Monthly Archives: February 2022

This 1870s engraving depicts an enslaved woman and young girl being auctioned as property.

Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group/Getty Images

Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries people were kidnapped from the continent of Africa, forced into slavery in the American colonies and exploited to work as indentured servants and labor in the production of crops such as tobacco and cotton. By the mid-19th century, Americas westward expansion and the abolition movement provoked a great debate over slavery that would tear the nation apart in the bloody Civil War. Though the Union victory freed the nations four million enslaved people, the legacy of slavery continued to influence American history, from the Reconstruction, to the civil rights movement that emerged a century after emancipationand beyond.

Hundreds of thousands of Africans, both free and enslaved, aided the establishment and survival of colonies in the Americas and the New World. However, many consider a significant starting point to slavery in America to be 1619, when the privateer The White Lion brought 20 enslaved African ashore in the British colony of Jamestown, Virginia. The crew had seized the Africans from the Portugese slave ship Sao Jao Bautista.

Throughout the 17th century, European settlers in North America turned to enslaved Africans as a cheaper, more plentiful labor source than indentured servants, who were mostly poor Europeans.

Though it is impossible to give accurate figures, some historians have estimated that 6 to 7 million enslaved people were imported to the New World during the 18th century alone, depriving the African continent of some of its healthiest and ablest men and women.

READ MORE:The Last Slave Ship Survivor Gave an Interview in the 1930s. It Just Surfaced

In the 17th and 18th centuries, enslaved Africans worked mainly on the tobacco, rice and indigo plantations of the southern coast, from the Chesapeake Bay colonies of Maryland and Virginia south to Georgia.

After the American Revolution, many colonistsparticularly in the North, where slavery was relatively unimportant to the agricultural economybegan to link the oppression of enslaved Africans to their own oppression by the British, and to call for slaverys abolition.

Did you know? One of the first martyrs to the cause of American patriotism was Crispus Attucks, a former enslaved man who was killed by British soldiers during the Boston Massacre of 1770. Some 5,000 Black soldiers and sailors fought on the American side during the Revolutionary War.

But after the Revolutionary War, the new U.S. Constitution tacitly acknowledged the institution of slavery, counting each enslaved individual as three-fifths of a person for the purposes of taxation and representation in Congress and guaranteeing the right to repossess any person held to service or labor (an obvious euphemism for slavery).

In the late 18th century, with the land used to grow tobacco nearly exhausted, the South faced an economic crisis, and the continued growth of slavery in America seemed in doubt.

Around the same time, the mechanization of the textile industry in England led to a huge demand for American cotton, a southern crop whose production was limited by the difficulty of removing the seeds from raw cotton fibers by hand.

But in 1793, a young Yankee schoolteacher named Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin, a simple mechanized device that efficiently removed the seeds. His device was widely copied, and within a few years the South would transition from the large-scale production of tobacco to that of cotton, a switch that reinforced the regions dependence on enslaved labor.

READ MORE:40 Years a Slave: The Extraordinary Tale of an African Prince Stolen from His Kingdom

Slavery itself was never widespread in the North, though many of the regions businessmen grew rich on the slave trade and investments in southern plantations. Between 1774 and 1804, all of the northern states abolished slavery, but the institution of slavery remained absolutely vital to the South.

Though the U.S. Congress outlawed the African slave trade in 1808, the domestic trade flourished, and the enslaved population in the United States nearly tripled over the next 50 years. By 1860 it had reached nearly 4 million, with more than half living in the cotton-producing states of the South.

An escaped enslaved man named Peter showing his scarred back at a medical examination in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 1863.

Library of Congress

READ MORE:The Shocking Photo of 'Whipped Peter' That Made Slavery's Brutality Impossible to Deny

Enslaved people in the antebellum South constituted about one-third of the southern population. Most lived on large plantations or small farms; many masters owned fewer than 50 enslaved people.

Land owners sought to make their enslaved completely dependent on them through a system of restrictive codes. They were usually prohibited from learning to read and write, and their behavior and movement was restricted.

Many masters raped enslaved women, and rewarded obedient behavior with favors, while rebellious enslaved people were brutally punished. A strict hierarchy among the enslaved (from privileged house workers and skilled artisans down to lowly field hands) helped keep them divided and less likely to organize against their masters.

