This SaturdayBarbados will commemorate the August 1, 1834 abolition of slavery in the British colonies. Indeed it is a day to celebrate, as it brought an end to the horrific enslavement of the descendants of the millions of Africans who were uprooted from their homes and shipped to the Caribbean like nothing more than cargo.

Estimates suggest that close to 12 million Africans made the trip across the Atlantic Ocean in the Transatlantic Slave Trade and even though countless died along the way, still many survived and it was on their backs, at the expense of their lives and freedom that the planter class made their fortunes fortunes that many of their descendants continue to enjoy to this day. On the other hand, African slaves endured an injustice of the highest proportion - an injustice that must never be forgotten nor excused.

Sadly, however, there have been concerted efforts here in the region and further afield to encourage persons to disregard the atrocities of the past, but those of African descendants have a duty to ensure that such is never the case. As a country and a region we cannot afford to forget, and it is equally important that we do not allow the past to haunt us. Instead, we must see the past as stepping stones to help us in the construction of a better future for all our people. We must take the lessons of slavery and oppression and use them to make our countries better places to live, work and recreate.

It is equally important that we share the stories of the struggles endured by the African slaves with our young people, and instil in them how their ancestors used resistance and struggle to overcome challenges not of their making. The onus is on us to tap into their strength, and use that to become more innovative, so we can devise new services and products to offer to the world.

What is also important now is that the Caribbean in general seek to further advance its call for reparations. Indeed the call by the Chairman of the CARICOM Reparations Commission and Vice-Chancellor of The University of the West Indies, Professor Sir Hilary Beckles, for a reparations summit between Caribbean countries and the former colonisers of the region must be supported. Such a conversation is necessary, and is now definitely overdue.

The fact is that the Slave Compensation Act of 1837 in England for example, paved the way for approximately 20 million to be paid to slave owners for the loss of their free labour, but absolutely no compensation was paid to the slaves. The fact is that when the slaves were liberated, to their former owners they were still considered chattel and the idea of compensation for the centuries of inhumane treatment they endured was not even contemplated. A shame!

But as Sir Hilary has said, Britain and wider Europe owe a debt to this region a debt to development that must be repaid. He has insisted that in much the same way as the region met with European governments to discuss independence, the discussion on reparations is phase two of the independence process. And, if those who make up the government and private sector in European countries are honest, then they must take responsibility for the sins of their forefathers and seek to make things right.

Certainly they must seek to put financial and technical resources at the disposal of countries in the Caribbean. Our countries were put at a disadvantage following slavery and even more since independence, with international bodies and countries failing to see our inherent vulnerabilities as the reason why we should be given a helping hand to aid in our progress and long term sustainability. So it is hoped that the efforts being made by the Reparations Committee bear fruit in the not too distant future, and that it does not take another 186 years before we gain tangible traction in this area.

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EDITORIAL: Must put an end to the struggle - Barbados Advocate

While Juneteenth (June 19) is celebrated in many US states as its Emancipation Day, Canada does not have an official day to recognize when members of its Black community were freed from slavery.

The day does exist though, because while unknown to some, August 1 marks the day that chattel slavery officially ended in Canada and across the British Empire.

According to the Royal Commonwealth Society of Canada (RCSC), in March 1793, John Simcoe, then Governor of Upper Canada what is now Ontario learned that an enslaved woman named Chloe Cooley was forcibly bound and taken by boat across the Niagara River to be sold.

Nobodys perfect, but the good part about Simcoe is that he saw something that happened that was wrong and tried to address it,Rosemary Sadlier, an author and chair of the Toronto branch of the RCSC, told Daily Hive in an interview. That is what caused him to attempt to end the enslavement of people of African descent in this country.

However,Sadlier says he was forced to compromise asmany of the officials he worked with in government-owned slaves and were not interested in giving them up.

That same year, Simcoe managed to pass legislation banning the importation of enslaved Africans into Upper Canada and guaranteeing freedom for the children of enslaved Africans born after that date when they reached the age of 25.

TheRCSC says this isthe first such law of its kind in the British Empire, and it would eventually lead to the abolition of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade in 1807.

It would still take almost 30 more years for the kingdom to pass the Slavery Abolition Act and fully bring an end to chattel slavery on August 1, 1834, in Britain, Canada, and several other colonies.

Ontario is currently the only province to have officially recognized Emancipation Day, and the August civic holiday that falls on the first Monday of the month has been named Simcoe Day in honour of the abolitionist.

ToSadlier, however, who has been lobbying to have the day recognized officially for 25 years, Ontario was only one of many steps to see the day officially recognized across the country, a battle still being fought today.

In 1999, a private members bill would be brought to the house of commons by the lateDeepak Obhrai, an MP for Calgary East, proposing the official recognition of the day.

It is important to recognize the heritage of Canadas Black community and the contributions that it has made and continues to make to Canada, the bill reads. Whereas it is also important to recall the ongoing international struggle for human rights, which can best be personified by Lieutenant Governor John Graves Simcoe and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, and it is appropriate to recognize August 1 formally as Emancipation Day and to celebrate it.

The bill would not reach a third reading in parliament, however, falling victim to a common political stumbling block the end of the parliamentary session.

It went to second reading twice in the house under Deepak Obhrai, whos now deceased, says Sadlier. The records still remain of what he said and what he did, but because governments change and what have you it never got the third reading.

Several other bills would follow, including in 2008, and again in 2018. A petition was also sponsored by Beaches-East York MP Nathaniel Erskine-Smith asking for the commemoration of the day.

While the petition was politely declined by the government,based on already existing commitments to multiculturalism,the bill then made it to a second reading in the Senate but once again, the session would end.

More recently, Sadlier added, in March it went to first reading in the house and then COVID came.

While Senator Wanda Thomas Bernard, a supporter of the bill, would say at the time we were watching pandemics of racism and COVID-19 collide across the world, the emergence of the health crisis has stalled the bill once again.

Undeterred, the advocates of recognizing Emancipation Day continue to work for its passage.

It speaks to the resistance, it speaks to unity, it speaks to the efforts of people of African descent to make themselves free,Sadlier said, but it also speaks to those people on the other side of the equation who even if they may have come to the party a bit late did choose to work towards ending slavery.

There were advocates on both sides of the racial divide who were working towards the same purpose. And if we can look at that effort to work together and bring that into the present, continually, well then I think were doing a great job.

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Advocates still fighting to have Emancipation Day recognized across Canada | News - Daily Hive

[A] man of high ambitions must face the loneliness of original work. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Brown University Commencement Address (1897)

The following is a series of questions posed by Ronald Collins toCatharine Pierce Wells in connection with her new book, Oliver Wendell Holmes: A Willing Servant to an Unknown God (Cambridge University Press, 2020).

Catharine Pierce Wells is a professor of law and a Law School Fund research scholar at Boston College Law School, where she teaches and writes in various areas of legal theory, including pragmatic legal theory, feminist jurisprudence and civil rights theory. She received her law degree from Harvard Law School and also earned an M.A. and Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of California, Berkeley.

Wells articles on Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes have appeared, among other places, in the Journal of Supreme Court History. Her new book was published in the Cambridge Historical Studies in American Law and Society series, edited by Christopher Tomlins.

Welcome, Catharine, and thank you for taking the time to participate in this question-and-answer exchange for our readers. And congratulations on the publication of your book.

* * *

Holmes is on the way of becoming one of the great representative figures of his nation, a type of man which has so far been rare in American history. Max Rheinstein (1943)

[A]re we in danger of accepting him too uncritically? Max Lerner (1943)

Question: These two quotes reveal something of the spectrum of views on Holmes Olympian on the one hand, dark and dangerous on the other. Before we turn to your book, what is your general sense of this range of opinions?

Wells: As you say, Holmes is a controversial figure. What is surprising, of course, is not so much the range of opinions but the passion that animates them. While there are some moderate voices, assessments of Holmes and his influence have tended towards the extreme. They run the gamut from he is the greatest jurist who ever lived to he is a fascist and a dangerous influence on American law. It is hard to imagine John Marshall or William Howard Taft exciting such passionate responses.

One common explanation for the intensity is that Holmes became the symbol of generational conflict among law professors. One generation mythologized Holmes as its spokesman and leader, while a younger generation rebelled by seeking to desecrate his image. But this explanation does not account for the fact that Holmes was controversial even in his own time.

I think the true explanation is somewhat simpler. Holmes was an astute observer. He saw all sides of human life its heroism and villainy, its successes and failures, and its joy and despair. In addition, he made no excuse for doing what he thought was right, and he did not mince words when saying what he honestly thought. To put it in Thoreaus words, Holmes was a man who marched to the beat of his own drum. Some people think of this as a sign of courage; others as an unwarranted smugness. The former group tends to see in Holmes a captivating idealist; the latter group may see nothing but a cranky old man. The truth, of course, is somewhere in between.

Question: In an essay published last year in the book The Pragmatism and Prejudice of Oliver Wendell Holmes, you wrote: No expert on American law has been subject to as many differing interpretations as [Holmes]. In your own book, you concede that it is hard to have a fresh outlook on Holmes. Given that, how does your interpretation of the man and his legacy differ from what has already been offered up in the 6,275 biographical pages printed in books about Holmes?

Wells: What compelled me to write about Holmes was the feeling that, despite all that had been written, no one had gotten it quite right. I first read Holmes after completing a dissertation on Charles Peirce, the founder of American pragmatism.

Pragmatism is a complex philosophy. The men who formulated it were intelligent and well educated (even if self-educated) in philosophy. As philosophers, they had a somewhat contradictory vision. On the one hand, they sought to provide an analysis and justification of the scientific method. On the other, they were committed to recognizing the limits of scientific thought. Disagreeing with Kant, they believed that there was no objective foundation for science. Instead, they saw the value of science in its effectiveness as a guide for human action.

The essential insight of the pragmatists whether Peirce, William James or John Dewey was their recognition of the value of the subjective aspects of human experience. Thus, they did not view feelings and speculation as degraded junior partners to rational science. Rather, they understood them as an essential ingredient in the construction of meaning. As lawyers looked at Holmes, they did not see this aspect of his philosophy. Even Professor Thomas Grey, who recognized Holmes as a pragmatist, seemed to ignore it. It was this omission that challenged me to write one more book about Holmes. It was written in the belief that one had to take Holmes mystical statements seriously, and to treat them as an integral part of his pragmatism.

Question: The subtitle of your book is something of a riddle A Willing Servant to an Unknown God. Can you unravel that a bit for us?

Wells: Yes, it is a bit of a riddle, but one that is central to Holmes life. Remember he was descended from Puritans who thought that the meaning of life was to serve God. But he was also an agnostic who lived in a city where zealous Calvinism had morphed into a more liberal Unitarianism. He did not believe in the biblical God, preferring instead to think broadly in terms of an unknowable power that transcended the physical world. Thus, he found himself inhabiting a paradox. On the one hand, he believed in serving God, and on the other, he had no sure knowledge of God or what it meant to serve God.

Some members of his generation resolved this conflict by embracing a faith that defied skepticism. Others simply shrugged, finding it impossible to serve a God they did not understand. But Holmes followed Ralph Waldo Emerson on a harder, middle road. He dedicated himself to duty, but at the same time recognized that the nature of his duty could only be gleamed by momentary insights. The best he could do was to remain open to his experience and allow himself to be guided by the love he felt for honor and country.

Question: As you see it, how does Holmes life experience (especially his Civil War experience) connect to his philosophy and jurisprudence?

Wells: The standard answer to this question is that three years of blood and gore made him cynical and detached. This is the central narrative for those who think that Holmes lacked the idealism necessary for a legal legend. But I disagree. One can see a similar detachment in others of his generation who did not go to war. Think, for example, of his friend Henry Adams or his cousin, the historian John Torrey Morse.

As I began to reconstruct his experience in the war, what stood out to me was the constant back and forth between the horrors of the front and the comfort of home. He was wounded three times and each time spent a significant period in Boston. We can see in his letters that he came to realize the unbridgeable gap between the war as it was understood on the battlefield and the war as it was understood by the civilians in Boston. He also understood that the soldiers of the South were as idealistic and committed to justice (their vision of justice) as he was. These were formative experiences. Through them, he learned in the most dramatic fashion that perception depends on context.

What we see, sense and understand is always dependent upon perspective the way in which our past constructs and illuminates present experience. This emphasis on perspective was an important element of Holmes skepticism. On the one hand, he authentically held certain beliefs. On the other, he understood the substantial possibility that some or all of these beliefs were wrong.

Question: You write that we need to reject the simple image of Holmes as a [legal] realist. Please explain why you think that common portrayal is inaccurate.

Wells: When we approach Holmes through the lens of contemporary legal theory, it is natural to think that he must be either a formalist (someone who believes that legal decision-making is the result of applying logic to precedent) or a realist (someone who thinks that judges should decide on the basis of sound social policy). But this dichotomy overlooks a substantial middle ground.

Holmes was not a realist; he did not believe that judges should impose their own views of social policy. Nor was he a formalist, as is obvious from his criticism of Christopher Columbus Langdell.

Holmes understood something important about the common law. He saw that it was not the logic of precedent that constrained legal decision-making. Instead, he viewed the common law as a tradition with its own customs, norms and vocabulary. Judges were participants in the tradition and had to abide by its rules both stated and unstated.

