Monthly Archives: September 2022

Last month, amid the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine, Daisaku Ikeda, president of Soka Gakkai International, the nongovernmental organization that serves as an umbrella group for the worlds largest sect of Nichiren Buddhism, pleaded for the five nuclear weapon statesincluding Russiato commit to never being the first to use nuclear weapons in a conflict.

In a world where divisions are as deep as they have ever been, it is crucial that all the nuclear-weapon states clearly declare that they intend to maintain the stance of self-restraint with regard to nuclear war, he said, ahead of the review conference for the states party to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, which concluded on August 26.

While for many the issue of nuclear abolition has faded to the background after the Cold War, members of the Soka Gakkai movement have been fighting for nuclear abolition for more than 60 yearsand say that the war between Russia and Ukraine should be a stark reminder of the imminent and existential threat nuclear weapons pose to humanity.

As Buddhists, we believe in the utmost dignity of life, that life is so precious, said Anna Ikeda, a representative for SGI at the UN. Nuclear weapons destroy life on such a broad scale in an instant, so of course we should be enraged at them.

This commitment to nuclear abolition is actually intertwined with the foundation of SGI itself, Joan Anderson, of the groups international office of public information, points out.

Soka Gakkai traces its roots to 1930s Japan, during the lead up to World War II. Its two founders, Tsunesaburo Makiguchi and Josei Toda, were schoolteachers who opposed Japans growing militarism and imposition of the Shinto religion, and were later imprisoned for publicly resisting it, Anderson said. Makiguchi died in prison.

Resistance to nationalism and to the war is in-built in SGI members, Anderson said.

Toda was released from prison in July 1945, one month before the United States dropped atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which killed more than 200,000 people, most of them civilians, and leaving thousands of survivors, known in Japanese as hibakusha, with cancer and other health effects from the radiation. Toda then began rebuilding Soka Gakkai in the wars aftermath.

In 1957, at the height of the Cold War and months before his death, Toda delivered a declaration on the abolition of nuclear weapons, which became the foundation for Soka Gakkais work on nuclear abolition.

We, the citizens of the world, have an inviolable right to live, he said. Anyone who jeopardizes that right is a devil incarnate, a fiend, a monster. I wish to declare that anyone who ventures to use nuclear weapons, irrespective of their nationality or whether their country is victorious or defeated, should be sentenced to death without exception.

His strong language was a response to the global arms race and ballooning of nuclear stockpiles at the time, Anderson said.

I think he felt that its not the case that there are good nuclear weapons and bad nuclear weapons, that having nuclear weapons in the hands of the United States is fine, but in the hands of the Soviet Union is bad, she said. What he said was, we have to stop this kind of thinking, nuclear weapons are a threat to all life, and theres no such thing as a limited nuclear war.

After Todas declaration, Soka Gakkai started an extensive international campaign for nuclear abolition. One of the organizations first activities was interviewing hibakusha to document their experiences with nuclear war and suffering. By tasking young members with collecting these testimonies, he was able to educate a new generation about nuclear weapons, Anderson said.

Soka Gakkai also put together exhibitions about the human toll of nuclear weapons, which have been showcased around the world, and launched other public education campaigns. In 1983, Soka Gakkai International registered as a nongovernmental organization with the United Nations, where its also been pushing for abolition on a global scale.

SGI is a partner organization of the Geneva-based International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), which was awarded the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize. SGI also works on the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT)an agreement among the worlds five nuclear powers to prevent the spread of nuclear weaponsand the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weaponsan agreement among non-nuclear countries to not develop or produce nuclear weapons.

And in the United States, SGI-USA is currently working with the Back from the Brink campaigna coalition of faith and civic groups, including the Union of Concerned Scientists, the Sierra Club, and several mainline Protestant denominationsto push a domestic policy platform that includes renouncing the first use of nuclear weapons; ending the presidents sole, unchecked authority to launch nuclear war; taking nuclear weapons off hair trigger alert status; and abandoning the plan to update the USs arsenal with enhanced weapons.

Anna Ikeda said that as a Buddhist civil society organization, SGIs role in the fight for nuclear abolition is to strengthen international norms and remind people of the human toll thats at stake, since governmental discussions about nuclear weapons are typically sanitized and focus on numbers and military strategy.

Its to the point where you dont really hear about human suffering, she said. So its the role of SGI, ICAN, and others to put human suffering at the center of the debate.

Another noteworthy attribute of SGIs nuclear abolition work is that youth have always played a significant role, Danny Hall, public affairs director for SGI-USA, pointed out. (Daisaku Ikeda wrote in 2009, It is the passion of youth that spreads the flames of courage throughout society.) Student groups have for decades hosted exhibitions on their college campuses and disseminated petitions to raise awareness.

Even though nuclear abolition isnt often at the forefront of the minds of young people, who werent alive during the Cold War, Hall said it should be. By some measures, the risk of nuclear war is even greater now than it was during the Cold War, he said, since the number of nuclear weapons has once again started to grow. In addition, he said, nuclear weapons dont exist in a vacuum; they intersect with issues young people care about.

Nuclear weapons can exacerbate the climate crisis, and nuclear testing and waste have disproportionately impacted marginalized people and communities of color, he said. Its also an issue of economic justice: The US will spend $1.7 billion over 30 years to update its nuclear arsenal, money that could be used for housing, healthcare, or schools, he said.

Finally, for SGI, nuclear abolition isnt just about politics; its also about spirituality.

Anna Ikeda said that in SGIs view of Buddhism, nuclear weapons are a manifestation of what we call the fundamental darkness. Its our inability to see our own dignity and the dignity of others. Because of this, she said its critical not just to abolish nuclear weapons themselves, but also the types of thinking that have led people to developand usethem in the first place. We could destroy all nuclear weapons from earth, but if you dont change human tendencies, its going to be something else, she said.

Her views reflect that of Daisaku Ikeda, who in 2009 wrote, If we are to put the era of nuclear terror behind us, we must struggle against the real enemy. That enemy is not nuclear weapons per se, nor is it the states that possess or develop them. The real enemy that we must confront is the ways of thinking that justify nuclear weapons; the readiness to annihilate others when they are seen as a threat or as a hindrance to the realization of our objectives. This is the new consciousness we must all share.

SGI members understand that they face an uphill battle to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons.

Is it possible? I dont know, Hall said.

But its a matter of faith to continue to make this effort for a world free of nuclear weapons, he said. Our goal is not to be resigned to nuclear war as an inevitability, but to believe that a better world is possible and that we can make a difference.

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Soka Gakkai International's Nuclear Abolition Work - Tricycle

An organization founded by Hillary Clinton in the wake of her 2016 election defeat funneled $75,000 to a left-wing defund the police group whose affiliate worked on a failed campaign to abolish the Minneapolis Police Department, according to a report on Wednesday.

Onward Together, which the former senator from New York and secretary of state created in 2017 to advance progressive values, provided the general support grant to the Alliance for Youth Action sometime between April, 1, 2020, and March 31, 2021, Fox News Digital reported, citing a review of tax documents and annual reports.

The Washington, DC-based Alliance said in a June 2020 press release that it would join in solidarity with other radical groups to demand justice for George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and other minorities who died at the hands of police and joins their calls to defund the police and defend Black lives.

In the statement, the alliance condemned the publicly-funded policing system that was founded on slave patrols and continues to target and murder Black people.

Centering Black people in our work means it is time to divest from police, and invest in Black futures, the group continued in the statement. Defunding the police as part of the path towards abolition is one of the many steps that must be taken to ensure that Black people are able to thrive.

In its 2021 annual report, Alliance for Youth Action noted that its affiliate, the Minnesota Youth Collective, was part of the Yes 4 Minneapolis coalition that aimed to defund and ultimately dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department.

Yes 4 Minneapolis is working to get a charter amendment on the ballot in November, 2021 through petition signature collection. Enough signatures have been gathered that community members themselves will have the opportunity to vote on whether or not to replace the police. This is a vital first step in the movement toward abolition in Minneapolis, the collective said in a statement in April 2021.

Voters in Minnesotas largest city ultimately rejected replacing the police department with a Department of Public Safety in November 2021.

The ballot initiative was prompted by the death of Floyd in May 2020 at the hands of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, who was later sentenced to 22.5 years in prison.

Billionaire Democratic donor George Soros Open Society Policy Center also gave a $500,000 donation to Yes 4 Minneapolis in support of the defund the police campaign, Fox News Digital previously reported.

The report added that Onward Togethers donations have fallen by nearly 50% since it was launched.

In fiscal year 2017, the organization raised $3.1 million, but that fell to $1.6 million in fiscal year 2020, the report found.

Onward Together and the Alliance for Youth Action did not respond to Fox News Digitals requests for comment.

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Clinton nonprofit funneled $75,000 to 'defund the police' group: report - New York Post

When 16-year-old Julius Tate, Jr. was killed during a SWAT raid by undercover Columbus police officers in December of 2018, citizens swiftly gathered to protest the unjust killing of a child. One year later, during an anniversary vigil mourning Tates loss, Ingrid Raphal, co-creator of No Evil Eye and Film Futura, and Melissa Gira Grant, a New York-based reporter covering police brutality, came together to co-direct and collaborate on They Wont Call It Murder, a documentary short from Field of Vision that captures the enduring grief and activism that surviving families of police violence undertake. The film, embedded above, makes its online premiere today.

The film recounts Tates unjust killing alongside three other victims who recently died at the hands of police in Columbus, Ohio: Henry Green, Tyre King and Donna Dalton. It also chronicles the fight for accountability that the families of the deceased doggedly continue. Though the films title refers to the fact that at the time of filming, it had been more than 20 years since a Columbus cop was charged with murder, the doc itself probes into the politics of what it looks like when justice is finally served. In Daltons case, the officer who killed her broke that 20-year streak and was actually charged with murdera victory that the filmmakers (and Daltons own sister) owe to the fact that she was a white woman murdered by a Black man.

They Wont Call It Murder surveys the horrific reality of the state-sanctioned execution of marginalized civilians, insisting that the wrongful extinguishing of life cannot be rectified by any financial settlement or prison sentence. In documenting the sinister reality of this epidemic as it pertains to Columbus, the filmmakers highlight the ubiquity of these senseless killings across the country.

