbird, University of Washington

The COVID-19 pandemic has spawned an infodemic, a vast and complicated mix of information, misinformation and disinformation.

In this environment, false narratives the virus was planned, that it originated as a bioweapon, that COVID-19 symptoms are caused by 5G wireless communications technology have spread like wildfire across social media and other communication platforms. Some of these bogus narratives play a role in disinformation campaigns.

The notion of disinformation often brings to mind easy-to-spot propaganda peddled by totalitarian states, but the reality is much more complex. Though disinformation does serve an agenda, it is often camouflaged in facts and advanced by innocent and often well-meaning individuals.

As a researcher who studies how communications technologies are used during crises, Ive found that this mix of information types makes it difficult for people, including those who build and run online platforms, to distinguish an organic rumor from an organized disinformation campaign. And this challenge is not getting any easier as efforts to understand and respond to COVID-19 get caught up in the political machinations of this years presidential election.

Rumors are, and have always been, common during crisis events. Crises are often accompanied by uncertainty about the event and anxiety about its impacts and how people should respond. People naturally want to resolve that uncertainty and anxiety, and often attempt to do so through collective sensemaking. Its a process of coming together to gather information and theorize about the unfolding event. Rumors are a natural byproduct.

Rumors arent necessarily bad. But the same conditions that produce rumors also make people vulnerable to disinformation, which is more insidious. Unlike rumors and misinformation, which may or may not be intentional, disinformation is false or misleading information spread for a particular objective, often a political or financial aim.

Disinformation has its roots in the practice of dezinformatsiya used by the Soviet Unions intelligence agencies to attempt to change how people understood and interpreted events in the world. Its useful to think of disinformation not as a single piece of information or even a single narrative, but as a campaign, a set of actions and narratives produced and spread to deceive for political purpose.

Lawrence Martin-Bittman, a former Soviet intelligence officer who defected from what was then Czechoslovakia and later became a professor of disinformation, described how effective disinformation campaigns are often built around a true or plausible core. They exploit existing biases, divisions and inconsistencies in a targeted group or society. And they often employ unwitting agents to spread their content and advance their objectives.

Regardless of the perpetrator, disinformation functions on multiple levels and scales. While a single disinformation campaign may have a specific objective for instance, changing public opinion about a political candidate or policy pervasive disinformation works at a more profound level to undermine democratic societies.

Distinguishing between unintentional misinformation and intentional disinformation is a critical challenge. Intent is often hard to infer, especially in online spaces where the original source of information can be obscured. In addition, disinformation can be spread by people who believe it to be true. And unintentional misinformation can be strategically amplified as part of a disinformation campaign. Definitions and distinctions get messy, fast.

Consider the case of the Plandemic video that blazed across social media platforms in May 2020. The video contained a range of false claims and conspiracy theories about COVID-19. Problematically, it advocated against wearing masks, claiming they would activate the virus, and laid the foundations for eventual refusal of a COVID-19 vaccine.

Though many of these false narratives had emerged elsewhere online, the Plandemic video brought them together in a single, slickly produced 26-minute video. Before being removed by the platforms for containing harmful medical misinformation, the video propagated widely on Facebook and received millions of YouTube views.

As it spread, it was actively promoted and amplified by public groups on Facebook and networked communities on Twitter associated with the anti-vaccine movement, the QAnon conspiracy theory community and pro-Trump political activism.

But was this a case of misinformation or disinformation? The answer lies in understanding how and inferring a little about why the video went viral.

The videos protagonist was Dr. Judy Mikovits, a discredited scientist who had previously advocated for several false theories in the medical domain for example, claiming that vaccines cause autism. In the lead-up to the videos release, she was promoting a new book, which featured many of the narratives that appeared in the Plandemic video.

One of those narratives was an accusation against Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases. At the time, Fauci was a focus of criticism for promoting social distancing measures that some conservatives viewed as harmful to the economy. Public comments from Mikovits and her associates suggest that damaging Faucis reputation was a specific goal of their campaign.

In the weeks leading up to the release of the Plandemic video, a concerted effort to lift Mikovits profile took shape across several social media platforms. A new Twitter account was started in her name, quickly accumulating thousands of followers. She appeared in interviews with hyperpartisan news outlets such as The Epoch Times and True Pundit. Back on Twitter, Mikovits greeted her new followers with the message: Soon, Dr Fauci, everyone will know who you really are.

