Why some states are treating schools differently from other indoor spaces when weighing end of mask mandates

Feb. 12, 2022

By
Frances Stead Sellers,
Brittany Shammas and
Reis Thebault
The Washington Post

As indoor mask requirements fell away across the country this week, leaders in the states home to America’s largest school districts made an important distinction: Classrooms are different from other public spaces, they argued, and mandates there will remain in place — for now.

The Democratic governors of California, Illinois and New York all announced plans in recent days to phase out mask rules for businesses, but said they needed more time and data before they could make a decision about face coverings in schools, one of the most contentious and hotly debated aspects of the pandemic response.

The politics around these policies are changing rapidly, as other leaders in blue states have nixed indoor mandates entirely, and some experts who have previously pushed for stringent virus mitigation measures have called for an end to requiring masks in schools. The latest wave of governors — whose constituencies include school districts in New York City, Los Angeles and Chicago — appear to be reaching for a middle ground, lifting rules for many indoor spaces but carving out exceptions for educational institutions and other venues.

In making the case for this stance, leaders have cited two primary concerns: Vaccination rates for children, particularly the youngest eligible, remain far lower than those of adults; and social distancing is more difficult in schools, where students spend hours in proximity at desks, in hallways and in cafeterias. Masks will also still be required in licensed child-care centers in all three states.

“Schools are unlike most other environments,” Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker said Wednesday. “The equation for schools just looks different right now than it does for the general population. Schools just need a little more time — for community infection rates to drop, for our youngest learners to become vaccine-eligible and for more parents to get their kids vaccinated.”

Children are in school “for six to eight hours, five days a week, week after week after week,” he added. “That’s very different than someone going to a bar even for two hours or going to a ballgame.”

In New York, where the indoor mandate expired Thursday, Gov. Kathy Hochul said her office will reassess the situation in schools during the first week of March, after students return from break. The state will provide parents with coronavirus tests, she said, and watch for potential spikes in infection during that week before making a decision about ending the mandate.

She said schools are different from workplaces, where “people have the ability for movement.”

“Kids are in a very concentrated setting,” she said. “And also, adults can make their own decisions. Children still need adults to look out for their health.”

California, meanwhile, will announce “in a matter of days” its plans for updating the statewide school mask mandate, which is set to continue after the business requirements expire next week, Gov. Gavin Newsom said Wednesday.

Negotiations among local school boards, labor leaders and parents are delicate, he said, and they’ve been working for weeks to come to an agreement. Newsom declined to discuss the specifics of the impending plan and did not say what the updates would look like.

But the “fundamental factor,” he said, will be the rate of vaccination among children, which is “substantially lower” than the adult population. Just 28% of California’s 5-to-11-year-olds are fully vaccinated, according to state data, compared to 75% of those aged 18 to 49 and more than 83% of over 50 years old.

Still, the leaders signaled that if infections continue to decline and immunization rates increase, they would lift the school mandates in the coming weeks or months, perhaps as early as March.

Illinois will be among the most closely watched states, as leaders look to avoid a repeat of the teacher strikes that shuttered Chicago schools in January. An Illinois judge last week temporarily granted an order barring 140 school districts who sued Pritzker from enforcing the mask mandate. The state plans to appeal the ruling.

Hochul said it is “a very strong possibility” that she lifts the schools mandate in New York on March 7 if infection rates continue their downward trend.

At her Wednesday news briefing, she acknowledged the intense public pressure around required face coverings in classrooms, calling it “the most common question I get in the state of New York.”

Some experts have said the recent rollbacks in many states seem to have more to do with this pressure than with public health considerations.

“It fits with this wishful thinking narrative that many people in America are following — that we can go back to normal, the worst is over — when in reality 3,000 people still die every day of COVID and hospitals are still heavily impacted,” said Jorge Luis Salinas, a hospital epidemiologist at Stanford University.

Salinas said he agrees schools present more opportunities for virus transmission, but just because the risk is greater there doesn’t mean it’s safe elsewhere.

“Why would we require it in one place but not in another?” he said. “I don’t see the consistency from a public health point of view. If you apply a different lens, a political lens, then perhaps it can be more easily explained.”

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Rochelle Walensky has said that the agency’s recommendations — to wear masks in areas with high or substantial coronavirus transmission, which includes most of the country — have not changed and that now is not the time to relax restrictions nationwide. The White House has backed this position, encouraging Americans to continue following the CDC’s guidance, regardless of loosening local restrictions.

In an interview with NBC News that aired Thursday evening, President Joe Biden avoided directly criticizing the governors who have announced mandate rollbacks, but he reiterated the effectiveness of masking.

“I’ve committed that I would follow the science,” Biden said when asked if leaders were moving too quickly. “And I think it’s probably premature, but, you know, it’s a tough call.”

Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Jersey and Oregon have all announced an end to their indoor mask mandates — including those for schools — in recent days, each state following slightly different timelines. Officials in Delaware and Rhode Island have also said they would drop restrictions, but plan to keep school rules in place into March.

Public opinion polling has found disagreement among Americans over mask mandates in both schools and public settings.

In November, Monmouth University pollsters found that 60% of parents supported the requirement in schools. The university’s January survey did not ask about school masking specifically but found that 52% of adults overall favored having mask and social distancing guidelines in their state, down from a high of 63% in September.

Thirty percent of parents wanted schools to be open in person without masks or social distancing when choosing from several options, according to a January Fox Business poll.

And a CNN survey conducted in January and February found that 64% of people with children under 18 said it was “time to learn to live with the virus.”

In San Francisco, parents have been making this appeal to Democratic Mayor London Breed, asking in a letter that she “come out in support of a return to normalcy for the children of this city, including mask choice in schools.”

The letter’s author — Laura Fagan, who has three children under the age of 8 — said in an interview that she collected 400 signatures before sending it on Thursday. In asking for parents to be allowed to choose whether to mask their kids, she pointed to other states and countries that have not required face coverings in school, cited the low risk the virus poses to children and said she feared the consequences of pandemic disruptions.

