Daily Archives: August 3, 2020

Maya Schenwar and Victoria Law have been writing about the shortcomings of prisons for years, but as the pandemic continues, their collaborative effort Prison By Any Other Name questions the inefficacies of the system, with its scant alternatives, providing examples of how these institutions extend the control and surveillance over those who are involved with the criminal justice system. Schenwar talked with Newcity about the impact of alternatives in Chicago as well as nationally, the Chicago Gang Database, sex offender registries, defunding police, removing police stations from schools, and the role of Black women in rethinking prisons. We even talked about how her work is received not just as a family member of a formerly incarcerated sibling, but as a white activist who sometimes engages with predominantly white audiences.

Tell us how you and Victoria started collaborating on Prison by Any Other Name.

Both of us were coming from backgrounds of writing and editing about prison. In addition to all of Vikkis freelance work and my main work with Truthout, Vikki had written a previous book,Resistance Behind Bars, about incarcerated women organizing, and Id written Locked Down, Locked Out, which is primarily about the impact of prison on families and communities. As we interviewed people about incarceration, we became more and more aware that for many people, being released from prison does not mean being freed from the system. These are all extensionsfrom electronic monitoring and house arrest to locked-down drug treatment and psychiatric hospitals to probation and sex-worker rescue programs, not to mention the child welfare system, community policing and all the other ways that police and prisons entangle themselves in homes and communities, systematically targeting Black communities and other communities of color. We were also seeing how these extensions of the system were targeting disabled people, trans people, drug users. These alternative systems were endangering peoples lives and deeply harming marginalized communities. But much of this was not being documented because it doesnt fall into the category of what most people see as prison. Its all part of what Beth Richie calls the prison nationour culture of policing and imprisonment that has very long tentacles. Both Vikki and I also had personal experiences which drove our work. Vikki had been on probation as a teenager. And my sister spent the past fifteen years in and out of jail and prison. During that time, for my sister, being out of prison meant being under heavy surveillance, including probation, monitoring, drug court, and other punitive so-called alternatives. We realized that there was a need for a book tying together all these thingsall these ways that prison extends far beyond prison wallsto show that many popular alternatives to incarceration and policing are simply expansions of the same old oppressive systems.

There are several approaches to the idea of prison abolition and defunding the police throughout the book. Could you talk about the work here in Chicago thats highlighted in the book or that you wish you couldve covered as Black Lives Matter, police brutality, and prisons have taken on even more significance after COVID-19 and the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor?

Yes! Most of the book focuses on whats wrong with many popular reforms to prisons and policing, and how theyre widening the net of who gets policed and punished and surveilled. But in the last chapter, we talk about how things could be different: What does a world look like in which not only police and prisons, but these harmful alternatives, are abolished? We discuss projects around the country that have contributed to this work, and mention some past and current efforts in Chicago that address extensions of the prison-industrial complex, including [the former] We Charge Genocides efforts against community policing, the Just Practice Collaboratives role in training people to facilitate transformative justice processes, the Visible Voices collective that provides a space for formerly incarcerated women, many of whom are still under state surveillance, to tell their stories, the ways in which restorative justice practitioners have worked within Chicago Public Schools to counter the police, how Ujimaa Medics are providing community health care. We highlight efforts happening around the country that provide a glimpse of what the world could look like, beyond the prison nation.

We turned in our final-final manuscript in January after many drafts. After our book went to press, COVID erupted, then the police-perpetrated murders of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd and Tony McDade, and the uprisings followed. Suddenly, abolition was being uttered, if not endorsed, in mainstream circles! Mainstream newspapers were publishing the words of Mariame Kaba. Multiple large cities were committing to seriously reduce police funding, thanks to powerful grassroots organizing. If we were to write the book now, our final chapter would include some of the recent visionary work being done primarily by Black-led abolitionist groups to defund police. This connects deeply with the goal of our book, because the current movement is not saying, defund the police and instead fund electronic monitoring or just switch the money over to community policing. People are saying no, we need healthcare, education, housingactual support and liberation, not punitive, racist, oppressive alternatives. In Chicago, were seeing powerful efforts like the newly formed Black Abolitionist Network, which is calling for a seventy-five percent cut to Chicagos police budget and the investment of that money in real community programs and services, the removal of police from schools, and an end to the gang database, among other demands. And there are many neighborhood-based mutual aid groups that have sprung up during the pandemic, in which neighbors are building connections and figuring out how we can provide for each other, how we can ensure that everyone has housing and food and care. Thats abolitionist work; its building the world we want to live in, wholly outside of policing, surveillance and imprisonment.

The earlier chapters discuss the problems with electronic monitoring. Could you talk about the challenges that families face when a relative is under this sort of surveillance?

I think a lot of times people forget that incarcerationof all types, including electronic monitoring, which scholar-activist James Kilgore and others have termed e-carcerationaffects whole families and communities, in addition to the primary impact on the person whos incarcerated. Electronic shackles amount to home confinement: You cant leave your house without pre-approval. Many things outside of a job and essential medical appointments arent going to be pre-approved. One key impact is on children. One of the people we interviewed who was confined on a monitor for several years talked about how she couldnt take her children to the park, or drop them off at school, or attend their sports games and practices. She had five kids. But she could not participate in whole swaths of her kids lives, particularly as they grew older. We need to think about the impact of that on kids lives. When kids are old enough, they often also begin to worry about the fact that since their parent is shackled with a monitor, that parent is always one step away from jail or prison, because the consequence of violating the monitors strict conditions is often incarceration. In one study, kids expressed fear that their parents would be taken to jail anytime the monitor beeped. Beyond children, family members often become the ones responsible for attending to the basic needs of a person whos shackled with a monitor. When my sister was on electronic monitoring, we were bringing her groceries and other supplies, and checking in constantly because we were worried about what this confinement was going to do to her mental health. Knowing that your family member, who is probably already struggling, risks incarceration if they leave the houseeven for, say, an emergency room visitis terrifying.

