Monthly Archives: June 2021

"In most circles prison abolition is simply unthinkable and implausible. Prison abolitionists are dismissed as utopians and idealists whose ideas are at best unrealistic and impracticable, and, at worst, mystifying and foolish. This is a measure of how difficult it is to envision a social order that does not rely on the threat of sequestering people in dreadful places designed to separate them from their communities and families. The prison is considered so 'natural' that it is extremely hard to imagine life without it." Angela Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete?

Scalawag founded Abolition Week in 2020 to spotlight incarcerated writers, reflect on our values as an abolitionist organization, and encourage fellow media to join us. As the national media is shifting its attention away from demands to restructure, defund, and abolish the police, Scalawag's Abolition Week is an appeal to keep these conversations at the forefront. Learn more.

Last summer, in the wake of the police killings of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and countless others, we wanted to tear the world down and build anew.

Violent crackdowns by police on protesters showed us what we already knew to be true: The state's never-ending reliance on dehumanizing tactics doesn't just cause harm in our streets or prisons, but everywhereour schools, our statehouses, our borders.

Black ancestors in the South long ago began this work of building a world without the horror of state-sanctioned violence and bondage. This is the legacy we've inherited. This is our work as abolitioniststo radically imagine and build toward a liberated world. As prison scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore said, "Abolition is about presence, not absence. It's about building life-affirming institutions."

We wanted to tear the world down. But what are we building in its place?

For our partas parents, partners, children, friends, neighbors, writers, and artistswe're committed to rejecting retribution as a way of life. We try not to shun our loved ones or shame our colleagues.

We do this imperfectly. We do this with devotion. We understand that punishing others in our personal lives makes it easy to uphold unjust systems of punishment everywhere.

For our part as journalists, this work also means shining a light on ongoing abolitionist efforts right now, lending our platform to those who are actively harmed by carceral systems as many newsrooms remain silent and complicit.

Each day this week, Scalawag will be publishing stories, hosting events, and engaging in conversations around abolition with incarcerated people, abolitionist scholars, artists, organizersand you. If you've been doing this work, thank you. If you're new to abolition, welcome.

Abolition is an unwillingness to accept that the conditions of the South's origin storyfrom slavery, to segregation and Jim Crow, to policing and prisonsare unchangeable, and a commitment to adapt in response even as they continue to regenerate.

Abolition is the strategic reallocation of resources, funding, and responsibility away from oppressive systemsincluding the policetoward community-based, life-affirming models of safety, support, and prevention. We're here to imagine and support the life-affirming movements, organizations, and ways of being that serve as the building blocks for the liberated world we all deserve.

In a liberated world, instead of armed agents of the state arriving during a mental health crisis, a trained counselor arrives. Instead of tax dollars funneled into anti-bias cop training and the militarization of small-town police departments, community money goes to Black- and brown-owned food cooperatives, free health care clinics, and accessible housing.

We believe this liberated world will come to us, in part, through abolition.

Abolition is the dismantling of oppressive institutions and the systems that keep folks in bondage.

The liberated world we're building is one in which all people are free from prisons and cages, where the state has no power to seize or control our bodies, where people address harm through restorative justice rather than punitive consequences, where we are free to be our whole selves in communities built around a shared ethical agreement to support and love one another, and where we never use violence as a means to enforce safety.

Abolition asks us to take a long view, to stop repeating harms done long ago that echo through our country, communities, families, and bodies. It's the work of unraveling the very roots of this country.

Abolition is the eradication of the state being able to control or seize your body, the creation of community accountability measures in place of our punitive systems, including police, prisons, and jails.

And we know something about that in the South. The home of slavery is also the birthplace of slave revolts. People who call this place home sparked the fights for civil rights, labor organizing, and almost every other movement rooted in dismantling oppressive systems. For too long, though, white southerners have been unwilling to accept the real history of the South. For generations, steeped in the Lost Cause of the Confederacy and "states' rights," they've refused the reality of slavery, Jim Crow, and segregationwhich makes easy work of ignoring the ongoing horrors of racial violence.

Meanwhile, Black Southerners have time and again envisioned our future. Abolition is the continuation of the work Black ancestors in the South did to radically imagine, seek, and take back their freedom from chattel slavery. That work is not done as long as police and prisons live on to uphold legal enslavement on this land.