Sometimes, but rarely, there would be a right answer to a legal question because there was a stated rule that dictated the result. Mostly, however, the constraints were less formal. There might be a right answer or a range of right answers because the law dictated the form in which questions could be raised, the strategies that might be deployed in analyzing legal problems, and the vocabulary to be used in their resolution. This way of looking at the common law is neither realist nor formalist as those terms are understood today.

Question: You note your interest in Holmes role as a judge and your consequent focus on his method of deciding cases. One of the opinions that you dwell on is Holmes 1896 dissent in Vegelahn v. Guntner. Why is that case important, and what does Holmes dissent tell us about his judicial method?

Wells: I focused on the Vegelahn opinion because it illustrates the type of constraint I just described. It is a clear example of Holmes use of a common law method in deciding cases of first impression. In this case, there is no stated rule that determines the outcome. Nevertheless, Holmes approach in this case is a good example of how adherence to the common law broadly understood commits him to a specific outcome.

The method is dialectical in the sense that it cycles between form and substance. His first move is to frame the issue in traditional tort terms. Then he suggests that privileges in tort cases are always a matter of substantive policy. The next step is to compare the case to other cases that seem to raise the same issue of substantive policy. He then applies the vocabulary and doctrines embodied in this latter group of cases to the case at hand. He reformulates the issue through this lens. Once this is done, he is able to decide the case based upon the fundamental principle of the common law like cases must be decided alike.

Question: All the chapter headings in the first part of your book come from lines in Holmes 1884 Memorial Day speech. In that speech, Holmes spoke words that would reappear in President John F. Kennedys 1961 inaugural address. Said Holmes: [I]t is now the moment when by common consent we pause to become conscious of our national life and to rejoice in it, to recall what our country has done for each of us, and to ask ourselves what we can do for the country in return.

Why is that 1884 speech so significant to your interpretive project?

Wells: I used the speech in the Prologue because it so clearly expresses Holmes basic attitude toward life. In it, we see the heart of his creed:

[Memorial Day] embodies our belief that to act with enthusiasm and faith is the condition of acting greatly. To fight a war, you must believe something and want something with all your might. (This you must) do to carry anything else to an end worth reaching. More than that, you must be willing to commit yourself to a course, perhaps a long and hard one, without being able to foresee exactly where you will come out. All that is required of you is that you should go somewhither as hard as ever you can. The rest belongs to fate. One may fall at the beginning of the charge or at the top of the earthworks; but in no other way can we reach the rewards of victory.

This summarizes not only his attitude toward fighting a war, but also his approach to studying law. I used phrases from the speech as chapter headings as part of an overall intention to tell Holmes story through his own words.

Question: You write about Holmes: How was it that the young man who had gone to war to fight for abolition had come to the Court forty years later seemingly uninterested in the project of restoring basic freedoms for those who had been emancipated? Might you say a few words about this apparent conflict?

Wells: Such a hard question. Perhaps the simplest answer is that the conflict is based upon his differing roles as soldier and judge, but this could use some elaboration.

Holmes favored abolition, but that was not the main reason he enlisted in the Union Army. He explained his reason in the Memorial Day speech:

I think the feeling that a man ought to take part in the war unless some conscientious scruple or strong practical reason made it impossible was right in the South as in the North. I think that, as life is action and passion, it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of his time at peril of being judged not to have lived.

Note that his reason for enlisting was not necessarily a hope that his action would help end slavery. To some extent, it reflected his desire to participate in something larger than himself. This was a touchstone throughout his life full participation was a continuous goal. Thus, he threw himself into learning the law with total and intense commitment.

The key to understanding Holmes is to understand how he thought about his place in the world. He often said that we should not set ourselves up as little gods outside the universe. By this he meant that individuals should not imagine that they are masters of the universe, that they can improve the world by imposing their own ideals. As a result, he did not believe in mandates for reform. He was a judge. That was his job, and doing ones particular job was Holmes highest ideal. By the time Holmes got to the Supreme Court, he knew what this meant. His role required him to participate in the grand sweep of the common law, and this meant conformity to a very specific set of ideals. Common law judges, he believed, should resolve disputes by upsetting surrounding customs and usages at little as possible. He may have disapproved of slavery. He may have thought that Southern efforts to restrict voting rights were unfair. But it was not his personal beliefs that were at issue. As a judge he believed, rightly or wrongly, that he had no power or authority to overturn well-established social arrangements.

In our time, young people are idealistic; they often become lawyers because they want to change the world. But their desire would have puzzled Holmes. It was just not the way he thought about things. Possibly our attitude is better, but thinking about Holmes has convinced me of at least one thing that arrogance and hubris are attached to a commitment to social change.

Question: In his 1960 Oliver Wendell Holmes Devise lecture, Francis Biddle (who once served as a secretary, the former term for a law clerk, to Holmes) took aim at the growing ranks of critics of his former boss. That criticism began in in earnest in 1941. By 1945 it was so strong that the American Bar Journal published an article by Ben Palmer (a prolific Minneapolis corporate lawyer) titled Hobbes, Holmes and Hitler. A more judicious, but nonetheless highly critical, portrait of Holmes was painted by Professor Albert Alschuler in his book Law Without Values: The Life, Work, and Legacy of Justice Holmes (2002). And that criticism continues today on various fronts. In your opinion, is any of the harsh criticism warranted?

Wells: In 2002, I wrote a review of Professor Alschulers book; it was titled Reinventing Holmes: The Hidden, Inner, Life of a Cynical, Ambitious, Detached Old Judge without Values. As the title suggests, I do not think that Alschulers negative assessment of Holmes is fair. His book is one of a number of works that distort Holmes record by cherry-picking quotes and discussing his worst opinions. Nevertheless, I do concede that there is a dark side to Holmes, especially in his later years.

The question is whether this dark side constitutes a real defect in character. What exactly were his crimes? In 50 years on the bench he wrote a few bad opinions opinions that are bad in the sense that, 100 years later, we strongly disapprove of them. I wonder if Alschuler or any of the others could do better. I am pretty sure I could not.

Question: Ralph Waldo Emerson (philosopher, poet, essayist, lecturer and leader of a transcendentalist movement) receives a good dollop of attention in your treatment of Holmes. Tell us how you think he influenced the justice.

Wells: Holmes first read Emerson in his early teens. In his later years, he would say that it was Emerson who had stood the test of time. Emersons influence was important because it shaped the way in which Holmes thought about the world. We can see this clearly if we contrast Emersons views with those of the British empiricists. The empiricists thought of human beings as observers. They equated experience with the passive reception of sense data. Emerson, on the other hand, thought of the natural world as a teacher. It interacted with human spirits, teaching them not just about the characteristics of a physical world but also about the meaning of a greater, transcendent world. Experience, he thought, was a relationship between himself and a larger world of which he was a part. This difference affected Holmes understanding of law in many ways. The British empiricists, for example, thought that experience taught only the facts. For Emerson and Holmes, it taught not only facts but also values. We should learn from our experience not just how to do things but also what is worth doing. This is an especially important insight for one who is studying law. Note, for example, how this larger conception of experience enlightens Holmes famous phrase The life of the lawhas not been logic: it has been experience.

Question: You devote time and attention to a two-volume book Holmes read in 1897, written by Fridtjof Nansen, the Norwegian explorer, scientist, diplomat and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, and titled Farthest North: Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship FRAM, 1893-96 and of Fifteenth Months Sleigh Journey.

Can you give us a nutshell account of why this wild-eyed explorer caught Holmes and your attention?

Wells: It is obvious why Holmes liked it. At the turn of the century, a trip to the North Pole was the greatest possible adventure, and Holmes admired action and passion. Nansens trip was filled with insurmountable obstacles and seemingly certain death. I think Holmes saw this narrative as the ultimate expression of a life well lived. He also clearly identified with Nansens experience, thinking not only of his trials during the Civil War, but also of the rather grueling trip he took through the Alps with Leslie Stephen.

In his 1897 Brown University commencement speech, Holmes used Nansens book as a metaphor for his own life. In the speech, he compared the perils of Nansens journey with his own lonely struggle to understand the common law and the universe that it illuminated. Like Nansen, he saw his journey as a series of difficult challenges that required heroic efforts.

Question: The second half of your book makes ample use of the Brown commencement speech. All the chapter headings in Part Two come from lines in that speech. Apart from Max Lerners inclusion of it in his 1943 book on Holmes, that speech has received relatively little attention from Holmes scholars. What made you decide to focus on it?

Wells: When I first read the speech, I was struck by the fact that it so accurately described Holmes intellectual life. It is easy to overlook the fact that, from 1865 to 1880, Holmes spent virtually all his spare time studying law. Essentially, he was glued to a seat in the Social Law Library in Boston reading dusty legal texts and wondering what they said about the human condition. This was lonely work, and like Nansens trip to the pole, it was not accompanied by assurance of success. I wanted to emphasize this aspect of Holmes life, because it was so formative for him. If you ignore this period of his life, it is easy to suppose that Holmes was just one more well-bred, well-connected young man who was in the right place at the right time to make his mark on the world.

Question: On a chilly Friday in March of 1935, there was a service for Holmes at All Souls Unitarian Church, located at 16th and Harvard Streets NW in Washington, D.C. You fold Unitarianism into your biographical/jurisprudential account of Holmes. Please tell us more.

Wells: Someone in Washington once asked Fanny Holmes about their religious affiliation. She said that they were Unitarians, and added: In Boston, one has to be something and Unitarian is the least you can be. The Holmes were not joiners. They did not actively involve themselves in religious or social organizations. Nevertheless, as Fannys statement indicated, they were comfortable with the agnosticism of the more liberal wing of the Unitarian Church.

Question: For a variety of political reasons, it is hard to imagine that any modern president would nominate a jurist in the jurisprudential mold of Holmes to the Supreme Court. The public, you observe, has come to understand good judging in terms of political ideology. This is a tragedy. [But] Holmes reminds us there are alternatives namely, acting impartially. Absent that, we would confront a troubling prospect: With ten more years of ideological struggle, how much legitimacy will the Court retain?

If a Holmesian jurist were to be nominated and confirmed, would such a justice have any real allies on the Roberts court? Or would they be no more than an anomaly, without even a Justice Louis Brandeis to join in thoughtful dissent? Put another way: Are the days of a Holmesian jurist long past, both as nominee and justice?

Wells: Holmes placed law above politics without exception. As you know, he dissented in Northern Securities v. United States (1904) soon after he was appointed by Theodore Roosevelt. This was no small matter, as can be seen in a March 24, 1904 press account in The Citizen Republican:

The president is angry at Justice Holmes (for his) dissenting opinion in the Northern Securities case, and Mr. Roosevelt is not going to any great trouble to conceal his displeasure. The trouble with Justice Holmes was that he reached his conclusion with his own interpretation of the law, instead of deciding the question as Mr. Roosevelt wanted him to.

And Northern Securities was just the tip of the iceberg. Over and over again, he made decisions that he knew would be unpopular among those in power.

Of course, the situation is different now. The country is polarized and there is no one opinion that pleases the powers that be. But the basic lesson is the same putting law over politics would strengthen the Supreme Courts ability to fulfill its constitutional function. This notion has support among several of the justices, including Chief Justice John Roberts.

Unfortunately, there are countervailing factors. Bickering over abortion and gun rights has created a sense that law is irrelevant to constitutional decision-making. In addition, the court continues to make openly partisan decisions, inserting itself into the very heart of the electoral process by explicitly benefitting one party over the other. Bush v. Gore (2000) is an example, but there are others dealing with voting rights, campaign finance, etc. In each of these cases, the Supreme Court could have emphasized its neutrality by deferring to state courts or to the Congress. To make matters worse, the president unequivocally promised that he would make appointments that had been individually approved by one of his constituent groups. Obviously, these factors are very harmful to the credibility of the court.

Question: Thomas Jefferson wrote: We hold these truths to be self-evident. Holmes countered: No concrete proposition is self-evident, no matter how ready we may be to accept it. Do you think those two statements can be reconciled? If not, what does that tell us about Holmes grand view of things?

Wells: Holmes and the other pragmatists adopted Alexander Bains definition of belief as something upon which one was prepared to act. Looked at in this way, we understand that even Jefferson did not believe his self-evident proposition. Had Jefferson acted on it, he would have freed his slaves, but infamously he did not.

It is easy to assemble a number of positive qualities and say that we should all aspire to them. Perhaps, for example, it is self-evident that we should all eat healthy meals. But this statement does not tell us what a healthy meal is, nor does it do much to change unhealthy eating habits. It is not, in Holmes terms, a concrete proposition. Aspirations of this type have an obvious power to command acceptance, but acceptance does not always result in a commitment to act. When the Supreme Court decided Dred Scott v. Sandford (1856), for example, it simply overruled one of Jeffersons self-evident propositions.

Then again, there are times when what is aspirational becomes real. One example of this was a suit by Quock Walker, an enslaved African American who sued for his freedom. The suit was based on the Massachusetts state constitution, which had been adopted a year earlier. He relied on a 1780 provision, similar to the one in the Declaration of Independence, which provided: All men are born free and equal, and have certain natural, essential, and unalienable rights; among which may be reckoned the right of enjoying and defending their lives and liberties; that of acquiring, possessing, and protecting property; in fine, that of seeking and obtaining their safety and happiness.

Based on that provision and good lawyering, a jury found in Walkers favor, ending the custom of slavery in Massachusetts. In Commonwealth v. Jennison (1783), the states highest court agreed. For the Massachusetts court, the idea that all men are created equal was a concrete proposition that had consequences for legal decision-making. At the same time, we must recognize that as the proposition became more concrete, it also became more controversial and less self-evident.