Filmmaker spoke to co-directors Raphal and Grant via email about their documentary short, touching on their individual connections to the city of Columbus, how they ensured the comfort of the mourning families involved and the oft-inconsistent definition of accountability.

Filmmaker: What individually inspired each of you to participate in this project, and what did you all take away from this collaborative effort?

Raphal: The film takes place in Columbus, Ohio, a city whose legacy with impunity toward police killings perfectly befits the name it bears: Columbus, Christopher Columbus.

I was living in Columbus, Ohio during the murders of Henry Green, Tyre King, Julius Tate Jr. and Donna Dalton (the victims highlighted in the film) and many others in the surrounding Columbus area, witnessing the anger and grief of the families at protests, and supported organizers efforts to rally the Columbus residents. [That] would later inform how They Wont Call It Murder would act as a container for these collective experiences.

After leaving the city in 2019 due to a lack of work opportunities, an opportunity to co-direct a film building off of Melissas extensive reporting on the citys history of police killings with impunity sparked my interest, and I thought about the countless other victims I had heard of while living in Columbus and thought, Nows the time to let their stories known beyond the borders of this city. It all unfolded from there.

The process of making this film was difficult, yet it was rewarded by acts of care, diligence, and trust. Making a film that asks participants, or subjects, to recount memories and moments of deep grief requires all of the ingredients that make a sustainable, and gratifying, relationship work: warmth, love, trust, safety, laughter, consent and more. Though you find these emotions through the film, they are bounded by realities of distrust, lack of safety and accountability from the city and local police department.

As a crew, we needed to make sure that we offered acts of care before and after each interview, that we obtained consent to film at vigils and provided support when families returned to the sites where their son or sister were killed. This taught me that the camera can be an extension of the self, not a barrier between yourself and the participant. When you enter someones home with all of this gear and theyre already wary of local news crews who disregarded their stories, you have to work really hard to not recreate that. And we did, we were attentive to each participants tempos and reluctancy. Because when we finished filming, their lives and grieving process continued: This is a humbling reminder that, as a first-time filmmaker, I will carry with me and embed into my continuing practice.

Grant: Four years ago, I met Bobbie McCalla, after a Columbus police officer shot and killed her sister Donna Dalton. I had been reporting on police violence for several years at that point. But that story was my introduction to the Columbus police departmentthe undercover officers, the pattern of killings.

That was 2018. By then, after the killing of Mike Brown in Ferguson and Eric Garner in New York, there was little expectation that prosecutors would charge a police officer with murder in such a case. Cops and prosecutors truly work the same side. When we started making this film, no Columbus police officer who killed a community member while on duty had been charged with murder since 1996.

The prosecutor in Columbus who would be responsible for these cases said something I couldnt stop thinking about, and I probably wrote it into every story I did back then: he said that nine times out of 10, when asking a grand jury to consider charging a police officer with murder, that his office didnt think a crime was committed. Rarely do they dispute that a police officer killed someone. Whats disputed is if it is a murder. So the press wont use the word murder. But in my conversations with families, they almost always use that word. And while they arent waiting for a grand jury or a prosecutor to affirm that something wrong was done, when they are denied that, it compounds the wrong. Their understanding of justice, to me, felt more expansive than I could address in a piece of print journalism.

Collaborating on this film felt like a first step towards doing that more complex story some justice, to work with people who shared that respect for the families experience and knowledge of the criminal legal system, who valued them as experts, and who didnt want to further compound what they had lost as we told this story together.

Filmmaker: They Wont Call It Murderaddresses that there is an overarching epidemic of law enforcement murdering Black and Brown people with virtually no consequence. The film, however, focuses on this injustice solely in the state of Ohio, namely Columbus. What made you want to focus on this crisis as it pertains to this specific corner of America?

Raphal: I was once told that Ohio is the heartbeat of the United States; situated at the center of it, considered a fly-over state, discarded and ignored, though many legendary people were shaped by its landscape and quietnessto name a favorite, Toni Morrison. Its a state that gets made fun of (understandably so) and though some stereotypes are true (corn fields, Buckeyes-craze, Hell Is Real banners, quietness), this is somewhere I chose to live after college and got to witness its history of violence with impunity.

As documentarians, I strongly believe that we can only give stories their due justice when we are directly connected to the people, themes or arcs that we aim to center. It provides you with a sensibility and accountability to the stories, people and landscape that a non-connected outsider couldnt tap into. This film is something I could give back to the people and community in Columbus that fostered and shaped meand show viewers that though the film focuses on Columbus, Ohio, this is an all-American story and reality.

Grant: Each of us had a connection to Ohio before collaborating on this film, either living there or having family there or both. And we got to see multiple sides of Columbus, from the winter of 2019 to the summer of 2020, to see how it contained that legacy of violence and that community we saw come together in the streets. It was about place but also about the passage of time, how this pattern of violence goes on, too, beyond the close of the film.

Its not a pattern unique to Columbus or to Ohio. These killings could have, and have, happened in so many communities. And no community is representative of another. But grounding the story in one community, and how they had navigated common obstacles with the same police and prosecutors, was important to us. To focus on the way police killings shaped this community, the way people responded here, let us look at police killings differently: not as isolated incidents, but as a pattern of violence that can suffuse a place and define who belongs there and whose life matters there.

Filmmaker: Furthermore, how did you get connected with the films subjects, and what felt vital to highlight when it came to each familys individual story?

Raphal: Relationship-building, organizing and trust led us to our participants: Adrienne Hood, Dearrea and Malika King, Jamita and Maryam Malone and Bobbi McCalla. Local organizers who had established relationships with our highlighted families vetted myself and Melissa, which allowed us to document their stories in a trusting and candid environment.

We spoke to each family separately. Malika King, the mother of Tyre King, surprised us on set at her mothers home and, after questioning our motives, trusted us to participate in the film. The vigil for the one-year anniversary of Julius Tate Jr.s killing was occurring while we were in town filming. At the last minute, the family agreed for us to film and thats how we got connected to his mother Jamita Malone. Bobbi McCalla, Donna Daltons sister, was in community with Melissa through her reporting work and Adrienne Hood, mother of Henry Green, was committed to speak publicly about her sons murder and introduced us to Malika and Dearrea King.

Grant: Pretty quickly we realized that Ms. Hood had done the work of reaching out to families after she heard the news about any police killing in the community, and had been building a relationship with them, offering support if they wanted it, and were able to benefit from that work.

As we got to know each family on our own, through calls and spending time with them at home (before COVID), we started to see certain common experiences they shared, like the very specific way detectives handled them at the hospital, how police informed them and how little they told them, while at the same time sharing much more information with the press. Where they differ is when we got into the question of what justice meant to themlike if a prosecution was accountability, or if police could be held accountable at all. And some of their takes on that question also shifted over the course of our knowing them, from the months before COVID to the months after the 2020 uprisings.

Filmmaker: The landscape of Ohio itself is, of course, heavily featured in the film. It certainly provides a harrowing point of reference for the violent crimes committed here by police, but also offers moments of aesthetic beauty that are compelling (and somewhat hopeful) in their own right. How did you go about framing the films location, and what felt particularly important to capture or convey about this place?

Raphal: When I lived in Columbus, I relied heavily on the bus to get around. This allowed me to discover many parts of the city through the seat of a passenger. I noticed the distinctive characteristics of each neighborhood, each divided by a highway or train tracks. A quintessential American city with rust-belt remnants and few downtown skyscrapers. We mimicked this POV with the camera and drove through streets surrounding the areas where each victim was killedpicking out routes and sceneries that showed the most recognizable landscapes, houses, graffiti, horizon of that area. When we premiered the film in Columbus, Ohio at the Unorthodocs Film Festival, I received feedback that folks appreciated that we showed each neighborhood, which meant we succeeded in capturing the citys essence.

A memorable moment was waking up before sunrise with our crew and capturing the downtown skyline at the brink of dawn while staking out on a parking lot. It was the first time I witnessed the citys skyscrapers glisten against the waking sun. It was a cold morning and though the view was beautiful, we were grounded in the fact that those buildings host the same individuals responsible for not prosecuting or indicting police officers.

Filmmaker:The one white victim of police violence that you spotlight, Donna Dalton, is unique in that the Black officer who killed her was charged with murder, unlike the officers who killed Black victims Henry Bub Green, Tyr King and Julius Tate, Jr. What discussions do you hope this film prompts about the systems relative inability to provide justice?

Grant: Its a huge question the film cant fully addressbut if we start from the position that you cannot separate the function of policing from anti-Black racism, which is where we as filmmakers did start, then you see how a system shaped by white supremacy will define accountability based on white supremacy. You cant assume what people even mean by accountability in this system, what justice means. The criminal legal system and the media have a lot of power to define those things for the community; we resisted that, or we tried to.

Its absolutely significant that at first, the story police and some media told about Donnas killing was of a good cop defending himself in a vice operation gone wrong. Over time, as more and more facts about the officer who killed her came to light, including the racism reported by others within the Columbus Division of Police, the story shifted. What made it easier for people to see a Black officer as a criminal is intimately connected with what makes it easier for people to see a white woman as a victim, and whats common across every story in the film is the way people killed by police are dehumanized and even blamed for their own deaths. They are denied their victimhood. For me, justice has to include breaking with those racist ideas about who is worthy of our protectionbeginning at the beginning, not the end, of a life.

Raphal: What kind of justice can truly be served when someones life has been taken? The film explores what the families consider to be justice, and they each have different answers. Their ideal of justice and accountability range from death penalty, imprisonment, an entirely new system, accomplices to receive carceral punishment, to sentiments that resemble abolition. It begins a conversation around the possibilities of justice that lean on what we know: the judiciary system. We rely on it to enact, and create the rules for, some sort of accountability, built on white-supremacist ideals which means it will fail to protect the needs and interests of oppressed peoples. From this perspective, when police officers act as extensions of power for the state, it is difficult to envision that the state would hold itself (through its judiciary system) accountable to the fullest extent which, to me, means the ending of police killings overall. For all of the families in the film, they have yet to receive any form of justiceas defined by themselves and the system. I would love to start a conversation around how justice could be being able to live your life with abundance and safety because we dont have Tyre King, Julius Tate Jr., Henry Green or Donna Dalton to tell their stories.

