Daily Archives: September 23, 2020

Shreyas Gupta had just started to doze off at 2:45 a.m when a glass bottle smashed through his bedroom window.

His first thought was that there had been an explosion. Glass littered his windowsill; shards scattered across his carpet, reflecting moonlight. A bottle of Hells Belle beer rolled across the floor, still intact. He heard tires screeching on the street.

It was the night of Sept. 4, a Friday. Five days earlier, Gupta, a senior, had appeared on local TV news station WRAL to represent Abolish Duke IFC & Panhel, the group he helped start thats advocating for the abolition of 24 Duke fraternities and sororities. It was the first time he had spoken publicly about his involvement.

I just never thought something like that could happen while I was at Duke, he said of the act of vandalism.

Gupta cant prove the incident was related to his role in Abolish Duke IFC & Panhel. Still, he and other members of the team have received some backlash since the groups creation, but most antagonizers choose to wage their battles online, in Instagram DMs or on Facebook Messenger. After WRAL interviewed him, Gupta received a Facebook message from an older man he didnt recognize. Troublemaker! the message read. Why dont you leave Duke!

A few minutes after his window shattered, Gupta went outside to see egg yolks dripping down the wood panelling of the house. More broken beer bottles and egg shells littered the front lawn. Hell probably never know who vandalized his home or if they were retaliating against his calls for abolition, he said, but being physically threatened in his home made everything feel a lot more real.

Although the idea of abolishing Greek life isnt new, this iteration of the movement started with the creation of an Instagram page in mid-July, when criticisms fueled by the Black Lives Matter movement came to a head. The account, which was created before the Abolish Duke IFC & Panhel group, offers a space for students and alumni to share anonymous stories about their experiences in Duke Greek life. It now boasts more than 2,300 followers.

The students who began the Instagram page, who havent publicly revealed their identities, also started a petition calling for the formal abolition of all Duke chapters of the Interfraternity Council and Panhellenic Associationhistorically white Greek organizations The petition has garnered more than 400 signatures.

Conversations sparked from the Instagram prompted Gupta and four other students to launch the Abolish Duke IFC & Panhel website about a month later. The same day, Aug. 12, their open letter was published in The Chronicle. The group has since amassed more than 40 members, Gupta said, and the open letter has more than 350 signatories.

The movement has prompted campus sororities and fraternities to internally evaluate their organizations. Panhellenic Association members Zeta Tau Alpha and Alpha Delta Pi have since voted to relinquish their charters. The attempts were rejected by the organizations national councils, according to the chapters.

But although calls for abolition began two months ago, for the five student leaders of Abolish Duke IFC & Panhel, the movement has been a long time coming.

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Four of the five members of the leadership team chose to speak with The Chronicle: Gupta, Christine Bergamini, Elena Gray and Carmela Guaglianone. Gupta said vandalization of his house dissuaded the fifth member from publicly attaching their name to the group.

Bergamini, a senior and former member of Kappa Alpha Theta, said she decided to disaffiliate when the Duke chapter was prevented from signing the list of demands issued by the Black Coalition Against Policing, which outlined a number of steps including the eventual abolition of the Duke University Police Department. To Bergamini, this proved the organization was only willing to engage in performative activism.

Senior Victoria Sorhegui, president of Dukes Theta chapter, confirmed in an email to The Chronicle that Thetas national policy prevents the chapter from attaching the sororitys name to the list of demands because of its political undertones. Representatives of the national organization did not respond to an email or phone call seeking comment in time for publication.

Gray, a senior previously in Kappa Kappa Gamma, said she had overall positive experiences in her sorority, but as a white woman, eventually, I had to ask myself why I was able to benefit from it, what factors of my identity allowed me to be welcomed.

Once I started asking myself those questions, I couldnt run from the problems of Greek life anymore, she said.

Guaglianone, a senior, accepted a snap bid from Gamma Phi Beta her freshman year but dropped a few months later. Greek life controls much of Dukes social culture, she said, and she has watched the archaic system place the burden of reform onto the members it disadvantages, often forcing victims of racism and sexual assault to advocate for necessary changes to their organizations.

Gupta had planned to drop his fraternity, Pi Kappa Phi, before the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement, which he said allowed him to reflect on his own identity as an Indian man. He and his friends wrote an open letter to the fraternity detailing racism within the Greek system. A mass exodus of the junior and senior classes followed.

In total, 31 members reported disaffiliating, according to Abolish Duke IFC & Panhels disaffiliation tracker, a number confirmed by Gupta. Pikapp President Brian Hu, a senior, told The Chronicle that the number has risen to 35.

Other than providing the number of members who have disaffiliated, Hu did not respond to requests for comment for this article.

Gupta clarified that the call for abolition does not apply to the Multicultural Greek Council or the National Pan-Hellenic Council, which, as Abolish Duke IFC & Panhel wrote in their open letter, provide community to BIPOC students on Dukes campus.

Gray and Bergamini said they recognize that their privilege as white women allowed them to benefit from and enjoy many aspects of their affiliations. Yet all three female leaders cited sexual assault by fraternity members, which Bergamini labeled innate to the Greek system, as a central motivation for their calls for abolition.

Pretty much every single one of my friends, including myself, has experienced sexual assault to some degree by fraternity members, Bergamini said. Its normalized. Why is that something were allowing?

In a 2018 survey, 48% of female students reported having experienced sexual assault at Duke. But from May 2018 to May 2019, only 169 cases were reported to the Office of Student Conduct.

Gray said misogyny in the Greek system stems from the binary and heteronormative nature of Greek life, which creates a power imbalance between fraternities and sororities.

If you break down a single fraternity partythey have the alcohol. They control the venue. They choose the clothes the mostly female participants are wearing, the theme, and how you get there and back, she said. You want to feel empowered as a woman, but that isnt an option.

Senior Rohan Singh, president of the Duke Interfraternity Council, wrote in an email that the members of the IFC executive board absolutely condemn acts of sexual assault and are aware that it is an issue that plagues our community.

We are taking measures to be proactive about eliminating sexual assault within the IFC, and encourage students to report acts of assault to Duke Student Conduct, he wrote.

Those opposed to abolition have argued that reforming the Greek system at Duke is a more feasible and desirable response to the criticisms lodged against Greek life. But Gupta, Bergamini and Gray said theyve tried to reform their organizations from the inside. They said it cant be done.

Bystander intervention trainings, a common reform strategy within fraternities and sororities to address the incidence of sexual assault, can only be so effective, said Gupta. He recalls one session hosted by his fraternity, led by a brother who is by no means an expert, and while attendance was mandatory, he said many members never showed up.

For trainings designed to combat implicit bias, the session takes two hours max, one day a year even when most members are in attendance, Bergamini said. Those reforms can be implemented, but they dont change the makeup of the organization.

Reforming the rush process has its limits, too, she said. Although dues can be lowered and sororities can make efforts to increase diversity, dues are never going to cost zero dollars, and being in a sorority has other associated costs, like formal dresses and costumes, she said. You can never eliminate the selectivity issue of whos allowed entrance into these organizations to begin with.

Bergamini also said Duke employs experts to tackle university reform while relying on unpaid student labor to address issues in Greek life like rampant racism without institutional support.

Gupta remembers feeling the burden of justifying the actions of members of his fraternity against students of color. But its not the responsibility of people of color to teach you how to not be racist, he said.

Mary Pat McMahon, vice provost and vice president for student affairs, highlighted several structures at Duke that serve to address misogyny and racism in Greek life, including the Office of Student Conduct, the bias response group and University Center Activities and Events staff, but she acknowledged that student training also plays a role.

Its definitely my goal to not burden students who are most impacted to have to do the training and the work, she said. Theres plenty of work that we have to do to become a more inclusive and truly equitable campus.

Yet the central issue with attempts at reform, said Gupta, is that the Greek system isnt broken. The group wrote in their open letter that fraternities were created after the Civil War to separate wealthy white male college students from the rest of the increasingly diverse student body. Therefore, Gupta said, Greek life is functioning exactly as it was intended, to uphold power structures and reinforce white privilege.

