During this past Fourth of July weekend many people were posting on social media that the Fourth of July should not be celebrated because slavery was practiced when the Declaration of Independence was written. To further support their assertion, they used an excerpt of Frederick Douglass keynote address at an Independence Day celebration in Rochester, New York on July 5, 1852 that asked, "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?"

Learning about history and understanding it in the context of time is so very important. When I read Frederick Douglass whole speech, instead of just the small section that was posted, I had a very different perspective. I personally feel the strongest section of that speech is at the conclusion:

Allow me to say, in conclusion, notwithstanding the dark picture I have this day presented, of the state of the nation, I do not despair of this country. There are forces in operation which must inevitably work the downfall of slaveryI, therefore, leave off where I began, with hope. While drawing encouragement from "the Declaration of Independence," the great principles it contains, and the genius of American Institutions, my spirit is also cheered by the obvious tendencies of the age

The obvious tendencies of the age he refers to were referencing a greater ease of communication. Certainly, if Douglass, a fugitive slave in the 1800s could hold much hope and encouragement from the Declaration of Independence, so we can, too, have encouragement. Constructive communication and finding common ground can heal the racial tensions we are experiencing today. We have a lot to learn from Frederick Douglass. Americans of every background can celebrate the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the document that started this country but also laid the groundwork for the abolition of slavery.

You can read his entire speech here: masshumanities.org/files/programs/douglass/speech_complete.pdf

Patricia Crocker

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Frederick Douglas saw hope in the Declaration of Independence - St. Albans Messenger

We have the power to forge a righteous future for our country and recent events have made that clear. Police forces are being defunded in Los Angeles, New York City and Minneapolis. Additionally, local officials plan to eventually dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department entirely; even Congress is taking action to reform the police nationally. These steps toward justice for the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and so many others are small victories in the larger, ongoing battle for a more impartial justice system. However, that fight encompasses more than police brutality and if we desire sustainable change, we must grow more knowledgeable and organized, keep up the pressure on our elected officials and educate those ignorant of the flaws prevalent in our justice system.

For decades, the United States has claimed to be the Capital of the Free World. The fact remains, however, that the U.S. holds almost 5% of the worlds population, yet about 20% of the worlds prison population. This is unacceptable. Since 1970, the U.S. prison population has risen by nearly 700%. This is unacceptable. Tough on crime campaigns and prison building programs encouraged by federal subsidies have supplemented the prison crowding epidemic. This overcrowding is an economic burden. This is unacceptable. Racial disparities at every level of the U.S. justice system have promoted an environment in which Black people have become the targets of civil and literal extermination. The word unacceptable is beyond inadequate; it could never adequately describe the 243-year affliction that is institutionalized racism in the U.S.

A just criminal justice system is one of the most important tools available to any society. To qualify as just, such an institution must demonstrate impartiality toward all racial and socioeconomic groups while balancing punishment and rehabilitation. To this end, a just system should have a series of measures that combat racism, classism and recidivism (the tendency of ex-convicts to reoffend), all of which fuel mass incarceration in the U.S. The current justice system punishes those with criminal records long after they have paid their debts to society this approach is counterproductive by both moral and economic standards.

Ex-convicts face discriminatory practices inherently enabled by our current justice system. Popular belief is that after an individual commits a crime and does their time, the punishment is over, but the reality is much harsher. According to Katheryn Russell-Brown and Angela J. Davis Criminal Law, former convicts are rendered ineligible for welfare, student loans, public housing, and food stamps. In 21 states, formerly incarcerated individuals lose their right to vote. These restrictions constitute lifelong barriers to rehabilitation and cause most people to end up back behind bars. In 2005, 68% of state prisoners released were arrested again within the next three years, 83% within nine years.

Black and Hispanic people disproportionately suffer from this cruel reality. A 2020 study of traffic stops between 2011 and 2018 found that Black and Hispanic drivers were, on average, much more likely to be pulled over during traffic stops than white people. Further, those drivers were more likely to be searched after being pulled over. This correlation suggests racial profiling plays a significant role in our justice system. The victims of profiling are more likely to be arrested, sent to jail or prison, and are subsequently forced into a vicious cycle of recidivism. However, this disproportionality is much more than a statistical quirk. As more Black and Hispanic individuals are incarcerated, fewer are able to vote. If we are not able to vote, our children will be less likely to vote as well. Racist criminal justice policies threaten to destroy Black and Hispanic communities in the present and ensure they remain politically weak in the future.