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Cops and Prosecutors Truly Work the Same Side: Ingrid Raphal and Melissa Gira Grant on their FOV Doc They Wont Call It Murder - Filmmaker Magazine

The 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) may be resurrected, but opposition is coming from an unusual place. After years of minimal constructive input, the UN International Atomic Energy Administration (IAEA) has suddenly found a voice that of its Director General, Raphael Grossi, who insists Iranian nuclear weapons work be fully revealed and inspections not be paused, and thus abandoned, as Iran presently insists.

Grossi and the IAEA are concerned by the presence of unexplained uranium particles in Iranian facilities built and operated for the 1989 AMAD nuclear weapons program. The program, ostensibly ended in 2003, has long been thought to have continued with both overt and covert nuclear activities, a theory given weight by documents smuggled out of Iran by Israel in 2018. In June 2022, the IAEA reported on the uranium particles and admonished Iran which responded by turning off IAEA cameras inside the facilities.

The IAEAs concern is welcome, late and mild as it is.

Supporters of a new JCPOA admit the Iranian position is problematic. The UN arms embargo on Iran expired in 2020, the snapback sanctions provision expires in 2025, and all restrictions expire in 2030. But, they argue, the US then would be no worse off with the JCPOA than without it, as Iran would have the ability to quickly produce enough nuclear weapons fuel for a nuclear warhead with or without the deal.

Thus, they argue, the US has nothing to lose and it just might be that in the intervening eight years, the Iranian economic sanctions, having expired, would lead to Tehran become more integrated into the world economy with more butter rather than more guns guiding the Iranian leadership. [The same strategy that thought Chinas accession to international institutions and trade with the US would result in the peaceful rise of Chinese power.]

The IAEA concerns cannot be easily dismissed. Built into JCPOA II is the idea that key deficiencies in the original must be corrected. Longer and stronger, President Joe Biden said. The foremost concern is precisely the investigation of prior nuclear activity, on which the IAEA is now insisting, and which Tehran is demanding to be terminated. Without a definitive baseline, how would the US know the status of Irans nuclear ambitions and whether we are being snookered? That is precisely what we did not know the first time.

Iran is also massively non-compliant with both the 1969 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and the comprehensive safeguards agreement under which Iran was required to disavow nuclear weapons capability. The JCPOA was necessary in fact because Iran was already in serious violation of its NPT legal obligations and was feared sprinting toward a nuclear weapon.

In addition, Iran received a singular dispensation to continue its nuclear fuel enrichment when Secretary Kerry announced Iran had a right to enrich. No other country could do that, says Mathew Kroenig of the Atlantic Council, adding that the Republic of Korea, for example, has a robust nuclear energy industry, but does not produce its own nuclear fuel.

This was a top requirement of Eisenhowers Atoms for Peace framework, to keep nuclear energy programs sharply distinct and away from any nuclear weapons capability. The NPT declares a right to research but not an explicit right to enrich and certainly not outside the legal requirements of the NPT and additional safeguard agreements.

The proposed nuclear deal does not move Iran further away from nuclear fuel enrichment, but in fact closer. Iran demands that it be allowed to not only produce nuclear enriched material, but to so with more advanced centrifuges, which could lead to an industrial strength nuclear program capable of building nuclear weapons.

Although the JCPOA II will not strengthen the original framework, Iran still gets complete up front sanctions relief rather than over time pegging such relief to Iran achieving certain milestones.

Furthermore, left by the wayside and kicked down the road would be discussion on limits on Irans ballistic missile capability, now the most robust in all the Middle East, as well as information about its rocket production and exports.

With sanctions gone, Irans multi-billion-dollar state sponsored terrorism empire, including the IRGC, Hezbollah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the Houthis gets a huge cash infusion, especially rockets and missiles, as the end of economic sanctions on Iran is reported by 2030 to be worth one trillion dollars.

The most often mentioned alternative is for the US to eliminate much of the nuclear infrastructure in Iran by militarily taking out what is referenced as four key nuclear buildings. Or for Israel to do the dirty work.

The threat of force from Israel, not the US would appear to be the hidden hand. And that hand may not comeonlyin the form of aerial attacks, which would likely cause the greatest collateral damage. There is possibility of special operations, including cyber or attacks on peripheral systems power plants, water cooling or air purification systems for underground bunkers.

Opponents warn that Iran would subsequently launch a retaliatory terror war against the United States or Israel, and given the size of Iran, it is assumed a military conflict could very well expand and last decades, not unlike the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq.

According to many supporters of JCPOA II, Iran sees it as an issue of national pride and prestige, and a right to enrich. It is assumed not to be about actually using the capability. For them, giving Iran MORE nuclear capability is prelude to Tehrans agreement to eventually have LESS nuclear technology or even NO nuclear technology.

Ironically, this is what Director Grossi objects to: the UN is being asked to support JCPOA II that bribes Iran to maintainthe fictionof being supportive of abolition even as the deal expands Irans possession of nuclear weapons technology.

While nuclear abolition is indeed called for by the original 1969 NPT, that goal is explicitly paired with conventional disarmament. No US President would have supported an agreement whose goal left untouched the huge Soviet conventional forces advantage in Central Europe whilefirstgetting rid of US nuclear weapons, which represented the military umbrella over NATO, or the deterrent hammer the US kept in Europe to forestall a Soviet tank army invasion through the Fulda Gap.

Although the dominant narrative today is that any military option is off the table, in reality, diplomacy without the threat of force is what former Senator Malcolm Wallop called prayer or as Henry Kissinger explained is without effect.

Without the threat of nuclear weapons, the US could simply not have stopped Soviet aggression.

But didnt President Reagan propose that all nuclear weapons be eliminated? No, he did not. Reagan at Reykjavk sought to eliminate fast-flyers or land and sea based intercontinental ballistic missiles, not the flexible strategic bombers, nor the tens of thousands of theater and medium range nuclear forces that were difficult to identify.

Reagans key purpose was to eliminate the forces that would enable the Soviets to try a pre-emptive disarming strike, what the former President termed in 1979 as the window of vulnerability which the massive Soviet nuclear buildup created.

To close that window, Reagan adopted a strategy of reductions in nuclear weapons, especially first strike weapons, modernization of the US nuclear deterrent, and deploying missile defenses.

Reductions under INF and START I proceeded, but the Russian Duma opposed banning multiple warhead ICBMs (MIRVs) as called for under START II, a clue to why abolition will never be accepted by Moscow.

As General Brent Scowcroft once explained, heavy ICBMs are the coin of the realm for the Russians. In 1999, the Duma rejected START II and instead adopted a massive nuclear modernization plan put together by none other than Vladimir Putin, then Secretary of the Security Council. When he became President, he put the plan into place to where now over 90% of the proposed modernization is completed.

Key to understanding what Russia is up to (and by reference Iran) is to understand what purpose nuclear weapons serve. Nuclear weapons are weapons of coercion and blackmail, securing for Moscow (or Iran) the standing down of US and NATO (and Israeli) forces in the face of Russian (or Iranian) military aggression.

Today, Moscow is developing multiple nuclear weapons systems of very low-yield and high accuracy. Moscow definitely believes in nuclear war fighting despite contrary phrases of restraint sometimes spoken by Mr. Putin but overwhelmed by the some nearly forty explicit nuclear threats by Russian officials to the US since the March invasion of Ukraine.

Iran is no different than Russia. The mullahs and Putin are on the same page but with different timetables.

Iran wants to hide, not advertise, its nuclear ambitions by getting an IAEA clean bill of health or a nuclear good housekeeping certificate. With such a piece of paper, Tehran thinks it can eliminate the economic sanctions it now faces.

In short, pretend to be for abolition.

But with a new deal, there will be a sharp surge in Iranian revolutionary Guard Corp (IRGC) cash with which to expand and arm its Shia empire which now includes Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen, even as it seeks to further partner with Moscow and Beijing to achieve its hegemonic goals.

Any new agreement that does not take these factors into account will fail to stop Irans eventual sprint to a nuclear bomb. The US thus faces a dilemma: to accept a weaker and shorter agreement now, which goes against the original goals set, or hold out for something stronger and better.

Logic tells you that a new deal is going to be weaker than the original as some restrictions imposed have already or are soon expiring. Technologically Iran starts in a much better position today than in 2015 when the JCPOA sunset provisions were originally adopted. Iran has since developed a fleet of advanced centrifuges and modified cascades able to produce high enriched uranium, indispensable technologies giving confidence to some Iranian officials to recently advertiseinadvertently its nuclear weapons capabilities.

Any new deal that requires the IAEA to close or delay its investigations into previous Iranian nuclear related activities, would demand, as in the Wizard of Oz, that Toto pay no attention to the Iran man behind the nuclear curtain.

Peter Huessy is President of Geo-Strategic Analysis and Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute. Shoshana Bryen is Senior Director of The Jewish Policy Center and Editor of inFOCUS Quarterly.

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The Iran Man Behind the Nuclear Curtain Jewish Policy Center - Jewish Policy Center

Illustration: Philip Burke

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One day in 2006, Dorothy Roberts went in for a conference with her youngest sons teacher. The boy, said the teacher, had too many unexplained absences from his public kindergarten in Evanston, Illinois, most egregiously missing the classs Thanksgiving activities. All the other children made Indian headbands out of paper and feathers, the teacher chided, according to Roberts. Before I could respond, the teacher gave me a strict warning: If your son continues to miss school, Im going to call a truancy officer to visit your home.

Robertss son, her fourth child, had actually been accompanying his mother a law professor and public intellectual who has helped provide the theoretical and historical backbone of the reproductive-justice movement to a lecture she was giving in England. Five years earlier, Roberts had published the first of two books arguing that what she calls family policing, more commonly known as the child-welfare system, singles out Black mothers for investigation, sanction, and separation. At their next meeting, Roberts told me, the teachers suspicion, even contempt, had disappeared: She must have looked me up and seen that I was a Northwestern professor.

Roberts tells this story in a book she published in the spring, Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Familiesand How Abolition Can Build a Safer World; she recognizes that her class and education prevented further inquiry into her son missing school. I dont think I deserved any special treatment, she told me recently. I see it as the disparaging of Black mothers who dont have the credentials I have.