Another idea that you mention is Mariame Kaba describing the idea of Somewhere Else as a place that people could find support services as a substitute for prisons that are often vague suggestions or theyre fraught with common shortcomings as institutions. Also, there are many existing alternatives that invade peoples privacy and impede their ability to work. Can we talk about how such existing institutions could become better possibilities?

Yes, Mariame was one of the first people we interviewed and this idea that she mentionedthe Somewhere Elseguided a lot of our work thereafter. The idea is that under the logic of our prison nation, people cannot simply be freed. Instead, they need to be put in some other restrictive, coercive institution, even if that institution purports to help them: a kinder, gentler cage. Electronic monitoringconfining people to their homesis a Somewhere Else. Psychiatric hospitals are a Somewhere Else. Locked-down drug treatment centers are a Somewhere Else. These are still places to put people whove been deemed criminal, to remove them from the larger society. This is why Mariame, and many others, talk about the need to challenge criminalization itself. Get rid of that label and that system. Instead of thinking in terms of Somewhere Else, we need to think about building support for peoples self-determination and expand their options for what kind of support they can get voluntarily. For example, its been shown again and again that forcing people into some treatment (addiction treatment, mental health treatment) does not actually succeed, even by the systems own standards. It doesnt improve peoples lives. Instead, these coercive measures are unethical and often very traumatizing, and sometimes enact the opposite of whats needed. My sister was placed in a mandated drug court program after her last incarceration. She wasnt ready to stop using heroin, but the program forced her into abstinence from the drug, lowering her tolerance and making her more vulnerable. When she left the program, she overdosed and died.

Instead of these harmful and even deadly measures, we need to think about how treatment could be offered on a voluntary basis in ways that account for peoples autonomy. Not everyone wants toor is ready tostop using certain drugs. So, what kinds of harm-reduction measures, such as safe consumption or safe injection sites, can we offer to make survival more possible for people with substance dependencies? How can we decriminalize all drugs so people are not being traumatized further by being trapped in cages? And how can we offer optional support so that people can get medical care and housing and their other needs met, regardless of what drugs theyre using?

Another example: We need to be thinking about what voluntary and non-coercive might mean in terms of mental health treatment. Psychiatric hospitals and court-ordered assisted outpatient programs operate by holding everyone to a certain norm, and medicating them and prescribing certain therapies to try to shape them toward that norm, but not everyone sees the condition theyve been diagnosed with as a problem needing to be eliminated. For example, some people who hear voices and see visions dont want to lose those voices and visions, though some do. How can we develop networks of mutual aid and healing justice that allow people to choose how they live in the world? How can assistance be offered in ways that dont intend to force everyone to align with a certain norm? These are questions we can be asking. We can look to the work of groups like the Fireweed Collective, a mental health education and mutual aid project, for more on this.

Many protests around removing police from schools in Chicago have centered on providing other resources, like school nurses and counselors. I know BYP100 [Black Youth Project 100] and other organizations were demanding mental health care centers on the South Side. I kept thinking about the statistic cited in Prison By Any Other Name where you cited that seventy-five percent of the students arrested by police in schools are Black.

Yes, that seventy-five percent number was from a Project NIA and Loyola University study from a few years back, specifically focused on Chicago, and we see similar patterns in other cities. A 2018 study showed that ninety percent of students arrested in New York schools were Black or Latinx. Like so many of these systems, school policing does not work in the ways that many people assume it does. Theres no research showing that it decreases violence in schools. Thereisplenty of research showing that school policing targets Black students and other students of color and disabled students, and increases the number of students who are arrested and entrapped in the prison cycle.

Crystal Laura, a Chicago writer and scholar who we interviewed for our book, wrote a great book called Being Bad about the school-to-prison pipeline. She talks about how all kinds of resources have gone into policing students, essentially creating police stations inside of schools, where students can be bookedand also the morphing of schools into more prison-like institutions in other waysrequiring uniforms and metal detectors, dispensing horrible food, not letting people leave the room even to go to the bathroom. So, what could we do with the resources that go toward school policing and school prisonization, if they were reinvested? Wed need to absolutely increase nurses and counselors and mental health care, as you mentioned, especially given how those resources have been nearly entirely stripped from so many schools and communities. Also, despite Chicago Public Schools constantly mentioning restorative justice as a buzzword, their funding for actual non-punitive restorative justice programs, which eschew police involvement, is meager. And all students should have access to smaller class sizes and recess and arts programs, which are provided as a given at schools filled with middle-class white students. I also think about how the Movement for Black Lives platforms education section called for not only better services, but also good-quality food and recreation and a curriculum that meets students needs both culturally and materially. There are plenty of important places that reallocated money can go, if it doesnt go to police. The calls for CPD out of CPS right now are so essential.

So many Black women are central to shaping the ideas in Prison By Any Other Name. Mariame Kaba, Angela Davis, Beth Richie and Ruth Gilmore among them. Have you found that people respond to you differently as a younger white woman and a journalist? If so, how do other people react to you writing about prisons and other forms of state supervision?

Yeah, in Prison By Any Other Name, Vikki and I wanted to center the words and work of Black women abolitionists because this is where abolitionand so much of the most important work against prisons and policingcomes from. When I wrote my last book and was going around talking about it, I noticed that particularly in predominantly white spaces, people saw me as something of a novelty and were quick to attribute these interesting new ideas to me. This is part of the reason we have like twenty-million citations and so many interviews in Prison By Any Other Namebecause abolition is a collective project with Black feminist roots and roots in incarcerated peoples organizing. We want to make clear that we did not come up with those things ourselves.