To make this system equitable and safe, Bergamini said, it would have to turn into something that its not.

Formal abolition would require that the Duke administration terminate their contracts with each of the national Greek organizations, as outlined in the Panhellenic executive boards abolition clarification statement.

McMahon noted that she hasnt yet heard from the national councils of ADPi or Zeta, the two Duke Panhel chapters that voted to relinquish their charters.

What our students are seeking is going to be the priority for how we think about going forward, she said.

Senior Kate Chen, president of the Duke Panhellenic Association, responded in an email to Abolish Duke IFC & Panhels statements. Reform within Duke Panhellenic is integral, she wrote.

Panhellenic members have the power to change how we support our members, include potential members, and treat other members of the Duke community, she wrote. These changes are much needed, regardless of whether Panhellenic as a greater community exists.

She also stated that the board seeks to lessen the association between IFC and Panhel and plans to indefinitely end all mixers with all-male organizations.

Singh said he felt obligated as a person of color to seek a leadership role in his fraternity. But he agreed that people of color should not be forced to educate white fraternity members on issues of racism, and said the IFC executive board is considering working with external consultants and Duke programs to design an anti-hate-and-bias curriculum.

The board also set up a task force to address campus sexual assault and is working with Duke Panhel and the Office of Student Conduct to promote better reporting practices, Singh said.

As a council, we are hoping to transform, rather than reform, our fraternities, he said.

Abolishing Greek life feels radical because Duke has never dared imagine what the universitys social culture would look like without it, Gupta said.

Theres no consideration of what the best option might be, he said. Its like, we have Greek life, and we will continue to have Greek life, so lets just tweak it so people are okay with it.

Although dissolving on-campus Greek housing would be a step in the right direction, it cant solve the major inequities inherent to Greek life, he said. In place of Greek organizations, Gray suggested a residential college system similar to those at universities like Yale and Princeton, which would address many concerns of advocates for Duke housing reform and change the face of Dukes social scene.

Asked if the administration is considering housing reform in response to racism and misogyny in Greek life, the short answer is yes, McMahon said. This is the time to ask the question, because everything is in its own funky spot right now.

This is going to be a year where we think a lot about the larger systemic connections around housing, student organizations, selectivity, and structures that are inherently racist or sexist, or in which students assume a certain identity or status, McMahon said.

Abolish Duke IFC & Panhel also wants Duke to halt the rush process for the spring semester to allow for continued discussion about the future of the Greek system.

Chen confirmed in an email that the Panhel executive board will have a vote Sept. 25 to determine what sorority rush will look like in the spring semester, including the possibility of postponing or canceling rush altogether, and that they plan to release a final decision Oct. 1. Senior Adam Krekorian, IFC recruitment director, wrote in an email that IFC plans to hold virtual recruitment in January.

Before the abolition of campus fraternities and sororities is possible, Abolish Duke IFC & Panhel wants the Duke administration to publicly recognize them.

If we can be brought in to have these conversations with administrators, at least they know what the students want, Bergamini said. That way, the administrators arent just relaying messages by themselves.

The group began exchanging emails with McMahon on Tuesday, which Gupta said is the first time they have formally reached out to set up a meeting with Duke administrators, having recently broken their anonymity. They plan to meet with Gary Bennett, vice provost for undergraduate education, and John Blackshear, dean of students, along with McMahon.

Gupta did meet individually with Duke administrators after his house was vandalizedgetting a bottle thrown through your window is a quick way to get an administrator to listen to you, he said.

Still, he said many students involved with Abolish Duke IFC & Panhel now feel afraid to speak out. The leadership team discussed releasing their names many times, and until recently wanted to remain anonymous, fearing potential repercussions.

But, Gupta said, Its bigger than us.

Editors note: The author of this article was briefly a member of a Panhellenic Association sorority during her first year at Duke but disaffiliated because of the cost.

Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly characterized the open letter that Shreyas Gupta and his friends wrote to his fraternity. It detailed racism in the Greek system generally, not just instances they had experienced, and not all the authors were people of color, as was originally stated. This article has also been updated to reflect that Panhel will hold a vote on spring rush Sept. 25, not a town hall to discuss it. The Chronicle regrets the errors.

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'It's bigger than us': Abolish Duke IFC & Panhel fights to get rid of two dozen Greek organizations - Duke Chronicle

If youve been involved in left politics in the last four years, youve probably heard a lot about the Overton window. Weve been told that Bernie Sanders has shifted the Overton window with his social-democratic policy proposals, that Bernie and Trump have jointly managed to break the Overton window, and that radical slogans like abolish the police must be supported by anyone who wants any sort of police reform because it shifts the Overton window in the right direction.

Sometimes, people who use these phrases are making a purely descriptive claim. Shifts occur in which ideas are widely discussed by political commentators. In 2014, for example, only a handful of prominent figures were foregrounding single-payer national health insurance. Now everyone who talks about politics for a living has said something about whether Medicare for All is a good idea. This in turn has helped spur centrists to develop proposals that lie somewhere in between Medicare for All and the health care laws currently on the books.

No one denies that shifts of this kind happen. The question is why they are happening and how consequential to real politics these evolutions are. Can shifting the Overton window help the Left get closer to achieving our goals?

Joseph Overton was a senior vice president at a libertarian think tank in Michigan, the Mackinac Center for Public Policy. He developed his window idea in the mid-1990s as a way of convincing potential donors that his organization was doing valuable work.

The Mackinac Center spends its time arguing for proposals to bust labor unions, undercut the movement for climate justice, and generally make things worse for most people. Its not hard to see why wealthy plutocrats would support this agenda, but Overton understood that even inherently attractive products benefit from good marketing. He made a brochure for potential donors with a cardboard slider to illustrate how the window of political possibility on any given issue could be shifted along a spectrum going from total government control to a libertarian utopia of zero government intervention.

After his death in 2003, the concept was taken up and named after Overton by his Mackinac colleague Joseph Lehman. Public officials cannot enact any policy they please like theyre ordering dessert from a menu, Lehman told the New York Times. They have to choose from among policies that are politically acceptable at the time. And we believe the Overton window defines that range of ideas.

Crucially, the point wasnt about implementing the policies the Mackinac Center actually wanted. He would tell them that neither the most libertarian nor the least libertarian possibility was ever going to become a reality. Instead, they should think about points on a spectrum.

Ideas within the window on Overtons slider might be implemented. Ideas that were too far outside of the window were radical or even unthinkable. Summarizing Overtons thinking in the New Republic, Laura Marsh says he proposed that the most effective way of moving relatively libertarian ideas into the mainstream wasnt to advocate for minor, incremental changes to an already accepted idea but to make the best case for a currently unthinkable idea and thereby move policy proposals adjacent to that from radical to acceptable.

At least two kinds of commentators whose political preferences sharply diverge from those of Joseph Overton seem to think that leftists can shift the Overton window by advocating policies previously considered to be unthinkable. On the one hand, some moderate progressives are, at least in their more conciliatory moments, happy to have the likes of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez shifting the Overton window on progressive policy. If Bernie and AOC are putting Medicare for All on the table, for example, this might have the virtue in the eyes of some of these Democrats of making a public option more likely.

The second group is made up of leftists genuinely committed to transformative goals who think that advocating the loaf that theyd love to have someday at least makes it more likely that theyll get half a loaf sometime soon.

The moderately progressive case for the value of Overton window manipulation is typified by Rachel Maddow. She did a segment on Overton and his window just before she interviewed Bernie Sanders in December 2015. The way to shift the window, she said, was to advocate super-extreme positions which change the realm of whats politically possible because after something super-nuts has been floated positions which are slightly less nuts will start to look acceptable. She illustrated this dynamic by describing Donald Trumps rivals for the GOP nomination first denouncing Trumps proposed Muslim ban and then making somewhat similar proposals themselves. When she segued from this segment to the Sanders interview without even a commercial break, the implication was lost on no one. This guy might be a little crazy, and he certainly wont be the nominee, but hey, at least hell help shift the conversation in a more progressive direction.