In the country that leads the world in revoking parental rights, the odds of a Black child being forcibly separated from their parents and placed in foster care before turning 18 is more than one in ten, mirroring our racially skewed record on incarceration. Only 16 percent of children enter foster care because they were physically or sexually abused, Roberts writes in Torn Apart. What the system calls neglect most often stems from poverty: living in dilapidated or overcrowded housing, missing school, wearing dirty clothes, going hungry, or being left at home alone, she writes. Robertss sincere provocation is to call for that system to be thrown out entirely.

The post-Roe era has made Robertss work grimly essential as both prophecy and cautionary tale. In these early days, directing outrage to the obvious horrors has been easy: the bleeding women with wanted pregnancies who arent dying fast enough to meet an infinitesimal legal exception; the inarguably victimized pregnant child with ever fewer places to turn for an abortion. These are catastrophes only the most monstrous excuse, and they make for uncomplicated pro-choice talking points. I call it poster-child feminism, says Loretta Ross, the organizer and foremother of reproductive justice.

By contrast, Robertss work, in Torn Apart and in her canonical 1997 book, Killing the Black Body, staked the theories of reproductive justice on the experiences of people whom mainstream institutions and figures, including liberals, long ago abandoned drug users accused of birthing crack babies; welfare recipients targeted for forcible sterilization; teenagers given long-term contraception without their clear consent. Robertss work demands us to extend imaginative and political sympathies to the reproductive autonomy of some of the most disdained members of society, who are overwhelmingly Black and poor women, in part because they are the ones who will bear the heaviest burden of criminalization. Indeed, they already have.

When I went to see Roberts at the University of Pennsylvania, where she now teaches law, sociology, and Africana studies, less than two weeks after Roes demise, she told me that early in her career she often had to explain to her colleagues what these drug users had to do with reproductive freedom or constitutional rights. Roberts responded that they were being punished not for using drugs but for their decision to stay pregnant, enacting fetal personhood via the war on drugs. That was with a floor set by Roe, which sometimes provided a defense in these prosecutions; without it, child endangerment can begin at conception. By dint of geography, poverty, race, or class, or all of the above, todays patient denied an abortion, or prosecuted for having one outside the law, is likely to be tomorrows target for a child-welfare investigation.

In person, Roberts is wiry and energetic, and disarmingly accessible. She describes herself as very mild-mannered. On at least three different occasions people who know her, either personally or by reputation, remarked to me how young Roberts is and were surprised to learn she is 66. Its not unusual for an academic to say they want to inspire movements, but to an extent more sweeping and durable than most, Roberts has accomplished that. Ross credits Roberts with adding theory to our practice and assigns excerpts of Killing the Black Body, which she refers to simply as KBB, to her students.

A quarter-century after its publication, organizations like the Mississippi Reproductive Freedom Fund and Medical Students for Choice give it to new hires at headquarters or outright require them to read it. A work of stunning historical and analytical breadth, it traces the state-sanctioned, often violent regulation of Black womens reproduction, including but far beyond the ability to refuse motherhood. In contrast to the account of American womens increasing control over their reproductive decisions, centered on the right to an abortion, Roberts wrote back then, this book describes a long experience of dehumanizing attempts to control Black womens reproductive lives.

The books framing reconciles policies that curb Black and low-income parenthood with ones that force pregnancy and childbirth. The objective of reproductive control has never been primarily to reduce the numbers of Black children born into the world, Roberts writes. (She quotes Thomas Jefferson writing to his plantation manager in 1820, I consider a woman who brings a child every two years as more profitable than the best man on the farm.) Instead, such control perpetuates the view that racial inequality is caused by Black people themselves and not by an unjust social order, she argues.

Failing to advocate for the most disfavored, Roberts says now, weakened the mainstream reproductive-rights movement. It allowed the right to expand the protection of the fetus and criminalize pregnancy more broadly. The surveillance and policing of Black mothers whether for drug use, purported neglect, or just having too many children has already provided a ready blueprint for enforcing the current abortion bans, down to the hospitals calling the cops. We can see how these policies, fueled by vilified stereotypes about Black mothers, are tested on Black mothers first, she tells me. And then they expand.

Roberts at the University of Pennsylvania in July. Photo: Jasmine Clarke

Growing up in Chicagos Hyde Park in the 1960s, Roberts had a sense of her father interviewing interracial couples, who became her parents friends and whose children became her friends. One parent was her piano teacher; another was the plumber. Her own father was an anthropologist, the inspiration for her desire to be a professor, and a white man who spent much of his life writing a never-published book on interracial marriage. Her mother had been a research assistant on the project, mainly interviewing the women in hundreds of couples.

Shed thought her fathers interest in the subject was sparked by meeting her Jamaican-born mother, at the time one of his students at Roosevelt University in Chicago. Ten years ago, as Roberts packed up her home in Evanston to move to Philadelphia, she came across boxes of files in her basement that had belonged to her late father, which told a slightly different story. Her fathers intellectual passion had actually begun as far back as his time as a 22-year-old masters student at the University of Chicago, in 1937.

Dorothy was the firstborn, a studious child. He liked to pull me aside and talk to me about his work, she recalls. He would try to convince me that interracial marriage was the answer to Americas race problem. I can remember him as a little girl telling me this. And he also liked to think of me and my sisters as I hate to say this, because it sounds terrible but as proof. She was idealistic even as an elementary-school student, going to activist meetings and passing out pamphlets for Eugene McCarthys campaign. I can remember being proud of walking down the street with my parents, she says. She believed then that her very existence, flanked by white father and Black mother, sent a message: Look, we could all get along, you know? But that was when I was little.

Her father clearly agreed. In the boxes Roberts found a file on herself, indexed with a dedicated number and containing some of her student papers. I can recall my mother saying sarcastically, Dont you know, were part of his research, she said. Shes been thinking a lot about her mother lately, how rare it was that a Black woman at mid-century would pursue a doctorate, but also how her mothers ambitions transferred to her children after leaving the program to care for them, and to her husband, whom she pushed to write the book. Roberts recently remembered that along with the nicknames her mother had for her Firstie, Gift from God, Ray of Sunshine she would also say, Youre my Ph.D.

Her father died in 2002 never having finished the manuscript. (Simon & Schuster demanded back its advance, in the low thousands.) Roberts, now on sabbatical, has decided to write her own book, a memoir that draws on his research but also critiques his premise. By the time she got to college, at Yale, Roberts didnt even want people to know her fathers race. I had this idea that if people knew my father was white, somehow that would diminish my identity as a Black woman, she tells me. Many years later, writing her 2011 book Fatal Invention, which took on genetic myths of race, finally helped her fully reconcile it. I realized that your ancestry doesnt determine your identity, she says. Still, she hasnt wavered in her skepticism of her fathers Utopian vision: Ive been much more convinced that there has to be radical change in America before there can be any possibility of interracial intimacy that could be seen as contesting white supremacy.

With her parents at Harvard Law School graduation in 1980.

At Harvard Law School, while taking antitrust with Stephen Breyer, Roberts started noticing a tall, well-built man around campus. He was a doctoral candidate in education 13 years her senior. Coltrane Chimurenga, the name he had chosen for himself, had taught at the College of Struggle in California and could expound on politics for hours. At the time, there were only two Black professors at Harvard Law, including Derrick Bell, a progenitor of critical race theory. Chimurenga had brought to Cambridge his prodigious library of Frantz Fanon and W.E.B. DuBois and Maos Little Red Book, books Roberts read as they grew closer. Chim, as she called him, would come to refer to Roberts as Shona, and after the two married, they named their first son after the anti-colonial author Amlcar Cabral.

After graduation, Roberts clerked for civil-rights icon Constance Baker Motley, the first Black woman to serve as a federal judge. Roberts had hoped for stirring civil-rights cases, but the southern district of New Yorks docket was heavy with business and finance. One case involving minors who wanted to marry against their guardians wishes, including a pregnant teen, came close to her imaginings. Roberts drafted an opinion proclaiming a right to marry under the 14th Amendment. Judge Motley pragmatically told her such an argument would be instantly overruled by the appeals court, and decided the opposite way. She felt a lot of pressure to be seen as a legitimate judge who understood and followed the law, Roberts says now. Because she was viewed as radical by the right wing. Motley was right about the appeals court, which affirmed her decision.

Motleys compromises didnt appeal to Roberts Ive always wanted to be unconstrained in my vision and my advocacy but her next gig was as a litigation associate at the white-shoe law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison. (Chimurenga, she says, knew it paid the bills.) In 1982, pregnant with Amilcar, she was told at the firm that no one had ever heard of an associate being pregnant, but managed to cobble together some decent maternity leave anyway. Over those six years, she gave birth to three children at home: in a rented brownstone on South Oxford Street in Fort Greene; in an apartment in Jackson Heights; in a house she bought in Hempstead, on Long Island, respectively. Today, she isnt sure if she already knew what would become a core part of her research, that hospitals themselves could be a deadly threat to pregnant Black women, or if it was just that Chimurenga had introduced her to the home-birth midwives, who were Puerto Rican, very political, revolutionary.

One evening in October 1984, Roberts was at home with her 2-year-old and her 3-month-old when the phone rang. The FBI and the NYPDs joint counterterrorism task force, she was told, was waiting at her door. Placing the toddler in the crib and hoisting the baby on her hip, she opened the door to what felt like dozens of armed officers, who began to interrogate her and ransack the apartment. Chimurenga, accused of being a terrorist ringleader of what came to be called the New York 8, was arrested later that night. They later learned that for nine months, a surveillance operation engaging up to 100 agents a day had been tracking him and his fellow activists. All this came as a shock to Roberts, she says now: I knew he was involved in political activism. I knew he opposed the NYPD. He had stood up to them. I knew that they didnt like him.

For months, Chimurenga remained in Metropolitan Correctional Center, one of the first people to be so detained under a provision of a new terrorism law. The prosecutor, a 40-year-old hotshot named Rudolph Giuliani, charged the eight, largely under racketeering statutes, of conspiring to use murder, kidnapping, and arson to rob an armored truck and free two prisoners who had famously been convicted of robbing a Brinks truck. He faced a possible 20-year sentence.

