Category Archives: Government Oppression

By Justin Rhoden

We are in a moment. Weeks of protest in the United States against anti-black racism and the systemic injustices Black people face every day have reignited similar conversations across the globe. In Canada, communities have mobilized in solidarity to advocate against the injustices Black and Indigenous communities experience, despite the health concerns of the current pandemic.

While others still baffle with the reality that systemic racism exists in Canada, endless inquiries, reports, books, articles, and research have exhaustively discussed the pervasive role racism plays in our societies. This moment is certainly not to debate the experiences of many communities across Canada.

It is the moment for change, as all moments in time have been. However, unlike times before, we have the opportunity to transition from the little steps social advocacy has grown accustomed to practicing in which we demand change in small portions: enough to alleviate some suffering but not too much as to upset the oppressors.

In the past, these small victories have been a necessary strategy to cultivate the climate of change that we are currently experiencing. It has allowed us to preserve ourselves and our communities while working tirelessly to decolonize and deconstruct the oppressive systems.

As a result, countless communities of leaders, activists, and educators have produced a wealth of knowledge and resources to guide us towards liberating futures. Now is the moment we collectively create those futures.

Communities are already attempting this by sounding the alarm to defund the police to address systemic racism, police brutality, surveillance, profiling, and the excessive budget used to do this. Of course, racism is not about the police. While many recognize this, it is still the dominant strategy presented to seize this moment and begin addressing racism in Canada.

The injustices Black and Indigenous communities face are not separated and isolated phenomena but are intertwined in a complex structure of marginalization: simultaneously sustained and mediated by various institutions. Policing is merely a single institution that intersects with education, the economy, the government, healthcare, and the media. However, in this fight for justice, we default to reducing violent systems into individual institutions, placing them into categories, and obscuring the interdependence that underscores its functionality.

The masters tools will never dismantle the masters house Audrey Lorde.

Engaging with racism as a separate and unique form of injustice is unmistakably the oppressors tools. The fight against racism is a resistance to all types of oppression. The racism that disadvantages myself as a Black man also disadvantages Black and Indigenous women, so this is also the fight against misogyny, misogynoir, and violence against women. The same racism impacts those that are made materially deprived, so this is the fight against poverty. It affects our communities and environments; this is the fight against environmental pollution and climate change. It affects LGTBQ members and two-spirited people; this is the fight against gendered and sexual discrimination. It affects people in distant places overseas whose humanity is denied and exploited; this is the fight against imperialism.

Racism is not divorced from these various forms of oppression nor the institutions that sustain them. Social change advocacy that decontextualizes racism erases the complexities of the systems we are addressing, reduces the degree of action needed, resolves the stakeholders, and distorts the ability for all communities to recognize their role in addressing systemic racism in Canada. We cannot advocate against racism and not fight against poverty, or epistemic violence, or climate change, or sexual discrimination, or settler colonialism, or imperialism, oppressive education, and so forth.

These complex intersections of our positionalities and the injustices we face are the driving force for large-scale advocacy and change. They are our own tools that we must use to equip ourselves. Then, we can begin creating new collective realities rather than fragmented change, often subjected to the oppressors insidious co-optation of the justice we seek.

The call to defund the police cannot be divorced from the need to address the entire system of oppression: violent curriculums in education, an exploitative economy, a government that continuously undermines its commitments to Indigenous communities, the historical material deprivation of BIPOCs, etc.

Advocating for these widespread and multifaceted changes is the responsibility of all allies wherever they reside. With so much research, recommendations, and models for transformative change already developed by previous and existing communities, social change is only a matter of unwavering collective action and reflection. For example, all teachers and educators who consider themselves allies need to mobilize the curriculum recommendations and resources curated by Black and Indigenous communities to eliminate the epistemic injustices and taught racism reproduced through education. Likewise, all allies need to organize and advocate for authentic change within the space(s) that they operate in solidarity with Black and Indigenous Peoples and their complex intersectionalities.

Whenever the system fails to meet our demands for systemic justice and social change, we must then collectively reflect on the limitations of the structures that currently exist and collectively create and support our own. If the education system refuses to redesign its racist curriculums, the alternative cannot be to continue students education in these violent environments. Instead, the solution is to begin collectively creating new educational structures that are reflective of anti-oppressive values. We must activate and sustain our agency as social beings to collectively redefine and reorganize our society. However, such transformational movements are only possible if we authentically unite in action and reflection.

We are in a profound moment, where there are many networks, experiences, and resources available to change these systems or create entirely new ones that are reflective of our collective humanity. This moment is for all allies everywhere to meaningfully organize and mobilize for the liberating realities we deserve.

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Opinion: How to make the most of this moment: A letter to anyone who cares about social change - Anishinabek News

I am not sure which is the more terrifying: the idea that the premier of Victoria, Daniel Andrews, had sufficient evidence to justify locking up about 3,000 of my neighbours, or the idea that he didnt and was doing it anyway.

Last Saturday, shortly after 4pm, Andrews announced that the public housing tenants of Flemington and North Melbourne were to be detained in forced quarantine because of potentially high rates of Covid-19. They would be prohibited from leaving their homes for any reason.

A sudden shock will send your fingers numb. I was watching the press conference on television. I grabbed my phone and ran the two blocks to the Flemington estate.

The police were already there. As dusk fell I began to take photographs of massed police cars, the flashing blue lights, the armed officers stopping people trying to leave the towers, and residents of the estate making their way home and asking: Whats happened? What have we done wrong? Has there been a murder?

The public housing towers are part of the rhythm of my suburb. There are the kids clattering up the hill to the high schools, and the constant traffic in the main street to and from the African cafes.

I can see the towers of the Flemington estate from my living room window. The lights in individual flats, blinking off, prompt me to my own bedtime. Sometimes if I rise in the night, I can see that someone over there is also awake.

I am not part of the public housing community. I am one of the middle-class white people literally and metaphorically at the top of the hill. But these are my neighbours.

On the estates, one in five people have no English, or poor English. The main languages are Vietnamese and Somali, as well as Ethiopian languages such as Amharic, Tigrunya and Oroimo. Arabic is common, as is Cantonese. Many of the residents are refugees from war-torn countries, predominantly in Africa. Unemployment is high.

And now, without warning, they were locked up by government.

The police, it emerged, had only about an hour and a halfs notice of the lockdown. The Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), the lead agency managing the lockdown, had about the same warning.

The two local governments City of Melbourne and Moonee Valley city council had no warning, and nor did the community leaders on the estate.

Ever since the coronavirus crisis began, these leaders had been asking the health department for a plan. They wrote emails and made phone calls asking for hand sanitiser on every floor, regular deep cleaning of lifts and shared spaces, and public health information posted in multiple languages.

Bottles of sanitiser were placed in the foyers, but when they ran out they were not replaced. Otherwise, there was no visible response.

Now the community depended for its most basic needs on the same department which they routinely experience as deaf to their voices.

And that department was responsible, with next to no warning, for provisioning a vulnerable community the size of a small town, vertically stacked.

Among the residents, shock at the sudden and heavy police presence was universal, but there was also some relief that the emerging Covid-19 crisis, which they had been uneasily aware of, was at last attracting serious government attention. Yet there were no health workers, social workers or health department employees in the first wave of government action.

As one frustrated department employee said to me later, there are no standing armies of health workers and social workers. We have no surge capacity in caring. If you need an emergency response, you have either the army or the police.

In the African Australian community, there were angry people who did not believe the public health justification for the lockdown and saw the operation as a racially motivated act of oppression.

One resident of the Flemington estate, Melissa Whelan, got the text telling her about the lockdown when she was in the checkout queue at the supermarket. Short on cash, she had popped out for milk and bread with a budget of $7. She rapidly rang a friend, borrowed another $50 and stocked up.

Other households were not so quick or lucky. These tend to be big and young families, living week to week. Those who had planned to shop on Sunday soon ran short of food.

By Sunday morning, there were a few DHHS workers on the estate, dispatched at no notice and with no clear directions. The police were still in charge, and there were hundreds of them.

The DHHS and other agencies struggled with the implications of the premiers promise that this vulnerable community would be supported with wraparound services. To start with, they could barely keep it fed.

The basics boxes the government delivered in the first day of lockdown contained date-expired food, Weetbix without milk, jam without bread. They were stacked in the foyers while the DHHS worked out how to get them safely up the towers.