“Kids should be the priority,” said Fagan, 43, who works for a tech company. “They’re OK — we should celebrate that. And we should stop limiting their childhood.”

A number of clinicians and scientists have also been advancing a version of this argument in recent weeks. Calling their mission “the urgency of normal,” one group has called for kids to doff their masks and resume pre-pandemic activities by next week.

“It’s not anti-mask. It’s pro-choice,” said one of the physicians involved, Lucy McBride, who said there are social, educational and mental health costs of keeping children masked.

But the message has been controversial. Former CDC director Tom Frieden said in an interview that a tweet he wrote, along with a headshot that appears prominently on the group’s website, was posted without his permission, “implying that I support positions that I don’t support.”

Mark Kline, chief medical officer at Children’s Hospital New Orleans, said the group’s message is “not junk science, it’s just junk” that did not to reflect that classrooms are “hotbeds” of transmission of most respiratory diseases.

Some teachers unions have signaled they prefer a more cautious approach to lifting school mandates. Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said she has for months been asking the CDC for an “offramp” for masks in schools but hasn’t received guidance. Weingarten has said repeatedly that the recommendations should be guided by science, not politics, and on Thursday she applauded Hochul’s approach.

“This is a smart way to adapt to local circumstances,” Weingarten said on Twitter.

David Rubin, a pediatrician and director of PolicyLab at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, said the country may be nearing a turning point, where governments can shift from requirements to recommendations. He described the earlier phase of the pandemic as “risk elimination at all costs,” saying that with no access to vaccines amid a new virus, “it made sense — it was a true emergency.”

Now, cases have declined sharply, vaccines are available for adults and for children over 5, and the omicron-driven crisis is receding.

“In the context of all of that, I think we have to be very circumspect about when we require things of individuals,” Rubin said. He added: “To me, I think the arguments are increasingly in favor of allowing schools to shift to policies that are based on recommendations instead of requirements.”

Rubin noted that throughout the pandemic, kids have been at lower risk than adults, even if they are unvaccinated. There is very little data available about the potential downsides of masking in schools, he said. But lacking data does not mean there’s no risk — instead, he said, harms could be introduced that are not being measured, such as impacts on a child’s learning ability and social development.

With the worst of the omicron wave receding and more children eligible for vaccination, “this is really a moment to take advantage of,” Rubin said. “And it’s really a question of when schools make that pivot.”

The Washington Post’s Scott Clement contributed to this report.

How Socialists and Trade Unionists Built a New Labor Organizing Model During the Pandemic

Millions of workers want a union. The Emergency Worker Organizing Committee, a project launched by socialists and the United Electrical Workers at the beginning of the pandemic, offers insights into how to organize them

.
Real working-class power comes from organized workers fighting the boss for better conditions.

 (UE Union)

BY ERIC DIRNBACH

JACOBIN

02.12.2022

We know the US labor movement is too small. Our current union density, or membership rate, is very low, about 10 percent of the total workforce. This includes around just 6 percent of private sector workers, and it’s been falling nearly every year for decades. To put this crisis in perspective, the union membership rate hasn’t been this low in more than a century. Wages, benefits, and working conditions for many workers are not improving, and in some ways have gotten worse in recent decades.

Furthermore, union membership is concentrated in too few states. Nearly half of the 14 million union members live in just six states. And in ten states, the union membership rate is less than 5 percent. That means there are too many elected officials that have no fear of voting against union and workers’ interests. Politically, we won’t accomplish many ambitious socialist goals with such a low level of worker organization. A socialist movement requires a strong and militant labor movement.

In the 1950s, the union membership rate was higher than 30 percent. We need to strengthen the labor movement dramatically to meet and ideally surpass this figure. A higher union membership rate will mean more worker power overall.

But unions are doing too little organizing. From the 1950s through the 1970s, an average of about 500,000 private sector workers participated in National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) elections every year, about 1 percent of the workforce annually. But in recent years, there have been only around 1,000 representation elections per year in the private sector, with less than 0.1 percent of all workers participating. To increase union density by just 1 percent per year, we would need to organize over 1 million workers annually. But current campaigns are organizing only tens of thousands of workers every year. Even if we include union organizing outside the NLRB, this number is likely not much greater. Aside from unions, there are alternative organizations that help workers, such as worker centers. But they’re also not organizing at a large enough scale either, although the data on that is less clear.

Why We Aren’t Organizing Enough

Asilver lining in this trend is that the union win rate of NLRB elections is pretty decent, at about two-thirds of elections in recent years. So unions know how to win organizing campaigns, but they aren’t doing enough of them. Why is that?

Mainly, organizing campaigns that are well-run and successful are very staff-intensive and time consuming, with most campaigns having to counter outrageous union busting and multiple unfair labor practices by employers. Of course, this is because labor law isn’t good enough, and passing something like the PRO Act would be very helpful. But historically, we tend to get labor law reform when the labor movement is strong and disruptive enough to win it.

We also have a major structural problem in the labor movement. Very few unions allow any interested worker to join or get trained to organize. You have to be in a workplace that the union targets for an organizing campaign. Then you have to win your campaign, usually in an election. And then you have to bargain for a contract. Only then do you become a regular dues-paying union member. That process can take years. The average amount of time just to bargain a first contract is over a year. Some workers win an election but never get a contract at all, and thus don’t become union members, even after all that effort. This whole standard organizing process is slow, resource intensive, and involves too few workers.

How to Reach More Workers

Meanwhile, more workers really want to be union members! The most recent annual Gallup survey recorded a modern record union approval rating of 68 percent, the highest level since 1965. Another recent poll found strong support among workers for unions at their workplace, with the highest support from those who earn less than $25,000 per year (58 percent), between $25,000 and $50,000 per year (57 percent), and among people with less than a high school education (60 percent). More than half of lower-income workers would support a strike at their job.