Another thing I notice, in terms of reactions, is other white people often respond to me by knowingly saying, But you cant really want to abolish the police, mentioning all the ways in which police supposedly protect communitiesand this goes unsaid, but its usually white communities that theyre talking about. Theres an assumption that I must see the police as a force that actually protects me in some way, when some of the most traumatic experiences of my life have happened because of police and prisons.

In terms of being a journalistIm definitely that, but in addition to my work at Truthout and my writing, Im also an organizer, currently mostly with Love & Protect, a Chicago-based collective that supports women and nonbinary people of color whove been criminalized or harmed by state and interpersonal violence, so Im bringing that work to bear in my writing and speaking. I dont think there should be a hard line between journalism and activism.

Although there has been public discussion about getting rid of the Chicago Gang Database, Prison By Any Other Name also addresses how sex offenders registries are not always effective as a community safeguard. Could you talk about both databases?

Gang databases are part of a whole range of data-driven reforms that are marketed as savvy ways to prevent crime, but actually put targets on peoples backs, particularly Black and Brown people, making people more vulnerable to the police and, very often, officers arent required to provide evidence for designating someone as a gang member. And once people are in the database, whether or not theyre actually in a gangthe database isnt even accurate about thatthey can lose out on jobs, be further subject to immigration enforcement, face worse consequences within the criminal legal system, miss out on educational opportunities. Last year, ninety-five percent of people on the database in Chicago were Black or Latinx.

Even if the databases were entirely accurate, wed have to ask: Why are police recording data on gang membership? Why should gang members have this additional target on their backs? Why do people join gangs in the first placeas New York organizer Josmar Trujillo asks in our book? (He pointsout that although gangs are obviously sometimes involved in violence, they also are places where people organize and build community, often in neighborhoods where few resources or support structures exist.) Here in Chicago, the Erase the Database project, a collaboration between Organized Communities Against Deportations, BYP100 and Mijente, has exposed the racism and cruelty of the database and called for its elimination. The recently formed Black Abolitionist Network is also calling for the elimination of gang databases, including the citys new criminal enterprise database.

Sex offender registries, like gang databases, are not cultivating safety for anyone. Theres no research that sex offender registries do anything to prevent sexual violence. Yet there are around 900,000 people on these registries nationwide. Thats a huge numberand people on the registries are listed publicly, leaving them and their families open to massive stigma and vigilante violence. Meanwhile, harsh conditions are imposed on them, sometimes for life, including residency restrictions that often leave them with very few places theyre allowed to live. Again, theres no evidence this prevents abuse in any way, but it leaves a lot of people unhoused. One woman I interviewed who was on the registry, due to having dated an underage boy when she herself was young, had her children automatically taken away from her and, for a long time, was not even allowed supervised visits with them. Many people are not allowed to use the internet even if their offense had nothing to do with the internet. Jobs are severely limited, too.

Meanwhile, with both the gang database and the sex offender registry, this punitive data collection allows officials to completely sidestep dealing with the actual roots of violence. Obviously, these databases do nothing to address poverty, white supremacy, patriarchy, and so on. Instead, they punish and surveil marginalized people, trapping them in an ever-growing cycle.

You and Victoria talked about the organizations and practices that people are creating in several cities to enact alternatives to prisons via restorative justice and practices from small organizations, but you also talk about challenges that they face. What else would you add to that discussion since the book is already in print and the landscape has shifted so dramatically?

The groups we mentioned in our bookfrom the Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective to the Audre Lorde Projects Safe Outside the System to Creative Interventions Storytelling and Organizing Projectcan provide models for different ways to approach dealing with harm, without prisons or police. And new models are always growingnow we can also look to projects like Los Angeless CAT 911, which is building community alternatives in emergency situations, and the ongoing way that Minneapolis Black Visions Collective has combined calls to dismantle the police with building spaces for healing justice.

Of course, responding to harm is just one aspect of abolition work,as the current defund police movement is reminding us. A large part of it is building up structures of support, from quality health care for all to liberatory education to universal housing, and childcare and robust funding for the arts and youth programs. A large part of it is digging up the roots of these oppressive systemsdismantling white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, ableism and other structures of oppression.

I hope that as some people with political power begin to adopt the language of defunding (and even dismantling!) the police, thanks to the longterm efforts of grassroots groups, these people with political power take the work of organizers to heart. Theres always a risk of powerful people using radical language while maintaining the same old systems. Were seeing some of that play out now, as always. But, of course, those attempts at co-opting language or concepts doesnt diminish the fact that this powerful organizing has been happening for decades. Abolition has always been about challengingstructures of power,and so activists have always known that the abolition of policing and prisons will not come from above. The whole structure of society will need to change, including political hierarchies. That may be daunting, but its also exciting. As Ruth Wilson Gilmore says, Abolition requires that we change one thing: everything.

Newcity Lit Editor Tara Betts is the author of Break the Habit and Arc & Hue. Her interviews and features have appeared in publications such as Hello Giggles, Mosaic Magazine, NYLON, The Source, Sixty Inches from Center, and Poetry magazine. She also hosts author chats at the Seminary Co-Op bookstores in Chicagos Hyde Park neighborhood.

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Writer of the Moment: Maya Schenwar - Newcity Lit

[] The very prosperity that slavery brought to British capital was to eventually make slavery redundant. The capital accumulated throughout slavery led to investments in science, technology and engineering, created the industrial revolution, brought into being productive forces based on machinery, speeded up the process of proletarianisation of the British rural population, changed the social structure of Britain and prepared British capitalism for its task of bringing the whole world into the capitalist market.

In the process slavery became obsolete, an historical anachronism. But not because a system has become historically unnecessary will it fall of its own accord. The slave did not wait for it to fall they battered the slave system with continuous insurrection.