Calls went out from those inside the flats to friends and relations, desperately asking for grocery deliveries and, in some cases, medication.

Local federal and state MPs Greens and Labor devoted their staff to trying to fill the gaps, escalating emergencies on an ad hoc basis. The premiers office made a staff member solely available for their calls.

There were people with asthma who had no Ventolin, diabetics without clean needles, mothers of premature babies now isolated from their infants in the nearby Royal Melbourne hospital.

Meanwhile, the African community was rallying, wanting to look after its own. In the forefront were young volunteers from the North Melbourne-based Australian Muslim Social Services Agency Youth Connect (AMSSA) who began soliciting and trying to deliver bags of goods. Others were trying to deliver just to specific family members and friends.

It was chaotic, and made harder by the fact there was no protocol. Police concern for security, and DHHSs concern for infection control, meant the deliveries were frustrated. Food was left in foyers and on steps, attacked by rats overnight.

The people on the outside were desperate knocking their heads against a system failing to care for the community, yet prevented from doing the job themselves.

That was the first 48 hours.

On Monday night, I began to get texts telling me things were going very wrong. Residents looking down from their windows, hoping for deliveries, could see hazmat-clad workers carrying away bags of food. The DHHS infection control officer had knocked off for the day, and so the order went out that deliveries from the community were to be stopped.

The bags being carried away were the food that had been left to spoil overnight, but the combination of events meant that people in the flats believed goods bought for them by family members were being stolen.

They are starving our people, one social media post said.

Everyone pitched in. The local MPs hit the phones. I tweeted that it was a mix-up. I got replies saying I was just a lickspittle for racist authorities. The police were heard arguing with the DHHS orders.

I am not sure which part of this effort worked, but the order to prevent deliveries was rapidly reversed, and DHHS issued an apology.

This whole crisis took about 90 minutes to brew, peak and dissipate, but during that time I thought there might be a riot that the whole situation might slip disastrously out of control. Some police confessed the same fear.

By Tuesday, things were beginning to improve. The emergency management commissioner, Andrew Crisp, was brought in, as were many volunteers, emergency services and local government. Coles repurposed an entire supermarket to the provisioning effort.

It was an immense effort, with many people working ridiculously hard hours, all in the knowledge that they were still in some ways failing.

Pallets of food and supplies were trekked into the estate and up the tiny, decrepit lifts. Nevertheless, that night there was an arrest during another conflict between police and young African-Australian volunteers delivering food.

Meanwhile, the huge effort to test every resident for Covid-19 was underway. In the end, they managed to test 85%.

By Wednesday, there was plenty of food far too much food and much of it was wasted.

But the help was still generic. MPs and family members were hearing of urgent medical needs and mothers without nappies for their babies. The hotline established for residents had a wait of over an hour to be answered.

One MP described dealing with DHHS as struggling with institutional somnambulance, including an inability to realise that more than a nine-to-five effort was needed, and a stark refusal to embrace the efforts by the community to look after its own. Some called for the community to be allowed to run its own hotline.

It was paternalism, said another community representative. The fact that people wanted to help their own was seen as a problem, not a strength.

Behind the scenes the Labor MPs for the area, Bill Shorten and Danny Pearson, the Trades Hall Council and other Labor groups were pushing a mutually agreed log of claims about what needed to be done to save the state government from getting this wrong. The Greens MPs, Ellen Sandell and Adam Bandt, with their colleagues on the Melbourne city council, were pushing a similar message.

Top of the list was arguing for the young people of AMSSA to be taken into the heart of the effort, instead of being resisted and frustrated. By Wednesday morning that was beginning to happen. Protocols for community deliveries were established and the authorities began to cooperate with the community.

By the afternoon, the relief effort was at last adequate and impressive. It was a mighty thing just three days late. There were dedicated workers on site, consistently identifying individual household needs.

Thursday was intense. Testing had been finished the night before an immense effort by many health workers. Residents were to be given news of their results, and the future of the lockdown. The premiers press conference was to be at 11 am, then early afternoon. He finally got to his feet at 4.30pm.

All but one of the towers were to be moved to the same stage 3 restrictions as the rest of Melbourne. Alfred Street, on the North Melbourne estate, with 53 people testing positive, would remain in quarantine for another nine days.

Most significantly, AMSSA would become the host of the continuing work of provisioning Alfred Street. The police minister, Lisa Neville, even thanked them.

That night, the young people of AMSSA posted images of themselves to social media, dancing as they delivered the food parcels.

The Greens have called for an inquiry into the public housing lockdown. It seems inevitable there will be a reckoning and only that can determine whether such action was justified.

Questions will surely include why there was no planning for this scenario. The states pandemic plan, written in 2015, makes no mention of public housing. But surely when the coronavirus crisis began in March, plans could have been made that included consultations with community leaders on the estates.

As Daniel Andrews likes to say, this isnt over.

Some residents who were not on the estate when the lockdown occurred did not return. About 10% of residents did not open their door to the authorities at any stage during the lockdown, whether from fear or anger.

Almost certainly, more Covid-19 cases will emerge. But lessons have certainly been learned.

Awatif Taha, who told the Guardian her story at the beginning of the crisis, said on Friday afternoon: Last night we were all screaming with joy.

Perhaps, she said, the government had learned something about her community, its strength and resourcefulness. Perhaps now they would be heard.

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'It was paternalism': how government support for Melbourne's locked down public housing blocks fell short - The Guardian

We are in the middle of one of the most inspiring protest upsurges in the United States in decades. Mass demonstrations against racist police violence have swept the country since the police murder of George Floyd, demanding an end to state murders of unarmed black people and racial inequality more generally.

Protesters have persisted in the face of vicious police rioting and repressive curfews. The number of protests has waned in recent weeks, as all protest upsurges eventually do. But they are still going strong throughout much of the country and have produced a massive ideological shift, making defunding the police a mainstream policy proposal. Elected officials in some cities, with varying degrees of sincerity, are arguing for or have already pledged to cut police budgets.

The protests have inspired many white Americans to reflect on the persistence of racism in the United States and their role in changing it. One common framework for reflection involves asking how white people can be good allies to people of color.

This framework seems to suggest that, while white people have a moral obligation to assist people of color in anti-racist struggles, we who are white have no interests of our own at stake in these struggles. So white people must be moved to anti-racist action through feelings of obligation, guilt, or sympathy. At its worst, the white allyship framework promotes introspection and quasi-spiritual self-improvement as political action.

Black people in the United States have faced and continue to face horrible forms of oppression that white people dont. Yet thinking of white peoples role in anti-racist struggle solely in terms of allyship is myopic. White people have sometimes taken part in significant black freedom struggles in the past not just out of altruism or a sense of moral duty. They saw the moral imperative to fight racial oppression as bound up with broader projects of collective liberation projects in which they, too, had a stake. They were moved, in other words, by solidarity.

Take the story of the Haitian Revolution, as an example, recounted by C. L. R. James in his classic The Black Jacobins and dramatically illustrating the power of solidarity. The revolution in the French colony of Haiti (then called Saint-Domingue) began with an uprising of the enslaved in August 1791. This revolt took place against the context of the ongoing revolution in France.

The enslaved black people of Saint-Domingue won their freedom through years of protracted, bloody struggle against the white plantation owners, as well as French, British, and Spanish troops who attempted at different points to crush the rebellion.

Given the forces they were up against, the Haitian slaves victory over so many European imperial colonizers and invaders is one of the most incredible achievements of recent history. The slaves themselves were the principal protagonists in overthrowing slavery. As James writes, the revolutionary troops led by Touissant LOuverture, and not the perorations in the Legislative [Frances governing body] would be decisive in the struggle for freedom.

But the victory of the Haitian revolutionaries was also aided by the revolutionary action of the French masses. In 1792, the internally divided French government, which had not yet entered its more radical, Montagnard phase, sent armed forces to Saint-Domingue to help quell the enslaved peoples rebellion. By early 1793, these forces had nearly crushed the uprising.

But in the meantime, the French masses had deposed and executed the King, provoking Britain and Spain to declare war on the revolutionary regime. These events helped turn the tide. They forced a diversion of French troops away from their assault on LOuvertures army to defend the coasts against British and Spanish invaders, and they allowed LOuverture to make an alliance with the Spanish against the French.