Robertss parents showed up to help, and Paul, Weiss stuck by her, even offering a pro bono criminal attorney. She needed one: Like several other spouses of the charged, she refused a subpoena to testify before the grand jury. Unlike the others, though, she managed to escape detention. Her fancy lawyer helped, as did the surveillance records showing she essentially did nothing but work at the firm, take care of their kids, and go to church. (At 19, Roberts had become a deeply religious Christian, and she still reads the Bible and prays daily.) The contrasts between the charges against Chimurenga, his Harvard pedigree, and his corporate-lawyer wife werent lost on the press. He was photographed and interviewed at MCC by this magazine and appeared on the front page of The Village Voice.

Her attorney told Roberts to keep a low profile, but she decided to speak at a rally and allow her and her kids faces to appear on fliers in support of the New York 8. She believed they were being targeted for their political activism for Black liberation. We didnt always see eye to eye, we didnt work within the same political movements, she says of her former husband, but we supported each others work.

Giuliani was unable to make the most serious charges stick, and in 1985 the New York 8 were convicted only of illegal weapons possession or false-identification charges and sentenced to community service and probation. Chimurenga remained active in left-wing politics; according to his obituary in the Amsterdam News, he approached a police officer who came to his organizations headquarters and was pointing his AR-15 at him, ordered him to put that fing gun down, grabbed the barrel and forced the weapon down. (Roberts and Chimurenga divorced a few years before he died of cancer, in 2019, and she has since remarried.)

Roberts seldom talks about all this; some of it, she tells me, she had never discussed with anyone. A few years ago, at a conference at Harvard, she was asked how she became a prison abolitionist. It occurred to me at that point that part of it was having a husband in jail and having police invade my home, she says. The months they spent apart, the prospect of the days turning into decades, of raising small children alone, were their own form of family separation. Oddly, she says, I havent really thought about that personal experience as much as Ive thought about other peoples personal experiences.

In 1987, Roberts read about the Angela Carder case. A working-class white woman in Maryland, Carder had struggled with cancer for most of her life. At 27 years old and 26 weeks pregnant, she lay intubated and sedated at George Washington University Medical Center, which went to court on behalf of Carders fetus. They wanted emergency permission to perform a Cesarean that Carders parents said their daughter wouldnt have wanted; later, Carder, drifting in and out of consciousness, gave conflicting answers about her desires. Judge Emmet Sullivan ordered the surgery: The court is of the view that the fetus should be given the opportunity to live. The baby lived less than two hours; Carder died after two days.

To Roberts, still at the firm, it was a turning point. When I read that, I thought, My goodness, if youre pregnant, they can kill you, Roberts tells me. I swear, I said, I have to work on this. Carder, Roberts understood, had lost the rights to her own body simply by being pregnant. I also had the sense, Roberts adds, that if they would do that to her, what would they do to a Black woman?

She soon found a job teaching at Rutgers Law in Newark, and the family moved to Montclair, New Jersey. By then, panic over so-called crack babies being born to addicted mothers was suffusing newspaper headlines and lurid television shows, along with a thirst for prosecuting women who used drugs during pregnancy. I immediately thought, I bet these are Black women who are being punished, Roberts says. She called the ACLU, whose thenstaff attorney, Lynn Paltrow, represented the Carder family against GW. The case, Paltrow said at the time, sent a message to women that the state can control and monitor every aspect of their lives, like prenatal police patrols. (Paltrow went on to found the National Advocates for Pregnant Women, which has been at the forefront of defending criminalized pregnant people.) The ACLU was also tracking all the cases of pregnant women being prosecuted for drug use, though not their races. Roberts called all the defense lawyers and learned that almost 80 percent of the defendants were Black.

The frame, Roberts thought, had to be pushed even further. I wanted to write about how racism turned this public-health issue into a crime, she recalls, and also the significance of that for how we think about reproductive freedom, that its not just a question of gender and sexism and misogyny. Some senior faculty members warned her that it wasnt the kind of topic that would establish her in legal academia, and that she was better off waiting until she had tenure, but she ignored them. In 1991, the Harvard Law Review published Punishing Drug Addicts Who Have Babies: Women of Color, Equality, and the Right of Privacy. Her conversations with Paltrow had helped Roberts distill her own thinking that the crime these women were being targeted for was not using drugs, but being, and staying, pregnant. I sometimes felt like we were the only two people in America who understood that punishing people for being pregnant was just as important as punishing people for having abortions, that they were connected, Roberts says. Any conduct or omission that could be seen as risky to a fetus, or a potential fetus, can be criminalized.

At Paul, Weiss, shed gotten used to writing on long yellow legal pads, and she remembers pulling over her car on the side of the road around that time to begin writing down the connections that rushed into her brain. The prosecutions, yes, but also welfare reform; sterilization abuse; Norplant, a new-birth control method then being touted as a solution to poverty without much consideration of side effects or informed consent. Slavery. That foment became Killing the Black Body, which instantly electrified not only organizers in the field but also a generation of legal thinkers. Dorothy is like a Harriet Tubman of law, says her friend and fellow law professor Michele Goodwin. She opened the gates for so many others, including myself.

Roberts managed to prove her senior colleagues wrong by getting those invitations to visit, and then teach, at prestigious law schools after all. (She had gotten in the habit of taking her kids along everywhere, including conferences one in the carrier, one in the stroller, and so on.) Even with the gates creaking open, the reception could be begrudging. At Stanford, where she was a visiting professor early in her career, in 1998, a (white, male) student had read a newspaper throughout her family-law class. Only a dozen years earlier, Stanford Law students had begun skipping a required constitutional-law class taught by another visitor, Derrick Bell, and ended up creating a public lecture series taught by other faculty members to replace it. At that point, Stanford had only ever had two Black tenured members, and the administration later apologized for going along with the lecture series. Roberts has a policy against cold-calling the Paper Chasestyle surprise Socratic method still popular with many law professors instead pre-assigning students to answer questions on specific days. The newspaper-reading student was unprepared anyway, and Roberts said something lightly mocking in response. The class laughed. Afterwards, the student indignantly told her she had humiliated him and that he would tell his father to no longer donate to Stanford. At Northwestern, where she taught for 14 years and held a named chair, a (white, male) student had once raised his hand during her criminal-law lecture and declared that what she said had been refuted by Wikipedia. In fact, Roberts says, he had misunderstood Wikipedia.

While teaching at Northwestern, Roberts remembers, she spoke at a Planned Parenthood event in Washington, D.C., and criticized the notion that birth control was a way out of poverty. Hands went up, saying that I was unfairly judging Margaret Sanger. And I remember an elderly white woman coming up to me and trying to justify the thinking of even eugenic policies. She is still seeing versions of that neo-Malthusianism around the Dobbs decision. Its true that Dobbs is going to intensify poverty, she said. Its going to intensify maternal mortality and infant mortality. But thats different from saying abortion is the solution to childhood poverty, or birth control is the answer to teenagers dropping out of high school because the problem is structural racism. The problem is structural income inequality. The problem is racial capitalism.

Among the arguments of reproductive-justice activists is the inadequacy of the doctrine of privacy, and the related, market-oriented language of choice, however poll-tested to appeal to white moderates. It lives on, including in the speech by Joe Biden the day Roe was shredded. Whether or not a better argument could have swayed the dogged ideologues of judicial conservatism, privacy alone could not save Roe.

Its so obvious that focusing on the ability to make private choices was a losing strategy. It was just thrown out, dismissed by the stroke of a pen, you know? Roberts had told me in the courtyard. That doesnt mean the idea of freedom that underlies it and actually should have been recognized as the essence of the 14th Amendment isnt important. We should support a human right to autonomy over our bodies. But we have to have a society where thats possible.

For all of her critiques of historically white reproductive-rights organizations, Roberts had no time for the Dobbs concurrence by Clarence Thomas, which had explicitly linked abortion rights with racism. Its a false retelling of history because abortion was not an instrument of eugenicists; sterilization was, Roberts explains. And abortion is a means of reproductive freedom. Whereas coerced sterilization is a means of population control. But the neglect of allies, she argues, had given Thomas a soft underbelly to attack. If reproductive justice were at the forefront from the very beginning, there is no way today people would accept Clarence Thomass argument, she says. It would be blatantly ridiculous.

There had been time to add a question to the final exam of her reproductive-justice class about Justice Amy Coney Barretts comments at the Dobbs oral argument that the opportunity to drop a newborn at a so-called Safe Havens might offset the harms of banning abortion. Roberts was furious at Barretts, and later Alitos, hand-waving over the violation of forced pregnancy and birth, but she also saw the connections to Torn Apart. If the presumed anonymity of safe havens was breached, as it has been, you could be subject to a child-protection investigation. Lets say you have other children, and you drop this child off, and thats considered child neglect, she said. Even if there is some protection against prosecution for dropping the baby off. That doesnt mean that it couldnt trigger a child-welfare investigation, unless thats explicitly written into the law.

After Shattered Bonds came out, Roberts agreed to try to be part of the solution, this time on the governments side. She accepted a spot on a task force as part of a settlement against Washington States child-welfare department. For nine years, there were action steps and benchmarks and dozens of meetings with administrators and attorneys at a hotel across from the SeaTac airport, Roberts writes in Torn Apart. There were anti-racist trainings for caseworkers and lawyers and judges and administrators. But we were unable to fix the long list of deficiencies that harmed children placed in the states custody. For the 20th anniversary of Shattered Bonds, she initially considered writing a new foreword, then decided she needed to start over with a bolder call: We must abandon the fools errand of tinkering with a system designed to tear families apart.

The racial-justice protests that crescendoed in 2020, with their calls to defund the police, enthralled Roberts, but they also worried her, because one of the proposed alternatives to policing was to transfer resources to the same agencies she wanted to dismantle. What resonated more showed up late that year, as a small group of New York City activists began blanketing the streets with posters and billboards. One read, Some Cops Are Called Caseworkers.

Roberts points out that family-services caseworkers are able to flout due process in a way police arent supposed to for example, searching a home without a warrant and sometimes the cops come along for their turn in the name of child protection. To people accustomed to thinking of child-welfare investigations as being about protecting kids from violent homes, Roberts has this rejoinder: The majority of substantiated complaints are not of abuse but of neglect. Rather than operating as a defense against a neglect charge, she writes in Torn Apart, poverty works as an enhancement of parental culpability.