This background suggests that Mikovits and her collaborators had several objectives beyond simply sharing her misinformed theories about COVID-19. These include financial, political and reputational motives. However, it is also possible that Mikovits is a sincere believer of the information that she was sharing, as were millions of people who shared and retweeted her content online.

In the United States, as COVID-19 blurs into the presidential election, were likely to continue to see disinformation campaigns employed for political, financial and reputational gain. Domestic activist groups will use these techniques to produce and spread false and misleading narratives about the disease and about the election. Foreign agents will attempt to join the conversation, often by infiltrating existing groups and attempting to steer them towards their goals.

For example, there will likely be attempts to use the threat of COVID-19 to frighten people away from the polls. Along with those direct attacks on election integrity, there are likely to also be indirect effects on peoples perceptions of election integrity from both sincere activists and agents of disinformation campaigns.

Efforts to shape attitudes and policies around voting are already in motion. These include work to draw attention to voter suppression and attempts to frame mail-in voting as vulnerable to fraud. Some of this rhetoric stems from sincere criticism meant to inspire action to make the electoral systems stronger. Other narratives, for example unsupported claims of voter fraud, seem to serve the primary aim of undermining trust in those systems.

History teaches that this blending of activism and active measures, of foreign and domestic actors, and of witting and unwitting agents, is nothing new. And certainly the difficulty of distinguishing between these is not made any easier in the connected era. But better understanding these intersections can help researchers, journalists, communications platform designers, policymakers and society at large develop strategies for mitigating the impacts of disinformation during this challenging moment.

Kate Starbird, Associate Professor of Human Centered Design & Engineering, University of Washington

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

Originally posted here:

Disinformation campaigns are murky blends of truth, lies and sincere beliefs lessons from the pandemic - TheStreet

Gerhard Apfelthaler and Loredana Carson, Your Turn Published 5:09 p.m. PT July 25, 2020

Out of the blue on July 6, the Department of Homeland Security informed more than 1 million international students in the U.S. that their student visas wouldexpire if theywere not able totake in-person classes in the fall. At the same time,many universities were pulling back in-person class offerings as the number of active COVID-19 cases continued to rise at an alarming rate.

Thankfully, on July 14, DHS retracted this decisionafter awave of lawsuits filed against the department on behalf of multiple institutions of higher education including Harvard, MIT, the UC system and at least 179 other schools that joined together to protest the plan. It isnt often thatso manycolleges and universities agree on a single approach,sosuchunification is worth noting.To understandwhy they moved so fast and so furiously to get this regulation overturned, it isimportant to understand the role of the international student populationinthe higher education landscape.

In addition to providing domestic students with a global learning experience, international studentscontributetremendouseconomicvalue to every sector of the U.S.economy.The Institute of International Educationplaces the contributionat$45billion annually.Education isour countrysfourth largest service sector export, and international students are responsible foran estimated500,000 American jobs. Most arehigh-paying jobs thataredesperately neededbecausetheunemployment ratenowexceedsGreat Recessionlevels.

In California,160,000international studentscontributeabout $7billionto the economyannually, supporting more than 74,000 jobs.Inthe Greater Los Angelesregion,there aretens ofthousands of international students.If these students had been forced toreturn to their home countries,the result would have beenvisible in theimmediate negative economic effects.

TherecentDHSturmoilonly added to a series of actions that havecreatedlong-term damage toourreputationas a country where futures can be built.Travelbans,visa restrictions, the suspension of H-1B visasandthe threat of not allowing international students to gain experience in Optional Practical Trainingpositions have allcreatedan overwhelming negative national message that international students are not welcome in the U.S.This is despite the fact thattheir presence enhances our campus communities and supportscompanies throughout the country, especially in Californias high-tech sector. International graduates with highly specialized degrees in many areas are desperately needed in the U.S, which doesnt graduate enough domestic students inscience,technology,engineering andmathematics.

Whilemany highlyqualifiedinternational students return to their home countries after graduation,othersstay and support the U.S. economyat the local, regional and national levels.According to studies based on U.S.Census data, immigrantsaretwice as likely to start new businesses than people born in the U.S., andthey account for more than 40% of new businessesin states such as California, New York and New Jersey.

Other countries are much more intentional in their messaging to their international student population,and the competition over international students has greatly intensified. The U.S. market share of global enrollment dropped from roughly 30% in 2010 to about 20% in 2019. This drop has accelerated since 2016 due in part to tighter immigration practices and the federal governments constant negative rhetoric regarding international students. The U.S has become a less attractive destination for international students, while other countries such as Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom have succeeded in attracting more of them.

