Study of infants finds that sleep differences by race, income emerge early

Night and 24-hour sleep durations increased less in Hispanic and Black infants compared to white infants, with differences largely explained by socioeconomic status

BRIGHAM AND WOMEN'S HOSPITAL

Research News

 

As almost any new parent will attest, the issue of infant sleep can be a nightmare. But the challenges and consequential health effects of infant sleep problems may, like so many other health disparities, disproportionately affect families of different racial/ethnic backgrounds and household socioeconomic statuses. A new study led in part by researchers from Brigham and Women's Hospital takes a look at 24-hour sleep-wake cycles for infants across racial/ethnic and socioeconomic categories. The team found several distinct differences in sleep-wake patterns, largely explained by discrepancies in socioeconomic status. Findings are published in Sleep.

"What we knew before this study was that, in general, individuals with low socioeconomic backgrounds, as well as children and adults who are minorities, had shorter sleep than white individuals and higher socioeconomic individuals," said senior author Susan Redline, MD, MPH, of Brigham's Division of Sleep and Circadian Disorders. "What wasn't so clear was when those differences first emerged."

Previous studies have used responses from surveys of parents to draw conclusions about how sleep duration varies by race and socioeconomic status, but when such disparities arise was previously unknown. This study characterized sleep-wake patterns in infants at 1- and 6-months old using ankle-placed actigraphs and parent-completed sleep diaries, examining differences among infants with different racial/ethnic backgrounds and household socioeconomic statuses.

The study consisted of 306 infants -- 42.5 percent non-Hispanic white, 32.7 percent Hispanic, 17.3 percent Asian, and 7.5 percent Black. Between the ages of 1 and 6 months, night sleep duration increased by 65.7 minutes, night awakenings decreased by 2.2 episodes, and daytime sleep duration decreased by 73.3 minutes, confirming that night sleep increases and day sleep decreases overall in the first six months of life.

The team found several distinct differences in sleep-wake patterns across these categories:

• Black and Hispanic infants experienced less of an increase in night sleep length when compared to white infants;
• infants in families with lower maternal education and household income experienced less of an increase in night sleep duration;
• Asian infants exhibited more frequent night awakenings than all other racial categories.
• Additionally, Asian infants were the only group to still have a night sleep duration deficit compared to white infants at 6 months after adjusting for household socioeconomic status, meaning, unlike Hispanic and Black infants, Asian infant night sleep duration may not be explained by corresponding SES.

Car rides, parental rocking, and other environmental factors may reduce the accuracy of a sleep-wake assessment. Additionally, the numbers of Black and Asian families were relatively low, driving Redline to conclude that the disproportionate night awakenings recorded in Asian infants may have been by sheer chance. Such discrepancies still intrigue Redline, as they point to other avenues for exploration: parenting styles, environmental cues, maternal stress, and more.

"We know that there are these significant differences in sleep duration and sleep consolidation in older children and adults; we know those are associated with negative health outcomes and behaviors," said Redline. "Now we see that they emerge early in life, pointing to a totally new set of risk factors."

This study is one of four in a longitudinal collaborative effort to investigate the sleep-wake cycles of children ages 1 month through 2 years, with the primary goal of tracking weight gain.

###

Research funded by the National Institutes of Health, National Institute of Diabetes, Digestive and Kidney Disease. Other principal investigators are Elsie Taveras, MD (Massachusetts General Hospital) and Kirsten Davis, PhD, (Boston College).

Paper Cited:
Redline, Susan et al. "Emergence of racial/ethnic and socioeconomic differences in objectively measured sleep-wake patterns in early infancy: results of the Rise & SHINE study" Sleep
DOI: 10.1093/sleep/zsaa193

 

Here's why conservatives and liberals differ on COVID-19

New Lehigh University College of Business study looks at getting everyone to agree on the pandemic threat

LEHIGH UNIVERSITY

Research News

 

IMAGE: DANIEL ZANE IS AN ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF MARKETING AT LEHIGH UNIVERSITY'S COLLEGE OF BUSINESS. view more 

CREDIT: LEHIGH UNIVERSITY

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, political ideology has been perhaps the strongest predictor of consumers' perceptions of the coronavirus' threat. According to a new study from Lehigh University's College of Business, the differences between conservative and liberal responses to COVID-19 are mitigated when people perceive the virus itself to have agency -- the ability to control its own actions and thus exert power over people.

Conservatives are generally more sensitive to threats that are relatively high in agency, propose Daniel Zane, assistant professor of marketing in Lehigh University's College of Business, and co-author Luke Nowlan, assistant professor of marketing at KU Leuven, Belgium, in their study.

"In the context of the pandemic, you have these players -- the policymakers, the American public, media organizations, your neighbors - that, at least relative to the unobservable virus, have more agency," says Zane, "whereas this virus has less agency."

According to the paper, "Getting Conservatives and Liberals to Agree on the COVID-19 Threat," published in the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research in September, conservatives tend to see free will as the primary driver of outcomes in life, whereas liberals are more accepting of the idea that randomness plays a role. Compared to liberals, conservatives tend to attribute outcomes to purposeful actions. So in the context of the pandemic, they're more likely to blame any negative outcomes in their lives on these more agentic policymakers or fellow Americans rather than the virus itself.