Marriages between enslaved men and women had no legal basis, but many did marry and raise large families; most owners of enslaved workers encouraged this practice, but nonetheless did not usually hesitate to divide families by sale or removal.

READ MORE: Enslaved Couples Faced Wrenching Separations, or Even Choosing Family Over Freedom

Rebellionsamong enslaved people did occurnotably ones led by Gabriel Prosser in Richmond in 1800 and by Denmark Vesey in Charleston in 1822but few were successful.

The revolt that most terrified enslavers was that led by Nat Turner in Southampton County, Virginia, in August 1831. Turners group, which eventually numbered around 75 Black men, murdered some 55 white people in two days before armed resistance from local white people and the arrival of state militia forces overwhelmed them.

Supporters of slavery pointed to Turners rebellion as evidence that Black people were inherently inferior barbarians requiring an institution such as slavery to discipline them, and fears of similar insurrections led many southern states to further strengthen their slave codes in order to limit the education, movement and assembly of enslaved people.

In the North, the increased repression of southern Black people only fanned the flames of the growing abolitionist movement.

From the 1830s to the 1860s, the movement to abolish slavery in America gained strength, led by free Black peoplesuch as Frederick Douglass and white supporters such as William Lloyd Garrison, founder of the radical newspaper The Liberator, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, who published the bestselling antislavery novel Uncle Toms Cabin.

While many abolitionists based their activism on the belief that slaveholding was a sin, others were more inclined to the non-religious free-labor argument, which held that slaveholding was regressive, inefficient and made little economic sense.

Free Black people and other antislavery northerners had begun helping enslaved people escape from southern plantations to the North via a loose network of safe houses as early as the 1780s. This practice, known as the Underground Railroad, gained real momentum in the 1830s. Conductors like Harriet Tubman guided escapees on their journey North, and stationmasters included such prominent figures as Frederick Douglass, Secretary of State William H. Seward and Pennsylvania congressman Thaddeus Stevens. Although estimates vary widely, it may have helped anywhere from 40,000 to 100,000 enslaved people reach freedom.

The success of the Underground Railroad helped spread abolitionist feelings in the North; it also undoubtedly increased sectional tensions, convincing pro-slavery southerners of their northern countrymens determination to defeat the institution that sustained them.

READ MORE: How the Underground Railroad Worked

WATCH:Missouri Compromise

Americas explosive growthand its expansion westward in the first half of the 19th centurywould provide a larger stage for the growing conflict over slavery in America and its future limitation or expansion.

In 1820, a bitter debate over the federal governments right to restrict slavery over Missouris application for statehood ended in a compromise: Missouri was admitted to the Union as a slave state, Maine as a free state and all western territories north of Missouris southern border were to be free soil.

Although the Missouri Compromise was designed to maintain an even balance between slave and free states, it was able to help quell the forces of sectionalism only temporarily.

WATCH:Kansas-Nebraska Act

In 1850, another tenuous compromise was negotiated to resolve the question of slavery in territories won during the Mexican-American War.

Four years later, however, the Kansas-Nebraska Act opened all new territories to slavery by asserting the rule of popular sovereignty over congressional edict, leading pro- and anti-slavery forces to battle it outwith considerable bloodshedin the new state of Kansas.

Outrage in the North over the Kansas-Nebraska Act spelled the downfall of the old Whig Party and the birth of a new, all-northern Republican Party. In 1857, the Dred Scott decision by the Supreme Court (involving an enslaved man who sued for his freedom on the grounds that his master had taken him into free territory) effectively repealed the Missouri Compromise by ruling that all territories were open to slavery.

In 1859, two years after the Dred Scott decision, an event occurred that would ignite passions nationwide over the issue of slavery.

John Browns raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginiain which the abolitionist and 22 men, including five Black men and three of Browns sons raided and occupied a federal arsenalresulted in the deaths of 10 people and Browns hanging.

The insurrection exposed the growing national rift over slavery: Brown was hailed as a martyred hero by northern abolitionists, but was vilified as a mass murderer in the South.

The South would reach the breaking point the following year, when Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln was elected as president. Within three months, seven southern states had seceded to form the Confederate States of America; four more would follow after the Civil War began.

