While celebrations for Emancipation Day may look different this year due to COVID-19, four Black Windsorites say the day is more significant in light of recent events most notably the death of George Floyd, which sparked worldwide Black Lives Matter protests.

Emancipation Day, celebrated each year on Aug. 1, commemorates the abolition of slavery across the British Empire.

The Slavery Abolition Act received royal assent on Aug. 28, 1833, but the legislation wouldn't come into force across the Empire and its colonies until Aug. 1, 1834.

Since then, communities across Canada, including in Windsor-Essex, hold events in honour of the abolition of slavery.

Fourth yearpsychology student at the University of WindsorFardovza Kusow,executive director of the Sandwich Teen Action Group John Elliott,law student Kendra Wilson at the University of Windsor and musician Abdullah Abubakre, also known as Ayola, told CBC News how this year's Emancipation Day takes on a whole new meaning and discussed their hopes for the future.

Kusow: Emancipation Day not only is an acknowledgement and a reminder of what we've accomplished so far, but also a reminder of what's left to be done. As a third generation Black Canadian, I grew up still experiencing anti-Black racism and racism in and of itself, but whenever I would face it head on, I would immediately be invalidated because this is Canada. We're not as bad as you know insert other country but it's important to acknowledge that there's still issues deep-rooted in Canada. And as much as we have a wonderful day, such as Emancipation Day, liberation cannot be fully accomplished without the acknowledgement and the accountability that need to be taken for issues that are still happening.

Elliott: When I was about 10 years old and I lived downtown at that time with my family, McDougall Avenue, which was in proximity to Jackson Park, where Emancipation was held, that was a highlight as a kid. That was a highlight event for the year. It was always summer vacation but 'can't wait until Emancipation Day came around.' At the time, I think this celebration ran for about a week and a half. So, it was an extended celebration, just great memories.

Wilson: I was born in Jamaica, and so this is something we have been celebrating since I was a little girl through cultural dances and poetry from icons such as Louis Bennett. As a child, the dark significance of that day did not register to me, but as I grew older, my mother taught me about Black history through books and films, and for the longest time, I felt a great sense of anger and disappointment for the way Black people had been treated. So as it stands, Emancipation Day is a sad reminder of the horrendous period in Canadian history and countries around the world about the lived reality that Black people faced in the past and presently face. I am grateful that we are no longer bounded in chains as Black people, but Emancipation Day is just a constant reminder for me that we have a long way to go. Emancipation is not just a physical act, it's also a state of mind, and with that being said, mental slavery is still a problem. Emancipation is still a problem because Black people are still restricted, targeted and treated unjustly.

Ayola: It's huge, right, because that's about the day we were set free Black slavery and all. ... but the same time, it's hurtful because seeing that we had to be set free for some things that shouldn't even [have existed]in the first place. ... It's freedom in a painful way.

Wilson: The last couple of months show that Emancipation means that we are free from the shackles, but we still have huge issues of supremacy affecting Black livelihood and wellbeing. It's a small view of the battles we have been fighting for the longest time. Windsor is one of the cities of significance that remind me of the realities we have been facing. Just a few steps away, we have the Sandwich First BaptistChurch, a significant stop along the Underground Railroad, where enslaved Black people aimed to escape from slavery. As I said, it's great that it's not still an active reality, but the last couple of months show us that the fight against inequality, discrimination and anti-Black racism is something Black people in Canada, and around the world, continue to face. We are not free until we are liberated from these restrictions among others.

Kusow: I've been pretty involved in educating myself on Black history and social justice since high school, but when you talk to others or even my own friends, some people still don't know when Canadian Emancipation Day is or when we talk about a holiday happening this weekend. People usually don't really know which holiday that is. Due to the current political environment and considering that we are in the largest civil rights movement in history, it allows people to take a step back and ask themselves, 'okay, what's going on where I live and how can I further educate myself on my own history, my own country's history and what's left to be done?'

Ayola: Yeah, it does because the George Floyd incident isn't the first of its kind. It's been happening for years and years, but I guess the attention that was paid to this one just made one realize that I think we are moving in the right direction. Normally, I just think 'oh it's just another [political movement]' and we forget about it and everything andgo back to normal over time. With the way things are playing out now, I just feel like it's a step in the right direction. ... People are becoming more passionate about it.

Elliott: All we can do is love each other. You know, foster good friendships. There is racial tension and that sort of thing going on, but we still have to live together. We have to work together. We have to try and get along. I'm thankful we live in Canada because in the backdrop of the U.S. where their problems seem to be rather enormous compared to Windsor's .. and in Canada itself. Although there is systemic racism problems in Canada too, we realize that, but I mean, at the end of the day, that's something that we're going to have to just continue to live with and do our best to try and eliminate it. My thing is just learn to get along.

Ayola: I definitely see racism becoming a thing of the past in my lifetime. Yeah, that's what I hope to happen. And I do feel like it's getting better because there's more integration now than there ever was. So people are coming from different parts of the world you know. Slavery aside, racism is sometimes also a fact of us stillgetting to know each other and not being able to integrate, but now that everyone is everywhere ... it breeds more integration. And more integration leads to more understanding. So, I definitely feel that in my lifetime, racism would be minimal.

Wilson: The list is endless to be honest. We have made a lot of progress, but we still have a lotof work ahead of us, huge emphasis on a lot. On a large scale, I seek a future society where access to justice issues facing Blacks do not start with large scale protest, but instead, where timely justice for Black victims is no issue at all. A society where Black women do not fear having children as a result of the risk of them dying at a young age or being killed at the hands of cops or people's general racist actions. A society where Black men, there are more of them in fortune 500 companies than in the prison system. Ultimately, a society where we don't have to fight for equality and equity, where justice for Black victims comes easy and the #BlackLivesMatter is not something we constantly have to scream at the top of our lungs just to be heard. This future starts with me and you actively working toward this. Starting now, championing the work of greats like Viola Desmond, Martin Luther King Jr, Rosemary Brown among other important individuals advocating for the human rights of Black people.

Kusow: I feel like I grew up in a generation of youth that is taking a stand and launching initiatives, taking on that leadership role to not only fix but approach the issue head on and work to build a better future for future generations after us because this has been going on for a little too long and it's clear that people are fed up and wish to see a change.

Kusow also urges people to educate themselves.