In the course of these events, the cause of the Haitian rebels and that of the French revolutionaries came to be fused in the minds of the more radical militants. As a Jacobin-aligned governor of the colony said: The slaves of the New World are fighting for the same cause as the [revolutionary] French armies.

Local French authorities in Saint-Domingue were forced to declare the abolition of slavery, in an attempt to win the formerly enslaved to their side in the struggle against the counterrevolutionary powers. The abolition of slavery was finally made official and extended to all colonies by the French government on February 4, 1794.

Robespierre and the left-wing Jacobins (the Montagnards) had won control of the National Convention, and their voting for abolition reflected not only longstanding personal convictions, but the revolutionary mood of the French people. James writes:

It was not Paris alone but all revolutionary France. Servants, peasants, workers. the labourers by the day in the fields all over France were filled with a virulent hatred against the aristocracy of the skin. There were many so moved by the sufferings of the slaves that they had long ceased to drink coffee, thinking of it as drenched with the blood and sweat of men turned into brutes At that time slavery had been overturned only in [Saint-Domingue] of all the French colonies, and the generous spontaneity of the Convention was only a reflection of the overflowing desire which filled all France to end tyranny and oppression everywhere.

The revolutionary French masses came to fight for the abolition of slavery not out of a sense of pity or disinterested moral obligation, but because they had come to see their own destiny as tied up with the enslaved. As James says, the poor and working classes of France felt towards them [enslaved Saint-Dominguans] as brothers, and the old slave-owners, whom they knew to be supporters of the counter-revolution, they hated as if Frenchman themselves had suffered under the whip.

The white slave owners of Saint-Domingue had always opposed the French Revolution, which represented an assault on their property rights and political power. In 1793, they actually took the side of the invading British who had promised to restore slavery against the revolutionary French government. These counterrevolutionary efforts incited the French masses against the the aristocracy of the skin, which the common people associated with the hated French nobility they had just deposed.

Thus the slave owners opposition to the revolution made it easy for the French masses to see the connection between their own liberty and that of enslaved Saint-Dominguans. And as James notes, the planters counterrevolutionary conspiracy also gave the Montagnards strategic reasons to abolish slavery.

[The] [abolition] decree, by ratifying the liberty which the blacks had won, James writes, was giving them a concrete interest in the struggle against British and Spanish reaction. Frances revolutionary leaders (rightly) predicted that the formal abolition of slavery would recruit the former slaves to their side.

It was up to the enslaved people of Saint-Domingue to make the legal abolition of slavery a reality on the ground, through several more years of war with European armies who wanted to return them to bondage. Facing the possibility of death or torture at the hands of a vicious enemy, the formerly enslaved freed themselves through courageous armed struggle. But they also werent alone.

At the high point of the French Revolution, the French masses joined the Haitians to push forward the fight for abolition. And they did so because they saw their freedom and that of the black people of Saint-Domingue linked together by the struggle to defeat their common enemies.

Multiracial solidarity is a big part of the story of slaverys destruction in our own country, too. As in Haiti, it took a violent war to end slavery, during which the actions of black people themselves were central to the process that led to their emancipation.

As W. E. B. Du Bois famously argued, the Union victory was hastened by a general strike of hundreds of thousands of enslaved people in the South, who deserted their plantations to assist and join the Union war effort.

But understanding why the Civil War occurred in the first place requires us to look to the mass antislavery movement that brought Abraham Lincoln and the Republican Party to power. It was the Republican capture of the federal government that provoked Southern secession, and as historian Matt Karp writes, the party achieved this [by] linking the moral battle against slavery to the material concerns of millions of Northern voters.

The ideological connection that the antislavery movement and Republican Party forged between the material interests of ordinary white Northerners and the freedom of enslaved black people helped make it possible for many Northern whites to find common cause with the enslaved and, again, to perceive a common enemy.

Republicans mass appeal rested in large part on developmental and egalitarian economic policies that ran counter to the interests of the slave-owning class, including tariffs and federal infrastructure spending. Their central economic proposal, Karp says, was a homestead act by which the government would give away millions of acres of land for free.

This policy, opposed by the pro-slavery Democratic Party, was justified by its advocates with the argument that citizens should be able to live on and work their own land for themselves, as free laborers, rather than be subject to the domination of landowners or industrial capitalists.

As Karp notes, it also depended, wrongly, on an assumption that the North American West rightly belonged to Euro-American settlers, not its indigenous inhabitants. The denial of prior inhabitants rights to the land was a justification for a different racist monstrosity the displacement and mass murder of indigenous peoples, which could never be justified.

Southern opposition to the Act, led by the regions enormously wealthy oligarchs, allowed Republicans to portray the slave owners as proponents of land monopoly and plutocracy, and hence as opponents of liberty for both white and black people. In doing so Republicans provided a material basis for Northern white solidarity with enslaved black people against the slave aristocracy.

Many Northerners also saw the pro-slavery laws passed by Congress as direct attacks on their own freedom, revealing the dominance of the slaveholding class over the political system. The House of Representatives passed a gag rule in 1836 barring from consideration any petition or resolution regarding slavery. Many viewed the law as an attack on their political liberties; it encouraged antislavery activism and actually resulted in a significant increase in petitions to Congress.

In 1850, Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act, which forced private citizens to aid in the capture and return of enslaved fugitives. Defiance of the act was punishable by fine or imprisonment. The law was met with outrage and civil disobedience in the North: even many who had been less sympathetic to the abolitionist cause saw the act as the product of a slave power conspiracy to subject Northern whites as well as enslaved blacks to the power of the slave owners. Like the gag rule, the Fugitive Slave Act heightened antagonism to slavery.

Republican appeals to white Northerners economic and political freedom went hand-in-hand with increasingly strong moral denunciations of slavery and its perpetrators. Partly through the partys electoral campaigns and propaganda efforts, both a sense of shared interests with enslaved people and a moral hatred of slave owners came to be established in the minds of millions of Northern voters.

Ohio Governor Salmon P. Chases comments during the 1856 election were typical of Republican rhetoric, which made the continued existence of slavery a threat to the freedom of all Americans:

[T]he popular heart is stirred as never before, for the issue is boldly made between Freedom and Slavery a Republic and a Despotism! The chain-gang and Republicanism cannot coexist, and you must now elect whether you will vindicate the one at whatever cost, or whether you will yield to the other.

Sentiments like these led to the election of an antislavery government. That election in turn put the country on the road to a social revolution, in which black and white Americans fought side-by-side to defeat the Confederacy and abolish slavery.

The movements which brought about abolition in Haiti and the United States provide particularly dramatic examples of the power of solidarity. But we dont need to look so far back in time to make the point. The US Civil Rights Movement of the 20th century was led by many activists, including socialists and labor organizers, who connected the struggle for black liberation with wider fights for economic justice.

Black workers led the struggle for civil rights in the 1940s, through participation in militant unions belonging to the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), and especially the most left-wing unions, led by members of the Communist Party. Radical unions like the United Public Workers of America fought against discrimination and for full rights for their black workers.

Local 22 of the Food, Tobacco, Agricultural and Allied Workers of America fought against racist police and voter disenfranchisement in Jim Crowera North Carolina. Local 10 of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union of San Francisco also fought racial discrimination against its black workers in the 1940s.

Many of these Communist-led unions were destroyed by McCarthyism and the Red Scare in the 1950s, significantly setting back struggles for racial justice. Even so, many leading activists of the Civil Rights Movement later on continued working to forge multiracial coalitions, by connecting anti-racism with broader redistributive demands. Paul Heideman writes:

At the grassroots, organizers like Ella Baker or Bayard Rustin came out of the Old Left, and knew full well that legal equality without redistribution would be a hollow victory. The 1963 March on Washington was built with crucial assistance from the United Autoworkers, and the marchs full title was The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. The policy objectives of this tendency in the movement were summed up in the Freedom Budget, a proposal that attempted to translate the Civil Rights Movement into a campaign for full employment and public works.

Martin Luther King Jr, best remembered for his passionate moral speeches against racism, was a supporter of the Freedom Budget. Toward the end of his life, King declared the need for democratic socialism and began organizing a Poor Peoples Campaign to demand economic justice. (He was assassinated before the campaign began, when he traveled to Memphis to support a strike of black sanitation workers.)