A map of the United States that shows 'free states,' 'slave states,' and 'undecided' ones, as it appeared in the book 'American Slavery and Colour,' by William Chambers, 1857.

Stock Montage/Getty Images

Though Lincolns anti-slavery views were well established, the central Union war aim at first was not to abolish slavery, but to preserve the United States as a nation.

Abolition became a goal only later, due to military necessity, growing anti-slavery sentiment in the North and the self-emancipation of many people who fled enslavement as Union troops swept through the South.

READ MORE: How Many US Presidents Owned Enslaved Workers?

On September 22, 1862, Lincoln issued a preliminary emancipation proclamation, and on January 1, 1863, he made it official that slaves within any State, or designated part of a Statein rebellion,shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.

By freeing some 3 million enslaved people in the rebel states, the Emancipation Proclamation deprived the Confederacy of the bulk of its labor forces and put international public opinion strongly on the Union side.

Though the Emancipation Proclamation didnt officially end all slavery in Americathat would happen with the passage of the 13th Amendment after the Civil Wars end in 1865some 186,000 Black soldiers would join the Union Army, and about 38,000 lost their lives.

READ MORE: What Is Juneteenth?

WATCH:The Civil War and Its Legacy

The 13th Amendment, adopted on December 18, 1865, officially abolished slavery, but freed Black peoples status in the post-war South remained precarious, and significant challenges awaited during the Reconstruction period.

Previously enslaved men and women received the rights of citizenship and the equal protection of the Constitution in the 14th Amendment and the right to vote in the 15th Amendment, but these provisions of Constitution were often ignored or violated, and it was difficult for Black citizens to gain a foothold in the post-war economy thanks to restrictive Black codes and regressive contractual arrangements such as sharecropping.

Despite seeing an unprecedented degree of Black participation in American political life, Reconstruction was ultimately frustrating for African Americans, and the rebirth of white supremacyincluding the rise of racist organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan (KKK)had triumphed in the South by 1877.

Almost a century later, resistance to the lingering racism and discrimination in America that began during the slavery era led to the civil rights movement of the 1960s, which achieved the greatest political and social gains for Black Americans since Reconstruction.

PHOTOS: See Americas First Memorial to its 4,400 Lynching Victims

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U.S. Slavery: Timeline, Figures & Abolition - HISTORY

Martin Luther King Jr. shakes hands with President Lyndon B. Johnson at the signing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Credit: AFP/Getty Images

The "peculiar institution of slavery was abolished nearly a hundred years after the Declaration of Independence called for freedom and equality for all in 1776. But it took another century before landmark legislation would begin to address basic civil rights for African Americans.

This slow progress was the product of decades of work amongst anti-slavery constitutionalists, activists and abolitionists.They agitated in Congress, the courts and the streets. The fruits of their labor were not enacted immediately and were often foiled by a highly adaptable architecture of discrimination. Poll taxes and literacy tests hampered African Americans from voting in the aftermath of the Civil War. Likewise, the equal access promised in the 1960s did not mark the end of de-facto segregation.

Between 1865 and 1968, much was on the agenda: the abolition of slavery, extending legal protections for the emancipated and their descendants, birthright citizenship and ending segregation in public facilities.

When President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863 in the midst of the Civil War, he was not ending slavery or declaring it illegal. The executive order was a wartime measure that promised slaves in the Confederacy their freedom should they make it to Union lines. It even purposefully overlooked slaves in those border states that had not joined the Confederacy. Instead, the 13th Amendment of December 6, 1865, abolished slavery.

Still, African Americans were vulnerable to subjugation. The South was passing so-called black codes that effectively tried to re-enslave freed persons, creating a form of neo-slavery by criminalizing Black behavior, says Baher Azmy, legal director of the Center of Constitutional Rights. So, there were statutes that prohibited vulgarities or spitting, or if you did not have employment, you could be imprisoned and then leased as labor to whites in a form of debt bondage.

The first Civil Rights Act established that all those born in the United States were to be granted American citizenship. It was a radical notion for its time, seeking to grant birthright citizenship and all the associated rights and protections, helping to counter the black codes of 1865.

Darren Lenard Hutchinson, director of the Center for Civil Rights and Social Justice at Emory University says the Civil Rights Act of 1866 also sought to reverse the Supreme Courts ruling in the 1857 Dred Scott case that Black people werent U.S. citizens and had no legal rights. Opposition to the act soon followed.