"Don't be ashamed to ask questions," she said. "There are always resources that you can turn to, people that you can turn to who will be grateful to educate you on what you're asking and it'll lead to a better mindset. And later on, you can tell someone else the same things that you learned."

CBC News learned via email that Richmond Hill Liberal MP Majid Jowhari'shas been working with Nova Scotia senator Wanda Thomas Bernardto introduce a motion to Parliament to nationally recognize Aug.1as Emancipation Day.

Themotion wasset to be presented to the house earlier this year, but was delayed due to COVID-19. Jowhari'soffices continue to advocate for the motion, according to the email, and will be presenting it again.

See more here:

Black Windsorites say Emancipation Day is more significant this year - CBC.ca

HONG KONG When Tian Feilong first arrived in Hong Kong as demands for free elections were on the rise, he said he felt sympathetic toward a society that seemed to reflect the liberal political ideas he had studied as a graduate student in Beijing.

Then, as the calls escalated into protests across Hong Kong in 2014, he increasingly embraced Chinese warnings that freedom could go too far, threatening national unity. He became an ardent critic of the demonstrations, and six years later he is a staunch defender of the sweeping national security law that China has imposed on the former British colony.

Mr. Tian has joined a tide of Chinese scholars who have turned against Western-inspired ideas that once flowed in Chinas universities, instead promoting the proudly authoritarian worldview ascendant under Xi Jinping, the Communist Party leader. This cadre of Chinese intellectuals serve as champions, even official advisers, defending and honing the partys hardening policies, including the rollout of the security law in Hong Kong.

Back when I was weak, I had to totally play by your rules. Now Im strong and have confidence, so why cant I lay down my own rules and values and ideas? Mr. Tian, 37, said in an interview, explaining the prevailing outlook in China. Witnessing the tumult as a visiting scholar in Hong Kong in 2014, Mr. Tian said, he rethought the relationship between individual freedom and state authority.

Hong Kong is, after all, Chinas Hong Kong, he said. Its up to the Communist Party to clean up this mess.

While Chinas Communist Party has long nurtured legions of academics to defend its agenda, these authoritarian thinkers stand out for their unabashed, often flashily erudite advocacy of one-party rule and assertive sovereignty, and their turn against the liberal ideas that many of them once embraced.

They portray themselves as fortifying China for an era of deepening ideological rivalry. They describe the United States as a dangerous, overreaching shambles, even more so in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. They oppose constitutional fetters on Communist Party control, arguing that Western-inspired ideas of the rule of law are a dangerous mirage that could hobble the party.

They argue that China must reclaim its status as a world power, even as a new kind of benign empire displacing the United States. They extol Mr. Xi as a historic leader, guiding China through a momentous transformation.

A number of these scholars, sometimes called statists, have worked on policy toward Hong Kong, the sole territory under Chinese rule that has been a stubborn enclave for pro-democracy defiance of Beijing. Their proposals have fed into Chinas increasingly uncompromising line, including the security law, which has swiftly curbed protests and political debate.

We ignore these voices at our own risk, said Timothy Cheek, a historian at the University of British Columbia who helps run Reading the China Dream, a website that translates works by Chinese thinkers. They give voice to a stream of Chinese political thought that is probably more influential than liberal thought.

As well as earnestly citing Mr. Xis speeches, these academics draw on ancient Chinese thinkers who counseled stern rulership, along with Western critics of liberal political traditions. Traditional Marxism is rarely cited; they are proponents of order, not revolution.

Many of them make respectful nods in their papers to Carl Schmitt, the German legal theorist who supplied rightist leaders in the 1930s and the emerging Nazi regime with arguments for extreme executive power in times of crisis, Ryan Mitchell, an assistant professor of law at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, documented in a recent paper.

Theyve provided the reasoning and justification, Fu Hualing, a professor of law at the University of Hong Kong, said of Chinas new authoritarian scholars. In a way, its the Carl Schmitt moment here.

Chinas ideological landscape was more varied a decade ago, when Mr. Tian was a graduate student at Peking University, a traditionally more liberal campus. Censorship was lighter, and universities tolerated guarded discussion of liberal ideas in classrooms.

Many scholars, including Mr. Tians dissertation adviser, Zhang Qianfan, argued that Hong Kong, with its robust judicial independence, could inspire similar steps in mainland China. I had also been nurtured by liberal scholars. Mr. Tian said.

Such ideas have gone into sharp retreat since Mr. Xi took power in 2012. He began a drive to discredit ideas like universal human rights, separation of powers and other liberal concepts.

Dissenting academics are maligned in the party-run news media and risk professional ruin. Xu Zhangrun, a law professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing, was detained in July and dismissed from his job after writing a stream of essays condemning the partys direction under Mr. Xi.

The education authorities generously fund pro-party scholars for topics such as how to introduce security laws in Hong Kong. Chinese and foreign foundations that once supported less orthodox Chinese scholars have retrenched because of tightening official restrictions.

More than fear and career rewards have driven this resurgence of authoritarian ideas in China. The global financial crisis of 2007, and the United States floundering response to the coronavirus pandemic, have reinforced Chinese views that liberal democracies are decaying, while China has prospered, defying predictions of the collapse of one-party rule.

China is actually also following a path that the United States took, seizing opportunities, developing outward, creating a new world, Mr. Tian said. There is even a fervent hope that well overtake the West in another 30 years.

Chinas authoritarian academics have proposed policies to assimilate ethnic minorities thoroughly. They have defended Mr. Xis abolition of a term limit on the presidency, opening the way for him to stay in power indefinitely. They have argued that Chinese-style rule by law is inseparable from rule by the Communist Party. And more recently they have served as intellectual warriors in Beijings efforts to subdue protest in Hong Kong.

For them, law becomes a weapon, but its law thats subordinated to politics, said Sebastian Veg, a professor at the School of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences in Paris who has studied the rise of Chinas statist thinkers. Weve seen that at work in China, and now it seems to me were seeing it come to Hong Kong.

For Hong Kong, these scholars have supplied arguments advancing Beijings drive for greater central control.

Under the legal framework that defined Hong Kongs semi-autonomy after its return to China in 1997, many in the territory assumed that it would mostly manage its own affairs for decades. Many believed that Hong Kong lawmakers and leaders would be left to develop national security legislation, which was required by that framework.