In the late 60s and early 70s, radical activists like those involved in Detroits League of Revolutionary Black Workers also sought to reconnect anti-racist struggle to workplace militancy. The League fought racism in the auto plants and within their own union, while building multiracial solidarity with other workers around their shared interests.

Civil rights activists of various stripes refused to separate anti-racist struggle from class struggle. Many of the movements successes in fact depended on linking struggles against racism with economic demands, within the workplace or outside of it. And movement leaders like King realized that the movement for racial equality would not make further progress without tackling economic equality. That vision of anti-racism linked the interests of black Americans with poor and working-class whites.

White people have a moral obligation to help dismantle white supremacy. But it would be wrong to see anti-racism only as a moral imperative. Now, as in the past, poor and working-class white people have a shared interest in fighting racism and destroying its material infrastructure.

Policies and institutions responsible for the severe oppression of black people and other people of color hurt the entire working class. Our massive, heavily militarized police forces kill black people at higher levels than whites, but kill the poor of all races at higher rates than the rich; mass incarceration locks up black people at much higher rates than whites, but it also locks up an enormous number of white people and represses labor organizing; xenophobic immigration restrictions also make it harder for workers to organize. That means working people of all races have a material stake in defunding the police, dismantling mass incarceration, and ending repression of immigrants.

The emancipatory potential of anti-racist demands for the working class as a whole is nothing new, of course. As Jamelle Bouie documents, the black freedom struggle in America has long been bound up with struggles against the dominance of capital and for economic redistribution.

Those who participated in great freedom struggles of the past did not lose sight of their common plight and common enemies. Neither should we. White people can act in solidarity with people of color to fight racial oppression and to work toward collective liberation.

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Solidarity Should Be the Basis of White Anti-Racism, Not Allyship - Jacobin magazine

An Indigenous scholars long-standing research related to Mtis women comes at a pivotal moment when understanding and standing in solidarity with people who are oppressed is crucial.

Jennifer Adese, an associate professor in the department of sociology at the University of Toronto Mississauga, has dedicated her efforts to Indigenous research throughout her academic career.However, it was attending the National Aboriginal Womens Summit (NAWS) in 2012 that cemented her focus on the experiences of Mtis women.

It was at these proceedings in Ottawa that Indigenous women collectively came together to call on the provincial premiers in attendance to use their power to push the federal government to commit to a national inquiry on the high rates of Indigenous women who have gone missing and/or been murdered, said Adese during a recent interview for the VIEW to the Upodcast.

I had the privilege to sit alongside these women as they met with different members of government, other Indigenous organizationsand even with United Nationsrepresentatives, and it gave me a pretty life-changing insight (into) the complex public strategies of resilience practised by Mtis women.

Adese, who joined the department as a faculty member in 2018, says the experience was not a new encounter with the high rates of murdered Indigenous women, nor was it her first time countering Canadas reluctance to reckon with its history of oppression and colonization. But the event reinvigorated her commitment to be an informed advocate and to lobby for the rights of Mtis and all Indigenous communities. Through her work, she continues to examine the history of violence against Mtis girls and women, looking into why Mtis were largely ignored in the federal government inquiry.

In 2019, Adese received Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) funding to pursue a project that explores Mtis womens mobilization and activism over the last 50 years.

When the two-year project wraps up, Adese has her sights set on strengthening existing collaborations with the academic community and Mtis organizations to raise awareness about Mtis issues through community engagement and dissemination of their findings.

It is this mobilizing of knowledge that Adese says is key to reaching a better understanding about the ongoing impacts of colonization, dispossessionand racism.

She says a central part of being involved in current activism confronting anti-Black and anti-Indigenous racism is being informed.In her capacity as an educator, she feels that reading and educating oneself serves as a foundation for further action. So, too, is listening to and centering the voices of Black, Indigenousand other racialized groups.

Adese is currently wrapping up a book that is being published by UBC Press, titledAboriginal, which is an analysis of the term aboriginal and its more frequent usage after the Constitution Act of 1982 was passed.

In addition, Adese is a co-editor oftwo forthcoming anthologies:A People and a Nation: New Directions in Contemporary Mtis Studiesthat she has worked on with colleagues from University of Alberta;andIndigenous Celebrity: Entanglements with Fame, the first dedicated volume to explore Indigenous People's experiences with celebrity culture.

Adese has a personal interest in this area: She is Mtis and draws on her culture via a large family unit that is primarily based in Alberta. She says that her relationships with other Mtis people and communities provideher with a unique perspective for her work, writing and teaching.

A lot of previous research has been undertaken and published by non-Mtis, and the tendency through that work has been to analyze and discuss Mtis people as simply a byproduct of the intermarriage of two other populations, broadly First Nations and European, says Adese.

That is not how we understand ourselves and our existence as adistinct Indigenous people, and quite often how Indigenous Peoples represent ourselves through art, through literature, through political engagement is very different. So, for usit's very exciting work to push the conversation even further, and for the first time strive for this level of representation within Mtis studies research, but also within Indigenous studies research.

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With a focus on women, U of T researcher aims to raise awareness of Mtis issues in Canada - News@UofT

When the COVID-19 pandemic is over would you download an app developed by the state that has access to your everyday movement, in order to ensure your medical well-being and security?While 49.8 percent said no, 46.3 percent said yes. Those who dont know are a mere 3.9 percent.

The poll was conducted by the Istanbul Economics Research in cooperation with the German Friedrich Naumann Foundation.

One interesting finding of the poll was that 63 percent of those aged between 18-24 said they would download it. Are the youth careless about their privacy and less sensitive to their individual liberties?

Not necessarily, according to zgehan enyuva, from Middle East Technical University (ODT). Young generations are digital natives; they are born to the digital world and they accept the fact that it is there. They would not fight downloading the governments app. But they would troll it, manipulate it by entering wrong information, for instance, said enyuva at an online panel last month on the findings of the poll.

The debate on the youth at that panel was particularly timely since it came at a time when both the ruling Justice and Development Party (AK Party) and the main opposition Republican Peoples Party (CHP) both said they will be chasing the votes of Generation Z, the youngest segment eligible to vote in the next elections in 2023.

And interestingly, it was during the pandemic that the representatives of this generation got into direct interaction with the political elites. What pushed them to do so? The university admission exams. The date of the exam was changed twice due to the pandemic. The original date at the beginning of June was postponed to the end of July.

But as the government concluded that it started to take COVID-19 under control, it took forward the date to the end of June. The government wanted 2.5 million children who entered this years exam to go as soon as possible to holiday destinations to revitalize the domestic tourism.

The last change of date infuriated the youth, who had to readjust their working timeline, and they expressed their anger by launching the hashtag #SandiktaGorusuruz (Well see you at the ballot box) on May 4 on Twitter.

Known with his criticism of social media, one would assume President Recep Tayyip Erdoan is not a frequent user of social media, delegating the management of his accounts to his aides. But it was interesting to see that he chose YouTube as a channel of communication for the youth on June 26, one day prior to the university admission exam.

There, too, the youth did not miss the occasion to express their reaction. One cannot know whether he was aware of it at the time.

But his July 2 statement implying additional restrictions to social media platforms like YouTube came as a contradiction to the AK Partys urge to lure the votes of the youth.

Of course, there is still time until 2023. The AK Party might have prioritized an approach to restrict social media, which many believe will help silence dissenting voices, and lift the restrictions perhaps at a later stage, when they will need the votes of the youth. Or, perhaps, they are counting on their allies from the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), as it seems to receive more support from the youth, than the AK Party.

Polls suggest the majority of the youngsters dont believe any of the present parties can solve the countrys problems. But they seem to be more attracted by the MHP, Y (Good) Party and the Peoples Democratic Party (HDP). The youth want clearer stances from the parties, explained prominent pollster Bekir Konda in a recent interview.

According to enyuva, an academic with extensive work on youth, the generation that grew up with Harry Potter, a boy who waits to be saved by an old wise man and learns to fight against oppression throughout seven books, is now followed by the generation of Hunger Games, where this time a girl who initially struggles simply to feed her family turns into a rebel fighting oppression in a short time.

Young people are not saving the world, but they are engaged and connected with their local communities, said enyuva. They are staying away from party politics, but they are organized among themselves.