Abolition is an imaginative tool for redefining and refining our existing reality. Abolition believes in healing our ways of connecting to one another preceding, during, and after instances of harm and severed bonds.

This week, you'll meet abolitionist artists, organizers, thinkers, and fighters radically imagining a world where racism, extraction, and domination are outdated modes of our collective past. We can't understand what life-affirming institutions are until we understand the institutions that are life-destroying, by design.

People in power over incarcerated folks silence those on the inside to make sure those of us on the outside never hear their stories. We are not meant to know the harsh conditions inside our prisons or the conditions that brought people there in the first place. And hard as these stories are to hear, we must hear them to begin advocating for the dignity of those who have experienced these conditions firsthand.

So, this week, you'll meet formerly incarcerated folks and those still on the inside whose insights are more revelatory, more worthy than anything we as scholars, artists, and journalists might offer. Once you understand the reality of prisons, you'll see why the need for abolition is immediate.

Abolition is necessary for liberation. And it's necessary for our dignity, our sanity, our wholeness. None of us are free in a society that profits off the imprisonment and dishenfrachiment of its people.

Abolition is not easy. For most of us, it's hard to imagine upending what we know of how society functions, to imagine our communities wholly free of our deepest-rooted, most powerful systems. But just as abolition is about presence, it's also about willingness.

We must be willing to refuse that the conditions of the South are as unchangeable as many who hold power here and many who've never stepped foot here would have us imagine.

We must be willing to bend time, to look honestly at our history, ourselves, and our roles in upholding systems where people are not free. We must be willing to dream our wildest dreams.

Realizing Abolition is an opportunity to gather together with others committed to challenging the existence of prisons in our society

Illustrations for this piece are by E.L. Tedana. Active with A.B.O. Comix since 2017, they plan on working with A.B.O. Comix once released as well. They have been incarcerated for 20 years and are currently seeking post conviction relief. E.L. is eligible for parole in 2 years.

Artwork for Scalawag's Abolition Week 2021 is provided by A.B.O. Comix, a small press and advocacy collective that works in solidarity with currently/formerly incarcerated LGBTQ people to amplify their voices and publish their creative endeavors.

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Welcome to Abolition Week Scalawag - scalawagmagazine.org

While the 13th Amendment abolished chattel slavery, an often ignored clause still allows for slavery and involuntary servitude as punishment for a crime. This slavery clause is now the target of #EndTheException, a new campaign launched this year on Juneteenth weekend. #EndTheException is pushing for the passage of the Abolition Amendment, a joint resolution cosponsored by Sen. Jeff Merkley and Rep. Nikema Williams, which would strike the slavery clause from the 13th Amendment making it so that neither slavery nor involuntary servitude may be imposed as a punishment for a crime.

On Saturday, June 19, as communities across the country celebrated Juneteenth a long celebrated holiday by Black Americans, particularly Black Texans Merkley and Williams joined advocates from groups including WorthRises, LatinoJustice PRLDF, JustLeadershipUSA, and the Anti-Recidivism Coalition for an online discussion about the #EndTheException campaign and to explain how the promise of freedom has yet to be unfulfilled.

The average incarcerated worker earns 86 cents per hour, and yet in five states Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Mississippi, and Texas laborers inside earn nothing. Jorge Renaud, the national criminal justice director for LatinoJustice PRLDF, was incarcerated in Texas for 27 years. For 13 years, he experienced not just the painful labor of fieldwork chopping trees and picking cotton, sorghum, and corn but also retaliation when refusing to work.

[It was] two years into my last sentence I had a 60-year sentence, Renaud said, I thought I was going to die in prison and I drew a line. I said, There are some things Im not going to do for you all. I dont care what you do to me. So Im working out in the fields and I threw my aggy [grubbing hoe] up in the air and I was lucky they didnt shoot me. They said, Youre not going to work? and I said, Im not going out in the fields for yall, and they put me in solitary for a couple of years.

Renaud spoke of how prisons force incarcerated laborers to work any type of job assigned to them, and how protesting such work will inevitably lead to being assigned more brutal jobs, more degrading jobs until you finally end up in solitary confinement. [Then] you dont have to work but now youre in there with nothing: no privileges, no commissary, no visitation, no nothing.