A major study in 2017 found that nearly 50 percent of nonunion workers would vote to join a union. Considering just the private sector, there are about 100 million nonunion workers, so let’s assume that roughly 50 million workers want a union. Recent years have seen a little more than 50,000 workers vote in annual NLRB elections, so at the rate that the labor movement is organizing, it will take about one thousand years to reach all these workers! How do we connect with more workers when current union efforts only organize a very small fraction?To increase union density by just 1 percent per year, we would need to organize over 1 million workers annually.

One way is for unions to be much more open about providing organizing training and assistance to workers who want it. The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) is the only union I’m aware of that allows any worker to join and get training and organizing assistance. That’s a great example other unions should follow. Mainstream unions don’t do this because, with few exceptions, they are committed to the idea of a membership based only in workplaces with exclusive representation and a union contract. Any worker who wants to learn to organize and get some help fighting for improvements on the job is out of luck if they can’t convince a union to prioritize their workplace for an organizing campaign.

This traditional union framework is simpler, provides organizational stability, and is easier to staff, but it leaves out too many workers who want a union. So we need to find another way to get organizing assistance to the millions of workers who want it.

Organizing Training Projects Are an Answer

An important concept for us to remember is that any group of workers organizing together to improve working conditions is acting like a union. They may not have official recognition and a contract, but they are a union nonetheless, and they can organize to win things. Many workers don’t realize this. But they usually need some help to start organizing, since this is a challenging and risky endeavor with many ways to fail.

That leads us to what I’ll call Organizing Training Projects, which are programs available for workers to learn about union organizing. A long-running example is Labor Notes, which has organizing training schools and materials like Secrets of a Successful Organizer. There’s also Jane McAlevey’s Strike School, which is based on the organizing philosophy found in her book No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age.

And there is also the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC), a joint project of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE). EWOC started in 2020 to help workers organize during the pandemic. I’ve been involved in EWOC since almost the beginning, and have become very interested in how it offers organizing training and campaign assistance to more workers who want and need help. It’s worth discussing how EWOC functions in some detail, because it provides a model for how we can overcome the organizing problem confronting unions today

How Does EWOC Work?

Since March 2020, EWOC has had over 1,300 volunteers, with over a hundred currently involved, and has two staff coordinators. Roles include organizing, research, media, communications, training, data administration, political education, and fundraising.

Workers contact EWOC by filling out a form on the website. An intake organizer then reaches out to them for basic information about their workplace and issues. EWOC’s goal is to contact the worker within three days of getting their initial form. If the worker wants to move forward, they are assigned an advanced organizer to develop an organizing plan together for as long as they want to continue. Contact with the workers has been primarily on the phone or over Zoom during the pandemic, and this may shift to more in-person meetings when the pandemic subsides.More than half of lower-income workers would support a strike at their job.

EWOC has also developed a six-session weekly training program that workers are encouraged to take. It has organizing materials on its website, such as videos, organizing basics, and a training manual. It also holds panel discussions where workers talk about their campaigns and the concept of “rank-and-file unionism.”

There is training for organizers to learn how to assist EWOC internally. Some of the workers who contact EWOC will run their campaign, go through the training, and then become an EWOC volunteer organizer.

EWOC is also experimenting with helping workers form networks at large companies with multiple locations, like retail chains. That’s an incredible challenge, since we need to coordinate organizing at many locations at the same time and build power with enough workers to move a large employer.

EWOC’s Organizing Methodology

The basic EWOC organizing framework is covered in the training and in our conversations with workers. It shares common features with Labor Notes, McAlevey, IWW, and many other union trainings. But the best training is to actually organize, and workers will learn this as they do it.

The organizing follows these steps:
Conversations among coworkers are the foundation to everything.
The initial worker(s) should form an organizing committee, and talk with more coworkers.
They should map the workplace, identify all the workers and leaders, know who talks with whom, and assess workers on their support for taking action.
They should identify common and deeply felt issues.
They should frame demands, for example in a petition, which can get majority support.
They should do “inoculation” against the likely boss response.
They should take majority actions, for example a march on the boss, and make their demands.
They can assess what happened and continue. If they win something, that’s great — claim the win and organize for more with an escalating campaign.
If they don’t win yet, regroup and try again.

EWOC’s Results

Here’s my experience as an advanced organizer to give a deeper sense of how this works out. I have taken cases with about seventy-five workers who reached out to EWOC, and I was able to talk with about half of them — the rest never got back to me. About twenty-five of the cases became campaigns in the sense that the worker engaged in some organizing activity, which means talking with coworkers and trying to form an organizing committee. Of these, a handful so far have been successful in that the workers won something, usually regarding COVID issues. Some campaigns are still ongoing.

Some of the workers will organize for wins and may stop there, while others will keep organizing over time. Some want to go further and run an election to get official union recognition and a contract. In one of those cases I worked on, the workers did a majority petition and made some gains, and I then discussed union options with them. I helped connect them to a union, and they won their election and are now in contract bargaining.

Overall, after almost two years of operation, over three thousand workers have reached out to EWOC, and we attempted to connect with all of them. Over 800 had intake calls and were assigned to an organizer for further discussions. These workers were employed at over 600 different employers. Of these, nearly 400 campaigns launched with some organizing activity. Of these, there have been about sixty successful campaigns that have won improved conditions or stopped concessions so far, involving thousands of impacted workers.

Some of the wins include fast food, grocery, and retail workers winning better COVID protections, sick leave and raises, graduate workers getting raises and other improvements, and health care and social service workers winning safety improvements. EWOC has also connected over a dozen workplaces with a union, with many winning elections or voluntary recognition so far. There have also been several successful strikes at EWOC-supported campaigns.There have been about sixty successful EWOC-supported campaigns that have won improved conditions or stopped concessions so far, involving thousands of impacted workers.