Turkish youth were ordered to stay at home during the pandemic and they obeyed it, according to enyuva, but they also took initiatives to bring care, for instance, for the elderly. And obviously, they are organizing through social media.

But enyuva warns that the learning curve in terms of social media has increasingly been in favor of the governments.

Turkey,

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Turkish youth and the governments stance on social media - Hurriyet Daily News

Key Points

On July 1, 2020, the U.S. Departments of Commerce, Homeland Security, State, and the Treasury issued a joint advisory on the Risks and Considerations for Businesses with Supply Chain Exposure to Entities Engaged in Forced Labor and Other Human Rights Abuses in Xinjiang. The advisory follows months of increased attention by Congress, the Trump administration, and nongovernmental organizations (NGO) on labor conditions in Xinjiang and the treatment of Uyghurs and members of Muslim minority groups in China. Specifically, the advisory describes a range of specific abuses including mass arbitrary detentions, severe physical and psychological abuse, forced labor and other labor abuses, oppressive surveillance used arbitrarily or unlawfully, religious persecution, political indoctrination, forced sterilization, and other infringements of the rights of members of those groups in Xinjiang. The advisory also describes how these concerns are, in the words of Secretary of State Pompeo, no longer confined to the Xinjiang region but spread across China through government-facilitated arrangements with private sector suppliers.

Against this backdrop, the agencies warn businesses of the reputational, economic, and legal risks of involvement with entities that engage in human rights abuses, including but not limited to forced labor in the manufacture of goods intended for domestic and international distribution. The agencies specifically call on [b]usinesses, individuals, and other persons, including but not limited to academic institutions, research service providers, and investors [businesses and individuals] that choose to operate in Xinjiang or engage with entities that use labor from Xinjiang elsewhere in China to heed the warnings in the advisory and implement human rights-related due diligence policies and procedures.

Towards this end, while the advisory itself is explanatory only and does not have the force of law, the agencies outline a range of ongoing U.S. government efforts to curb alleged human rights abuses related to Xinjiang in the areas of import and export controls and financial sanctions. They also provide specific guidance to importers, exporters, and financial institutions on how to identify Xinjiang-related risks. The advisory further urges businesses and individuals to evaluate their exposure to Xinjiang-related risks and to the extent necessary, implement due diligence policies, procedures, and internal controls to ensure that their compliance practices are commensurate with identified risks and international best practice across the upstream and downstream supply chain, and in making investment decisions.

In particular, the advisory highlights three types of supply chain exposure that broadly track export, import, and financial activities implicating Xinjiang:

(1) Assisting in developing surveillance tools for the PRC government in Xinjiang.

(2) Relying on labor or goods sourced in Xinjiang, or from factories elsewhere in China implicated in the forced labor of individuals from Xinjiang in their supply chains, given the prevalence of forced labor and other labor abuses in the region.

(3) Aiding in the construction of internment facilities used to detain Uyghurs and members of other Muslim minority groups, and/or in the construction of manufacturing facilities that are in close proximity to camps operated by businesses accepting subsidies from the PRC government to subject minority groups to forced labor.

On the subject of surveillance, the advisory recounts recent efforts by the Department of Commerce to list and leverage Entity List restrictions against a range of Chinese technology companies and public security bureaus allegedly implicated in human rights violations and abuses in Xinjiang. The advisory goes on to describe the Xinjiang surveillance infrastructure as an unprecedented, intrusive, high-technology surveillance system across Xinjiang, as part of a province-wide apparatus of oppression aimed primarily against traditionally Muslim minority groups. According to the advisory, this system is enabled by technologies including artificial intelligence, facial recognition, gait recognition, and infrared technology, as well as mobile apps used by police to track personal data about Xinjiang residents and cloud databases used to centralize collected information. The advisory notes the role of Chinese surveillance and technology companies supported by PRC government contracts, but also points to evidence that these [Chinese] businesses also get support from foreign academics, scientists, businesses, and investors.

With respect to these concerns, the advisory warns that businesses and individuals engaged in certain activities or who are otherwise directly linked to those in Xinjiang engaged in certain listed activities may face reputational risks and/or trigger U.S. law enforcement or other actions.... These activities include:

On the subject of forced labor, the advisory and related comments by Acting DHS Deputy Secretary Ken Cucinelli recount various recent and ongoing efforts by the Trump administration and Congress to increase scrutiny and enforcement related to labor conditions in Xinjiang and for Muslim minorities throughout the PRC.

As we described in our publication on this topic in March of this year, 2019 marked an uptick in DHS attention to and enforcement of forced labor authorities, beginning with a memorandum of understanding between Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Liberty Shared in July 2019 and culminating in Customs and Border Protections (CBP) issuance on September 30, 2019, of what would be the first of a string of Xinjiang-related WROs. Following a series of congressional hearings and NGO activity in late 2019 calling for further scrutiny of labor conditions in Xinjiang, DHS released a formal strategy describing its commitment to combatting human trafficking and forced labor on January 15, 2020, which included among five key goals leveraging DHS law enforcement and national security authorities to investigate, take enforcement action, and refer [human trafficking and forced labor] cases for prosecution. Since CBPs September WRO, it went on to issue additional Xinjiang-related WROs on May 1 and June 17, 2020, and announced on July 1 the seizure of nearly 13 tons of hair worth more than $800,000 that it suspects may have been produced using forced child labor and imprisonment. In describing the seizure, Brenda Smith, CBPs Executive Assistant Commissioner for the Office of Trade, said that [i]t is absolutely essential that American importers ensure that the integrity of their supply chain meets the humane and ethical standards expected by the American government and by American consumers (CBP, July 1).

In Congress, Rep. McGovern and Sen. Rubio introduced, with bipartisan support, companion bills entitled the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (Bill Text,Reuters, March 11), which would, if enacted as written, create significant obligations and restrictions for textile and other importers with supply chains connected directly or indirectly to Xinjiang. While the bills remain pending in Congress, they continue to gain co-sponsors and in some respects have had their political paths cleared by the passage and enactment on June 17, 2020, of the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act of 2020 (S. 3744), which received overwhelming support in both the House and Senate before being signed by President Trump. As noted in the advisory, the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act directs the President to impose sanctions on each foreign person the President determines is responsible for certain actions with respect to specified ethnic Muslim minority groups in the Xinjiang region in China.

Against this backdrop, the advisory focuses on several areas of PRC government activity contributing to forced labor conditions in Xinjiang and elsewhere in China, including:

(1) The governments mutual pairing assistance program linking companies from eastern China to factories in Xinjiang (described further in Annex 2 of the advisory).

(2) Involuntary transfers of Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities from Xinjiang to factories across China (described in Annex 3 of the advisory).

(3) The use of prison labor in the cotton, apparel, and agricultural sectors (described further in Annex 4 of the advisory).

To aid businesses and individuals in identifying and evaluating forced labor risks, the advisory goes on to describe six potential indicators of forced labor or labor abuses, including:

The advisory also includes (Annex 3) a nonexhaustive but illustrative list of industries in Xinjiang reported to be involved in labor abuses, including:

Finally, the advisory discusses certain due diligence strategies and challenges for identifying and evaluating Xinjiang-related supply chain exposure. For example, the advisory describes the role and limits of third-party audits as credible sources of information for indicators of labor abuses in light of repressive conditions on the ground. It further encourages businesses and individuals to collaborate with industry groups to share information, develop Chinese language research capabilities, and build relationships with Chinese suppliers and recipients of U.S. goods and services to understand their possible relationships in Xinjiang under the mutual pairing assistance program. The advisory also points to several forced labor and human trafficking due diligence tools produced by the Departments of Labor, State, and Justice, among others (see our March publication for additional resources, including a summary of CBPsnine-step processfor initiating and adjudicating forced labor allegations).

As described in the advisory, the foundational authority for regulating imports of goods produced from forced labor is found in Section 307 of the Tariff Act of 1930 (19 U.S.C. 1307) (see our earlier Client Alert on Section 307here). This law prohibits the importation of [a]ll goods, wares, articles, and merchandise mined, produced, or manufactured wholly or in part in any foreign country by convict labor[,] forced labor[, or] indentured labor, which includes forced or indentured child labor. Such merchandise is not only subject to exclusion and seizure; its importation may lead to criminal investigation of the importer and other parties involved in the import transactionand the imposition of civil or criminal penalties (e.g., 19 U.S.C. 1592 (penalties for fraud, gross negligence, or negligence) and 18 U.S.C. 545 (smuggling goods in the United States)).