But Mr. Xis government has pushed back, demanding greater influence. The authoritarian scholars, familiar with both Mr. Xis agenda and Hong Kong law, have distilled those demands into elaborate legal arguments.

Several Beijing law professors earlier served as advisers to the Chinese governments office in Hong Kong, including Jiang Shigong and Chen Duanhong, both of Peking University. They declined to be interviewed.

I dont think theyre necessarily setting the party line, but theyre helping to shape it, finding clever ways to put into words and laws what the party is trying to do, said Mr. Mitchell, of the Chinese University of Hong Kong. This is all happening through legislation, so their ideas matter.

A Chinese government paper in 2014, which Professor Jiang is widely credited with helping write, asserted that Beijing had comprehensive jurisdiction over Hong Kong, dismissing the idea that China should stay hands off. The framework that defined Hong Kongs status was written in the 1980s, when China was still weak and under the sway of foreign liberal ideas, he later said.

They treat Hong Kong as if it were part of the West, and they treat the West as if it were the entire world. Professor Jiang recently said of Hong Kongs protesters. Chinas rise has not, as some imagined, drawn Hong Kong society to trust the central authorities.

After protesters occupied Hong Kong streets in 2014, he and other scholars pressed the case that China had the power to impose national security legislation there, rejecting the idea that such legislation should be left in the hands of the reluctant Hong Kong authorities.

The survival of the state comes first, and constitutional law must serve this fundamental objective, Professor Chen, the Peking University academic, wrote in 2018, citing Mr. Schmitt, the authoritarian German jurist, to make the case for a security law in Hong Kong.

When the state is in dire peril, Professor Chen wrote, leaders could set aside the usual constitutional norms, in particular provisions for civic rights, and take all necessary measures.

Professor Chen submitted an internal study to the partys policymakers on introducing security legislation for Hong Kong, according to a Peking University report in 2018, over a year before the party publicly announced plans for such a law.

Since Chinas legislature passed the security law in late June, he, Mr. Tian and allied Chinese scholars have energetically defended it in dozens of articles, interviews and news conferences. Chinese intellectuals, Mr. Tian suggested, will next confront worsening relations with the United States.

We have to choose what side were on, including us scholars, right? he said. Sorry, the goal now is not Westernization; its the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.

Amber Wang contributed research from Beijing.

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Clean Up This Mess: The Chinese Thinkers Behind Xis Hard Line - The New York Times

This piece, written by a historian and biographer of John James Audubon, is the first in a series of pieces on Audubon.org and in Audubon magazine that will reexamine the life and legacy of the organizations namesake as we chart a course toward racial equity.

John James Audubon was a man of many identities: artist, naturalist, woodsman, ladies man, storyteller, myth maker. A now-legendary painter who traveled North America in the early 19th century, in an epic quest to document all of the continents avian life, he is above all known as a champion of birds. Today we see that legacy preserved in the National Audubon Society, but also in the cities, streets, and even birds that bear his name.

Audubon was also a slaveholder, a point that many people dont know or, if they do, tend to ignore or excuse. He was a man of his time, so the argument goes. Thats never been a good argument, even about Audubons timeand certainly not in this onebecause many men and women in the antebellum era took a strong and outspoken stand for the abolition of slavery.

Audubon didnt. Instead, he dismissed the abolitionist movement on both sides of the Atlantic. In 1834, he wrote to his wife, Lucy Bakewell Audubon, that the British government had acted imprudently and too precipitously in emancipating enslaved people in its West Indian possessions. It was with remarkable understatement that one of Audubons earlier biographers wrote that Lucy and John Audubon took no stand against the institution of slavery.

They took a stand for slavery by choosing to own slaves. In the 18-teens, when the Audubons lived in Henderson, Kentucky, they had nine enslaved people working for them in their household, but by the end of the decade, when faced with financial difficulties, they had sold them. In early 1819, for instance, Audubon took two enslaved men with him down the Mississippi to New Orleans on a skiff, and when he got there, he put the boat and the men up for sale. The Audubons then acquired several more enslaved people during the 1820s, but again sold them in 1830, when they moved to England, where Audubon was overseeing the production of what he called his Great Work, The Birds of America, the massive, four-volume compendium of avian art that made him famous.

The Birds of America was a tremendous artistic and ornithological achievement, a product of personal passion and sacrifice. Audubon thought big from the beginning, making his work ambitious in its reach, with 435 engraved images of some 490 species, and impressive in its scale, with each bird depicted size of life. Audubons avian images can seem more real than reality itself, allowing the viewer to study each bird closer and longer than would ever be possible in the field. The visual impact proved stunning at the time, and it continues to be so today.

Although never fully acknowledged, people of colorAfrican Americans and Native Americanshad a part in making that massive project possible. Audubon occasionally relied on these local observers for assistance in collecting specimens, and he sometimes accepted their information about birds and incorporated it into his writings. But even though Audubon found Black and Indigenous people scientifically useful, he never accepted them as socially or racially equal. He took pains to distinguish himself from them. In writing about an expedition in Florida in December 1831, Audubon noted that he set out in a boat with six enslaved Black menhands, as he called themand three white men, his emphasis clearly underscoring the racial divide in the boat and his place on the white side of it.

Audubon also, through his writing, manipulated racial tensions to enhance his notoriety. The tale of The Runawayone of the Episodes about American life he inserted into his 3,000-page, five-volume Ornithological Biography, a companion to Birds of Americaspins the tale of an encounter with a Black man in a Louisiana swamp. Audubon, who had been hunting Wood Storks with his dog, Plato, had a gun, but so did the Black man; after a brief face-off both men put down their weapons. Even as he described the tension easing, Audubon had already hooked into the fears of his readers. Published three years after Nat Turners slave rebellion in 1831, The Runaway presented the most menacing image imaginable for many white peoplethe sudden specter of an armed Black man. Audubon knew how to get peoples attention.

He also knew how to put himself in the most favorable light. The man and his family had escaped slavery and were living in the swamp, and as the tale unfolds, Audubon spent the night at the familys encampmentcompanionably but also quite at their mercy. It was the fugitives, however, who were really most vulnerable. The next morning, Audubon took them back to the plantation of their first master and convinced the planter to buy the enslaved people back from the masters to which the family had been divided and sold. And that was that: Reunited but still enslaved, the Black family was rendered as happy as slaves generally are in that country. (Exactly what happy meant, Audubon did not say.) In the span of a single storytrue or not, and many of Audubons Episodes were notAudubon portrayed himself as both a savior of a fugitive family and a defender of slaveholders claims to human property rights.