On the EWOC training program, over 1,200 people have attended at least one training session, and 290 have attended the whole series. Nearly 1,500 people RSVP’d for an EWOC political education event in 2021, and 1,500 have downloaded the Organizing Guide.

The industries that EWOC has interacted with the most include food service, grocery, retail, health care, and education, sectors that largely remained open with essential workers during the pandemic.

What We’ve Learned

One main lesson is that we have to be honest about how hard this is. A pretty low percentage of everyone that contacts EWOC, and even of those who start real organizing, wins a campaign because some workers lose interest, organizing is really challenging, and we need to get better. However, there are enough campaign wins to show that EWOC is on to something.

A major bottleneck in these campaigns is the formation of an organizing committee. Sometimes there is one activist in a workplace who wants to do something, but they can’t find anyone to work with them. A lack of faith that things can change or fear of getting fired are widespread. Admittedly, not every worker we deal with is a leader or a good enough organizer yet, and perhaps EWOC volunteers are not good enough mentors yet. I suspect that if an organizing committee can form, and eventually the workers take action, there’s a really good chance of winning improvements, and we’re collecting the data on these campaigns to test that theory.

Also, it’s difficult for many workers to imagine being able to win with collective action. Part of this project is to help them envision that possibility. Organizing together in a structured way builds the collective confidence that leads to making demands and winning improvements. It’s also important to share the sense that organizing is something many people can do and get better at. There are definite skills needed, and experience is very helpful, but organizing can be taught, practiced, learned and improved.

In my conversations with workers, I try to offer advice and assistance, be honest about the risks and what can be won, and teach the organizing framework. But the campaign timing and activity is all up to them. These campaigns continue as long as the workers want them to.

Even after wins, it’s an ongoing challenge to keep the workplace organized over time with worker turnover. The gains that were won have to be defended. And there’s the hope that trained workers will bring an organizing philosophy to future workplaces, training other workers and organizing there. It’s likely that spreading this organizing knowledge widely will contribute to victories later on.

The overall idea is that these campaigns should be run by workers with EWOC assistance. The organizing is based on direct action in the workplace, but other campaign elements can be added as well, such as online petitions, protests outside the workplace, getting media attention, and so on. If this sounds like a syndicalist model of organizing, that’s because it partly is. EWOC’s methodology is similar to the traditional IWW framework of worker-led, direct action organizing to fight the boss and win improvements on the job. But EWOC also has a relationship with more mainstream unionism since some campaigns connect with unions to achieve traditional recognition and a contract. In my view, maintaining this flexibility and providing different options to workers is a strength.

This project sees itself on the political left, consistent with UE’s rank-and-file “Them and Us Unionism” philosophy. Most importantly, the EWOC model suggests a way for unions to reach many more workers with organizing training and campaign assistance.

What Does This All Mean?

EWOC provides a network of experienced volunteers to do the traditional work of union organizers and other staff on a lot of worker-led organizing campaigns, with some success. EWOC has been able to assist thousands of workers over the last two years that might not have gotten any help otherwise. This valuable service provides a basic level of solidarity for all workers that is really needed in the labor movement — that any worker in any workplace can contact the project, get a conversation fairly quickly, and then have organizing assistance and training available to them as needed.Real working-class power comes from organized workers fighting the boss for better conditions.

However, let’s remind ourselves that ideally, we would have an organizing training infrastructure large enough to reach hundreds of thousands, even millions, of workers each year. Even if you think workplace-based organizing on that scale is madness, and that we need some sort of sectoral bargaining or to wait for the next worker upsurge, we would still need to train workers on this scale to build the power to make that kind of bargaining or upsurge successful.

This discussion raises a host of additional questions and thoughts:

Organizing Effectiveness: We need to learn more lessons about the most effective ways to organize and win over time. This raises issues about continuously improving the organizing training and mentoring process, as well as campaign support. Moreover, we should continue to improve our campaign data collection and analysis.

Scalability: If this is an effective program, how can we scale it up dramatically? If we want to have thousands of volunteers involved, how do we find, train, and retain them? We also want to find effective ways to reach out to more workers. This is obviously a massive training and coordination challenge for that scale of effort.

Structure: Do we need more paid staff? How much funding do we need, and where do we get it? Should workers in the EWOC ecosystem be encouraged to pay dues? EWOC is not a union and doesn’t intend to be. But it could become a kind of worker solidarity association, where workers in various campaigns provide assistance to each other. The governance of the program will likely have to evolve as well, to incorporate a more formal role for workers.

Relationship to Unions: Should the labor movement as a whole create a huge volunteer labor organizing training and campaign assistance program like EWOC? We can imagine a system where workers start their organizing campaigns there, and then for those interested, get connected with unions later on.

Organizing Is Critical

Let me reemphasize an important point. If 50 million workers say they’d vote for a union, this likely means that most of them want the better wages, benefits, and working conditions that come with a union job, but they may not have an understanding of the organizing it takes to get that. So, if unions open the door to everyone, perhaps hundreds of thousands or even millions of pro-union workers might want to join immediately. Sounds great, right? But it does them or unions little good to have a few unorganized workers scattered here and there in a million different workplaces.

If workers don’t build power and eventually get the improvements from union membership in the form of better wages, benefits and working conditions, many will become frustrated and quit, and who could blame them? That’s why it matters that there’s a commitment from the workers to organize and from unions to provide training and campaign support. Real working-class power comes from organized workers fighting the boss for better conditions. This program has to facilitate that, and not just enable more workers to become union members and pay dues.

I think the main question the labor movement has to grapple with, if it’s serious about growing and meeting the desperate need for worker organizing, is how it can provide good organizing training and campaign assistance to the millions of workers who need it, and in the near term, not on some distant horizon. Some of the ideas I have suggested here have been raised before over the years. But as a large-scale volunteer organizing network, EWOC provides a real-world working model for how this could be achieved.