The abolition of slavery did not mean an end to the exploitation of labour; it merely changed its form

The following column on Labour and Emancipation was shared by Gerry Kangalee of the National Workers Union (NWU):

Emancipation Day should be a day of great significance to people of the African Diaspora in the Caribbean. But it should be of significance not only to Africans in the society; but to all peoples who have known the oppression characteristic of European and North American imperialism, which oppressed, dominated, enslaved and eliminated whole peoples, particularly non-white peoples.

But which also constructed an elaborate ideological justification for its brutality toward non-white peoplean ideology, or should I say a demonology of racism, based on the most despicable pseudo-science which reached its highest level in South Africa. It was called apartheid!

Emancipation Day brought an end to 250 years of slavery in the British-controlled Caribbean and opened up a whole new era in Caribbean History, which, instead of leading to the death of racism, only developed and strengthened that ideology with the introduction of Indian indentured labour.

What then is the relationship of emancipation to the labour question?

It is pretty clear that the central question of modern Caribbean History is the question of labour: the need for regimented, captive labour; the shortage of labour; and what Labour (in its personified sense) does, feels and thinks.

The question of Labour is inseparable from the question of the sugar/mono-crop economy, and from the question of immigration into the West Indies, intra-migration within the West Indies and migration from the West Indies.

The fundamental statement about Labour in the Caribbean is that Labour has never had the decisive, dominant say in how the society is to be organised, even though labour is the foundation of the economy. Exploitation and repressioninstead of freedom and powerhave so far been the lot of Labour.

Slavery was about the extreme exploitation of Labour so that Capital could be accumulated and used to colonise the world. The slave as different to the wage slave or modern worker did not sell his labour power for a wage. His labour power was forcibly appropriated.

It was so appropriated that not only did the slaves labour power belong to the slave owner, the slave himself belonged to the slave owner.

The slave was part of capital. And if it is agreed that capital is accumulated or dead labour, then the dominance of capital over labour reached its most barbaric state with the slave systemwhere the living worker/slaves life was absolutely dominated by the frantic scramble of British Capital to accumulate more and more in order to exploit more and more labour so as to accumulate more and more capital in a continually expanding spiral.

There have been many vivid descriptions about the conditions of slaves in the Caribbean, but none more appropriate and gut-wrenching than Kamau Brathwaites poems, All Gods Chillun, contained in his major work The Arrivants:

Boss man rates gain:

I am his living veinof sustenance:his corn, his meat, his grain

Boss man lacks pride:

So hides hisfear of fear and darknessin the whip

Boss man lacks pride:

I am his hideof darkness. Bide

the black times Lord hide

my heart from the lips

that spit

from the hate

that grips

the sweating flesh

the whips

that rip

so wet so red

so fresh!

The quotation brings out two important aspects of slavery. The first deals with the fact that the slave owner was nothing without the slave: the slave owner absolutely depended on the slave in order to survive.

The second is that Labour had to be subject to absolute coercion. Slavery without coercion is a contradiction in terms.

Lets deal with the first aspect: I am his living vein/of sustenance/his corn, his meal, his grain.

What is being said is that capital is nothing without labour. It is precisely in the exploitation of labour that capital grows and assumes absolute dominance over the whole of society.

But if we take a look again at the quote l am his living vein of sustenance, it describes much more than the mode of organisation of labour called slavery. It also describes the relationship between the modern working class and the capitalists.

It is, in fact, a description of the relationship between Capital and Labour. It says that Capital is parasitic; it feeds and grows upon Labour. And, in the process, it emasculates, dominates and alienates Labour which is Capitals living vein of sustenance.

While slavery was abolished, the exploitation of Labour by Capital continues under changed and constantly changing forms. The exploitation of labour during slaverys hey-day could be carried out in no other way than by forcible, physical appropriation and coerciongiven the level of the productive forces and the state of evolution of society and the ideologies and philosophies arising therefrom.

But by the time the slaves were emancipated in the l830s, the British ruling class had gained enough experience in exploiting its own working class to be confident that emancipation would not mean the end of colonial imperialism in the Caribbean, and the domination of Capital over Labour and White over Black.

They also had enough experience to know that if Emancipation did not come from above, it would come from below. And if it did come from below, the status quo would be radically different.

The Haitian Revolution had taught them that the slaves were not going to put up with slavery for much longer and they were determined to be free, whether by petition or by violent means.

Ever since Eric Williams published his book Capitalism and Slavery, reactionary and racist European historians have been forced to recognise that the changing needs of capitalism made the abolition of slavery an historical necessity.

Before the publication of that book, Eurocentric history had postulated that it was the agitation of the so-called humanitarians, the Wilberforces and the Clarksons, that led to Emancipation.

Today, it is generally accepted that it was the changing needs of capitalist, political economy which gave rise to Wilberforce and Clarkson. The humanitarians did not agitate for emancipation because they were against the brutalisation of Africans by Europeans or against mans inhumanity to man.

They recognised that for capitalist economy to stand, pre-dominant remnants of pre-capitalist social formations had to be dealt with; and that slavery as a form of labour organisation was much more wasteful and expensive than the new powerful and gigantic forces of production brought into being by the then ongoing industrial revolution.

The spokesmen of the British Bourgeoisie knew that for British capitalism to really create and dominate the world market, preferential treatment for West Indian sugar had to go, colonial monopolies had to go.

In British capitalisms development into capitalist imperialism, free trade was an absolute necessity. The West Indian plantocracy was naturally opposed to free trade. They had to be dealt with. They were dealt with by the method of destroying the basis of their power: slavery!

The American bourgeoisie had to go to war 25 years later with the American slave plantocracy in order to clear the way for the expansion and development of American Capitalism. This is pretty much accepted today by right wing historians.