Ron, I thank you for this opportunity to discuss my book on Holmes.

Posted in Featured, Book reviews/Ask the author

Recommended Citation: Ron Collins, Ask the author: Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes and the loneliness of original work, SCOTUSblog (Jul. 31, 2020, 10:20 AM), https://www.scotusblog.com/2020/07/ask-the-author-justice-oliver-wendell-holmes-and-the-loneliness-of-original-work/

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Ask the author: Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes and the loneliness of original work - SCOTUSblog

In the wake of the police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Rayshard Brooks, protesters have taken to the streets against the violence of policing and to make demands, including defunding policing.

That demand is gaining traction as organizers have ignited a new wave of interest in the abolition of prisons and policinga concept theorized mostly by Black women and femmes.

But this newfound hunger for abolition is accompanied by questions and concerns about how to implement abolition in practice. People wonder how society would hold people who commit violence accountable for their actions, and in particular, use sexual violence as an example.

One way abolitionists have confronted these questions is through the development of Transformative Justice (TJ) processes. These processes, which have roots in Indigenous practices, model a different set of skills and principles for approaching harmful and dangerous situations.

Abolitionists argue we should eliminate all forms of policing and incarceration, and instead fund life-giving, community-based social services. They understand that properly executing such services requires shifting values and resourcing the development of valuable relationship skills to give communities the tools they need to disrupt and intervene in patterns of harm. Thats where TJ comes in.

Abolition is not a new idea; its been theorized, practiced, and advocated for by Black feminists like Angela Davis, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and Rachel Herzing for decades. They argue the carceral state emphasizes individual acts of harm, labeling those who commit harm as criminals to justify dehumanization, isolation, and punishment.

As demonstrated by the violence of policing, as well as the demographics of incarcerated populations, this is a mechanism of control over the most marginalized in American society: Black and brown people, Indigenous people, and often those who are poor, trans, sex-working, and/or disabled.

Those same people are proposing ways to exist and solve problems outside of this violent system.

In other words, abolitionists identify the punishment bureaucracy as a source of harm itself. Leila Raven is a queer mama, prison abolitionist, and organizer with Decrim NY and Hacking//Hustling, who points out that a thousand people are killed by police every year, Black people are three times as likely to be killed as white people, and half of those killed are people with disabilities. Sexual assault is also the second most common form of police brutality, primarily used against Black women and women of color who are also frequently criminalized for the strategies that we use to survive.

A police car on fire. Illustration by Dan Nott on Instagram (Source: https://www.instagram.com/p/CBV0i3kD8bl/)

While the state is actively harming folks at the margins, transformative justice seeks to do the opposite.

According to Mia Mingus, a writer, educator, and community organizer for disability justice and transformative justice, the process is a political framework and approach for responding to violence, harm and abuse. At its most basic, it seeks to respond to violence without creating more violence and/or engaging in harm reduction to lessen the violence.

JeKendriaa fat, Black, disabled, non-binary femme who is the Executive Director of Collective Action for Safe Spaces (CASS)argues TJ necessitates an understanding that the carceral system does not actually protect or heal survivors, but rather thrusts [them] into cycles of harm and trauma.

Like other abolitionists, she points out that sexual harm is still so prevalent despite having carceral systems in place. Not only is sexual violence prevalent within the carceral system, but she says that most rapists are not actually incarcerated. Instead, many have prominent positions of power.

Erin Gar-Yun Andriamahefa is a queer, genderfluid, Malagasy, Chinese person, who volunteers with CASS. She describes TJ as a framework through which people can begin to understand and address why harm is happening, while emphasizing collective responsibility to seek accountability when it happens.

It is a humanizing process, she told Shadowproof, that equips us to move beyond shame and punishment to normalize navigating conflict, seeing it as a portal for accountability, transformation, and healing.

CASS facilitates the creation of such a portal to accountability, transformation, and healing. JeKendria describes the organization as a small grassroots group that trains and supports communities, workplaces, bars/restaurants, and collectives in building safer environments that address harassment and assault through an intersectional, anti-carceral lens.

By prioritizing the survivors consent, safety, and healing, TJ ensures that carceral culture and systems arent recreated within communities.

Transformative justice is not one type of response, explains Ejeris Dixon, Executive Director of Vision Change Win.

We use transformative justice depending on what has happened, Dixon told Shadowproof. This can mean accountability processes, ways that we protect and interrupt violence in the moment through de-escalation or bystander intervention, ways that we can support survivors to heal, and structures that we create for communities to address violence, harm, and emergencies outside of the carceral state.

On an individual level, JeKendria explains that survivors lead the process, explaining what they need to feel safe. On a larger community scale, they say it can look like creating consistent containers for people to engage in co-learning, co-processing, and co-conspiring around upholding principles of collective safety and wellness. Communities have to be ready to pause, to assess and be accountable, to [create] shared agreements, principles, and methods that facilitate safety for everyone.

To JeKendria, this internal processing and work is paramount in collectives that organize externally as well.

A common refrain about transformative justice and other alternatives to carcerality is that they would only work in a utopia, or that they have never been used effectively. Though TJ generally requires community buy-in and consent of all of those involved, its untrue that alternatives to state solutions are not being practiced.

Raven points out that trans and queer people of color, especially those who are sex working, disabled, and housing insecure, have always known that we could not rely on policing for safety, and so we experiment frequently with many other strategies to keep each other safe.

Many of these folks may not have known or used the terms transformative justice, Dixon adds. But if we ask folks what they worked on, we will hear these practices in their answers.

Apart from engaging in community accountability and TJ processes, other non-carceral responses to harm can look like shared housing models that provide safety and stability to people by helping them rapidly exit houselessness.

It can also look like public calls for consequences. In these instances, people use the strength and reach of their combined platforms in an attempt to impose consequences on powerful individuals, who will not take accountability for engaging in harm.

Abolitionists are keenly aware that some people who engage in abuse will continue their harmful behaviors. Thats why TJ practitioners still believe in boundaries and consequences.

JeKendria emphasizes that consequences should be a series of steps grounded in minimizing future harm, taking power away from the harm-doer, and increasing the survivors agency and ability to thrive. This is different from punishment because to punish someone is to dehumanize, villainize, and inflict more harm on someone.

She offered examples of consequences, including the harm doer moving out of a housing situation, stepping down from a job, making a statement to every group theyre a part of disclosing the harm they caused, taking a break from social spaces where the survivor is present, dispersing funds to the survivor or to survivor-centered work, moving to another city, and gathering a dedicated group of accountability partners.

These steps require acknowledgment of the harm, as well as intentional and explicit actions to rectify it. According to JeKendria, this is something that punishment does not and cannot accomplish.

Consequences for gendered violence dont naturally occur in a cis heteropatriarchal society, Raven told Shadowproof. We have to actively disrupt oppressive behaviors and create consequences to keep people safe.

To her, such consequences can include the removal of someone engaging in abuse from spaces where they have power or access.

Since many people who engage in abuse are able to continue harming others and avoid taking accountability by expanding their access to important positions on multiple platforms, it can be important to deplatform them on social media, magazines, podcasts, and other media.

But experimentation is still necessary, as are adequate resources, to attempt to refine and increase the capacity of these approaches.

JeKendria sees this as rigorous study and training to continuously evolve in collective understanding of community safety and accountabilityhealing spaces that are proactive and address ancestral traumaradical consent and Black queer feminist trainings as a requirement for entering a movement space (shoutout to BYP100!).

Abolitionists apply these frameworks to their own lives and organizing spaces. To make those spaces safer, abolitionists continually analyze the environments they create and the harm that is perpetuated within them.

By questioning the conditions, environments, and systems that have allowed the harm to happen, Andriamahefa says, we reveal the spectrum and connection between our individual behavior and experiences and larger oppressive systems, including and upheld by the carceral state.

Understanding everyone is capable of committing harm, abolitionists have had to reckon with harms committed by other self-described abolitionists.

JeKendria argues that this should be a wake-up call for us to investigate how often were perpetuating harm in our movement spaces, how often were ignoring the signs of survivors, how easy it is for us to evade accountability, and how some of us weaponize and manipulate each other with TJ language.

A tree and stream appear where a burned-out police car once was. Illustration by Dan Nott on Instagram (Source: https://www.instagram.com/p/CBV0i3kD8bl/)

Its not easy work, as it requires us to focus on killing the cop in our heads and owning when we commit harm or enable others to do so. As we begin to actualize a world without police and prisons, we have to do the work to build communities of trust, with infrastructures of care to prevent the resurgence of carcerality as a solution.

Right now, organizers in New York City are confronting harm in their movement spaces. Lily Mishra, a Brooklyn-based organizer, is part of several organizing collectives in NYC. In response to abuse within one of her collectives, she and others entered a TJ process. (Shadowproof is using a pseudonym for Lily to protect the identity of those involved in the TJ process).

One of the difficult things, she says, is that were all at different points of personal reflection regarding everything that occurred. This makes an already difficult problem even harder, because people are going through their individual processes while realizing there were deeper structural issues that led to..how we collectively enabled abuse.

As Mishra notes, entering a transformative justice process is the beginning of a long journeya journey that takes commitments and consensus. Though these commitments are not always the most comfortable because of differences of opinion, theyre necessary when a group is prioritizing deep collective reflection. She says that this is particularly important in abolitionist collectives, where its important to organize at the scale of interpersonal relationships as well as institutional ones.

As such, its important to center survivors where they hadnt been centered before, such as within this particular collective. If not, the TJ process will not be a vehicle through which we learn how to transform that harm into vigilance and care, says Mishra.

Raven shared that after a recent experience of abuse and assault, she engaged in a process of community accountability with her abuser and their community.

I found myself revictimized and abused all over again by the community of the person who harmed me, and so I turned instead to the broader community to call on this group to be accountable by dissolving their collective and shifting resources toward Black-led abolitionist anti-violence work, Raven shared.

Something that I learned through this process, that now seems obvious, is that people who rape and abuse others are often surrounded by people who enable them.

Raven reiterates that despite the traumatic experience, she is hopeful that we can implement community accountability and TJ processes where we all acknowledge our role in causing harm, echoing JeKendria comments.

Dixon shared that one of the most important things to note is that TJ builds into the framework mechanisms through which we can support people who are navigating intense forms of violence. They note that TJ is as much about creating cultures of consent as it is about encouraging people to hold their friends and loved ones accountable, even when it is them who have committed sexual violence.

Im in a process right now holding a dear friend accountable, says Dixon, and it is both heartwrenching, challenging, and hope-creating.

Harm exists and will continue to exist. But the frameworks communities can use to address that harm are not static and can be improved. Transformative justice provides space to explore and react to individual situations as they arise.

We can use [transformative justice] to interrogate which systems need to be abolished and replaced in order for everyone to have their basic needs fully met, JeKendria said, and to grow communities that are communal, interdependent, and boldly accountable to each other.

See the original post:

How Transformative Justice Can Address Harm Without Police - Shadowproof

The police killing of George Floyd, and the protest movement that emerged from it, has reinvigorated a national conversation around reinventing criminal justice policy in the United States.

At the same time, reports that violent crime is rising in many US cities have resurrected talk of the much-disputed Ferguson effect, a theory put forward by law enforcement professionals, and some researchers, who argued that police slowdowns in the wake of the first wave of Black Lives Matter protests resulted in elevated rates of violent crime. President Donald Trump is trying to weaponise this narrative, paired with images of federal officers clashing with protesters in the streets of Portland, to wage a 1968-style backlash election campaign.

People who want to mobilise a lock-them-up style of either policing or prosecution have tried to weaponise those short-term increases, says James Forman Jr., professor of law at Yale Law School. Criminologists will say you have to be very, very cautious about short-term movement [in crime statistics]. We don't know whether or not what we're seeing right now [with violent crime increasing] is going to sustain itself. But the fact is, it's here and people are talking about it.

In 2018, Forman won the Pulitzer Prize in nonfiction for his book Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America. Drawing on his experience as a public defender in Washington, DC, he traced the emergence of anti-crime politics in late 20th century Black communities. Forman showed how newly empowered Black politicians fought for policies they believed would protect and uplift Black Americans, but inadvertently contributed to mass incarceration.

CityMetric recently caught up with Forman to discuss crime trends, where he sees reason for hope in this moment and how the Black political classs attitude toward crime and punishment has shifted since the latter part of the 20th century.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

There is talk right now about a resurgence of crime and violence in American cities. We saw similar, more localised concerns after the initial 2015 Black Lives Matter protests in Ferguson and Baltimore. Do you fear this could reinvigorate the kind of politics you describe in your book among segments of the Black community and political class?

I fear that it could be reinvigorated nationally and also in the Black political class. Look at the political conversations that are happening in Atlanta right now, for example, a city that also has seen a short-term uptick in crime as it is a site of a lot of protests about George Floyd and Breonna Taylor on the national level, as well as Rayshard Brooks and Ahmaud Arbery more locally in Georgia.

I think that you can already see in some of the language of the local elected officials this idea that we have to be very careful about pulling back. [They are saying] while the protesters may make some valid points, we can't risk returning to the 80s and 90s. Those decades really traumatised the United States, and particularly traumatised Black communities. There's a deep fear about returning to the levels of the violence that we saw in the crack years.