Republished from Socialist Forum.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Eric Dirnbach is a union researcher and socialist. He lives in New York City.

American Police Have Always Been Militarized

The new documentary film Riotsville, USA enriches our understanding of technologically enhanced police militarism in the United States. But militarization itself is not a 20th-century evolution in policing — it’s been there all along.

Still from footage in Riotsville USA.

BYJEFFREY LAMSON

JACOBIN

02.12.2022

In June 1882, a Boston lawyer noticed a man named John Burns leaning against a lamppost in Beacon Hill. Burns was drunk, but seemingly harmless, when a Boston police officer approached him from behind and knocked him “prostrate into the street” with a club to the head. The particulars of the case were quickly lost in a tangle of competing narratives. Was Burns disorderly and resisting arrest, or were these fabrications to cover up yet another instance of indiscriminate police clubbing?

News stories like these were standard fare in the late nineteenth century, but this particular instance prompted one writer at the Boston Globe to reflect on the material culture of the police. Alongside new vice laws, the Boston Police in 1882 acquired “handsome helmets” and “increased efficiency . . . by the introduction of stripes upon the coat sleeves.” The very notion of uniformed police in the nineteenth century often invited comparison to a standing army, which people from a broad cross section of American society commonly perceived as an affront to their democratic sentiments. At least in northern cities, police power in the 1880s was as contested as it was presumed, although the rhetoric of law and order would prevail in the coming decades.

This Boston Globe columnist continued that the police had been attending regular drills “in club exercise, superintended by the military member, familiarizing the men with the use of their weapons.” We know that military drills were common in this period, as in New York City where Commissioner Abram Duryée was “something of a fanatic with regard to the military nature of police work . . . fond of drilling the force to the point of exhaustion.” The militarism of early American policing was even clearer in the case of eighteenth-century slave patrols and urban city guards — the latter of which, Frederick Law Olmstead observed when visiting Charleston in 1860, deployed “police machinery as you never find in towns under free governments.”

In the wake of high-profile police killings and subsequent protests in the last decade, more Americans than ever before are asking when and how our police became so militarized. The prevailing narratives are unsatisfactory, usually identifying some recent turning point and obscuring the long arc of police militarism in the United States. To the extent that “the militarization of the police” indicates a fundamental change to the institution over time, the term is a misnomer. Sure enough, stripes on coat sleeves are not armored vehicles, but when we place the training, and equipment of police in their historical context, the persistent militarized nature of American policing comes into focus. It’s not a twentieth-century evolution in policing — it was there from the start.
Riot Act

Sierra Pettengill’s new film Riotsville, USA, which premiered at Sundance last weekend, enriches our understanding of police militarism in the United States. The documentary is made up entirely of archival footage, supplemented by onscreen text and narration written by Tobi Haslett and voiced by Charlene Modeste. Riotsville centers on two fake towns constructed in 1967 on military bases in Virginia and Georgia, the purpose of which was to train military and police in riot response tactics and technologies. As told by the film, these sites were both material and symbolic indicators of the intensifying militarization of American policing in response to black rebellion in the 1960s.

Riotsville, USA is an impressive feat of archival recovery. Six years in the making, Pettengill and her team developed the film alongside the mainstreaming and expansion of the Movement for Black Lives. Their production collapses the 1960s into the 2010s, even as Pettengill maintains her historical focus, emphasizing both our failure to respond to the demands of those 1960s rebellions as well at the importance of revisiting archival material to understand why we failed.The persistent militarized nature of American policing is not a twentieth-century evolution — it was there from the start.

Pettengill refrains from interrupting the archival material with excessive cutting, allowing footage — presumably recorded for training and posterity by the military — to run for extended periods, immersing the viewer in the social conflicts of the 1960s. The opening scene is an extended cut of fake protesters marching through the street of a fake town. Some critics have taken issue with the film’s lack of contextualization, but Riotsville’s power owes precisely to the strange and unsettling quality of the archive laid bare.

One need not be an expert in the history of this decade to appreciate the dystopian nature of fake riots tearing through fake towns, overseen from grandstands by military and law enforcement leaders. There’s something unnervingly comedic about soldiers playing protesters, dressed in hippie costumes and wigs, chanting antiwar slogans — both disturbing and amusing. One wonders what’s going through the soldier-actors’ heads. At one point, a black soldier yells out the side of a bus after being fake-arrested, seeming to carry on the scene a bit too long as the voyeurs in the grandstands applaud. Is there something authentic in his performance of black rebellion?

Throughout the film, archival media footage and narration remind us that the dramatizations enacted at Riotsville were technocratic responses to real protests. In reconstructing this moment, Pettengill is precise in her framing and language. The decision to term the 1960s uprisings as rebellions throughout the film is significant. Elizabeth Hinton writes that “riot” is a misnomer for understanding this period, robbing activists and common citizens of their political agency.

On the other hand, to refer to the hundreds of black rebellions that occurred in the 1960s as “civil disturbances” or “unrest” reflects a liberal squeamishness for direct action. These uprisings involved violence and destruction, as have the uprisings of the 2010s. Eliding that fact does not bring us closer to justice and equality, it merely makes the political consciousness of the rebellions more palatable.
The Long Arc of Militarization

The narrative put forth by Riotsville hinges on the Kerner Commission, an eleven-person committee appointed by President Johnson in 1967 and tasked with explaining what had happened, why it had happened, and what the government could do to prevent future uprisings. The commission is probably most famous for its conclusion that the United States was “moving toward two societies, one black, one white — separate and unequal.” That prediction was no revelation for many Americans, but to have it stated so candidly by a presidential commission was still remarkable.

The decision of the Kerner Commission to comment on racial inequality so explicitly was not, however, unanimous. In an interview with Jelani Cobb last year, the only surviving member of the commission recalled that half of its members wanted to cite “intolerance or discrimination” instead of explicit racism as the root cause of racial inequality and the 1960s black rebellions. That faction lost in a narrow 6-5 vote.