President Andrew Johnson vetoed the legislation on the grounds that it discriminated against whites. As early as the 19th century, advancement in the condition of people of color was seen or perceived to be an affront or harm to whites, says Hutchinson.

The 14th Amendment, ratified on July 9, 1868, forbid state governments, not just the national government, from abridging the rights and privileges enjoyed by citizenship. Congress now had the power to enforce and protect citizens from state and federal encroachment. However, the 14th Amendment did not promise political rights, which the next amendment addressed.

The 15th Amendment expressly banned the states and U.S. government from denying citizens the right to vote on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. Ratified on February 3, 1870, the monumental piece of legislation also gave Congress the power to enforce legislation.

These rights were still curtailed when states devised their own voter qualifications, like literacy tests and other regulations. These onerous requirements were sometimes disguised as neutral but were enforced in an entirely arbitrary and discriminatory way.

With respect to voting, the laws did not say Blacks cannot vote; instead they imposed literacy tests against Blacks, asking things like, 'How many bubbles are in this bar of soap? How many jellybeans are in this jar?' The Klan and Southern sheriffs would terrorize Blacks who tried to register to vote through violence, so there was almost no Black voting in the Deep South until the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, says Azmy.

The Civil Rights Act of 1871also known as the Ku Klux Klan Act or the Enforcement Actempowered the federal government to use military force against people and organizations that conspire to violate the constitutional rights of other citizens. This act targeted racial terrorism in the South (particularly in South Carolina) and attempted to dismantle not only the KKK and other white supremacist organizations, but also organizations like rifle clubs that threatened or used violence.

The period from 1865 and 1871 was one of the most dramatic and radical conversations about freedom and equality probably in the history of humankind, says Azmy. "During Reconstruction, the United States government became fully committed to reconstructing the South in the northern image, and an image based on equality, which included U.S. troops in the South to enforce laws and protect Blacks. It created very significant proportions of Black representation in southern statehouses and produced three Black senators and multiple congresspersons from Mississippi and Alabama in an 11-year period."

This behemoth legislation is a benchmark act that banned labor discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex or national origin. Proposed by President John F. Kennedy in 1963 and passed by President Lyndon B. Johnson, it also ended racial segregation in public facilities, public education and in federally funded programs.

This statute, along with more aggressive judicial enforcement of Brown v. Board of Education, helped to accelerate desegregation in southern schools, says Hutchinson. When the legislation passed, less than 3 percent of Blacks attended schools with Whites in the South, despite the fact that Brown had been decided 10 years earlier. In the decade following the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, southern schools became the most integrated in the U.S.

In addition to outright violence and intimidation that existed at the grassroots level, states developed an array of tools to prevent African Americans from voting: the grandfather clause, literacy tests and poll taxes. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 forcefully addressed these issues.

According to Hutchinson, a key nuance of the legislation includes banning, not only specific prejudicial policies (such as literacy tests), but more generally any policies that could potentially have a racially disproportionate effect.

In addition to enforcement rights, the act requires that states with histories of discrimination receive a green light from the federal government before any changes to their voting practices. (In 2013, the Supreme Court, in a 5-4 ruling in Shelby County v. Holder gutted these protections arguing that they were "based on 40-year-old facts having no logical relationship to the present day.")

A week after the assassination of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., the Civil Rights Act of 1968, also known as the Fair Housing Act, was signed into law and banned discrimination in housing.

The Fair Housing Act bans discrimination in public housing and in certain private units. The statute covers actions that discriminate by impact as well as intent. Thus, it has been used to strike down arguably race-neutral policies like zoning laws that make housing unaffordable for persons of color in a particular jurisdiction, says Hutchinson.

Read more:

8 Key Laws That Advanced Civil Rights - History

In 2015, a Buckingham Palace insider signaled that the Queen would begin paying her staff a living wage that reflected the true cost of living for UK residents. "Queen to pay the Living Wage to servants," read the Daily Mail headline.

A review of the royal household's public accounts of its spending and an analysis of advertised pay rates suggest that while the palace is mostly meeting that goal, a large chunk of workers are getting the bare minimum.