There have long been lingering questions about Audubons own racial identity. His birth in Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) to one of his fathers two mistresses on a sugar plantation suggests he may have shared some measure of African descent. The truth of that may be impossible to know for sure even now. Audubon may not have known for sure himself, yet he took care to leave a specific impression.In an essay written for his sons, he described his birth mother as a lovely and wealthy lady of Spanish extraction from Louisiana, who went back to Saint-Domingue with Audubons father and became one of the victims during the ever-to-be-lamented period of negro insurrection on that island. Neither part is true, but both could have been useful to Audubon: Having a European mother killed by Black rebels reinforced a white identity, and in an American society where whiteness proved (and still proves) the safest form of social identity, what more could Audubon need?

Audubon made his place in American culture by creating a self-identity as outsized as his images of birds. Much of that is justified: As an artist he set a bar for realism in nature art that raised the worlds standards and continues to influence artists today. His paintings of birds and other wildlife were remarkablefull of exacting detail and often exciting drama, both of which make his work so vibrant and valuable. Although the veracity of his science has sometimes been called into question, his major written work, Ornithological Biography, remains a valuable resource and a very good read. And he left in his wake a movement of people ardent in their passion for identifying and protecting bird life, including the founders of the first Audubon societies, which took his name long after he died. But if we look at John James Audubon as a figure in history, not as a figure of his own myths, we come away with a truer picture of the man himself.

That is an important exercise, and not only for historians. Audubons Runaway could not escape the long reach of slavery, and neither should heor any of us. In this critical time of reckoning with racism, we must recognize that the institution of slavery in Americas past has a deep connection to institutions in the presentour governments, businesses, banks, universities, and also some of our most respected and beloved organizations. Audubon didnt create the National Audubon Society, but he remains part of its identity. As much as we celebrate his environmental legacy, we need to grapple with his racial legacy. If we could train our binoculars on history, now is the time to do so.

Gregory Nobles is author ofJohn James Audubon: The Nature of the American Woodsman(University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017). He is also a member of the National Audubon Society and two local chapters, Atlanta Audubon and Michigan Audubon.

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The Myth of John James Audubon | Audubon - National Audubon Society

In these tumultuous times, an event meant to promote understanding among people may be just what your soul needs.

Enter Candles on the Water, an annual program that advocates for peace and harmony by commemorating the bombings of the Japanese cities of Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

This year marks 75 years since the bombings, and a local group plans a program of music, prayer and public proclamations, concluding with a launch of lantern boats into the Susquehanna River at sunset.

On August 6, 1945, a uranium atomic bomb called Little Boy was dropped on Hiroshima. About 140,000 people were killed and thousands of others died within months from burns and radiation sickness. Just three days later, a plutonium bomb called Fat Man was dropped on Nagasaki, where 70,000 were killed.

As a member of Pax Christi, a Catholic organization that rejects war, preparation for war and every form of violence and domination, Ann Marie Judson has been involved with Candles on the Water for about 20 years.

Judson explained that the idea began taking shape in 1982 at a session on nuclear disarmament held at the United Nations. At the time, Mayor Araki of Hiroshima proposed a new program to promote the solidarity of cities toward the abolition of nuclear weapons. Harrisburg was one of the first to sign on. Today, the Mayors for Peace movement totals 7,905 cities in 163 countries and regions.

Judson said that Harrisburg peace activists Deborah Davenport and Milton Lowenthalheld the first event in the 1980s.

Lowenthal was instrumental in Harrisburg becoming a member city of Mayors for Peace, she said.

Judson described the event as an ecumenical effort to help unify people and bring attention to the cause.

It represents solidarity with Hiroshima and Nagasaki and our common desire for the abolition of nuclear weapons, she said.

Judson said that Bill Dallam of Mechanicsburg will address the crowd during the event. Dallam was on site just three weeks after the bombings, she said. As a member of the military, it was his job to measure radiation.

He was told it was a classified, secret mission, she said. They didnt want anybody to know all the damage we caused.

Judson explained that Dallam encouraged his wife, Mary Lou, to paint a depiction of the devastation. The painting reads, Never Again, and has been used on the front Candles on the Water program schedule.

Peace Garden

The Peace Garden is another permanent reminder of the bombings and is located above the eastern bank of the Susquehanna River between Maclay and Emerald streets.

We brought the idea back from Hiroshima after the international conference, said retired Harrisburg pediatrician Dr. Jim Jones.

The two-block area includes three large sculptures inspired by the destruction in Hiroshima and the hope that followed. The sculptures are the work of Dr. Frederick Franck, a writer, artist and oral surgeon who once worked with Dr. Albert Schweitzer in Africa.

Among the sculptures are flowers, trees and plaques containing sayings that promote peace, hope and renewal. A pole among the brightly blooming flowers bears messages of peace written in four languages.

Jones and Judson are thankful that the city provides the water for the Peace Garden and for the hard work of volunteers who are responsible for the upkeep, along with the dedication of organizations like the Physicians for Social Responsibility, which plant 1,200 annuals every spring.

Judson stressed the importance of keeping history in mind as we move forward.

Ive been dedicated to the cause of peace and Candles on the Water for many years because it reminds us that nuclear weapons should never again be used, she said.We are all brothers and sisters on this planet, and the abolition of nuclear weapons is a critical necessity.Never again!

Candles on the Water will take place on Sunday, Aug. 9, at 7 p.m., with attendees meeting in Riverfront Park in Harrisburg across from the John Harris Mansion. Please bring lawn chairs or blankets. For more information, email annmarie512@aol.com.

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A Shimmering Peace: Candles on The Water offers hope on 75th anniversary of nuclear bombings - The Burg News

For most of Labours history, our policy has been to abolish the House of Lords or have an elected second chamber. In recent manifestos, we have committed to the creation of an elected Senate of the Nations and Regions. Last weeks colourful dissolution peerage list demonstrates again the necessity of that commitment.