You write a lot about class divides among Black Americans, where middle income and elite Black people don't suffer as much from extremely punitive policies. They also have closer ties to the politicians who are creating these policies. There are very specific groups of people, even in marginalised communities, whose voices are heard. As a result of these dynamics, you write about Black politicians fighting for things like mandatory minimum prison sentences or against decriminalising marijuana. Is there still that disconnect between those who suffer the most from criminal justice policies and those who are actually heard in political discourse?

Let me just say a caveat, that when we talk about class divisions in the Black community it's important to hold two truths in our head at the same time. Bruce Western and others have shown the way in which class, educational status, income can dramatically reduce the likelihood of being hardest hit by the criminal system namely incarcerated. Middle class and upper middle class Black people get some measure of protection. It's also true at the same time that Black people of all classes are worse off relative to their class counterparts in the white community.

One area where class is least protective is policing and police stops. The police do not know how many degrees you have. They don't know how much money you have in your bank account. I want to be very clear that in making this point about class, I'm not making the argument that race or racism don't matter in this context.

In terms of how it plays out now, I see an awareness that has developed in the Black community in the last 10 years or so about how deeply racist the criminal justice system has become. Twenty or 30 years ago they had a consciousness, but there's levels of understanding. Many of the people I write about in the book wanted to promote the interests of the Black community. They weren't motivated by indifference or callousness. When presented with mounting evidence of how awful this system has been in Black lives, they're reconsidering and recalibrating.

Lots of former elected officials have said to me some version of I didn't know at the time and I appreciate that you showed us in our full complexity. I appreciate that you showed the pressures we were under. If I had known then what I know now, maybe I would have been less quick to go along with some of these harsh measures.

The second thing that has affected the Black political class has been the emerging movements, led by Black people in particular and led by young people. They not only educated leaders, but pressured them and made them understand that there is a political cost. If you're not moved by the moral argument, then you'll be moved by the political argument. You'll be moved by the people protesting outside the office of District Attorney Jackie Lacey in Los Angeles, for example, where Black Lives Matter LA has held, I believe, a year of consecutive protests against a Black district attorney who has had really some of the worst practices.

From what I can tell, she's been pressured by the movement to change some of her positions on important issues like prosecution of low-level drug offenders, for example, and the aggressiveness with which she prosecutes police officers for acts of violence.

What do you make of the calls to defend or even abolish the police?

What I find so compelling about abolition, initially in the prison context and extended to the police as well, is that it shifts the conversation and forces us to go through experiments in which we imagine what it would take to build that world. I think that exercise is very important, because it pushes us further than we are naturally inclined to go. Cultivating a broader imagination is an incredibly important part of this work, because as you know from my book, often it was lack of imagination that caused people to fall back on [punitive policies].

That's what caused D.C. Councilmember David Clarke to call the police rather than public health experts when he was overwhelmed with letters about heroin addicts in public space. He was anti-drug war, but he couldn't imagine responding to a call for help with heroin addicts with anything other than police. That's a very common move from even really good and progressive people.

People who are for defunding, for abolition, are absolutely right about reinvesting that money into alternative structures that support communities. But the reinvestment part doesn't follow naturally from the terms. We might want to come up with a term that captures the new stuff we want to do. I think that's particularly important because one of the reasons Black communities have ended up supporting more police is that Black communities have always wanted their fair share of the resources.

Then, the evidence suggests the United States has too many police officers doing prophylactic, preventative, or stop-and-frisk style policing. The style of policing that leads to district level harassment, pulling people over for no reason. But we have too little investment in the parts of police departments that investigate unsolved crimes. I'm talking about the investigator or the detective who comes to your house after there's been a robbery, an assault, a rape, or homicide.

As compared to European countries, in the United States we actually underinvest in those parts of our police departments. Jill Leovys book Ghettoside shows this in dramatic detail. She describes an LAPD that's stopping and frisking Black drivers wantonly and yet the homicide detectives are still relying on a fax machine and the fax machine is broken. They have to go with their own money to Staples to buy a printer. Meanwhile, other aspects of the department are kitted out in this ridiculous riot gear that makes them look like they're in Fallujah.

That under investment is particularly damaging to Black communities because we're disproportionately victimised by crime. Because of racism and this allocation of resources, the police are less likely to respond in Black communities. The kids I used to work with in the charter schools in DC, we talk about no snitching, but one of the reasons they would never call the police after they'd been victimised by crime is they would say, They're not even going to come. You're wasting time.

I did a Q&A with Jill Leovy too and her argument is one I've struggled to articulate in our present moment. She argues the state doesn't have a monopoly on violence in low-income Black neighbourhoods, because investigations of violence are deemphasised and crime victims or their loved ones often take retribution into their own hands. But right now, establishing or preserving the state's monopoly on violence isn't an appealing talking point.

Yes, this is another thing nobody's talking about. Whatever we're going to do instead of the police has to be accountable to the public. The best, most direct way to have accountability is to have the individuals be public employees. As long as we have 300 million guns in this country at least some of those state employees are going to themselves be armed. It's unreasonable to ask them to do the job without it. Not as many need to be armed as are armed now, but some of them need to be. But they can't be hiding behind union contracts or civil service protections which make it impossible to remove even the worst performing, most abusive officers.

We can not call them police if we want to. That's semantic, but maybe symbolism matters. But those people have to be state employees. They can work with community-based nonprofits, but there are also communities that don't have as robust of a nonprofit network, and they deserve protection too. These [community] groups have to be accountable to the state and, when they don't exist, the state has to be there.

Progressives get all the points I just made when it's applied to education. The notion that things be public and accountable to the state is understood when it comes to schools. It's exactly why so many people on the left are opposed to charter schools, because they say they don't have public accountability. They want these things to be a state function. But this point about the difficulty in removing this entirely from the hands of the state is, I think, one that liberals and progressives understand from other contexts.

Jake Blumgart is a staff writer at CityMetric.

More:

How the rise of anti-crime politics caused lasting harm to Black Americans - CityMetric

The same thoughts keep running through his mind. That guy sitting in his cell wondering if hes going to outlive his sentence, all the amends he made or wants to makewill he get to see that through? Will he get to be like me and the numerous other people who are formerly incarcerated and are doing great things in the community right now? I think about them and that my voice has to be in advocacy for them.

B

eyond the urgency of the San Quentin COVID outbreak, Lockhearts day-to-day work at Planting Justice is about the longterm project of prison abolition, which means working with people to build healthier communities. The definition of that is manifold. It means helping formerly incarcerated people get on their feet through green jobs at Planting Justice, awakening them to a new sense of purpose by building raised flower beds for clients and tending to plants at the organizations nursery and farm. It means teaching about sustainability and food justice in public school classrooms, juvenile detention centers, jails and prisons. It means helping people who live in food deserts start urban gardens. It means handing out free kale smoothies at Castlemont High School during a time when many are going hungry because of the pandemic-induced recession.

If we go in and teach these people how to grow their own food and how to be sustainablethe Black Panther Party got it right, Lockheart says. With no food and no options, [people are] gonna go get it how they can. And unfortunately, thats crime. And crime equals prison. We wanna abolish the prisons, we wanna abolish all these systems, but we first have to plant the seeds of love, trust and sustainability.

Lockheart and his fellow reentry coordinator Diane Williams sow those seeds by helping their colleagues get acclimated to life outside of prison, sometimes in ways people whove never been incarcerated may take for granted. Planting Justice gives former residents, as formerly incarcerated people are called there, clothing and food stipends; Lockheart and Williams help them navigate bureaucratic tasks such as reinstating a drivers license after a DUI. They offer emotional support too. Meditation circles are as much a part of the workday as pulling weeds and watering strawberries and squashes.

Really its believing in them and whatever they bring to the table thats positive, encourage that, says Williams, who brings 40 years of social work and substance-abuse counseling experience to Planting Justice. So much stuff that happened to us as a little kids, we keep recycling it as adults until we process it and move on. So were just helping each other move on here.

Read more from the original source:

Planting Justice's Prison Abolition Work Starts at the Root - KQED

InYourArea Community

Exeter Quakers are hosting a socially distanced peace vigil on Sunday, August 9, from 10:45am until 11:15am, at the Exeter Peace Tree in Southernhay

A service marking 75 years since the second atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki is being held in Exeter, Devon.

Exeter Quakers are hosting a socially distanced peace vigil on Sunday, August 9, from 10:45am until 11:15am.

The vigil will be held at the Exeter Peace Tree in Southernhay, opposite the United Reform Church, exactly 75 years since the second atomic bomb was dropped on the Japanese city.

The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9 1945 killed up to a quarter of a million people, half of them instantly, leaving shadows of some people etched on the ground.

A spokesperson from the Exeter Quakers said: Ever since they have been a reminder of the immorality of nuclear weapons.

The vigil will take place in front of the Japanese Cherry Tree planted by the Lord Mayor of Exeter in February 2005 to mark Exeter joining mayors of towns and cities around the world, including 90 in the UK, to declare a commitment to work for a nuclear free world.

The organisation, based in Hiroshima, declares: We pledge to make every effort to create an inter-city solidarity, transcending national boundaries and ideological differences, in order to achieve the total abolition of nuclear weapons and avert the recurrence of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki tragedies.

The spokesperson added: As Quakers we hold working for peace as one of our core testimonies and have been prominent in the peace movement in Britain and around the world.

The event will be introduced by Exeter Quaker Laura Conyngham, who will recall her powerful visit to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

She said: While I was at the tomb, a group of citizens asked me to lay a bouquet for a photograph to illustrate a guidebook for tourists. I felt utterly guilty.

For further information contact Ian Martin on 07980 301058 or Laura Conyngham on 01363 773000.

See the latest news, information, conversations and much more, all tailored to your neighbourhood, in your InYourArea live feed here.

Read the original here:

Exeter vigil will mark 75th anniversary of Hiroshima bomb - In Your Area

Although there was a demonstration Saturday in the historic Woodstock Square calling for the abolition of ICE, it might have looked a little different than previous protests and rallies that have been held earlier this year.

People still held signs, saying "America Runs on Immigrants," "Humans, not Aliens" and demanding the end of McHenry County's contract with ICE.

However, protest organizer Tony Bradburn said Saturday's event was a little less "rah-rah" and more about learning and growing.

"ICE is not just about the borders," Bradburn said. "ICE is right here in McHenry County."

Through its agreement with the U.S. Marshals Service, McHenry County earns $95 a day for each ICE detainee held at the McHenry County Jail.

Sponsoring organizations of Saturday's protest included Activists for Racial Equity (Crystal Lake and Surrounding Communities), Elgin in Solidarity with Black Lives, Standing up Against Racism (Woodstock), McHenry Direct Action, Warp Corps of Woodstock and Tree of Life Unitarian Universalist: Social Justice.

"We want to make sure that people know about the stories of the voiceless," Bradburn said.

One of the stories told by Bradburn, submitted by someone before the rally, was about someone who's father was deported in 2013, when they were 10.

This person had to celebrate their quinceanera and graduation without their dad.

Several other people told stories at Saturday's rally, documenting tales of those who were afraid to get domestic violence help because they were undocumented, of a 15-year-old who spent their first Christmas in the U.S. in a detention center, and one person who said it would cost them $10,000 to become documented.

Luis Aguilar, a teacher in McHenry High School District 156, said a lot of his students are Hispanic, and some of them are DACA recipients, or DREAMers, who commit to work, school or the armed forces.

When he tells students there's an ICE detention center in Woodstock, he can see the fear reflect off their eyes, Aguilar told attendees.

"We must recognize that any profit made off of that detention center is made off of human misery," he said.

Amanda Garcia, an immigration lawyer from Crystal Lake, said people do not have a good impression of a community that supports an ICE detention facility.

Garcia spent 18 months working in McHenry County Jail, visiting there twice a week to provide legal orientations to those who did not have immigration attorneys.

When taking their information down, Garcia would ask where they lived before they were detained," she said.

"McHenry, Woodstock, Crystal Lake, Elgin, Carpentersville. They would tell me all the little towns they came from, and I knew where they were because that's where I go grocery shopping. That's where I live. That's where I come to spend the Saturday," Garcia said. "So these are real people in our community."

Adi Jimenez, of Woodstock, said she wanted to support immigrants in the community.

"I know a lot of people who are affected by this," she said. "They're afraid to go out and stand up for themselves because they don't know what's going to happen."

This is why Jimenez said she wants to use her privilege from being born in the U.S. to stand up for people.

" [ICE] is attacking a lot of people that don't really deserve to be targeted," she said. "There are a lot of children right now that are locked up in cages without their family members without their parents. They're just all alone and It's just really sad."

Woodstock resident Mariam Figueroa held a sign with the Bible verse Isaiah 1:17 written on it, which read "Learn to do right, speak justice defend the oppressed."

"This verse is so significant for why it's important to abolish ICE," she said. "People are coming, children, mothers without protection. They're seeking asylum, but they're turned away. But to be Christ-like, to be a Christian, means to help them.

"To be a real Christian, you need to really love and embrace everyone, even if they're different than you," Figueroa said. "Even if you're not a Christian, to love everyone is essential."

Haidy Perez, from Crystal Lake, said she has a lot of family who are immigrants and DACA recipients.

"ICE is something our country really doesn't benefit from anymore," Perez said. "If anything, I would say it is more fear-mongering than it is protecting us."

Perez said her father, although he is in the U.S. legally, has still gotten questions about his background and been detained.

"We're a nation of immigrants," she said. "Everyone comes from different backgrounds. I just feel like ICE has targeted my community and has really struck fear into the hearts of innocent people."