Insider identified 503 jobs at the royal household with pay rates advertised between 2015 and 2021. Ten of those positions advertised salaries starting below the living wage recommended by the Living Wage Foundation. A further 274 positions advertised pay within pennies of that rate.

Former staffers for various members of the royal family; a spokesperson for the staff union, the Public and Commercial Services Union; and others told Insider that workers tolerate the low pay because they have immense pride in working for the monarchy.

"Our members take pride in their work," the PCS Union told Insider. "But as a culturally significant institution in the public consciousness, the royal household should be leading the way on good pay and working conditions."

The Living Wage Foundation, an influential nonprofit formed in 2011, calculates a minimum wage needed to support the true cost of living in the UK. UK companies have widely adopted its model wage benchmark, which is higher than the legally required minimum wage.

In 2015, the royal household's public account of its spending in the annual Sovereign Grant report said it "aspires to offer London and Regional Living wage as a minimum." In 2021, the foundation's benchmark was 10.85 an hour (about $14.50) in London and 9.50 (about $12.75) in the rest of the country.

"The Queen pays in a very tight-fisted way," Norman Baker, author of "And What Do You Do? What The Royal Family Don't Want You To Know," told Insider. "It's been apparent to me for some time that when [job] adverts come up that they are not advertised at a generous salary," he said. "It's just shocking that one of the richest people in the world pays some of the lowest wages."

Baker is a former Liberal Democrat minister and member of the Privy Council, a large group of current and former lawmakers that advises the Queen on royal prerogative.

There, he says, his advice is "to pay people properly."

In addition, the palace benefited from Windsor Castle's location when it comes to paying staff. The castle is within walking distance of the London city limit. Windsor borough is one of the wealthiest and most expensive towns. But because Windsor is technically outside of London, the palace may pay the lower regional wage.

"They have a huge amount of money, an endless amount of money, really," said Graham Smith, a spokesperson for Republic, a group that campaigns for the abolition of the monarchy. "They are quite capable of leading in terms of paying people a living wage at the very least and make sure that people are well-paid for what they do."

"These people are working in, living in London, or just on the outskirts of London, an expensive place to live You would think that they would be leaders on this issue and pay comfortably over that [the living wage] and reward people properly for the work they do, which I imagine can be fairly demanding given the people that they're working for."

In response to Insider's extensive request for comment, a spokesperson for the royal household said, "It is disappointing to find glaring inaccuracies and outdated information being relied on for a series of ill-informed and baseless claims about the operations of The Royal Household."

The palace declined to specify the matters it considered inaccurate or outdated.

It's nearly impossible to produce an overview of the royal household's staffing practices, which are exempt from UK Freedom of Information Act requests.

Based on available public records, such as job advertisements and official announcements, Insider compiled in one place, for the very first time a searchable database of 1,133 positions in the royal household.

Insider's database includes posted salaries for top aides like the Queen's private secretary and the keeper of the privy purse, as well as advertised salaries for hundreds of much humbler positions.

Most of the Queen's official business is funded by taxpayers' money.

The grant totaled 85.9 million for the fiscal year ending on March 31st, 2021. It covers things like palace repairs, royal travel, and staffing the royal household. (It does not cover staffing for other working royals like Prince Charles, Prince William, and Kate, but it does fund some of their official business, such as trips abroad.)

Every year, the royal household issues an annual spending report, and since 2014 that report has taken a progressively weaker line on paying a living wage.

Sovereign Grant reports for 2013-14 and 2014-15 said the palace offered "London and Regional Living wage as a minimum to staff" and included a commitment to pay at the market median. There was an exception for staff who were provided housing.

But the 2015-16 report said only that the household "aspires to offer London and Regional Living wage as a minimum to staff."

Mention of a living wage disappeared in the 2016-17 report, and even meeting the market median was framed as an aspiration.

So Insider looked at the palace's help-wanted ads to see what the Queen pays her workers from those who scrub the palace fireplaces to those charged with washing the dishes after a royal banquet.

The palace appears to have made some progress in paying a living wage:

The London Living Wage would be the equivalent of about 21,000 a year. Median annual pay for all full-time UK employees was 31,285 in 2021.

The PCS Union, which represents some palace workers, told Insider that many of its members' pay rates at the household were "far too low."