In addition to the advisorys guidance for the import and export communities, it also urges entities with banking ties to the U.S. financial system to be aware of requirements for financial institutions to adopt risk-based antimoney laundering, counter terrorist financing, and countering proliferation financing (AML/CFT/CPF) programs to identify, assess, and mitigate risks related to those regulatory regimes. The advisory specifically urges financial institutions to assess their potential exposure to the risk of handling the proceeds of forced labor on behalf of their clients and, as appropriate, implement a mitigation process in line with the risk. As noted in the advisory, money laundering crimes generally require the involvement of proceeds of a specified unlawful activity, which may include sex trafficking, forced labor, and other crimes related to trafficking in persons.

To address these risks, the advisory recommends that financial institutions:

In addition, all U.S. persons and financial institutions with ties to the U.S. financial system must comply with U.S. economic sanctions administered by the Treasury Departments Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC).

On July 9, OFAC and the State Department took the first concrete Xinjiang-related actions following the July 1 joint advisory. OFAC sanctioned four PRC officials and one Public Security Bureau pursuant to Executive Order 13818, which implements the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act (OFAC Press Release). These individuals and entities include:

As a result of the designations, U.S. persons are broadly prohibited from dealing with these persons and entities that are 50 percent or more owned, directly or indirectly, by one or more Specially Designated Nationals (SDNs) (collectively, blocked persons), absent a license from OFAC. U.S. persons must also block and report to OFAC any such property that is in, or comes into, their possession or control.

Also on July 9, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo designated Quanguo, Hailun, and Mingshan under Section 7031(c) of the FY 2020 Department of State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs Appropriations Act; as a result, they and their immediate family members are ineligible for entry into the United States (State Department Press Release). Secretary Pompeo indicated that he is also placing additional visa restrictions on other CCP officials believed to be responsible for, or complicit in, the unjust detention or abuse of Uyghurs, ethnic Kazakhs, and members of other minority groups in Xinjiang pursuant to the State Departments October 2019 visa restriction policy under Section 212(a)(3)(C) of the Immigration and Nationality Act.

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U.S. Agencies Issue Business Advisory Warning of Xinjiang-Related Supply Chain Exposure and OFAC Imposes Blocking Sanctions on Chinese Persons Related...

The ongoing awakening to the long-standing realities of discrimination against African Americans is marked by a scope and intensity that were unimaginable even one month ago. Polling shows a significant increase from 2015 among Americans who believe racial and ethnic discrimination in the United States are big problems, and widespread protestsincluding in rural and suburban communities where such activism is unprecedentedagainst systemic racism and police misconduct have erupted. The United States has thus entered a window of opportunity where real social change is more likely than at any time in recent history.

But are there foreign-policy implications for this moment? Could this enhanced recognition of racial discrimination at home result in meaningful differences in how the United States engages with the world? Its tempting to think sobut the answer to both questions is almost certainly no. The structural impediments to more seriously accounting for social justice and human rights in foreign policy are simply too great.

There are at least four such structural factors. First, the composition of foreign-policy shapers (think tank experts, columnists) and implementers (government officials) remains disproportionately white (and male). This is visibly evident from any photograph of senior military officials. But it also pronounced in Americas diplomatic corps. In 2002, 70 percent of all State Department employees were white; by September 2018, it remained nearly unchanged at 68 percent. Moreover, in 2018, the more senior the role, the greater the proportion of employees who were whitegoing from 35 percent for midlevel GS-10 rank up to 87 percent for the most senior civil service executives.

This relatively homogenous composition of the foreign-policy eliteincluding yours trulymatters because the recognition of racial oppression at home and abroad is a glaring blind spot. In 20-plus years of working at academic institutions and think tanks, I can recall very few mentions of race. And even these observations were made not out of inherent concern for racial underrepresentation or discrimination within the United States but because the lack of progress toward combating those twin evils could lessen Americas relative power on the international stage.

Second, the predominant frame through which foreign-policy debates are conveyed is as national security interests. These seemingly neutral concepts are conveyed through principles or objectives, ranked by their purported interest-ness: vital, extremely important, important, or secondary. Those categories come from a landmark 2000 report by the Commission on Americas National Interests, which was representative of many comparable bipartisan initiatives. The 23-member commission included just three women, one of whom was the only person of color (Condoleezza Rice). The sole mention of individual rightsone of 10 important national interestswas in promoting pluralism, freedom, and democracy in strategically important states as much as is feasible without destabilization. The caveats that this august group of geostrategic thinkers added on demonstrate that rights are not universal and should never hinder stabilitymeaning a government that endorses U.S. interests retains power.

Though the facts shift, and allies and adversaries come and go, the narrative of Americas global role is always conveyed via static interests, which remain wholly uninformed by human rights concernsunless it can be weaponized selectively to highlight an adversarys human rights abuses. Foreign policy cannot be reconfigured in enduring and impactful ways without updating the thinking and language that could enable such change.

Third, and relatedly, a consistently missing element in elite foreign-policy debates is the livelihoods of actual humans. The central unit of analysis is countries, which are overwhelmingly evaluated through the words and actions of their leaders. When people are considered at all, it is as demographic clusters that might influence the countries or regions where they residethe Arab youth bulge, Russias population decline, and Chinas graying citizenry are popular examples. So-called voices from the regions are those few media-tested, English-speaking people who reside in the rolodexes of TV producers, serve as visiting think tank fellows, or are escorted through Capitol Hill offices by K Street lobbyists.

Without a reimagining of Americas global influence from the perspective of the individuals who experience hatred, bigotry, and oppression, it is impossible to conceive of a foreign policy that ever truly confronts racism.

Finally, the defining manifestation of U.S. foreign policy for 75 years has been the threat or use of military force. The global architecture required to use force anywhere at any time requires host nation basing and overflight permissions. These, in turn, require permanently stationing U.S. troops abroad, which increases civil wars and enables human rights violations by host nation governments. These governments enjoy military assistance in the form of arms sales. According to the State Departments latest World Military Expenditures and Arms Transfers report, the United States is the top arms exporter to the least democratic countries (meaning those in the lowest quintile as determined by Polity Project rankings)accounting for 66 percent of all such sales. In short, to project military power, the United States tolerates or abets subjugation.

Moreover, military spending ($712 billion) absorbs more than half of all federal discretionary spending, towering over the diplomacy and development budget ($48 billion), which could be far better suited to promoting individual rights and freedoms globally. Unfortunately, when you review what country receives the most foreign assistance from the United States, it is a conspicuous list of occupiers, autocrats, and illiberal regimes. The top six proposed recipients for 2020, in order, are: Israel, Egypt, Jordan, Afghanistan, Nigeria, and Uganda. These are so-called strategic partners showered with aid because of their geographic location, security partnerships, or a consequence of great-power competition (Uganda). Congress could vastly increase funding for international and nongovernmental organizations that work to protect groups experiencing prejudice and seriously hold recipients of foreign aid to account for their human rights violations. But there is nothing in recent history to suggest that legislators will fulfill this needed role or even its most basic oversight functions.

For these four reasons, and many others, an overdue turn toward an individual, rights-centric foreign policy is unimaginable, at least for now. The current defensiveness among elite foreign-policy institutions toward considering the role that race plays in U.S. foreign policy is simply too overwhelming. A more diverse group of future foreign-policy thinkers and leaders could one day lead the waybut that group wont arrive in time to keep pace with the current push for racial justice across the rest of U.S. society.

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From National Interests to the Diplomatic Elite, the Foreign-Policy Blob Is Structurally Racist - Foreign Policy

It is said that when Benjamin Franklin emerged from the concluding session of the Constitutional Convention, one Mrs. Powell asked him, What have you given us?

A Republic, he responded, if you can keep it.

That claim, of course, stood glossed by the trenchant irony that, at that point in 1787, the American constitution framed in Independence Hall in Philadelphia did not include the right to vote for American women.

Only after heroic struggles by American suffragettes was that right realised in 1920.