The inclusion of the slavery clause made the passage of restrictions targeting Black people like the Black Codes possible as well as convict leasing of the late 19th century. Its important not to erase the unique horrors faced by those who were enslaved and those who are currently or formerly incarcerated, but the fact is that the slavery clause helped enable the current system of prison labor where incarcerated people are forced to work for both the state as well as private companies for little to no pay.

Recent years have brought more attention to how private companies make up a small portion of those who benefit from incarcerated labor only roughly 1% of incarcerated laborers are employed by private companies and about 6% of imprisoned workers are employed by state agencies who task them with jobs including manufacturing furniture for public colleges, making hand sanitizer, or washing scrubs and linens for state hospitals. In truth, the overwhelming majority of work performed by incarcerated laborers involves facility maintenance a fact that panelist Deanna Hoskins, president and CEO of JustLeadership USA, came to understand years after her own incarceration in Ohio where she was not paid at all for her labor.

I thought it was an incentive, Hoskins said. We take these jobs thinking, Ill work in the kitchen to get extra food, or Ill work in the laundry to get out of the current pod and not be in the chaos.

It wasnt until Hoskins went to work for a Department of Corrections that she understood whose labor was actually keeping the facilities operating. The state was effectively undercutting their employee budget by having incarcerated individuals staff services like laundry, landscaping, working in the kitchen, custodial work, janitorial work, gardening, and so on.

Even down to state departments actually used womens prisons as their call centers to alleviate them from having to pay for that, Hoskins said.

In Texas, Renaud pointed out, the type of work provided to those inside also varies tremendously based on race. Black and Latinx people are often assigned to these more custodial positions while their white peers are more likely to get jobs that enable them to acquire more technical skills.

I once took a tour about five years ago, Renaud said. I took some legislators down to a prison in TDCJ where they [offered] computer refurbishing. They had some 47 people in there [working on computers] and there were two Black individuals and like three Latinos. That job at least could give you some technical expertise [so that] when you got out there would be a prestigious job or maybe a well-paid job, [but it] was reserved still for white people.

The phenomenon reminded Renaud of the separation between enslaved people working in the house versus the field. It also serves as a reminder that in addition to the loss of wages and the strain that places on families who are now tasked with financially supporting their incarcerated loved ones, prison labor also fails to provide jobs that can translate into careers upon release.

Even jobs that could lead to fruitful careers, such as positions in Californias Conservation Camps where incarcerated people fight fires alongside local and state fire departments, are rife with inequity. In addition to not earning anything close to the wages enjoyed by their free world counterparts, incarcerated firefighters are often barred from continuing this work upon their release because of restrictions in getting their license due to their past conviction. For Michael Mendoza, director of national advocacy for the Anti-Recidivism Coalition, this profoundly stifles peoples ability to reshape their lives.

When we talk about jobs in prison, Mendoza said, Were talking about jobs that dont lead to actual careers because of these exceptions and these laws that we desperately need to change.

In addition to advocating for The Abolition Amendment at the federal level, movements to end prison slavery are being made on the state level as well. Thus far, Colorado, Utah, and Nebraska have abolished prison slavery in their state constitutions and groups like the Abolish Slavery National Network are working with grassroots organizers in 24 other states to help works towards the same goal.

Writers, historians, and activists have warned about the dangers of overconflating chattel slavery and mass incarceration arguing that doing so ignores the unique horrors faced by those who were enslaved and those who are currently or formerly incarcerated but the slavery clause is an important tie between the two oppressive systems that must be addressed. As the country winds down Juneteenth celebrations for the yearthe first in which the day was commemorated as a federal holiday #EndTheException organizers are tasking the public with not just memorializing the past but also considering our responsibility in the present to create a more free future.

This fight is deeply important to the soul of our nation, said Kamau Allen, lead organizer with the Abolish Slavery National Network. We find ourselves at a crossroads to decide who we want to be as a society moving forward. We must win and we can win because weve done this before.

Prism is a BIPOC-led nonprofit news outlet that centers the people, places and issues currently underreported by national media.

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Organizers Are Calling on Congress to Close Loophole That Enables Prison Slavery - Truthout

As the United States celebrated Juneteenth as a national holiday for the first time this year, a number of major cities in the Netherlands have asked the Dutch government to recognise the abolition of slavery with a national holiday here as well.