The scope of judicial inequality explains why there are so many solutions being proposed to secure a more impartial justice system. We must demand the prioritization of convict rehabilitation. Doing so could redefine our prison systems mission by helping ex-convicts avoid reincarceration through safe, truly voluntary in-prison jobs, skill training, educational programs and parole reform, among other strategies. We should also work to strengthen the existing social safety net for ex-convicts. The justice system should work alongside different agencies to ensure former criminals are able to receive an education, find a place to live and a job to receive legal income. The recent buzzwords, police abolition, have been popularized by Campaign Zeros #8CantWait project. It entails the defunding and abolition of police departments. Following the steps outlined by #8CantWait, we could implement a system like community policing, in which officers are recruited from and specially trained to work within communities to develop compassionate relations with inhabitants and the area.

After their release from prison, many ex-convicts endure a cycle of poverty and discrimination that, all too often, enables their eventual reincarceration. Structural flaws in our justice system have allowed racism and classism the would-be ghosts of Americas depraved past to haunt our countrys modern pursuit for social justice and equality. Our goal as a nation should be to help end systemic racial injustices and assist victims of the prejudicial justice system. We must pressure our elected officials and demand they assist us in changing our justice system. Reforms proposed to combat police violence are receiving attention, but we cannot stop there. Prison reform still demands our attention. Members of our communities are still in need of our help to end their prolonged victimization at the hands of the current justice system. The definition of justice is dictated by the people. It is time we step up to the challenge of doing so.

Peter Nicholas Cooke (23C) is from Atlanta, Georgia.

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Unlocking the Bars on Life: Understanding Criminal Justice Reform - The Emory Wheel

Daveed Diggs portrays Thomas Jefferson in a filmed version of the original Broadway production of Hamilton. (Disney Plus via AP)

By Tyler Sperrazza / The Washington Post

Americans rush to watch Hamilton on Disney Plus has reignited conversations about the award-winning musical during a time of racial reckoning for the United States. While early criticism of the play in 2016 focused on its glorification of the Founders and the institutions they championed, the focus has now shifted to the shows erasure of slavery, the politics of Lin Manuel Miranda and the creative teams silence in the wake of George Floyds killing, which Miranda apologized for in a video on May 30.

But while it is easy to attack a single 2-hour musical for not solving racism (much in the way many blame Barack Obama for not solving racism) the show was groundbreaking when it first launched in a moment eerily similar to now. The show debuted at the Public Theater five months after the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., amid a national uprising spurred by the Black Lives Matter movement. And now, the films premiere on Disney Plus in the context of the protests spurred by the police killing of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd and others reminds us that it is critical and perhaps even the perfect show for this moment.

Why? Because Hamilton rests on the long tradition of black and brown theater makers using their craft to subvert white Americas dominant narratives. Since the Reconstruction Era, black theater has offered a space to present a counter-perspective of American nationalism; the perspective that centers on black voices and black experiences.

Theater has long been a venue for creating meaning from the nations history, and often its most violent eras. In Hamilton, Miranda forces his audience to confront the fundamental paradox of the American Revolution: How could a war fought for freedom also uphold slavery? But the script rarely asks that question. Instead, the presence of black men and women embodying the founding generation demands an answer every time they step onstage. Mirandas project follows a long line of black playwrights and theater makers who have interpreted and reinterpreted Americas wars onstage since the Reconstruction Era.

In the wake of the Civil War, over 180,000 black men who had served in the United States Colored Troops arrived home looking for ways to commemorate their time served and to memorialize the war as a war to end slavery. Many formed veterans organizations under the umbrella of the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR), the largest and most politically powerful Union veterans organization in the nation.

The white membership of the GAR almost universally adopted the dominant narrative being peddled to ascribe meaning to the Civil War: It was fought to preserve the Union; the abolition of slavery was merely a fortunate by-product of the nations reunification. Like the majority of white Americans, these veterans also believed that Reconstruction was about this reconciliation, not addressing racial inequality. To that end, white GAR members commissioned and wrote dozens of melodramatic plays that pushed the narrative of a war fought to preserve the Union.

Black veterans within GAR, however, balked at this interpretation of the war, and some used theater to challenge it. In 1871, the racially integrated Sedgwick Post of the GAR in Norwich, Conn., commissioned The Volunteer, which incorporated a sharp critique of any narrative that dismissed slaverys role in the war. The play explicitly mentioned the greater sacrifices made by black soldiers because of their inhumane treatment at the hands of Confederate armies.

Another integrated post in Springfield, Mass., performed The Post of Honor, which centered on a black soldier heroically fighting to end slavery. Newspapers reported large crowds at these integrated performances, reflecting the desire of black Americans to centralize black stories in public interpretations of the war.

In the wake of Reconstruction and through the turn of the 20th century, when Jim Crow segregation and white supremacist violence were sweeping the nation, multiple black playwrights used the stage to center black families experiences with lynching. Koritha Mitchells book, Living With Lynching, asserted that black communities used art to sustain conceptions of themselves as modern citizens in a nation that allowed their execution at the hands of white lynch mobs.