A resolution to cancel the intergovernmental agreement between McHenry County and ICE is on the agenda of the next Law and Government Committee meeting for the McHenry County Board, at 8:30 a.m. Tuesday.

At the event, attendees were encouraged to call members of the committee to encourage them to end the contract, and were given sheets of paper with their contact information.

Lillian Purich, with McHenry Direct Action, was disappointed with the response she got when she called McHenry County Board Member Bob Nowak.

She said when he picked up, he said: "What the [expletive] is going on?"

"Then I went to start talking and he just hung up," Purich said. "It's just not what I was expecting. You'd think if someone was on the board they'd be a bit more welcoming with a phone call from someone from the public."

Requests for comment from Nowak were not returned.

Organizers told people to be respectful, and only call board members from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m, Purich said.

She's not discouraged, however, adding that it just makes her want to call more.

"It's horrible that families are being torn apart from each other," Purich said.

View post:

Locals call for end to ICE contract with McHenry County - Northwest Herald

ABritish police officer uses a Taser during training. Photo:Finnbarr Webster / Alamy Live News

Taser use by British police forces in Manchester and London has increased rapidly, posing a growing threat to life, a new report published by Resistance Lab warns.

The report details how police use of the electric stun guns has increased by more than 500 percent in England and Wales over the last ten years, with particular focus on Manchester and London. Using police use of force statistics from the Home Office, the report states that the Metropolitan Polices use of Tasers increased by 49 percent in the last year, while use by Greater Manchester Police increased by 73 percent. Both figures are higher than the national average of 39 percent. In Greater Manchester, the number of Taser incidents rose from 832 in 2017/18 to 1,442 incidents in 2018/19. Greater Manchester also had the second-highest use rate of Tasers of any police force in England and Wales, other than the Met.

Resistance Lab, a Manchester-based group of academics and activists working to confront state violence, warns that this increase in Taser use poses a growing threat to life. This is in part due to the risk of cardiac complications associated with the weapon.

Police use of Tasers also disproportionally affects Black people. According to Home Office stats, highlighted by the report, Black people are four times more likely to be Tasered by police than white people.

The report comes at a time when increased scrutiny has been placed on police treatment of Black people following the death of George Floyd in the US. The pandemic has also resulted in an increased use of police force. The number of stop and searches has risen dramatically during the pandemic, and BAME people are more likely to be fined under coronavirus legislation than white people.

In June, rapper Wretch32 shared a video on Twitter of his 62-year-old father, Millard Scott, being Tasered by police in his home. The video was widely circulated at the time, drawing criticism for the perceived unnecessary use of a weapon. In an interview with ITV News, Scott said: Im lucky to be alive.

The only people who have invaded our space are the Metropolitan Police, he continued. The only people who seem to ignore the guidelines put out there are the Metropolitan Police. It seems at this moment in time we are being singled out and targeted.

Dr. Kerry Pimblott, author of the study and lecturer in international history at the University of Manchester, told VICE News: Since the introduction of the weapon in 2003, at least 18 people have died following Taser usage by police and many more have sustained serious injury and lasting trauma. These individuals and their families have, in many cases, fought protracted battles to secure justice and to alert the wider public to the very real threat to life that these weapons pose in the hands of police.

Unfortunately, an examination of the Home Offices own use of force data indicates that these warnings have not been heard, she continued. Tasers are being rolled out to more and more frontline officers around the country and their use is becoming increasingly routinised.

Resistance Lab states that more cases in which members of the public suffer serious injury or death from Tasers are to be expected, and is calling for the abolition of the weapon.

VICE News contacted the Metropolitan Police. A spokesperson said: Taser is a vital tool in keeping safe both members of the public and police officers. Officers undergo rigorous training before they are allowed to use Taser and are required to pass an annual refresher course to ensure they remain competent in its use.

Officers know and expect to be held to account for their actions. We welcome scrutiny around the use of Taser, and examine our processes regularly to ensure it is being used in an appropriate manner. We also work close [sic] with policing nationally to discuss and take forward matters that have an impact on policing across the UK and link in with our dedicated firearms and Taser independent advisory group members for their valuable help and guidance. We always take concerns about disproportionality seriously and this forms part of our regular scrutiny within the Met around the use of Taser.

Looking closely at London Taser data from the Home Office reveals many incidents in which Tasers were deployed by police officers who had not received official training. According to Gavin Haynes, an independent researcher of policing, a breakdown of the stats reveals 98,017 incidents where Tasers were used by officers who were not recorded as being Taser trained. This is larger than the number of officers who were recorded as Taser trained who used the weapon (63,002 cases). Out of those 63,002 incidents, 16,816 occurred when officers were not recorded to be carrying the weapon while on duty.

VICE News also contacted Greater Manchester Police for comment but had not received a response at the time of publishing.

Read this article:

Vast Increase in Police Taser Use a Threat to Life, Report Warns - VICE

By now, almost everyone recognizes that large gatherings in confined, indoor spaces risk spreading the Coronavirus pandemic. Nonetheless, 23 states are currently conducting or planning to soon conduct in-person bar exams for new applicants for licenses to practice law. Even with precautions, putting hundreds of people in indoor spaces together for many hours at a time creates serious risks of exacerbating the pandemic.

Admittedly, the danger is smaller because most bar exam takers are young and healthy. However, there are still some older bar applicants, such as lawyers moving from one state to another, who need to be licensed in their new homes. And, of course, some young exam takers have health conditions or weakened immune systems, that make them especially vulnerable, as well. In addition, exam takers could potentially spread the disease to others, including some who are older or otherwise more vulnerable to Covid.

I am not one to say that all seriously risky activities should be avoided so long as the pandemic continues. There is, I think, a strong case for moving forward with those that create enormous benefits that cannot be achieved in another way. That, however, is not true of the bar exam, where there is the obvious alternative of "diploma privilege"giving bar cards to anyone who has graduated from an accredited law school. Four states Utah, Washington, Oregon, and Louisiana, have adopted this approach in various forms, joining the state of Wisconsin, which has had it for in-state law schools for years. Other states should follow this example.

The standard argument against diploma privilege is that the bar exam requirement is needed to protect consumers from incompetent lawyers. But there is no evidence that bar exams actually achieve that goal, as opposed to serving as a barrier to entry that protects incumbents in the profession from competition. The quality of legal services in Wisconsin has not suffered from its longstanding diploma privilege policy. Bar records indicate that attorneys in that state have disciplinary records similar to those in other states.

Such results are not surprising. The truth is that the bar exam is a test of arcane memorization, not a test of whether the applicant is likely to be a good attorney. That's why, as my co-blogger Orin Kerr puts it, "when it [the exam] is over you can forget everything you just learned."

For that reason, I have long advocated the abolition of bar exams, most recently here:

The reason why you can "forget everything" immediately after the exam is that very little of the material on the exam is actually needed to practice law. It's a massive memorization test that functions as a barrier to entry, not a genuine test of professional competence. That strengthens the case for my view that the bar exam should simply be abolished.

My general view on bar exams is that they should be abolished, or at least that you should not be required to pass one in order to practice law. If passing the exam really is an indication of superior or at least adequate legal skills, then clients will choose to hire lawyers who have passed the exam even if passage isn't required to be a member of the bar. Even if a mandatory bar exam really is necessary, it certainly should not be administered by state bar associations, which have an obvious interest in reducing the number of people who are allowed to join the profession, so as to minimize competition for their existing members.

Defenders of bar exams argue that consumers would otherwise have little or no way to tell whether a given lawyer is competent or not. But, in reality, there are many other signals to determine that. Often, clients hire not a specific lawyer, but a firm. In that event, the firm's reputation is a signal of quality, and firms have an incentive to protect that reputation by avoiding the hiring of incompetents. Even with solo practitioners, quality can be discerned by consulting past clients, and a variety of other mechanisms.

Legal scholar Gillian Hadfield has an excellent article making the case that barriers to information can be further reduced by eliminating prohibitions on the corporate practice of law. If corporations were allowed to provide basic legal servicesas they currently do with many other professional services, such as accountingthat would reduce cost and also make it easier to signal quality. When you hire H&R Block to do your taxes, you are relying on the overall reputation of the firm, not on that of the specific person who handles your case. Legal services can work similarly.

These methods are not perfect. But they are likely to be far better than relying on bar exam passage as a signal of quality, since the latter is really just a test of memorization.

One possible alternative to "diploma privilege" is simply postponing bar exams, as some states have done. But that prevents thousands of recent law graduates from earning an income in the meantimeand blocks clients from using their services. If states are unwilling to forego the bar exam entirely, they should at least provide temporary diploma privilege for a period of, say, three years, by which time the pandemic is likely to be over, and bar exams can be safely administered.

Online bar exams are another possible solution. The obvious objection to them is that it is extremely difficult to prevent cheating on an online "closed book" exam. It may well be impossible to ensure that a test-taker doesn't have study guides or reference books with her as she takes the exam. That doesn't bother me too much, because I believe bar exams are a sham credential in any case. But even I recognize there is some unfairness in a format that rewards those most willing to cheat. In addition, not everyone has access to software and internet connections that are likely to be reliable through many hours of exam taking.

On balance, online exams seem preferable to in-person ones, or to keeping law school graduates in limbo until in-person exams become safer. But diploma privilege is a better approach than either.

For those states that stubbornly insist on holding in-person exams during a pandemic, I am tempted to revive my "modest proposal" for bar exam reform (first developed many years ago):

Members of bar exam boards and presidents and other high officials of state bar associations should be required to take and pass the bar exam every year by getting the same passing score that they require of ordinary test takers. Any who fail to pass should be immediately dismissed from their positions. And they should be barred from ever holding those positions again untilyou guessed itthey take and pass the exam.

After all, if the bar exam covers material that any practicing lawyer should know, then surely the lawyers who lead the state bar and administer the bar exam system itself should be required to know it. If they don't, how can they possibly be qualified for the offices they hold? Surely it's no excuse to say that they knew it back when they themselves took the test, but have since forgotten. How could any client rely on a lawyer who is ignorant of basic professional knowledge, even if he may have known it years ago?

Of course, few if any bar exam officials or state bar leaders could pass the bar exam without extensive additional study (some might fail even with it). This material isn't on the exam because you can't be a competent lawyer if you don't know it. It's there so as to make it more difficult to pass, thereby diminishing competition for current bar association members..

My proposed reform wouldn't fully solve this problem. But it could greatly diminish it. If bar exam board members and bar association leaders were required to take and pass the exam every year, they would have strong incentives to reduce the amount of petty trivia that is tested. After all, anything they include on the exam is something they themselves will have to memorize! As prominent practicing lawyers, however, they presumably are already familiar with those laws that are so basic that any attorney has to know them; by limiting the exam to those rules, they can minimize their own preparation time. In this way, the material tested on bar exams might be limited to the relatively narrow range of legal rules that the average practicing lawyer really does need to know.

If the knowledge tested on bar exams is so important that we must ensure all practicing lawyers know iteven at the risk of exacerbating a deadly pandemicthen surely that principle applies with extra force to prominent leaders of the legal profession, particularly those responsible for setting professional standards for others. By this reasoning, they should have to take the exam on the same terms as they impose on new bar applicants. If that means taking an in-person exam during a pandemic, then so be it!

On balance, however, I will not insist on this idea, so long as the pandemic continues. I recognize that many bar association leaders are likely to be at special risk, due to age and health conditions. The "modest proposal" might be a useful reform under normal conditions. But it would be wrong to impose it now.

We should not require bar leaders to risk their lives and health for no good reason. But they, in turn, should not impose such risks on others.

Finally, critics may argue that, as a law professor, I have a self-interest in promoting "diploma privilege." My brief response is that I have also long advocated abolishing or at least reducing the requirement that all lawyers attend ABA-accredited law schools, as well. I have also long advocated a variety of other reforms that would have the effect of reducing the demand for law school education and legal services generallymost notably reducing the number and complexity of laws. I don't claim diploma privilege is the optimal regulatory regime, merely that it's superior to system under which lawyers are required to both have a diploma and pass a worthless bar exam.

Original post:

The Case for Replacing the Bar Exam With "Diploma Privilege" - Reason

Anti-monarchy group, Republic, have referred the Royal Foundation to the Charity Commission, claiming money given to Prince Harry and Meghan Markle's charity endeavours was an "inappropriate use of charitable funds". The Duke of Sussex's response to the accusation was said to have "made more of this story than necessarily warranted".ITV Royal Rota podcast hosts Chris Ship and Lizzie Robinson noted the difference in responses between the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and the Duke and Duchess of Sussex.

A spokesperson for Kate and William said: "The grants made to Sussex Royal were to support the charitable work of The Duke and Duchess of Sussex.

They were fully in line with governance requirements and were reported transparently.

Prince Harry issued a significantly longer response through his legal team.

Ms Robinson said that they may have felt that due to the nature of the accusations they wanted to provide a further comment.

READ MORE:Camilla, Duchess' hidden message in 'specially made' outfit revealed

She told listeners: "A lot of people have said the response made more of this story than necessarily warranted.

"The Royal Foundation's had two lines. That deals with it, and it goes away.

"But by putting out paragraph after paragraph, there is much more that can then be reported and said about this.

"So it's sort of adding fuel to the fire."

Excerpts from Harry's statement include saying it was "deeply offensive to see false claims made about the Duke of Sussex and his charitable work".

They continued: "It is both defamatory and insulting to all the outstanding organisations and people he partnered with.

"To suggest otherwise in unequivocally wrong and will be acted on accordingly with the weight of the law."