If there is any good to have come from this debacle, perhaps the conversationcan continue,and the higher education community can remain united in framingthe role of the international students as positive and valued instead of something to dismiss at a moments notice. Clearly, they do matter, and their presence is welcome. Its time for the national rhetoric to become more inclusive and less divisive on this important issue.

Gerhard Apfelthaler isprofessor anddean andLoredana Carsonis alecturerat the School of Management at California Lutheran University.

Read or Share this story: https://www.vcstar.com/story/opinion/editorials/2020/07/26/guest-column-u-s-war-on-international-students-needs-end/5490476002/

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Guest column: The U.S. war on international students needs to end - VC Star

Equality and inclusivity at work requires effort by everyone.

Our country has a huge issue with systemic racism, and it has been swept under the rug for far too long. This toxic problem has permeated pretty much every single aspect of life, but it is notably present in the workplace, along with other forms of discrimination. Research from McKinsey showed that ethnic and racial minorities, LGBTQ+ individuals and women were less likely to pursue a job opportunity because they didnt feel the company was inclusive enough. These populations have also experienced more microaggressions while at work. In addition, white people still dominate positions of leadership and get paid more, on average. For example, the average hourly wage for Black people is $21.05. For white people, its $28.66a startling 27% difference.

This is just the tip of the inequality iceberg, and there is, unfortunately, much more where that came from. Transforming our workplaces wont be easy, but we desperately need change. Frankly, we needed it decades ago. And for this to occur, for us to be able to break down the complex webs of structural oppression, we need to start at the top.Leaders have a responsibility to create a culture in which every single person has equal access to opportunity and feels wholly accepted and celebrated for exactly who they are. Its not just the right thing to doits whats going to set your team up for success, or failure. After all, its only when people feel they are able to be who they are that they can perform at their best.

I asked six incredible leaders, all of whom have been committed to diversity for some time, what theyve been doing to create even more inclusive environments in 2020. Heres what they had to say.

1. Centering A Company Objective Around Diversity And Inclusion

Carrie Siu Butt, CEO, Simple Health

At healthcare company Simple Health, Carrie Siu Butt has always been committed to building a diverse team. This moment in time has been something I have been working towards for my entire career, she said. But with renewed urgency, her team recently established a new company-wide objective for the third quarter of 2020 with a focus on diversity, inclusion, equity and social justice.To meet it, theyre leveraging a five-pronged approach:

This objective will be evaluated with the same level of scrutiny as our revenue and Ebitda objectives, Butt shared. Ill be holding my team accountable, and both my team and my board will be holding me accountable in return.

2. Making Inclusion More Than Just Rhetoric

Kerel Cooper, SVP Global Marketing, LiveIntent

For Kerel Cooper, its imperative that marketing platform LiveIntent backs up words with actionbecause its simply not enough to say youre diverse and inclusive.Near the beginning of 2019, a group of LiveIntent employees (including Cooper) spearheaded an employee resource group called BID, which stands for Belonging, Inclusion and Diversity. The ultimate goal was to bring the company together and share in each others unique day-to-day experiences, explained Cooper. Hes proud to report that BID has seen great success, and theyve expanded it to include a newly-formed Executive Committee, for which Cooper serves as chairman.[The Executive Committees] purpose is to continue to mature and oversee our D&Is success by providing opportunities for all employees to come together to share and educate each other both internally and externally, Cooper said.Cooper is also the co-founder of Minority Report Podcast, which focuses on diversity within media, business and technology and highlights people of color, diverse backgrounds, women and the LGBTQ community.

3. Increasing And Prioritizing Diversity In The Hiring Process

Tina Hsiao, COO, WePay, A Chase Company

We take pride in the culture weve built at WePay, shared Tina Hsiao. Jennifer [Aubert Parker, Chief Revenue Officer] and I are both diverse members on WePays leadership team; Jen is Black and Im Asian. We recognize we have the opportunity to bring our diverse perspectives together, and we continue breaking barriers and making diversity and inclusion a priority at our company.WePay has a strong set of diversity and inclusion efforts, including:

4. Creating Opportunities For The Communities They Serve

LaShunda Leslie-Smith, Executive Director, Connected Communities, Inc.

