Monthly Archives: June 2022

On June 19 now a national holiday celebrating Juneteenth, the day in 1865 when slavery finally ended in the United States the final round of the U.S. Open Championship will be played at The Country Club in Brookline, Massachusetts. Known to few is a historical connection between the club and one of Americas most important documents, the Emancipation Proclamation. President Abraham Lincoln issued this executive order in 1863, setting in motion the abolition of slavery.

That connection is George Sewall Boutwell, born in 1818 in a Brookline farmhouse whose foundation exists today as part of the Jaques Room of the clubs clubhouse. Boutwells father, Sewall, managed a farm owned by Dr. William Spooner on land that would become The Country Club in 1882, with the golf course constructed in the 1890s. As for George, who attended common schools and never went to college, he would have a remarkable 60-year career as Massachusetts governor, congressman, and senator, as well as Secretary of the Treasury for President Ulysses Grant. Importantly, for our story, he served as Commissioner of Internal Revenue under Lincoln.

At a low point for the Union during the Civil War, Boutwell arrived in Washington in the summer of 1862 to organize the revenue bureau. Over the next few months, he would play a pivotal role as trusted friend and adviser to Lincoln in publicly calling for the abolition of slavery at a time when the president had to be cautious about alienating Northern public opinion regarding the Unions wartime objectives.

On a sweltering August day, Boutwell and Lincoln appeared together at a public rally attended by 10,000 people on the grounds of the U.S. Capitol building. Speaking just after the president, Boutwell sparked cheers from the crowd and positive coverage in Northern newspapers when he declared, We shall never crush the rebellion until we crush slavery.

This was something Lincoln could not yet say. As president, his stated aim was to preserve the Union and make sure border states such as Kentucky and Maryland didnt desert the Union for the Confederacy. The next day, The New York Herald noted that all but one of the speeches reflected Lincolns policy to prosecute the war for the Union, to crush out the rebellion first, and attend to other matters [slavery] afterward. The one single exception [was] the speech of Governor Boutwell.

The Boston Evening Transcript applauded Gov. Boutwells strong emancipation speech, while The Evening Post in New York reported that Boutwell described the real causes of the rebellion and how the Union could never be restored until slavery had been eternally removed.

In the weeks following, when Boutwell met with the Lincoln at the White House to discuss the work of collecting taxes for the Union war effort, he would urge the president to publicly make the abolition of slavery a central aim of the war. In late August, shortly after the Union defeat at the Second Battle of Bull Run, Boutwell told Lincoln that emancipation seemed the only way out of our troubles.

Three weeks later, after Union armies blunted the Confederate advance into Maryland at the battle of Antietam and sent Gen. Robert E. Lees forces back across the Potomac River, Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation, to take effect on Jan. 1, 1863.

In the years following, as congressman from Massachusetts 7th District, Boutwell would help write the 14th and 15th amendments to the Constitution, which provide for equal protection under the law and Black voting rights. In the 1870s, as senator, he chaired a select committee investigating the Ku Klux Klan and White supremacist violence against Black people during the Mississippi state election campaign of 1875.

Boutwells devotion to civil rights and racial equality continued up to his death in 1905 at age 87 at his home of 70 years in Groton, Massachusetts, now open to the public as the Groton History Center.

Eight years later, in 1913, the club hosted its first U.S. Open Championship, made famous by the playoff victory of 20-year-old amateur Francis Ouimet over British stars Harry Vardon and Ted Ray, which helped spark Americas golf boom in the early 20th century. That tournament was also memorable for the participation of John Matthew Shippen Jr., Americas first Black professional golfer and the son of an enslaved father set free by the abolition of slavery. Shippen first played in the U.S. Open at Shinnecock Hills in 1896 at 16, tying for fifth place, and by 1913 he was the head pro at the exclusive Maidstone Club in Easthampton on Long Island.

Shippen played in six U.S. Open championships and finished his career in 1960 as head pro at Americas first Black country club in New Jersey, The Shady Rest Golf and Country Club in Scotch Plains. A pioneer in efforts to desegregate American golf, Shippen was awarded a posthumous membership in the PGA of America in 2009, and his work is promoted today by the John Shippen Memorial Golf Foundation.

In 1913, Shippen was the first Black American golfer to participate in a tournament at The Country Club, walking fairways where George Boutwell had been born a century before. In their very different ways, the two men worked to redeem Americas promise of racial equality and opportunity, a struggle that continues today, a century later.

Jeffrey Boutwell, a native of Winchester, Massachusetts, and a distant cousin of George S. Boutwell, is the author of the forthcoming, Redeeming Americas Promise: George S. Boutwell and the Politics of Race, Money, and Power, 1818-1905.

Continued here:

The link between freedom and golf's biggest event, the US Open - The Boston Globe

As my plane touched down in Louisville earlier this week, there were many thoughts I brought back from California with me. I had the privilege of attending the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention in Anaheim and would like to offer seven observations and how we can move forward.

1. Trust is low in the SBC: From the very first motions coming from the floor, it became quickly evident the SBC has a trust problem. Motions ranging from a request for a forensic audit of a national entity, an investigation into an SBC seminary, and the abolition of one of our entities made it plain that we have a trust issue. Since ministry runs at the speed of trust, this is a sizeable matter and we must address it.

2. Accountability is needed: The messengers seemed to be saying to entity leadership that they expect the entities to be accountable to them, the messengers, and the churches of the SBC. Since the local church is the headquarters of the SBC, this seems like a reasonable request. Entity leaders must take the initiative in assuring they are providing the level of accountability needed to restore trust with the messengers and the churches.

3. Trustees can be bridge builders: Bridges go both ways and trustees can build bridges between the national entities and local churches by providing accountability in both directions. Trustees are to be cheerleaders for the entities, but they must also represent the churches that send them. In other words, the trustees must speak to the messengers about the entity they represent but they must also speak to the entity about the concerns of the churches that send them. If the entity leadership fails to listen, then the messengers must demand a change.

4. We have guardrails: Our system of cooperative ministry is unlike any other in the nation. We send messengers to a convention to give a thumbs up or a thumbs down on issues impacting our cooperative work. We do not cooperate in ministry and mission together as a convention of churches because we agree in lockstep on every theological or methodological matter, but because we believe we can have a greater gospel impact by working together than any of us can have alone.

5. We can solve problems: Much prayer and arduous work was carried out between the SBC gathering in Nashville last year and the one in Anaheim last week. As a result, we were able to hear a report on sexual abuse and then take overwhelmingly affirmed next steps toward securing church attendees from sexual predators. We also made it clear that we are not prepared to abolish one of our long-standing entities because we disagree with some of its past actions.

6. Our mission matters: There were few dry eyes in the room as we heard the testimonies of fifty-two of our missionaries and their call to the nations with the gospel. One of our entity leaders reminded us that the worlds greatest problem is lostness and the gospel is the only solution and that we originally came together, and need to stay together, to address the worlds greatest problem. We must remember that our mission is too important for us to let it be derailed. We must continue to learn to solve our trust and accountability problems while at the same time addressing the worlds greatest problem: lostness.

7. I love the SBC: As I sat next to a couple of Kentucky Baptist pastors, had conversations with others from other states, interacted with entity heads and ministry leaders, shook hands with people I have only met on social media, saw a pastor of eight people nominate himself for an SBC office, and saw another pastor of a mega-church come to the same microphones as others, I was reminded once again that although we do have problems and we do need to address them I love being Southern Baptist.

Thank you, Kentucky Baptists, for allowing me to serve you and for sending me to the SBC in Anaheim. May the Lord Himself give us the courage, conviction and compassion to address our problems and move forward with our mission in a cooperative way until Jesus comes or calls us home.

See more here:

FIRST PERSON: At the SBC in Anaheim | Baptist Life | kentuckytoday.com - Kentucky Today

How does a simple party become a full blown shindig? Make it an all weekend party celebrating two huge occasions! Wah Gwaan Brewing is turning one this weekend, an anniversary that coincidentally coincides with Juneteenth. Being a Black-owned brewery, Juneteenth is a perfect time for Wah Gwaan to celebrate, and celebrate they will.

Industry collaboration and community involvement is key to any brewerys success, and Wah Gwaan owners Harsha Maragh and Jesse Brown have always made it a point to work with others and foster strong relationships amongst the local and larger Black community. To that end, they are releasing a collaboration beer with several Black owned or led breweries around the country. Says Harsha, we love networking and connecting with folks in the industry, so we reached out to a ton to see who would be interested in this particular collab. The response was strong as 3 breweries (Daleview Biscuits and Beer from Brooklyn, Outerworld Brewing from Longmont, CO and Vine Street Brewing from Kansas City), and 1 homebrewing group (Crafty Brothas from Houston) offered to help brew a passion fruit Pale Ale, Sweet Chariot. The beers name is a reference to the song Swing Low Sweet Chariot which can be interpreted to be about the abolition of slavery and as a code to escape to freedom. This prominent song has been a staple in the Black community for 100s of years and is reflective of what Juneteenth represents. The beer itself is on the sweeter side with a slight hop presence. Passion fruit puree was used in its brewing, and Sweet Chariots yeast helps to bring out stone fruit flavors.

In addition to this collab, another beer brewed with Old 121 Brewing will also be released Saturday. This Schwarzbier is a community collab between two nearby breweries who are good friends. Other beer releases include a peach cardamom Strong Golden Ale, a style of beer and additions chosen by Wah Gwaan staff. The return of the popular Trop Queen is sure to please crowds as the refreshing jackfruit Kolsch goes great with the hot summer weather.

Beer is not the only thing happening at Wah Gwaan this weekend. Saturday is the designated birthday party and will feature live music from DJ Ambitious Boy. Serving up good eats will be Flippin Birdz, a Hawaiian inspired food truck. There will also be free cupcakes for the first 100 guests, merch giveaways and a keep the glass promotion featuring special anniversary glassware. Wah Gwaans in-house artist has designed anniversary merch including tees, glassware, stickers and hats, so be on the lookout for those.

Sunday will be a laid back celebration for both Juneteenth and Fathers Day. While enjoying all the newly released beers, visitors can check out Offbeat Market, a Denver makers market that highlights women, LGBTQ, Black and POC owned businesses. ~12 different vendors will be on-site offering their wares presenting a great opportunity to buy local goods. Food will be provided by Fritay Haitian Cuisine.

Giving back to the community is not only limited to this weekends events at the brewery. Wah Gwaan will be participating at Big Queer Beer Fest Saturday and will donate a portion of their proceeds to Black Pride Colorado. Black Pride Colorado will also be setting up at the brewery next week to spread their good word. Its not just the local community that Wah Gwaan is seeking to make an impact upon. In August, Jamaican Independence Day will be celebrated in the taproom August 6. They are working with the Lasco Chin Foundation and the Caribbean Philanthropic Alliance to host a charity event in support of these organizations as a way to give back to the Jamaican and Caribbean communities abroad.

As detailed here, Wah Gwaan has a busy weekend ahead packed full of special releases and events. While their anniversary is certainly an occasion worthy of a party, it is the larger Black community that Wah Gwaan hopes to celebrate. Asked about the significance of having Juneteenth as their anniversary, Jesse said Juneteenth is the day that we celebrate our freedom as Black Americans. Opening our business on Juneteenth is a way to exercise our freedom to conduct commerce and come together as a community to celebrate. Join the party and celebrate with Wah Gwaan this weekend!

Featured image courtesy Rebecca Todd of TruBlu Images

Excerpt from:

Wah Gwaan 1 Year Anniversary and Juneteenth Celebration PorchDrinking.com - porchdrinking.com

Rev. Candace McKibben| Guest columnist

My sweet daddy was born the last of 10 children on a farm in Baxley, Georgia. His older siblings were quite a bit older, and some of his playmates were their children, Daddys nieces and nephews.