These lynching dramas countered the way in which lynch mobs openly celebrated the murders of black Americans. They demanded that attention be paid to the plight of black citizens at a time when governments, especially in the South, had codified segregation and endorsed African Americans deaths at the hands of white mobs. While these lynching dramas were not necessarily widely performed, the scripts themselves reflected what Mitchell refers to as self-conscious efforts to build community.

Black dreams for citizenship and equality were at the core of the scripts. Lynching plays focused on the experiences of black American families as a direct counter to the dominant narrative found in minstrel shows, vaudeville and mainstream melodrama that portrayed African Americans as violent animals or ignorant buffoons.

Black theater was critical to campaigns for racial equality long before the modern civil rights movement of the 1950s. W.E.B. Du Boiss pageant, The Star of Ethiopia, portrayed by a cast of more than 300 black performers, asserted the importance of black Americans to the founding of the United States. The pageant premiered in New York in 1913 as part of the National Emancipation Exposition commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation.

In his 1916 essay, The Drama Among Black Folk, Du Bois explained the significance of subverting the dominant historical narrative, claiming that pageants like The Star of Ethiopia presented black Americans with the meaning of their history and their rich emotional life while simultaneously revealing black Americans to the white world as a human, feeling thing. Like the lynching dramas and plays for black veterans, Du Boiss black theater humanized African Americans in ways that the dominant white narrative never could. It allowed black voices to tell black stories, and insert themselves into the nations whitewashed history.

This is why Hamilton and the legacies it builds upon are vital to our current moment. Sure, it does not offer a perfect history. But it is musical entertainment, not a piece of historical scholarship. Yet, what it does offer is a continued legacy of black and brown theater makers using the stage to deal with the historical contradictions of our nations founding. By putting black bodies into the roles of the founding generation, Hamilton forces white audiences to sit and consume a reinterpretation of our national mythology, which for too long has only celebrated the work of white men.

As the country debates how history is portrayed through monuments and statues, the reintroduction of Hamilton streaming into our living rooms reminds us of how artists of color can use a tradition deeply rooted in the history of African American theater to reshape the dominant national narrative. Black theater has long offered a master class in anti-racist pedagogy and practice, and now, thanks to the Hamilton film, hundreds of thousands of Americans are paying attention.

Tyler Sperrazza researches black theater history and civil rights in the postbellum, pre-Harlem era.

Gallery

Chris Jackson portrays George Washington (left) and Lin-Manuel Miranda portrays Alexander Hamilton in a filmed version of the original Broadway production of Hamilton. (Disney Plus via AP)

From left, Daveed Diggs, Okieriete Onaodowan, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Leslie Odom Jr. and Anthony Ramos appear in a filmed version of the original Broadway production of Hamilton. (Disney Plus via AP)

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Viewpoints: 'Hamilton' is actually perfect for this moment - The Daily Herald

If you look skyward on the fourth of July in the United States, you can usually expect to see fireworks burst forth above towns and cities as people celebrate Independence Day.

This year, in the sunny skies above the land of the free, the loaded question of independence for whom, and on whose terms? was brought into clear focus by sky-typing planes that wrote messages including CARE NOT CAGES, ABOLISH ICE and ESTOY AQUI (Im here) above detention facilities, immigration courts, borders, and historically significant sites in dozens of cities across the US.

The messages were part of In Plain Sight, an artwork by a coalition of 80 artists and activists. Over the course of a number of weeks, these messages will be delivered to the sky by two fleets of five planes. Founded by the interdisciplinary artists Cassils and rafa esparza, In Plain Sight is as ambitious in its scale as it is in its intention: working towards the abolition of immigrant detention and the US culture of incarceration.

I was shocked to learn that there are over 50,000 people in detention at any given moment, and that this is a for-profit industry, says Cassils, who is Canadian but lives in Los Angeles.

This is a humanitarian crisis. And its hiding in plain sight, thus the title. The idea is to really use the skywriting as a way of piercing through electoral politics, to focus on the fact that this is not a partisan issue.

Theres poetry to the skyward messages of In Plain Sight. It is literally visible, perhaps through windows of detention facilities, by the people whose liberation the action works towards. But it also recalls both the patriotic messages and red, white and blue smoke plumes that are daubed across the sky on 4 July.

Delivered by a method usually used to advertise car sales or insurance, In Plain Sight brings to mind the work of other artists who have harnessed the language of advertising, but does so in a uniquely 21st century fashion; its not just a shareable, photogenic action, but one that has an impact team led by the organiser, Set Hernandez Rongkilyo working to ensure the message lingers. In this way, the artists behind In Plain Sight hope to push the viewers experience of the artwork beyond contemplation and into direct action.