The Living Wage Foundation says it's confirmed that more than 9,000 companies operating in the UK, including Nestl, Burberry and Ikea, pay the living wage it recommends. But a foundation spokesperson said the royal household was not among them.

The royal household has never spoken to the foundation, the foundation's director, Katherine Chapman, said. She told Insider she would be "delighted" if the palace were interested in committing to paying its living wage.

Of the 503 royal roles Insider looked at, 171 were at Windsor Castle. The 1,000-room castle, which sits on 13 acres, is in one of the priciest boroughs in the country. But its location just outside of Greater London allows the palace to pay the foundation's Regional Living Wage, which in 2021 was 1.35 lower than the London living wage.

Yet you'd need deep pockets to afford to live there.

"Windsor may not technically be in London, but it is to all intents and purposes part of that region that is a very expensive place to live," said Smith, the Republic campaigner.

In 2019 Windsor was the UK's richest town, housing 250 multimillionaires, according to the research firm New World Wealth. Many residents would surely love to send their children to nearby Eton College, where William and Prince Harry were educated. The real-estate company Zoopla included Windsor in the 15 most expensive UK towns to buy a home in.

Insider identified 119 jobs at Windsor Castle with advertised pay rates in 2018 that were no more than 15 pence (about $0.20) above the regional living wage of 8.75 an hour that year.

Eighty-two percent of the jobs in Windsor were advertised with pay within pennies of the Regional Living Wage.

A job listing for an admissions assistant at Windsor Castle in 2019, for example, was advertised at 9.45 an hour. If the castle were in London, five miles to the east, the position might have paid about 2 more an hour.

"Just about paying the living wage isn't the standard we ought to expect from our head of state," said Smith, the spokesperson for Republic.

No-one gets rich on the Living Wage. It is designed to represent the minimum needed to cover living costs, but not much more. "The real Living Wage covers all the everyday needs of living household bills, rent/mortgage payments, travel, food as well as a little extra to cover for unexpected costs a broken boiler, a new winter coat for a child," said a spokesperson for the Living Wage Foundation.

In opening up palaces to the public, the royal household employs hundreds of people in hourly low-wage positions, such as retail assistants, ticket-sales and information assistants, and visitor assistants.

Insider's analysis found:

Some palace positions such as kitchen porters, palace attendants, and housekeepersare advertised as including housing or meals "for which there is a salary adjustment."

Two former senior staffers for Prince Charles Grant Harrold, a former butler, and Carolyn Robb, a former executive chef told Insider that their jobs paid lower than comparable jobs outside the royal household.

A former live-in staff member, Harrold said shifts were often long. "Because you were on duty," he said, "you were fed, you were watered, you were warm, you were comfortable" a situation he said allowed him to save money.

While most hourly-wage positions in Insider's database were advertised at or below the living wage, the salaried roles appeared to be paid above the benchmark and offer benefits like pensions.

Insider's database shows that higher-paid jobs in the royal household are in areas like accounting, human resources, and executive retail.

Salaries for these generally white-collar jobs start at about 40,000 and top out at 190,000 for senior positions.

The Sovereign Grant report says salaries for the household's six directorate positions the lord chamberlain, the comptroller of the lord chamberlain's office, the keeper of the privy purse and treasurer to the Queen, the private secretary to the Queen, the master of the household, and the director of the Royal Collection Trust are benchmarked against the UK's senior-civil-service pay scales.

None of the palace workers who fall under the PCS Union were willing to answer Insider's questions about their working conditions. The PCS Union spokesperson told Insider that members were "subject to stricter than usual contracts and NDAs."

But former higher-level employees emphasized that some royal-household employees accepted their lower pay because of the perceived privilege and historic significance of working at a royal palace.

Baker, the former minister, said there is an "attitude that people should be grateful for being in the same place as the royal family, and that they should be prepared to work for a very low wage just for the sheer honor of being there."

Richard Fitzwilliams, a longtime royal commentator and journalist, told Insider that genuine reverence for the royal family means that for many, the job comes with an "actual gut feeling of loyalty."

"The point is you do have a lot of people who would be prepared to work for less for something that they very, very definitely believe in," he added.

In her 2019 memoir, Angela Kelly, the Queen's stylist and dresser, described playing practical jokes on the Queen and because they happen to have the same-size feet even breaking in the monarch's shoes.