His older brother, Harvey, worked in the turpentine business with the help of tenant workers whose children were also his playmates and who kept an eye on little Billy. My understanding is after a hard days work, these tenant workers played checkers on the porches of their modest homes in the evening.

Things to do: Watermelon, barbecue, Lee Boys and Lure of Fishing on tap

Sense of purpose: Purpose and sense of destiny roll in with the waves at Destin Beach | Tompkins

Whenever my daddy, Billy, went missing in the evening, he was sure to be found on a porch playing checkers. My mother said it was what made him such a strategic player.

Daddy was hard to beat at checkers, but that is a small prize compared to the other important lessons and values he learned growing up among children who were different in color but the same in so many other respects. They liked playing stick ball and the freedom of roaming the nearby fields exploring and pretending, as children at play often do.

My daddys own father died when he was only 2, but he did not lack for fatherly figures as his evening checker partners were patient and kind enough to help him learn the game, and his older brother, Harvey, took on the role of Dad.

This year, Fathers Day and Juneteenth, also known as Emancipation Day or the Day of Freedom, fall on the same day. Juneteenth is both somber and celebratory as it commemorates the Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery.

It was first observed in Galveston, Texas, on June 19, 1866, a year after the day the last African American slaves in our country who were residing in Galveston learned of their freedom that had been won the year prior as the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified. On Dec.6, 1865, the required 27 votes of the then 36 states came when Georgia agreed to ratify.

Though long celebrated in Black communities, Juneteenth has been gaining a wider audience and was declared a National Holiday in 2021.

What I have heard of my own family story is that my Uncle Harvey was a kind boss to his tenant workers. He helped many of them acquire birth certificates, giving some of them full names and birthdates, so that they could apply for Social Security.

But writing these words feels deeply sad, that 70-plus years after so-called freedom, these tenant farmers were still in so many ways beholden to the boss, as kind as he may have been. Sadder still that today, some 157 years after so-called freedom, we are still working at offering liberty and justice to all.

As I think of my sweet daddy this Fathers Day, my sadness is tempered by gratitude for the tenant workers who were kind to him, treating him like one of their own young ones. I love the thought of daddy playing with their children and each learning from the other that we are so much more alike than different.

Recently, we visited the boyhood farm of Jimmy Carter in Plains, Georgia. The National Park Service has done a remarkable job of restoring the house and its outbuildings to a pre-1938 condition, including two tenant houses. Carter was born four years before my father and lived in the same neck of the woods, so I wonder if the tenant homes on Carters boyhood farm were anything like the ones where my father played checkers.

I imagine that the connection that Jimmy Carter felt to one tenant family, Rachel and Jack Clark, might resemble the connection my father felt years ago. On the tour of his boyhood farm, you can hear recordings of Jimmy Carters voice as your guide.

He says in one of the tenant houses recordings, that his parents left him in the care of the Clark family on some occasions and it was his joy to be with them. He attributes their hospitality towards him with his own deep conviction that all people matter. They always made me feel like I belonged, he said of staying with them while his parents were away.

Human research tells us belonging matters greatly. It is what we all long for, and the absence of love and belonging creates suffering.

Belonging is not about fitting in as vulnerability and shame researcher Dr. Brene Brown writes. It is about believing in inextricable human connection.

She has found in her research of our current climate that we are less diverse in our human connections than ever before, but more lonely. Perhaps this is because we have sorted ourselves based on our disdain of others rather than our intrinsic human connection with all people.

Capital City Culture Community Outreach, a nonprofit program founded to educate different cultures about each others heritage while encouraging local youth to become strong leaders, is hosting Juneteenth Empowerment Day at Cascade Park in downtown Tallahassee on Saturday, June 18, from noon to 6 p.m. This free event hosts 10 food and 100 retail vendors, live music, and speakers.

Attending provides an opportunity to commemorate the abolition of slavery in the American South and to learn more about African American culture.

A college student says of Juneteenth, Take the time to learn about what we went through as a culture and a race, so you can see where our pain is coming from when certain events happen in America and why we feel the way we feel.

It is an invitation to embrace our inextricable human connection in all its rich diversity.

This Fathers Day, I am grateful for the ways in which my daddys upbringing afforded him the opportunity to experience diverse human kindness and connection early. I know that his positive regard for all people had a profound impact on me.

I pray that all fathers and father figures will realize the influence they have on their children and sow seeds of kindness and love. Happy Fathers Day.

What: Capital City Culture Community Outreach, a nonprofit program founded to educate different cultures about each others heritage while encouraging local youth to become strong leaders, is hosting Juneteenth Empowerment Day

When: noon-6 p.m. Saturday

Where: Cascades Park in downtown Tallahassee.This free event hosts 10 food and 100 retail vendors, live music, and speakers

Never miss a story: Subscribe to the Tallahassee Democrat using the link at the top of the page.

Link:

A father's influence instills sense of connection on Juneteenth - Tallahassee Democrat

manila, philippines

Philippine President-elect Ferdinand Marcos Jr.s national security adviser-designate has urged a stop to the dangerous and deadly practice of red-tagging, or labeling government critics and activists as communists or terrorists.

Clarita Carlos, a retired professor of political science, would become the first woman to hold the position of national security adviser (NSA) if confirmed, as expected, by July 1. Its a powerful post that oversees the countrys security and defense approach and is usually reserved for high-ranking military officials.

To the extent of my mandate as NSA, I would like to stop red-tagging, Carlos said in a recent TV interview after her appointment was announced, adding that it was a lazy, counterproductive practice.

Red-tagging in the Philippines is the practice by the military and police of branding human rights defenders, activists, journalists and other members of civil society who have been critical of the government. Some people who have been red-tagged have been harassed and have turned up dead.

The United Nations, expressing concern about the practice, has said it posed a serious threat to civil society and freedom of expression.

'It is not productive'

Carlos, if approved, will chair the National Security Council and be vice chair of the Anti-Terrorism Council. She advocates for a human security approach to solve the Philippines' decadeslong battle with a communist insurgency, the longest in Asia.

Lets stop red-tagging because it is not productive. Lets put our energies on the ground, addressing inequalities, lack of opportunities, Carlos said. If you prevent these people from becoming journalists scientists, if you kill their future, they will hold guns.

Carlos proposed plan, if she gets to implement it once in office, is a total reversal of President Rodrigo Dutertes policy, which saw a surge of red-tagging and the killing of activists totaling 318 people in 2021, according to a human rights group.

In 2018, Duterte formed and poured money into funding the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC) to counter the insurgency. The task force has been widely criticized for harassing activists, government critics and journalists.

Empirical evidence shows that the military route never works, so we should stop it. We look stupid doing the same things that do not work. We should do what works, Carlos said.

Human rights organizations have welcomed Carlos call to end red-tagging, but there are doubts she will get to have the last say on the matter.

As an academic with a nonmilitarist mindset, we can give her the benefit of the doubt. We hope, though, that the traffickers of red-tagging will not outmaneuver her sensible position in the end, said lawyer Edre Olalia, president of the National Union of Peoples' Lawyers.

Silence from Marcos, so far

But Olalia, whose organization has worked with people who have been red-tagged, jailed or killed by government security forces, doubts Marcos will heed Carlos call.

I doubt especially that [Marcos] has endorsed the NTF-ELCAC during the campaign, and he seems to be deafeningly silent on the issues of red-tagging and the Anti-Terrorism Act up to now. And he has to deal with many sponsors and practitioners of red-tagging around him, he said.

Cristina Palabay, secretary-general of rights group Karapatan (rights in Filipino), called on Carlos to advocate the abolition of the controversial NTF-ELCAC.

Aside from its notorious and dangerous red-tagging sprees, it has directed and incited several gross human rights violations numerous arrests and raids of progressive leaders and organizers and trumped-up charges against activists, Palabay told VOA.

But the challenge for Carlos, Palabay said, is to stand her ground and heed the calls to end NTF-ELCAC and red-tagging amid the overall framework of policies of Marcos Jr. and the military.

Similarly, Human Rights Watch called on Carlos to make good on her statement to end red-tagging.

What remains uncertain is whether her new boss, and the Philippines armed forces, will allow her to do that, once she is in office, HRW Philippines researcher Carlos Conde said.

Read the rest here:

New Marcos Administration Wants Red-Tagging to Stop - Voice of America - VOA News

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SECRETARY BLINKEN: Well, good afternoon, everyone.

It is wonderful to see everyone here today, particularly for this occasion. Susan, thank you very much, both for the introduction but also for what youre doing every day to really bring our diplomacy alive, to bring it to new generations of Americans. Were grateful for this. Its a remarkable project and one that were fully invested in, so thank you.

And Mr. President, its so good to have you again in Washington. We were just in Los Angeles days ago. Its wonderful to see you here. Its an opportunity, in a small way, for us to return the hospitality that youve extended to us over this past year and a half, including my own visit to Bogotlast year, and also to celebrate a truly joyous occasion. And maybe well do away with the microphone and Ill try and project. (Laughter.) The 200th anniversary of our bilateral relations that were celebrating today I guess were giving new meaning to Juneteenth next week as well.

And Mr. President, I really wanted to thank you again publicly, as I just did privately, for not just your participation in the Summit of the Americas, but for Colombias leadership in the Summit of the Americas. We got a lot done for the people of our hemisphere over those three days in Los Angeles, and in no small measure because of Colombias leadership, including on the migration declaration, which I may say a few additional words about in a few minutes. But that leadership, as always, was invaluable. Our partnership, as always, was invaluable. And Im grateful to you, President Biden is grateful to you, for that partnership.

Mr. Ambassador, Ambassador Pinzn, friends for a long time its great to have you here today; other colleagues from across the Government of Colombia: So I know this is only one in a series of events that have been organized to celebrate our 200 years. Were grateful to our colleagues from Colombia for actually, in a sense, hosting the event today, co-hosting it with us.

Our team in Bogot is also extremely active in organizing celebrations in multiple Colombian cities over the coming days.

And finally, let me say to our colleagues who are here from the Colombian and American private sectors: Thank you for being here today; thank you for your work every day to strengthen ties between our countries. The economic bonds that bind us together are strong and growing stronger, and of course, its a profound benefit to the people in both of our countries.

It is, I think, fitting that we are celebrating today at the National Museum of American Diplomacy. How are we doing? Lets see. (Laughter.) Its a rogue microphone. (Laughter.)

We have and I suspect the president will get into this as well a long history of being bound together, even before 1822, when our formal diplomatic relations began.

From 1806 to 1807, Simon Bolvar spent six months in the United States traveling the East Coast from Charleston, South Carolina, up to cities along the coast, before, of course, leading the independence movement in South America.

Beyond history, we, of course, have been and continue to be enriched immeasurably by Colombias culture the magical realism of Garcia Marquez, the art of Botero, the music of Shakira. (Laughter.) Colombia is said to be the land of a thousand rhythms; I suspect Shakira is responsible for 999. (Laughter.)

But to the point that Susan made and I think its really important this is a relationship that has remained strong over 200 years, even in the most challenging times, and that speaks volumes. A few decades ago, Colombias entire future was on the line, under assault from drug cartels and insurgent groups. Conflict ravaged the nation. Many Colombians endured violence or lived in fear of it. And of course, at that time huge unemployment as well, economic difficulties.