LaShunda Leslie-Smith is the executive director of a small nonprofit that focuses on revitalizing neighborhoods and breaking the cycle of poverty. And shes well aware that her organizations huge endeavor simply cant be accomplished without dismantling structural racism and being intentional about equity at every level. To do their part, the Connected Communities team makes sure to have a staff that reflects the population they serve by hiring from their neighborhood. In addition, they also have a Resident Ambassador program, for which they recruit, train and pay a living wage to residents who provide critical context expertise. This ensures that the voices and desires of those most impacted by Connected Communities work are heard and reflected in the organizations actions.In her free time, Leslie-Smith facilitates conversations around race equity through a weekly live stream show in which she challenges listeners to be active anti-racists.

5. Getting The Whole Team Involved

Karsten Vagner, People VP, Maven Clinic

At Maven Clinic, a telehealth company for women and family, We asked the company for volunteers to help build our diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, shared Karsten Vagner. To his delight, almost half of the employees wanted to participate, and theyre all committed to holding themselves accountable to long-term change. Together, the staff organized working groups focused on areas like education, partnerships, member experience, hiring and other areas of Maven Clinics business. They now have a 12-month roadmap with measurable OKRs built by our employees that will make our team, culture, and product more diverse and inclusive, Vagner said.

6. Learning By Doing

Diana Marie Lee (Co/lead CEO), Samuel Gonzlez (Co-lead Creative Strategist) and Ruth Jeannoel (Wellness Consultant), Sweet Livity

Sweet Livity, a minority- and women-owned B-corp is helping other organizations transform in a holistic way. We dont offer one-off skills-building workshops because they dont lead to culture change, shared Diana Marie Lee. Instead, the organization works to curate action-based, experiential learning that helps you transform, supports you to change your mind (the first step to changing your behavior).

Some of the specific ways Sweet Livity does this include:

As these leaders show, there simply arent one or two easy solutions to dismantling systemic discrimination and creating a culture that feels inclusive and equitable to all. Every company or organization must have different approaches and initiatives that reflect their own issues, values, and employee base. The important part, though, is prioritizing this workand ensuring that diversity and inclusion are woven into the fabric of our organizations from here on out.

See the rest here:

6 Innovative Leaders Share What They're Doing Behind The Scenes To Create Truly Inclusive Cultures - Forbes

After months of Black Lives Matter protests and violent police response, Americas faith in the police has been shaken, and so has its faith in police shows. If the cancellation of Cops is any indication, networks now think audiences are less willing than ever to tolerate idealized portrayals of the police in popular media. But the excavation of copaganda hasnt stopped at cop shows: Critical viewers have pointed out that the superhero genre may also be culpable, which isnt too surprising, considering the genres similarities to police fiction.

At their most conventional, cop shows and superhero stories both run off the assumption that crime is a persistent threat to society, and an equally persistent force is needed to punish criminals and maintain order. Whether that force wears a badge or a cape is a minor detail. What remains is that audiences have to accept the necessity of this kind of force for these kinds of stories to work.

The Golden Age of superhero comics started while the U.S. was still recovering from the Great Depression and Prohibition eras. Action Comics #1, featuring Supermans first appearance, was published while the intentional homicide rate was just starting to come down from its highest peak in the century up to that point. It isnt hard to see why 1930s children and adults alike would want to escape into stories where the excesses of lawlessness were curbed by strongmen in tights. The Golden Age of superhero movies, on the other hand, is occurring while violent crime in America has been in sharp decline for almost three decades. Police and prisons have an unprecedented amount of power, and the communities with the highest levels of police presence are also the ones being harmed the most.

None of these trends are being reflected in current American movies and TV. When modern superheroes arent rehashing the original 1930s vision of rampant domestic crime (like how every other week on The Flash, Barry Allen employs his speedster abilities to arrest yet another costumed criminal in Central City), theyre playing on audiences post-9/11 fears by having the Avengers fight terror overseas (Hydra cells in Lagos!) or from outer space. (Chitauri attack-bombers in Manhattan!)

In each of these examples, superheroes do the work of law enforcement, only its more palatable because the criminals are supervillains, aliens, robots, and gods rather than everyday people. But even considering the genres fantastical remove, the superhero-movie formula largely hasnt transcended that of the police procedural: A subversive element threatens a peaceful, ordered society. A trustworthy force arrives to eliminate the subversive element, through carceral or lethal means. Finally, order is re-asserted without the status quo needing to be changed.

The parallels between superheroes and police dont necessarily valorize police. In superhero stories, cops are often portrayed as incompetent, corrupt, or resentful because caped vigilantes infringe on their monopoly on violence. But superhero stories do legitimize the function of police: to punish people, often without any oversight or accountability, in the name of order.