Riotsville’s narrator tells us that “A door swung open in the late ‘60s. And someone, something sprang up and slammed it shut.” True enough. The opportunity for dramatic change as recommended by the Kerner Commission certainly existed, an opportunity which promised a refocus on root causes and solutions to poverty and inequality rather than the so-called punitive turn that followed. If we widen the historical scope, however, it is clear that someone, something has always sprung up to prevent substantive change.There’s something unnervingly comedic about soldiers playing protesters, dressed in hippie costumes and wigs, chanting antiwar slogans.

To truly understand what happened in the 1960s, we need to look further back, to Herbert Hoover’s 1929 Wickersham Commission and, further yet, the New York State Lexow Committee in 1894. While neither of these commissions considered race in a meaningful way, both concluded with scathing indictments of police abuse — and nevertheless, both yielded ballooning police budgets for training and technocratic solutions instead of improved police accountability or solutions to poverty. Commissions such as these have consistently served to fortify police power through expanded training, reform, and professionalization. Whether or not this has occurred by design is another question, but we cannot escape the fact that police have always been further militarized in the process.

Riotsville’s emphasis on the Kerner Commission inadvertently reinforces the idea that police militarization occurred in the aftermath of the black rebellions, when in fact it is woven into the DNA of American policing and has been steadily fortified since the nineteenth century. Nonetheless, the film succeeds in telling the story of Kerner Commission’s ultimate legacy.

Some of its members pressed for increased funding for police, resulting in the only tangible outcome of the commission: the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA). Via the LEAA, the government opened a firehose of federal dollars to local police, which had actually begun earlier via the often conflated, but smaller scale, Law Enforcement Assistance Act in 1965. This marks an important moment that some historians refer to as the “punitive turn,” when the Lyndon Johnson administration turned more definitively away from solving poverty to waging a war on crime.

One of the key tools in this pivot, highlighted in Riotsville, was tear gas. While some considered the emphasis on tear gas a point of digression in the film, the technology is an essential moment for understanding the militarism of police in this period. As Stuart Schrader makes clear in Badges Without Borders, tear gas captures the technocratic approach to American policing that drew on imperial interventionism in order to address domestic challenges. In other words, it brought together militarism abroad and policing at home.

Pettengill demonstrates the point well, using military footage, scenes from Riotsville itself, and the unrestricted use of tear gas to pacify American neighborhoods. In some of the film’s most convincing and unsettling moments, we see tear gas streaming from helicopters or from the end of an officer’s cannon walking down an empty street, blanketing the front porches of suburban communities.
The More Things Change

The key to understanding the trajectory of American policing is to avoid relying on the idea of turning points, even if the so-called “punitive turn” was an important historical moment.

Riotsville is a valuable and meaningful contribution to our understanding of policing in response to the 1960s rebellions, when the militarization of the police definitively expanded and took on new form. Still, abrupt turning points belie the fundamental nature of policing. Would policing be better today if not for the LEAA and the “punitive turn?” Probably, but policing reform has never meant to fundamentally change the police, and more often it has expanded budgets or given them fancier tools.The key to understanding the trajectory of American policing is to avoid relying on the idea of turning points, even if the so-called ‘punitive turn’ was an important historical moment.

Slave Patrols in the eighteenth century operated as militia forces, and their urban equivalents in Charleston roamed in companies of thirty mounted men, “headed by fife and drum.” Police in Boston and New York used military rankings to organize their departments from the outset. Just after the Civil War, the New Orleans Metropolitan Police deployed Gatling guns and canons against protesters (granted they did so in the name of Reconstruction). During WWI, the New York Police Department donned military uniforms and marched with mounted machine guns down Fifth Avenue.

When we consider the long history of policing the United States, it would be wise to heed the reflection of historian Mark Haller, who wrote that “In more than a century from the Civil War to the present, city police have undergone little change in organization or function. Those changes that have occurred have resulted primarily from technology.” It is easy to claim that police have become more militarized, but the reality is that they have always been militaristic in their tools and internal structure. The changes we see reflect evolution in the technology and tactics of force more than evolution of the police.

Likewise, American resistance to policing has always existed, despite the widespread impression that we’ve recently abandoned a tradition of praising law enforcement. We are rightly disturbed by Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles (MRAPs) and full body armor in 2022 — just as Americans were disturbed by stripes on blue uniforms in 1882. Police technology constantly changes, but the tendency toward militarization and the public’s discontent have stayed much the same.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jeffrey Lamson is a PhD student in world history at Northeastern University, researching and writing about the material culture of police in the United States and Latin America.

Rep. Ilhan Omar Slams Biden Plan to Seize Afghan Assets to Give to 9/11 Victims

People wait to receive aid provided by a charity on the outskirts of Kabul, Afghanistan, on January 30, 2022.

WAKIL KOHSAR / AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

BYBrett Wilkins, 

Common Dreams

PUBLISHED February 12, 2022

As U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar on Friday led condemnation of a reported Biden administration plan to permanently seize $7 billion of currently frozen Afghan assets and distribute half to relatives of 9/11 victims, advocates pointed to the worsening humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan and urged President Joe Biden to change course.

Noting that “there wasn’t a single Afghan” among the 9/11 hijackers — and the U.S. gives billions of dollars to the Saudi and Egyptian governments despite their “direct ties to the 9/11 terrorists” — Omar (D-Minn.) tweeted that punishing millions of starving people is “unconscionable.”

Omar said she agrees with Barry Amundson — a member of 9/11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows who lost his brother in the Pentagon attack — who warned the proposed seizure would “cause further harm to innocent Afghans.”

“That’s exactly what will happen,” Omar tweeted.

Khaled Beydoun, an Egyptian-American scholar, tweeted: “This is theft. Graft. Amid famine, no less.”

“Newsflash: Zero of the 9/11 terrorists were Afghan,” he added. “This is absurd.”