Just as the formal right granted in 1870 to African-American men to vote was actually to fructify as late as 1965 when the Voting Rights Bill was passed.

Yet, some 230 years after the adoption of the American constitution, the United States under the Trump presidency can be seen to be embroiled in another historic battle to preserve the republic and all its democratic and institutional accomplishments.

The situation in India is not too different.

The Indian constitution granted the right to universal adult franchise from its very inception, transcending some stiff opposition from deeply conservative sections of the Constituent Assembly.

The Constitution of India. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

A pivotal aspect of that revolutionary accomplishment was the new emphasis on expanding literacy in order to lift the mass of Indians out of ignorance and render their exercise of franchise sentient and independent. Long decades of struggle were finally to culminate in the legislation by parliament on August 4, 2009, which made access to free school education a legally enforceable right.

Needless to say, that education about republican values and citizens struggles to realise them is transmitted to students in academic institutions through a study of social and political science curriculum, and, overall, through a study of the history of cultural oppressions and aspirations.

Those histories also teach us that when nation-states come to centralise economic and political power, the existence and sanctity of democratic institutions and imperatives notwithstanding, it is not the hard sciences that offer much resistance. Such resistance invariably comes from the social scientists and historians who insist on educating us about the non-negotiable status of republican goals and the required modes of governmental conduct thereof.

Also read: The Republic at 71: Faced With an Unbending Government, Indians Continue to Speak Out

Caveat: There was a time when the hard sciences became the chief instruments of progressive historical transformation (recall Copernicus and all those that followed in changing irretrievably our consciousness of material forces and phenomenon). But, as the new revolutionary classes settled down to profit accumulation, science needed to be reduced suitably to technologies that would no longer ask humanist questions but serve the interests of endowed classes.

For a century or more now, the burden of humanist scrutiny has been carried forward by historians and social scientists. One must always remember that many historians and social scientists have, nonetheless, continued to owe allegiance to revanchist and reactionary structures of thought.

Closed authority structures then develop a vested interest in keeping from citizens critical knowledge of social and political formations and of constitutional values that pertain to principles of republican democracy, even while they obtain executive legitimacy from democratic forms of government formation. The possibility of such a degradation of liberal archives of politics into authoritarianism was eloquently explored by Horkheimer and Adorno in their path-breaking Dialectic of Enlightenment.

Such authorities begin to clip the wings of the sources of progressive humanist knowledge by either cutting resources to the social sciences, or by taking recourse to sundry strong-arm methods available to the state. But, most of all, by reformulating schools curricula to the states ideological requirements.

A demonstrator attends a protest against riots following clashes between people demonstrating for and against a new citizenship law in New Delhi, India, March 3, 2020. Photo: Reuters/Adnan Abidi

Within any educational system, it is a given that the content and quality of curricula suggest what authorities who frame those curricula think to be desirable or deleterious to the development of citizens cognitive allegiance to the ideological preferences of ruling social forces.

And, exclusions from the curricula are often far more indicative of the bent of those authorities than the inclusions.

In that context, the shredding of subjects inscribed in the Social Science, Political Science, and History text books of class 9, 10, and 11 of Indian schools just announced by the Central Board of School Education (CBSE) on directive from the Minister of Human Resource Development, no less, must be seen as a telling pointer to the priorities of the present central government.

Also read: Chapters on Citizenship, Secularism, Federalism Scrapped as CBSE Prunes Syllabus for COVID

Arguing that the burden on senior school students needs to be reduced, for the year 2020-2021 In view of the disruption caused by the COVID-19 calamity, it is proposed that subjects like, inter alia, Democracy and Diversity, Gender, Religion, Caste, Popular Struggles and Movements, Challenges to Democracy, Citizenship, Nationalism, Secularism, Federalism, Planning Commission and Five-Year Plans, Peasants, Zamindars, and the State, Understanding Partition, and Mathematical Reason be excluded from the existing curriculum for purposes of examinations.

In effect, all those materials that bear on the formation of republican citizenship, a republican constitution, and a critical understanding of how we came to be and who we are, and what our role as citizens of a republic is in upholding republican principles are to be ejected as matters of lesser consequence than the imbibing of supposedly ideologically neutral skills. The ejection of such materials, of course, reveals how frustrated authorities are with their critical and social import.

All this of course falls pat within the intellectual parameters of a nationalism that looks upon open liberal enquiry into state formations as anathema. In so far as such enquiry often brings into question the unanalysed or tendentious economic, cultural and historical predilections of closed authority structures, it is always the social sciences and truthful history writing that present the most obstacles to the closure of the governing arrangements of autocratic rule.

Also read: CBSEs Deletion of Chapters on Ecology, Evolution During Pandemic Ironic, Say Biologists

It should be clear from the above list of exclusions that the bad and the ugly must be jettisoned from study and deliberation; unsurprisingly, all of these exclusions impinge on the right of diverse oppressed segments of the citizenry to learn of both their sources of oppression and their republican rights and prerogatives.

Coming as this does in the wake of what we have seen of the plight of millions of trudging immigrantsan instructive episode that brought to the fore the continuing fault lines of caste, class, gender, and religious identitythe diktat seems to announce a clampdown on such learning and pedagogy that may raise questions of macro-historical distress and discrimination that continue to plague the republic.

Note that the honourable minster does not include such subjects in the core values of education or of learning achievement.

Just as one wonders what Franklin may have thought of the current goings-on in the American Republic, one may wonder what the founding fathers of the Indian freedom movement and the framers of the Indian Constitution may have thought of these revanchist moves in the substance and conduct of Indian school education.

John Dewey, that doyen of educationists, once wrote that the true aim and purpose of education is education.

Not so.

Badri Raina has taught at Delhi University.

Read more from the original source:

Republican Values, Or Things That Students Need Not Learn - The Wire

New Delhi: Every day, an average of five people die in custody in India, with some of them succumbing to torture in police or judicial custody. 2019 was no better, as 117 people died in police custody while 1,606 deaths were recorded in judicial custody. And yet, there has not been a single conviction in the deaths of 500 persons allegedly due to torture in police custody between 2005 and 2018.

A report by the National Campaign Against Torture a platform for NGOs working on torture in India has highlighted how torture continues to remain a favoured tool in the hands of the police to extract information and confessions, or sometimes just to victimise oppressed sections of society.

The India: Annual Report on Torture 2019 has also identified `15 trends of torture and impunity which reveal how torture has also become a systemic tool of oppression, extortion and silencing dissent. Further, it alleges that high levels of criminality exist within the police and amongst jail officials.

Watch: Indias 23-Year-Old Failure to Ratify UN Convention Against Torture is Shameful

Drawing from the past, the report said with respect to the death of 500 persons remanded to police custody by court between 2005-18, 281 cases were registered and 54 policemen were chargesheeted, but not one has been convicted so far.

The report said in 2019, the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) recorded 1,723 cases of death in custody. It noted that most deaths in police custody occur primarily as a result of torture. Of the 125 deaths in police custody, 93 (74.4%) were due to alleged torture or foul play while 24 people (19.2%) died under suspicious circumstances such as suspected suicide (16 persons), illness (7 persons) and slipping in bathroom (1 person). Uttar Pradesh had the highest incidence of such deaths with 14 cases, followed by Tamil Nadu and Punjab with 11 cases each.

Many theft suspects allegedly tortured to death

The report also highlighted how while probing non-heinous crimes, police personnel in several states went to the extent of torturing the suspects to death. It said the practice of torturing the suspects in police custody to punish them or gather information or extract confessions continued to be rampant.

From a 17-year-old boy in Tamil Nadu, to Hira Bajania of Gujarat, Karan Kumar of Punjab, Nesar Ansari of Bihar and Ashok Bansal of Madhya Pradesh, the report cited cases where people were allegedly tortured to death only because they were suspected to have committed thefts. This apart, it pointed out how some, like Rajesh of Kerala, died by suicide as they are unable to bear such torture.

Also read: Custodial Torture: It Is the Criminal Justice System That Requires Investigation

In some cases, groups of people are also subjected to torture as the cops want to extract confessions. In this regard, the report cited the case of two Dalit brothers Deepak and Dashrath and 12 labourers, including women, of Gujarat who were tortured to extract confessions in connection with a case of murder. Often, it said, people are also tortured by cops or jail staff to extort money from them or their relatives.