"According to our study, conservatives might at least in part be less likely to wear masks because they don't feel as threatened by the virus itself," says Zane. "Any hardships that they're facing in their lives around health, financial issues, even going to movie theaters or shopping malls, might not necessarily trace back to the virus for them. So, they feel like they don't have to protect themselves from it."

To get greater buy-in about safety measures like wearing masks and economic shutdowns, Zane says that at the beginning of the pandemic, and even still now, instead of throwing around statistics, policymakers and health officials should have started talking about the virus in terms that gave it more agency.

"If they talked about the virus as having a motive, as being a palpable enemy that is seeking to attack humans," says Zane, "maybe you get greater buy-in from the start on the part of conservatives. We also show in our research that liberals are not driven away by doing this, so it seems like a good move."

###

Daniel Zane discusses this research on the Lehigh Business ilLUminate podcast .

About Lehigh Business:
Lehigh University's College of Business is an internationally renowned college dedicated to the scholarship of the next generation of business makers. Aligning business with technology and data analytics, its global curriculum makes the critical connections today's business world demands. We are boundary breakers that encourage and facilitate learning beyond disciplines, borders and classroom walls. And with a distinguished faculty at the forefront of research, we are delivering the highest caliber education for the business elites of tomorrow. Learn more here.

 

Plastic pollution is everywhere. Study reveals how it travels

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY, ENGINEERING SCHOOL

Research News

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VIDEO: RESEARCH HAS SHOWN HOW PLASTICS, DEPICTED HERE AS GREEN PARTICLES, TRAVEL LONG DISTANCES IN SOIL AND OTHER SUBSTANCES THROUGH A PROCESS OF REPEATEDLY GETTING STUCK AND THEN RELEASED. view more 

CREDIT: PRINCETON UNIVERSITY/DATTA LAB

Plastic pollution is ubiquitous today, with microplastic particles from disposable goods found in natural environments throughout the globe, including Antarctica. But how those particles move through and accumulate in the environment is poorly understood. Now a Princeton University study has revealed the mechanism by which microplastics, like Styrofoam, and particulate pollutants are carried long distances through soil and other porous media, with implications for preventing the spread and accumulation of contaminants in food and water sources.

The study, published in Science Advances on November 13, reveals that microplastic particles get stuck when traveling through porous materials such as soil and sediment but later break free and often continue to move substantially further. Identifying this stop-and-restart process and the conditions that control it is new, said Sujit Datta, assistant professor of chemical and biological engineering and associated faculty of the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment, the High Meadows Environmental Institute and the Princeton Institute for the Science and Technology of Materials. Previously, researchers thought that when microparticles got stuck, they generally stayed there, which limited understanding of particle spread.

Datta led the research team, which found that the microparticles are pushed free when the rate of fluid flowing through the media remains high enough. The Princeton researchers showed that the process of deposition, or the formation of clogs, and erosion, their breakup, is cyclical; clogs form and then are broken up by fluid pressure over time and distance, moving particles further through the pore space until clogs reform.

"Not only did we find these cool dynamics of particles getting stuck, clogged, building up deposits and then getting pushed through, but that process enables particles to get spread out over much larger distances than we would have thought otherwise," said Datta.

The team included Navid Bizmark, a postdoctoral research associate in the Princeton Institute for the Science and Technology of Materials, graduate student Joanna Schneider, and Rodney Priestley, professor of chemical and biological engineering and vice dean for innovation.

They tested two types of particles, "sticky" and "nonsticky," which correspond with actual types of microplastics found in the environment. Surprisingly, they found that there was no difference in the process itself; that is, both still clogged and unclogged themselves at high enough fluid pressures. The only difference was where the clusters formed. The "nonsticky" particles tended to get stuck only at narrow passageways, whereas the sticky ones seemed to be able to get trapped at any surface of the solid medium they encountered. As a result of these dynamics, it is now clear that even "sticky" particles can spread out over large areas and throughout hundreds of pores.

In the paper, the researchers describe pumping fluorescent polystyrene microparticles and fluid through a transparent porous media developed in Datta's lab, and then watching the microparticles move under a microscope. Polystyrene is the plastic microparticle that makes up Styrofoam, which is often littered into soils and waterways through shipping materials and fast food containers. The porous media they created closely mimics the structure of naturally-occurring media, including soils, sediments, and groundwater aquifers.

Typically porous media are opaque, so one cannot see what microparticles are doing or how they flow. Researchers usually measure what goes in and out of the media, and try to infer the processes going on inside. By making transparent porous media, the researchers overcame that limitation.

"Datta and colleagues opened the black box," said Philippe Coussot, a professor at Ecole des Ponts Paris Tech and an expert in rheology who is unaffiliated with the study.

"We figured out tricks to make the media transparent. Then, by using fluorescent microparticles, we can watch their dynamics in real time using a microscope," said Datta. "The nice thing is that we can actually see what individual particles are doing under different experimental conditions."

The study, which Coussot described as a "remarkable experimental approach," showed that although the Styrofoam microparticles did get stuck at points, they ultimately were pushed free, and moved throughout the entire length of the media during the experiment.

The ultimate goal is to use these particle observations to improve parameters for larger scale models to predict the amount and location of contamination. The models would be based on varying types of porous media and varying particle sizes and chemistries, and help to more accurately predict contamination under various irrigation, rainfall, or ambient flow conditions. The research can help inform mathematical models to better understand the likelihood of a particle moving over a certain distance and reaching a vulnerable destination, such as a nearby farmland, river or aquifer. The researchers also studied how the deposition of microplastic particles impacts the permeability of the medium, including how easily water for irrigation can flow through soil when microparticles are present.