What is frantically hidden is that while it was recognised that the abolition of slavery was a historical necessity for the further expansion of capitalism, the political realisation of that goal did not depend on intellectual understanding, but on the outcome of the clash of class interests both within the UK and in its colonies.

The argument about whether slavery should be abolished or when slavery should be abolished could have gone on for another generation. The decisive push toward Emancipation came from the movement of the slaves themselves.

The objective laws of capitalist development can only operate and be discerned in the subjective activity and struggles of the contending class forces in capitalist society.

The intervention of the slaves settled all debate and pushed the ruling classes to hasten the end of slavery. If they had not, the slaves inevitably would have. This perspective is useful in understanding the forces that led to the end of apartheid in South Africa.

The opening shot in the drama of the slaves intervention began in 1791 with the great Haitian Revolution which began only two years after the French Revolution. The significant thing about the revolution in Haiti is not so much that the slaves revolted. Slaves had always revolted.

The fundamental dynamic of West Indian history is to be found in the spiral of repression and resistance that continues to this day. The significance of the Haitian Revolution is that it succeeded; and in succeeding, opened a thirst for and an ideology of liberation that spread throughout the Caribbean.

The Haitian Revolution shattered, at least from an historical point of view, the myth of the docile negro; the myth of the intellectually, physically and morally inferior African.

The myth led to British philosopher David Hume, saying: I am apt to suspect the Negroes to be naturally inferior to the Whites. The myth led the third President of the USA Thomas Jefferson, who made so much noise about the rights of man to say: I advance it therefore as a suspicion only that the blacks are inferior to the whites in the endowment both of body and mind.

After the Haitian revolution, only pseudo-scientists and dishonest intellectuals like Trollope and Froudewho was so devastatingly dealt with by John Jacob Thomas, the Afro-Trinidadian linguist and educator in his book FROUDACITY, published in the 1880scould still argue with equanimity that Blacks were an inferior people.

What the revolution in Haiti did was to spawn a series of never ending revolts throughout the Caribbean that convinced the colonial authorities that it was time for slavery to go.

In the words of one historian: Economic change, the decline of the monopolists, the development of capitalism had now reached their completion in the determination of the slaves themselves to be free.

Lets sum up what led to emancipation. In the late 15th and early 16th century, the West Indies became the sugar pots of Britain and Western Europe. Sugar was produced by slave labour which was procured on the coasts of West Africain the process destroying many societies and civilisations which were as developed as those of Western Europe.

The trade in slaves, the production of sugar by slave labour and the trade in sugar gave rise to astronomical profits for British capitalists. So invaluable were the West Indian sugar islands to mid-eighteenth century Europe that at the end of the seven years war between Britain and France in 1763, which Britain won, the French were quite content to let the British keep Canada in exchange for Guadeloupe.

The very prosperity that slavery brought to British capital was to eventually make slavery redundant.

The capital accumulated throughout slavery led to investments in science, technology and engineering, created the machine-based industrial revolution, speeded up the process of proletarianisation of the British rural population, changed the social structure of Britain and prepared British capitalism for its task of bringing the whole world into the capitalist market.

In the process slavery became obsoletean historical anachronism.

But not because a system has become historically unnecessary means it will fall of its own accord. The slave did not wait for it to fall; they battered the slave system with continuous insurrection.

The British Government took readings and instituted Emancipation from above rather than afford more Haitis in the Caribbean. That is how Emancipation came about.

What we must now look at are its lessons. The abolition of slavery did not mean an end to the exploitation of labour; it merely changed its form. When the masses revolted, Emancipation was conceded, but the plantation system survivedand indeed expanded on the basis of indentured labour, which carried forced labour into the twentieth century.

Emancipation did not remove colonialism, did not put power in the hands of the working people. In l937, when the wage slaves revolted, the colonial authorities conceded limited rights to the people; but the cause of the revolt, the exploitation of labour by capital, continued.

When the people of the Caribbean demanded independence and control over their destinies after the Second World War, we were diverted with political independence under the rule of middle-class professionals who implicitly supported capitalism.

When, in 1970, the working people demanded economic independence, an end to racism and power to the people, the ruling classes in T&T, who are allied with international capitalism, gave us localisation and state capitalism. The exploitation of Labour by Capital remains.

Emancipation, while carrying society to a more advanced level, did not solve the basic contradiction of West Indian history: the capital-labour contradiction. It simply placed it on a new footing.

The resolution of that contradiction lies solely in the hands of the modern working class. That is our historic mission.

Let us make haste and complete the unfinished revolution that our ancestors began.

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Kangalee: Why capitalism is the new slavery; and emancipation revolution remains unfinished - Wired868

Professor Linda WynnPhoto: Eric England

From its launch in the mid-1800s, the womens suffrage movement was fraught with challenges and controversy, as most pivotal moments in history often are. But with Harry Burns tie-breaking vote, cast on Aug. 18, 1920, none of those troubles mattered anymore at least not to many of the women whod finally witnessed their wildest dreams made manifest. Indeed, while awash in the victorious glow of the franchise, those women mostly white used their pens to draft a version of womens history that was formed in their own image. In the process, they erased the Black women who made it all possible.

Professor Linda Wynn of Fisk University has worked tirelessly to tell the stories of too many Black women whose efforts were directly responsible for the 19th Amendments ratification, but whose names have been largely lost to time. For those women, gaining the right to vote wasnt about wresting independence from an abusive husband or an overbearing father. It was a small but mighty step toward equality for the entire Black race, the opportunity to advocate for neglected Black children and marginalized Black men men who were still struggling to cast their own ballots. In a phone call with the Scene, Wynn discussed the complicated but constructive relationship between Black and white suffragists. In so doing, she also reminds us of the dangers in whitewashing history.