Oftentimes this speculative space that exists between an artwork and its reception by the viewer is filled with the hope that something generative is experienced by the viewer, esparza explains, saying the artists wanted to make something that can be of service to organisations that have been seeking justice for immigrant folks in detention for decades.

Sky-typing may appear, upon first glance, to be an ephemeral mode of performance (albeit one that can reach around 3 million people with each message), but the work will live on via the free Augmented Reality app 4th Wall: users will be able to see the messages floating in the sky above key locations they visit.

The hashtag #XMAP directs viewers to the accompanying website, xmap.us, allowing viewers intrigued by the heavenly messages to see, via geolocation, the detention facilities in their town. They will also be able to donate to local bond funds and engage with the 17 immigrant justice organisations involved such as ACLU Southern California, RAICES, and Freedom for Immigrants and their work being done on the ground.

The coalition of activists and artists involved is nearly as jaw dropping as the scale of the work, including former minister of culture for the Black Panther party, Emory Douglas, the Cree artist Kent Monkman, the conceptual artist Mary Kelly, the writer and performance artist ALOK Vaid-Menon and the revolutionary artist Dread Scott.

The Aboriginal Australian cross-disciplinary artist and writer SJ Norman contributed the message NO SUCH PLACE (the literal meaning of utopia), which appeared over the Laredo detention center in Texas. When Indigenous peoples speak the names of our nations we are frequently told, implicitly or explicitly, theres no such place, Norman said in the artists statement. The maintenance of the colonial project is contingent on atrocity and the perpetration of atrocity is largely contingent on denial. Settlers live with the ancestrally coded fear of losing what they know they stole in the first place.

Indeed, many Australians who shared the In Plain Sight images on social media were quick to note Australias significant rates of Aboriginal deaths in custody, incarceration and immigration detention such as the former Manus Island detainees now being held in Melbournes Mantra Hotel and how the inhumanity of such policies is magnified by the Covid-19 crisis.

The artists hope that as the messages fade from the sky, they will inspire in viewers a desire to bring about change. We knew it was ephemeral, but the quickness [with] which the wind erased the cloud really for me spoke to the moment were in currently, Cassils says. We have a brief moment of clarity with Covid, with uprisings, theres momentum thats building but we must act now, we must be relentless, we cannot give up.

The final fleets of planes will head to the skies in the coming weeks. Above the Statue of Liberty, where Emma Lazaruss inscribed sonnet Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free came to symbolise the hopefulness of immigration to the US, Dread Scotts message will float in the sky. It will read Carlos Ernesto Escobar Mejia, the name of the first immigrant to die in US detention from Covid-19.

In Plain Sight will continue in July, weather permitting. Visit xmap.us or follow @inplainsightmap on Instagram for updates

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In Plain Sight skywriting project targets US culture of incarceration: 'We have a brief moment of clarity' - The Guardian

Coun. Bill Karsten speaks during Tuesdays nuclear weapon debate.

It was meant to be a symbolic gesture a wish for peace but concerns over jurisdictional meddling kept some of Richard Zurawskis colleagues from fully supporting his call to abolish nuclear weapons.

Zurawski brought the four-part motion to councils meeting on Tuesday. It read in full:

That Halifax Regional Council:

This motion is a commemoration, a wish for peace, a wish for the abolition of nuclear weapons and a small act on our behalf to write a letter in support of those in the federal government who would support the abolition of nuclear weapons, Zurawski said.

Coun. Bill Karsten was the most vocal opponent of Zurawskis motion.

Its not about me being a warmonger or me thinking this is great to have nuclear weapons in the world, Karsten said.

What it is for me is so near and dear to my hear; its jurisdictional.

Karsten was worried about stepping on the toes of the federal government which has yet to sign or ratify the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, according to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons website.

We dont know the federal governments position, Karsten said. Why would a council in Halifax, Nova Scotia want to weigh in on something that in reality is the federal governments responsibility?

Coun. Stephen Adams had the same concern, and also worried that the third part, allowing the creation of removable chalk outlines on the Grand Parade, would encourage gathering during the pandemic.

I have an immense amount of respect for Councillor Zurawski and I understand why hes brought this forward, Adams said. I get that, but as Councillor Karsten said, its a bit outside what we should do and who knows what it will lead to.

Coun. David Hendsbee expressed concern that the motion might lead to Halifax declaring itself a nuclear-free zone meaning big U.S. Navy ships carrying nuclear weapons wouldnt be welcome in the harbour. He was assured that wouldnt be the case.