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Mr Ship said: "Republic isn't going to put out reports or press releases that support the monarchy.

"It's whole purpose is for the abolition of the monarchy, I don't know why Harry was so surprised about that.

"It is the job of pressure groups to create publicity around their cause, and they have successfully done that. Or you could say Harry has successfully done that."

A legal letter will be issued to Republic in due course.

The Charity Commission put out a statement saying they have not made any determination of wrongdoing.

Go here to read the rest:

Prince Harry warned rash action will 'add fuel to fire' after Duke 'surprised' by backlash - Express

The news comes soon after the Governments recent pledge to invest 1.7 billion into repairing local roads and speeding up work on major road networks.

The 60mphlimit in roadworks is likely to have the biggest impact in areas where smart motorways are being introduced. New safety measures, including the abolition of dynamic hard shoulder sections and an increase in the number of Highways England traffic officer patrols, have been introduced on smart motorways in response to concerns over their safety.

Jim OSullivan, chief executive of Highways England, said: All of our research shows that road users benefit from 60mph limits in roadworks. They have shorter journey times and feel safe.

Road users understand that roadworks are necessary, but they're frustrated by them. So testing 60mph has been about challenging the norm while ensuring the safety of our people working out there and those using our roads.

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Smart motorways are a response to increasing congestion on UK motorways; they use cameras and remotely-controlled speed limit signs to control the flow of traffic, and many allow cars to be driven on the hard shoulder either all or some of the time.

The thinking behind them is toadd an extra 33% of capacity to our motorway network at a fraction of the cost in money and to the environment of physically adding another lane to every stretch of motorway. They also improve traffic flow, helping to compensate for the 2 billion a year that the UKs economy losesdue to congestion caused by long-term underinvestment in roads and increased traffic volume.

Go here to see the original:

Motorway roadworks speed limit raised to 60mph - What Car?

I've been down too many years. I've been raped and assaulted. This ain't nothing new, C Jay Smith told her attorneys in March of 2019. Smith, a Black transgender woman currently incarcerated at San Quentin Prison, has served over two decades behind barsalways among men. She would have been eligible for parole in 2023, but now faces up to 10 extra years behind bars, for what she says were infractions correctional officers gave her unfairly, as a form of retaliation for coming forward about being severely and consistently harassed and sexually assaulted by fellow prisoners. Now, shes suing California prison officials for the alleged retaliation, and for claims that officers continually refused to investigate her reports of assault.

The complaint filed by Smiths attorneys against the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation is extensive. Nearly forty pages long, it lays out how, when Smith first arrived at a CDCR Reception Center 1998, she was raped by multiple male inmates consecutively over the course of four days. It then goes on to detail her 22 year history of incarceration in mens prison, which includes indecent exposure and lewd sexual acts by many men in custody and another instance of rape by other prisoners.

In early March, Smith told her Mental Health Primary Clinician that she was being repeatedly sexually harassed and assaulted by another prisoner who raped her seven years prior. Her report initiated a mandatory investigation. But instead of starting a process to determine whether Smith needed additional protections, the complaint states that prison guards interrogated her for hours and referred to her with transphobic slurs. The guards caged Ms. Smith like an animal, verbally berated her, threatened her with physical assault, sexually harassed and assaulted her, and issued her multiple fabricated Rules Violations Reports (RVR) riddled with glaring inconsistencies and due process violations, the complaint reads.

I just want to walk out of prison one day, Smith told her attorneys last year. I dont want to be rolled out of here.

Smiths experiences are endemic to trans women, and particularly trans women of color, in the prison system. A 2007 report looking at sexual assault in Californias prisons found that the rate of sexual assault for trans women was 13 times higher than for men in the same prisons. Other studies have found that correctional staff themselves can be a major obstacle to preventing sexual violence in prisons because of their lack of acceptance of trans people, tolerance of sexual violence, unwillingness to intervene, and lack of interest in informing inmates about its prevalence. But a new law seeks to change the experiences of people like C Jay in the state of California.

State Bill 132, the Transgender Respect, Agency, and Dignity Act, would require that prisons appropriately gender and house incarcerated people based on their identity and preferences. It would further require that trans people have their perception of health and safety given serious consideration. The bill is currently in the assemblys appropriations committee after being passed by the state senate in May. All legislative business in California must conclude by August 31st, which means SB 132 could be passed in a matter of weeks. California State Senator Scott Wiener, who proposed the bill, said hes hopeful about its chances of passing, but cant yet be sure that it will.

California is not alone in considering gender based reforms in prisons to protect transgender people. New York, Washington DC, Massachusetts and Connecticut have already taken similar legal and informal steps. But in an abolitionist future, SB 132 is caught in a familiar paradox of either going too far, or not far enough. Jennifer Orthwein, one of Smiths attorneys, said Smiths experience is common.Their first time down, theres generally a hazing that happens, she said. Trans women are assaulted when they get inside, then its a matter of navigating safety once theyre inside.

The extremely limited research on incarcerated trans people reveals that trans prisoners in general endure disproportionate levels of sexual assault. A 2015 report found that trans respondents who had been held in jail, prison, or juvenile detention in 2014 were over five times more likely to be sexually assaulted by facility staff than the U.S. population in jails and prisons, and over nine times more likely to be sexually assaulted by other inmates. Meanwhile, national incident-level data has shown that when trans prisoners are sexually assaulted by another prisoner, the incident is more likely to involve weapons yet less likely to evoke medical attention if needed.

Senator Wiener says this particular form of violence is precisely what SB 132 seeks to stem. Trans women in particular are at such high risk for severe violence, he said. Transgender community members and advocates came to speak with Wiener years ago about the horrific experiences of trans people in California prisons, and opened his eyes to issues such as lack of healthcare access, to being misgendered, to staff using the wrong pronouns, to the housing issue. Wiener believes SB 132 provides a corrective. While trans people are incarcerated, SB132 will ensure they be treated with the dignity that they deserve, he said.

But activists, and Smiths own lawyers, know that SB 132which relies on legal compliance, training, and cultural change within the prison industrywalks a fine line between cosmetic and seismic change. Especially at a time when closing prisons and defunding police has become a part of the national political conversation, some greet reforms like SB132 with reservation.

Part of that skepticism comes from the fact that prison guards, like those who allegedly perpetrated much of Smiths trauma, would be the ones tasked with implementing SB132. Thats not necessarily promising, considering that 37 percent of trans people who served time in jail reported having been harassed by correctional officers.

We see this [retaliation] all the time, Orthwin said, particularly with trans women who raise concern and dissent over their safety.

Felicia Medina, Smiths other attorney, added: The fact that people [outside of prisons] think theyre safer with police or corrections officers who function like a gang to terrorize people kills me.

Still, activists see the importance for such reforms as a form of harm reduction. Freddie Francis is a member of the Transgender Advocacy Group (TAG), a coalition based in California that supports, advocates for, and organizes with members of the trans community behind bars with the long-term vision of abolishing all carceral systems. Francis is also one of the many organizers who have been pushing for SB132 in the last few years. Its been complicated, they said, but [SB132] has the potential to set the stage for how trans people are imprisoned on a national basis.

At the same time, Francis is concerned. [SB132] makes me nervous because I dont want people in institutions to get the impression that there is a safe, just, or humane way to imprison people.

Eric Stanley, a longtime community organizer and co-editor of the landmark anthology Captive Genders, which traces the relationship between transness and the prison industrial complex, agrees. Is the thing were fighting for the thing that we have to be fighting against in five years? they asked.

Still, Stanley added: "If this is something people inside really want or ask for, its something we have to support."

Bamby Salcedo, the CEO and President of the TransLatin@ Coalition, spent 14 years in and out of prison. For her, abolition is a dream and SB132, which she helped create, is a reality. How can we support individuals who are incarcerated? she asked. Many who have life sentences will continue to be incarcerated. We do our best to support them until we finally get to the abolition of the prison industrial complex.

A staggering one in every two Black transgender people has been behind bars. Such statistics highlight the myriad pipelines to prison that trans people of color face, and the reasons that trans activists of color are fighting for widescale changefrom decriminalizing sex work, to gaining access to housing and education. This week, Salcedo became one of only two people she knows in her community to have earned a masters degree.

Salcedo wants to see a sweeping systems-level overhaul. Im hoping that people understand the fact that our community continues to be criminalized because of who we are and how we have to resort to street economies to survive and get arrested and incarcerated, she said. Next, were going to push for what is just, what our communities deserve, and to seek the dignity we deserve.

Similar to Salcedo, Medina said Smith is a leader who protects other trans women incarcerated at San Quentin. Her life before incarceration was of marginalization and oppression, Medina added. She never should have been locked up to begin with.

Read the original post:

Trans Women Are Still Being Held in Men's Prisons. Is Changing That Enough? - VICE

A federal officer tells the crowd to move while dispersing a protest in front of the Mark O. Hatfield U.S. Courthouse on July 21, 2020, in Portland, Oregon. State and city elected officials have called for the federal officers to leave Portland as clashes between protesters and federal police continue to escalate.Nathan Howard / Getty ImagesNote: This is a rush transcript and has been lightly edited for clarity. Copy may not be in its final form.

Kelly Hayes: As Black Lives Matter protests continue to play out around the country, images of protesters squaring off with police in Portland have inflamed debates about peacefulness, violence and respectability. Some liberal figures have argued that Trumps law and order narrative is facilitated by imagery of police dueling with protesters, and that unity will be needed to halt the march of fascism. Such critics have pointed to the riots of the late 60s, claiming that the Civil Rights Movement was derailed by those who resorted to violent tactics in the streets.

As someone who has been calling on people for years to lock arms against the threat of fascism, regardless of personal difference, I can appreciate some of the sentiments behind these assertions. But I, too, see some tired historical patterns at work. It is very easy, as Nathan J. Robinson recently wrote in Current Affairs, to blame groups whose actions frustrate us for larger outcomes that disappoint us. This phenomenon can be observed in arguments that particular riots derailed the Civil Rights Movement, despite innumerable efforts to derail civil rights organizing, and a disastrous presidential campaign waged by Hubert Humphrey against Richard Nixon. Some people have blamed those who riotously rebelled against anti-Black violence for Nixons election, despite the many factors working in Nixons favor, including Humphreys incompetence as a candidate.

We are seeing a similar narrative being spun now. Even though Biden is not a terribly formidable opponent, we are told that if Trump wins, it will be the fault of people who threw soda cans at police after being brutalized and terrorized their entire lives, rather than the fault of people who have enabled Trump, and those who paved the path to his violence. We are told that if Trump wins, it will be the fault of Black protesters, and others acting against the anti-Black violence of the state, rather than the violence of white supremacy itself.

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We have similarly seen claims that the L.A. Rebellion of 1992 led to a newfound enthusiasm for mass incarceration and austerity among Democrats, even though such accelerations had been well underway throughout the 1980s. Even historic romanticizations of the idea of general strikes a tactic we may well need in order to remove Trump often strip away the reality that the labor movement is, itself, rooted in a great deal of rebellion and historical violence. But blaming rioters for the outcomes of presidential elections is much worse than whitewashing the history of the labor movement in the U.S. Because blaming those with the least power for what unfolds at the highest levels of government is an abdication of responsibility.

Why would I trust someone who paints the marginalized as the problem because they are demonized? Why would I trust people who say that our communities must be controlled in a manner that demonization dictates? Demonizing people while demanding their votes is, to put it mildly, a flawed strategy. Its also absurd. When water sits too long on the stove and boils over, do we lecture the water for jumping out of the pot? Black people are tired of being murdered without consequence. They are tired of employing all manner of protest, only to be briefly applauded or spit at, and then cast aside. Decrying a lack of nonviolent direct action training among people who are tossing plastic bottles at police will not transform them into Alinsky-style organizers which also shouldnt be the goal.

It takes a certain belief in liberal politics to blame those who benefit the least from such politics for the failures of the Democratic Party. Many of us are unlikely to survive another four years of Trump without winding up in a cage. Many will not survive at all. There are horrors ahead regardless of who wins, to be sure, but the importance of derailing fascism is not lost on me. But how the Democrats win, and who is ground under or sold out in the process matters. I will not sanctify this system to save it from a fascist because burying the truth about how we got here will not help us escape.

Folks who have positioned leftists as the problem in this moment have found an easy mark in Portland and this is true of both conservatives and liberals who are taking aim at direct actions that they consider violent. Portland is largely white, which allows people to attack the actions of protesters without directly criticizing Black protesters around the country who may also have destroyed property or thrown objects at police. But the targeted goal is the same: to foster the idea that good liberals arent like that, so centrists should relate to them and share their goals.

Liberals are demanding cooperation from the left and from the most oppressed people in the U.S., not just at the polls, where our executive options are extremely limited, but also in how we endure an era of collapse. The idea that unrest can be kept at bay as a society falters is folly. Unrest will be part of the current political moment. Pivots in energy and expression are important, because narratives are easily lost amid chaos, but if unrest is the key to Trumps victory, then liberals need to figure out how to leverage unrest, and the potential for unrest, to their own advantage, because they simply do not have the power to wish it away.

I will organize for collective survival and for collective liberation, but as someone who wants to dismantle the oppressions that uphold this system, I will not play into ahistorical notions of what these institutions are, in order to rally people to protect them. I will not insult Black and Native people who have righteously rebelled by asking them to pledge allegiance to a country that has violently excluded them from its social contract since its bloody inception. I believe that marginalized people are capable of processing the need for a united front, and if I am wrong about that, it wont be because the mythological unity that some are proposing would have persuaded people.