The primary purpose of the Lords is to scrutinise and amend legislation. Linking the appointment of legislators with peerages and having life terms undermines our democracy. Those who defend the Lords argue that the House contains considerable expertise and independent thinking, which would not exist within an elected system. However, as was so clearly displayed last week, it is a system mainly based on patronage.

The Lords is also almost three-quarters male, with the newly published list actually reducing the proportion of women, and predominately white. The chamber is definitely not a reflection of modern Britain. There is surely a way of ensuring both expertise and independence within an elected, representative and accountable chamber.

Labour boycotting the Lords wont bring about its abolition or quicken the pace of reform. The second chamber makes hundreds of amendments to bills every year, often improving the legislation. The current 174-strong Labour peers group regularly make the difference, as many changes to law would not take place without Labours voting strength. We were right to take five places out of the 36 created last week.

In March 2007, I voted to abolish the Lords and when that was defeated for a fully-elected chamber. That vote, won by 337 votes to 224, is the only time the Commons has voted for a wholly-elected second chamber. But turkeys dont vote for Christmas, and the Lords then rejected this proposal. Jeremy Corbyn was right to ask new peers to vote to abolish an unelected Lords whenever the opportunity arises.

If there were no second chamber, restructuring of the Commons would be required with already overstretched MPs having to take on additional scrutiny work. It may be that reform of the second chamber is more practicable than simple abolition. In recent years, Labour has done work mainly behind closed doors on a reformed second chamber as part of a wider new constitutional framework for the UK. The detail of what that would look like needs to be fleshed out with a public debate as to where power should lie.

As a former Scottish MP, I would like see Scotlands rights as a nation enshrined in this new set-up, and a further transfer of power to Scotland as significant as that which took place when the Scottish parliament was created in 1999. Until the Second World War, Labour supported home rule with maximum self-government for Scotland within the UK, and I stand in that tradition. But constitutional change is needed in the rest of the UK, too. Labour must use the experiences of our elected councillors, metro-mayors and others, who will have views as to what powers are needed to deliver economically for communities.

As a Labour peer, I will be there to try to amend legislation, take up human rights cases, and issues and campaigns on behalf of the labour movement. It is an honour to be given the opportunity to do that. But part of that role also must be insisting that we get a legislative system appropriate for a 21st-century democracy and calling for an overhaul of the second chamber.

Katy Clark was Labour MP for North Ayrshire and Arran (2005-2015). She is a former political secretary to Jeremy Corbyn, led the Labour Party democracy review, and was a Labour nominee on the 2019 peers dissolution list.

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Should the House of Lords be abolished? My role as a new Labour peer - LabourList

Three months of quarantine taught us to live online, so its perhaps unsurprising that it was what we saw online that sent us back onto the streets. On May 25th, the circulation of video footage capturing George Floyds murder by four Minneapolis police officers quickly incited local protests. Three nights later, our feeds streamed with live images of protesters burning Minneapoliss Third Police Precinct. In the course of June, uprisings expanded at unprecedented speed and scalegrowing nationally and then internationally, leaving a series of now iconic images, videos, and exhortations in their wake. Every historic event has its ideal medium of documentationthe novel, the photograph, the televisionand what were witnessing feels like an exceptionally online moment of social unrest.

Indeed, the struggle in the public square has unfolded alongside a takeover of the virtual one. Amid cell-phone footage of protests and toppling statues, the Internet has been further inundated with what we might call activist media. Screenshots of bail-fund donations urging others to match continue to proliferate. Protest guides, generated from years of on-the-ground activist experience, are readily shared over Twitter and Instagram, telling readers how to blur faces in photographs or aid in de-arrests. There are e-mail and phone-call templates, pre-scripted and mass-circulated. Webinars about police abolition now constitute their own subgenre. And city-council meetings, which had already migrated to Zoom because of the pandemic, have come to host the hallowed activist tradition of town-hall agitation. (Well-timed appeals for the police department to suck my dick, it turns out, can be as effective online as off.) As some of Junes uprisings evolve into todays encampments, the long revolutionary summer of 2020made all the longer by quarantinecontinues apace online.

Some of this story may seem familiar. In Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest, from 2017, the sociologist Zeynep Tufekci examined how a digitally networked public sphere had come to shape social movements. Tufekci drew on her own experience of the 2011 Arab uprisings, whose early mobilization of social media set the stage for the protests at Gezi Park, in Istanbul, the Occupy action, in New York City, and the Black Lives Matter movement, in Ferguson. For Tufekci, the use of the Internet linked these various, decentralized uprisings and distinguished them from predecessors such as the nineteen-sixties civil-rights movement. Whereas older movements had to build their organizing capacity first, Tufekci argued, modern networked movements can scale up quickly and take care of all sorts of logistical tasks without building any substantial organizational capacity before the first protest or march.

The speed afforded by such protest is, however, as much its peril as its promise. After a swift expansion, spontaneous movements are often prone to what Tufekci calls tactical freezes. Because they are often leaderless, and can lack both the culture and the infrastructure for making collective decisions, they are left with little room to adjust strategies or negotiate demands. At a more fundamental level, social medias corporate infrastructure makes such movements vulnerable to coptation and censorship. Tufekci is clear-eyed about these pitfalls, even as she rejects the broader criticisms of slacktivism laid out, for example, by Evgeny Morozovs The Net Delusion, from 2011.

Twitter and Tear Gas remains trenchant about how social media can and cannot enact reform. But movements change, as does technology. Since Tufekcis book was published, social media has helped representand, in some cases, helped organizethe Arab Spring 2.0, Frances Yellow Vest movement, Puerto Ricos RickyLeaks, the 2019 Iranian protests, the Hong Kong protests, and what we might call the B.L.M. uprising of 2020. This last event, still ongoing, has evinced a scale, creativity, and endurance that challenges those skeptical of the Internets ability to mediate a movement. As Tufekci notes in her book, the real-world effects of Occupy, the Womens March, and even Ferguson-era B.L.M. were often underwhelming. By contrast, since George Floyds death, cities have cut billions of dollars from police budgets; school districts have severed ties with police; multiple police-reform-and-accountability bills have been introduced in Congress; and cities like Minneapolis have vowed to defund policing. Plenty of work remains, but the link between activism, the Internet, and material action seems to have deepened. Whats changed?