America is going through a cultural shift that may lead to fiction about the police fading in popularity, just as Westerns did. But the superhero genre in spite of its parallels with cop fiction isnt in the same danger of becoming irrelevant. Thanks to the expansive flexibility of science-fiction/fantasy and the work of thoughtful comics creators, superhero stories are actually in a pretty good position to resist the pro-police, pro-prison themes which have, Hydra-like, infiltrated modern Western media. With that in mind, here are five main approaches to making superhero stories that dont legitimize the police.

Film and TV examples: Thor: Ragnarok, Wonder Woman, Avengers: Infinity War and Endgame, Justice League, Arrowverse crossover events, Avatar: The Last Airbender

Comic-book examples: Thor, Wonder Woman, Fantastic Four, every DC and Marvel crossover event, Grant Morrison and Frank Quitelys All-Star Superman, Jonathan Hickmans House of X/Powers of X, Tom King and Mitch Gerads Mister Miracle

Many superhero stories have avoided the thorny politics of policing by avoiding the pretense of realism altogether. These stories dont usually take place on Earth and if they do, its an Earth with so many fantasy elements that it hardly resembles our own. The heroes in these stories share more with pulp adventurers and ancient mythological figures than they do with vigilantes. Some of them are straight-up gods, like a certain blonde Asgardian who isnt ashamed to brag about it. The conflicts of these stories arent inspired by the news. Instead, they reach into fantasy conventions like prophecies, dynastic struggles, mortality vs. immortality, opposing armies at war, apocalypse, and other topics that lie way out of the average police departments jurisdiction.

The hazard with mythic superhero stories is that some lean on the genres escapism as an excuse to not examine its deeper implications. A clear example of a mythic superhero story that updates the genres conventions for the modern day is Taika Waititis Thor: Ragnarok. That film flourishes in fantastical settings and tropes without giving an easy pass to monarchies and colonialism.

Any story with an increasing number of superpowered individuals naturally trends toward mythic status, as the Marvel Cinematic Universe and its Infinity Saga both show. For interconnected cinematic universes, this is a virtuous cycle: Crossovers encourage mythic stories, and mythic stories can provide a buffer from the politicized contexts which might alienate global audiences.

Comic books have been engaging in mythic storytelling since the inception of the superhero genre, but much of our modern cosmic superheroes a debt to Jack Kirby. Kirby was the architect for the space operas of both the Marvel and DC universes, and one of his characters, Mister Miracle, recently had a mythic yet achingly human miniseries by Tom King and Mitch Gerads. Its a run that reminds us why we create and look up to mythical figures: As humans, were always at war with our own selves, so we use larger-than-life characters to play out the emotional conflicts we couldnt contain otherwise. But the biggest reminder of Mister Miracle is that the battles within us can be just as big as any apocalyptic conflict.

Film and TV examples: Watchmen (HBO), Marvels Jessica Jones, Super, Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice

Comic-book examples: Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons Watchmen, N.K. Jemisin and Jamal Campbells The Far Sector, Robert Moraless Truth: Red, White & Black

The moral absolutism of police procedurals is part of what makes them so easy to digest. Thats true of all propaganda. Alan Moore once called D.W. Griffiths Ku Klux Klan-romanticizing epic Birth of a Nation the first American superhero movie. That films self-righteous portrayal of its masked vigilante heroes (read: hooded Klansmen) is decried for its open, enthusiastic racism today, but its very self-righteousness is what made it powerful enough for audiences to follow in the films footsteps and revive the Ku Klux Klan.

The usual absolutism of superhero stories can be circumvented if the creators and audience are willing to tolerate grey areas. Stories with complex moral frameworks have a defense against propagandistic themes, pro-police or otherwise, slipping in undetected.

Moore has often exorcised his suspicion of superheroics in his work. Thats why Watchmens questions about power and accountability remain potent 30 years later. The HBO series continued Watchmens complex moral tradition in several ways, including by depicting American law enforcements white-supremacist history, and dramatizing the trauma and deep-seated resentment which motivates even the most just vigilantes.

Most recently in comics, N.K. Jemisin and Jamal Campbells The Far Sector has been exploring what it means to be a Black cop through the context of an interstellar murder investigation. Green Lantern Jo Mullein struggles between doing whats right and stepping over her bounds while trying to keep the peace on the incredibly alien City Enduring.

Both Watchmen and The Far Sector are successful because they use complex worlds to make people reflect critically on their lived-in surroundings. This should always be the main impetus behind telling a morally ambiguous superhero story; without a sociopolitical backdrop, these stories risk becoming needlessly nihilistic (like Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice) or silly (like Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice).