Datta said this experiment is the tip of the iceberg in terms of particles and applications that researchers can now study. "Now that we found something so surprising in a system so simple, we're excited to see what the implications are for more complex systems," said Datta.

He said, for example, this principle could yield insight into how clays, minerals, grains, quartz, viruses, microbes and other particles move in media with complex surface chemistries.

The knowledge will also help the researchers understand how to deploy engineered nanoparticles to remediate contaminated groundwater aquifers, perhaps leaked from a manufacturing plant, farm, or urban wastewater stream.

Beyond environmental remediation, the findings are applicable to processes across a spectrum of industries, from drug delivery to filtration mechanisms, effectively any media in which particles flow and accumulate, Datta said.

###

This work was supported by the Grand Challenges Initiative of the High Meadows Environmental Institute, the Alfred Rheinstein Faculty Award from the School of Engineering and Applied Science, and a postdoctoral fellowship from the Princeton Center for Complex Materials (PCCM) to Navid Bizmark.

BOOKS The Relevance of Marxist Critique

In this book, writes reviewer Beeber, the author "unapologetically asserts the continued relevance of Marxism, and in particular the continued necessity for a class-based critical approach to literature."

November 4, 2020 Matthew Beeber AGAINST THE CURRENT

Marxist Literary Criticism Today
Barbara Foley
Pluto Press
ISBN: 9780745338835

IN 2001, THE late Argentinean philosopher Ernesto Laclau and Belgian political theorist Chantal Mouffe, foundational proponents of what would become known as “post-Marxism,” asserted the following premise:

“In the mid-1970s, Marxist theorization had clearly reached an impasse. After an exceptionally rich and creative period in the 1960s, the limits of that expansion — which had its epicentre in Althusserianism, but also in a renewed interest in Gramsci and in the theoreticians of the Frankfurt School — were only too visible. There was an increasing gap between the realities of contemporary capitalism and what Marxism could legitimately subsume under its own categories.”

The two go on to observe that:

“This situation, on the whole, provoked two types of attitude: either to negate the changes, and to retreat unconvincingly to an orthodox bunker; or to add, in an ad hoc way, descriptive analyses of the new trends which were simply juxtaposed — without integration — to a theoretical body which remained largely unchanged.”*

Almost 20 years later (and more than 30 years after Laclau and Mouffe first formulated their position), the debate continues over the usefulness of “orthodox” Marxism — as opposed to any number of post- or neo- Marxisms like that of Laclau and Mouffe. Barbara Foley, Distinguished Professor Emerita of English at Rutgers University-Newark and a specialist on African-American and proletarian literature, unapologetically asserts the continued relevance of Marxism, and in particular the continued necessity for a class-based critical approach to literature, in her recent book, Marxist Literary Criticism Today.

Some critics will no doubt consider her position a “retreat” to an “orthodox bunker” — indeed the introduction to the volume makes clear its intentions to return to the “basics” of Marxism. As a whole, however, the book manages to depart from the dichotomous paths described by Laclau and Mouffe, charting a model for the “integration” of orthodox Marxism with our contemporary economic and social order.

While steadfast in its determination that Marxism still provides the necessary tools for the analysis of our present moment, the volume represents more than mere retrenchment. It addresses head-on many of the critiques made of Marxism’s limitations, offering rebuttals to such critiques that draw on a wide range of scholarship.
Entry into the Conversation

In its prologue and throughout many offset explanatory text boxes, Marxist Literary Criticism Today puts forth a coherent political position, representing a valid entry into discourse surrounding the continued relevance of Marxist theory.

Foley argues (against the likes of Laclau and Mouffe, who are referenced directly as foils), that neoliberal or “late” capitalism is still capitalism, that a class-based analysis is thus as necessary as ever, and that “it is those who have given up on the class-based critique of capital who are behind the times.” (xii)

Foley’s claim for the continued relevance of Marxist critique derives from an analysis of our current neoliberal moment as continuous within — rather than a departure from — capitalism as an overarching economic structure. We are, according to Foley “still very much in the longue duree […] of capitalism,” such that the critique of capitalism provided by Marxist analysis is as relevant today as it was during Marx’s time.

Working within what many would consider an orthodox Marxist framework, the goal of the book, and of its version of Marxist literary criticism, is to “contribute to the project of constructing what Antonio Gramsci called an alternative hegemony: an oppositional common-sense understanding of the ways in which artistic production and reception can either foster or fetter revolutionary change.” (124)

The offset text boxes answer what could be considered FAQs of Marxism, socratically voicing and responding to possible critiques. These text boxes do much of the work towards making the book’s topics relevant to today.

Foley does not shy away from such controversial topics as “What does it mean to say that class is the ‘primary’ analytical category for explaining social inequality and leveraging revolutionary social change? What about sexism and racism and modes of domination, and gender and race as modes of identity?”

Or, “What is the difference between chattel and free labor? Are they features of qualitatively different modes of production, or can they exist within a single social formation?;” or “Is Marxist value theory obsolete in the era of the internet?”

Many of these sidebars address questions that might indeed be asked by an undergraduate student, whereas others address questions of Marxism’s limitations which would more likely be raised by those already working within a Marxist framework.