Anecdotally, Ill say that I heard a lot of this kind of thing after Bernies first defeat in 2016. Sometimes it came from liberals trying to cheer up their dispirited leftist friends. Sometimes it came from leftists themselves looking for a silver lining in the outcome of the primary. In a way, members of both groups would say, Bernie has already won. Just look at all the concessions to him in the Democratic platform!

This was always pretty thin gruel. American major party platforms are wish lists with little practical significance. But its the kind of consolation that rings especially hollow after Bernies second defeat this time to a man who has strongly suggested that if Medicare for All were passed by a Democratic House and Senate during his second term, he would veto it.

In a way, the idea that we should put forward radical demands not in order to achieve them but so that less radical versions of them will become policy just sounds like common sense. Any union negotiator will tell you that it makes sense to bring ideas to the bargaining table that are highly unlikely to make it into the actual contract. If you demand eleven, you might at least end up with three.

The problem with using this analogy as a prism for thinking about what kind of a left political agenda were putting forward is that there are some fairly large and relevant disanalogies between the two cases. To start with, a union negotiator suggesting contract language it would be difficult for the boss to accept knows that the unions members would love these proposals.

Those extra two weeks of paid vacation every year might never become a reality, but thats not because the people on whose behalf the negotiator is working dont want them. Contrast that to demanding the abolition of all policing in a country where 81 percent of black Americans dont even want police presence in their neighborhoods to be reduced. Demanding eleven is sometimes a good strategy for getting a nervous enemy to grant you three, but its far less clear that when the majority of the people you think would benefit from a policy dont even want two, demanding eleven will get them to want three.

In at least some cases, it might even have the opposite effect. It remains to be seen whether the gambit will pay off, but Donald Trump certainly seems to believe that hell get a lot of mileage out of blurring the lines between (a) the tepid and grotesquely inadequate police reforms proposed by Joe Biden, (b) the more popular idea of defunding the police, and (c) police abolitionism, and using popular fear of (c) as a cudgel against even (a). To be clear, I dont think the possibility of the Right using this kind of rhetorical strategy against us is a good enough reason not to put forward radical policy proposals. Right-wing fearmongers will lie about any progressive idea as a matter of course. The point is just that we have little reason to believe that proposing very unpopular ideas will do anything to make more moderate versions of those ideas more popular.

The second, related problem is that company negotiators arent going to come back with a proposal for an extra two days of paid vacation out of a sheer desire to continue to look reasonable in a situation where the boundaries of the discussion have shifted. If the demand has any impact its because the union has real-world leverage. If bargaining breaks down, the workers might walk off the job and hurt the companys bottom line. No parallel mechanism exists to make establishment politicians sit up and take notice when a faction thats out of power engages in a purely rhetorical escalation of its demands.

The analogy between negotiating tactics at bargaining tables and ultraradical slogans printed on protest signs or advocated in left-wing magazines gets even thinner when we remember that much of the point of the latter isnt to directly spook policymakers into making concessions. Our goal is to shift public opinion in our direction so that we can build up a movement with enough support to actually win such concessions or, better yet, to take power so we can implement our ideas ourselves. And for that task, the negotiating analogy just isnt relevant. You cant spook a majority of the population into wanting the things that you think they should want.

None of this means that socialists should only advocate things most people already support. It doesnt even mean that theres no value in making currently unthinkable ideas a little easier to imagine. About half of the articles I write for Jacobin are attempts to do exactly that. But the point of the exercise isnt to somehow trick skeptics into supporting something halfway in between our radical aspirations and the status quo.

Sometimes the activity of the Left might well result in inadequate reforms implemented by establishment figures that greatly improve on previous conditions. But we dont get any closer to that goal by going for broke on a rhetorical level. Instead, that becomes possible when we build up a movement so powerful that our political enemies see the need to make concessions to stop us from coming to power. And the way we build up such a movement is by clearly and persuasively articulating what we actually want in a way thats compelling to large numbers of people whose material interests would be served by that agenda.

Thats the opposite of verbally advocating things we arent even sure make sense for the sake of shifting the Overton window. Doing the latter, if anything, undermines our ability to convince persuadable people that a better world is realistically possible.

Ghoulish right-wing think tanks like the Mackinac Center do advance the agenda of their wealthy donors. But the way they do it isnt well-represented by Joseph Overtons cardboard slider moving some ideas into the window of political possibility by making previously unthinkable ideas a few steps beyond those proposals a bit more thinkable. Rather, the main value of think tanks to their donors agenda comes from doing things like filing amicus briefs in court cases, providing cheat sheets of arguments used by partisans in debates about things that already politically possible, and even writing sample laws that fit the preexisting policy preferences of right-wing donors.

A think tank (or a political magazine) that wants to be useful to its political goals might well spend some time, or even quite a bit of its time, advocating ideas that probably arent going to become popular any time soon. Im a socialist. I dont just want to nationalize health insurance by implementing Medicare for All. I want to nationalize every hospital in the country by taking a page from Britains postwar Labour government and creating a National Health Service. Oh, and Id also like worker control of the means of production. Thats pretty far outside of the window of political possibility in America in 2020.

But we need to be clear on what advocacy for these ideas can and cant accomplish. Medicare for All is already quite popular, which is one reason it makes so much strategic sense for us to focus on it right now, but its quite doubtful that its going to be made more popular by socialists talking about currently fringe ideas that go beyond it. The point of talking about creating an American NHS isnt to trick anyone into supporting M4A. Its to persuade people who already support M4A that our work wont be done when weve accomplished it.

Its important for radicals to work to make whats currently unthinkable thinkable. But thats not so we can shift the Overton window so far that something halfway between those unthinkable horizons and the miserable present can become politically possible. Its so that we can actually achieve the kind of unthinkable future that we desperately need.

Originally posted here:

Let's Stop Talking About the Overton Window - Jacobin magazine

Reading Time: 4 minutes

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article are the authors own and do not necessarily reflect the viewpoint of The Eyeopener.

Content warning: This article contains mentions of police violence, racism, sexual violence and death.

By Alannah Fricker

On June 4, Ryerson University announced that it would not proceed with its plan to hire special constables as security staff in response to pressure from community members and the wake of global police violence. While they do not carry guns, special constables work closely with armed police officers and are often equipped with handcuffs, pepper spray and batons. They are also granted the power to detain, search, ticket, arrest and use force with minimal legal sanctions.

While the announcement to cancel the program was a win for many of those who sounded the alarm and a testament to years of sustained pressure from Black and Indigenous people at Ryerson, it remains a symptom of a more complex fight for justice and safety on campusone that problematizes less obvious forms of surveillance and punishment and calls attention to the universitys ongoing relationships with police and security.

On Aug. 20, the university announced the creation of a presidential external expert panel (EEP) on campus safety and security, to develop a different approach to campus safety. The EEP is composed of mostly lawyers and includes DiversiPros Hamlin Grange, the former Toronto Police Services (TPS) board member who led the consultation process to bring special constables to Ryerson in 2020. We should be outraged that anyone involved in shaping alternatives to police on campus is pro-police. It is troubling that the group positioned as experts do not learn, work, teach or live in this community. Therefore, I am steadfast in my call for abolition.

After the brutal murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police on May 25, the movement to defund and abolish the policean idea previously positioned on the marginsquickly became mainstream and realizable. In so-called Canada, police murders and widespread community outrage forced the hands of politicians, media, institutions and schools to reposition themselves at a distance from police.

While some of the killings were high profile, many were not. As of September police murders of Black and Indigenous people in Canada included DAndre Campbell, Jamal Francique, Eishia Hudson, Regis Korchinski-Paquet, Chantel Moore, Ejaz Choudry, Rodney Levi and Jason Collins. More hidden were the deaths of those caged in jails and prisons due to neglect and murder, including Jordan Sheard, Michael Croft, Shawn Spaulding and countless others killed by capitalism under the guise of COVID-19, drug overdoses, poverty and suicide.

Police and prisons do not keep us safe from violence. They are violent and they should be abolished from our campuses entirely

I mention these deaths as a reminder that police and prisons do not keep us safe. They are especially dangerous to those whose bodies are marked as disposable by the state and its dominant classes. Police, like their counterpartsprisons, detention centres, child welfare systems, courts and lawscannot be reformed to achieve justice because they exist to maintain order through subjugation within enduring systems of white supremacy, hetero-patriarchy, ableism and capitalism.