Torture includes beating, pulling nails, burning and even rape

The method of torture revealed by the report show the level of criminality in the police and jail officials. It also shows how operating in closed systems, they have a sense of entitlement and impunity.

The report said from acts like slapping, kicking with boots, beating with sticks, pulling hair, torture also includes barbaric methods like hammering iron nails in the body (as in the case of Gufran Alam and Taslim Ansari of Bihar), applying roller on legs and burning (as happened to Rizwan Asad Pandit of Jammu & Kashmir), and falanga or beating with sticks on the soles (as with Rajkumar of Kerala).

Sometimes, the police and jail staff even go to the extent of stabbing people with a screwdriver (as Pradeep Tomar of Uttar Pradesh was subjected to) or giving electric shock (as with Yadav Lal Prasad of Punjab and Monu of Uttar Pradesh). Often, private parts are also targeted. There have been instances of cops pouring petrol on private parts (as in the case of Monu of Uttar Pradesh) or applying chilly powder to them (in the case of Raj Kumar of Kerala)

Sexual crimes also perpetrated by the custodians of law

As part of torture, the report pointed to cases where the victims were forced to perform oral sex (as in the case of Hira Bajania and 12 others of Gujarat). Also, it said women continue to be tortured or targeted for sexual violence in custody.

In this regard, the report said a 35-year-old Dalit woman was allegedly illegally detained, subjected to torture and raped in police custody by nine police personnel at Sardarshahar police station in Churu district of Rajasthan. Her nails were also plucked by the cops who tortured her, the report said.

Most victims from poor, marginalised sections

The report said most victims were from poor and marginalised sections and were targeted because of their socio-economic status. It said 75 of the 125 people killed in police custody belonged to such communities with 13 of them being Dalits or from tribal communities, 15 being Muslims and 37 being those who were picked up for petty crimes.

Also read: Most States Have Flouted Mandatory Judicial Inquiry into Custodial Deaths for 15 Years

After these heinous crimes of torture, the report said, the police often tries to cover up by destroying incriminating evidence of torture, not conducting post-mortems or cremating the bodies of torture victims in haste.

The NCAT recorded at least four such cases. These included the 17-year-old boy from Tamil Nadu; Hira Bajania of Gujarat, and Mangal Das of Tripura.

Even minors not spared

On how minors also end up being victims, the report said it was because the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act, 2000 has not been implemented properly. It pointed out that those allegedly killed due to torture include four children in police custody and one in a juvenile home.

In jails too, the report said, torture was common. In this regard, it referred to how Nabbir, an inmate of Tihar jail in Delhi was allegedly tortured by a jail superintendent who branded Om symbol into his back before depriving him of food for two days.

Torture by armed forces

The NCAT report also accused the Indian Army and Central Armed Forces deployed in the insurgency affected areas and the border areas of being involved in torture. It said Mungshang Konghay was allegedly tortured in the custody of 17th Assam Rifles at Litan in Ukhrul district of Manipur in May 2019. The victim alleged that he was tortured to make him confess that he is a member of an underground group, it added.

Similarly, it said, in June 2019, 17-year-old Tarun Mondal was allegedly tortured to death in the custody of Border Security Force (BSF) in Murshidabad district of West Bengal. Suspected of cattle smuggling, he was first shot below the knee and then beaten with boots and rifles till he fell unconscious.

Also read: Justice for Jayaraj and Bennix Means Ending a Culture of Impunity

The report also blamed armed opposition groups like those in Jammu and Kashmir and Nagaland of using torture against informers. It said two people Arif Sofi of Khudwani and Mehraj Ahmed Dar were abducted by militants from their homes in Kulgam district of J&K on the suspicion of being informers. Though they were later released, one of them succumbed to his injuries.

Similarly, Hangkon Solting was tortured to death by alleged National Socialist Council of Nagaland (NSCN) (R) militants in Changlang district of Arunachal Pradesh, it said. It also spoke about how Maoists use brutal killing and torture of their hostages, including after being subjected to summary trial in so-called `Jan Adalats or peoples courts, in full public view to instil fear among the people.

Centre not keen on bringing own law, ratifying UN law against torture

Finally, despite the large number of cases of torture being reported each year, the NCAT lamented that the Government of India has no intention to ratify the United Nations Convention against Torture (UNCAT) or enact a national law against torture despite the Law Commission of India submitting the draft Prevention of Torture Bill, 2017 for enactment by the parliament in October 2017.

It added that the refusal of the Supreme Court, in its judgment of September 2019, to issue directions to the Centre to enact a national anti-torture law has further emboldened the government to not ratify the UNCAT.

Read this article:

Custodial Torture Continues Unabated in India Amidst Culture of Impunity: Report - The Wire

MinnPost photo by Tom Nehil

Rep. Ilhan Omars most prominent challenger in the DFL primary is Antone Melton-Meaux, a newcomer to DFL politics.

Welcome to this weeks edition of the D.C. Memo. This week from Washington, the Fifth District primary, Jason Lewis responds to MinnPosts coverage and Andy Slavitt says something hopeful on COVID-19.

Rep. Ilhan Omars most prominent challenger in the DFL primary is Antone Melton-Meaux, a newcomer to DFL politics. Whos funding Melton-Meaux? Where did he come from?

You can read more at MinnPost.

HuffPost also has a breakdown of the race, primarily looking at how right-leaning Israeli policy groups are targeting Omar and assisting Melton-Meaux. Heres a bit of it:

Antone Melton-Meaux, 47, the Minneapolis attorney seeking to unseat Omar, 37, in the states Aug. 11 Democratic primaries, raised more than $1.5 million in May alone.

Much of that cash comes from political action committees opposed to more U.S. pressure on the Israeli government. Two such groups, Pro-Israel America and NORPAC, have bundled upwards of $450,000 for Melton-Meaux to date.

These Israel hawks investment in unseating Omar follows an expensive and ultimately unsuccessful intervention on behalf of House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Eliot Engel. Given Engels massive deficit in the in-person vote, the New York Democrat has all-but-officially lost to Jamaal Bowman, a progressive challenger who is more critical of Israel, in his June 23 primary.

I reported last week that Jason Lewis, the endorsed Republican for Senate in MN, previously said Trayvon Martin was a thug, a kid in trouble, not a saint, not a role model, and guilty.

On Monday, Lewis was asked by a radio host what he thought about the discrepancy between his words about George Floyd, whose death he called tragic, and his words about Trayon Martin. He laughed.

Host: You called the death of George Floyd tragic, because it was, but you said different things after another person died a long time ago, so how do you rectify that, Jason?

Jason Lewis: I dont know, its kind of amazing.

You can listen to the clip here at about the 42 minute mark.

On July 7, during a speech in front of the Minnesota state capitol, Rep. Ilhan Omar called for dismantling the whole system of oppression. Right-wing media immediately jumped on the clip, suggesting that Omar was saying we need to dismantle the entire U.S. political system.

The Daily Caller ran this headline: Ilhan Omar Calls For The Dismantling Of US Economy, Political System.

Fact-checking website Snopes rates that claim as false.

Andy Slavitt, the former Acting Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, talked to the Minnesota State House about COVID-19 this week. His assessment: Minnesota can have its economy back if it stays hyper-vigilant.

The good news is that with all the time Ive spent with leaders around the country, with scientists, with epidemiologists, that with the right strategy and the right approach, we can get through this virus. We can live with this virus and we can indeed have our economy back, Slavitt told the Minnesota Houses Select Committee on Minnesotas Pandemic Response and Rebuilding.

Today we are asked whether the land these treaties promised remains an Indian reservation for purposes of federal criminal law. Because Congress has not said otherwise, we hold the government to its word, Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote, in a 5-4 decision affirming that nearly half of Oklahoma is within an Indian reservation.

Omar Rashad and Katherine Swartz for CalMatters: UC will sue Trump administration over new international student visa rules

Joining Harvard and MIT, the University of California is set to sue the Trump administration for a policy change that would force international students not taking in-person classes to leave the country.

Thats all for this week. Thanks for sticking around. Until next week, feel free to send tips, suggestions, and sound advice to: gschneider@minnpost.com. Follow at @gabemschneider. And dont forget to become a MinnPost member.

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DC Memo: Focus on the Fifth District - MinnPost