Film and TV examples: Logan, Black Panther, Birds of Prey

Comic-book examples: Action Comics by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, Captain America by Ta-Nehisi Coates, Ironheart by Eve Ewing, Miles Morales: Spider-Man by Saladin Ahmed

Everyone has heard a variation on the joke that Bruce Wayne could do a lot more for Gotham if he put his billions toward social programs instead of fancy gadgets for breaking muggers arms. But imagine if superhero films took this kind of observation to heart.

Superhero stories can get so carried away with crime-fighting that they forget what real-world heroism actually looks like. (It rarely resembles comics supervillain battles or wars on organized crime.) Some stories have avoided this trap by presenting heroes whose work centers around community-building, problem-solving, activism, and progress rather than policing and stasis.

In Eve Ewings current Ironheart run, Riri Williams is an armored avenger who avoids interring the poor, young gangbangers of Chicago in the needlessly cruel criminal justice system when she can help it, and who also opens up her headquarters, turning it into an after-school community center.

A different side of this can be seen in the latest Captain America run, written by Ta-Nehisi Coates. When Captain America: The Winter Soldier was released in 2014, the film was criticized for soft-pedaling its socio-political commentary by blaming Americas moral decline on a fictional terrorist organization. Coates pulls no punches by pitting Steve Rogers against an American populace and government thats genuinely embracing Hydras ideology.

In comics, Cap has a long history of protesting real-world political developments. And comic-book writers have an even longer history of writing heroes as agitators. Action Comics #1 features The Man of Steel challenging corrupt lobbyists and thwarting an unjust death sentence.

Progressive superhero narratives are much more common in comics than they are in film and TV, because the massive corporations which control these IPs arent trying to support any revolutions. (After Action Comics became a hit, Siegel and Shuster were forced to tone down Supermans social crusading.) In spite of corporate reluctance, though, a groundswell of demand is making studios cater toward audiences who have been demanding social relevance over pure fantasy. Logan offers a dystopia to fight back against. Black Panther mostly works as a paean to Black liberation. And then theres Cathy Yans Birds of Prey, a work with punk sensibilities that amplify its feminist themes.

Film and TV examples: Doctor Strange, Megamind

Comic-book examples: She-Hulk by Charles Soule and Javier Pulido, The Vision by Tom King and Gabriel Hernandez Walta, Unbeatable Squirrel Girl by Ryan North and Erica Henderson

Superhero stories cant unwittingly justify police violence if they dont center violence at all. And, if they implicitly make the case that violence isnt the answer, and they also add more variety to the genre.

Its natural to assume that where there are superheroes, there are antagonists getting punched. But this isnt always the case. As cathartic as action-packed splash pages can be, there are a variety of stories which have had no trouble staying compelling even though theyve passed on the typical action.

Charles Soule and Javier Pulido made a legal satire out of She-Hulk. Tom King and Gabriel Hernandez Waltas The Vision is a haunting family drama. Readers of Sandman, Swamp Thing, and Shade, the Changing Man wont forget their metaphysical ruminations. The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl is funnier than any of the studio comedies released last decade.

It isnt realistic to expect Hollywood to start turning out non-action-centric tentpoles, but if theres one lesson to take away from Joker, its that audiences are ready for the occasional cape film that doesnt end with a fistfight. Doctor Stranges non-combat resolution was so refreshing that people didnt care that the rest of the movie was magic Iron Man.

These four approaches shouldnt be interpreted as mutually exclusive. Some of the listed stories take multiple approaches. And these tactics also shouldnt be taken as foolproof against pro-police messaging. The surest way to dismantle police propaganda is by platforming creators from the communities most affected by police brutality.

In her essay on police abolition, Mariame Kaba wrote, As a society, we have been so indoctrinated with the idea that we solve problems by policing and caging people that many cannot imagine anything other than prisons and the police as solutions to violence and harm. Superhero media has participated in this indoctrination, but hopefully by now, the superhero fan and creator communities have bigger imaginations. A little bigger than a Batman spin-off about the Gotham City PD.

Read more from the original source:

5 ways to fix the police problem in superhero movies and comics - Polygon

Connections between Black communities in Seattle and Vancouver, BC include the family of Jimi Hendrix; his maternal grandparents, Ross and Nora Hendrix, lived in Vancouver, BC, and his father Al was born there. (Public Domain)

A neighborhood in downtown Vancouver, B.C. was wiped off the map more than 50 years ago for a freeway project, but a group there is working to keep its legacy alive and to help rebuild a new community in its place.