We came together the United States and Colombia and I see leaders of that effort in this room today. We undertook Plan Colombia. We ended half a century campaign to topple the Colombian Government, as well as a war that killed more than 200,000 people. Plan Colombia became Peace Colombia, and though many issues remain, Colombia has expanded access to education, to jobs, other social services in its rural areas, and to the countrys underserved communities, including Indigenous and Afro Colombian communities; reformed land laws; established institutions like the disappeared persons unit. Much work remains, but it is a remarkable thing, especially at a time of so much challenge around the world, to see the commitment the enduring commitment that Colombia has made to peace and progress.

Last month, we saw the strength of democracy in action. I think you had the highest turnout for the first round of presidential elections in memory. Regardless of the results, the United States looks forward to working with the next administration to continue the progress thats underway and the relationship that generations of our officials and our people have built together.

Let me just say a few words before turning it over to the president.

We are deepening our economic ties. Last month marked the 10-year anniversary of the Colombia Trade Promotion Agreement that has helped double U.S. agricultural exports to Colombia, while making the United States the top importer of agricultural goods from Colombia.

Last week in Los Angeles, at the Summit of the Americas, President Biden announced the Americas Partnership for Economic Prosperity. We will work closely with countries across the region, including Colombia, to remove barriers to investment, to accelerate economic growth across our hemisphere, while ensuring that the gains of growth are more equitable because we know that even as our economies grow, so have gaps between the rich and poor, and were determined to address that.

Were advancing our shared security together. Our partnership over the years has allowed U.S. and Colombian security forces to work together. Ambassador Pinzn and I worked on this some years ago. We now see the benefits in the work Colombian security forces are doing to train others throughout the hemisphere. Colombia has become an exporter of security in our hemisphere, and that matters. The recent designation of Colombia with President Duque as a Major Non-NATO Ally will enhance this cooperation by helping our militaries work even closer together in the years ahead.

And this partnership, besides being a bilateral partnership, besides being a regional partnership, is increasingly a global partnership. Were working together on global challenges, like the climate crisis. We see the stakes of this in Colombias extraordinary natural beauty, from the snow-capped mountains in Los Nevados to the tropical rain forests in the south. Were working together to protect these and other diverse ecosystems across the country for example, through Amazonia Connect, also announced at the Summit of the Americas. This initiative will work to reduce deforestation across the Amazon the lungs of the hemisphere, and an unmatched source of biodiversity.

In my visit to Bogot last year, I had a chance to talk to a group of young Colombians, who asked me about several other areas where our countries work together, from creating safe pathways for migration to promoting understanding through culture and education.

So I had one conversation with someone from a much younger generation and a much more talented musical background. (Laughter.) Juan Carlos Mindinero is an Afro Colombian musician from Tumaco who told me about his work using music to promote peace and to address some of the most difficult issues in his community, like racism. His work reminded me in so many ways of the songs of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, which played such a key role in inspiring and mobilizing ordinary people to act.

And when it comes down to it, that is really one of the most beautiful things about democracy: ordinary citizens confronting the toughest challenges that we face out in the open. And ultimately, these dedicated citizens are what give me the most optimism for the future of the relationship between Colombia and the United States. People who believe in the bonds between our countries, who stand ready to continue to grow them, to make their own governments and the relationship between them even better, even stronger, in the years ahead. Thats what really drives this.

So let me simply say to everyone present, because in various ways virtually everyone here has been involved in this relationship, thank you for the commitment to this work. And simply put, Mr. President, friends and colleagues, here is to the continued friendship between Colombia and the United States. We could ask for no better partner, no better friend in the world.

Mr. President, over to you. (Applause.)

PRESIDENT DUQUE: Good afternoon. Its a great honor for me to be here at the State Department and especially at the Diplomacy Center. Thank you so much, Secretary Blinken, for your words, for your friendship, for your permanent support to Colombia. Susan, thank you so much for having us today. Ambassador Pinzn, Dr. Mara Paula Correa. My also special greetings to the panelists that were going to have this afternoon. Maureen, thank you. Joseph, Luis Alberto, and Marie Arana, a great writer who has written a lot about Latin Americas history. I also want to express my salute to the former ambassadors from the United States to Colombia. Speaker Boehner, its great to have you here with us.

And I would love to express, Mr. Secretary, that we feel very honored of this 200 years celebration. It has been 200 years of our relationship that has been driven by values, by common purpose, and obviously by principles. And I would like to make some references of a historical nature. The first one is that the flag that I have behind me yellow, blue, and red was designed by Francisco de Miranda. Francisco de Miranda designed that flag, and Francisco de Miranda, who has to always be considered as one of our founding fathers, was very close to General Lafayette, and he was pretty much inspired by the founding fathers of the United States. He was approached later in time by the leaders of the Liberty Society of Caracas to come back and fight for liberty. But before that, in 1807, Simn Bolvar departed from the Port of Cdiz and he was coming to the Americas with the idea of fighting for liberty. But instead of going directly to La Guaira that was the common trip that he would have made, he decided to stop in Charleston. And he remained in the United States for a few months, and it was during Thomas Jeffersons mandate.

About that trip, there are no important documents about what happened to Bolvar, with the exception that he ran out of money and his brother had to send some money, finding a carrier. But what is interesting is that years after, there was this amazing letter that Bolvar wrote to a Jamaican diplomat. And this has been recalled also by Professor John Lynch. And he said in the letter, During my short stay in the United States, I tasted the flavor of liberal democracy. Those were major words that also inspired Bolvar. And he fought for independence. We got our independence in 1819. Then he fought in the Venezuelan territory against Toms Boves. He finally also built the independence of Venezuela. And then he started the southern campaign.

But at the time when he started the southern campaign, he called for a former Spaniard that had turned himself into a New Granadan and a Colombian, Manuel Trujillo y Torres, to be appointed as a representative to the United States of America. He came to Washington. He was a very clever guy. He had this capacity to speak eloquently. And he started knocking everybodys doors in order to make the case for the recognition of Colombia by the United States of America. People who knew him describe him as the Colombian Franklin. And there are few historical records about him, and it is very common that he is always referred with that phrase. He was a Renaissance man, and he was a very persuasive man.

He got to constitute a very powerful friendship with John Quincy Adams, who was the secretary of state at the time. And he made such a strong case for the recognition that John Quincy Adams approached President Monroe, and President Monroe in 1822 signed the recognition ofla Gran Colombia, becoming the first former Spanish colony to be recognized as a state by the United States of America. And Manuel Trujillo y Torres was a big fan of Thomas Jefferson. He always mentioned that that great inscription in the Declaration of Independence, to hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, became a mantra that also inspired the abolition of slavery in our countries.

Since then, this relationship has always been stronger and stronger. And we remember always the first visit that a U.S. president did to Colombia, and it was FDR, who came to Cartagena. Then we also remember President Kennedys visit to Colombia, when he launched the Alliance for Progress with his good friend, Alberto Lleras Camargo. We remember Ronald Reagans visit to President Betancourt; President Bush 41, his visit to Colombia, where he also met with President Barco in the city of Cartagena. We remember the visit that President Clinton made to Colombia. And we also remember how, in times of despair, the United States came to us and said: We will support you. And thats how Plan Colombia was built. And Im very glad to see here Ambassador Pickering, who was also an architect of Plan Colombia.

At the time when Plan Colombia was approved, Colombia was considered at the brink of becoming a failed state. Twenty years after this policy that has been bipartisan and bicameral, Colombia has become the 37th member of the OECD. And that just clearly speaks about how this diplomatic effort, based on values and principles, has been able to change our diplomacy.

And also, after Plan Colombia, President Bush 43 decided to move forward the free trade agreement between Colombia and the United States. Speaker Boehner, we remember all the big efforts in Congress, how this also became a bipartisan, bicameral effort. And it has opened many opportunities for us.

Then, during President Obamas administration, we got strong support from the United States in multiple fronts. We also finalized the putting in practice of the free trade agreement, and it marked a very important era for us. I remember as president how President Trump supported us in the midst of the pandemic, and how he also supported us to face the situation of the migrants in the border zone. And I have to express to you, Secretary Blinken, and to President Biden, my gratitude because you have saved millions of lives. You have become the largest donor of vaccines to Colombia in the midst of this pandemic. You have opened the accessibility of products to the United States like no other time before. And we have been able to work on climate action, the protection of the Amazon, the protection of the migrants and it all came together in multiple ways.

First, bringing our diplomatic relations to the highest peak ever by declaring Colombia a strategic non-NATO member ally, which means Colombia is today among the few countries that have that kind of recognition. But also, being able to work along, as we did last week in Los Angeles, in two major policies: the migration declaration of L.A., which out of the complex noise that we have on permanent politics is one of the most important statements ever in a summit to describe by all ourselves that we need to treat migration with a sense of fraternity, as we have done when 1.8 million Venezuelan brothers and sisters, Ambassador Vecchio one million already have their TPS cards in their hands.

And the other very important statement the launching of the economic prosperity framework by President Biden. This can become as important as the Alliance for Progress because it can bring investment back to the Americas, thinking on the opportunities that we have with North America; and it can be an effective deterrent of migration driven by lack of opportunities. This will open opportunities for many Latin Americans. And we also believe that its an opportunity to bring U.S. investment back in issues such as infrastructure, 5G networks, renewable energies, among many others.

So I consider that what we built last week was very important, and I feel proud that we were very much cohesive, the countries that participated. And we remembered that if there were reasons why some countries were not there, its because in 2001, when we signed the Inter-American Democratic Charter, we also signed the Protocol of Quebec. That protocol established that the summits are not spaces for dictatorships, and that will never be a space for dictatorships. (Applause.)

So, Mr. Secretary, I feel so honored that today were celebrating these 200 years of this relationship in a very special day that I want to bring to your attention. It was in June 15, 1952, that Colombian troops entered South Korea. Colombia was the only Latin American country that participated in the Korean War, and we came with a contingent of more than 5,000 troops, which can be called Ambassador Pinzn, whos a military expert, has said that it could have been more than 40 percent of the Colombian army at the time. And those soldiers came there hand by hand to participate with the United States in saving the South Korean democracy. And no country would have done that if it wasnt because we share those values, those objectives, and those purposes.

I believe that this celebration is an opportunity for keep on strengthening our ties, and we will remain the most important ally for the United States in the Western Hemisphere. We will continue to differentiate ourselves, by embracing democracy, with autocracies with pleasure and we will also remain united to protect those in need, especially the migrant communities in our country that have left the horrible impact of the Maduro dictatorship.

Secretary Blinken, you have been a friend of Colombia, you are a friend of Colombia, and I want to express my gratitude to all the diplomatic corps of the U.S. State Department here today. You have to always see the relationship between Colombia with the United States as an example of what bipartisan, bicameral policies can do and what bipartisan diplomacy can do. I definitely want to express to each one of you, thank you for doing so much for our country.

And with your permission, Secretary Blinken, I would love to close my remarks by asking Ambassador Tom Pickering to join us here to impose him the 200 years condecoration to celebrate this 200 years anniversary between Colombia and the United States for (applause) to an example of one of the greatest minds in U.S. diplomacy. You have been an ambassador in many places around the world, in complex scenarios, Dr. Pickering, but as the president of Colombia, we have to thank you for being one of the brightest minds who created Plan Colombia, and we can say that because of Plan Colombia, we are today in a much better shape in a country of law and order and opportunities.

And Ill finish by saying the following: In my last four years, I have been honored with being the president of my country, fighting every day for the good of our people. We passed a pandemic. Out of 48 months of my administration, 30 months will be facing a pandemic. But were leaving Colombia with the highest growth ever, with the lowest multidimensional poverty ever reached by Colombia, with the lowest job informality rate, being a country that delivers on an energy transition, and a country that is considered today one of the most important places for start-ups in the region. Obviously, we still have challenges, but none of the things that we have achieved would have not been achieved without the support of an ally such as the United States of America.