Robb, the former chef, told Insider over email that despite the lower pay "it was the job that I wanted above all others." She said she had other benefits "which made it very worthwhile for me."

Harrold, the former butler, told Insider that many roles are an impeccable boost to the rsum he can likely be a butler anywhere on the planet now.

Working for the monarchy also provides unique experiences. Harrold said that when he gives talks about his former work, people are "literally gasping and laughing and crying" when he reveals he's danced with the Queen.

Baker disagrees with this mindset. "Well, more fool them," he says. "Why should they take a small sacrifice in their salary to serve some of the richest people in the world?"

Read more from the original source:

The palace appears to fall short of ambitions to pay Queen's staff a living wage - Insider

Photo: Stock photo (Getty Images)

A bipartisan group of US Senators that includes Senators Lisa Murkowski (R-Ala.), Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), and Dick Durban (D-Ill.) is determined to renew the Violence Against Women Act this year, nearly three years after Republican Senators blocked the reauthorization of the bill in 2019. And they have strong support from nearly every leading womens rights and anti-sexual violence organization in the nation.

But the bill faces opposition, not just from Republicans, who oppose its gun safety measures and language that includes trans and non-binary people; some of its key components also face opposition from feminist activists, and particularly abolitionist feminist activists like Beth Richie, Gina Dent, Angela Davis, and Erica Meiners, who wrote the recently published book Abolition. Feminism. Now. As abolitionists organizing against the prison industrial complex, they argue that we should be addressing the root causes of interpersonal harm by investing in our communities rather than in prisons and policing, as VAWA does.

VAWA ultimately relies on carceral strategies, in that a huge percent of the funding thats authorized in that bill goes to prosecution, to training police officers, to criminalization, surveillance, and providing mostly criminal legal solutions for survivors, Richie told Jezebel. This is rather than what we would call more abolition solutions, like addressing the power imbalances that breed gendered violence through guaranteeing housing, employment training, childcare, food services, health care.

VAWA has a number of important features that include funding and resources for survivor hotlines, legal aid, shelters, and rape kit funding to serve the significant swaths of women and people of all genders and sexualities who have experienced sexual violence. But the bill, which was originally introduced as a part of then-Sen. Joe Bidens 1994 crime bill, does allocate most of its funding to police departments to respond to domestic violence, despite their long histories of disbelieving, mistreating, and retraumatizing survivors.

These features of VAWA are part of why the law has historically been criticized for primarily serving a narrow sliver of mostly white, middle-class or wealthy, straight, cis women who are more likely to be seen as good victims. In contrast, women, immigrants, and queer people of color are more likely to be harmed by VAWAs mandatory arrest program, which compels police who are called to domestic violence disputes to arrest at least one person involved. In many cases, victims of sexual violence may be arrested themselves for self-defense against abusers, or if theres any ambiguity in who is the primary abuser in an abusive relationship, which is common in same-sex relationships. One 2020 survey found 24% of women who have called the police to report intimate partner violence say that they were consequently arrested or threatened with arrest, contributing to whats known as the sexual assault-to-prison pipeline, and a prison system in which 90% of incarcerated women have survived sexual violence.

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Contrary to ever-present copaganda like Law and Order, police have proven either inept or actively harmful to most victims who turn to them for help, and we shouldnt be particularly surprised by this. Despite how abuse victims are frequently invoked as the most common argument for why we need police, many report being failed or retraumatized by law enforcement. Other research has shown at least 40% of police officers are domestic abusers.

In Abolition. Feminism. Now., Richie and Dent present the case for why abolition and feminism are inextricably linked, noting how women and particularly women and trans people of color have historically been leaders of the movement for abolition. A key reason they were compelled to write the book is that false messaging has increasingly framed the feminist and abolitionist movements as being at odds with one another, because of the popular assumption that police always help rather than harm victims.

Richie says VAWA has unfortunately contributed to this narrative. There are many well-meaning advocates who are deeply committed to the work of liberation and freedom. But weve been limited in our imagination, and we have to think and build beyond the current system thats more likely to criminalize than help survivors, she said.

In the summer of 2020, amid a nationwide uprising for racial justice, nearly 50 anti-sexual violence organizations and direct service groups signed onto the Moment of Truth letter, highlighting the harms of police and prisons on victims of abuse, and calling for divestment from them. After sharing the letter, some of the groups who signed, including local shelters and community anti-violence programs, have since lost public funding, while others say police departments have stopped referring abuse victims to their services.