And part of that community legacy has a deep connection to one of Seattles most famous residents.

Seattle and Vancouver, B.C. are similar cities in many ways. Both have struggled to manage growth and address problems of homelessness, as well as long histories of systemic racism.

In Seattle, redlining and other practices restricted where people of color could rent or buy homes, creating a large de facto Black neighborhood in the Central Area. The same was true in Vancouver, where the Black population was proportionately smaller than Seattle generally comprising about 1%.

Members of Vancouvers Black community lived almost exclusively in a place called Hogans Alley, a several square block area in the Strathcona section of the city. Unlike Seattles Central Area, Hogans Alley was demolished around 1970 to make way for two elevated roadways known as the Georgia and Dunsmuir viaducts.

Those viaducts, which were part of a freeway project that was never fully completed, are now slated to be torn down.

In the past few years, there has been a lot of community interest about what will go in their place once the viaducts are gone. In June, Black Lives Matter demonstrators blocked traffic on the viaducts to call attention to the fate of the long-ago residents of Hogans Alley and to Vancouvers somewhat hidden Black history.

Stephanie Allen is a founding board member and current board member of a community organization called the Hogans Alley Society.

Were a not-for-profit organization that was formed in response to a real need to look at redressing the displacement of a Black community that happened in Vancouver, Allen said. And we kind of came together at a time when the City of Vancouver was looking at redeveloping an area of downtown, and a big component of that redevelopment is the removal of a bit of a segment of highway called the Georgia and Dunsmuir viaducts.

A half-century ago, those viaducts were built right over what used to be a several-block long neighborhood called Hogans Alley, scattering residences and businesses to the wind.

The Georgia and Dunsmuir viaducts were built during urban renewal, which we know happened across a lot of North American cities and that had devastating impacts on a lot of racialized and Black communities, as it did here in Vancouver, Allen said.

Allen says Vancouvers Black community grew in Hogans Alley more than a hundred years ago because it was near the railroad terminus the current Vancouver railroad station is just a few blocks away. For many Black people in Canada and the United States, working for the railroad was one of the only well-paying jobs available.

Allens description of racism in Canada echoes much of the American Pacific Northwest, but it has its own specific realities.

The first-hand accounts are very similar, Allen said, of descriptions of racism in Canada in the not-too-distant past. People wouldnt call you the n-word outright to your face, but they wouldnt allow you to live in their neighborhoods or they wouldnt rent places to you. Theres a Canadian anti-Black racism that doesnt really show up in the in the legal structures and the formality of it like weve seen in the Southern states, but it is in this empowerment exclusion from aspects of the formal society, and in an unwillingness to accept that there are these kinds of racial inequalities that show up in Canada.

Its a color-blindness that Canadians use, she continued. We absolutely use our veneer of politeness to hide some of the more structural and systemic racism that really has its most violent impacts on Indigenous and Black communities.

Part of that racism fueled urban renewal efforts that targeted voiceless communities, such as where Black and Indigenous people lived. And because the destruction was so complete, its almost as if when the neighborhood disappeared, the history of Hogans Alley pretty much disappeared, too. Other than a handful of books and countless personal memories, that history was practically invisible for most of the past 50 years.

Part of the reason why the disappearance could seem so complete is the numbers.

Stephanie Allen says while Seattle and Vancouver have similarities, the Black community in Vancouver has always been smaller, likely because of a Canadian law that was passed in 1911.

Our then-prime minister, who was Wilfrid Laurier, his cabinet passed an order to ban Black migrants from coming to Canada, Allen said. And while it was overturned not long after, there was a very institutionalized immigration policy in Canada that kept Black migration from coming here. It was very intentional.

So I think what happened, too, is that that stunted the growth of the community as well, she added.

Though the Black community was small, theres at least one deep connection between Hogans Alley and Seattle, and thats the family of legendary guitarist and rock legend Jimi Hendrix.

Jimis father Al was born in Vancouver, and came to Seattle in 1940 to find work. Seattle Washington Hall, specifically, at a Fats Waller concert is also where Al Hendrix met Lucille Jeter, who would later become Jimis mom.

But when it comes to Vancouver, BC, Jimi isnt the only star of the Hendrix family.