So Ambassador Pickering, Im going to impose this condecoration. I invite Secretary Blinken to join me here.

(A decree was read.)

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Secretary Antony J. Blinken and Colombian President Ivn Duque Mrquez at the 200th Anniversary of US-Colombian Relations Celebration - United States...

Abortion rights demonstrators march into downtown following a rally in Union Park on May 14, 2022, in Chicago, Illinois.Scott Olson / Getty Images

We have to be thinking and dreaming and planning really expansively because when Roe falls, band-aid solutions are not going to be enough, says Meghan Daniel, a support coordinator with the Chicago Abortion Fund. In this episode of Movement Memos, Daniel and host Kelly Hayes talk about the end of Roe, abolishing police and prisons and how funding abortions builds power.

Music by Son Monarcas, Pulsed & Imprismed

Note: This a rush transcript and has been lightly edited for clarity. Copy may not be in its final form.

Kelly Hayes: Welcome to Movement Memos, a Truthout podcast about organizing, solidarity and the work of making change. Im your host, writer and organizer Kelly Hayes. Today, we are talking about how the Chicago Abortion Fund is gearing up for the end of Roe and how prison and police abolition intersect with the fight for reproductive justice. We will be hearing from Meghan Daniel, who is a support coordinator with the Chicago Abortion Fund, or CAF for short. CAF provides financial, logistical, and emotional support to people seeking abortion care throughout Illinois and the Midwest. Laws restricting abortion access in red states have made Chicago a crucial hub for abortion care in the midwest. Those laws have also led to an increased demand for the assistance of groups like the Chicago Abortion Fund. In the first three months of 2022, over 80% of abortion seekers who contacted the Chicago Abortion Fund were living outside the state of Illinois. That out-of-state demand is expected to continue to surge after the fall of Roe. Receiving hundreds of calls per month, CAF is presently on a years-long streak of helping every caller.

For the unacquainted, abortion funds are local, autonomous organizations that provide resources and build power for cultural and political change. After the Hyde Amendment ensured financial barriers to abortion access for impoverished people by banning the use of federal healthcare funds to pay for abortion care, abortion funds began to emerge to help impoverished abortion seekers pay for their procedures. In addition to paying for procedures, some funds provide practical support, including transportation, child care expenses, lodging, translation services, abortion doulas, and more. Black and brown people have been disproportionately impacted by the Hyde Amendment, and were largely left behind by mainstream feminist organizations, which failed to make ending the Hyde Amendment a priority.

The National Network of Abortion Funds, or NAF, has 90 grassroots member groups that received over 200,000 requests for assistance in 2019. The funds directly supported 62,933 abortion seekers in 2019. When laws attacking abortion access dominate the news cycle, some abortion funds may see an influx of cash. But the need still greatly exceeds what is being donated, and in a post-Roe U.S., requests for assistance are expected to surge further, as pregnant people in red states attempt to travel to places like Chicago, where they can legally receive care.

United by a national network, these groups operate independently, across varying cultural and political geographies. Here in Chicago, I have been in the streets protesting alongside members of the Chicago Abortion Fund and the abortion fund Midwest Access Coalition many times often at actions waged in response to police killings. Ive also been known to hit up CAFs annual bowl-a-thon, even though I dont bowl. As abortion funds around the country work to scale up their operations, Meghan and I talked about the end of Roe; why transphobia, prisons and police violence are reproductive justice issues; and how funding abortions builds power.

Meghan Daniel, in addition to being a support coordinator with the Chicago Abortion Fund, is also a PhD candidate in Sociology at University of Illinois Chicago, where she teaches, writes, and conducts research about reproductive justice, social movements and state violence.

Meghan Daniel: So my name is Meghan. I use she and her pronouns. I am one of two support coordinators at the Chicago Abortion Fund, and I work in a team of four full-time staff at Chicago Abortion Fund or CAF as we like to call it. We also have a few part-time folks and a really amazing team of volunteer case managers. There are upwards of 20 folks who donate their time and love and wisdom to supporting people who call our helpline in need of support for abortions. Chicago Abortion Fund provides financial, logistical, and sometimes emotional support to people seeking abortions in Chicago, in Illinois, the Midwest, and really nationwide.

Chicago Abortion Fund was founded in the mid-1980s, by a group of people that came together to meet this need, and I came across some numbers that are pretty astonishing. So in our first full year of serving callers, October 1986 to November 1987, we got calls from 106 people who needed financial support for their abortion care, and we were able to fund 33 of them. And thats awesome. And in the almost 40 years, since weve opened our doors, the landscape of abortion access has shifted and barriers have multiplied, and weve really scaled up to meet the need. So in the first four months of this year alone, January through April, we received calls from 2,000 people, 2,000, and these callers came from 33 states. So roughly 30% were calling from Missouri where folks have been living in a so-called post-Roe reality for quite some time now. 20% of these calls came from Indiana where the cost of an abortion in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy is nearly $900, and 15 percent from our home state of Illinois, where though Medicaid does cover abortion services at no cost and legislation posits that all private Illinois insurance must cover abortion care, all pregnant people dont fit neatly into these insurance categories and costs still run really high.

Chicago is going to remain an important hub. Illinois is going to remain an important hub because Illinois is one of the states in the U.S. where abortion access will remain protected when Roe falls. In previous years with the passage of the Reproductive Health Act, weve repealed the so-called trigger ban on abortion so that when Roe v. Wade gets overturned at the federal level, abortion will remain legal in Illinois. So well see these trends continuing, and by these trends I mean people from out of state calling, people traveling to Illinois in increasing numbers. And so Illinois, like many other states in the U.S. with either protected or expanded access to abortion care, will remain an important place for people to get the care that they need and deserve.

KH: The Chicago Abortion Fund has been on a roll, in terms of not having to turn anyone away, but like abortion funds across the country, they are currently preparing for a storm.

MD: Post-Roe I think that we will continue to see an influx in callers. I think that we can expect those numbers to grow exponentially, and I think that the barriers those people are facing are going to multiply. Were talking people coming from rural areas in states with low access, were talking people having to take multiple days off work.

Were already coordinating things like childcare, ride shares, hotels, sometimes flights, stipends for food. At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, which is ongoing, of course, we initiated what we call mini-grants, which are direct payments to folks in the amount of $50; no questions asked. If it seems like they need them and theyre struggling with their lights getting shut off, or just needing a little something extra, we send that to folks and thats something were really proud of. The intersections of economic precarity and access to health care being very difficult are very real for our callers, and we anticipate this to grow as the cost incurred by people seeking abortion care grow as well.

Having to travel multiple days to get health care from states with low access or from states with 24- or 48-hour mandatory wait periods, its a lot to coordinate. We have been expecting this for a long time. Its something that people inside of repro have been struggling with. It feels like youre trying to warn people about something they may not be as alarmed about. You know its real, you know its coming because youre living in it and perhaps they dont want to see it, or theyre not seeing it, but the writings been on the wall so to speak for years now. So weve been deepening our partnerships with funds in the Midwest and across the country with funds in Nebraska, with funds in Wisconsin, because many of our callers are calling us from there.

Abortion funds just deserve so much more than what we currently have, so as a staffed fund, this is painfully clear and were interested in continuing to support other volunteer-led funds with intake, with data and with our best organizational practices so that they can get access to the resources that they need and deserve too. Were not trying to be like the midwest abortion fund. We want to work in solidarity and link arms with our sibling funds with whom we cant do this work without. We do it in a constellation of other sibling funds of independent clinics, of bigger networked clinics, of providers, of practical support organizations, doulas, midwives of other mutual aid organizations. And deepening those partnerships in the coming weeks and months is going to be so important. Were going to need each other more than ever.

Illinois protected access is not enough, we need expanded access. So weve been talking to elected officials and agitating for more protection and expansion of abortion care and engaging with and growing our base to support that work. We also expect that You know, we see this in cycles, right? With the passage of Senate Bill 8 in Texas, there was an influx in people wanting to get involved and thats amazing. And with the leaked Supreme Court opinion in May, theres an influx of people who want to get involved. We want to engage that base to put pressure on our elected officials in Illinois to agitate for expanded abortion access. So in California, for example, theres a bill that passed the house and crossed over to the Senate that would protect anyone who helps someone have an abortion by prohibiting California courts from taking up any cases based on out of state laws. These are just examples of the sort of creative legislation that people are coming up with to protect each other, and I think that matters.

And were using this moment to preach a pro-abortion gospel, so to speak. So we are in the majority; two thirds of people in the U.S. want Roe upheld, and were not going to see that happen, but we cant be quiet about it. We need to name abortion explicitly and we have to have conversations with our people. We have supported a hundred percent of our callers since July 2019, and we want to keep that going. We dont want to go back to listening to voicemails, logging those voicemails, doing all of that data intake and not being able to support any single one of those people. Its a horrible feeling to not be able to meet that need, and I am remaining very disciplined in my hope that we wont have to.

KH: I am so glad Meghan brought up the need for legislation to protect pregnant people, and people who miscarry or abort, even in blue states. As we recently saw in California, with the attempted prosecution of two women who experienced stillbirths, people are still at-risk of being criminalized for pregnancy outcomes in blue states. What can we do about that? Well, there is a piece of model legislation, written by the Public Leadership Institute called The Pregnant Womens Dignity Act, and while I would obviously prefer a trans-inclusive title, the gist of this bill is that it would protect people who experience the loss of a pregnancy from criminal investigation. We need some version of this bill passed in every possible state. Because right now, we have states declaring themselves welcoming states for abortion seekers where residents can still be investigated and criminalized for their pregnancy outcomes, if they are suspected of managing their own abortion. We also have prosecutors in conservative counties in blue states who are going to want to get in on the criminalization of pregnancy, and will look for any legal avenue to do so. If states want to declare themselves safe havens for abortion, then they need to decriminalize pregnancy entirely. In my opinion, the fact that we even have to talk about decriminalizing pregnancy is a strong argument for prison and police abolition. Laws that offer abortion funds and residents in blue states some legal insulation, when helping abortion seekers in red states that are implementing aiding and abetting laws could also prove important.

This crisis is largely being presented to people as though there are states where abortion is safe and states where it is not. But even with Roe intact, a map of so-called abortion deserts in the U.S., created by Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health in 2018, revealed a bleak picture. The color-coded maps that depict what states are most likely to allow or restrict abortion post Roe do not capture the actual availability of abortion care within blue states. As Robin Marty wrote in The New Handbook for a Post-Roe America, when clinics and providers are mapped, most of America is a spotted wasteland where pregnant people live over a hundred miles from care and thats now, prior to the fall of Roe. For this and many other reasons, even within blue states, people will sometimes opt to self manage their own abortions. Others will simply be accused of doing so, whether they have or not, because pregnancy outcomes are being surveilled, and profiling will come into play. We know this is happening and that it has happened, and if we say we are going to defend reproductive autonomy, we have to fight to protect everyone.

When a swath of near total abortion bans passed in 2019, CAF was among the groups my collective worked with to organize a reproductive justice rally in Chicago. The rally had a major online fundraising component, as we were trying to direct money to abortion funds in states affected by the bans. That rally included chants like, All genders, all voices, our bodies, our choices, to emphasize the inextricable connection between abortion rights and all trans health care rights. We also held our ground that day against right-wing protesters. I have been thinking about that action lately, and all the values it tied together, and how desperately those values are needed in this moment. Because, as we have covered in recent episodes of the show, the fight against transphobia and the struggle against white supremacy cannot be divided from the struggle for abortion rights.