The first part of the motion passed with only Karsten voting no. The second part passed unanimously. The third part passed with only Adams voting no.

On the fourth part the letter councillors Steve Streatch, David Hendsbee, Lorelei Nicoll, Sam Austin, Richard Zurawski, Paul Russell, Tim Outhit and Mayor Mike Savage and Deputy Mayor Lisa Blackburn voted yes.

Councillors Bill Karsten, Tony Mancini, Russell Walker, Stephen Adams, and Matt Whitman voted no.

Tuesdays motion was reminiscent of another by Zurawski. In 2018, he sought his colleagues support for a motion opposing offshore oil drilling.

As the Halifax Examiner reported the next day:

Zurawski cited the release of the International Panel on Climate Changes most recent report last week, which underscored the need to cut greenhouse gas emissions pretty much immediately or face irreversible climate change and all the human horrors that will come along with it.

The reason for this motion is a message to the public that we must stop this we have a dire report saying the continued use of fossil fuels is bad said Zurawaski, and the offshore is the epitome of continued use of fossil fuels.

The motion was defeated on a 10-6 votes. The yes votes (in opposition to drilling) came from councillors ShawnCleary, Lisa Blackburn, Stephen Adams, Waye Mason, Lindell Smith, and Zurawski. Mayor Mike Savage is in China and so didnt vote. All others voted pro-drilling.

Understand this was a toothless motion. Had it passed, it would have had no force of law. Stephen McNeil and his government would have kept on with their plans to expand the offshore. The motion was merely symbolic, a statement of concern.

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Five Halifax councillors wouldn't support letter advocating abolition of nuclear weapons - Halifax Examiner

Debbie Kilroy is a long-term prison rights campaigner, particularly focused on protecting the rights of women and children. She helped establish Sisters Inside and is its CEO. She is a strong supporter of decarceration to end the use of prisons and other systems of social control in response to crime and social issues. Below is an abridged transcript of Kilroys presentation to an online Green Left forum on June 28 where she spoke alongside Gumbaynggirr Dunghutti Bundjalung woman Elizabeth Jarrett and Mervyn Eades, a Menang/Wilaman man from the Noongar nation.

* * *

First, the abolition of the prison industrial complex is our destination and decarceration is our journey. Its not something Im going to see in my life. But, right now, with a new movement on the streets there is a conversation around abolishing the prison industrial complex and decarceration strategies.

Its really important to imagine a world without prisons and police and punishment. The models we know of now are killing First Nations people, black and brown people. I hope you all demand we defund police and abolish prisons: its now a global movement.

In Australia, we must demand divestment from police and punishment and prisons. This must include every entity that uses carceral mechanisms. By this, I include corporations and non-government organisations that are funded with taxpayers money and use carceral mechanisms to control people that they are funded to support. They must be defunded.

We cannot continue to use carceral responses and think we are going to get something different than what we have today: the killings of First Nations people, black and brown people by police, prisons and other institutions. And, as Lizzie Jarrett said, the removal, the kidnapping of Aboriginal children is still a huge issue.

Until recently, society has not questioned whether policing and punishment and prisons should exist. Its only now, that a new generation of young people are thinking about the world and wanting a different one to this racial capitalist society.

Prisons have become part of the subconscious landscape in our mind. When we think of behaviour we dont like, we think of calling cops and engaging courts and prisons to respond. This must end.

We cant rely on the same structures to deal with cops within a system that doesnt deal justice to anybody. We have to come up with other models of public safety and security.

Its time. There are groups in our community that are working on these strategies. We know Aboriginal women will not go to the police for help around domestic and family violence because theyll be arrested. We know that black trans women wont call the police to deal with a violent interaction, whether its interpersonal or with the state, because they will also get violated and may be killed. Non-binary communities have other strategies to deal with the violence in their lives. We must start talking to these communities because theyre already doing it.

Women in prison today dont rely on screws to deal with the violence in the prison system. They know that they will be violated even further. We take it into our own hands.

To say that we need prisons because of certain people that are violent just means that the violence will continue, because prisons are violent. To end violence, we need ways to deal with people in a way thats respectful and dignified.

But, if someone is violating someone else, causing harm, how do we address that? It cant be with police and punishment and prisons. Weve got to stop thinking about punishment models. Weve got to start thinking outside the bars. My sister in the United States Angela Davis says: Its as if prisons were an inevitable part or fact of life, like death and birth. We cant rely on prisons to be part of our lives, like life and death. They do not give us life. They kill us and we know more so for Aboriginal people, Torres Strait Islander peoples and black and brown people around the world.

An important question today is about how to prevent the net widening? How do we prevent the further criminalisation and imprisonment of First Nations peoples and other disadvantaged peoples in our community here and around the world?