Initially, the suffrage movement was closely linked to the abolition of slavery. Can you talk about the link between Black rights and womens rights?

When you look at social movements, what you find is that womens movements generally come after social movements pushed forth by, and for, African Americans. You have the abolitionist movement, that starts around the 1830s, maybe just a little bit before. Then you have a womens movement that starts, and you can look at Seneca Falls in 1848. If you look at the modern civil rights movement what comes after the modern civil rights movement? The womens movement. And I think you can probably even take that into the present day. Everybody thinks Black Lives Matter started last year, or the year before. But it started a little bit before the #MeToo movement.

I think [the womens suffrage movement followed the abolition movement] because women were second-class citizens too. They were going to bat for another suppressed group, and they realized, Well, Im just as suppressed as they are. So they decided, Im out here fighting for that cause, but Im suppressed, so Im going to fight for womens rights too.

But there were white women who didnt agree with the 15th Amendment because it gave Black men the right to vote before the white women received it.

Yes. That is the amendment that, as you said, splintered Black women and white women or further enhanced the dissent. For example, I think Susan B. Anthony made the statement, I would cut off my right arm, this right arm of mine, before I will answer the ballot for the Negro and not for the woman.

As they moved toward the first part of the 20th century, white women were trying to gain the right to vote, and they would have been looking at Southern states remember, most of the Southern states had not voted to ratify the 19th Amendment. So in order for them to get those states on board, they had to sort of follow the principles of the lost cause; they had to look at the South and its ubiquitous racial climate. And it became a big problem.

So how did it happen that Tennessee a Southern, former slave-holding state became the last state to ratify the 19th Amendment?

It was a quid pro quo. Suffragists wanted as many people as possible to support the amendment, and there was a fairly large contingent of Blacks in Nashville who were for it.

Youve got the womens clubs for example, the National Association of Colored Women was formed in 1896 by Mary Church Terrell, a native Tennessean, and the organizations first convention was held in Nashville. You have Fisk University; you have Tennessee State; you have Meharry; and you have a well-rounded Black middle class. Booker T. Washington spent a lot of time here because he was friends with [Black politician and civil rights activist] J.C. Napier. By 1904 you had [One Cent Savings Bank], a Black-owned bank that is still the oldest Black bank in the nation. So you have all of these coalitions being built in Nashville. Then there was [educator and activist] Frankie Pierce and [physician] Dr. Mattie Coleman, who registered 2,500 Black women to vote [in the 1919 municipal election].

White women were not unaware of what was going on in the Black community, and they realized that they needed the organizational skills of Black women. They knew they had an interest, those women had an interest, and maybe those interests were one and the same. So while we may not affiliate socially, we can work together politically because we have the same goal.

Right. And the interests of Black women extended beyond the right to vote.

What Coleman and Pierce really wanted was a vocational school for delinquent girls. Prior to them having the vocational schools, Black girls that got into trouble were basically thrown in jails with adults. So that was the deal that they struck with the white women.

If you look at that 1920 convention [the first of the Tennessee League of Women Voters, held in May], Pierce used that opportunity to lay out her vision for linking women together across racial lines. When she spoke, the question was, What will the Negro woman do with the vote? And she gave them a very clear and concise answer. She said, Yes, were going to work with you, and we will stand by you, white women. Were going to make you proud of us; were going to help you help us and yourself.

Do you think that the school took precedence over the vote since in many areas, especially in the South restrictions like literacy tests made both the 15th and 19th amendments largely theoretical for Black voters?

I dont think the school took precedence over the right to vote. I think that was the deal that Coleman and Pierce were making. I think oftentimes we dont realize, as a populace, that your vote is your voice in terms of policy. Those who you send to state legislatures, to the U.S. Senate, to the U.S. House of Representatives, and to local offices enact the laws that ultimately become policy. I think Coleman and Pierce understood that, and I think they were looking at potential policy. They knew that if they wanted a school and a state department of child welfare, that had to come through a legislative process. So Pierce was telling white women what [she and Dr. Coleman] wanted. We will help you [gain the right to vote] if you will help us do that.

Black women were so critical to the ratification of the 19th Amendment, but their stories have been largely forgotten. Why is it important, 100 years later, that people fully understand their role?

When you look at those who were doing the writing about the suffrage movement, especially from an academic point of view, it was basically white writers. And Im going to say what I say to my students sometimes: White folks dont have to stop and think about you. They dont think about whether somebody else was involved. Theyre busy trying to narrate their story from their perspective, and their perspective is very narrow. They dont know the conversation Black parents have to have with their children about what to do if the police stop you. Whites dont say to their children, If you go in the store, dont put your hands on anything that youre not going to buy, because the floor walker will say youre stealing. Thats what I mean when I say they dont think about you. They have the privilege of not thinking about you. So I think its important to know about the involvement of Black women simply because Black women were involved.

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Black Women Played a Pivotal Role in the Suffrage Movement - Nashville Scene

This story is part of The Confederate Reckoning, a collaborative project of USA TODAY Network newsrooms across the South to examine the legacy of the Confederacy and its influence on systemic racism today.

The white men stand, immortalized in metal and stone, in parks, public squares and the halls of government.

Statues of prominent figures in the Confederacy are a common sight in the South. But the visibility of their monuments often belie the way their lives and legacies are obscured by myth.

Like other symbols of the Confederacy, such memorials have been defended for generations as pieces of Southern heritage, or simply uncontroversial artifacts of history. But for many people, they are ever-present reminders of racial discrimination and violent oppression that has never gone away.

The removal of statues of Confederate leaders as well as those of others who promoted or profited from slavery and racism has become a focal point of calls for a true confrontation with racial inequality in the United States. As part of that conversation,USA TODAY Network newsrooms across the South are taking a critical look at several such figures to understand who they were and what they believed.