MD: The struggle against white supremacy and transphobia shows up in our work every day. At CAF we work towards abortion access from a reproductive justice model and reproductive justice is not interchangeable with abortion access. Its not interchangeable with reproductive rights or with reproductive health. Reproductive justice is a very specific framework and theory and praxis that was founded by Black and African American women, a group of 12 people here in Chicago in 1994 and it encompasses the right to have children, the right to not have children and the right to parent and care for our families in safety and with dignity. So its very broad and its a very deliberately laid out framework and theory.

So its fundamentally about whether you as an individual or the state has control over your body or your destiny, your family, your community, these bills are all connected. So the history of fighting for reproductive justice is essentially the history of fighting against anti-Blackness and xenophobia and settler colonial violence. So in order to have the right to care for our families in safety and in dignity, these structures of violence cant exist. So day after day, were seeing transphobic bills roll out across U.S. states, around girls sports, for example; that would deputize everyday people to subject young folks to invasive and medically unnecessary pelvic exams, for example, tantamount to sexual assault in order to ensure that only cis girls are allowed to play girls sports. And were involving multiple social systems here: schools, health care, the family in what amounts to the sexual assaults of young people.

And this is fundamentally a reproductive justice issue, and we do not need a dissertation to understand why, right? And the deputizing of everyday concerned citizens in these efforts should ring the same alarm bells for us as the bounty hunter provisions in the Texas Senate Bill 8 and its copycat bills do. And this isnt to mention other transphobic legislation that makes hormones difficult or impossible to access for trans folks of all ages. Again, its about bodily autonomy, about creating and caring for the families that we want and deserve. Queer children deserve to be protected and we deserve to see our elders grow up. And we know that because of how different forms of oppression intersect, that people of color, especially Black folks, are going to be most impacted by these types of bounty hunter legislations, right?

We have seen, and we can talk about this when we talk about criminalization, we have seen how invitations to become bounty hunters most adversely impact people of color, right? And we dont have to do mental backflips to try to get inside their head or ask ourselves, How can they be doing this if they know women and girls, or if they care about women and girls? Right? I think its well intentioned and I think folks are really trying, but white supremacy is what ties all of these strategies together for the right. It is what allows them to justify the control of particular peoples bodies, of particular peoples reproductive and sexual health, and its what allows the right to control how particular people create and care for their families, and whether particular people are separated from their children or whether particular people are caged. Thats how they make sense of their strategy.

In our daily work, were very deliberate in our language. We say abortion, and we say pregnant people. We ask people what their pronouns are, we dont assume. We dont use euphemisms like a womans right to choose because thats not what were talking about. And we know that the framework of choice is overly individualistic anyway, right? We refuse to leave our trans and non-binary and queer siblings behind. Were not going to do that. Additionally, we see over and over again, that white supremacy creates multiple barriers for Black women, especially.

If folks have not listened to the Movement Memos episode with Dr. Dorothy Roberts, she lays this out exquisitely and all of her research and all of her books do as well, right? That white supremacy creates structural barriers, anti-Blackness specifically. And that pregnancy and reproductive healthcare are particularly dangerous for Black women. This shows up in our work every day and we see the barriers that people are facing in pregnancy, unwanted pregnancy, right? And its our job to fill that gap in care, to fill that gap in resources and connect them to the abortion care that they need and that they deserve, and to make sure that its a good experience when they get there.

KH: At that reproductive justice action in 2019, that I mentioned earlier, we actually used some coathanger imagery in our signage and props. It made sense at the time, but if we organized the action today, we would not use that same imagery, because we are now in a moment when we are desperately trying to get the word out to people that, even after Roe falls, there will be medically safe options outside the law. For now, at least, there are many trustworthy online sources of information for people who want to self-manage their own abortions, and there are already people working in their communities to assist people who are managing their abortions outside the medical system, on their own terms. But the threat of criminalization hangs heavy.

Even with Roe intact, we have seen the criminalization of pregnancy fall most heavily upon Black and Indigenous women and people of color. State Supreme Courts in Alabama and South Carolina have ruled that a persons substance use during pregnancy constitutes criminal child abuse. Several states have also created child welfare laws that make prenatal drug exposure grounds for terminating parental rights because of child abuse or neglect. Such penalties have been disproportionately applied to Black women, whose demonization during the crack epidemic of the 1980s was leveraged to pass such laws. As Dr. Dorothy Roberts explained in a previous episode of Movement Memos, the criminalization of pregnancy as we know it today evolved from this framework of demonizing Black mothers who had used substances while pregnant.

In 2018, 19-year old Brittney Poolaw was convicted of manslaughter in Oklahoma after having a miscarriage. When she was questioned by police at the hospital, Poolaw, who is a member of the Comanche Nation, admitted she had recently used methamphetamine and marijuana. At trial, a medical expert testified that Poolaws drug use may not have resulted in her miscarriage, but the jury was unmoved and convicted Poolaw in less than three hours. She was sentenced to four years in prison.

Many people are familiar with the case of Purvi Patel, a South Asian American woman who was sentenced to 20 years for feticide and child neglect in Indiana before her conviction was overturned. Patels pregnancy ended outside of a medical setting and she was accused of self-managing an abortion. By the time the court downgraded the charges against her, Patel had already served a year and a half in the Indiana Womens Prison. Feticide laws ostensibly exist so that people who commit violence against pregnant people can be charged with the death of the fetus. Patel was the first woman charged in the U.S. under a feticide law, but it appears likely that she will be the first of many. While investigating, police questioned Patel about the ethnicity of the fetuss father, believing that because she was an Indian woman, Patel might want to abort a baby conceived with someone of another race. This kind of profiling and surveillance provides a snapshot of what to expect from the state as it polices and surveills miscarriages in a post-Roe United States.

In the 1980s, laws criminalizing drug use during pregnancy led many pregnant people to forgo necessary medical treatment. The same should be expected in the new age of surveilled miscarriages in red states after the fall of Roe.

Given the role of criminalization in this moment, I was eager to hear Meghans thoughts on how the fight for abortion rights connects with the struggle for prison and police abolition.

MD: Prison and police abolition is integral to our fight for abortion rights and specifically integral to our fights for abortion justice and reproductive justice. Criminalization, especially criminalization of people of color and Black people in particular is the foundation upon which the right hopes to control peoples reproductive outcomes. So the hyperfocus and hyper-criminalization of Black womens pregnancies. And again, Dr. Dorothy Roberts speaks to this, whether conduct during pregnancy or miscarriage or still birth, criminalizing pregnancies for Black women is widespread and has deep historical roots.

Beyond the criminalization of pregnancy outcomes, whether they be miscarriages, whether they be still births, whether its the criminalization of abortion, we can think about prisons and policing themselves as reproductive justice issues. Incarcerated people who are pregnant may be outright denied access to abortion or pressured by guards and jailers into getting abortions if their pregnancy is the result of assault. Roth and others have done incredible work on this really important research, documenting these horrific practices inside. So there are tremendous medical needs for people who are incarcerated: substandard prenatal care, abortion restrictions and bans, coerced birth control and shackling during childbirth, even though this has been specifically outlawed in many places. So we can think of incarceration itself as a reproductive justice issue.

Now, if were talking about somebody who is on electronic monitoring or EM, lets picture them in a state where theres a 48-hour mandatory wait period, or a 24-hour mandatory wait period, that means they have to leave the house twice, right? And getting clearance to leave the house is such a bureaucratic nightmare and thats part of it. Its part of the punishment. Additionally, anti-choice protestors outside of clinics create massive, massive disturbances and people will say, Well, oh, cant the police be there? And the police and the anti-choice protestors are some of the same folks. The Venn diagram is almost a circle. We can think of policing as a reproductive justice issue as well. We have had folks stopped by the police in Chicago on their way to get abortion care, harassed by the police in Chicago. There have been multiple studies about policing influencing poor reproductive health outcomes, especially, especially for Black women and Black pregnant people.

We can think about what it takes to cross state borders for pregnant people to access abortion care, we need to be thinking about warrants. We need to be thinking about the fact that somebodys support person might not be able to cross state boundaries because of being criminalized. The pregnant person might not be able to because of being criminalized, and then where does that leave us? Right? So when we are thinking about abortion access, it might feel overwhelming, but we have to be thinking and dreaming and planning really, really, really expansively. We have to be doing what prison and police abolitionist thinking encourages us to do. We need to be thinking about building a new world entirely because when Roe falls, band-aid solutions are not going to be enough. We need to be thinking about building something better in its place, because a lot of people are going to be left behind otherwise.

When we think very critically about criminalization and policing and prison, we need to keep our focus laser focused on the social structures that criminalize people and the lack of resources that make people more susceptible to criminalization.

And when we do that, it frees us from these awful perceptions that blame people for their own incarceration, that blame people for ending up in cages. And It frees us from this invitation to categorize people into good people and bad people. It frees us from this moral binary that I think ultimately is so useless. And when we can imagine ourselves in solidarity with folks who are incarcerated, we can do really good work. We can be more strategic. I think we can build better movements, we can build stronger movements and our analyses will be sharper. On a less theoretical level and a more material level, we can get people free, and thats the most important thing.

For people who are newly activated, newly energized, or perhaps reactivated and re-energized in the wake of Roe v. Wade being overturned, I say welcome. Were so glad youre here. And we need you. I think everybody has something to offer, and doing a scan of what your skills are and how that matches to the needs of collectives and organizations that are already doing work to make abortions more accessible for people in your community is the best way to get started. I think doing a bit of research to see whats already being done and then figuring out how you fit into that is the way to go. My mentor and friend, Sekila Enzenga, always says, Get in where you fit in. And I think thats a really sound piece of advice.

There are so many ways to help with organizing and to help with this type of work. Not all of it is glamorous, not all of it is fun. Some of it can be crunching numbers. Some of it can be transcribing a really beautiful virtual event. Some of it, yes, can be helping to organize the marshals at a protest or a march in your local city or town at the behest of an organization who needs your help. For those who are really interested in direct service work, something I wish I knew earlier is that it can be really hard.

There is a lot that abortion funders and people working with these collectives can address. Abortion funds work magic. I mean, we just do: financial support, logistical support, getting people from A to B. And there are so many things going on in peoples lives that we, even as an organization, even in a beautiful network of funds and clinics, practical support providers, with all of the connections that we as individuals bring to this work cannot solve. And that is crushing. Sometimes you will feel crushed under the weight of systemic oppression and thats part of the work.

KH: One thing Meghan and other organizers have strongly cautioned people against in this moment is the reinvention of wheels. Before you consider starting anything new, please do a solid search for people and groups who might already be addressing the need you are concerned with. Because they are probably out there, and this kind of support work requires a lot of training and preparation. There are major safety concerns to navigate, and there are also many essential lessons that organizers have learned along the way, in their years, or even decades of doing this work.

MD: For people who are newly activated, newly energized, or perhaps reactivated and re-energized in the wake of Roe v. Wade being overturned, I say welcome. Were so glad youre here. And we need you. I think everybody has something to offer, and doing a scan of what your skills are and how that matches to the needs of collectives and organizations that are already doing work to make abortions more accessible for people in your community is the best way to get started. My mentor and friend, Sekile Nzinga, always says, Get in where you fit in. And I think thats a really sound piece of advice.

There are so many ways to help with organizing and to help with this type of work. Not all of it is glamorous, not all of it is fun. Some of it can be crunching numbers. Some of it can be transcribing a really beautiful virtual event. Some of it can be helping to organize the marshals at a protest or a march in your local city or town at the behest of an organization who needs your help. For those who are really interested in direct service work, something I wish I knew earlier is that it can be really hard.