The advocacy group Afghans for A Better Tomorrow said in a statement that the proposed redistribution of Afghan funds “is short-sighted, cruel, and will worsen a catastrophe in progress, affecting millions of Afghans, many of whom are on the verge of starvation.”

“Taking money which rightfully belongs to the Afghan people will not bring justice but ensure more misery and death in Afghanistan,” the group — which is circulating a petition aimed at convincing the administration to immediately unfreeze some of the funds — asserted.

Phyllis Rodriguez, whose son died in the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center in New York City and who is also with Peaceful Tomorrows, was among those urging Biden to reject the proposed policy.

“President Biden has the opportunity to make amends right now! He can unfreeze the funds belonging to the Afghan people,” she said. “They are not the Taliban’s property but of everyday folks like us. Let’s see this as a humanitarian crisis that we can address immediately.”

Others noted the dire conditions the Afghan people are currently enduring.

Masuda Sultan, an Afghan-American author and activist with Unfreeze Afghanistan, said that Afghans are “experiencing a historic famine within a pandemic, and their economy has been in a freefall worse than the Great Depression.”

“One of the main drivers of the economic collapse is the freezing of their assets,” she added. “If the funds are not returned and the famine is not averted, America will be blamed for one of the worst famines in history.”

Rodriguez said that “it saddens me that there are 9/11 family members who can’t see the discrepancies in our relative privilege to demand reparations instead of recognizing the dire need of Afghans.”

“They have suffered unjustly for the actions of a cadre of extremists — a tiny minority of the population,” she continued. “Major famine, disease, displacement, and destruction that our government and its allies created should be reversed through all means possible.”

Medea Benjamin, co-founder of the women-led peace group CodePink, said in a statement that “taking funds that rightfully belong to some of the poorest people in the world who are now facing a catastrophic famine is a cruel move that will not bring justice to the 9/11 families.”

Referencing the U.S. occupation that Biden ended last year as the Taliban retook the country, Benjamin tweeted that taking “billions of dollars away from starving Afghans” would be “a fitting end to 20 years of screwing the Afghan people.”

‘USA Stole Money From Afghans’: People Take to Streets of Kabul to Protest US Asset Seizure

© Photo : Twitter / @Shamshadnetwork

Ilya Tsukanov

All materialsWrite to the author

Joe Biden signed an executive order Friday allowing for $7 billion in Afghan Central Bank funds in the US to be split in two into a ‘humanitarian trust’ and a fund to pay victims of the 9/11 terror attacks. Afghanistan is the latest nation to fall victim to the US policy of asset pilfering, with Iran and Venezuela previously robbed of billions.

A small group of demonstrators took the streets of Kabul on Saturday to protest Washington’s “illegal” seizure of $7 billion in cash which the previous government had stashed in US banks before Afghanistan was overrun by the Taliban* last summer.

Protesters gathered before the Grand Id Gah Mosque with makeshift cardboard signs, some of them in illegible English, reading “USA stole money from Afghans”, “America is cruel” and “America should give us one million [illegible] people damage.”

In addition to slamming Biden’s decision to use $3.5 billion in Afghan assets for payments to families of American 9/11 victims, protesters demanded financial compensation for the tens of thousands of Afghans who died during the 19+ year war and occupation of their country.

“What about our Afghan people who gave many sacrifices and thousands of losses of lives?” protest organizer Abdul Rahman asked. "This money belongs to the people of Afghanistan, not to the United States. This is the right of Afghans," he said.

Taliban Slams Biden's Order Freezing $7Bn in Afghan Assets as 'Theft and Moral Decline'

Yesterday

Torek Farhadi, a former financial advisor to the US-backed government, told reporters that Biden’s order was illegal.

“These reserves belong to the people of Afghanistan, not the Taliban…Biden’s decision is one-sided and does not match with international law,” he said. "No other country on Earth makes such confiscation decisions about another country's reserves," he added.

The vast majority of Afghanistan’s overseas assets abroad have been stuck in limbo in US banks ever since the NATO-backed government’s collapse last August. Along with $7 billion in the US, another $2 billion is stashed in Germany, Switzerland and the United Arab Emirates.

The Taliban blasted the Biden administration over the "theft" of Afghan assets on Friday, calling his decision a "showcase of the human and moral decline of the country and people."

Washington has promised that $3.5 billion of the $7 billion will be put into a humanitarian trust which will be used to aid the Afghan people. The rest of the money will remain in the US, pending court rulings on legal claims against the Taliban by the families of victims of the 11 September 2001 terror attacks.

The United States holds the Taliban partially responsible for the 9/11 attacks, citing the group's decision to provide refuge to al-Qaeda* commander and terror mastermind Osama bin Laden. The Taliban's refusal to hand him over to US authorities served as a pretext for the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. The Taliban maintain to this day that US officials have yet to show them evidence that bin Laden was responsible for 9/11.

US courts have not shied away from seizing assets even of countries which had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11 to pay compensation for the attacks. In 2018, a New York court ordered $6 billion in Iranian assets frozen in US banks to be redistributed to 9/11 victims' families, even though none of the 19 terrorist hijackers were Iranians, and despite Iran's record of battling al-Qaeda, the Taliban and other jihadist groups.

*The Taliban is an organization under UN sanctions for terrorist activities.

*A terrorist group outlawed in Russia and many other countries.

COMMENTARY
Separation of church and state? Let's get real — that's over. So what do we do now?
Jefferson's "wall of separation" is history. There are other, better ways to fight the Christian right's onslaught

By JACQUES BERLINERBLAU
PUBLISHED FEBRUARY 12, 2022 12:00PM (EST

Neil Gorsuch, Jesus and Thomas Jefferson (Photo illustration by Salon/Getty Images)

During oral arguments in the case of Shurtleff v. City of Boston, Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch made a pointed reference to "so-called separation of church and state." What precisely this aside was meant to convey is unclear. Yet Gorsuch's dismissive comment laid bare what many have known for some time: "Separationism," as a judicial and legislative doctrine, is on life support. Courtesy of the Christian right, it languishes in a theologically-induced coma.