***

For more than four decades, a bronzesculpture of thebust of Confederate Lt. Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest has been featured prominently in the Tennessee state Capitol.

A statue portraying Forrest was one of three removed in Memphis in late 2017 afterthe city found a loopholeto legally take down the monument that residents widely agreed should not stand in a public park.

But as the fate of the Capitol bust hangs in the balance pending a state commission meeting later this year and after years of debate among Black and white lawmakers, and Democratsand Republicans who was Forrest and why is he so controversial more than 150 years after the Civil War?

Among the most notorious parts of Forrest's legacy is his reported involvement leading Confederate soldiers in the West Tennessee Battle of Fort Pillow in April 1864, which has commonly become known as a massacre of surrendered Union troops, many of whom were Black.

Primary documents from a variety of sources refute argumentsmade by some Forrest apologists including some who have raised the possibility during conversations at the legislature about the bronze bust and Forrest's legacy that he was not responsible for the mass killings at Fort Pillow.

"We've been going through these excuses for Bedford Forrest for the longest while, and none of them are holding up under scrutiny," said Richard Blackett, a history professor at Vanderbilt University.

In 1868, Forrest gave an interview with a Cincinnati Commercial reporter that was widely published in newspapers around the country. In the interview, he said the Ku Klux Klan had "no doubt" been a benefit in Tennessee. While he denied being an official member, he said he was part of the organization "in sympathy," and later when Forrest testified before Congress about the KKK he eventually disclosed that he was familiar with rituals and practices.

Repeatedly in the 1868 interview, Forrest tried to suggest that he had more disdain for white Radical Republicans and Northerners trying to infiltrate Southern politics than he did African Americans, but he still remained fiercely opposed at that point to Blacks gaining the right to vote or having equal standing in society.

"I am opposed to it under any and all circumstances," Forrest said.

"And here I want you to understand distinctly I am not an enemy to the negro.We want him here among us; he is the only laboring class we have."

***

Jefferson Davis was a man of many words. He literally wrote volumes during his lifetime and spent the last decade of his life writing about the history of the Confederacyandan in-depth analysis of the Civil War.

But Davis (1808-1889) most notably is known for his role withthe Confederate States of America, of which he was named its first and only president.

Susannah Ural,professor of history and co-director of the Dale Center for the Study of War and Society at the University of Southern Mississippi, said Davis seemed to be a natural choice for president of the Confederacy.

Although he did not support secession, he felt duty-bound to represent his state, which voted to secede, and the new government to which he was appointed president. However, he also believed secession was a right afforded tothe states.

Davis wrote in his book,"The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government," that slavery "was not the cause of the war, but an incident."

In his preface to the bookhe said,"the States had never surrendered their sovereignty," and that states should be allowed to make their own decisions regarding slavery.

Davis saidthe federal government was usurping its authority by forcing unwanted laws on the states, first and foremost the abolition of slavery, which was an integral part of the Southern states' agricultural economy.

"(Slavery is) the primary cause, but it's not the only cause," Ural said. "When you talk about states' rights, when you talk about what powers the federal government should have versus state authority, one of the centralissues to states' rightswas the right to slavery."

However, she said, determining the Civil War happened because of slavery isn't entirely accurate.

"There's never one cause ofa war, and things thatmotivatepeople to fight in a war change over the course of time," she said. "To boil the Civil War down to slavery is problematic, but the bigger problem was that for decades, we just kind of pushed slavery aside and didn't really talk about it."

***

Even in his last days, Robert E. Lee, the Confederate general, had already become a myth a myth that gave a defeated South something to cling to; a means of understanding its defeat.

In 1865, Lee surrendered to Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Courthouse in Virginia. His exploits during the war and his canonization by defeated Southerners have rendered him among the most famous losers in military history.

To Emory Thomas, who wrote "Robert E. Lee: A Biography,"published in 1995, historical evidence shows Lee was a man who lived by a strict moral code, a sense of honor and duty; a great soldier and engineer who rose to the challenges he faced.

He was also a slave-owner and a white supremacist. While Lee believed slavery was morally wrong, he did not believe the abolition of it should come through the works of man, but, instead, the will of God.

In an interview, Thomas referenced a famous letter Lee wrote about slavery in 1857. In it, Lee distilled his views as a slave owner on race.

"In this enlightened age, there are few I believe, but what will acknowledge, that slavery as an institution, is a moral & political evil in any Country. It is useless to expatiate on its disadvantages. I think it, however, a greater evil to the white man than to the black race," Lee wrote. "The blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, socially & physically. The painful discipline they are undergoing, is necessary for their instruction as a race, & I hope will prepare & lead them to better things. How long their subjugation may be necessary is known & ordered by a wise Merciful Providence. Their emancipation will sooner result from the mild & melting influence of Christianity, than the storms & tempests of fiery Controversy."

In that letter, and other moments throughout his life, including testimony before Congress after the Civil War, Lee displayed views on race that Thomas described as compatible with social Darwinism a worldview that arose later in the 19th century and early 20th that Western governments, particularly that of the U.S., used to justify colonization, war and imperialism.

In 1862, he wouldfree his father-in-law's slaves, as required by the man's will, a matter of weeks before the Emancipation Proclamation took effect.

"He anticipated social Darwinism In the evolutionary pyramid of human beings, I think he saw white folks like himself at the top. And African Americans somewhere down the ranks, above American Indians whom he really thought were dreadful," Thomas said.

***

Known as the "Boy Hero of the Confederacy," Sam Davis' story was resurrected from obscurity in the late 1800s by journalist Archibald Cunningham, founder of the Confederate Veteran magazine. There are monuments erected in Sam Davis'honor. His boyhood home is on the National Register of Historic Places and operates as a museum.