There is a lot that abortion funders and people working with these collectives can address. Abortion funds work magic. I mean, we just do: financial support, logistical support, getting people from A to B. And there are so many things going on in peoples lives that we, even as an organization, even in a beautiful network of funds and clinics, practical support providers, with all of the connections that we as individuals bring to this work cannot solve. And that is crushing. Sometimes you will feel crushed under the weight of systemic oppression and thats part of the work.

When Trump got elected, we saw these so-called anti-networks popping up. In our movement, we knew immediately that these were pretty dangerous. I want folks to know that you need a lot of training and expertise to do direct service with people who are seeking abortion care. And I would say you probably need even more to be running that kind of practical support network to be hosting people in your home or to be starting your own organization. So get in where you fit in is again, the sound piece of advice that I keep coming back to. But everybody has skills that they can offer and if its not within an organization, then there are some really great low-lift individual ways that people can get involved. You can become a monthly donor to your local abortion fund. And when I say any amount matters, I do really mean any amount. You can give $5 a month to your local abortion fund. That goes much further than giving to a big national organization.

We work in partnership with some of these organizations and they do excellent work in clinics, and we appreciate them so much, and your donation to your local abortion fund will go much further by way of getting direct support to people needing abortion access. If a monthly donation just isnt it for you right now, you can have a heart to heart conversation with somebody in your life about abortion. You can say the word abortion when you have that conversation. I think people may not realize how important this is: Ask folks in your lives if anyone they know has had an abortion.

Ive had really beautiful conversations with my family members about whether or not grandmas or great aunts have had abortions. And Ive learned that they had, but it was always in secret, right? It was very hush hush. And this work has cracked open a lot of really beautiful conversations with loved ones for me that just never would have happened and has shifted them in ways that I had never expected. And its because I was encouraged and supported by people in our network to have those conversations. And that peer-to-peer work and connecting with us or connecting with your local fund for resources about having those conversations is I think more powerful than people realize.

KH: Despite being uplifted and even celebrated in some circles, abortion funds remain seriously underfunded.

MD: Abortion funds are still seriously underfunded compared to large national organizations, when we look at the funding landscapes of major grants making organizations. When we look at the breakdown from major grant making organizations in the reproductive rights, health and justice landscape, abortion funds receive just 3% of that funding.

This is really important because the direct service budget of abortion funds is quite large proportional to their organizational funding needs. So weve gotten 2000 calls in the first four months of 2022, weve called all of those people back. Our average pledge or grant to a caller for their abortion care is about $160, $175 right now. They could be as little as $100 and they could go all the way up to $2,000. So that funding is needed and that funding goes directly to our callers. Funding abortion funds, equipping abortion funds with the financial material resources to do this work will help us scale up to meet the growing need that were going to see in the next weeks and months to come. Weve already seen a huge influx of calls in the past year. I gave you a quick statistic about what we funded in 1986 and what were funding now. So 33 calls versus 2000 calls and thats a huge jump.

But in 2019, we were getting just under 200 calls the whole year and funding just under 200 people the whole year, and now were getting 2000 calls in four months. So this influx began as barriers were starting to stack up for people, before the overturn of Roe v. Wade became imminent. And thats exactly what the right has designed for us to be the reality for pregnant people across the U.S. And so abortion funds need material resources so that we can scale up, so that we can have staff to do this work, so that we can spread out the number of calls, so that we dont have people who are burned out, so that we can invest in the leadership and wisdom of people who have had abortions to do this work of Black and Brown people to lead our funds and make sure that this work is sustainable for the folks who are doing it.

KH: This is a tense and angry time for a lot of us. I know Im fucking furious. Every day, I take in the news, and I process the trajectory we are on, and I feel like I could punch a hole in the wall. But, as talking with Meghan reminded me, our anger is not our greatest strength right now. Dont get me wrong, our anger has power and I plan to put mine to use. But we are going to need so much more than anger to get through this. To protect and defend each other, to fight for reproductive justice and the world that we deserve, we are going to need to double down on our relationships, and we are going to have to care for each other.

MD: I think in the coming weeks and months, there will be a lot of fear and a lot of sadness and a lot of anger, but that wont sustain us. I think what will sustain us is our hope and is our love for each other. What will sustain us is our commitment to our callers. What will sustain us is our commitment to reproductive justice and our commitment to eradicating criminalization, to fighting against white supremacy. Loving each other and holding each other close will be what gets us through these moments. We need each other and we cant do this alone.

That means all of us individually can be thinking about how to love each other, how to appreciate each other, how to hold each other close. And it means as an organization, were always aware that we dont do this work alone either. Its made possible by all of the incredible sibling funds we have in the Midwest and nationwide, all of our clinic partners who are opening up extra days already to meet the growing need for their influx of patients, the amazing doulas and midwives who do abortion care work, people who provide practical support. All of us and all of the people who love on us so that we can show up to do this work, have to keep hopeful and grounded that the wisdom and love that we have cultivated together will get us through because it has to. And having each other and relying on each other has to be our fuel because the fear and the anger and the resentment is only going to get us so far. I think the hope and the love has to be what gets us the rest of the way.

KH: The hope and the love have to be what gets us the rest of the way. I could not agree more. There are so many ways we can show up for each other in that spirit right now, and I really encourage folks to do so. I also encourage everyone to have conversations, not only about abortion, but about the prison-industrial complex and its many tentacles. Talk about what pregnant people are going to be up against in 2022, given that the surveillance state extends into schools, hospitals and interpersonal communications. We live in an age when texts about being surprised, scared or unhappy about being pregnant could become evidence in a criminal case, as could the information in our period tracker apps. Purvi Patels doctors helped the police criminalize her. That is the world we live in now and we have to talk about it.

Many people have never really imagined themselves as being subject to the criminal system, or even begun to process what that would mean, if they have considered it. For this reason, that system, and its expansive reach, can become invisible to them. But its time to see the unseen. Its time to make connections and understand what were really up against. Because the prison-industrial complex is the beast the Republicans would feed us to, and its ongoing fortification and expansion is a bipartisan project. But we have the power to organize against that monstrosity and compromise its reach. We have the power to organize for abortion rights and reproducive justice. We have power. And we have each other. So lets do what we can, when we can, to get each other through these times.

I am so grateful to Meghan Daniel for talking with me about the Chicago Abortion Fund and the powerful work that they are doing. You can learn more about their work at chicagoabortionfund.org. You can also check out the show notes of this episode on our website for more resources about funding abortion, self-managed abortion and how you can take action. I also want to thank our listeners for joining us today, and remember, our best defense against cynicism is to do good, and to remember, that the good we do matters. Until next time, Ill see you in the streets.

Show Notes

Resources:

Further reading:

Excerpt from:

Abortion Funds Are Preparing For a Storm. To Help, Get in Where You Fit in. - Truthout

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WKRN) A new effort to remove slavery conditions from the Tennessee State Constitution is making headway on Capitol Hill in coordination with the celebration of Juneteenth.

A bipartisan coalition consisting of advocacy groups, pastors, elected officials and more has set to pass Amendment 3 later this year, which would officially ban the practice of slavery in the state of Tennessee.

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Currently, the state Constitution allows for slavery as punishment for a crime, much like the United States Constitution.

Article I, Section 33 of the 1870 Tennessee Constitution, reads: That slavery and involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime, whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, are forever prohibited in this State.

The amendment, which passed the Tennessee Senate in March and the House in May 2021, proposes removing that language entirely and replacing it with a new section:

Slavery and involuntary servitude are forever prohibited. Nothing in this section shall prohibit an inmate from working when the inmate has been duly convicted of a crime.

Constitutional amendments require a referendum vote of the entire state if passed by the Tennessee General Assembly. The question will appear on the November general election ballot later this year.

The campaign to vote Yes on 3 is led by Director Kathy Chambers, who shared she was proud to lead the charge on the amendment.

I am honored to be leading a non-partisan coalition to finally address this overlooked part of our State Constitution, she said. This campaign is not about right and left, its about right and wrong. Slavery has no business anywhere in our state, especially in our highest governing document.

In order to vote on the amendment, Tennessee voters must also cast a ballot for governor, according to Chambers.

Were going to lead this campaign and educate voters on what the amendment will do and how they can make their vote count this November, she said. That begins today by letting voters know that they must also vote in the governors election to ensure their yes vote for Amendment 3 counts. Vote your conscience or write in the name of your choice just make sure you dont skip it!

Theeda Murphy, an organizer of the effort, celebrated the momentum the amendment is gaining.

On this Freedom Day, Tennesseans are celebrating the opportunity to finally finish the work of emancipation, she said. We can eliminate the last vestiges of slavery from our state constitution by voting Yes on 3 this November.

The resolution allowing the issue to be placed on the November ballot passed the legislature with overwhelming bipartisan support, according to the campaign. Of 132 members in the General Assembly, only six opposed it.

The measure has received support from faith leaders as well as elected officials. Greeneville pastor Dr. Kenneth Saunders considered the measure a human rights issue.

As a believer in Jesus of Nazareth, and as an Episcopal priest, I made vows to uphold these ideals in my life, he said. So, it bothers me to the core of who I am as a child of God to know that slavery still exists in whatever form in this country and in this state. To consider another human being a slave is very much a human rights issue.

Our state and federal constitutions arent just our primary and most important governing documents, said coalition leader Jeannie Alexander, they are moral documents. As long as the stain of slavery remains in either of these constitutions we can never have a truly or just moral society. This November, Tennessee voters have the chance to do something right, to do something good and to finally finish the job of abolition. I am proud the state of Tennessee will lead the way toward freedom.

Read this article:

Yes on 3: Bipartisan coalition seeks to remove slavery from TN Constitution - WKRN News 2

Allston hates Harvard. Source: Shin Eun-jung, Vertia$: Harvards Hidden History (2015).

Universities on Turtle Island, as la papersonwrites, are land-grabbing, land-transmogrifying, land-capitalizing machines. Indigenous land theft, and profits from slavery, enabled these universities to be built in the first place and theystill collect profitsfrom stolen lands.[1]

With this accumulated capital, major US universities have become colonial real estate agents. Harvard University, notably, ownsland all over the world from vineyards in Washington state to farmlands in Brazil, South Africa, New Zealand, andRomania.[2]Harvards land-grabbing machine has harmed Indigenous communities,poisoning their water and cropsin Brazil, anddenying access to burial sites and pasture landin South Africa.

In the Boston area, too, Harvard and other universities grab land and put it to work for private profit, war, and perpetuation of medical apartheid. These land grabs increase property values and rents, fuel the displacement and ethnic cleansing of local communities, and make it harder for grassroots organizations to survive in the city.

Universities take control of city politics and grab land

Today, Greater Bostons major universities control many expensive land parcels (Figure 1). As of 2021, the estimated total market value of Harvards lands and buildings in Massachusetts comes to a staggering $9.8 billion. Harvard is followed by MIT, whose lands and buildings are valued at $6.7 billion, and Boston University ($2.7 billion).[3]In Cambridge alone,Harvard owns190 tax-exempt acres, while MIT owns over 150. These massive footprints are the spoils of an 80-year expansion strategy. Harvard and MIT have built up large land banks[4] property holdings so vast that universities policies can harm entire communities.

Figure 1: University land grabs. Land holdings of Boston-area universities (as of 2021) with the most highly valued properties (data from MassGIS).

