Starbucks Workers United Wins in US’s Most Anti-Union City

An outside view of a Starbucks in New York City on March 8, 2022.

KENA BETANCUR / VIEWPRESS

BY John Logan,

Truthout

PUBLISHED May 29, 2022

The Starbucks Workers United union campaign continues to produce astounding election wins week after week. As of this writing, more than 260 stores have petitioned for National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) elections: The union has won more than 70 NLRB elections, most by overwhelming margins, and has lost only nine elections. The union has won elections throughout the country, including in places where union victories are rare, including in Mesa, Arizona; Boone, North Carolina; Jacksonville, Florida; Knoxville, Tennessee; Augusta, Georgia; and Overland Park, Kansas.

Last Monday, workers in Greenville, South Carolina, voted eight to one to become the first unionized store in the state. Greenville has a deserved reputation as being “among the most relentlessly anti-union cities in the nation,” as The New York Times described it in 1977. Starbucks Workers United’s victory there is arguably one of the most remarkable union wins in recent years.

South Carolina Has Lowest Union Density in the Nation

For the past two years, South Carolina has been the least unionized state in the country, and is the only state with a union density under 2 percent: South Carolina’s union density in 2021 was just 1.7 percent. The next lowest state, North Carolina, was 2.6 percent.

Most recent union campaigns in the state have failed: In a campaign that lasted for several years before a defeat in 2017, the machinists union was met with a blistering anti-union campaign inside and outside of Boeing in North Charleston, South Carolina. Then-Republican Gov. Nikki Haley stated, “We discourage any companies that have unions from wanting to come to South Carolina because we don’t want to taint the water.”

Then-Governor Haley’s labor director, Catherine Templeton, said on her first day in office, “Let me be very clear … this is an anti-union administration.” The South Carolina Chamber of Commerce — which has had links to anti-union organizations like Union Free South Carolina and Palmetto Shield — also discourages unionized firms. When its CEO retired in 2020, he listed “Keeping Unions out of South Carolina” among his major accomplishments.

Greenville Is the Most Anti-Union City in the State

Greenville is even more anti-union than the rest of South Carolina. The metropolitan area has only seven employers with any union workers, three represented by the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, two by the Teamsters, one by the Teamsters and the United Food and Commercial Workers, and one by the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers. Moreover, over the past decade, the city’s unionized workers have not participated in a single strike, protest or walkout.

The Greenville area has had an extraordinarily lawless anti-union history. In one especially bloody incident at the Chiquola Mill in Honea Path, South Carolina, just outside Greenville, seven union supporters were shot and killed during the 1934 national textile strike.

In the 1970s, the J.P. Stevens textile mill in Greenville, along with its other mills in the Carolinas, became the country’s worst labor law violator. When it finally recognized the union in 1980, The New York Times reported that the “truce” marked “the end of one of the ugliest episodes in recent labor history: a 17-year war during which Stevens repeatedly harassed or fired union activists.”

Marketing anti-unionism:

The Greenville Area Development Corporation has stressed that weak unions are a major reason firms locate there, boasting that, “In 2021, the private sector unionization rate for the Greenville area was only 0.3%. The Greenville Metropolitan Statistical Area is the least unionized Metropolitan Statistical Area in the United States…. There have been no reported work stoppages reported in the past ten years.” Even with a 0.3 percent private-sector unionization rate, the Greenville Chamber of Commerce lists “Promoting a Union Free Environment” prominently among its major policy and economic goals.

Greenville is also home to several leading law firms that specialize in fighting unions. The nation’s second-largest union avoidance law firm, Ogletree Deakins, was founded in Greenville in 1977 with 11 lawyers — along with five in Atlanta, Georgia. It now has more than 800.

Ogletree has played a key role in keeping Greenville and South Carolina union-less over the past several decades. It represented J.P. Stevens, and it helped several foreign auto transplants fight unionization, causing one recent profile to call it a “witness to history.” Attracted by the city’s anti-union reputation, Starbucks firm Littler Mendelson, alongside Jackson Lewis — the nation’s first- and third-largest union avoidance law firms — have long-established offices in Greenville.