The current uprisings slot neatly into Tufekcis story, with one exception. As the flurry of digital activism continues, there is no sense that this movement is unclear about its aimsabolitionor that it might collapse under a tactical freeze. Instead, the many protest guides, syllabi, Webinars, and the like have made clear both the objectives of abolition and the digital savvy of abolitionists. It is a message so legible that even Fox News grasped it with relative ease. Rachel Kuo, an organizer and scholar of digital activism, told me that this clarity has been shaped partly by organizers who increasingly rely on a combination of digital platforms, whether thats Google Drive, Signal, Messenger, Slack, or other combinations of software, for collaboration, information storage, resource access, and daily communications. The public tends to focus, understandably, on the profusion of hashtags and sleek graphics, but Kuo stressed that it was this back end workan inventory of knowledge, a stronger sense of alliancethat has allowed digital activism to reflect broader concerns and visions around community safety, accessibility, and accountability. The uprisings might have unfolded organically, but what has sustained them is precisely what many prior networked protests lacked: prexisting organizations with specific demands for a better world.

Some of this growth is simply a function of time. It has been seven years since Black Lives Matter was founded. Since then, groups such as the Movement for Black Livesan explicitly abolitionist, anti-capitalist network that includes more than a hundred and fifty organizationshave lent unity and direction to a coalition that was once, perhaps, too diffuse to articulate shared principles. These groups have also become better at using the Internet to frame, formalize, and advance their agenda. As Sarah J. Jackson, Moya Bailey, and Brooke Foucault Welles write in #HashtagActivism, social media provides a digital counterpublic, in which voices excluded from elite media spaces can engage alternative networks of debate. When moments of rupture occur, this counterpublic can more readily make mainstream interventions. Recent discourse about prison and police abolition might be the clearest example of a shift in the Overton window, though Bailey points even to the language that were hearing on television, white supremacy being named for what it is, as unimaginable just a few years ago.

Whats distinct about the current movement is not just the clarity of its messaging, but its ability to convey that message through so much noise. On June 2nd, the music industry launched #BlackoutTuesday, an action against police brutality that involved, among other things, Instagram and Facebook users posting plain black boxes to their accounts. The posts often included the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter; almost immediately, social-media users were inundated with even more posts, which explained why using that hashtag drowned out crucial information about events and resources with a sea of mute boxes. For Meredith Clark, a media-studies professor at the University of Virginia, the response illustrated how the B.L.M. movement had honed its ability to stick to a program, and to correct those who deployed that program navely. In 2014, many people had only a thin sense of how a hashtag could organize actions or establish circles of care. Today, people understand what it means to use a hashtag, Clark told me. They use their own social media in a certain way to essentially quiet background noise and allow those voices that need to connect with each other the space to do so. The #BlackoutTuesday affair exemplified an increasing awareness of how digital tactics have material consequences.

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The Second Act of Social-Media Activism - The New Yorker

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Emancipation Day is rightly celebrated as one of the most important anniversaries for Jamaicans. Sadly, this year's was not our traditional Augus'1 jubilee style commemoration. Last year this time celebrators had settled into their north coast resort accommodation, done the Saturday night party bit, and booked time out for Caymanas Park, cricket matches, beach outings, and family gatherings.

The West Indies team was struggling against a well-oiled Indian side (sounds familiar), Denbigh was summoning farmers from labour to refreshment, and for many a Red Stripe and a game of dominoes was sufficient to while away the time and reflect, oh so briefly, on the reason for the holiday.

That was last year, 2019. But this year COVID-19 has put paid to all that excitement and everything is now on virtual reality. A great effort has been made to bring the shows into our living rooms, but so much is missing from these events without the crowd excitement.

What a change we have witnessed when, in six months, January to July, a blanket of soberness and containment has curtailed the world's normal behavioural patterns as we seek to shield humanity from the scourge of the coronavirus pandemic.

The celebrations we indulged in last year have been toned down and, although we still danced, we danced with one eye open for the security forces who were placed on anti-COVID-19 alarms and crack down duties.

The Government allowed 'let up' to some extent, but to my mind the almost total abandonment of masks and social distancing which has reached peak during this holiday period makes it obligatory for a return to some of those restrictions, advisories, and guidelines issued by the Government and the World Health Organization at the start of the pandemic.

Comparing the lock down we went through at Easter to the wild abandonment we are revelling in at Emancipation makes one shudder to think that we could be laying ourselves open for the coming of that dreaded second wave we have been warned against.

The practice of wearing masks, washing hands, and social distancing must be followed strictly. We have been through the initial importation, cluster and community stages, and the cycle has turned full circle as, with the reopening of our borders, we are right back into the importation stage.

There is one other stage we don't speak about much, and it's the complacency stage. The belief that, in spite of the increasing numbers (importation), Jamaica is doing so well that we can drop our guard. The complacency stage can be the most dangerous stage of all.

As was said earlier in this column, Prime Minister Andrew Holness has taken on the mandate of leadership and is not letting us down. He has been very much in charge; forthright and decisive.

Minister of Health Dr Christopher Tufton has taken on the responsibility for one of the heaviest burdens ever cast on a minister of government in the history of Jamaica, and continues to do exceedingly well.

Indeed, the latest Bill Johnson polls commissioned by this newspaper have given a vote of excellence to the Government for the job they are doing to protect Jamaica from the effects of the virus.

This vote of confidence must be shared by the unflappable Chief Medical Officer Dr Jacquiline Bisasor-McKenzie, whose style we find to be engaging, comforting, compassionate, and, most importantly, inspires trust.

These three have been leading the fight for Jamaica, supported by Cabinet ministers, medical officers, the Ministry of Health and Wellness, the police, as well as thousands of workers stretched to the max across the country. Altogether they have earned the confidence of the people they lead.

Unfortunately, with an election prognosis now turning up the volume, it's going to be almost impossible to keep politics out of this health crisis. The ungracious and unworthy politicking that has crept in can be a diversion from the real issues that face us.

We simply cannot play politics with coronavirus, and where it has happened and is likely to continue to happen we must rein it in. Please don't play games with life and death.

Our big brother, the USA, has been involved in some amount of turmoil in that regard as it too prepares for elections in November. The excitement and enthusiasm around conventions and public rallies have been crowded out by the coronavirus outbreak and coloured by the Black Lives Matter movement spurred by the killing of George Floyd.