To gain control of the land, universities have helped rewrite the rules ofCambridges government. Key to this was the implementation of Plan E: an anti-democratic system in which a small number of city councilors are elected from across the entire city, and where the financial power to implement council decisions is held by an unelected city manager. Plan E replaced the more decentralized ward-based system that, despite its problems, arguably kept powerful entities like Harvard from expanding into new areas. The brainchild of Harvard academics, Plan E enabled the university to expand by pushing its favored candidates into city council.[5]Although Plan E was met with fierce opposition by local groups who denounced it as fascistic in the late 1930s, it was eventually adopted in 1940.[6]

Universities used the new rules to push racist slum clearance policies. At the end of WWII, Cambridge was a working-class, immigrant city: it was still home to factories, organized labor, and racially integrated neighborhoods, despite theredlining of its historically Black neighborhoods. As the war ended, however, universities seized the opportunity to turn what they saw as slums into research and development centers for the reconfigured war industry. Harvards push for urban removal (urban renewal) was also motivated by a nakedly racist white fear of the surrounding communities, with one Harvard student claiming the university was in the position of a man about to be eaten by cannibals.[7]In 1956, Cambridges unelected city manager (empowered under Plan E) appointed Jos Luis Sert, dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD), as chair of its planning board to steer urban renewal in the city.[8]Collaborating with municipal offices filled with their alumni, MIT and Harvards urban planning departments advocated bulldozing entire neighborhoods, especially majority Black and Brown neighborhoods. These neighborhoods were replaced by developments like Kendall Square that house the companies and academics working for the US war machine, with Pentagon sponsorship.[9]

As universities expanded, the influx of students and faculty put pressure on surrounding neighborhoods. Between 1960 and 1970, the student populations of Harvard and MIT increased by 35%, and by 1968, 4,000 units of Cambridge housing were occupied by Harvard faculty, staff, and students, with another 2,000 occupied by MIT students and staff.[10]Over the same decade, Harvard bought 834 Cambridge housing units and tore down 172. One frontline of the offensive was Riverside, a small neighborhood between Harvards campus and Central Square, threatened for destruction under the Inner Belt plan.[11]Since Riversides school population was 50.5%non-white, replacing the school building to expand student capacity was rationalized as a way to restore racial balance.[12]The architecture firm of the Harvard GSD dean, Sert, Jackson & Associates, drew up plans that required demolishing the surrounding homes. At a public meeting, residents voiced their outrage: As far as were concerned, we wont be here to enjoy a new school, said David Bailey. Lucille Crayton questioned where people whose homes were taken would go: It looks like theyd let us stay there. Theres only a few colored left, she said, adding Im fighting to the end.[13]By the time the new school opened in 1976 as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. School, 30 families had been displaced.

Anti-displacement groups working in coordination with student activists also pressured Harvard to halt the evictions caused by its expansion. In 1970, 300 community members and students disrupted Harvards graduation ceremonies to demand the last open space on the Charles River waterfront, the Treeland Bindery site in Riverside, be reserved for 100 low-income housing units. Under pressure, Harvard bought an alternate site for 32 low-income townhouses. As local politician and Riverside resident Saundra Graham put it, We successfully stopped Harvard from buying up the whole community they only got half of it.[14]

Since then, universities have continued to accumulate properties by playing the real estate market. They buy housing for their faculty, students, and staff, which drives up home prices and rents which in turn boosts the value of universities real estate holdings. In the 1970s and 80s, Harvard Real Estate Inc. ramped up its approach, seeking to buy any properties available at a reasonable price, and introducing an option plan for faculty homebuyers under whichHarvard retained the right to buy upon resale.[15]As landlords, Harvard and MIT often bypassed rent control when it existed, and pushed hard for its abolition in the later ballot fight.[16]

By the 1990s, these university-backed ethnic cleansing programs had filled Harvards surrounding neighborhoods with affluent white residents who were no longer happy with university expansion so the cityenacted policies to limit it. But since Cambridge rent control was abolished in 1995 through the actions of the militant landlord groupSmall Property Owners Association (SPOA), Harvard and MITs leverage has only increased. Today, the land-grabbing machine continues to work at full speedacross the river inAllston.

University expansion fuels the currenthousing crisis in Cambridgeand continues toethnically cleanseworking-class communities. Meanwhile, these universitieseconomics departmentsand housing research centers produce the propaganda that helped make rent control ataboo termamong the political class, even asrents have risen by 30% in Cambridgebetween 2021 and 2022 alone.[17]This ideological consensus helps universities grow their real estate empires.

When universities are powerful landlords, who gets space and what is it used for?

Real estate for war and medical apartheid

Living up to its nicknamePentagon East,MIT leases buildings to weapons developers and war profiteers. MIT leases space toBoeing(Figure 2), a company that provides the Israeli state with missiles, fighter jets, and helicopters, and also servicesImmigration and Customs Enforcement(ICE).

Figure 2: MIT deals land for war and medical apartheid. A subset of MITs real estate relationships and partnerships with pharma, weapons developers, and computing corporations in Kendall Square, Cambridge. MIT parcels as of 2021 shown in green (data from MassGIS).

MIT has also built a joint laboratory withIBM, a company that has helped racist regimes keep records from the US to the German Nazis and the South African apartheid government. The Hollerith machine, a mechanical tabulator developed in the 19th century that was core to IBMs founding, offered a way torecord peoples race and sexon a large scale for purposes of criminalization. The company has continued to develop tools of repression with more sophisticated computers. IBM helped develop COPLINK, a platform used by police departments across the US to share and analyze records. In Massachusetts,as many as 25 police departmentsautomatically feed most of their data from arrests, complaints, and citations to interviews with police officers into COPLINK. IBM also services Israelspopulation registry, which the Israeli state uses to issue ID cards. The registry supports a colonial divide-and-conquer strategy in which Palestinians are differentially oppressed by Israel based on where they reside (e.g., Palestinians with Israeli citizenship versus Palestinian non-citizens living in East Jerusalem), a distinction which is tracked using IBMs tools.

Along with war, MIT also allocates space to the companies that sustain medical apartheid, such asPfizer,Novartis, andTakeda(which bought the Cambridge-based biotech Millennium Pharmaceuticals). During the Covid pandemic, Pfizer cut a deal with the Israeli state: the company provided vaccines for distribution to Israeli citizens (at the expense of Palestinians) in exchange for medical data. Novartis fights to keep drug prices high and to block the production of more affordable generics in the Global South. In 2013, for example,Novartisfought in Indias courts for the right to charge exorbitant prices for Gleevec, a cancer drug.Takedasimilarly charges exorbitant fees for cancer drugs while flexing legal muscle toblock production of cheaper generics. Like Pfizer and Novartis,Takedas expansion, which residents have tried to stop, contributes to the ethnic cleansing of Cambridges communities. Harvard has followed a similar strategy when expanding into Allston, where it has built biomedical research facilities geared towardsprivatizationand the creation ofstartup companies against residents will.[18]

Replacing the resistance

For the colonial university, Cambridge is a success story: if you visit today, youll find a booming industry that works for capital and empire, built on the ruins of displaced communities. Youll see pharmaceutical companies, computing corporations, weapons developers, and secretive weapons research labs such asDraper Laboratory. But what existed before this landscape was reorganized by the land-grabbing machine?

Cambridge was once home to a third of all organizing spaces in Greater Boston, according to local historian Tim Devin who documented a range of mutual aid groups, radical feminist organizations, and tenants unions working in the city in the 1970s. Part of the force of these groups was their visibility, Devin writes inMapping Out Utopia, both in the media, and in the physical space of the city. The physical visibility of storefront organizing spaces depended upon the cheap rent that existed in Cambridge at that time cheap rent which was made possible by priorracist redlining and organized abandonmentthat had devalued real estate in Cambridges historically Black and immigrant neighborhoods. As universities expanded into these neighborhoods and displaced their residents, rents increased and many radical groups couldnt afford to stay.

Figure 3: Harvard Square, then and now. Left: Tim Devins map of community organizations in Harvard Square in the 1970s (source: Mapping Out Utopia).

The groups mapped by Devin have been progressively replaced (Figure 3). The landlords of Sanctuary (74 Mt. Auburn St), a shelter and provider of counseling services for people experiencing homelessness, sold the building to Harvard in 1974, who terminated the lease; today it houses the Harvard Office for the Arts. A feminist cooperative daycare (46 Oxford St) survived a move into a Harvard-owned building only to become a $2,780/month daycare serving Harvard parents. Other Ways, an alternative school at 5 Story St, was swallowed up by Harvards campus. Organizations not directly replaced by universities were destroyed by their effects on the real estate market. In 2015, a triple-decker at 186 Hampshire St that lefty landowners had been renting affordably to radical groups for 40 years was seized by the city for back taxes (for most other landlords, rising property values are enough to kill low rent).[19]

Occupation of a Harvard University building on Memorial Drive, March 1971.

Some organizations held on through struggle, like theCambridge Womens Center, which in 1971 raised money to buy their current space through a 10-dayoccupation of a Harvard building(888 Memorial Drive) that demanded a Womens Center and more low-income housing. But most oppositional spaces from that period are either gone or transformed into liberalNGOs.

Beyond Cambridge, in those parts of Greater Boston that havent been as thoroughly cleansed, the struggle to stay continues.

Colonizing Boston in the service of the US war machine

By reshaping city politics, universities have directly contributed to the whitening of the city. But even when universities arent directing displacement, their colonial presence sets the stage for it. The resulting increases in property values further enrich the universities as landowners, and enable them to take more resources for war and medical apartheid. Universities colonization of Roxbury illustrates this racist feedback loop and its connections to US imperialism.

Protest sign against BUs bioterror lab that emphasizes link between bioweapons and environmental racism.

In the early 2000s, Boston University decided to establish a government-funded bioweapons lab called NEIDL (National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories) on Albany Street in the South End, at the edge of Roxbury (Figure 4), against the residents will. NEIDL cultivates dangerous air-borne pathogens, including Ebola, smallpox, and anthrax all to enhance the harm capacities of the US war machine. Pathogens and epidemics have long been weaponized by empires for use against colonized peoples and as weapons of counterinsurgency. The US government has grown its biological weapons research since World War II, and has a record of experimenting with bioweapons in urban areas without residents consent, especially in Black communities and other communities of color.[20]

Figure 4: Universities grab land and create private wealth amidst displacement and ethnic cleansing. Universities land parcels are color-coded (Boston Universitys parcels in orange), black dots indicate eviction filings filed between 2015-2022, and blue dots indicate police stations (data from MassCourts and MassGIS; note location of Boston Police Department Headquarters). Eviction filings are certainly an underestimate of the number of actual evictions, which often take place informally through intimidation, coercion, and/or punitive rent hikes, without leaving a legal record.

Continuing this pattern, the state chose to build one of its most dangerous biolabs in Roxbury. Roxburys predominantly Black residents were already suffering from displacement, criminalization, and organized abandonment under racial capitalism. As George Lipsitz writes inHow Racism Takes Place, living in segregated inner-city neighborhoods imposes the equivalent of a racial tax on people of color a racial tax that manifests in literal harm to the health and well being of Black bodies.

Some of the citys most polluting facilities have been imposed on Roxbury, including power stations, high-traffic bus stations, junkyards, and waste incinerators.[21]The areas residents lack access to health care and nourishing foods, and parts of Roxbury have the shortestlife expectancyin the city (59 years), dramatically lower than that of the wealthy Back Bay area (92 years) which is half a mile away. Roxbury is also where the forces of ethnic cleansing and displacement are most intense. The Boston Housing Authority and real estate companies have been evicting residents in Roxbury at far higher rates than in Cambridge and Somerville (Figure 4).