Barely 21 in 1863, Davis was hanged for his refusal to give Union Army Gen. Grenville Dodge the names of Confederate spies. "I would rather die a thousand deaths than betray a friend," Davis said moments before he was hanged on the Public Square in Pulaski, Tennessee.

Davis wasnt a boy, but a young man whose bravery is immortalized as a symbol of the Confederacy and the Lost Cause, said Brenden Martin, a Middle Tennessee State University history professor. The underpinning of the Lost Cause was that the Confederacy was "right all along" and had a right to secede from the United States.

"All youve got to do is look at the (Confederate) Articles of Secession. The people who brought about the secession (from the United States) made it clear it was about preserving the institution of slavery," Martin said.

Slavery was the backbone of the Southern economy, Martin said.

And the Davisfamily plantation was steeped in that economy.

Data from the American Battlefield Trust notes that Charles and Jane Davis, Sam Davis' parents, originally owned a830-acre plantation located in Smyrna. By 1860, there were 51 enslaved people owned by the Davis family. Sam Davis also had his own slave, named Coleman Davis,who was gifted to him when he was a boy.

***

Anarcha was at least 17 when the doctor started experimenting on her. The year before, she suffered terrible complications during a 72-hour labor that opened a hole between her bladder and vagina and left her incontinent.

The man who held Anarcha in bondage outside Montgomery sent her to Dr. J. Marion Sims sometime in 1845. She was one of at least seven enslaved women sent to Sims by white slaveholders. They had the same condition as Anarcha, known as a vesicovaginal fistula.

Sims wanted to find a way to address it. From 1845 to 1849, the enslaved women became experiments.

By Sims own account, Anarcha underwent 30 operations as Sims tried different approaches to repairing the fistula.

These women could not say no. Neither Sims nor the white men who held them against their will showed interest in their opinions. Deirdre Cooper Owens, a professor of medical history at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and author of "Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology," said if the women protested, they "could get beaten, or they could get ignored."

Anesthesia, Cooper Owens said, was not in wide use at this time.

Despite that, a statue of Sims unveiled in 1939 remains on the grounds of the Alabama Capitol in Montgomery. A bust of Sims also stands in Columbia, South Carolina. New York City officials removed a statue of Sims in Manhattan in 2018.

***

Andrew Johnson considered himselfa champion of the common man but only when those common men were white.

The 17th president of the United Stateswas a common man himself. Born into poverty in 1808, he escaped indentured servitude in North Carolinabefore moving to Greeneville, Tennessee, where he worked as a tailor,owned slaves and launched his political career as a Democrat.

When President Abraham Lincoln died from an assassin's bullet just six weeks after Johnson took office, a fractured countryfound its stubborn new president lacked Lincoln's ability to navigate theend of the Civil War with nuance and sensitivity.

Although Johnson had helped Lincoln end slavery across the land, he nowclashed with the Republican-controlled Congress by planting himself firmly in the way of rights for newly freed slaves. He soon grew widelyunpopular and became the first president ever to be impeached.

Johnson believed in what's called "herrenvolk democracy" the idea that the lowest white man in the social hierarchy should beabove the highest Black man, said Aaron Astor, ahistory professor at Maryville College who researches the Civil War-era South.

In 1860, the year before the Civil War broke out, Johnson said white Southernersfelt so threatened by the prospectof Black freedom that poor men would unite withslave ownersto exterminateslaves rather than see them freed.

***

Albert Pike is a name well-known in Arkansas history as both a Civil War general of Native American troops and a newspaper editor.

Although Pike was known nationally after the Civil War for his involvement with the Freemasons, he gained national attention again on June 19, 2020, when a statue dedicated to him in Washington, D.C.,was toppled by a group of Black Lives Matter demonstrators. The monument to Pike was the only one of a Confederate Civil War general in the District of Columbia.

Pike was a Boston transplant to Arkansas who initially resisted secession, but followed the lead of his fellow Arkansans in fully supporting the Confederacy and even servedas an appointed brigadier general in at least one battle in Arkansas.

By the end of his life, Pike had risen among the highest ranks of the Freemasons.

Before the Civil War, he had moved from the Fort Smith area to Little Rock to pursue a career as a journalist. He eventually became editor and owner of The Advocate where he reported on the Supreme Court of Arkansas.

When the Civil War broke out in 1861, Pike was called up to be a brigadier general over a troop made up of several Native American Tribes. He was cited as being an advocate for Native Americans and the wrongs they suffered at the hands of the white man.

When it came to African Americans, however, Pikes view of slavery was one that claimed it was a "necessary evil." He claimed that slaves would not be able to hold any other job and that they were treated well by their masters. He even admitted to having his own slave for "necessary" work.

***

Gen. Alfred Mouton has become one of Acadianas most polarizing historical figures. His statue, standing on city property in the heart of downtown Lafayette, has been the focus of public outcry, protest and legal battles for decades.

As support is increasing to remove the statue, most of the controversy over Mouton has focused on the fact that he owned Black peopleas slaves and fought for white supremacy during the Deep South's most oppressive era.

While Mouton is hailed by some as a hero from Lafayette's oldest family who fought to defend his hometown from Union forces during the Civil War, the famous son of former Gov. Alexandre Mouton helped wage another civil war here.

Mouton, along with his father, trained the "Vigilante Committee" in Lafayette Parish, a group that would carry out their own form of violent justice against Black residentsthrough whippings, expulsions and lynchings.

From the late 1850s to the beginning of the Civil War in 1861, Mouton-backed vigilantes fought against other groups in Lafayette Parish's own civil war.

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This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Confederate monuments: What the men honored by statues did and believed

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Confederate monuments: What the men honored by statues did and believed - Gadsden Times