Starbucks’s blistering and unlawful anti-union campaign:

For a corporation which consistently and prominently tries to associate itself with progressive values, Starbucks has engaged in one of the most brutal anti-union campaigns of recent decades. The union’s remarkable success has likely obscured some of the intensity and lawlessness of the anti-union campaign.

Starbucks’s anti-union campaign in Buffalo, New York, last fall was comparable in intensity and lawlessness to anything that Amazon or Walmart have ever done to crush unions. In May, the Buffalo regional NLRB office issued a complaint alleging that Starbucks committed more than 200 violations of federal law, an extraordinary number probably not seen since the United Auto Workers’s campaign at Caterpillar over several years in the 1990s.

Starbucks is alleged to have committed hundreds of other unfair labor practices across the United States. The NLRB currently has opened more than 100 allegations of unlawful anti-union behavior. On May 20, the NLRB imposed a bargaining order on Starbucks at the only Buffalo store at which the union had lost, a rare remedy only used when unlawful actions make a fair election impossible for the foreseeable future.

In addition to unlawful dismissals and other illegal actions in Buffalo, Starbucks management has fired workers in Phoenix, Arizona; Memphis, Tennessee; Kansas City, Missouri; Raleigh, North Carolina, and at multiple other locations.

How Did Starbucks Workers Pull Off Greenville Victory?

Given the city’s anti-union reputation, perhaps the most remarkable thing about the Greenville victory is that pro-union workers won there pretty much the same way they’ve won at almost every other Starbucks store across the country.

Intrepid worker-organizers lead the Starbucks union campaign:

After resisting the company’s anti-union onslaught, Starbucks Workers United won two NLRB elections in Buffalo in December 2021. In the six months following those two historic wins in Buffalo, the union campaign has constructed a replicable model based around the dynamism of its intrepid, self-assured worker-organizers at stores all across the country.

New activists who reach out to the campaign by email, Twitter or through the Facebook page have been trained via Zoom meetings on how to organize their own stores. They then go on to play leading roles in organizing other stores in their own region. In regions such as the Boston, Massachusetts, area, worker-organizers have built up an incredible campaign infrastructure. The organization of the Greenville store — the first store in South Carolina to go union — followed a now-familiar pattern for the union campaign.

Shift supervisors as lead organizers:

The lead organizer at Greenville, Hayden Mullen, first reached out to the union campaign via email and was connected with one of the experienced Buffalo-based organizers. Mullen had no previous involvement with unions; he had worked as a barista at another Starbucks outside Spartanburg, South Carolina, before transferring to the Greenville store to become a shift supervisor.

Shift supervisors have no managerial authority and thus are eligible to vote in NLRB elections. Most baristas trust their shift supervisors — often long-serving employees — more than store or district managers. Shift supervisors have been organizers at several stores, which has assisted the organizing. Some stores have had vocal anti-union shift managers, which can undermine organizing. However, at the first store to unionize in the South — in Knoxville — all the shift managers opposed the union, but it still won because the store had an unusually determined and charismatic lead organizer.

Inspired by Sen. Bernie Sanders:

Mullen had worked at American Eagle, Dunkin’ Donuts, Krispy Kreme, and other low-wage service jobs. He was inspired and politicized by Sen. Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaigns — as have other Starbucks activists — and strongly supported workplace organizing.

Before the Greenville union campaign became public last fall, Mullen informed his store manager at his former store in Spartanburg — who was sympathetic — that Starbucks would benefit from a union. Mullen’s Greenville store manager, in contrast, was curious about how unionization would change her job — which Mullen explained to her satisfaction. The Greenville store manager, however, later participated actively in the anti-union campaign, which Mullen attributes to pressure from Starbucks corporate representatives.

Starbucks has consistently worried that store managers are insufficiently dedicated to the anti-union campaign, and both CEO Howard Schultz and Executive Vice President Rossann Williams have implored them to get more involved. Some managers viewed as being too sympathetic to the union campaign have been reassigned or even fired from their stores.