Earlier this month, President Joe Biden passed legislation officially recognising the anniversary of the abolition of slavery in the United States on June 19, and the public holiday was celebrated on Friday, June 18 for the first time, as the official holiday fell on a Saturday this year.

Linda Nooitmeer, chair of the National Institute of Dutch Slavery History and Legacy (NiNsee), praised the US decision to recognise the significant day in history, calling it a real step towards worldwide recognition of the history of slavery.

To further this recognition, Nooitmeer said she would like to see Keti Koti (broken chains) recognised as a national holiday in the Netherlands to celebrate the abolition of slavery in Suriname and the Dutch Antilles on July 1, 1863, and honour the lives lost. When we commemorate the victims together, we recognisethat the history of slavery has had an impact and continues to have an impact, Nooitmeer explained. Then you can also ask what we are going to do to nullify its effects."

A number of Dutch cities have supported Nooitmeers call, as Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague, and Utrecht urged the cabinet to make Keti Koti(July 1) a national holiday. Councillor for Amsterdam,Nenita La Rose from the Dutch Labour Party (PvdA), believes the holiday can aid national reflection on the Netherlands history and the ongoing impact of slavery.

In a letter to the cabinet, the cities call for the hidden and inconvenient history of slavery to be brought out of the shadows, allowing for the stories of the slavery past and colonial history [to] be discussed openly. In addition to making Keti Koti a holiday, the cities would like to see a national survey conducted into the role the Netherlandsplayed in the slave trade, and would like a National Bureau of Racism and Discrimination to be established.

Nooitmeer has, however, said that the holiday can only work if it operates as a first step towards taking further action to combat the long-term effects of slavery. Concrete measures must follow, she says. Investments in Afro-Dutch communities in the Netherlands and in the former colonies, combating abuses in the housing and labour market. Something must be done, otherwise, such a day will remain symbolic."

Thumb: National Monument to Slavery, viaStadsarchief Amsterdam / Martin Alberts.

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Dutch cities ask government to recognise abolition of slavery with national holiday - IamExpat in the Netherlands

Senator Bernie Sanders appears to have changed his mind on the deduction for state and local taxes (SALT). Chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, Sanders previously has come out quite strongly against lifting the cap, saying in May: It sends a terrible, terrible messageyou cant be on the side of the wealthy and powerful if youre going to really fight for working families.

But the Senators draft budget document includes money for partially lifting the SALT cap. No further details are available at this point, but Sen. Sanders has also said in a TV interview: There are middle-class families in states where property taxes are very high, that are paying a whole lot in state and local taxes. And I think we have to support them. On the other hand, if you got some billionaires who own a massive mansion, should they be able to write off their state and local taxes? The answer is no, they should not.

No doubt there are political considerations at play here. But from a policy perspective, Sen. Sanders was right in May and is wrong now. Any relaxation of the cap will necessarily benefit people towards the top of the income ladder. If the cap was lifted to $20,000, for example, over 95 percent of the benefit would flow to the top income quintile. Not billionaires, perhaps but hardly the neediest in our society.

We have argued against lifting the $10,000 cap in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and in a short analysis for Brookings. Our case is quite straightforward: the benefits of repeal would flow to the rich and affluent, who now have a disproportionate influence on the Democratic Party. To be specific, the top 1 percent would get an average tax cut of over $35,000. The middle class would get an average tax cut of about $37 (note that our analyses here relate to full repeal, since we do not know yet what alternative Sen. Sanders has in mind):

This is not a good way to spend $70 billion each year, especially for politicians committed to fighting inequality. Over the past several decades, the top of the income distribution has dramatically pulled away from everyone else. The top one percents income more than tripled from 1979 to 2017. They do not need a tax cut.

Arguments have ensued. Emails have been received. Tweets have been tweeted. A SALT caucus has formed. And many questions have been asked. Here we set out, as fairly as possible, what we think are the strongest counters to our position, perhaps some of which have influenced Sen. Sanders and why we dont find them persuasive.

We dont deny the politics here. But good policy is good policy even if the political motivations behind it were questionable. The motivation of legislators is not a good measure of the quality of the policy itself. Good policies can result from bad motivations, as well as the other way around. One of the casualties of political polarization is to adopt a stance towards policy based largely on its provenance. The view that a policy must be good or bad because it was pursued by Obama or Trump is a dangerous one indeed. Two wrongs do not make a right.