America has only itself to blame for allowing racism to play such a dominant role in the decision-making process to select a Government in the world's largest democracy. And, in 2020. A lot of battles have been fought and won down that road. The Civil War 1861-65, which ended in victory for the Northern states and the abolishment of slavery, the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which legally ended the segregation that had been institutionalised by the Jim Crow laws, the decline of the Ku Klux Klan, the civil rights movement, and the historic march on Washington in 1964, all of which were important milestones on the way to eradicating racism in America.

But those accomplishments and seminal victories have not proven to be decisive enough. A 2013 report published by the Economic Policy Institute, which assessed the progress made by the original March on Washington, contended that the attainment of civil rights alone cannot transform people's quality of life unless accompanied by economic (and social) justice. It pointed out that much of the primary goals of all these historic victories listed above (housing, integrated education, and widespread employment at equal wages) have not been met. They further argued that, although legal advances were made, black people still live in concentrated areas of poverty, where they receive inferior education and suffer from widespread unemployment; hence, the unsettled, restless situation in America and the anger and pain now manifesting itself in mass protests all over the United States.

I was surprised to learn that there is no national public holiday declared in the USA to mark Emancipation. The District of Columbia observes a holiday on April 16 to mark the anniversary of the signing of Emancipation Act. Elsewhere in the United States, the emancipation of slaves is celebrated in sections of several states and on different days, including Florida (May 20), Puerto Rico (March 22), Texas (June 19), and in Georgia (Saturday closest to May 29), Mississippi (May 8) and Kentucky (August 8).

In contrast, Jamaica has long recognised August 1 as a day for national celebration. And even when Emancipation Day, for a while, has been subsumed by the August 6 Independence celebrations 1962 to 1998 Jamaicans still continued to honour and observe August 1 in communities all over the country with sporting tournaments, parties, fairs and picnics.

The holiday is more than just a welcome break from work when one can lounge around and relax in preparation for Independence Day. For Jamaicans, the day is a very important date in our history as a people, as it represents the time when our forebears were 'freed' from the shackles of chattel slavery.

On this day, August 2, 2020, let us spare a sobering thought for what took place in Jamaica on the night of July 31, 1834.

On that night, 186 years ago, thousands of enslaved Africans flocked to places of worship all over Jamaica to give thanks for the abolition of slavery.

In 1834 many of the slaves could still recall the time when they were uprooted from their peaceful villages and forcefully taken to a port of departure, where they awaited the arrival of a slaver.

The journey to the West Indies was horrible. The ships were overcrowded and unsanitary, resulting in the breakout of various diseases. Many of them died. Others thought least likely to recover were chained, ankle by ankle, and thrown overboard, weighed down with cannonballsalive.

Those who endured the journey were then forced on to the plantations to begin their sentences of slavery, with multiple whippings, torture, and instances of sexual abuse. Many were killed for daring to seek freedom. The enslaved African was now mere chattel.

So here comes freedom in 1834 from all these unspeakable horrors. Their joy was not to be just another Red Stripe beer, a day at the track, or a Sunsplash night at the park. This was genuine, heartfelt, deeply emotional joy and thanksgiving celebrations: That overwhelming feeling of thanksgiving to the Almighty God who had intervened in the machinations of man and had finally set the captives free.

The Emancipation Day holiday, as we celebrate it in 2020, can never fully pay tribute to, or recall the passions and the immensity of the feelings that must have overwhelmed the Africans who, that night, were to hear the proclamation of liberty to the captives, and experience for themselves the opening of the prison doors to them that were bound.

And can you imagine how our forefathers and mothers celebrated? And did they not have more cause for natural joy than we have today? Those former slaves, yes, our 'owna' family, set the pace for grand times to be had by all when they left church that night to spill out into the streets for joyous celebrations and thanksgiving.

Queen Victoria gi wi free, tiday fus a Augus', tenky Massa, they sang, as the women paraded around the rural neighbourhoods in their tailored petticoats with tashan lace edging. The Bruckins party songs and dances which have been handed down to the present generation were the highlights of any celebratory gathering: Jubilee, Jubilee, this is the year of Jubilee...

We are fortunate to get a first-hand description of what took place in the churches that night from a parson, Reverend Henry Bleby, who was an eyewitness to the event, and who actually conducted the service of thanksgiving and freedom in one of the churches in his charge. From an address which Rev Bleby gave to the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society in 1858 we glean how he remembered, in detail, every second of the service, every sob, every gasp, and, at the end of the night, every soulful prayer that sang and ran through the congregation.

Sirs, he told his audience, I was there when slavery was abolished. I saw the monster die. This day, 24 years ago, I stood up late at night, in a very large church (unnamed), and the aisles were crowded, and the gallery stairs, and the communion place, and the pulpit stairs were all crowded, and there were thousands of persons looking in. This was at 10 o'clock at night, on the 31st of July.

I took my text from Leviticus 25: 10. By and by, the midnight hour approached. When it was within two minutes of the first of August, I requested all the people to kneel down, as befitting the solemnity of the hour, and engage in silent prayer to God.

A moment of the highest drama was approaching.

By and by, the clock began to strike: It was the knell of slavery. It was the stroke which proclaimed liberty to 800 souls. And, Sirs, what a burst of joy rolled over that mass of people when the clock struck, and they were slaves no longer.

Over at the Baptist church in Falmouth a similar procession of time in motion. As the clock started to strike the first chime of midnight, Rev William Knibb said quietly, The hour is at hand, the monster is dying. There was silence. Then when the church bell outside struck midnight, he shouted: The monster is dead: The Negro is free!

At Rev Bleby's church there was also a heavy silence that had gripped the congregation. Then when the midnight hour struck a burst of joy rolled over that mass of people as they realised they were slaves no longer. He told them to rise from their knees, And, Sirs, it was really affecting to see, in one corner, a mother, with her little one whom she had brought with her, clasp her baby to her bosom. And there was an old, white-headed man, embracing a daughter. And, here again, would be a husband congratulating his wife.

This is what you call unspeakable feelings. One great, large, significant, unforgettable moment in history. Outside the churches the people gathered to bury the chain shackles all over the countryside.