From Zoom to petitioning for an election:

Mullen first had a Zoom meeting — followed by other contacts by Zoom, email and text — with a Buffalo-based Starbucks Workers United activist, and was given a step-by-step guide to the unionization process: how to print NLRB authorization cards; how to approach coworkers about signing cards; how to mail the cards and petition the NLRB for an election; and how to draft the “Dear Howard” letter requesting recognition.

The entire process from Mullen’s first Zoom meeting to mailing off the store’s authorization cards — signed by 75 percent of the store’s workers — took little more than one week at Greenville.

Anti-union reputation not an obstacle:

Mullen said that Greenville’s anti-union reputation did not impede organizing. Some workers had negative views on unions, primarily because they had worked at anti-union corporations such as Target where management had expressed anti-union views. Others wanted reassurance that it was legal to form unions in South Carolina.

However, when Mullen explained that this campaign was about getting respect and improving daily conditions, and that workers would negotiate their own collective agreement, most signed cards and subsequently voted for the union.

Throughout the campaign, Mullen kept secret the identities of union supporters so as not to expose them to management retaliation. Starbucks has allegedly fired more than 20 union activists, while others have allegedly been disciplined for minor infractions of rules — which would not have been enforced prior to the union campaign — or have had their hours reduced drastically.

Starbucks’s anti-union campaign:

The Greenville store got its vote scheduled within a month of having petitioned for an election. In most cases, Starbucks’s Littler Mendelson legal team has done everything possible to delay elections and vote counts.

When the store’s organizing committee is small — as measured by the number of signatures on the “Dear Howard” letter — Starbucks has generally facilitated faster elections, believing that it can win these ones. However, even in most of these cases, as in Greenville, management has significantly underestimated support for the union.

One-on-one anti-union meetings:

Prior to the election, Greenville management did not hold group captive-audience meetings — which, at other stores, have often proved ineffective or even counterproductive for management — and instead focused on one-on-one anti-union meetings with store “partners.”

These meetings were conducted by a combination of the store manager, district manager and a regional manager. In the meetings, the managers, asserted that the things workers most cared about, such as the ability to transfer from store to store, could be lost under a collective bargaining agreement.

Benefit threat:

Management also repeated the threat — first stated by CEO Schultz in early May, then repeated by Starbucks headquarters and subsequently amplified by district and store managers around the country — that Starbucks cannot extend upcoming benefit increases to stores already engaged in bargaining and those who have voted to unionize.

In reality, organizing and bargaining committees have already informed the company that they will not object and have called on it to extend any benefit increases to all partners; thus, the only reason that management has repeated this (almost certainly unlawful) threat is to disrupt the momentum of the campaign. The union has filed a complaint with the NLRB on this issue.

Starbucks’s scaremongering didn’t work:

After management’s one-on-one meetings, the lead union organizer talked with workers about Starbucks’s threat to eliminate benefits for unionized stores, including the ability to transfer stores, and other scare-mongering talking points. Most were satisfied with his reassurances, Mullen said.

Mullen believes the one-on-one meetings discouraged some of the store’s pro-union workers from voting. But only one worker voted “no,” and that worker told Mullen that he mailed his ballot early and that, if he had spoken to Mullen prior to sending it, he would likely have supported the union. Thus, despite the extraordinary result in Greenville — an eight-to-one win for Starbucks Workers United — Mullen was disappointed that the margin of victory wasn’t bigger because some pro-union workers decided not to vote.

Union campaign spreads beyond Greenville:

Three other Starbucks stores in South Carolina — in Columbia, Anderson and Sumter — have petitioned for NLRB elections. Last week, workers at the Columbia store participated in a three-day strike to protest Starbucks’s sacking of the store’s manager. Other than strikes by McDonald’s workers who were part of the Fight for $15, a three-day strike over unfair labor practices at a non-union employer is a rare event in South Carolina.