Stephanie Allen says that the mother of Al Hendrix Jimis grandma Nora Hendrix was a community leader in Vancouver in her own right. She was born in Tennessee in 1883, and arrived in Vancouver in 1911 before the exclusion law was passed after spending time in Chicago and then traveling Seattle.

In Seattle, Nora and her husband Ross were performers at the 1909 Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, the worlds fair held on the University of Washington campus.

Nora Hendrix is featured in a 1977 oral history collection called Opening Doors in Vancouvers East Endin which she describes her life in Hogans Alley.

Allen says that Nora Hendrix worked at several of the iconic restaurants in the neighborhood most of which were owned and operated by Black women and shes considered a founder of the AME Fountain Chapel Church, the first Black church in Vancouver and an important community gathering place. Nora Hendrix was on the board of directors of the church; in this capacity, she helped recruit preachers, and she was a member of the church choir her entire life.

Stephanie Allen says that Nora Hendrix was such a pillar of the community, Hogans Alley Society and another Vancouver non-profit named a 52-unit supported housing complexafter her.

Its been a real heartwarming story that even though she had this really famous grandson who did come here and spend some time with his grandmother, she really is our hero here in Vancouver because of what a significant member and contributor to the community that she was, Allen said.

And that famous grandson Jimi Hendrix helped put his hometown of Seattle on the map decades ago.

Seattle-based writer and historian Charles R. Cross, author of the landmark Hendrix biography Roomful of Mirrors, says that though he doesnt think it should be over-emphasized, Jimi did have a special connection to Vancouver, B.C.

And a lot of that was because of Nora Hendrix who coined Jimis family nickname of Buster, by the way.

He ended up going to Vancouver and staying with his grandmother in 1962, Cross said. That says a lot about the adult Jimi Hendrix, that he would pick his grandmother over [spending time with] his dad [in Seattle].

Jimi ended up in a band in Vancouver for a while called Bobby Taylor and the Vancouvers talk about a hometown sounding name, Cross said. Jimi was the rhythm guitar player, so he wasnt the lead guitar player of that band. The lead guitar player Jeopardy question one day, maybe was Tommy Chong of the later stoner duo Cheech & Chong.

Charles R. Cross says that it was a car trip by Jimi and his family from Seattle to Vancouver in 1968 when Jimi was at the height of his fame and had skipped riding the band bus to head to a performance at the Pacific Coliseum that led to a troubling racist episode in Skagit County.

He stops with the family in Mount Vernon, of all places, at essentially a Dennys, and theyre going to eat lunch and they were not served, Cross said. I mean, it almost makes me want to cry, frankly, to tell you that story, because Seattle presents itself in many ways as if its a more progressive place.

The idea that at that point in 1968, that any restaurant in Washington state would not serve a family because they were Black just makes me sick to my stomach, Cross said.

Charles says that eventually a kid in the restaurant recognized the famous musician and asked Jimi for an autograph. Finally, Cross says, the staff grudgingly gave the Hendrix family menus.

If Jimi felt more welcome in Vancouver, perhaps it was because of how he had been treated in his hometown.

We essentially ran Jimi Hendrix out of town because he was Black, so he had mixed feelings about Seattle, says Charles R. Cross, pointing to dubious arrests of Hendrix that led him to leave town by choosing to join the Army rather than go to jail.

He was proud to have been from here, Cross said. But there was a part of Seattle at that point that [because of] his race still put many barriers up to what life was. It didnt put barriers up to who Jimi was as a creative person, but it put barriers up to how he could sustain himself and survive as a human being with dignity in a world where a Dennys in Mount Vernon is not going to serve him.

In Vancouver, Stephanie Allen and her group want to do more than just share the history of Hogans Alley they want to restore the community, and get more units of affordable housing built where Hogans Alley once stood.

As they continue to work to restore the legacy of that lost neighborhood, the Canadian federal government has been supportive, but the City of Vancouver has not been as forthcoming as yet.

They havent shared any updates with us lately, so were not clear when the actual highway structures will eventually fall, Allen said. Were just hopeful that they would work with us in negotiating through all the preambling parts of this and setting the terms and conditions, so that when those highway structures do fall and when this redevelopment can take place that were well positioned to move it forward.

And while the Hogans Alley Society works to put that long-ago neighborhood back on the map, future historians might note that it was a grandmother and grandson who helped put their respective communities there on those maps in the first place.

Editors note: Special thanks to Ralph Bevins for research assistance with this story.

You can hear Feliks every Wednesday and Friday morning on Seattles Morning News and read more from himhere. If you have a story idea, please email Felikshere.

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