The responses to these questions — such as the assertion that class, as an analytical tool, is in fact not an “axis of oppression” on par with gender or race but rather an “ur” category of Marxist analysis (which of course then includes the other two) — follow from Foley’s premise that the locus of contemporary oppression is not “multi-faceted,” but “unitary,” and “situated … in capital.” (xi)

Foley openly advocates for communism, yet does not engage in a defense of past or current regimes who identify with that term. The book makes clear that its interests lie in the idea of communism as theorized by Marx and Engels, not any historical substantiation of it. Indeed, the volume gives a wide berth to historical questions regarding the achievements or atrocities of past self-described communist regimes.

Despite this, Foley does not dismiss the “huge challenges” that “are posed not only by the coercive and ideological power of current elites but also by certain historical limitations in the legacy inherited from Marx and Engels themselves — as well as by problems inherited from past movements carried forward under the banner of one or another version of Marxism.” (xv)

An explanatory text box rhetorically asks, “Why do I use the term ‘communism’ rather than ‘socialism’ to denote the classless society superseding capitalism?” Foley responds by clarifying that despite their seeming interchangeability (even a return to Marx does not clear up the distinction, as he used both terms inconsistently), in the vocabulary of today, socialism often denotes a reformist position, one which many consider compatible with aspects of capitalism.

Foley writes that “countries designating themselves as socialist (the Soviet Union and China figure prominently here) retained so many features of capitalist inequality — including nationalist politics, unequal wages, and continuing divisions between mental and manual labor — that they reverted to capitalism.” (9)

Foley here both rejects a stagist approach — in which socialism is seen as the first stage towards achieving communism — and also any reformist version of socialism which could exist within capitalism. She simultaneously, if somewhat tacitly, argues that historical regimes such as the Soviet Union did not in fact achieve communism as Marx envisioned it, thus removing the burden from contemporary Marxist critics to either defend or condemn them.
Lit Crit Primer

Informed by the continued necessity of Marxist critique, the main text of Marxist Literary Criticism Today puts into practice the politics it advocates for in its prologue, explaining the basics of class-based criticism and demonstrating its applicability to a wide range of contemporary literature.

The book fills a need for such a volume, being the first entrant into that field since Terry Eagleton (Marxism and Literary Criticism, 1976) and Raymond Williams (Marxism and Literature, 1977). The first half serves as a foundational course in Marxist studies more broadly (not limited to its application to literary criticism).

This is both a primer on the work of Marx and Engels and on Marxist studies since Marx, akin to books such as Perry Anderson’s Considerations on Western Marxism. Foley divides this first section into three major areas of Marxist studies: historical materialism, political economy, and ideology.

The first, “Historical Materialism,” draws mainly from Marx and Engel’s The Communist Manifesto and from the famous preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, giving a general overview of Marx’s philosophy, including his reformulation of Hegelian dialectics, the distinction between materialism and idealism, and the relation between base and superstructure.

The following section, “Political Econ­omy,” offers an overview of Marx’s critique in Capital, defining key concepts such as commodities, surplus value, and alienation.

The third section, “Ideology,” begins by explaining that Marx himself uses the term in three distinct senses: 1) “illusory consciousness,” 2) “the standpoint of a class,” and 3) “socially necessary misunderstanding.”

Marx’s multifaceted use of “ideology” as a term — and his incomplete theorization of it as a concept — has contributed to its being one of the richer fields of interrogation by 20th-century Marxist thinkers. Foley charts the development of ideology critique, giving concise overviews of Lukács on reification, Althusser on interpellation, and Gramsci on hegemony.

In particular, the focus on hegemony powerfully anchors the volume as a whole, emphasizing the role of literature — and of the critique of literature — in its “capacity to encompass a wide range of modes of resistance to ruling-class hegemony.” (83)

The second half of Foley’s book directly addresses the ways that Marxist analytics can be put to use in a practice of literary criticism, and in turn how literary criticism can play a role in challenging ruling-class hegemony.

Foley divides this half of the book into three sections, the first attempting to define literature itself, the second addressing many current strains of Marxist literary criticism, and the third giving several examples of Marxist analyses of classic literary texts.

The first of these makes a convincing argument for the need to conceive of literature as a bounded category of cultural production, and usefully articulates the political implications of how we define this category. The book’s attempt to actually provide a definition of “literature” is, however, less convincing, comprised of thirteen characteristics of which many are either vague or subjective, such as “greatness” or “depth.”

The strength of the second half of the book lies in the “Marxist Literary Criticism” section, in which Foley both traces dominant strains of Marxist critique of bourgeois literature (the majority of which expresses the ideology of the ruling class), but also addresses the role of critique regarding overtly revolutionary texts.

Foley begins with Paul Ricoeur’s concept of a “hermeneutics of suspicion,” providing a list of “maneuvers” of which the Marxist critic is rightly suspicious, such as dehistoricism (capitalism has always been the dominant economic mode) and naturalization (hierarchical social structures are natural).

Another major strain of Marxist criticism, “symptomatic reading,” attempts to locate what Fredric Jameson calls the “political unconscious” of a text, such that we “view the given text as a mediation — indeed, a series of mediations — of the contradictions shaping the world from which it emerged.” (131)

Foley also responds to critics who have questioned Marxist critique for a number of reasons, allowing for the validity of some (e.g. critical techniques such as symptomatic reading are better suited to analyzing bourgeois literature than to overtly political writing), while vehemently rejecting others.