Roberts argues that the system is swamped with neglect complaints that actually stretch caseworkers too thin to find children in actual danger. Meanwhile, women in domestic-violence situations fear asking for help lest they be blamed for putting their kids in a violent situation and separated from them. She tells the story of New Yorker Angeline Montauban, who worked up the courage to call the Safe Horizons hotline about her partners violence toward her; the revelation that they had a 2-year-old soon led to an ACS caseworker knocking at their door, despite no evidence he had harmed his son. Because Montauban filed for an order of protection against her partner but wanted her son to keep seeing his father, Roberts writes, her toddler was placed in a series of foster homes for five years. Foster and group homes, meanwhile, are notoriously sites of abuse themselves.

The group behind those billboards had another slogan that stayed with Roberts: They Separate Children at the Border of Harlem Too. I did 1,000 for each borough, Joyce McMillan, founder of the nascent advocacy group JMAC for Families, tells me. (Almost. I didnt do Staten Island because no one has time to go to Staten Island.) McMillan can recite by heart the names of New York politicians who showed up to rally against the Trump administrations separation of families at the border. For years, she had been trying to get their ears on behalf of parents impacted by New Yorks Administration for Childrens Services, or ACS. There was no outrage for the children that were removed from their own community domestically, she says. You cant even get their legislative directors.

A few years ago, McMillan asked Roberts if she would come speak about her work to parents who were fighting the system. My observation is that shes always willing to show up, McMillan says.

This past July, Roberts showed up again for McMillan, this time on Zoom. It was the third permutation of McMillans HEAL program, a 12-week workshop to help these mothers the session I attended was all mothers process what they had experienced and then train them for activism and talking to the media. JMAC for Families has been lobbying for New York State to pass a package of legislation that includes ending anonymous reporting of child-welfare complaints (though keeping them confidential) and Miranda rights for parents being visited by caseworkers.

The instructor began with an ice breaker. If youre writing a book about your life, what would you call it? And what would you want readers to take away from it? The titles seemed to come easily to the women. Im A Survivor, chiefly about putting your faith in God. She Moved On, with the lesson being life is difficult but you dont dwell, and I Wont Give Up and Reborn and Battling a Broken System. Knockout, its author said, would be about my life, but I would also write about knowing your rights. ACS Took My Childhood and Now Theyre Taking My Children needed no explanation. McMillans was Catapulted, because ACS wanted her to be a victim and instead she became a monster for change.

After the instructor led a guided meditation, Roberts began speaking. People sometimes listen to lawyers in ways they dont listen to other people, she explained, and it helps to have a book. The history of forced separation of Black families during slavery was a crucial parallel, Roberts told the HEAL participants, but so was what came after the dismantling of reconstruction a so-called apprenticeship system. White people would petition to say that Black children were being neglected, she said, and family-court judges would declare these children neglected and order them to be apprenticed out to white people, who sometimes are the very same people who had enslaved them prior. Tens of thousands of Black children were put back to work under the authority of former white enslavers in the South.

In the question-and-answer session, the participants talked about their kids in foster care being put on medications without their consent, about their experiences with domestic violence and the shelter system. They talked about how the government could give families direct support without increasing surveillance, if it was even possible, and the self-perpetuating system of the algorithm designed to identify risks. McMillan pointed out that children in Brooklyn get ticketed for riding bikes on the sidewalk, which kids in the suburbs do all the time, and theyre not treated as criminals. She said, They try to make us think that we are stupid when we point out how ridiculous the system is.

One of the women offered the send-off: Thank you for sharing space with us, queen. Roberts replied, Thank you. All of you are queens.

Dismantling the child-welfare system sounds improbable and politically toxic. But Roberts points out in Torn Apart that its already been done. When enforcement in New York City was vastly curtailed by early COVID shutdowns in 2020, it was briefly replaced by a combination of mutual aid and government support, including a series of direct payments. Its hard to know exactly what happened behind closed doors, but heres one empirical measure. Law professor Anna Arons crunched the numbers and found that ACS investigations related to child fatalitieswhich were required despite the lockdowndropped by 25 percent between February 2019 and June 2019 and the same period in 2020.

The night she visited the summit, Roberts had arrived a little late from another meeting, and though shes writing a memoir, the icebreaker flustered her. It would have something about gratitude and hope in it, she managed. But I cant come up that quickly with a good title. And what would I want readers to take away from it? I would want readers to take away something about being hopeful despite how distressing the world seems to be, and take away something joyful from it.

Id been surprised, when we spoke in Philly, to hear her talk so much about hope. I havent seen such hope and excitement around organizing since I was a little girl in Hyde Park in the 1960s, she said. Im seeing it in uprisings, around the country after George Floyd was murdered, Im seeing it in this family movement to abolish family policing. But the backlash has been so fierce, I said: to racial-justice movements, to reproductive freedom in all forms, and it seemed that the people who had once marched felt demoralized and disconnected. Theres always a backlash, Roberts replied. Theres a backlash because you did something powerful that requires a backlash.

When we talked after the visit to HEAL, I noticed Roberts bristled a little when I referred to her as having done research about the lives of these women, going back to meeting with Black mothers in a Chicago basement in 2000 for Shattered Bonds. The term research felt to her too clinical, too detached. Those meetings are part of why I became an abolitionist, she corrected. They didnt just affect me in terms of collecting empirical data. They affected my political aims and desires.

This wasnt theoretical for McMillan, either. In 1999, she had been working in the banking industry and had just had a baby when an anonymous tip and a positive drug test wrested away her two young children for two years. McMillan says her drug use was recreational at the time, but that the ordeal eventually pushed her into addiction and homelessness. She lost her house, her car, her job. They literally destroyed my life, she says. It took a good public defender and a year of being substance-free to get her children back, and much longer to process the damage done by the separation. McMillan had trouble finding a therapist who didnt feel like another cop. But in therapy, her younger daughter talked about the vivid memory she had that McMillan had been the one to steal her from her real mother her foster mother.

McMillan remembers how she felt when she first encountered Robertss work. It was reading Killing the Black Body, and then Shattered Bonds, around 2015. It was a truth I didnt have language for, she says. It was a truth that I had lived in the shelter. I saw someone spoke about it. And someone put a name to it. And someone said, I see it too.

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Dorothy Roberts Tried to Warn Us - New York Magazine

The scene on this watercooler, a couple in fancy dress with a hog below, is often interpreted as a slave wedding, and is a rare figural depiction of Black life and regional traditions in Edgefield stoneware, write Spinozzi and Hughes. Detail, watercooler by an unrecorded potter, probably Thomas M. Chandler Jr (1810-1854), Phoenix Stone Ware Factory, Old Edgefield District, S.C., circa 1840. Alkaline-glazed stoneware with iron and kaolin slip, height 31 inches. Collection of the High Museum of Art (1996.132). Photo by Michael McKelvey / Courtesy of the High Museum of Art.

By Laura Beach

NEW YORK CITY On view from September 9 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (MMA) and traveling thereafter, Hear Me Now: The Black Potters of Old Edgefield, South Carolina has long been anticipated by Americana enthusiasts. Though in some respects narrowly focused and physically not large it numbers 65 objects, including five fragments and seven works by contemporary artists the show and its accompanying catalog are monumental, representing a fundamental shift in approach to a complicated group of African American-made objects and a milestone acknowledgment of the soft bigotry of past oversight by the nations foremost art museum.

What defines this revisionist history is the project teams insistence that a chorus of voices other than its own be heard. In collaboration with Ethan W. Lasser, chairman of the Art of the Americas department at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA), and Jason R. Young, associate professor of history at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MMA associate curator Adrienne Spinozzi has crafted a presentation that is nuanced and provocative, with a call-and-response cadence reminiscent of an African American spiritual.

Over the past 150 years, Edgefield stoneware has gone from a sturdy standard of the Southern kitchen and pantry to museum trophy and rarified collectors item. Spurred by institutional bidding, the market reached spectacular new heights in 2021 when Crocker Farm auctioned a large, inscribed jar by Edgefields poet laureate, the enslaved potter David Drake, for $1.56 million, a world record for American pottery at auction. As contemporary Black artists and intellectuals engaged with the wares, it became clear that the Edgefield story needed retelling.

Roughly 160 miles east of Atlanta and encompassing portions of five counties, the Old Edgefield District, as it was designated between 1785 to 1865, supported at least 12 pottery sites between 1815 and the 1890s. Recent archaeological excavations confirm the scale of the operations, which shipped wares up to 150 miles in all directions and collectively exemplified industrial slavery, an understudied dimension of the antebellum Southern economy.

Detail of board tracking known face vessels, begun in 2018 by Katherine C. Hughes and Adrienne Spinozzi. Spinozzis team confirmed nearly 180 extant Edgefield face vessels made by and for enslaved potters. The form appeared in Edgefield in the 1850s, coinciding with an influx of captives from Africa. Image courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art, Eileen Travell photo.

Having discovered kaolin in the region, Dr Abner Landrum (1785-1859) is recognized as the first in the United States to make alkaline-glazed stoneware, doing so at his Pottersville Stoneware Manufactory. Other manufacturers, from the Harvey & Reuben Drake Factory (1828-32) to the Thomas M. Chandler Pottery (1850-52) and the Miles Mill Pottery (1867-85), followed.

Enslaved African Americans, who by 1830 formed a majority of the regions population, operated but did not own the businesses. Skilled craftspeople, they produced quantities of utilitarian stoneware bowls, churns, pitchers, cups, crocks and jugs plus monumental food-storage jars and, uniquely, watercoolers with capacities of up to 40 gallons. Scholars, among them recently the collectors Corbett E. Toussaint and April L. Hynes, have worked to identify individual potters and their descendants by name, a task made difficult by slaverys systemic repression of Black identity and accomplishment. The names stamped and incised on most Edgefield stoneware belong to owners of the potteries, not makers.

Our hope is that as technology progresses, we will be able to build on the genealogical and archeological work underway, as well as other methodologies for doing this research, says Spinozzi, whose team gleaned subtle clues to authorship in the form of makers marks, symbols, handprints and decoration.