In Australia, were now having the conversation about defunding police and the abolition of prisons. We need to keep this conversation going. We cannot bolster the expansion of the prison industrial complex.

I dont support justice reinvestment, because I dont see any justice in the first instance. The reinvestment thats usually made in those type of models are Back to white academia, universities or researchers. The money is not given back to elders or to communities to distribute how they want.

Money saved in the government-funded justice reinvestment models is removed from the community and spent elsewhere. In New South Wales, a new 1700-cell prison, run by Serco, has just opened, something weve been fighting against for years. Justice reinvestment is only on the agenda because new prisons are opening their doors.

We must imagine and creatively explore new ideas of justice, new models of community safety and security. We can no longer rely on the racial, capitalist, punishment models and those institutions that it calls justice.

People call it the criminal justice system. I call it the criminal punishment system. That is the reality. There is no justice. Weve got to take justice back and develop the models ourselves.

We must continue to expose racial capitalism and its punishment institutions.

We must declare, now, a moratorium on building any more prison cells in whatever form. No more. Not even if the reform is to say, well, the children are cramped together or the prison is overcrowded. Well, release them!

During the coronavirus pandemic in Queensland, the watchhouse was not locking up women and more women were being released from prison; the numbers were coming down and more lawyers were taking action for women and girls and men.

The numbers came down because the watchhouse didnt want people coming in under arrest in case they had the virus. Instead, they would give them a notice to appear in court on a certain date. So the watchhouses were cleaned out. Sisters Inside was going into the biggest watchhouse in this state, where usually about 30 women or more were being held and processed in a week, and it went down to four or five.

Its only now that were seeing the restrictions ease that watchhouses have become active again.

We knew that the cops could do things differently. But now, because the watchhouse is open again, were seeing the numbers of people go up.

The time has come to push back on the cops.

Pam Palmater, my Indigenous activist sister from Canada said it so beautifully: we can and must stop taxpayers dollars yours and mine from continuing the oppression of First Nations peoples. The time has come to defund the police, take the resources from them. The time has come to move funding from those organisations, whether they are non-government organisations or corporations or companies, she said.

Funding must be removed from carceral mechanisms to control people, that carceral institutions are funded to support. Whether its housing, for example, and they want someone to move out, rather than call the cops and criminalise someone, they need to talk to the person to work out the issues.

The same goes for when they take a baby from mum, and mum's upset. They call the cops to come with the child protection workers to kidnap that Black baby. The baby is never returned home to its mother, its family and its community. This is the ongoing genocide happening to First Nations peoples in this country.

What Palmater says must happen for Canadian Aboriginal people is also what we must call for here: weve got to stop using taxpayers money to fund the oppression of First Nations peoples.

We must decarcerate and create a national plan about how are we going to do this together. We also need to stop criminalising people. Weve got to repeal the laws that criminalise people.

Ruthie Wilson Gilmore, an activist, academic and prison abolitionist in the US, says three words, twice. I want to end by saying them too, because I really believe this: Life is precious. Life is precious.

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Debbie Kilroy: Why we must abolish the prison system - Green Left Weekly

Attorney general Philip Yorke, of the 18th-century YorkeTalbot slavery opinion. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Aslave is a human being who is the property of someone else: a human being who can be owned, bought and sold just like other forms of property. Property rights, in turn, depend on being recognised and enforceable by a system of law.

Of course, a person can be kept captive by brute force and forced to work on pain of violence, and this too perhaps can be called slavery. But for slavery to be sustainable in any organised society, the complicity of laws and lawyers is required. A system of slavery needs to have laws and lawyers to make it work.

Slave owners and traders such as Edward Colston, whose statue was recently toppled in Bristol, were not on some frolic of their own. They were part of a wider enterprise in which many others in British society were complicit. They were practical businesspeople supported by specialist banks and insurers, supplied by expert chain and weapon makers, and advised by attorneys and barristers on how to avoid and minimise risk in their commerce in human flesh.

Few at the time thought any of this exceptional. Slaves were regarded as chattels or even as investment opportunities. Ownership of a slave in the faraway plantations was as normal then as, say, owning a timeshare in Spain would be now. Slave ownership was prevalent throughout society, and not just the preserve of a few wealthy merchants in Liverpool and Bristol.

There is a comforting national myth promoted by some commentators and politicians that slavery was not known to English law. Certain 18th-century cases are pointed to as deciding that slavery was always repugnant to the common law. But this is not correct: English law was quite at ease with slavery until its abolition across the Empire in 1834. This is demonstrated by the immense compensation arrangements that were required for the abolition to happen. If slavery was already unlawful, then what were the slave owners being compensated for losing?