I do think imagery of street fights between Trumps fed squads and protesters could help reelect Trump. But Trump will also win if this political moment becomes a duel between liberals and the left over respectability and peacefulness. I think this is a good time to examine the lessons of history and also to ask questions. Why did people in the 1960s riot rather than uniformly committing to nonviolence? How did nonviolence fail them? How did white people who demanded an adherence to nonviolence fail them? Was measuring the utility of their efforts in electoral outcomes alone true to the needs or the aims of Black people? Why are some liberals so sure that it was the riots of the late 60s, as opposed to a historically inevitable white fatigue around Black-led protest, or the horribly run campaign to elect Humphrey, that delivered us to Nixon? History is a progression of events, but it is also a jumble of actions and reactions that cannot be cleanly divorced from each other.

Trump sows chaos. Liberals attacking the left over a peacefulness that will not come is part of that chaos, although to them, it may feel like order because it is an effort to impose order. In an unjust society, restoring order is often the work of maintaining injustice. If you want people who are inclined to break things, to do something else, then organize something meaningful and invite people to direct their energies there.

Lets hold direct actions that invite people to do more than just show up for the next march. Lets plan actions that invite people to defend tenants from eviction. Lets invite people to actions that become blockades against ICE. Lets invite people to actions that encourage networks of care in our communities, where we meet our neighbors and align against the forces that are harming them. Militancy has a place, and that place is the discipline with which we sustain one anothers survival. Because even larger storms are looming in the distance, and we need to be anchored to one another when they arrive.

As an organizer, I will not ask people to claim unity where it does not exist. I will not ask people to pledge allegiance to anything or romanticize anything that would kill them. I will not tell people they must publicly fetishize social contracts that were never meant to include them and rarely have.

What I will do is tell people that living to fight another day is always part of my strategy, and that come what may, and whatever tactics we must employ we are worth it. The things we believe in are worth it. The future that could be is worth it. And survival is worth it, because without that, there is nothing else. So whether we are taking on police violence, evictions, federal relief, ableism or any of the other issues we must face, when I step into the fray, I am inviting folks to join me in an act of survival in the pursuit of collective liberation. So lets dream new worlds into being with the protests we stage, and lets survive together, so that we might live to see those dreams realized in a freer, more beautiful world.

To those of you who are in the streets protesting, whether you are marching, setting up mutual aid tents or squaring off with Trumps feds, my heart is with you, and with everyone who would be there if they could. Onward to Black liberation, the destruction of capitalism and white supremacy, and the abolition of the prison industrial complex. Until next time, Ill see you in the streets.

Go here to see the original:

"Unrest" Is Not the Enemy. Fascism Is. - Truthout

Rather than creating safety, our punishment system is an active source of harm for many. And the systems violence extends far beyond what makes the news. Black, disabled, and sex-working women and trans people are especially vulnerable to police violence and often face sexual assault at the hands of the police. Disabled people are estimated to make up as many as half of those murdered by police. Between 70 and 100 million Americans have a criminal record, and one year in prison takes two years off ones life expectancy. Further, there are more than 10 million arrests per year, and a misdemeanor arrestthe standard encounter between police and civilianscan upend a life, leading to lasting exclusions from employment and other opportunities.

So while some ask how we will be safe without police and prisons, abolitionists point out that most people cannot be safe so long as they exist. For this reason, abolitionists are, at heart, buildersbuilders of community safety, well-being, accountability, and harm prevention. As abolitionist Ruth Wilson Gilmore has said, abolition is about presencethe presence of life-giving systems that allow people to thrive and be well, that prevent harm and better equip communities to address harm when it occurs.

To be clear, building toward a world without prisons is different than believing in a world without harm. As one contributor to the prisoner-run publication In the Belly writes, abolitionists are not promising a world without harm. People hurt each other, and that wont change. But why do we all just accept that the appropriate response to harm is more harm, administered by the state?

Instead, when presented with harm, abolitionists reject the false choice of putting someone in a cage or doing nothing. In fact, abolitionists are actively building various models of preventing and responding to harm, focusing in particular on community accountability processes that, as our #8ToAbolition cocreators recently explained, seek safety for those harmed, changed behaviors for those who caused harm, and a transformation of the conditions that allowed the harm to occur.

Countless groups across the country are doing the work of safety building. In Washington D.C., the Collective Action for Safe Spaces (CASS) trains community members to intervene in gendered public harassment and, through the Rethink Masculinity program, helps men to identify harmful behaviors and build relationships of accountability and care. Likewise, the Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective holds regular labs to help community members build skills around transformative justice and ending child sexual abuse. Across the country, violence interrupters work to halt lethal violence before it happens by resolving conflicts and building healthy relationships between community members. And beyond programming centered on ending violence, groups focusing on mutual aid are doing the work of abolition by meeting community members needs and building local models of self-sufficiency. This is a small sliver of the work being done by abolitionists.

Ultimately, abolitionists do not have all the answersbut we are committed to finding them together. Prison is a one-size-fits-all solution, sending people to cages for violating a criminal law. Abolition requires just the opposite, recognizing the complexity of harm and the indispensability of humanity.

Ultimately, abolition is a verb, a practice. It consists of the actions we take to build safety and to tear down harmful institutions. People do abolition every day when they connect to their community, learn how to take accountability, and foster communal responsibility for preventing and responding to harm.

Abolition is within our reach; its up to us to build it.

Reiana Sultan and Micah Herskind are 2 of the 10 cocreators of the #8ToAbolition campaign.

Link:

What Is Abolition, And Why Do We Need It? - Vogue

After the leftist progressives have tackled police and government, they will come for the family. The idea is that having family, growing up with two parents, is privileged, and that this creates inequity. Any inequity must be crushed.

Bethany Letiecq, professor in the Human Development and Family Science program at George Mason University called for the abolishing of family, and this concept has been increasingly growing in academic circles. There have been several recent articles calling for abolishing of the family, including in Open Democracy, Outline, and even The Nation. Letiecq, the author of a paper "Surfacing Family Privilege and Supremacy in Family Science: Toward Justice for All," coined the concept of Family privilege. These arguments are all rhetorically similar and are couched in ideas of "justice."

"Family privilege recognizes that some families are the beneficiaries of unearned or unacknowledged advantages... our society values and privileges heterosexual marriages over other relationships, including couples who live together, raise children together, and choose not to marry," Letiecq argued. "Marriage as an institution is patriarchal and hegemonic at its base," she wrote, designed by men to have a hold of power. Needless to mention, that is ahistorical and complete nonsense. And yet, it is increasingly echoed by others.

"There is no doubt that the most effective way to mitigate privilege would be to eliminate the family. Without parents, grandparents, siblings, or any kin relations, we could become equal." The group Black Lives Matters acknowledges their official position stating that they intend to "disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and 'villages' that collectively care for one another, especially our children."

Feminist lobby group Family History Project argues for abolition of traditional families by claiming that conservatives have weaponized traditional marriage. Earlier, a few years back, the best-selling new academic book in feminism was "Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family," by British-American feminist Sophie Lewis, who argued that "gestation" is work, like any other work and therefore there should be no kinship attached to it, and women should simply be treating childbirth as labour.

"Abortion is a form of necessary violence. We need to move away from arguments designed to placate our enemies, and defend abortion as a right to stop doing gestational work," Lewis claimed, adding that that is the only way for women to reclaim their power, and abolish the traditional family.

Lewis proudly claims to be a Marxist, and wants to abolish not just family but capitalism as well. Coming from a broken and abusive family herself (obviously) she believes that family is the root to all evil, including "discomfort, coercion, molestation, abuse, humiliation, depression, battery, murder, mutilation, loneliness, blackmail, exhaustion, psychosis, gender-straitjacketing, racial programming, and embourgeoisement." Others are not as out and proud, which makes them even more dangerous.

In the traditional western understanding of Marxism, the focus is almost always on class conflict and violent revolution. However, that is also a narrow understanding. A much deeper aspect is often overlooked; Marxists primarily hate family and nations, the units of society, which are the greatest hindrance to true egalitarianism, alongside faith, and flag. In the 1920s, Marxist Alexandra Kollontai outlined how family is viewed under Marxism.

"The family breaks down as more and more women go out to work," Kollontai wrote, adding that "The old family structure is now merely a hindrance. Communism liberates worm from her domestic slavery and makes her life richer and happier." You see, under communism and true egalitarianism, there wont be any personal belonging and attachments, and that includes children.

"The woman who takes up the struggle for the liberation of the working class must learn to understand that there is no more room for the old proprietary attitude which says: 'These are my children, I owe them all my maternal solicitude and affection; those are your children, they are no concern of mine and I dont care if they go hungry and coldI have no time for other children.' The worker-mother must learn not to differentiate between yours and mine; she must remember that there are only our children, the children of Russias communist workers."

Any religion gives a sense of forgiveness and commonality, and any flag gives a sense of nationalism and unity, and family is the ultimate symbol of aspiration. But all these supersedes class consciousness, and naturally are detrimental to an egalitarian flattening social system. The original Leninists wanted this egalitarianism under a single totalitarian state. But thats just one school of Marxism.

The post-60s new left, and feminism, for example, were much stealthier, and far more destructive. Lewis and Letiecq are not the first ones calling for abolition of family. In the late 60s, feminist philosopher Kate Millet urged her followers to understand that the only way to gain true equality is by destroying heterosexual family, by means of pornography, prostitution and promiscuity. In The Dialectic of Sex, book written by American feminist Shulamith Firestone in 1970, childbearing was considered a form of labour performed by women (workers) who were legally subordinate to their husbands (the owners of the means of production).

In the 1968s Paris revolt, the Comit d'action pdrastique rvolutionnaire, and the Front homosexuel d'action rvolutionnaire (clue is in the name) desired "true Marxist egalitarianism" which will destroy the masculine foundations of both capitalism and Soviet style Leninism. Small traditional heterosexual family, as always is the primary threat to leftist state ideology and totalitarianism as child bearing is simply considered labour supply for the society.

A few years back, one would have laughed at such utopian notions. The argument goes like this, the Marxist argument for abolition of the family has been there forever, so what is the threat now? The difference is this: In the 60s and 70s, the majority of the west had a semblance of religious and traditional morality. The universities were not radical hubs churning out revolutionaries funded by tax dollars.

The media, while biased, were not openly contemptuous and destructive in its agenda. And the conservatives were not afraid to legislate, and didnt leave it all to the judiciary, with defeats after defeats in every social issue. As Bethany Mandel wrote in 2017, the argument of slippery slope is very real. It was easy to laugh it all off in 2010 or even in 2015, not so much in 2020. The last remnants of the traditional family is the next and final battleground, one that cannot be lost at any cost, if one wants to preserve society as we know it.

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The next step in the culture war is the assault on the traditional family - The Post Millennial

About Central St Martins

Finn crawford radical temperance 1a

Project titleRadical Temperance

Project descriptionRadical Temperance looks at alternatives to the City of Londons hyper-capitalism and its self-serving use of technology. Responding to the studios agenda of Designing Politics, Finn critically reflects on existing models of social relationships and access to technology. He introduces the idea of temperance to oppose the technological arms race and growing replacement of human social roles by machines, drawing lessons from Icarus and his fall. In response to the studios brief, Imagining Collaborative Futures, Finn gives agency to a radical arts movement of digital secessionists who use arts and crafts to create a virtual world that uses technology to realise a socialist agenda of democratic open access. The proposal develops an open, public building, featuring a theatre arena with reverberating corridors for a political dialogue.

Tutor citationFinns project is exemplary in the way it deals with complex urban, conceptual, political, and architectural settings. Finn re-imagines how the relations between the production of culture and public and political performances in the city could be pushed through the intersection of sophisticated interactions between spatial, material, and virtual realms. The proposal is a layering of spaces and cultural references to create a multiplicity of experiences, interpretations, and meanings. Dejan Mrdja and Albane Duvillier

1.closertohome lois innes

Project titleCloser to Home

Project descriptionCloser to Home challenges the unethical prison system and sets out an alternative future for the young people of colour that are disproportionately incarcerated in this country. Prisons and the way that we think about them have changed little in the past 200 years. Despite overwhelming evidence that points to their inefficacy, our prison population in the UK continues to soar and these repressive environments increasingly serve more to stimulate criminal behaviour, than to act as its deterrent. Taking Londons oldest Category C prison, HMP Brixton, Closer to Home speculates on an alternative and largely de-carcerated penal model. It begins within the community, examining the environmental circumstances that first influence criminal behaviour, and the existing socio- economic capital that offenders can positively tap into. It proposes a policy re-shift, redirecting criminal justice expenditure and commitment to social infrastructure projects instead. This proposition is developed through a series of interventions and imagined stories, using the appropriately fantastical format of the graphic novel to express complex ideas, and to provoke more imaginative possibilities for our changing times.

Tutor citationLois developed her project from the perspective of a young, black architect born and bred in London. Personal insights pertinent in the context of the Black Lives Matter movement have motivated and informed the work. Combining her writing talent with design practice, Lois has chosen the role of narrator and developed a graphic novel advocating the abolition of prisons in favour of community-based forms of education and training. Loiss strong and independent voice finds expression in a powerful graphic novel that translates her social critique into an architecture of care. Ulrike Steven

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AJ Student Prize 2020: University of the Arts London - Architects Journal

Her powerful voice resonates across the empty theatre. Actress and director Fotini Banou is preparing for a performance, even though we dont know when well reopen, she says. In mid-March, the Greek government decided to close cinemas, theatres, museums, archaeological sites, schools, universities and essentially all common spaces (except for supermarkets, pharmacies, hospitals and doctors offices) in order to stem the spread of the coronavirus in the country which has seen 4,279 cases to date, including 203 deaths. A scenario similar to the one that occurred in Italy would be a disaster for Greece, where the health system has suffered under ten years of austerity policies.