By fueling displacement and pursuing biowarfare, universities and their corporate-state partners negate efforts to build life-affirming communities. This negation is covered up with propaganda. NEIDL is presented as a public health lab that will develop treatments for infectious diseases, and which is entirely safe. Yet NEIDL is sponsored by the very entities that block affordable access to medicines and vaccines, such as theGates Foundation(which also supports bioweapons development) and pharmaceutical companies likeMerckandTakeda, and by the US war machine that sucks resources away from communities and pollutes the earth.

Roxbury residents saw through the lies, and tried to stop Boston Universitys bioterror lab.

Community resistance to the colonial university

As soon as plans for Boston Universitys bioterror lab became known, Roxbury residents organized against it.Stop the BU Biolab, a coalition of Roxbury residents and allies, fought against the lab because of the health and environmental dangers the facility brings, and because of the inherent harm of putting bioweapons in the hands of the state. Chuck Turner, then a Boston city councilor backed by Roxbury residents, repeatedly tried to get the cityto ban the lab. The community managed to delay NEIDLs opening by nearly a decade, until the National Institutes of Health ruled that the lab poses no substantial risks despite the history of accidents in Boston Universitys facilities and other bioweapons labs.

Community protests against BUs bioterror lab (photographs from 2005-2007).

Even some local politicians voiced opposition: at a2005 protestagainst NEIDL, then Boston city council member Tito Jackson said, Our community will no longer get dumped on. We have an expressway, we have all the traffic that occurs in a city in that area, and we also have a prison. We do not need ebola, or whatever other airborne or non-airborne agents in our community. Organizers have since continued to warn about NEIDLs harms. As Klare X. AllentoldBostons WBUR radio station in 2012, NEIDL has failed to address basic questions about the facility, such as How are we going to be safe? How are we going to eat? How will we be notified [in case of an accident]? Will there be an alarm? How is it going to be transported? What neighborhoods is it going through?

Roxbury resident and organizer Klare X. Allen speaking at a2006 protestagainst BUs bioterror lab.

The resistance persists today, as NEIDL continues its secretive operations. The lab has started working with SARS-Cov-2 in recent years, and as expected, it has had a series ofdangerous accidentsthat even made it into NEIDLs sanitized reports.

Boston University, meanwhile, continues to accumulate wealth. Down the street from NEIDL, on 700 Albany Street, the university has a set of campus buildings that the state of Massachusetts values at over $96 million and that sit on land valued at ~$21 million (as of 2021). Northeastern University also holds expensive real estate in the area (Figure 4). Private wealth is thus being created amidst evictions, criminalization, and organized abandonment by the state. The university drives this violence, both directly through policy (as we have seen) and more indirectly. The accumulation of property invites morepolicing to protect that property; more policing brings more criminalization and evictions of the undesirable residents; evictions clear the way for real estate developers to serve the growing population of university professionals; this population invites more accumulation of property and hence more policing, and the cycle continues.

Yet history shows that this colonial loop can be disrupted. The universitys land-grabbing machine has been challenged at every stage by the organized efforts of the people it seeks to exploit, push out, and harm. We can fight this machine by building local community power, and connecting our struggle for health, housing, and liberation with the struggle against imperialism and war.

Further reading

About US universities displacing and extracting profits from communities

* John Trumpbour (ed), How Harvard Rules: Reason in the Service of Empire(1989)

* Lily Geismer, Dont Blame Us: Suburban Liberals and the Transformation of the Democratic Party(2014)

* Shin Eun-jung, Verita$: Harvards Hidden History(2015)

* Davarian Baldwin, In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities Are Plundering Our Cities(2021)

* Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, Automating Banishment: The Surveillance and Policing of Looted Land(2021)

* Bill Cunningham, Belonging(unpublished manuscript).

About bioweapons and Boston Universitys NEIDL

* Stop the Biolabwebsite

* BU flunks the trust test,Boston Globe(2005)

* Roxbury, Massachusetts: Direct Action Civics and Biodefense in Thomas Beamish, Community at Risk Biodefense and the Collective Search for Security(2015).

* Aberrant Wars in Harriet Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present(2017).

* Mark Wheelis, Lajos Rzsa, and Malcolm Dando, Deadly Cultures: Biological Weapons since 1945(2006)

Notes

[1]Land. And the University Is Settler Colonial, in la paperson,A Third University is Possible(2017); Robert Lee and Tristan Ahtone, Land-grab universities,High Country News(April 2020) (see alsoLand-Grab Universities Map).

[2]Harvards billion-dollar farmland fiasco. So Paulo: GRAIN & Rede Social de Justia e Direitos Humanos. August 2018.

[3]These numbers were calculated from estimates of land and building value to the capitalist market system, done by the state of Massachusetts (source: MassGIS).

[4]Zachary Robinson and Oscar Hernandez, Neighborhood Bully: Harvard, the Community, and Urban Development, in John Trumpbour (ed),How Harvard Rules, 190.

[5]Bill Cunningham,Belonging(unpublished manuscript), 43;How Harvard Rules(1989), 182-184

[6]As Zachary Robinson and Oscar Hernandez write, Perhaps city-wide at large elections [as implemented by Plan E] are not inherently anti-democratic, but at the time it had that effectPlan E changed the tone of politics, creating a sort of mysticism of the professional municipal problem-solver. It changed the focus of politics towards highly organized interest groups. (How Harvard Rules, 185).

[7]The University today is in the position of a man about to be eaten by cannibals The fully matured product is visible in a slum-surrounded university like Columbia or Chicago.It is hard enough to find good teachers. Inducing them to live in slums is next to impossible.The only alternative is to attack the existing pattern, to develop a new pattern through urban renewal.Harvard cannot be fitted to a slum community, and Harvard cannot move. (Belonging, 44)

[8]At the same time, Harvard opened its own planning office, to work closely with the city manager and his urban renewal assistant (Belonging, 43).

[9]Belonging, 49-50; Throughout the postwar era, MIT boasted the largest defense research budget of any university, with neighbor Harvard following closely behind in third place. (Lily Geismer,Dont Blame Us, 21). See alsoHow Harvard Rules, 186.

[10]Jon Pynoos,Housing Urban America, 58.

[11]The Inner Belt (I-695) was a ring road highway proposed to link I-95 to Boston, Brookline, Cambridge, and Somerville under the eminent domain powers of the 1949 Housing Act. A cross-neighborhood coalition of residents succeeded in getting the project canceled in 1971, thereby preventing massive clearance of central Cambridge and southern Somerville neighborhoods but not before neighborhoods in Roxbury had been leveled along what is now Melnea Cass Boulevard (Karilyn Crockett,People before Highways).

[12]Belonging, 56.

[13]Seek Houghton School Site Which Wont Involve Homes,Cambridge Chronicle(March 3, 1966):1.

[14]How Harvard Rules, 187-190.

[15]In the words of Thomas OBrien, vice president for financial affairs at HRE in the 1980s: In the long run the University may have the need to use its properties in other ways that they are currently being used When property is available at a reasonable price it has thus been sensible for the University to buy it.

[16]How Harvard Rules, 194;Belonging, 107, 158.

[17]According to apaper by MIT economists, written for the National Bureau of Economic Research, the gentrification produced by rent deregulation (abolition of rent control) reduces crime. They write: Our findings establish that reductions in crime are an important part of gentrification and generate substantial economic value.

[18]A Hedge Fund With Libraries: The Financial Crisis of 2008, in Shin Eun-jung,Verita$: Harvards Hidden History(2015).

[19]Mapping Out Utopia, 46-48.

[20]Aberrant Wars in Harriet Washington,Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present(2017).

[21]Roxbury, Massachusetts: Direct Action Civics and Biodefense in Thomas Beamish,Community at Risk Biodefense and the Collective Search for Security(2015).

Originally posted here:

Boston's Colonial Universities Grab Land for Profit, War, and Medical Apartheid - CounterPunch

Of course, you know I could never share your faith. So wrote a friend of mine in a letter. She felt it was constitutionally impossible for her to believe. Many of my friends feel the same; perhaps yours are similar. They think theyre not people of faith and that Christians are.

Its a way of thinking thats as popular as it is preposterous. But really, it is wildly preposterous. Because Im a believer and Im a skepticit just depends what things Im being asked to believe (or doubt). At the same time my friend is a believer (about certain things), and shes a skeptic (about others). We are all living by faithall of us, all the timeso its really important to examine such beliefs.

Sometimes I classify our faith positions in terms of day-to-day beliefs and deepest beliefs. Day-to-day beliefs are ones we exercise all the time. Theyre our moral assumptions about what makes the world go round, what makes people tick, what makes society work. We rarely examine these beliefs and we almost never seek to prove or justify them; they are simply the air we breathe.

Im a believer and Im a skepticit just depends what things Im being asked to believe (or doubt).

These beliefs include things like people have intrinsic value, a society should be judged by the way it treats its weakest members, might does not make right, everyone should be free to make their own decisions in the world, the arc of history is long but it bends toward justice, and so on.

What youll notice about these day-to-day beliefs is how commonly theyre held. I believe them, my friends believe them, it seems as if most people in the modern world believe them. So really, were incredibly united by faith, wouldnt you say? Except that we havent discussed our deepest beliefsour metaphysical and religious views about the fundamental nature of reality. At that level a great chasm opens up.

For atheist Richard Dawkins, the universe appears at bottom [to contain] no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference. For Moses, on the other hand, underneath are the everlasting arms (Deut. 33:27). So take your pickunderneath there are uncaring, brute forces or an eternal God with outstretched arms of love. Which is it? The clash of beliefs at the deepest level seems irreconcilable.

Given this immense difference, its completely understandable why my friend would consider herself incapable of my kind of faith. The gulf between blind, pitiless indifference and the everlasting arms of love appears unbridgeable. But maybe we need to reframe things. Instead of focusing on the chasm between those two deepest beliefs, why dont we focus on a different disparity? Because the really unbridgeable chasm is the one that exists within our atheist friends. Consider the following clashes:

My friends believe the second half of all these statements, passionately. As do I. And these dearest intuitions shape us at every levelindeed we stake our lives on such beliefs (as unprovable as they are). We are all persons of faith. But the real inconsistency to point out is not the inconsistency between the atheists deepest beliefs and the Christians. The starkest contradiction is among the atheists own beliefsthe gulf between their dearest intuitions and their deepest beliefs.

In my book The Air We Breathe, I take seven of our dearest intuitions and show how theyve become commonplace:

The Air We Breathe explores each of these values in the context of the Christian story, taking the reader from Genesis to George Floyd. We begin in the Old Testament, continue in the New, then chart the early churchs growth, then medieval Christendom, the scientific evolution, the abolition of the slave trade, and on through World War II and the civil rights movement into the present day.

The starkest contradiction is among the atheists own beliefsthe gulf between their dearest intuitions and their deepest beliefs.

At each juncture we see that the dearest intuitions we hold are not at all obvious, natural, or universal. These values are largely unknown to pre- and non-Christian cultures. Each of these beliefs has come specifically through the Jesus revolution (a.k.a. Christianity) and they make little sense apart from it.

When were tempted to focus on the clash between believers and unbelievers, we should think again. Everyone is a believer. And there can be surprising agreement on the dearest beliefs we holdsuch unprovable values have, through the Christian revolution, become the air we breathe. But we need to go further. As we press into those heartfelt beliefs, we see the most urgent clash to resolve is really the one that exists within the non-Christian. The beliefs our friends cherish (even while claiming to be unbelievers) are unfounded apart from Jesus Christ. He alone is a solid foundation. All other ground is sinking sand.

This article is adapted from Glen Scriveners The Air We Breathe (The Good Book Company, 2022) and was published in partnership with The Good Book Company.

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Everyone You Know Is a Believer - The Gospel Coalition