Police are antithetical to the goals of our institution which should include supporting the learning and wellbeing of students, staff, faculty and the community. Research has repeatedly and overwhelmingly concluded that police erode trust with, alienate and criminalize Black, Brown, Indigenous, dis/abled and undocumented learners and teachers. Black and Indigenous people in Canada are targeted and severely overrepresented in all areas of the injustice system when compared to the overall population. Police regularly enforce unjust laws that exacerbate issues related to poverty, homelessness, substance use, drug dealing, sex work and mental health.

We know that creative, community-led alternatives to police exist, which are rooted in transformative justice, free housing, education, food, water and status for all. Yet police and prisons remain, justified by their control over racialized and Mad bodies, and the disappearance of so-called dangerous people from our communities.

But who are the dangerous people? Most crimes are low-level, rooted in poverty and desperation and involve property, drugs and personal relationships. Police and prisons do little to prevent violence and rarely resolve cases of serious harm.

Rather, they regularly uproot people from their communities and enact against them insitutionally-sanctioned acts of assault, rape, neglect, deprivation, torture and murder.

Police and prisons do not keep us safe from violence. They are violent and they should be abolished from our campuses entirely.

In our search for alternative community safety models, we must be cautious of stigmatizing discourses and attempts to reform rather than transform the ways we keep each other safe. We must be clear, solution-focused and uncompromising in our demands and continue to take action when the university acts in bad faith.

While it is not exhaustive, I offer a shortened version of Canadian Students for Sensible Drug Policy (CSSDP) Ryersons list of demands that we urge the university to adopt to support community safety:

In closing, I would like to urge you to take action and exercise your power as a stakeholder. I encourage you to follow and support the work of the Black Liberation Collective-Ryerson and CSSDP Ryerson; Latinx, Afro-Latin-America, Abya Yala Education Network Toronto; Toronto Prisoners Rights Project; Black Lives Matter-Toronto and others demanding supportive, police-free campuses. I encourage you to send a message to decision-makers at Ryerson to demand an end to relationships with police; attend workshops to build your capacity to respond to emergency situations; and read, write, speak and act in support of police and prison abolition.

Abolition is inevitable and I know that we will win, but it is up to us to care for each other and take the necessary steps to realize it in our lifetime.

Alannah Fricker is a Ryerson bachelors of social work graduate, an Ontario Institute of Studies in Education masters in social justice education student, lead organizer with the Toronto Prisoners Rights Project and Abolition Coalition andfounder of CSSDP Ryerson.

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OP-ED: No cops on campuswe keep each other safe - The Eyeopener

Event starts with film screening Sept. 24, discussion Sept. 25

The Latin American and Iberian Institute at The University of New Mexico has announced its Fall 2020 Im/migration and Human Rights Series, co-sponsored by the Maxwell Museum of Anthropology, the Alfonso Ortiz Center for Intercultural Studies, and El Centro de la Raza.

All events will be held virtually and require pre-registration. For more information or questions, contact the LAII at laiioutreach@unm.edu.

LAII Im/migration and Human Rights Series:

Border South Film Screening and Discussion with Filmmakers

Available to view starting at 1 PM on Thursday, Sept. 24 Discussion at 3 PM on Friday, Sept. 25

Every year hundreds of thousands of migrants make their way along the trail running from southern Mexico to the US border. Gustavos gunshot wounds from Mexican police, which have achieved abundant press attention, might just earn him a ticket out of Nicaragua. Meanwhile anthropologist Jason painstakingly collects the trails remains, which have their own stories to tell. Fragmented stories from Hondurans crossing through southern Mexico assemble a vivid portrait of the thousands of immigrants who disappear along the trail. Border South reveals the immigrants resilience, ingenuity, and humor as it exposes a global migration system that renders human beings invisible in life as well as death.

For more information, visit the LAII website. Pre-registration required, limited spots available.

The Pushback Film Premiere and Discussion with Director Kevin Ford, Congresswoman

Veronica Escobar, and former Congressman Beto ORourke

Monday, October 5 4 PM

The first of two Latinas to represent Texas in Congress, Veronica Escobar, and the only African-American woman to run for city council in Austin in 2018, Natasha Harper-Madison, lead a diverse group of progressive voices across Texas as they fight decades of institutional racism and policies of discrimination along the border. The battle over immigrant rights, land seizures to build the border wall, and the troubled racial history of the state form the backdrop to a film that explores how a place once known for its reactionary politics is becoming more liberal, more diverse and more at risk for violent conflict. Join us for a dynamic live conversation about the current political climate and what's at stake this election season, with special guests Congresswoman Veronica Escobar and former Congressman Beto O'Rourke. The Director of The Pushback, Kevin Ford will join us in conversation and share exclusive clips from the new documentary before the film's release on TVOD.

For more information, visit the LAII website. Pre-registration required, limited spots available.

Discussion with fronteristxs collective members hazel batrezchavez and Bernadine Hernndez

Thursday, October 8 3:30 PM

In this presentation the fronteristxs collective will discuss their ongoing collaborative work in the abolition movement. They will talk about the historical violence of the US immigration system and its relationship to racism in the criminal justice system. The fronteristxs collective is currently working with several coalitions on 1) the #FreeThemAll campaign to demand immediate release of individuals from jails, prisons, and detention centers 2) the campaign to divest NMERB funds from private prisons 3) and a legislative ban on private prisons in New Mexico. The collective will shed light on the ways that those in power work to silence individuals and give insight on how you can get involved in the campaign to #FreeThemAll.

For more information, visit the registration website. Pre-registration required.

Las Madres de Berks Screening and Talkback with Michelle Angela Ortiz

Sunday, October 18 2 PM

Join us for a free screening and talkback of Las Madres de Berks short documentary created by artist Michelle Angela Ortiz. Las Madres de Berks documentary shares the testimonials of four mothers that were detained for two years with their children at The Berks County Residential Center, a family prison in Pennsylvania. Berks is the oldest of the three permanent family prisons for immigrant families in the country. Despite being held up as a model by proponents of immigrant detention, the center has amassed a record of human rights violations.

Award-winning visual artist, Michelle Angela Ortiz created the Las Madres de Berks Documentary, as part of her "Familias Separadas" public art project which amplifies the stories of families affected by detention and deportation in the United States. Ortizs main community partner, the Shut Down Berks Coalition has been fighting to close down the Berks family prison for years.

For more information, visit the meeting registration website. Pre-registration required.

Justicia For the Children Screening and Discussion with Filmmakers

November 19 2 PM

Frontera elders speak and demand justice for children who have been detained, separated from their families and who have gone missing in the borderland of El Paso Texas and Ciudad Juarez Chihuahua Mexico. Ya Basta! Join us for a discussion with filmmakers, community members, and the musical artist behind "Justicia For the Children."

For more information, visit the meeting registration website. Pre-registration required.

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LAII to host Im/migration and Human Rights Series - UNM Newsroom

U.S. Attorney General William Barr is sworn in before testifying before the House Judiciary Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., on July 28, 2020.

Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

On Saturday night, the New York Police Department arrested nearly a third of a 300-person protest. Demonstrators had gathered in Times Square to call for the abolition of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, better known as ICE. The protesters did no more than march and chant. They stayed on the sidewalk. Police outnumbered them 3 to 1. One demonstrator told CNN that officers descended from all sides and started ripping people off of the sidewalk. There were 86 arrests.

In the preceding days, small protest after small protest in New York had been crushed by overwhelming police force and aggressive arrests.

Such is the state of unchecked liberation in this, the anarchist jurisdiction of New York City.

Theres no subtlety in Trumps cynical base-pandering, aided once again by Barrs Justice Department inserviceas the presidents private law firm.

Alongside Seattle and Portland, New York City earned the official anarchist jurisdiction label from Attorney General Bill Barr on Monday. Other cities under Democratic leadership are likely to be added to this farce of a naughty list, targeting areas where potent antiracist, antifascist protests have erupted this summer. The designations are the latest act in President Donald Trumps theater of the absurd.