Since 18 May, the Acropolis of Athens has once again been accessible to the public, as are all of the countrys archaeological sites and museums. Open-air cinemas have been open to the public since June. Indoor theatres, however, remain closed. Banou and her colleague Dimitris Alexakis are currently waiting for official authorisation to reopen the curtains at TV Control Center (also known as KET), a theatre for artistic, social and political experimentation they founded together in the Kypseli district in the heart of Athens.

While their main source of income relies on revenue sharing between artists, a sustainable cash flow through perseverance, as they deal with the crisis provoked by COVID-19 they cannot count on the help of a state with, according to Banou, no tradition of helping independent artists and public debt that amounts to roughly 180 per cent of GDP. Since opening their theatre in 2012, Alexakis and Banou have received no financial support from the successive governments of the last few years. Though the culture minister Lina Mendoni insisted in late May that there would be no summer 2020 without culture, the decisions made mostly in favour of historical heritage sites and public institutions have left those outside of official circles to fend for themselves.

Kypseli has seen no lack of initiatives. Since early May, Alexakis and Banou have joined weekly meetings organised by about 50 culture workers from the neighbourhood.

Everyone shares their fears and struggles. Some independent venues, especially those with rent to pay, might have to close their doors. What artists are experiencing with this pandemic is a sort of collapse, says Alexakis. Its a drama, a tragedy even, says Banou.

In this tragedy, an alliance between artists was born and Kypseli now teems with cultural and community spaces. In the 1950s, the neighbourhood was home to writers, intellectuals, actors and painters. It was a chic neighbourhood with a vibrant nightlife. In the 1980s and 1990s, people from Africa and Asia settled there, making it one of the most multicultural parts of the city today. Unlike other areas of the capital, rents in Kypseli remain affordable and the neighbourhood, free of Airbnb rentals, is once again attracting gallery owners, painters, actors and musicians looking for spaces to create. It is this social stratification that brought artists together around a question after the lockdown: What do the inhabitants here need? How can we reopen spaces in a way that responds to community needs?

In response to the reality of the neighbourhood, where men and women bending over to dig through rubbish is a daily sight, artists began to reach out to various initiatives, including feminist NGOs, African womens associations, a detox centre and migrant communities. Their aim was to strengthen local associations rather than making demands of the state. For example, Alexakis joined the food aid collective Khora, which prepares and distributes up to 200 free meals a day. In this spirit of solidarity, musicians, theatre and visual artists lend each other spaces and even materials to create, join forces with detox centres to set up ceramic workshops, and with NGOs in the neighbourhood to put on writing workshops.

Communication is now possible, says Meteoritis, who is involved in this mutual aid movement. The closure of his bookstore O Meteoritis in March came as a hard blow. The space with its pastel green storefront is located in the heart of Kypseli on the pedestrian street Fokionos Negri, which was emptied of foot traffic for two months. In late June, Benot partnered with the local organisation El Sistema Greece to invite local musicians to play in front of his bookstore. The open-air concert breathed new life into the neighbourhood and drew passers-by into his shop, where buyers have become increasingly rare.

Further up the street, not far from the bookstore, three young painters have repurposed the studio where they previously hosted educational activities for children before the lockdown. During the quarantine, Katerina Charou, Vincent Meyrignac and Olga Souri asked themselves what they could do to help once the absence of the local government became clear. We had no contact with the town council during the lockdown. We simply never saw them. After that, a sense of urgency was born, which led to the meetings between artists and the need to mobilise, explains Meyrignac. If the state doesnt want to invest in the neighbourhoods cultural life, and in contemporary culture in general, we choose to rely on local initiatives, he adds. In May, all three joined the Kypseli network and are currently preparing to open their exhibition space Noucmas to organisations with the aim of giving free courses and showing films. We keep in touch with whats going on in the community. Creating, reflecting, and continuing to communicate with the people of the neighbourhood by opening our workshop to them is as necessary for living as the most basic needs, says Charou.

While these initiatives are reshaping Kypseli to the point that life here is being reorganised, as Meteoritis explains in front of a row of books, the entire culture sector is mobilising across Greece. The national movement Support Art Workers, which for the last two months has been bringing together people working in the culture sector, has given independent artists an opportunity to make their voices heard. Culture isnt something abstract, there are people behind it. Thats what we are trying to show with this campaign which works to educate trade unions on the precarious conditions faced by artists, explains Konstantina Karameri, cultural project manager.

Karameri has participated in several demonstrations with the 24,000 others members of the movement since May. We are asking the government for a support plan for the next six months and the regularisation of royalty payments and the status of independent artists. According to the artists, the government has yet to respond to demands relating to the most urgent needs and many of the difficulties related to workers rights existed before the quarantine. This has been a problem with the system for years. A significant percentage of people in the culture sector work without a contract and are paid under the table. The result is that they are not registered anywhere and have to do jobs on the side to survive, she explains. When youre not registered you have no rights. We need regulation. If you dont work for public institutions like the national theatre, for example, you dont receive any aid from the state.

Independent venues also suffer from a lack of visibility. There isnt a small theatre company that didnt start off in a space like ours. Its integral to the culture and provides a base for the more commercial theatres, says Alexakis of KET. But at an official level, no one talks about them.

Our culture minister Lina Mendoni doesnt seem to be aware of this and is proposing solutions that completely neglect our [non-institutional artists and culture workers] needs. At the same time, she spends her time being photographed in front of the Acropolis.

According to a study by Eurostat on the share of government expenditures on cultural services in 2018, Greece is at the bottom of the list with the lowest percentage of 0.3 per cent out of an average of 1 per cent in the European Union. The 2020 official national budget dedicated to culture amounts to 334.2 million and to date includes no emergency plan in response to the health crisis that has impacted the entire sector.

While various groups, including the Greek Federation of Performing Arts ( ), which comprises 43 unions, are trying to open a dialogue with the state, the government of Kyriakos Mitsotakis announced in mid-June the abolition of arts and music education in middle and high schools. Cultural events remain banned and indoor theatres closed. At the same time, Greece has allowed international flights since 15 June in anticipation of foreign visitors. We are going to welcome thousands of tourists but the venues will remain closed. Wheres the balance? asks Karameri.

With a tourist sector that contributes more than 20 per cent to GDP, opening up the country is essential to avoiding another economic catastrophe. Theyre still looking for a magic bullet for recovery but the recovery never comes and the economy is still just as fragile and burdened by debt, says Alexakis, who sees an urgent need to unite the struggle of cultural workers with that of health workers, migrants and climate activists. To do this, they will have to continue to make their voices heard in the coming months. If there is a true general mobilisation, artists will be able to make themselves visible, says political scientist Gerassimos Moschonas.

While taking action, artists are working hard to keep cultural life alive. Alexakis and Banou remain hopeful that their play about the Jewish community of Janina will take place and that Fotini will be able to perform the traditional songs of Epirus in front of an audience. When and under what conditions remains to be seen.

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Artists in Greece are fighting for their rights and accessible culture for all - Equal Times

Emancipation Day commemorates the Abolition of Slavery Act, which became law on August 1, 1834. This act freed more than 800,000 people of African descent throughout the British Empire. In honour of Emancipation Day the Afro-Canadian Caribbean Association of Hamilton is staging We Are Planted Here: Commemorating Emancipation Day. The keynote speaker is Natasha Henry, President, Ontario Black History Society. The event will include an Arts and Culture Celebration featuring local artists including Juno and Grammy Award Winning Recording Artist Liberty Silver, Spoken Word Artists Klyde Broox and Shiloh Wong, African Dancer Aisha Nicholson and Drummer Jean-Assaoma.

Keynote Speaker Natasha Henry is the president of the Ontario Black History Society. Natasha is an historian and has been an educator for 19 years. She is an award-winning author and an award-winning curriculum consultant, focusing on Black Canadian experiences. Henry is currently completing a PhD in History at York University, researching the enslavement of Africans in early Ontario. Through her various professional and community roles, Henrys work is grounded in her commitment to research, collect, preserve and disseminate the histories of Black Canadians.

Musical Guest Liberty Silver is a multiple Juno and Grammy Award winning recording artist. She was originally discovered on the US based TV show Star Search hosted by Ed McMahon. Liberty Silver was the first Black woman to receive a Juno award. Her Grammy Award (collaboration) was in association with her performance on the single Tears Are Not Enough, which raised funds for relief of the famine in Ethiopia. She has performed for and shared the stage with prominent and influential figures and recorded songs and performed on studio recordings that have sold millions of units worldwide including multi-platinum dance tracks. She has performed thousands of shows, including some of the most celebrated musical events from across the globe.

To Register visit the event Website: https://accahamilton.com/we-are-planted/

Twitter: @accaham Instagram: @accahamilton

Facebook Event Page: https://www.facebook.com/events/766715170732023/

Eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/we-are-planted-here-commemorating-emancipation-day-virtual-event-tickets-114226829522

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Gala Emancipation Day event planned - The Bay Observer - Providing a Fresh Perspective for Hamilton and Burlington

The kerfuffle between the city of Marlboro and Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, over the John Brown bell reminds us that the past sometimes doesnt stay in the past. John Brown was hanged on Dec. 2, 1859, an event that led to the Civil War and created modern journalism.

As I hope you know, John Brown was a radical abolitionist who in 1859 led an invading force into Virginia in the hope of setting off a slave insurrection. With the country teetering on the edge of civil war, all eyes were on the little town of Harpers Ferry. Browns foray was quickly put down by an army unit headed by Col. Robert E. Lee and the ensuing trial was covered by reporters from publications far and wide. It was the first media extravaganza in U.S. history.

Harper's Weekly sent a reporter named David Huntington Strother, whose graphic account and drawing (under the pseudonym Porte Crayon) of the actual hanging proved too much for the Harper's editors and lay unpublished for years. Strother was an enterprising newsman and sketch artist. As the body hung in the gibbet, he mounted the scaffold and lifted the masking cap so that he could do a quick sketch of the old revolutionists face in death.

John Brown was a notorious figure in the America of the 1850s, beloved by some abolitionists in the North, untrusted by others and universally hated in the South. His strident call for armed intervention to overthrow slavery did much to ready the nation for Civil War.

Brown was born in Torrington, Connecticut, in 1800 and led a peripatetic existence for most of his mature life. Early on he developed an overweening hatred of slavery and spent his life railing against it and plotting campaigns to get rid of it. He joined various abolition groups but considered them generally as ineffective. He went around the country with his message of violence and won support from some, including Henry David Thoreau and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Worcesters radical minister. After the execution, Thoreau wrote a widely distributed article that compared Browns death with that of Jesus Christ. Others considered him an agent of the devil.

He polarized the nation. Many thought him a madman, especially after the so-called Pottawatomie massacre where Brown and three of his sons slaughtered a settler family from the South. That was during the Bleeding Kansas period when the new territory of Kansas was opened up for settlement. Under the Compromise of 1850, the new state could choose to be either slave or free, depending on the wishes of the settlers at the time. That set off a land rush from the North and the South with much violence.

All that was but a prelude to Browns grand scheme to overthrow slavery by a military attack. He imagined that such a dramatic move would inspire millions of slaves to join the rebellion and force Southern slave owners to capitulate. It did not work out that way. After months of speeches and fundraising, including a visit to Worcester, he assembled a motley group and attacked the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, on Oct. 16, 1859. After the hapless venture was put down. Brown was transferred to Charlestown, then in Virginia, later in West Virginia.

That led to an orgy of publicity. Magazines and newspapers from all over the country sent reporters and sketch artists to chronicle the events. Strothers reports and sketches were avidly featured by Harpers Weekly. Harpers great rival, Leslies Illustrated Newspaper, followed suit, using the work of Alfred Bergson, a talented artist. Other publications used telegraphed accounts from the scene. The trial and the conviction were followed far and wide. But Strothers description and drawings of the actual hanging were too much for the editors at Harper's and they were unpublished for 90 years.

At eleven oclock escorted by a strong column of soldiers the Prisoner entered the field. He was seated in a furniture wagon on his coffin with his arms tied down above the elbows, leaving his forearms free ... He wore the seedy and dilapidated dress that he had at Harpers Ferry ... As he neared the gibbet his face wore a grim and grisly smirk In this position he stood for five minutes or more while the troops that composed the escort were wheeling into the positions assigned them ... The Sheriff struck the rope a sharp blow with a hatchet, the platform fell with a crash a few convulsive struggles & a human soul had gone to judgment.

That was not the end of Strothers report. According to Andrew Hunter, reporter for the New Orleans Times-Democrat, While the body was hanging, Strother slipped up, raised the cap from his face and took a sketch of him hanging. An enterprising newsman indeed.

Strother, a staunch Union man, served with distinction in the Union army and ended the war a Brevet Brigadier General. After the war he resumed his career at Harpers.

The bell, seized by Union soldiers from Massachusetts after the Civil War, was brought to Marlboro, where it has been ever since, despite periodic demands from Harpers Ferry that it be returned. Should it be? Thats not for me to say.

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Al Southwick: John Brown and his bell in Marlboro - Worcester Telegram