Other Starbucks stores will likely petition for NLRB elections soon. Mullen has already reached out to the other Greenville stores. If the campaign continues to spread and win, Starbucks Workers United might challenge Greenville’s reputation as the most anti-union city in the country.

Starbucks Union Is Reaching Areas Other Union Campaigns Couldn’t

Over the past several months, Starbucks Workers United has won victories — often by overwhelming margins — in several locations in which unions are unaccustomed to winning. By mid-May, stores in almost every state in the South had petitioned for NLRB elections, and activists believe the campaign would have spread even more widely if not for the terminations of the “Memphis Seven” early in the campaign. Now it is spreading in South Carolina.

In 2016, then-Governor Haley’s labor director Templeton — a former Ogletree Deakins lawyer who was “the only woman involved in three successful defeats of the historic United Auto Workers drive on Nissan in Smyrna, Tennessee in the late 1990s” — warned a Greenville business audience about a new poll showing growing support for unions among the state’s newer residents: “It’s a shocking result, especially for those of us who were pretty sure we were anti-union…. [South Carolina has a] new demographic that we need to be aware of. And it’s only going to continue to become more of a majority.”

Templeton was fretting over a poll, but Starbucks Workers United has won an election in the nation’s most anti-union city. The newly unionized Greenville workers are the demographic that terrifies anti-union ideologues like Templeton, and more workers will likely follow their courageous example.

The union campaign has developed a grassroots dynamism that appears replicable, thus enabling it to spread even to cities and regions with ferocious anti-union reputations. Union revitalization in the U.S. will almost certainly require many more such campaigns, which are based to a significant degree on worker self-organization.

The campaign’s remarkable victory in the U.S.’s most anti-union city might just be a harbinger of things to come. If Starbucks Workers United can win in Greenville, it just might be able to win anywhere.

John Logan is professor and director of labor and employment studies at San Francisco State University. He has published widely on the topic of employer opposition to unionization.

Seattle considers measures to address gig worker pay, rights

yesterday

SEATTLE (AP) — The Seattle City Council will vote Tuesday on the first in a series of policies that would ask app-based companies like food delivery services to improve wages, transparency and other working conditions for gig workers.

The Seattle Times reports if the bills pass they would require companies to pay per-minute and per-mile rates to delivery drivers on apps like DoorDash, UberEats and Grubhub.

The rates would begin when drivers accept an order, in an effort to help the drivers — who are contract workers, not employees — earn the city’s $17.27 minimum wage and receive the standard mileage reimbursement set by the Internal Revenue Service.

In a statement, DoorDash criticized the council’s plans, calling for an impact study to be completed before a vote is taken. The company said the proposals would lead to higher costs for customers and reduced earnings for workers.

City Councilperson Lisa Herbold says the companies should find a sustainable business model that allows workers to make a fair wage.

“This is an expensive city to live and work in and if paying employee subminimum wage is the only way that businesses can sustain their model, then there should be some consideration about whether or not their business model really works,” Herbold said, adding DoorDash reported nearly $5 billion in revenue in 2021, up 69% over 2020.

“I don’t think that paying minimum compensation is a threat to their business model.”

Future legislation being considered by the City Council would aim to regulate a series of transparency and equity issues, including right to access restrooms, discrimination protections and protections from unfair deactivation from apps that can result in wage loss.

PROTECTING PETROLEUM

The 900 US Troops in Syria Should Not Be There

Let's get the 900 U.S. troops out of Syria and away from any war with Russia or Iran.

Soldiers stand guard next to a US Bradley Fighting Vehicle (BFV) during a patrol in the countryside of the Kurdish-majority city of Qamishli in Syria's northeastern Hasakeh province, on April 20, 2022. (Photo: Delil Souleiman/AFP via Getty Images)

JUAN COLE

May 30, 2022

 by Informed Comment

Memorial Day or Decoration Day (referring to the decoration of the graves of soldiers killed in combat) began after the Civil War and has been commemorated since 1868. It is no wonder that the mourning began then. Historian J. David Hacker has estimated that 750,000 troops died in the war, the biggest total for any war in which the US was involved. Nearly 300,000 died in WWII.