The Civil War marked the beginning of the end of the industry. Some newly freed craftspeople went to work for their former enslavers, others among them John Chandler, who migrated to Guadalupe County, Texas, where he was part of the Durham-Chandler-Wilson Pottery moved west to establish businesses of their own. Though collectors have been gathering specimens, particularly face vessels, for more than a century, much Edgefield pottery has likely not survived, the organizers say.

The poem on this jar Daves most significant literary contribution illuminates the potters own experience but also transcends it, writes Adrienne Spinozzi. Storage jar by Dave (later recorded as David Drake, b circa 1801-d 1870s), Stony Bluff Manufactory (circa 1848-67), Old Edgefield District, S.C., 1857, alkaline-glazed stoneware, height 19 inches. Collection of Greenville County Museum of Art.

Installed in Gallery 955 of the Mets Robert Lehman Wing, Here Me Now touches briefly on Native American ceramic traditions in pre-contact western South Carolina before focusing on several distinct groups of Edgefield pottery: utilitarian wares, some with figural decoration; face vessels, most by unidentified craftspeople; and signed, dated and inscribed vessels by David Drake. Sprinkled throughout the gallery and offering evidence of Edgefields continuing influence are a handful of ceramics, drawings and mixed-media pieces, some sumptuous in scale, by contemporary Black artists. Innovatively, exhibition labels and the museums audio guide feature the voices of eight experts of varied perspective.

Given their visceral appeal, it is perhaps not surprising that jugs and jars with hand-modeled facial features in the past called grotesques, voodoo jugs and, derogatively, monkey jugs were among the first examples of Edgefield pottery sought by curio collectors, notably snowbird visitors to nearby Aiken, S.C., and institutions, beginning with the Charleston Museum in 1902.

Spinozzis team confirmed roughly 180 extant Edgefield face vessels, made by and for enslaved potters, and apparently not originally for sale. According to the researchers, the form appeared in Edgefield in the 1850s, coinciding with an influx of captives who brought with them African cultural and spiritual traditions. Surveying the literature, co-organizer Young speculates that the vessels may have been intended as whimsies, as receptacles for water or alcoholic spirits, or perhaps even for use in burial or funerary rituals.

Displayed together on one wall, the face vessels make a striking presentation. Spinozzi notes, We thought it was important to show them together so visitors would have insight into some of the stylistic decisions made by the potters. Weve identified roughly ten different groupings with common characteristics, reflecting either individual makers or groups of makers, and the exhibition presents some of these groups. More face vessels are coming to light, but we still feel we are in the beginning stages of our research.

The exhibition opens with a reference to the Native American clay tradition that existed in the Carolinas prior to settlement by European and African Americans. Attributed to the Woodland culture, circa 1500, this bowl by an unrecorded potter is the earliest work in the exhibition. Earthenware, height 15 inches. South Carolina State Museum, Columbia, S.C. (SC80.15.368). Image courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art, Eileen Travell photo.

Greeting visitors at the exhibitions entrance are 12 vessels by the enslaved potter who sometimes signed his pieces Dave, and who upon emancipation took the surname of one of his former enslavers, Drake. Spinozzi notes, Each vessel is in its own case and is meant to be viewed in the round. Its a powerful installation. Among Daves 50 largest pots are works extraordinary in their scale, wit and radical assertion of free expression. Signed and inscribed with short verses, dates or both, they resonate in our compulsively communicative age.

Dave was born around 1801 and died in the 1870s. Beginning in the 1820s, he likely made thousands of vessels, most of which were relatively nondescript commercial pieces. His first signed pieces of the early 1830s coincided with South Carolinas furious attempt to preempt the anticipated end of the legal Atlantic slave trade by increasing its importation of slaves and forbidding literacy among African Americans.

How Dave learned to read and write remains a mystery. Harvard professor and catalog contributor Vincent Brown speculates that it may relate to enslaver Harvey Drakes business partner, Abner Landrum, and his newspaper, the Edgefield Hive. Daves talent appears to have insulated him against reproach, though scholars question whether he lost his leg in an accident, as went the official account, or whether he was maimed as punishment, a not unusual occurrence among the enslaved.

Here Me Now offers a compendium of Daves known verses. Inscribed in flowing hand by Dave, then working for the Drake & Rhodes Factory (1832-36), the first script appears on a two-handled jar dated June 12, 1834. It reads simply Concatination, a word meaning a linked series of things or events. Here the words use is obscure, other than to suggest the potters access to penmanship guides prior to South Carolinas passing of more punitive antiliteracy codes in December 1834. Daves last known inscribed and dated jar of May 3, 1862, calls on sinners to repent, a message that may have abolitionist overtones.

Artist Adebunmi Gbadebo (b 1992) forges a physical connection with the plantation home of her ancestors in K.S., a sculpture of 2021. True Blue Plantation cemetery soil and human locs from Aaron Wilson Watson, Kelsey Jackson and Cheryl Person; length 22 inches. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; courtesy of the artist and Claire Oliver Gallery, New York; Aaron Wilson Watson photo.

The most compelling of Daves works is a 19-inch-tall jar, ovoid in shape, with tiny, ear-like handles and warm, brown color. Signed and dated August 16, 1857, its rhymed inscription asks deferentially, I wonder where is all my relation/ Friendship to all and every nation, a reference, perhaps, to the sale of Daves family to a planter 500 miles distant. These 13 words are among the most powerful and emotive in the history of American letters, write essayists Michael J. Bramwell, the MFAs newly named Linde curator of folk and self-taught art, and exhibition co-curator Lasser, who rank Dave with Frederick Douglass and other great voices of the abolition movement.

Cited throughout the catalog text, Chipstone Foundation deserves special mention for raising awareness of Edgefield pottery in general and Dave in particular. In partnership with the Wunsch Americana Foundation, the Milwaukee-based organization underwrote a think tank at the Met in 2016 with an eye toward stimulating dialogue about new approaches to museum display and interpretation in the American arts and material culture. The Chipstone journal Ceramics in America has led the way with studies considering African American influences in ceramics. Moreover, it was Lasser, then Chipstones curator, who introduced Dave to the contemporary art field with the 2010 Milwaukee Art Museum exhibition To Speculate Darkly: Theaster Gates and Dave the Potter. Lasser later advocated for inclusion of a contemporary component in Here Me Now.

Chipstone Foundations executive director and chief curator Jon Prown asks, Thinking critically, one key question regarding Hear Me Now is how meaningfully it shifts the field forward and builds upon previous studies of the topic by opening new interpretive pathways. Does the initiative expand the range of historical narratives we pursue as curators and historians? Does this research substantively change how we think about our historical and material past? When it comes to museum-based projects such as this one, our curatorial efforts in the American decorative arts world need to walk-the-walk. That is the great hope we all have for the collaborative Met/MFA Boston project.

Hear Me Now draws arresting parallels between Edgefield pottery and contemporary work by artists such as Gates (b 1973), who has called David Drake one of the most important craft figures in American history, and Simone Leigh (b 1967), winner of a Golden Lion award at the 2022 Venice Biennale.

Archaeological evidence suggests this face jug may have been made at Miles Mill Pottery (1867-85), opened by Lewis J. Miles after emancipation and following the closing of his nearby Stony Bluff Manufactory. Face jug by unrecorded Old Edgefield District potter, 1867-85, alkaline-glazed stoneware with kaolin, height 8 inches. Hudgins Family Collection, New York. Image courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art, Eileen Travell photo.

Opposite the face vessels in the present display is Large Jug by Leigh. The 62-inch-tall stoneware sculpture calls to mind in form and proportion, if not scale, the nearby harvest face vessel of circa 1850-80, acquired by the Met in 2017 and so-called because of its horizontal handle. There the likeness ends. Glazed white, Large Jug is embellished in high relief with elements resembling cowrie shells or perhaps human anatomy. Leigh included a closely related piece in her Biennale presentation, citing artistic traditions of Africa and the African diaspora as influences and noting her sustained interest in issues surrounding Black femininity.

Spinozzi says, We were thrilled when Simone joined our project during its planning stage. We shared with her photographs of our face-vessel board, the harvest face vessel and James A. Palmers stereograph from his 1882 series Aiken and Vicinity, which features an almost identical face vessel. Its fascinating to see how Simone engaged with the material.

Another crucial piece is the moving K.S., a 2021 work by Adebunmi Gbadebo (b 1992), whose elegantly reductive representation of a human skull joins clay collected at the former True Blue Plantation in Fort Motte, S.C., with locs of Black hair. As Lasser explains, There, at the burial ground for the enslaved, she collects clay for her sculptures, turning the earth that ran through the hands of her ancestors into vessels that commemorate the history of her family.

Spinozzi acknowledges the many difficulties inherent in presenting Edgefield pottery, asking, What does it mean to elevate objects made by forced labor and celebrate them as creative masterworks? How can artistic agency be understood in this context? How can we give space and a voice to these objects and the people who made them? And who is telling these stories?

Detail of a watercooler by an unrecorded potter, probably Thomas M. Chandler Jr (1810-1854), Phoenix Stone Ware Factory, Old Edgefield District, S.C., circa 1840. Alkaline-glazed stoneware with iron and kaolin slip, height 31 inches. Collection of the High Museum of Art (1996.132). Photo by Michael McKelvey / Courtesy of the High Museum of Art.

As incomplete as the Edgefield narrative remains, Hear Me Now is a brave, powerful step toward setting a flawed record straight.

Edited by Adrienne Spinozzi, Hear Me Now: The Black Potter of Old Edgefield, South Carolina was published by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and is distributed by Yale University Press. In addition to Spinozzi, Lasser, Young, Bramwell, Brown and Leigh, its contributors include the Mets former Peggy N. Gerry research scholar Katherine C. Hughes, now a doctoral candidate in public history at Middle Tennessee State University and a curator at the McKissick Museum in South Carolina.

Following its close in New York on February 5, 2023, Here Me Now will travel to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (March 6-July 9, 2023), the University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor (August 26, 2023-January 7, 2024) and the High Museum of Art, Atlanta (February 16-May 12, 2024).

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is at 1000 Fifth Avenue. For information, http://www.metmuseum.org or 212-535-7710.