The idea of a donor stateor even a moocher stateoften emerges in arguments over SALT. The impression given is that the Treasurer of New York State writes a big check to the Secretary of the Treasury. But of course, that is not what is happening. The IRS taxes people, not states. And rich people pay more taxes. So, a donor state is just a state with lots of rich people living it. If there is an unequal geographic distribution of income, then a progressive tax and transfer system will have so-called donor states by designit means the system is working.

Further, there is no strong argument that rich people living together in a place with high taxes should be taxed less by the federal government than equally rich people in another state. Why should a New York millionaire contribute less than a Las Vegas millionaire towards national goods from which they derive equal benefit, for example national defense, or infrastructure, or AmeriCorps? The argument sometimes made here is that the New Yorker is contributing more to government services overall (through the New York tax system), and that some of the benefits of this spending might spill over to the residents of other states. This is an empirical question, however, and to our knowledge, there is not a definitive answer. These spillovers are almost certainly second-order effects in any case. Given the strong first-order distributional effects, that $70 billion a year does not look justified in the least.

This is not a case of double taxation. Citizens receive government services at the local, state, and federal levels. Sure, some functions overlap, but the separate levels of government often provide different types of services. As a citizen, you benefit from all three levels, thus you should fund all three. People are not being taxed on the same money twice, they are simply funding different entities out of their income. To call this double taxation is like complaining about paying for a burger from one store and paying for a muffin from a different one. And as Josh McCabe has pointed out: other countries with federal systems do not have anything like a SALT deduction. Of course, we might be getting it right, while Canada, Germany, and Australia are screwing it up: but we do not think so.

This is a reasonable argument. It raises two questions: 1) What is the empirical evidence for this? 2) If the concern is valid, is SALT the best policy to address it?

Leaving the cap on the SALT deduction may result in state and local governments moving away from income taxes and towards sales taxes. The evidence here is mixed, but the shift in revenue is plausible, especially in the long run. Frank Sammartino and Kim Rueben, our colleagues at the Tax Policy Center, summarized the literature thus: Several empirical studies have found a measurable effect of the SALT deduction on the mix of state and local taxes, but only a few of them also have found an effect of the deduction on either total state and local revenues or expenditures. Regardless, these effects are almost certainly small, which means that on net, the SALT cap is still a progressive reform. As Jason Furman, chair of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Obama, puts it, I like calling SALT [cap] repeal the Democratic version of trickle-down economics. It is *slightly better* trickle down but slightly better than terrible is, well, pretty bad.

Even if the SALT deduction does slightly increase the fiscal space for states to raise revenue, it is then hardly the optimal approach. If the goal is to support state spending that hopefully helps the disadvantaged, trying to increase that spending by giving the rich and affluent a federal tax break is, to put it kindly, a convoluted policy design. It is like entering your house by climbing over the back fence, onto the garage roof and through the upstairs bathroom window. It can be done, but it is easier to walk through the front door. Similarly, it is far more efficient for the federal government to support states through direct spending. As Josh Bivens at EPI puts it:

The SALT deduction is one tool for redistributing tax revenue, but most working people dont have access to it, because they dont itemize their tax deductions to be able to qualify for it. We should transfer federal aid directly to states to allow them to use the money on targeted healthcare, infrastructure, and education spending, which would more progressively distribute the money and allow states to be more responsive to recessions.

We have pointed to some alternatives to lifting the SALT cap. One is to establish a State Macroeconomic Insurance Fund (SMIF), as proposed by Len Burman, Tracy Gordon, and Nikhita Airi. This fund would act as an automatic stabilizer for state revenues during downturns. Another idea is to restructure the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) block grant to be more generous and equitable. Josh McCabe thinks we should look to Canada as an example, where the funding formula is on a per capita basis and includes automatic annual increases. While the specifics of any of these plans can be debated, there are multiple alternatives to help state spending without reverting to a regressive tax break.