In particular, Foley responds to claims from Rita Felsky and others that Marxist criticism ignores the “‘joy, hope, love and optimism’ embedded in great works of literature,” arguing that “this accusation constitutes little more than an updating of Cold War-era formalism, extending the radical-baiting historically directed at specifically Marxist criticism to the entire domain of politically charged cultural critique.” (136)
Closing Arguments

In the book’s final section, “Marxist Pedagogy,” Foley performs Marxist readings of a range of texts, providing both useful examples to students and a formidable resource to teachers of Marxist criticism.

The section offers pairs of poems organized by themes such as “art,” “nature,” and “alienation,” often putting canonical bourgeois texts in conversation with overtly radical works.

In one particularly effective example, Langston Hughes’ “Johannesburg Mines” (1925) serves as the foil to Archibald MacLeish’s oft-taught “Ars Poetica” (1926).

Whereas “Ars Poetica” argues that “A poem should not mean / But be,” suggesting its relevance purely to the aesthetic realm, Hughes’s poem directly addresses the political, specifically the conditions of the “240,000 natives working / In the Johannesburg mines.”

Yet while Hughes asserts that poetry should in fact “do” things in the political realm, his poem “interrogates the limits of literary representation,” asking, “What kind of poem / Would you make of that?” Thus, while both poems ultimately question the political utility of art, MacLeish’s serves as a condemnation of poetry which attempts any kind of political engagement, while Hughes’s on the other hand laments poetry’s limitations in fully expressing political conditions.

Foley contextualizes her readings of both poems, explaining that “In the hands of the New Critics — who, we will recall, elevated formalism to the level of political and cultural orthodoxy during the Cold War — over the decades MacLeish’s poem would come to stand in for a critique of the entire tradition of socially committed poetry that had exercised widespread influence during and beyond the Depression years.” (222)

Through such pairings, Foley demonstrates the utility of Marxist criticism in understanding both “politically engaged” work as well as art that participates in the pretense of an apolitical “art for art’s sake.”

Overall, Foley makes a convincing argument both for the “continued need for a classless future,” and for the continued relevance of Marxist critique in achieving this project, against post-Marxists and others who would suggest that Marxism has become rather “part of the problem.”

In its capacity as a literary criticism primer, the book practices its politics, demonstrating the applicability of Marxist critique to a wide range of cultural production, both contemporary and historic.

In so doing, Foley avoids the twin accusations of Laclau and Mouffe — either blind retrenchment to orthodoxy or ad-hoc application — offering a model for the elusive integration of orthodox Marxism with the present social and economic landscape.

Laclau and Mouffe published their seminal work, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, in 1985. A second edition was published in 2001 with a new introduction, from which this quotation was taken (viii).

Matthew Beeber is a PhD candidate at Northwestern University, where he is writing a dissertation about the role of literary institutions in the 1930s proletarian movement. His work focuses on the writing circles, congresses, journals and printing presses that both undergirded and shaped the literary production of the radical 1930s.

Leonard Cohen
Democracy Is Coming
to the USA

November 6, 2020



A Spadecaller video featuring the visual arts of Matthew Schwartz in accompaniment with Leonard Cohen's song, Democracy.

https://portside.org/video/2020-11-06/leonard-cohen-democracy-coming-usa

Black People Defeated Trump (The Movement for Black Lives)

We Win when we Follow Black Women (Showing Up for Racial Justice - SURJ)

Black People Defeated Trump (The Movement for Black Lives)
The defeat of Donald Trump and the building of grass roots political independent. 

Reports from The Movement for Black Lives (M4BL); Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ); 

The Movement for Black Lives (M4BL),

Black People Defeated Trump (The Movement for Black Lives)

Black people showed up, and we won. From Philly to Atlanta to Detroit, Black people defeated Trump, and pushed back against white supremacy. We proved that the majority of people in this nation support our fight for Black lives and oppose hate, bigotry and indifference.

Black people moved through so much pain and heartbreak to get to today. We’ve lost over 235,000 people to COVID-19, including a disproportionate number of our family and loved ones. We lost millions of jobs when we already face a precarious economic situation every day due to racial capitalism. And lawmakers across the country did everything they could to stop us from organizing, voting and building power.

We won anyway. This is a testament to the power of Black people and Black organizing.

This win is also a testament to the power of Black women. Black cis and trans women and femmes are at the forefront of our movement. Black women rejected the white supremacist agenda and mobilized our communities to turn out and vote.

But our work is not done. We have always said: the fight for justice does not stop at the ballot box. We have our first Black woman Vice President alongside many new Black women, trans and non-binary leaders who were voted into office across the country. Now, our job will be to hold these leaders accountable to the people’s demands.



We have a vision for Black lives and a plan for the first 100 days of the new administration.

We will champion the BREATHE Act to divest from ineffective, racist policing and invest in our communities. We will dig in on local defund the police campaigns all over the U.S. We will double down on our commitment to be about ALL Black lives including trans, gender nonconforming and intersex people, disabled people and immigrants.


Keep Showing Up With Us:


RSVP for our post-election roundtable next week. We’ll detail our plan for the first 100 days and beyond.


Join 150,000+ people and become a community co-sponsor of the BREATHE Act.