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Hear Me Now: The Black Potters Of Old Edgefield, South Carolina - Antiques And The Arts Weekly - Antiques and the Arts Online

An old line relayed to me, credited to a former Australian administrator possibly apocryphal but perfectly apt has rattled around my head over the past week as Zimbabwe played their first series in that country for nearly two decades.

The quip goes, when Zimbabwe were granted access to the big kids table where Test cricket is permitted in 1992, he supported this for them in a non-playing sense. Knock yourselves out lads, just not against the big boys.

Well, the Chevrons made the most of playing in the third and final one-dayer of their series on Saturday, knocking off Aaron Finchs side after rolling the hosts for 141 in 31 overs. Thats a team of players with barely any name recognition beyond their homeland denying some of the most feted superstars around; their first international victory against Australia in Australia. Special stuff, made possible thanks to a haul of five for 10 from the leg-spinner Ryan Burl, who last year become famous on Twitter for posting a plea for better boots.

Against the backdrop of well-founded existential fears over the future of the global game, this was a feelgood story for those interested in the growth of the sport in a country that has ridden endless bumps since its golden era at the turn of the century. But that was until taking a closer look at whats ahead. When doing so, it becomes painfully clear the probability of Australia playing Zimbabwe at any time in the future outside major tournaments is next to zero. Why? The abolition of the World Cup Super League.

No judgment if that doesnt mean anything to you the competition, to the extent it is one, has failed to capture the imagination since its initiation in 2020. But what it has done, quietly and successfully, is produce fixtures that otherwise would never have happened Zimbabwes in Australia is a case in point. It bound the five-time world champions to make it work.

The Super League was dreamed up to provide an organising structure for ODIs played by the top 13 nations between World Cups, each playing eight opponents in a three-match series over three years to facilitate qualification for that event. But with the pinnacle 50-over bonanza swelling from 10 to 14 teams in 2027 (a great thing) the International Cricket Council has ditched it, arguing it wont be required because 13 already goes into 14.

The collateral damage smaller, developing nations was clear in the recently released Future Tours Programme. Sure enough, over the scheduled period of five years, Zimbabwe will not enjoy a single match, in any of the three formats, against Australia or England.

Their relationship with the latter who last played Zimbabwe in 2004 is fascinating, chequered and endlessly complicated. Naturally, as a former British colony, theres an ingrained wariness that goes well beyond the field of play. From a cricket perspective, it didnt help that Englands heavy hitters tried their best to ensure Zimbabwe wouldnt graduate to full member status in the 1980s at a time they were recruiting Graeme Hick.

But through the 1990s, Zimbabwe stunned Graham Goochs team at a World Cup and towelled up Mike Athertons three-zip in the ODIs from their first full tour, following the we flippin murdered em draw at Bulawayo.

Then there was the 2003 World Cup, a sequence of events that is barely plausible now when Nasser Hussain nearly quit the captaincy due to the treatment he received when, quite reasonably, he pulled his team from a World Cup fixture as the country spiralled under the murderous Robert Mugabe regime.

Zimbabwe did visit later that year (Jimmy Andersons Test debut) and there was a return to Harare in the next (Kevin Pietersens ODI bow) but the relationship from that point was as good as sunk when Hussain was, in his words, hung out to dry by, well, everyone.

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As Zimbabwes presence diminished in England and Australia, coverage of their journey has been reserved mostly for when theyve lost their way a couple of ICC bans, the latest in 2019 for government meddling, or missing out on qualification for that years World Cup.

But theres a correlation to their improved fortunes since the initiation of the Super League. This year, Zimbabwe won entry to next months T20 World Cup in Australia, their first trip to a major ICC event since 2016. A series win against Bangladesh on the road, a commendable performance against India and now saluting over Australia in Townsville (without their best quick), bolsters the view that green shoots are no illusion.

From an England perspective, the political minefield that denied further engagement through the Mugabe years is no longer after the coup to remove him in 2017. Reluctantly accepting the mens schedule is now inked in to 2027, however, doesnt mean the seeds cant be sown in other ways between times to help get the two teams playing again.

With that, a positive thought before signing off. While it is a further frustration that Zimbabwe were the only full members left out of the first iteration of the womens Future Tours Programme also released in August theyve recently issued their female players full-time contracts. They are late to this party but determined to catch up as quickly as possible. With a touring schedule thats fundamentally less chaotic than the men, this is something that should be facilitated.

In Zimbabwe, theres a commonly used response to adversity: make a plan. The threat posed by the end of the Super League means theyll soon need a new one to keep moving in the right direction. If those running English cricket are interested in being good global citizens through this next challenging period, theres no better time for them to do their bit to help this country make up for so much lost time and commit to charting a course to taking the field alongside them again.

This is an extract from the Guardians weekly cricket email, The Spin. To subscribe, just visit this page and follow the instructions.

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The Spin | Zimbabwe's upset win should spur England to be good global citizens - The Guardian

Like Michael Henderson (The Critics, 2 September), I am disappointed with the BBCs approach to classical music. While it seemed essential to disrupt the weekend schedules to ensure that virtually every moment of the Glastonbury Festival was televised, we have to be satisfied with a meagre selection of the Proms concerts. The fact that many of these are televised on BBC Four, which is to be discontinued as a broadcast channel, bodes ill for future years.

In the past, every Friday evening BBC Four broadcast a classical music-based programme, such as Simon Russell Beales excellent history of sacred music. The channels normal Friday-evening fare now features pop or folk groups and old editions of Top of the Pops. On the news, the recent death of the countrys leading classical composer, Harrison Birtwistle, was hardly mentioned.

The BBCs orchestras contribute much to the cultural life of the country, as do the Proms. It is a pity that the corporation seems so reluctant to share much of this with its viewers. David Kirk, Dunblane, Stirling

As your leader states (A state of emergency, 2 September), the prospects for this next government are bleak if Liz Truss does believe that erroneous thinking on turbo-charging the economy is the way to proceed. Perhaps once she is in office, this politician who has turned and turned again will turn back into a prime minister who knows she must govern for all, and consign her economic and social mantras to the back of her office drawer, where they belong. Judith A Daniels, Cobholm, Norfolk

Your leader says the current circumstances could not be more propitious for a revival of the centre left, but there is plenty of evidence to suggest that Labours standing would be stronger if it adopted a more radical programme. A recent Survation poll, for example, revealed that around two-thirds of Tory voters support state ownership of energy, railways and water. Bernie Evans, Liverpool

Select and enter your email address Morning Call Quick and essential guide to domestic and global politics from the New Statesman's politics team. The Crash A weekly newsletter helping you fit together the pieces of the global economic slowdown. World Review The New Statesmans global affairs newsletter, every Monday and Friday. The New Statesman Daily The best of the New Statesman, delivered to your inbox every weekday morning. Green Times The New Statesmans weekly environment email on the politics, business and culture of the climate and nature crises - in your inbox every Thursday. The Culture Edit Our weekly culture newsletter from books and art to pop culture and memes sent every Friday. Weekly Highlights A weekly round-up of some of the best articles featured in the most recent issue of the New Statesman, sent each Saturday. Ideas and Letters A newsletter showcasing the finest writing from the ideas section and the NS archive, covering political ideas, philosophy, criticism and intellectual history - sent every Wednesday. Events and Offers Sign up to receive information regarding NS events, subscription offers & product updates.

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Andrew Marrs The return of the radical right (2 September) is a forensic analysis of the current political and economic mess and should be required reading for politicians. And while it is ridiculous to imagine that a right-wing Conservative government would take advice from the New Statesman, why not invite a rebuttal of Marr from a member of the Truss tribe? Brent Charlesworth, Lincoln

Philip Collinss article (Politics, 26 August) on the need to replace the GCSE echoes my own experience having just quit after 33 years as an English teacher, largely because of the unfitness of the GCSE to educate our teenagers.

While the GCSE before the 2015 Gove reforms was just about passable as an educational tool, the last seven years have seen an exam that is based on a narrow Gradgrindian concept of learning, which reduces knowledge to a tick-box exercise, and trains students in valueless skills. Tom Barnes, London N19

Rab Butler was a decent man but the 1944 education act he is credited with was mainly the work of James Chuter Ede, later Clement Attlees home secretary. The act aimed to set up a comprehensive schooling system with three streams academic, technical and general with provision for transfer if justified. Of course, with our irredeemable snobbery, in most parts of the UK it became a hierarchy in which academic education was top, technical education was left to wither away and everything else had to be content with the title of modern. Anthony Murray, Kingston upon Thames, Greater London

I was surprised to read Christopher Bowsers assertion (Correspondence, 26 August) that the RMT cannot represent the working class because some of its striking members are among the top third of earners before tax. Being working class doesnt always equate to being poor. If some RMT members earn above average wages, it is because the union has been doing its job. Jane Middleton, Bath

I read Rowan Williamss review of Maurice Glasmans book Blue Labour (The Critics, 2 September) having looked again at William Morriss lecture How Shall We Live Then? (1889), and there are remarkable parallels between Glasmans and Morriss visions. Morris believed that a prodigious and overwhelming change in society was required via the abolition of individual ownership or the monopoly of the means of production, and greater equality for all. He believed that social relations would not be happy unless we all enjoyed the ordinary functions of life, and took part in the full gamut of arts. His free community would require decentralisation, and Morris also saw the need to give up material progress. Roy Darke, Oxford

As a by-product of his excellent review of Maurice Glasmans Blue Labour, Rowan Williams provides a brilliant analogy for the cycles of political debate: a great marine creature stranded on a beach trying to get itself back into the water; heave, flop, lie there for a bit, another heave, another flop. David Murray, Wallington, Surrey

@GemmaHopePolicyGemma Hope, director of policy at the health and welfare charity Leonard CheshireGreat article in @NewStatesman highlighting how the energy crisis is affecting disabled people.How the cost-of-living crisis is pushing disabled people into poverty, Sarah Dawood, 25 August

@MirandaTHolmesRevd Dr Miranda Threlfall-Holmes Good article in @NewStatesman interviewing our curate Louis Johnson about @StBridesLpool and the work of @MicahLiverpool etc here in @LivDiocese.The cost-of-living crisis is tearing community safety nets to shreds, Fergus Butler-Gallie, 29 August

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[See also: Letter of the week: Making the grade]

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Letter of the week: The Proms deserve better - The New Statesman