The celebrated cases of the 1700s touched on what rights a slave owner could assert if their slave happened to be on British soil. The sordid practice was fine, as long as owners exercised their property rights from afar.

Other legal cases reveal how the horrors of slavery were normalised. In the Zong shipping case of 1784, the court heard how in order to protect a ship and its crew with depleted onboard supplies, slaves had been thrown overboard to drown. The commercial law issue for the court to rule on was whether the cargo owners could make a claim on the insurance policy. The judges took their decisions on a technical point of evidence, and nobody concerned in the case made any objection to slavery as a matter of principle. The insurer defendants certainly did not object, even if they disputed this case, as they were as much a part of the overall slavery system as the cargo owners who brought the case.

Any doubts that human beings could be property had much earlier been waived aside with a formal legal statement of 1729 by the two law officers of the Crownthe attorney general and solicitor general. The so-called Yorke-Talbot Opinion was, in substance, little more than an assertion that the practice was acceptable with no authorities cited. But with this endorsement by the British state, practical people saw no need to give the matter a second thought.

And once you know about how deep and wide slave ownership was before 1834, many familiar things become disconcerting. Fine Georgian squares, great public schools, handsome Oxbridge colleges and the Inns of Court: many of these things have hidden foundations at least in part in slave ownership. The social satires of Jane Austen are more sharply excruciating when you realise what many of the estates of her characters were ultimately based on.

Even after the abolition of 1834, British economic development depended in part on the slaves held elsewhere and then, later in the 19th and early 20th century, on the annexation of properties belonging to others, the very essence of imperialism. And at each step, lawyers and others were there to counsel those who were seeking to commercially exploit such misery.

No doubt many of those involved considered themselves then just as kind as we consider ourselves now. One could own, buy and sell slaves, and profit from their exertions, without ever encountering anyone actually enslaved, as they were far away in the Indies and out of mind as well as sight.

Understanding the complicity and connivance of law and lawyers (and of society generally) is essential to filling out the picture of the past. The archives show how central the miseries of slavery and imperialism were to our national history: the evidence is there in the detailed legal instruments, inventories and other business records that were needed to sustain them. There are shelves of volumes of ledgers of everyday bookkeeping and due diligence. They constitute our own version of the banality of evil, as Hannah Arendt described a later bureaucratic system ofmethodical horror.

The current focus on individual traders, like Colston, means that those who facilitated and enabled the trade, such as lawyers and other advisers, are out of sight. Systems make the difference. In more modern times, the police officer who abuses their power does so because he or she knows that they will probably get away with it: the system is rigged against anybody facing real accountability.

The wider legal system means that bad things can easily happen. Laws and due process are never neutral in their application, even if legal equality is the ideal.

Slaves could be thrown overboard just as a police officer can now kneel on a black mans neck, because the legal system will operate so as to protect those inflicting the harm. The system of law is better at protecting those abusing power more than those they are dealing with. Some lives, and livelihoods, matterand some do not.

See the article here:

Why lawyers were as culpable as any slaver - Prospect Magazine

It was trademark malpractice to remove the name Franklin Pierce which had become synonymous with excellence in IP in the first place. It would be negligent to rush to judgment, caught up in a whirlwind, and remove it a second time.

According to the Concord Monitor, the University of New Hampshire is being petitioned by several students to drop the name of Franklin Pierce from the law school. And although the decision will not rest with the faculty of the law school, sources tell IPWatchdog that 12 of the 25 full-time law school faculty support the petition.

With the movement that were currently in, it felt like an opportune time to take the name off there, Adrin Coss, a rising third-year law student at the law school who is involved with the petition told the Concord Monitor. Its wrong to begin with. This is racially insensitive.

Why is the name Franklin Pierce racially insensitive? In a nutshell, Pierce, who did not himself own any slaves and abhorred slavery, did not do enough to put an end to the practice of slavery during his turbulent one term as President of the United States.

I consider slavery a social and political evil, Pierce said, and most sincerely wish that it had no existence upon the face of the earth. See Franklin Pierce. Unfortunately for the legacy of Pierce, he saw as his primary responsibility the preservation of the Union, and made several compromises to keep the Union together, which ultimately failed and pleased no one. History teaches that Pierce did not live up to his own convictions because he did not think the Union could survive the abolition of slavery, see Id., a prophecy that unfortunately turned out to be true.

This story matters to me because I graduated from Franklin Pierce Law Center more than a generation ago. This matters to many within the intellectual property community in the United States and all across the world because Franklin Pierce Law Center, which was subsequently acquired by the University of New Hampshire, was one of the top intellectual property institutions in the world. A tradition carried on by Franklin Pierce Law School, the school has never been outside the top 10 rankings for intellectual property law schools since the rankings began. In the early years while I was walking the halls, FPLC enjoyed the status of the top school in the nation three years in a row. In recent years, the school has been again rising.