Stay ready, be alert and continue organizing to safeguard our communities against state and/or white supremacist violence and repression. The people have spoken and we must ensure the will of the people is respected.


Follow us on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter to get and share updates using #M4BL and #TheWorkisNotDone.


Text POWER TO 90975 to receive our calls to action.

We must make Black lives matter after elections, too. And we must hold politicians accountable to the Black people who put them into office. We’re not going anywhere — Black movement was here long before this election and will be here long after.

In power and solidarity,

The Movement for Black Lives

[The Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) formed in December of 2014, was created as a space for Black organizations across the country to debate and discuss the current political conditions, develop shared assessments of what political interventions were necessary in order to achieve key policy, cultural and political wins, convene organizational leadership in order to debate and co-create a shared movement wide strategy. Under the fundamental idea that we can achieve more together than we can separately.]

We Win when we Follow Black Women 

(Showing Up for Racial Justice - SURJ)



Today, we are all breathing a collective sigh of relief. The people of this country – led by communities of color – have voted out Donald Trump.

This win is a testament to the power of multi-racial grassroots organizing. These last four years we have again seen that People of Color, but most especially Black women, offer the vision, leadership, and organizing work to get all of us free.

I am so proud of how we showed up in this election. We knew white voters elected Trump and we took responsibility for organizing our own to get him out. We threw down in Georgia – a place the Democratic Party had written off and where Black women organizers have been leading the way. We joined partners on the ground in Georgia, including the New Georgia Project, Black Voters Matter, Fair Fight, Working Families Party, and so many other groups that had already laid the foundation to flip Georgia because of their tremendous ongoing work to expand the electorate with more Black voters while keeping real solutions to working people’s problems front and center.

SURJ made over a million calls to white voters who we knew were suffering under this administration and who are infrequent voters. Over 3,800 SURJ members had 36,000 conversations with voters and secured 21,200 commitments to vote.

And it worked. The New York Times is reporting that Biden made major gains in majority-white counties among white people who didn’t attend college. That's who we called.

This is what it looks like to organize our own – and to do it at scale and in service of a vision set by Black movement leaders.

When we build multi-racial coalitions and invest in long-haul organizing, we win, y’all! And let’s be clear: defeating Trump was a movement win, not a win for the Democratic establishment. Years of powerful Latinx organizing laid the groundwork for progressive wins in Arizona. Black leadership paved the way to defeat Trump in Georgia. Grassroots organizers across the country built the people power to send visionary progressive candidates to the halls of Congress.

We know the road ahead will not be easy. Our movement is going to have to fight hard against a Biden administration – and we’re up against an emboldened Right. More white people voted for Trump in 2020 than in 2016 and the Right will not let up for a single second. We’ve got our work to do to continue to organize more of our people away from white supremacy.

Today, we celebrate – and recommit to organizing alongside our partners for the long-haul.

We now know control of the Senate will be decided in Georgia on January 5th. Want to take action with us to help win? Sign up here and we’ll be in touch to put you to work after we’ve checked in with our partners and rested up

In solidarity and with hope,
Erin Heaney
SURJ Director

Showing Up for Racial Justice - SURJ
81 Prospect Street
Brooklyn, NY 11201

BOOKS 

You’re Tearing Me Apart: On William L. Barney’s “Rebels in the Making: The Secession Crisis and the Birth of the Confederacy”

The Enlightenment and other liberation ideologies had put slavery under fire. “This was the international context of insurgent liberalism that the Confederacy sought to reverse with its bid for a reactionary slaveholders’ republic..

November 5, 2020 Bill Thompson LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS

Oxford University Press,


SECESSION OF CONFEDERATE STATES from the Union in 1861 was the inevitable crest of the defensive battles fought by slaveholders after the first moral assaults on slavery emerged in the late 18th century.

The Enlightenment and other liberation ideologies had put slavery under fire, an attack that intensified with the abolition of the overseas trade in kidnapped humans in 1808. Meanwhile, a new middle class was emerging with republican sensibilities, and the old order was starting to crumble in Europe.

“This was the international context of insurgent liberalism that the Confederacy sought to reverse with its bid for a reactionary slaveholders’ republic ruled by a landed elite,” writes William L. Barney in his masterly new study, Rebels in the Making.

Rebels in the Making: The Secession Crisis and the Birth of the Confederacy
By William L. Barney
Oxford University Press; 392 Pages
August 3, 2020
Hardcover: $34.95
ISBN-13: 9780190076085

Oxford University Press


The election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860 and the fear of antislavery agents spreading a freedom message in the South created intense paranoia that the Southern way of life and its institutions were under attack. And many Northern political figures, including President James Buchanan, remained sympathetic to the South’s position, and to their Southern colleagues in Congress. Abolitionists were a minority even in the North, and often reviled, but their voices were becoming more insistent.

Rebels in the Making, the first one-volume narrative history of secession in all the 15 slave states, is both a withering indictment of secessionist folly and a concerted attempt to examine the divergent and often contradictory threads of its fabric. The years 1860 and 1861 were pivotal, but Barney, a professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, also demonstrates how revolt had been fomenting for decades.

Rebels documents the initial circumspection of the more prosperous members of the planter class and locates the impetus for secession in the rungs below them: younger slaveholders whose aspirations for higher status were thwarted, in part, by increasing economic decay.