The many Americans who yearn for secular governance, believers and nonbelievers alike, must confront this truth, accept it and innovate accordingly. They need to do so expeditiously, given the Supreme Court's hard pro-religion turn — a turn that advantages a white conservative Christian majority at the expense of religious moderates, religious minorities and nonbelievers.

Gorsuch may have just been trolling, but he had a point. Let's ask ourselves some hard questions about the "separationism" we know (and love).

If we really had a "wall of separation," the Supreme Court wouldn't appear receptive, as it does in Carson v. Makin, to affirming "a religious right to government funds" for schools that teach a "biblical worldview." Huge Christian crosses honoring fallen soldiers wouldn't sit on state property (American Legion v. American Humanist Association). The recently re-established White House Office of Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships would not exist. Symbolically, Christmas videos from the Trump White House wouldn't be permitted, nor would Joseph Biden's shout-outs to St. Augustine on Inauguration Day.

RELATED: "Christian flag" case reaches Supreme Court: Is the Proud Boys flag next?

We have no real separation in the United States. Luckily, separationism is just one type of secularism. There are others. The secularist movement in the United States, however defined, has an interest in learning about them and thinking outside of the box — as well as beyond the purported wall between religion and government.

Secularism is a governing policy in which the state regulates the relationship between itself and its religious citizens, and also between religious citizens. A secular state strives to balance freedom and order. It must provide citizens who are beholden to very different worldviews with as much freedom of religion or — since demographics are changing rapidly in this regard — freedom from religion as possible. Simultaneously, it secures the civil calm required for them to enjoy those freedoms.

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Other nations teach us that these secular goals are achievable without separationism. India's beleaguered secular model accentuates sarva dharma sama bhava, or "equal respect for all religions." Far from walling itself off, the government accommodates faith communities. India's constitution, for instance, even makes provisions for Muslims to abide by their own law codes.

French secularism is altogether different. Laïcité, as it is known, doesn't separate itself from religion: It actively controls it. French laws strike Americans as overly severe (e.g., prohibiting public display of religious attire, like burkas). French citizens, though, overwhelmingly prefer a strong state grip on religion, a preference conditioned by centuries of traumatic clashes with the Catholic Church.

France and India are constitutionally secular. The United States, as Christian conservative activists cheerfully note, is not. There is no constitutional guarantee of separation. Instead, there are a few dozen ambiguous words in our founding documents, 16 of which read: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion; or prohibiting the free exercise thereof."

In 1802 President Thomas Jefferson interpreted these sparse clauses to say that a "wall of separation" must exist between church and state. That was a radical and unpopular opinion — especially with the Great Awakening on the horizon. Even James Madison, author of the First Amendment, did not share his colleague's separationist zeal. Jefferson's opinion was mostly ignored until 1879, when it surfaced in a Latter-day Saint polygamy case, Reynolds v. United States. It then lay dormant for another 70 years!

While separation is often assumed to be a foundational principle of American democracy, it was first operationalized as a judicial framework in the 1947 Everson v. Board of Education case. Soon thereafter, nondenominational prayer in public schools was deemed unconstitutional (Engel v. Vitale, 1962), as were daily Bible readings (Abington School District v. Schempp, 1962). Lemon v. Kurtzman (1971) prohibited "excessive government entanglement" with religion. When John F. Kennedy exclaimed in 1960: "I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute," he was trumpeting the new separationist status quo.

By the 1970s, that status quo was in the crosshairs of a resurgent religious right. That triumphant onslaught aside, separationism's constitutional basis was always wobbly. In Wallace v. Jaffree (1985), Chief Justice William Rehnquist pronounced the wall metaphor to be based on "bad history" which "should be frankly and explicitly abandoned." As indeed it soon was; 37 years later, Justice Gorsuch took a victory lap.

Instead of demanding something the Constitution doesn't guarantee (i.e., a wall of separation), secularists ought focus on something it does: equal protection for all citizens, as guaranteed by the 14th Amendment. Borrowing from India, they might advocate for the equality of all believers (and non-believers). "Equal-rights secularism" would highlight the legal inequalities that conservative Christian political activism fosters.

Thus, no county clerk could deny a marriage license to a same-sex couple in the name of religious liberty. No single notion of when life begins could assume the status of law. As dozens of religious organizations noted in their amicus curiae brief for Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization: "[T]here is a diversity of views both within and across religions concerning the nature and timing of the beginning of life." A secularist should argue that to subject a Jewish woman in Texas to a conservative Catholic standard of fetal viability renders the former unequal to the latter.

Borrowing from laïcité, American secularists might emphasize how privileging the rights of a few religious groups threatens order. When worshipers congregate during a pandemic, that's not free exercise, but reckless endangerment. When extremists storm the U.S. Capitol, that's not protected free speech, but sedition. Even colonial-era constitutions stipulated what the First Amendment somehow never mentioned: Your free exercise can't threaten public safety. American secularists should demand equal protection, literally.

Enough with walls. This rigid (and illiberal) metaphor undersells the complex task secularism performs in multicultural societies. Instead, secular legal and cultural activism should focus on the lawlessness and inequality that arise when LGBTQ persons, nonbelievers, religious minorities and religious moderates are forced to live under one particular religious conception of God.

Read more from Salon on religion in America:
How Christian nationalism drove the insurrection: A religious history of Jan. 6

Religion scholar Anthea Butler on "White Christianity" and its role in fueling fascism

Catholics will control two branches of government. What does that mean for American Christianity?

JACQUES BERLINERBLAU
Jacques Berlinerblau (@Berlinerblau) is a professor of Jewish civilization at Georgetown University. He has written numerous scholarly books and articles about secularism, his most recent being "Secularism: The Basics" (Routledge).