Rev Bleby, again, takes the platform. I cannot tell you the feelings which with which those people, just emerging from freedom, shouted. And they literally shouted the hymn which was sung in the church that night:

Send the glad tidings o'er the sea,

His chains are broken, the slave is free

This is the Negro's jubilee...

Lance Neita is a public relations consultant and historian. Send comments to the Jamaica Observer or to lanceneita@hotmail.com.

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'This is the Negroes' Jubilee' - Jamaica Observer

Part I: From muscle power to steam power

Conflicts around fundamental issues of energy arent new, they just underline how difficult a transition can be.

Anyone interested in the politics of energy today would do well to study the worlds first energy revolution, one that is often called the age of steam.

What you see is a transition between two forms of what is now called dispatchable energy; that is, energy you can control, rely on and send to places.

There was always non-dispatchable energy, like wind and water, but for many applications and a growing economy this wouldnt suffice.

The original form of dispatchable energy was muscle power, often forced muscle power. But around the second half of the 19th century dispatchable power increasingly looks like steam and coal.

But the transition from reliance on labour intensive muscle power to the steam engine wasnt easy. And with this transition came another social transition that was deeply connected, the abolition of forced muscle power or slavery, and its ugly brother indentured labour.

The large 35 tons steam hammer at the Woolwich arsenal, engraving from The Graphic, 1874, Great ... [+] Britain, 19th century. (Photo by DeAgostini/Getty Images)

As the steam revolution gathers pace, we see numerous attempts at abolishing these types of forced labour; but reforms were to take many years, and many attempts at legislation and numerous uprisings of captives.

It's instructive to understand how one system of dispatchable energy would eventually be replaced by another system, to where we find ourselves today.

A long journey to the new dispatchable

Before 1860, if you wanted to move on land, you took a horse; if you wanted to pump water out of a mine, it would be done by a human with a bucket.

Wind and water did much of the heavy lifting, but sometimes, for properly dispatchable power muscle of both animal and human forms were the only solution.

These of course were powered by carbohydrates, which in turn could be created on farms and plantations which often used forced labour. So the ancient muscle energy paradigm had a certain simplicity.

As the 19th century progressed, movement increasingly could involve steam engines and thermodynamics. Calories for doing mechanical work were more and more likely to come from lumps of coal, and less likely to come from carbohydrate food fed to workers and draught animals.

By 1865, the same year the American Civil War over slavery was drawing to its bloody end, steam traction engines were just starting to replace muscle power on farms.

The problems along the way tell us much about what we can expect from replacing another form of dispatchable energy and trying to create a more modern one.

Lessons for todays energy revolution

In the development of steam, there was a lot of transitional technology and knowledge that had to be acquired first. From Watts first engine that pumped water to Stephensons rocket that moved people, lots of technological inventive steps were required.

The American Civil War and the numerous different acts and amendments that were required to achieve the abolition of slavery showed how reluctant we were to get rid of forced muscle power.

From a 19th Century point of view, getting rid of your coerced muscle workforce, however much it was the right thing to do, was still an act of faith. It was a moral vote, which hoped for a more technologically enabled future. That future was coming, but coming at the same slow pace that slavery was being dismantled.

As we stand on the brink of a new energy revolution, there are many things that would look familiar to our forebears two hundred years ago.

Perhaps most striking, is how difficult and politically charged is the transition, and how polarised are the two standpoints of old and new forms of energy.

Were not fighting a civil war over it yet, but things could hardly get anymore bitter.

In Australia so far, four prime ministers have changed over this fault line in our politics and no doubt there will be many more. There are echoes and parallels in Japan, California and in Poland where the regulator has described the situation as a tragedy.

In Germany, the long running battle between the lignite coal mining interests and renewables goes unabated. It has seen letter bombs sent and the rise of the extreme right wing populist movement, the AFD.

The government has told miners that they are part of an essential service to the state; but at the same time the same government is planning Germanys exit from coal altogether.

Such mixed messages are now typical of the predicament many countries find themselves in.

A lump of coal in Parliament

In Australia, this deeply embedded conflict is just as acute.

When Scott Morrison, the Australian Prime Minister, walked into the Australian Parliament with a lump of coal in his hand, saying theres nothing to fear he was speaking for a huge number of his constituents who also believe that getting rid of coal is reckless.

These people ask why their electricity keeps costing more and more, despite the promises of cheap solar electricity. Pauline Hanson, a veteran outspoken Australian right wing politician also speaks for the same audience.

They dont buy the romance of the renewable, they want the certainty, the dispatchability, of the fossil.

And who can blame them? We never reckoned for electricity prices going to an all time high.

Perhaps most vociferous in their criticism of what are perceived as white elephant projects like Snowy 2.0 is Bruce Mountain, who says it simply fills a gap in the national discourse.

On the other side there are the renewables supporters in all shades, in many parts of Europe and the West, including the more extreme Extinction Rebellion.

They look to the bushfires in Australia and say that our planet is on fire, set alight by the higher temperatures created by the carbon in fossil fuels.

THE HAGUE, NETHERLANDS - JANUARY 16: Members of Extintion Rebellion are preparing for the ... [+] demonstration that will take place in front of the Australian Embassy on January 16, 2020 in The Hague, Netherlands. Extinction Rebellion has demonstrated in front of the Australian embassy in protest of what they consider to be ineffective measures by the Australian government to fight the fires that plague the country.

They block roads and bring cities to a halt. Theirs is a moral crusade and justifies higher prices, extending fuel poverty to the many, and are ready to live with blackouts caused by uncertain amounts of electricity at peak demand times.

Indeed the moral dimension reminds us of the abolitionists fighting slavery.

Are these two sides going to magically heal their rifts and start understanding each other?

Theres no sign of that yet.

More significantly its becoming clear that its not just an ideological conflict.

In a report by McKinsey entitled Germanys energy transition at the crossroads, the consultancy throws a big question mark over the entire project of renewable energy and its integration into the grid.

It says Germany is in trouble on all three major counts: Energy security, price and of course, emissions targets. Germanys situation was summed up by Die Welt as disastrous.

In the second of this multi-part blog, well look at why this fault line is so difficult to overcome, and why so often it results in waste. Well see how its born of a new technological system thats being honed as we speak, one that is both audacious and innovative and some would say inevitable at the same time.

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What The Struggles Of The Past Teach Us About Our Next Energy System - Forbes