A related question involves the political feasibility of federal support for state spending. In other words, even if we are right in theory, in practice politics may require a second-best solutionthe SALT deduction. Since the other policy options are not currently on the table, the argument goes, lets restore the full SALT deduction as a least-worst option. To follow this line of argument is to treat public policy as a truly dismal science, and to adopt a deeply pessimistic view of political possibilityespecially given the big shifts in policy over the past year and a half. Keeping the cap on the SALT deduction is an opportunity to put better alternatives in place, even if these cannot be enacted immediately. But we should be clear. Even if the deduction was not going to be replaced, ever, with an alternative form of state support, we would still oppose lifting the cap. Even if the goal is worthy, the policy approach is so shoddy that it does not deserve the $70 billion annual price tagespecially when there are so many better candidates for that spending.

This is the purely political argument, and likely the one really driving the policy agenda here. The thinking goes: even if lifting the cap is bad and regressive policy, it is a small price to pay if it helps the Democrats to hold on to the Senate and/or House in 2022, or the White House in 2024. Perhaps lifting the SALT cap will in fact win some votes for Democrats in affluent suburbs of expensive citiesbut of course it is impossible to know for sure how big a political factor this one issue will really be.

These are partisan political calculations that are of course well outside our scope here, though it would be nave to assume that bad policy can never be good politics. Our role here is simply to point out that lifting the SALT cap is really bad policy, and against the stated progressive goals of many of those proposing it and leave it to others to judge what kind of politics we want.

This concern is overstated. The most recent data suggests no discernable change in the net migration of adjusted gross income from high-tax to low-tax states due to the SALT cap. Of course, the data is yet to be subject to rigorous causal analysis, but based on the descriptive trends and previous studies, we think the conclusion is likely to hold.

The literature is very mixed on how responsive rich taxpayers are to state taxes. Several papers find small migration effects. Two papers examine top tax rate increases in New Jersey and California, respectively, and each find small migration effects with substantial net revenue gains. Another paper looks at administrative tax data of millionaires across states and finds that higher state taxes have small effects on migration. This paper emphasizes the theory of social embeddedness of elites over the transitory millionaire hypothesis. In other words, even the richest among us choose where to live based on more than just the tax codesocial networks matter too.

Several papers find larger migration effects but come with important caveats. One study finds that state estate taxes have a large effect on migration, but in almost every case, states benefit on net from having an estate tax. In other words, the revenue collected from the estate tax exceeds the missed remaining lifetime income tax revenue from the movers. Two prominent papers that find large mobility effects are based on specific populations: European soccer stars and star scientists. These are likely upper-bound estimates on migration effects and are unrepresentative populations anyways.

Wellyes and no. This is more a problem of what one of us has called the Me? Im not Rich! problem, consisting of people failing to understand their relative affluenceoften by pointing to their considerable outgoings. But according to the Census Bureau, only 16 percent of households have incomes of at least $200,000 in the New York City area. In the San Francisco area, 26 percent of households do. Even by comparison to the other people living in these cities, these folks are squarely upper middle class.

The point here is that the income distributions of these cities are different to the U.S. as a wholebut not wildly so. Of course, it is more expensive to live in the New York City or San Francisco metro areas than in most other parts of the U.S. But this is in no small part because these are desirable places to live with robust public services, cultural amenities, rich labor markets, etc. And of course, wages are higher too. It is not clear why high demand is a sufficient reason for lifting the SALT cap. There is also something of a vicious cycle at work here. The high cost of living (especially in the Bay area) is driven in part by exclusionary zoning, too: but policymakers have repeatedly failed to make more progress on that front. The basic point here is that most of the people who would benefit most from lifting the SALT cap are rich, even by New York and San Francisco standards.

This is a bad argument for at least two reasons. First, and most fundamentally, there is only so much revenue the government can feasibly raise and a long list of important social problems that need to be addressed. We should prioritize scarce resources to pay for far more important policies, like making the expanded child tax credit permanent and addressing the racial wealth gap, among many others. Of course, raising marginal rates should be on the tablebut lets not waste our limited tax dollars by simultaneously giving a handout to the rich and affluent.

Second, lifting the SALT cap and paying for it with marginal rate increases would actually make the SALT deduction even more regressive. Deductions get more valuable as marginal rates increase. If someone is in the top marginal tax bracket under current law (37 percent) and the SALT cap is lifted, the marginal dollar deducted is worth 37 cents. If the SALT cap was lifted and the top rate is raised to, say, 40 percent, then that marginal dollar deducted is worth 40 cents. This approach puts SALT deduction advocates in the awkward position of paying for a regressive tax change by making that same tax change even more regressive; the fiscal equivalent of going round in circles.