Because of the designation, the localities now stand to lose significant federal funding. Theres no subtlety in Trumps cynical base-pandering, aided once again by Barrs Justice Department in service as the presidents private law firm.

Residents of New York, Seattle, and Portland responded with bemusement on social media when they learned that their cities heavily policed, viciously unequal, racially segregated terminals and repositories of capital are, in fact, anarchist jurisdictions. New York City hasnt been an anarchist jurisdiction since CBGB closed, man, quipped comedian and writer Josh Gondelman on Twitter. Reminder: In this anarchist jurisdiction, alternate-side parking rules are in effect, tweeted MSNBCs David Gura. There was some heady riffing on whether the horizontalist, anti-hierarchical nature of anarchist organizing makes anarchist jurisdiction an oxymoron. The city is ours! #AnarchistJurisdiction, Brooklyn-based anarchist community center, The Base, mockingly tweeted.

It is hard not to scoff. There are over 38,000 officers in the NYPDs standing army. And the departments budget even after some toothless cuts in the new city budget will continue to exceed $5 billion. In June, during New York Citys historic six-night curfew, 1,349 people were detained by police and placed in holding cells, in the midst of a pandemic, for merely being out past 8 p.m. Not to mention that there are, even in New Yorks left-wing milieux, very few self-identifying anarchist groups. The citys new label is laughable.

Yet the material consequences for residents in the designated cities could be all too real. White House Budget Director Russ Vought is set to issue guidance to federal agencies on withdrawing funds from the cities in less than two weeks. The New York Post, which broke the story, noted that it is not yet clear what funds are likely to be cut, but the amount of money siphoned from New York City could be massive, given the Big Apple gets about $7 billion in annual federal aid. City coffers, devastated by the pandemic, now face more brutal cuts.

In no uncertain terms, Trump is punishing cities that have, again and again, shown themselves to be hubs of antiracist, antifascist resistance.

Theres an irony in the targeting of funds to governments that have, for the most part, cracked down heavily on anti-racist protesting. Democrats have been all too happy to see antiracist uprisings heavily policed and neutralized. As such, Govs. Andrew Cuomo of New York and Jay Inslee of Washington state, alongside other Democratic state and city leaders, are only superficial targets here.

Some politicians highlighted the hypocrisy in Trumps move, pointing out that the cuts could hurt their ability to crack down on protests. New York Attorney General Letitia James correctly identified the central aim of the designations a pathetic attempt to scare Americans into voting for a commander-in-chief who is actually incapable of commanding our nation but added in her statement that Trump should be prepared to defend this illegal order in court, which hypocritically lays the groundwork to defund New York and the very types of law enforcement President Trump pretends to care about.

Such is the fulcrum of this bleak debate: Powerful Democrats respond to Trumps attacks by pointing to the police state that they, too, seek to uphold.

The Democratic officials insisting that Trumps order is illegal are almost as laughable, in this political moment, as the anarchist jurisdiction designation themselves. Trumps base-baiting speech acts have always served to create new and darker political realities beyond their technical legal scope.

The Justice Department may well have to defend this jaundiced, cynical move in court, but the work its meant to do has been done: the fortification of escalating efforts to repress dissent, building on Trump and his Justice Departments ongoing campaign strategy of groundlessly demonizing antifa, while decimating Black lives.

Read the original:

Bill Barr: NYC, Portland, And Seattle Are Anarchist Jurisdictions - The Intercept

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

The demands are clear: defund and abolish police. As those calls grow, so will efforts by reformers to propose new rules and regulations that they say will improve and restore legitimacy to policing. These bureaucratic reforms reflect the failed thinking that built up the carceral state, and they will make policing harder to dismantle. Reforms like this are meant to pacify social movements, replacing community self-determination with the expertise of lawyers, academics, and other professionals who are complicit in oppression.

Bureaucratic reforms are not just too little. They are also dangerous. Decades of judicial oversight, transparency legislation, and self-auditing requirements have not reduced the power of the carceral state. To the contrary, they have created a vast punishment bureaucracy giving political legitimacy and social inertia to a system of mass caging rooted in enslavement. Applying this same regulatory framework to the governance of policing will only expand the reach and harm of policing, just as it has helped to make the prison-industrial complex bigger, harsher, more durable, and racist as ever.

The chief proponents of police bureaucracy are typically professionals whose authority depends on working closely with the carceral state. Consider the recent L.A. Times op-ed by University of Texas professor Sarah Brayne, One way to shrink the LAPDs budget: Cut costly and invasive big-data policing. Brayne spent years embedded within the Los Angeles Police Department as a doctoral student at Princeton. Despite the op-eds title, it never proposes reducing let alone cutting any police surveillance. Instead Brayne writes about the secrecy that shrouds LAPDs data systems. She notes that New York City recently required the NYPD to disclose which technology it uses and what data it collects. She proposes that Los Angeles should follow suit.

Brayne asserts that surveillance technologies are largely missing from todays urgent conversations. That voice is missing only if one ignores local activists. Here in Los Angeles, the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition has fought to dismantle LAPD surveillance since 2011, recently forcing LAPD to end its LASER, Chronic Offender, and PredPol surveillance programs. An abolitionist organization, Stop LAPD Spying has also organized against laws like the one Brayne proposes importing from New York. That law, named the POST Act, tasks the NYPD with writing surveillance impact and use policies to post on their website, where the public has 45 days to comment. While police are asked to consider the comments, NYPD is not required to make changes or to share the information that underlies their conclusions, which will be framed by NYPDs army of lawyers.

These laws are also often coupled with efforts to limit use of a particular surveillance technology, like the restrictions on facial recognition enacted by San Francisco and the recently proposed Facial Recognition and Biometric Technology Moratorium Act, introduced by Senator Ed Markey and others this June. Explaining the bill, Markey acknowledged calls to dismantle the systematic racism that permeates every part of our society and noted that face recognition physically endangers Black Americans. But at the same time that his bill seeks to freeze police use of face surveillance, it outlines details of the regulatory scheme that Congress would enact to end the moratorium, including auditing requirements, standards for use and management, and minimum accuracy rates.

The idea behind these reforms is that policing can be tamed through paperwork and rules. This whitewashes the harm of surveillance, which will be used for racial domination no matter if it is lawful or unlawful, no matter if accurate. The politicians and lawyers behind the POST Act last month celebrated their tremendous and vital victory. But the truth is that legislation like this is the easiest possible win in this moment, betraying the bolder visions of the mass movement calling to abolish police.

No one is taking to the streets facing down tear gas to demand police bureaucracy. To the contrary, todays protests originate in the failure of past reforms, which have done little to end policings death toll. These protests have made police abolition a serious conversation. Whether and how legislation can be abolitionist are important questions. But if legislation is a goal, that power should be used to ban particular forms of surveillance, not just create a bureaucracy to regulate them. Calls for surveillance oversight ignore the lessons of past struggles against federal national security surveillance and Red Squad repression, which led to the creation of bureaucracies like the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and the NYPDs Handschu guidelines. Rather than dismantling policing, reforms like this help police adapt to criticism, to reinvent and rebuild.

When the POST Act was enacted, the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition criticized the reform as surveillance bureaucracy and observed that laws like this presume that our communities want to be surveilled, so long as the state follows a heavily stacked process, pretends to consider input, and checks off a few baseline legal requirements. At the time, it may have appeared odd for activists from Los Angeles to criticize local legislation in another state. But Stop LAPD Spying observed that the national uprising against police terror will be used to force similar reforms across the country. We are seeing that now.

To be sure, this isnt the first time a reformer who worked closely with police has proposed surveillance bureaucracy laws for Los Angeles. In 2015 the ACLUs local Director of Police Practices sent a proposal for a similar local law that he had drafted to an LAPD deputy chief, asking if you have any concerns with any of the provisions that are in here and inviting ideas for provisions you think should be in here but arent. The ACLU later pushed a statewide version of similar legislation. An ACLU press release announced that the bill would offer a seat at the table and foster public debate to build community assent for surveillance.