An early Faustian bargain set the stage for later disaster. Delegates to the Constitutional Convention of 1787 negotiated key protections for slaves as property and the unassailable power of masters. The nullification crisis of 1832–’33 was only the first flare-up of the hardwired trouble the new nation had created for itself. The stakes rose with the emergence of organized abolitionism.

The drive for secession evolved incrementally (with many a setback) on a state-by-state basis, albeit with much of South Carolina’s planter class and notorious “fire-eaters” applying a bellows to the flame. While its Lowcountry planter class dreamed of regaining lost glory, the most fervent of the radical demagogues were not above intimidation, rigged elections, and violence to push their agenda. More conservative and Unionist political elements in the South impeded them for a time, but the latter’s hopes for accommodation or compromise vanished with Lincoln’s call for troops.

The war that came claimed a staggering 750,000 lives — the price some were willing to pay, and others compelled to pay, for the defense of slavery. But as Barney notes, slaughter and immediate postwar ruin was only a down payment on the South’s bill of atonement.

For all the persistent noise about “state’s rights” having been the real linchpin of secession, Barney produces a barrage of incontrovertible evidence that the war was entirely about slavery, as attested to again and again by prominent Southern whites of the day. “The prime cause of this conflict is African slavery in this country,” declared South Carolina planter Henry Ravenel. “On the issue of the contest rests its triumph or its complete overthrow.”

No ruling class relinquishes power willingly, and secessionists claiming Northern “usurpation” and “aggression” saw the only alternative to departing the Union as one of desecration of the white race, the degradation of Southern manhood, economic collapse, and anarchy.

“The liberty to own slaves, fears of those same slaves, defense of their homes, and a demand for the respect of an outside world that defamed them as sinners were all one and the same as a motive for secession and independence,” Barney writes.

For their part, many yeoman whites and recent European immigrants in the South feared competition from emancipated slaves for a dwindling number of jobs. Radicals, by contrast, embraced the idyll of an agrarian republic unimpeded by working-class discontent and any competition from manufacturing interests. It was a pipe dream.

Repression notwithstanding, a few dissenting voices could be heard in the South. Not the least of them was James L. Petigru, a South Carolina politician and jurist of Charleston who proclaimed that the Confederacy was “formed on principles that are hollow and rotten, on the shallow conceit that all nations will pay tribute to King Cotton, and that our new reading of ‘The Whole Duty of Man’ will be accepted by Christendom.”

Secessionists’ miscalculations and delusions of the grandeur to come when the South was an independent nation, thus securing the moral and legal continuance of slavery, were legion. To the modern observer, they seem ludicrous. Secessionists maintained the Confederacy’s constitution was the true democratic instrument, all the while asserting that the welfare of slaves under Southern stewardship was vastly more benign. They claimed secession’s supposed popular support in the Lower South, where slavery suffused every aspect of life, derived from the whole of Southern society. But they ignored the fact that this “groundswell” was top-down: heavily influenced by the secessionists’ iron grip on governorships, state legislatures, and, most egregiously, the pulpit and much of the press.

It could be argued, as Barney does forcefully, that in many cases secession had no direct mandate from the people whatsoever. In the months leading up to secession, all opposition was quashed, often violently.

“Secession and Southern independence meant little to the poorest one-third of whites who owned neither land nor slaves,” he writes. “They entered the Confederate army primarily through the forced mechanism of the draft.”

The move to secession was filled with complexities and conundrums of the first order, with geographic, economic, cultural, class, and even slaveholder divisions. Barney details them exhaustively. So exhaustively, in fact, that were it not for his cogent organization and interpretation of the historical record, lay readers would get lost in the thickets. Even so, the sheer number of political machinations, shifting alliances, and class conflicts can be dizzying, despite the book’s accessibility to the general reader.

He gives full credit to an army of scholars who preceded him in the field, cementing his fascination with the period, from his student days at Columbia University to the present. But today, at 77, and with numerous titles published on the Civil War era, he is widely esteemed for his particular acumen, the probing quality of his research, and his considerable skills as a storyteller. Rebels in the Making is a narrative shot through with missed opportunities, appalling capitulations, extraordinary arrogance, unexpected fortitude, and a measure of disbelief that so great an American tragedy as the Civil War should have come to pass.

Even today, some still glorify postwar Confederate memories of “selfless sacrifice on the altar of Southern liberties,” oft coupled with gauzy moonlight and magnolias myths for the tourists. Barney gives such romantic nonsense the dismissal it deserves. As he concludes, “The legacy of secession was the prostrate South at war’s end engulfed in an unfathomable tragedy of death, poverty, and broken bodies.”

[Bill Thompson, a freelance book critic, arts and travel writer, is the former book review editor, film critic, and arts editor of The Charleston (S.C.) Post and Courier.]

BACKGROUNDER 

General Motors to Reopen Assembly Operations at Oshawa

This reopening is the result of negotiations with Unifor.

November 7, 2020 Jamie L. LaReau, Eric D. Lawrence

DETROIT FREE PRESS

Unifor members protest outside GM Canada headquarters., 

Unifor/Twitter

General Motors plans to invest $1.3 billion (Canadian) to reopen its assembly plant in Oshawa, Ontario.

The stunning announcement came Thursday during a news conference to discuss the tentative agreement Unifor, Canada's autoworkers union, had reached with GM. The news means about 2,000 workers and possibly up to 2,500 if a third shift is added would, in coming years, be working at the plant, which GM had previously decided to "unallocate."