Once upon a time, many hundreds of international students would descend upon FPLC in Concord every summer to learn about intellectual property at the Intellectual Property Summer Institute (IPSI), which the school just relaunched this summer in virtual form due to COVID-19. Some 50 to 100 students from abroad would stay throughout the academic year. Indeed, a more diverse institution would be hard to find, with students from America, Asia, South America, Europe and Africa. That is what Franklin Pierce means to me and so many others. These international students would take turns each week sharing their stories, their culture and food from home with the school community. It was a most inclusive place.

Over time, Franklin Pierce Law Center and then the University of New Hampshire lost its focus on intellectual propertyand even lost the name Franklin Pierce for nine years, when it was acquired by UNH in 2010but somehow still managed to maintain a top 10 ranking. This lost focus caused many alums to distance from the school. With the recent hire of Dean Megan Carpenter, the school has become rededicated to intellectual property, has restored the name Franklin Pierce, and many alumni are cautiously reengaging with the school in hopes that the diverse law school that focused on intellectual property in New Hampshire named after the only President in the States history might regain its mojo.

And therein lies the issue. Robert Rines was the founder of Franklin Pierce Law Center. He was a patent attorney, Hall of Fame Inventor with more than 60 patents to his name, and a composer of both Broadway and off-Broadway productions. Rines chose the name Franklin Pierce precisely because he was the only President from the state of New Hampshire. Are we at the point in American history where institutions cannot be named after former Presidents? Perhaps we are. Princeton University made the decision to remove the name of Woodrow Wilson from its School of Public and International Affairs, a decision supported by some, and questioned by others as setting a bad example.

If we are going to judge who can have a school named after them based on the worst, most difficult or most complicated decisions the individual ever made, will we ever be able to name anything after anyone anymore?

When it comes to names, there is so much good will that attaches over time that has nothing to do with whether the name is, was or should be defined in totality by one, a few, or a series of decisions or actions devoid of consideration of the complete picture. When the University of New Hampshire removed Franklin Pierce from the name of the law school in the first instance, it severed ties with a past that had nothing to do with slavery, or racism, or even Franklin Pierce the individual. Instead, UNH severed ties with what Franklin Pierce had come to mean to those who attended a quirky and shockingly diverse institution that just happened to be named after the only President in the states history.

When UNH removed the name Franklin Pierce it severed itself from the memories many alums had of a genuinely good place, with genuinely good people who genuinely cared, and signaled it was something different. It lost the good will it had accumulated. Alumni openly and mockingly joked that they attended the school formerly known as Franklin Pierce, and student resumes made obvious notations to make sure employers knew that the University of New Hampshire was really the old Franklin Pierce Law Center. Why? Because the name Franklin Pierce had become synonymous with excellence in the field of intellectual property, wholly devoid of any association with the man who was President during the most difficult period of time in U.S. history.

It was trademark malpractice to remove the name Franklin Piercewhich had become synonymous with excellence in IP in the first place. It would be negligent to rush to judgment, caught up in a whirlwind, and remove it a second time in order to appease what appear to be a small group of petitioners that in the words of Mr. Coss admit their actions are purely opportunistic (i.e., it felt like an opportune time, he told the Concord Monitor).

In the heat of the moment it is impossible to reflect with the proper perspective. Franklin Pierces name was on the school for over 35 years, it was removed for a handful of years, and now it has been reinstated after great deliberation and much celebration by alums because it has always been synonymous with excellence in IP education.

As the U.S. Senate was created as a cooling saucer for the hot passions of the House of Representatives, greater perspective ought to be brought to bear and alumni consulted before another change is made. The reputation for excellence the school rightfully deserves was built by the hard work of alums all over the world. Shouldnt they be at least consulted?

Gene Quinn is a Patent Attorney and Editor and President & CEO ofIPWatchdog, Inc.. Gene founded IPWatchdog.com in 1999. Gene is also a principal lecturer in the PLI Patent Bar Review Course and Of Counsel to the law firm of Berenato & White, LLC. Genes specialty is in the area of strategic patent consulting, patent application drafting and patent prosecution. He consults with attorneys facing peculiar procedural issues at the Patent Office, advises investors and executives on patent law changes and pending litigation matters, and works with start-up businesses throughout the United States and around the world, primarily dealing with software and computer related innovations. Gene is admitted to practice law in New Hampshire, is a Registered Patent Attorney and is also admitted to practice before the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. CLICK HERE to send Gene a message.

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On Goodwill Versus History and the Potential Renaming of Franklin Pierce Law School - IPWatchdog.com