This relates to the deeper issue with reforms like the POST Act, reflected both in who is advancing these proposals and in what these laws will create. Reform like this is pacification: it takes power away from the people, directing opposition into a bureaucratic process that marginalizes community voices, while elevating voices that support police or at most compromise with them. And at the end of the day, these reforms allow police to say that the community controls surveillance (community control is even in the title of the ACLUs model surveillance bureaucracy legislation, curiously named CCOPS) when the truth is that police set the agenda and violently hold the power. After securing public approval, police continue their harm with a claim of legitimacy. This is nothing like abolition. Its not even de-policing, reducing the scope of what police do. Its police preservation.

Abolition is decolonization. More than just ending policing and prisons, its a practice of building a new world. Those institutions are weapons of settler colonialism and racial capitalism, but they arent the only ones. Abolition requires dismantling all the weapons made using those ideologies. It requires dismantling universities, which colonize and hoard knowledge while credentialing experts who work to maintain oppression. It requires ending imperialism, whose wars, borders, and extraction are police violence on a planetary scale. And it requires dismantling the legal bureaucracies that legitimate and sustain a system of mass torture and killing.

Far more than dismantling and defunding though, abolition requires building the autonomy and self-determination that the carceral state denies. This begins with advancing the political vision of those who policing harms. Academics like Brayne arent the only people with ideas about how to address the harm of surveillance in Los Angeles. Brayne is using her authority to argue against the views of movement organizers who are working to dismantle LAPD surveillance. No matter her intentions, Braynes expertise comes from riding around in police cars and helicopters, shadowing police as they hunted people. In contrast, grassroots organizers speak from working to empower the communities harmed by policing.

Academics and lawyers dont need to get in the way of liberation. Instead of solely thinking about social problems, they can think with movements struggling to transcend those problems. They can defer to the deep expertise of communities marginalized by the state and participate in the daily work of building political power, advancing self-determination, and dismantling oppressive structures. They can amplify community leadership in an effort to ensure lasting social change, contributing their expertise to collective liberation rather than being another cog in the technocratic management and bureaucratic rationalization of structural violence.

The positive task of surveillance abolition building a world without mass suspicion and supervision poses questions that need deep attention. Surveillance extends beyond the hard social control and violence of police and prisons. Surveillance, writes Simone Browne, is the fact of antiblackness. Its purpose is to harm communities and administer an oppressive social order. Rather than settling for community control of this violence, communities that are resisting surveillance from the perspective of liberation are creating a new historical horizon, where at first light these important questions can be confronted and then in the fuller light of a new day can help new ways of life built around democratic self-administration to bloom. Advocating for reforms like the POST Act keeps us lost in the darkness of our present condition.

Abolitionists have long known that the purpose of policing is to violently maintain an oppressive social order. New rules and criteria will not end that violence. Instead, they will just lead police to invest more resources and expertise into monitoring and avoiding compliance with the latest rules. This will make our system of mass suspicion, incarceration, and banishment harder to dismantle. If academics and lawyers wish to play a role in advancing liberation, they need a radically different approach to expertise as well as deference to those working to build a world without policing. Reforms that build police bureaucracy go in the opposite direction, placing more authority in elite hands and giving police new footing to expand their violence.

Original post:

Police Bureaucracy and Abolition: Why Reforms Driven by Professionals will Renew State Oppression - CounterPunch

The past few months have sparked conversations about defunding the police, specifically through the Black Lives Matter protests held around the world. I want to explain, from a criminological point of view, why this is imperative.

We know that there have been more than 440 Aboriginal deaths in custody, according to Guardian Australia, since the royal commission into Aboriginal deaths in custody report and recommendations were released in 1991. We know that Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander people make up approximately 28% of the total prison population in Australian prisons, despite making up only 2% of the total adult population in Australia.

We know and have witnessed police brutality, we have seen the lack of police discretion when it comes to Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander people in the community. We know that police surveillance on our young people is occurring through taskforces particularly in New South Wales. This includes children as young as nine years of age.

We know that deaths in custody would not occur if racist legislation was overturned, specifically in relation to the summary offence of public drunkenness. Victoria is still yet to decriminalise public drunkenness, despite the commitment to do so in August, 2019.

Defunding the police, prison abolition and dismantling the systems that created and continue the ongoing oppression, violence, discrimination and the othering of this countrys Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, is not a radical idea.

I was recently interviewed on Progressive Podcasts about prison abolition and defunding the police. The main points of this podcast are to look beyond punishment as a way to address crime. It is, after all, a social problem. I am certainly not denying there are people who need to be protected in society and vice-versa. However, in 2016, we knew that approximately 46% of people in Australians prisons were incarcerated for non-violent offences. The cost of incarceration of people in prisons for non-violent offences equates up to $1.8bn nationwide.

We need to be looking at redirecting those funds to services that adequately and appropriately address the social issues around non-violent offences. Prison abolition is not about simply opening the prisons up and letting dangerous people into the community. It is about supporting the services that are integral to society. This includes housing, health, education and employment. These areas have all been defunded, yet this is not seen as radical it is almost expected and accepted.

Police brutality is another reason why we should be looking to defund the police. Korey Penny, an Aboriginal man, said he was violently thrown off his bicycle by police officers in Melbourne recently and called a black cunt. An Aboriginal teenager in New South Wales was kicked to the ground by police officers in an incident caught on camera. Video footage also showed an Aboriginal man being arrested and hit by police in Adelaide, in June 2020. In Sydney, Aboriginal man Kris Bradshaw was tasered in the face and was thrown to the ground in June 2020. These examples have occurred over the past few months, but police brutality is a practice that has occured since colonisation.

We have seen time and time again that police are not held accountable for their excessive use of force and violence towards people in society.

What is radical is living in a society where acts of violence are accepted because a blue uniform is worn or where racist legislation exists.

It is not so radical to say we need to defund police and pour much needed funds and resources into areas that improve social issues such as housing, health, education and employment. These, in turn, reduce the incarceration rates of Aboriginal people and reduces the over-reliance of degrading and dehumanising punitive measures such as prisons. It also addresses the social issues that impact on the disproportionate numbers of Aboriginal people in prison. We need to be exploring alternatives to prison and stop violence in the community. We must address the issues at the beginning, not looking for services to respond and fix issues created by the criminal justice system.

Robyn Oxley is a Tharawal woman and has family connections to Yorta Yorta. Robyn is an activist and a lecturer at Western Sydney University in criminology. Her field is in the space of the criminal justice system and Aboriginal rights to self-determination. Her work primarily focuses on human rights, social justice, systemic racism and improving outcomes of Aboriginal people in relation to the criminal justice system.

Originally posted here:

Defunding the police and abolishing prisons in Australia are not radical ideas - The Guardian

We have seen renewed calls for the abolition of vernacular primary schools in Malaysia.

This is a drum beaten periodically by Malay leaders most recently Perlis mufti Mohd Asri Zainul Abidin and PPBM Youth chief Wan Ahmad Fayhsal who seek to remove the ability for native Mandarin- and Tamil-speakers to be educated in their mother-tongues.

As a social psychologist who has studied and written on national integration and race relations in Malaysia for the last 15 years, I believe these periodic calls are neither pragmatic nor do they contribute towards nation-building and mutual respect within a vibrant multicultural country.

Instead, they might be interpreted as assimilationists an attempt to subsume and erase under the seemingly benign and exalted guise of integration.

Given that we have an enormous investment economic, cultural, psychological and political in primary vernacular education in Malaysia, Asri and others who echo his proposal for single-stream primary education and some possible vernacular secondary education need to answer a basic question: What is the evidence that single-stream primary education leads to more integration compared with single-stream secondary education?

Is interracial, inter-religious mixing and schooling at the primary school level likely to produce citizens who are more open-minded and focused on integration compared with having such mixing at the secondary school level?

This is an empirical question, which we in Malaysia do not have the data to answer.

I have not come across evidence from any country that the period of childhood between the ages of seven and 12 (primary school years) is advantageous to promoting racial integration over the ages of 13-18 (secondary school years).