The deal, which marks a major win for the union and covers about 1,700 of GM's 4,100 Unifor-represented workers, would still need to be ratified, but that is likely a formality. The contract, which would mean investments at GM's Canadian facilities in excess of $1.4 billion (Canadian), would see workers producing Chevrolet Silverado and GMC Sierra pickups in 2022. Pickups are a particularly popular and profitable segment of the automotive industry.

However, unlike investments announced as part of recent Ford Motor Co. and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles negotiations, GM's deal apparently does not include an electric vehicle production component.

Unifor National President Jerry Dias called the Oshawa news a reason to celebrate and announced that "we will be a complete assembly operation once again."

During the news conference Thursday, Dias choked back emotion at times as he described the development, effectively a reversal of what had been seen as a closure announcement in November 2018. That "news was incredibly devastating for the community of Oshawa and the tens of thousands of members and workers that it impacted," he said, noting his own personal connections because "it's where our family lives so we lived the devastation of the announcement."

However, Dias said a settlement with GM that led to a decision to produce aftermarket parts at the plant, employing about 300 workers there, was key to what was announced Thursday. He noted that critics had been harsh in their assessment at the time, even suggesting that the government buy the plant, but that he needed to find "real solutions."

"We maintained the ability to build cars or build vehicles in the future,” Dias said. “We never gave up hope and frankly never did General Motors because we never slammed the door."

GM released a short statement confirming the news, but the automaker did not provide additional details:

“Subject to ratification of our 2020 agreement with Unifor, General Motors plans to bring pickup production back to the Oshawa Assembly Plant while making additional investments at the St. Catharines Propulsion Plant and Woodstock Parts Distribution Centre.”

In addition to the developments at Oshawa, the deal calls for $109 million (Canadian) to be invested in the next three years at St. Catharines near Niagara Falls, "introducing volume to prop up the existing portfolio," Dias said. It will mean additional transmissions to supply the Chevrolet Equinox and a new program to build transmissions for the Chevrolet Corvette as well as engines to complement the existing portfolio, he said.

The news comes after Unifor reached a three-year deal with Ford and FCA that includes wage increases, bonuses and other benefits for its factory workers in Canada. If GM's deal follows the pattern at Ford and FCA, it would include 5% hourly wage increases, a $7,250 signing bonus, $4,000 inflation bonus, shift premiums and the restoration of the 20% wage differential for skilled trades. Unifor represents about 19,400 workers among the Detroit Three.
A battle fought

Unifor's bargaining with GM was preceded by an all-out war with the automaker two years ago.

On Nov. 26, 2018, GM made an unexpected announcement that it would “unallocate” product to five plants in North America. In the U.S., those were Detroit-Hamtramck, Lordstown in Ohio, Warren and Baltimore transmission plants.

In Canada, it was GM's Oshawa Assembly Plant in Ontario, about 30 miles east of Toronto. About 2,500 people worked there at that time.

Detroit-Hamtramck, now called Factory ZERO, got a reprieve in last year's contract talks and GM is spending $2.2 billion to retool it for all-electric vehicle production starting late next year. GM repurposed Warren Transmission to make facemasks this year. But GM closed Warren Transmission and Lordstown Assembly, selling the latter to electric truck maker Lordstown Motors last year.

Unifor went to battle with GM on multiple fronts to save Oshawa Assembly. Dias came to GM's headquarters at the Renaissance Center in Detroit to meet with GM leadership to try to work out a plan to save the plant.

There were protests at GM's Canada headquarters, walkouts at plants (deemed illegal under Ontario law) and television ads during the Super Bowl and Oscars. Dias also called for a boycott of the company’s vehicles.

Unifor had argued that the terms of its bargaining contract with GM required the carmaker to keep the plant operating until September 2020. But GM said the collective bargaining agreement gives it the option to change its production if there is a significant disruption to the car market.

GM pointed to the decline in sedan sales and Oshawa running at just 30% capacity as reason to shutter the facility.

GM built the last of these products there in 2019:
The last Cadillac XTS rolled off the line Sept.10.
The last Chevrolet Impala rolled off the line Oct. 25.
The last 2018 Chevrolet Silverado pickup rolled off the line Dec. 18.

A compromise

But Unifor got a minor victory of sorts for some workers in May 2019. At that time, Unifor and GM announced that the plant would remain in limited operation producing parts.

Today, the plant makes doors, hoods, fenders, tailgates and deck lids, and more recently medical face masks for Health Canada to help in the coronavirus pandemic. It employs about 300 people, according to GM's website, a fraction of workers there when it was making cars.

The St. Catharines plant makes the V6 engine, V8 engine and the GF6 transmission, which are shipped to 10 GM plants worldwide, GM's website said.


Eduardo Lima, AP

GM is building the GM Canada McLaughlin Advanced Technology Track in Oshawa. It will be completed later this year. A grand opening is planned for next spring. The track, which was announced in May 2019 at the time of GM’s Oshawa Transformation Agreement, is on 55 acres on the south end of the Oshawa plant. GM invested $129 million in its Canadian operations.

Canada is GM's largest market outside of the U.S. GM employs a total of 5,300 people there and GM's Canadian Technical Centre is one of the largest automotive software development centers in Canada. It has multiple campuses, including one at Oshawa, and employs a total of 900 workers, GM said.