This, Richie and Dent say, encapsulates how police and the greater prison industrial complex have capitalized on the traumas and vulnerabilities of the most marginalized people in societyparticularly victims of sexual violenceto give their work the guise of legitimacy. When survivors and advocates fight back against being used, they face retaliation and punishment from these systems.

The work we do has to be about more than getting rid of prisons, but thinking about what other system of relations we can create to achieve justice, to collectivize and share responsibility, to address harm without further harming or criminalizing survivors, Dent said.

Prior to VAWA, domestic violence was widely accepted, normalized, and shrugged off as a private affair, exclusively discussed in underground, feminist consciousness-raising circles. Advocacy around gender-based violence began to draw mainstream support amid the tough-on-crime era in the 1980s and 1990s, when awareness campaigns on the issue conflated it with stranger-danger violence in the streets. This, of course, was despite how most gender-based violence is carried out by intimate partners or someone the victim knows, and often takes place at home or in private.

As public awareness and protest of gender-based violence grew, some of the movements most visible activists ceded its more radical demands to gain wider public support, resulting in collusion with law enforcement and the carceral features of laws like VAWA.

In Abolition. Feminism. Now., Richie, Dent, and their co-authors are critical of the many, seemingly benign reforms of prison and policing that actually lead to greater funding and investments in them, ultimately strengthening the prison industrial complex. This can include funding for sensitivity trainings for police that have proven ineffective; the construction of new, supposedly more humane prisons; or electronic monitoring and house arrest approaches that activists say will eventually turn most of society into a prison without walls.

In a similar vein, despite some of VAWAs important investments in shelters and community violence prevention programs, the authors are dubious about how much the law can be reformed, so long as it extends from broader government systems of punishment, incarceration, and racial capitalism that denies poor people of color basic resources.

Since the first version of VAWA passed in 1994, advocates through the years have constantly worked toward improving it, from updating its language to include queer and trans abuse victims to creating special routes to citizenship for select non-citizens experiencing domestic violence. Some Indigenous anti-violence activists are currently pressuring lawmakers to pass a version of VAWA that respects tribal sovereignty, citing a 1978 Supreme Court case that ruled that tribes dont have the authority to prosecute non-Indians who commit crimes in their territories. Indigenous women and girls are three times more likely to experience sexual violence than their non-Indigenous counterparts.

With funding and other resources from VAWA, many shelters and organizations across the country have been able to offer both shelter to victims and support for their wide-ranging, day-to-day logistical needs, like transportation to places of employment, funds for prescription medication and health care.

The authors recognize the life-saving ways that pieces of VAWA have reached and helped many people across the countrybut theyre also concerned with how its existence has been hugely distracting, to the extent that people have spent countless hours and money and ruined relationships over this damn bill. This, Richie says, has come at the cost of focusing on on-the-ground efforts to raise money for people to have abortions amid existential threats to Roe v. Wade, or to help a trans person get access to housing and safety from transphobic violence, among other community-based avenues to more directly support survivors.

According to Richie, feminists need to reject neoliberal thinking that narrowly defines violence as individual, interpersonal acts that are disconnected from overarching crises of state violencemass incarceration, the criminalization of poverty, family separation via immigration laws, the imprisonment of sexual assault survivors for acts of self-defensethat carry disproportionate harm for women, gender-oppressed people, and survivors of color.

Amid the growing popularity of the Defund the Police movement and other abolitionist demands, Dent believes anti-violence activism is at an inflection point. Activists can continue to inadvertently harm and criminalize survivorsor they can reject carceral solutions and support the most marginalized survivors.

Anyone whos been involved with cases of gendered violence has seen firsthand that for all the resources that are consumed in handling just one case in the legal system, this often fails to improve the conditions of life for the person who was harmed, to offer them meaningful support, or to offer any possibility for transformation for the person whos done harm, Dent said. We need to think both smaller and bigger, at the same timeto help the individuals who arent getting what they need, and on a systems-level, to stop bolstering the institutions that are failing them.

Excerpt from:

Perhaps It's Time to Think Beyond the 'Violence Against Women Act' - Jezebel