In fact, there is strong psychological evidence that shows how adolescence is a critical period for identity development, which would include national identity.

Further, minority groups have a reason to prefer vernacular education at the primary level because there is extensive global evidence, including from Unesco, that mother tongue education (for example, Mandarin or Tamil) makes it easier for children to pick up and learn other languages (such as Bahasa Malaysia), develop their personal and cultural identities, help develop their critical thinking and literacy skills, and also leads to higher enjoyment of school and academic performance.

An obvious fact that we often neglect in the furore over vernacular education, is that single-stream Malay-medium schools are essentially vernacular, or mother-tongue schools for Malay children.

Pretending that Malay schools are somehow not vernacular, but are purely national or culture-free, is either ignorant or disingenuous.

This is not to deny the value of a national language that unites us and educational opportunities that allow students from different backgrounds to mingle. But how we marry the legitimate cultural needs of different groups is a challenging question that we need to seriously work through, rather than seeking to flatten the diversity that our nation contains.

Based on the available evidence from educational and psychological studies, it seems that vernacular education should be available at the primary school level, while secondary school might be a particularly good place to encourage interracial and inter-religious mixing and co-education, potentially leading to greater racial integration.

This is largely what we are seeing in the current educational landscape, that is, based on the education ministrys 2018 data, students educated at Mandarin and Tamil vernacular primary schools migrate to mainstream Malay-medium secondary schools.

However, we see an opposite, separating pattern among Malay students, more of whom migrate to mono-religious secondary schools instead.

There is also the simple question of pragmatism, in that we already have multiple long-standing vernacular primary schools in Malaysia, some of which have a multicultural student body.

So, even if you agree with Asri on single-stream primary schools, his particular proposal for vernacular secondary education only works if he persuades the government to provide high quality and widely available vernacular education at the secondary school level, such as currently enjoyed by Muslim students in Islamic schools.

Otherwise, I think it is fair to wonder whether such proposals are little more than an excuse for covering the final goal, that is the abolition of vernacular education, and the resulting erosion of the culture and identity of Mandarin- and Tamil-speakers. All the while beating the beguiling drum of integration.

Ultimately, this is an empirical question.

Had Asri and others called for a careful study to be conducted to assess whether vernacular schools necessarily produce less patriotic students, and whether primary or secondary schools should be single-stream, this would have been a responsible way to proceed.

In the absence of such data, it is irresponsible and majoritarian to strongly recommend the abolition of vernacular schools.

Ananthi Al Ramiah is the founder of Dataluminescence Research and holds a PhD in social psychology from Oxford University.

The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of FMT.

See the original post:

Why proposal to abolish vernacular schools is irresponsible and unfounded - Free Malaysia Today

Asia-Pacific, Children on the Frontline, Editors' Choice, Education, Featured, Headlines, Human Rights, Migration & Refugees, TerraViva United Nations

Migration & Refugees

Trafficking survivor Devendra Kumar Mulayam, who hails from Shahapur in the Chandouli district of Uttar Pradesh, had to begin working at age 12 to help pay off the two loans his father had taken out. Credit: Rina Mukherji/IPS

PUNE, India, Sep 22 2020 (IPS) - One of the worst fallouts of the COVID-19 pandemic has been the closure of industries in India, which caused thousands of migrant labourers to return home to villages in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Bengal. In a region where the poorest have always been subjected to bonded labour, child labour and slave trafficking, it has meant revisiting the past.

Uttar Pradesh has seen 35 lakh [3.5 million] workers return home. Azamgarh district alone has seen 1.65 lakh [165,000] returnees. Of these, only 10,000 people could be given employment under MNREGA [Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act], activist and Rural Organisation for Social Advancement chief functionary, Mushtaque Ahmed, told IPS

Of late, as the country has progressed into a loosening of COVID-19 restrictions, and some workers who comprised the bulk of the skilled labour in industrial belts have returned to work.

Bonded labour formally ended in India with the passing of theBonded Labour System (Abolition) Act, 1976.

But in the underdeveloped districts of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, where feudal lords exploited the lower castes and had them work for free on their lands in the past, it continues to exist in invisible forms, drawing sustenance from within the casteist social structure that has confined Dalits and Mahadalits to illiteracy and grinding poverty.

The Mahadalits, are especially vulnerable, with their abjectly low literacy of 9 percent, as compared to the Dalit literacy level of 28 percent. First-generation learners for the most part, the Dalits and Mahadalits are generally unable to access government schemes that guarantee a better future. Often, the inability to pay back a small loan of Rs 5,000 ($68) or Rs 2,000 ($27) sees entire families being bound into slave or bonded labour in brick kilns, or farms owned by the person they are indebted to for generations.

At times, families are forced to pledge a minor child to work for an unscrupulous trafficker, according to the Freedom Fund.

The health infrastructure in eastern Uttar Pradesh and in Bihar districts along the Nepal border has always been wanting.

While the COVID-19 pandemic may have worsened the situation but matters become compounded as many villages in Bihar faced the fury of unprecedented floods last month, which saw almost 8.4 million people affected. Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) centres in Bihar have collapsed, with the unprecedented floods straining them to the hilt.

Children are more at risk because of the current circumstances than previously.

Human trafficking for slave or bonded labour may either see a child being sent to a place thousands of kilometres away from home, or across the border into Nepal. Within India, the modus operandi involves sending children from Uttar Pradesh, Bihar or Bengal to a southern state where unfamiliarity with the local language prevents the child labourer from escaping or negotiating a way out and returning home.

With so few options, parents are sometimes lured with a lump sum of Rs 5,000 ($68) to Rs. 10,000 ($136) paid in advance, as Manav Sansadhan Evam Mahila Vikas Sansthan ( MSEMVS)executive director Dr. Bhanuja Sharan Lal told IPS. MSEMVS is an NGO that focuses on the eradication of child labour.

But the stories many of the survivors have to relate are harsh.

Wage labourer Umesh Mari from Mayurba village in Sitamarhi district in Bihar, had to take a loan of Rs 300,000 ($4,080) for his wifes medical treatment.

Since Sitamarhi lacks healthcare facilities needed for serious medical problems, the family had to admit her to a hospital in the adjoining district of Muzaffarpur.

Unable to repay the loan, the family, comprising of four children and son-in-law, had no option but to look for additional, better-paying jobs.

It is how 13-year-old Ramavatar and his brother-in-law Kesari were recruited for a tile fitting job across the border, in Malangwa in neighbouring Nepal. The job promised a wage of Rs 300 ($4) per day. Once there, they found that the conditions entailed working from 9 am until 7 pm with just a half-hour break. It was bonded labour.

There was little food, and erratic or no payment for months. The recent COVID-19 lockdown helped Ramavtar escape and return to his village, as IPS found. However, the family remains worried on account of their unpaid loan. Chances are, Ramavatar may find it hard to resist the trafficking mafiosi, and may have to return to an enslaved existence in bonded labour in another factory once again.

Take the case of Devendra Kumar Mulayam, who hails from Shahapur in the Chandouli district of Uttar Pradesh. The second among five siblings of a landless Dalit family, Mulayam told IPS how the family became desperate for a source of income following two loans that his father had to take one was for the marriage of his elder sister marriage and second following an accident that resulted in this elder sister sustaining a sever head injury, which occurred after her wedding.

As the eldest son in the family, 12-year-old Mulayam had to drop out of school and start looking for a job, while his younger siblings had to forgo their education.

Courtesy of a recruiter, Mulayam soon found his way to a textile factory in Coimbatore, where he was hired as a loader, at Rs 150 ($2) per day in 2010.

He was made to work for 12-15 hours each day, and the payments were erratic. Worse still, he had to pay for his own treatment wherever he was injured during work.

Mulayam and his fellow-workers remained closely guarded and were never allowed to move away from either their workplace or living quarters.

Any breach of discipline or error at work invited severe beatings. In 2011, when things became unbearable, Mulayam and 18 other fellow workers decided to protest. Theirs was one of the worst forms of bonded labour.