So, there are some arguments for lifting the SALT cap, and not all of them are silly or specious. But even the best arguments for raising the cap are weak. Any of the goals listed by those arguing for its removal could be reached more efficiently and equitably in other ways. Far from seeking to restore the deduction, even if only in part, Congress should be moving towards its abolition.

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Note to Bernie: The 8 arguments for restoring the SALT deduction, and why theyre all wrong - Brookings Institution

Hajar Press is the new house setting an exciting precedent for the future of print publishing. The press aims to platform writers of colour, creating space within publishing for these writers where theres little. Founded by Brekhna Aftab and Farhaana Arefin, Hajar Press responds to the widespread commercialisation of diversity, by giving its writers room to produce transformative and urgent writing, fearlessly unpicking and critiquing systematic inequality, and encouraging readers to imagine a world beyond.

We are political, in that we dont take a neutral stance on issues like Palestine, abolition, capitalism, etc. co-founders Brekhna and Farhaana tell me. We ask our writers, What would you want to write if you could write anything you wanted? This boundary-less, free approach to writing means that Hajar Press has a line-up of some of the timeliest, fluid writing that the UK has to offer being published by them this year.

Jamal Mehmood provides the Houses latest offering with The Leaf of the Neem Tree, with gentle reflections on loss. It follows Fovea/Ages Ago by Sarah Lasoye, a careful, tender rumination on childhood, growth and time. Both books set the precedent for the talented writers releasing projects on Hajar later this year. Lola Olufemi, Heba Hayek, Yara Hawari, and Cradle Community are all releasing writing with the press, each their own fascinating explorations of worlds yet to exist, how to build those worlds, and the conflicts of our current state of living.

Most importantly, the press is tied incredibly close to the anti-racist struggle.

Anti-racism is embedded in the fabric of everything Hajar publishes. The mainstream publishing industry perpetuates at best a constrained and at worst a racist imaginary. Weve seen how successful publishers talk about diversity only when it serves the bottom line, or how free speech and publishing a plurality of voices is invoked to publish racists or bigots instead of building trust with marginalised communities (which would mean actually doing the work to publish a plurality of voices!).

Hajar instead makes very clear that we are not cynically using the cloak of impartiality to publish sellable but harmful works. Instead, we want to actively engage with our communities to archive our stories and create beautiful experiments in the process.

We caught up with the Hajar Presss co-founders to hear about the exciting work they have in the pipeline, their aim to reject mainstream understandings of diversity, and creating a pocket for themselves within a predominantly white independent publishing scene.

What are you planning to publish this year?

Fovea / Ages Ago by Sarah Lasoye

Sarahs collection takes primary school as its landscape, showing how those formative first experiences, with their patterns and emotional contours, are often very impactful and can stay with us in later life. We love the energy in her poetry its full of sharp movement and acute insight as well as how the work is full of reverence, for childhood, for friends, for the world around us, for artistic predecessors.

The Leaf of the Neem Tree by Jamal Mehmood

Bittersweetness makes up the very fabric of this collection tales of migration and heritage weave into a tapestry that is soulful and quietly spiritual. There is a slow unravelling of grief and vulnerability in a work that otherwise feels quiet and still, a sort of grief that becomes magnified through time and across different continents. Yet, meditations on the mundane aspects of life give the reader gentle reassurance, and the sea is an ever-present source of catharsis.

Sambac Beneath Unlikely Skies by Heba Hayek

This is a beautiful collection of flash fiction stories, or short vignettes, reflecting on the narrators childhood in Gaza, Palestine, and on the echoes of these memories in adulthood, lived painfully far away from home. Hebas writing is sensory, full, honest and brilliantly deft traces of the past subtly mirror or layer over the present, and behind the longing and chaotic devastation is an overarching, comforting sense that everything fits together.

The Stone House by Yara Hawari

Yara has a distinctive style of writing that is quite striking: thoroughly measured, almost laconic, darkly humorous and deeply chilling. This novel not only tells the story of a family surviving trauma, but it also provides a careful and rigorous history of Palestine. The perspectives of three characters a grandmother, a mother and a son piece together the dystopian horror of settler-colonialism and the risks people will take to reclaim their homes.