Recounting the horror, Mulayam told IPS, We were heavily assaulted, and thrown out. Scared of being rounded up by the police and sent back to the clutches of our tormentors, we kept hiding in the forested tracts adjoining the town, for five days. Thankfully, I could manage to tell my family members back home of my plight. They sought the help of a local NGO, which managed to secure my release and arrange for my return.

Despite the pandemic, children are still being bonded.

We recently rescued nine children from Jaunpur in Uttar Pradesh who were trafficked to a panipuri [an Indian snack] factory in Telangana after their parents were paid an advance of Rs 10,000 each. Once there, they were made to work from 2 am every morning to 4 pm in the evening. They were only given their meals, and had to work for free. Similar circumstances had driven eight children from Azamgarh (in Uttar Pradesh) to a textile factory in Gujarat where they were used as slave labour, Lal told IPS.

This is part of a series of features from across the globe on human trafficking. IPS coverage is supported by the Airways Aviation Group.

TheGlobal Sustainability Network ( GSN )is pursuing the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal number 8 with a special emphasis on Goal 8.7 which takes immediate and effective measures to eradicate forced labour, end modern slavery and human trafficking and secure the prohibition and elimination of the worst forms of child labour, including recruitment and use of child soldiers, and by 2025 end child labour in all its forms.

The origins of the GSN come from the endeavours of the Joint Declaration of Religious Leaders signed on 2 December 2014. Religious leaders of various faiths, gathered to work together to defend the dignity and freedom of the human being against the extreme forms of the globalisation of indifference, such us exploitation, forced labour, prostitution, human trafficking and so forth.

Read more:

Fighting India's Bonded Labour During the COVID-19 Pandemic - Part 1 - Inter Press Service

SYDNEY, N.S.

Nova Scotia NDP Leader Gary Burrill spent some time in Cape Breton this week meeting with the party faithful and chatting with selected candidates for the next provincial election. On Wednesday, Burrill sat down with Cape Breton Post municipal affairs reporter David Jala to talk about Nova Scotias political landscape and his vision for a post-COVID economic recovery. Burrill, who has led the NDP since 2016, weighed in on a number of provincial and local issues that included equalization transfers, centralization and how to best spend economic stimulus monies.

A: (laughs) Well, I remember living here as a United Church minister when I was running for the leadership of the NDP, so I am well used to driving in and out of Sydney when there are different forms of weather. The real purpose of my conversations down here this week is to talk to people about the impact of COVID and hear the many different points of view from the different sectors. We are asking what are the things that are needed from the government of this province in terms of investments as we move into this coming period of recovery.

A: Its been a mixed bag. On the substance of the public health directives, I think theyve done a very fine job. But on the basic communication and clarity and coherence of how this is all implemented, I think that they have done a less good job and it has become less effective as time has gone on. There have been inconsistencies in coherences in their approach that have not improved public confidence and compliance. For example, when we opened up the borders between Nova Scotia, P.E.I and New Brunswick the other provinces were way ahead of us with a whole regime in place for how to track people coming into the province. We didnt have any of this. We were behind the 8-ball. I also think about how the economy was reopened before childcare was reopened and that caused all kinds of chaos. So, overall, I think the advice Nova Scotians got from the public health directive has been strong and weve been happy to participate and do our part as an opposition party, but at the same time, the core elements of good communication and coherence around that communication has been lacking.

A: Over the past six months, we have seen that there are particular areas of our society in need of investment and in need of improvement. At the same time, we know that as we come into the recovery period, every government, everywhere, is going to have signature levels of investment and stimulus spending. So, in our view, that mega investment, that mega stimulus that is going to be required everywhere to come out of the contraction of the COVID period must be directed to those places where in the pandemic we have seen a particular need. High on this list is the whole economy of care. Regarding long-term care, another report was issued earlier this week that said we dont have enough people to provide the adequate levels of care in our nursing homes. And that having two or three people in a nursing home room is a highway to the transmission of infection. We need to move to a place where we have one bedroom for one resident. Imagine the jobs that would be created and the economic stimulus that will be provided to the whole province. If the government directed the investment that is required in order for us to come out of this contraction to building nursing homes, where every one of those 8,000 people in long-term care in Nova Scotia had their own bathroom and where everyone had their own room, then this would be a wonderful economic development program that would fulfil a wonderful need.

A: The economy of care is paramount and it also applies to childcare. One of the most jarring experiences of the pandemic in Nova Scotia came three or four months ago when, as I mentioned, the economy was reopened before childcare was reopened so there was a period of a week or 10 days that families all over the province were in chaos and didnt know what to do. So again, imagine the jobs that would be created and the overall economic development stimulus that would be produced if investments were made to provide childcare that is affordable, high quality and available across the board. Not only would you have early childhood educators going to work in all areas of the province but youd also open the door for parents to go to work.

A: I think its important to recognize the unique character of the present economic moment. This is not the 08-09 recession, this is not the dot.com bubble of 20 years ago, anybody under the age of 85 has never experienced an economic contraction like we are in at the moment. This is a Depression-level contraction. So, it changes the economic conversation for us. For years that conversation has included questions like how are you going to pay for it, where are you going to get the money, but in this moment, every jurisdiction in the western world, every province, every state, every nation is going to move into a deficit position. So the question is no longer about whether or not there is a deficit, that is no longer in the conversation. The question now is what are you going to do with the deficit you are going to have. What we are saying is spread that stimulus to places where, during the pandemic, we have seen a particular need. How better to direct investment and economic development than to develop the local jobs that would be created by a major investment in commercial and residential building retrofitting, and in local renewable energy production. These are major job creation programs, major economic development programs and major stimulus programs that could address exactly the needs of the present moment.

A: I think it has created a moment of real volatility and fluidity in which anything can happen. And because of COVID, we were already in a moment of that kind. So, overall, so many of the fixed points on our political landscape arent fixed at this time, theyre not in cement, theyre floating all everywhere, theres a fluidity and a possibility that has been deepened and underlined by the resignation of the premier. Were now in a situation where anything is possible.

A: Were excited about our candidates. Were excited to have nominated former CBRM mayor John Morgan to run in Glace Bay, well nominate Kendra Coombes again in Cape Breton Centre where she is the incumbent and were excited to have Madonna Doucette back running in Sydney-Membertou. We have about half of our Cape Breton slate ready, so the team is coming together well.

A: We cannot have success as a province that has two cities, one of which has had an inordinate concentration of decision-making and power and the other, the CBRM, does not have the capacity to direct its fundamental affairs. We need a system that municipalities can derive their revenue in such a way as to provide comparable levels of service for comparable levels of taxation. Thats what equalization means and is what we support.

A: We are living in the midst of the greatest centralization that has ever taken place in Nova Scotia history. In the seven years since the Liberals came to power in 2013, there has been this hyper-concentrated withdrawal of decision-making power from the communities and municipalities across the province. Those powers have been relocated to Halifax. So, in those seven short years, we have seen the abolition of local school boards that was replaced with a Halifax-based advisory council of education. We have seen the abolition of the local district health authorities that was replaced with the Halifax-based Nova Scotia Health. We have seen the abolition of the department of regional and rural development that was replaced by the Halifax-based department of business. In our judgment, this is not a model that accords to the nature of Nova Scotia. This province is by nature a highly decentralized society. What works on the South Shore wont necessarily work the same way on the Eastern Shore or the Acadian Shore. Previous generations devised systems that had local decision-making power for things like health and education. So, when people in Cape Breton say that they have lost their voice, they are absolutely right, they are absolutely describing the processes that occurred over the past seven years. The present government dedicated itself to a program of withdrawing and shutting down local voices across the province and relocating them to Halifax. In our view, the road forward for the province has to be one of re-establishing the integrity and the capacity at local levels across Nova Scotia.

A: Ive coached baseball for many, many years. I love ball and have worked with a lot of kids, but I am a singularly poor ballplayer. And, I never cheered for the Expos or Blue Jays. Im from Yarmouth so I grew up cheering for the Boston Red Sox. My other favourite team, of course, is the Cape Breton Eagles. They are a big part of the community. When I lived here, I knew never to schedule any church meetings on a game night. That would have been a no-no.

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VIDEO: NDP leader calls for investment in the economy of care - SaltWire Network