Brick by Brick: How We Build a World Without Prisons by Cradle Community

This is an accessible introduction to prison abolition, written for anyone impacted by state violence and capitalism not just seasoned activists. Its hugely collaborative, drawing on the collective knowledge and experiences of many people organising across different movements for justice, like housing, climate change, feminism and migration. Cradle honours and shares examples of abolitionist work being done in the UK context, as well as in the Global South, demonstrating very powerfully how all of our struggles for liberation are interconnected.

Experiments in Imagining Otherwise by Lola Olufemi

For Lola, every turn against this world towards another is also a turning back to face the histories that precede us. People call books groundbreaking all the time, but when we read Lolas proposal, we sensed the radical potentiality in every line. Lola builds upon the collective work of black feminists and community organising to present radical literature as a living body of work. Formally ambitious and politically arousing, this is a book that invites us to experiment with the possibility of imagining otherwise.

How did you go about recruiting the selection of writers you are currently publishing?

Were both so proud to be publishing each one of our six 2021 authors. We feel that they all embody the values of Hajar, and their writing harnesses the spirit of freedom were trying to encourage. Early last year, we started reaching out to writers whose work we were interested in, introducing our project and values, and asking what they would write if they could write anything the only guide being a general min and max word count. Some were writers whose work wed heard at live poetry readings; some we knew from activist networks; some were known for nonfiction writing and journalism but wanted to foray into fiction. It was so exciting to start developing ideas with people, albeit kind of weird having all these crucial conversations during lockdown there were a lot of Zooms!

This has been a tough year, but working with our writers has been truly inspirational. All of our writers have such a vivid political understanding of the world, but they take that understanding and experience and show that things dont have to be this way. We feel so lucky to be working with writers who are carving out a new world with their words. Weve had wonderful conversations with them, and sharing stories with each other has been cathartic. We hope we can create spaces where others can have those conversations too, because they have been healing. Thats what we want Hajar to be about: carving out new worlds and creating healing spaces for people of colour.

Do you feel there is an urgency to platform newer writers of colour, if so, why?

Absolutely. Most of our writers are publishing their first books with us. We want to give a platform to new (which doesnt need to mean young) writers, but also to writers who may have published before but want to experiment with different forms of writing. We aim to build long relationships with writers at all stages in their careers, to help them to develop their work over their lives and give them space to keep trying new things.

Most publishers arent keen to take risks, particularly in times like these when its mainly backlists and bigger names driving sales. A shift to buying books through online retailers also means that readers are less spontaneous in selecting works, browsing to find what they are looking for specifically, or choosing books based on algorithms. For this reason, its important that publishers give a lot of attention to newer writers, help them develop their craft and put energy into marketing and publicising their books in creative ways.

Its also important that we dont do the classic publishing thing of putting newer writers in restrictive boxes, asking them to write books about oppressive parents, or salacious memoirs just because theyre POC. Newer writers should be given the space to write about what they want!

Where do you see the press in the coming years?

Our dream for Hajar is to connect with readers and writers, to open up a sense of possibility politically and creatively for people of colour. In the future, we would love to grow our community of subscribers and start exciting reading groups and conversations around our books. Were also looking forward to collaborations with other comrades and groups, like our friends at Maslaha and Shubbak. And we cant wait to publish more beautiful, revolutionary writing. Weve recently launched a short story competition as part of MFest, open to unpublished Muslim writers of colour.In an industry known for its hierarchies and exclusivity, initiatives like this give marginalised writers the opportunity and platform to develop their work.

Were also both very committed to making Hajar sustainable, to building something that will last. To do that we know we have to be attentive to our capacity and resources, so that we dont overstretch ourselves and can continue giving each of our authors the attention and care they deserve. This year weve been working for Hajar for free, but thanks to the overwhelming support we received from our communities through last years crowdfunder, we do have enough money to be able to publish our first list of books. Were not sure yet how were going to raise the funds for our 2022 list, so unfortunately a lot of what we do will depend on funding.

As long as we can continue publishing works that archive our stories and experiment with possibilities of radically changing the world, while looking after each other, well consider Hajar to be a success.

Fovea/Ages Ago by Sarah Lasoye and he Leaf of the Neem Tree by Jamal Mehmood are both published by Hajar Press

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Features | Tome On The Range | Hajar Press: The Indie Publisher With Anti-Racism At Its Core - The Quietus