Whatever the U.S. troops are accomplishing in eastern Syria is not worth it, especially since their mission seems poorly or illegally defined since the days of Trump.

Today instead of writing about the war dead, I’d like to consider the plight of the 900 U.S. troops in Syria. They should not be there, and their presence is a mixed bag when it comes to U.S. national security, especially in view of the new Cold War between Russia and the United States and their proxy war in Ukraine. As with eastern Ukraine, Syria is crawling with Russian troops and air force planes.

Whatever the US troops are accomplishing in eastern Syria is not worth it, especially since their mission seems poorly or illegally defined since the days of Trump. This is a powder keg, given the outbreak of the war in Ukraine. President Biden said that he did not want US troops in Ukraine because if they came into conflict with Russian troops, that would be WWIII. Well, the same consideration should lead him to get out of Syria, which is a Russian sphere of influence now.

After what happened in Afghanistan when the US left, Biden may be reluctant to pull US forces out of Syria. But the two situations are not similar. Russia and Iran have already shown that they will go to great lengths to keep Bashar al-Assad in power. There were no outside powers willing and able to prop up Ghani in Afghanistan. Besides, the real danger is in staying in Syria without a clear mission, cheek by jowl with Russia and Iran, not in leaving it.

The basis on which the Obama administration sent troops into eastern Syria was self-defense. The ISIL terrorist organization had formed a mini-state in eastern Syria and northern Iraq and had hit NATO allies like France as well as using the internet to encourage stochastic or random terrorism against the United States.

The Syrian Kurdish militia, the Peoples Protection Units or YPG, provided the infantry to defeat ISIL and take its capital, Raqqa. The YPG captured Raqqa on October 17, 2017, receiving US air support, and having some US troops embedded among them.

So there is no longer any self-defense justification for US troops to be in Syria. In the meantime, the government of Bashar al-Assad, backed by the Russian Aerospace Forces and Shiite militias from Lebanon and Iraq, along with a small contingent of Iranian Revolutionary Guards, defeated most of the rebel forces that had challenged the regime, most of the Sunni Arabs of a fundamentalist bent. They are now holed up in the northern, rural Idlib Province, along with some 3 million residents and internally displaced persons.

The Syrian government, which is gradually regaining its sovereignty and recognition, has said that it wants the US troops out. Syrian Foreign Minister Faisal al-Miqdad says the US troop presence is “illegal,” and has called on the Syrian Kurds to stop cooperating with Washington, saying that the US will have to leave sooner or later.

In mid-October of 2019, Trump abruptly ordered US troops out of Syria and gave Turkey’s president Tayyip Erdogan a green light to invade the regions of the Syrian Kurds, who had been US allies against ISIL. Most US troops were pulled out, to the dismay and fury of their erstwhile Kurdish allies, who felt abandoned and betrayed. Their tanks headed for Iraqi, festooned with rotten eggplants and tomatoes cast at them by angry Kurdish villagers, who soon thereafter had to run away from Erdogan’s invading forces.

Someone in the White House, however, manipulated Trump into keeping a few hundred US troops in southeastern Syria at Deir al-Zor around some of Syria’s oil fields, the oil from which was then going to the Kurds and not to the Damascus government. The staffers told Trump, who always had a thing about stealing other people’s oil, that he should keep those US troops there to siphon off Syrian oil, and Trump was persuaded. In the end a scheme for an American company to exploit Syria’s oil fell through, which is just as well, since that would have been a war crime.

Whatever you think of the Obama administration’s self-defense argument, it at least had some merit and ISIL was a dangerous statelet that roiled the world for a few years.

The current charge of the 900 remaining US troops seems awfully vague, and one fears they might actually be there to make sure the petroleum in Deir al-Zor goes to the Kurds rather than to the Damascus government. This mission is problematic in international law and weird because the US has thrown the Syrian Kurds anyway to the Turkish wolves.

The US troops at the Green Village Base near the al-Omar oil field, one of Syria’s largest, have recently come under rocket fire from Shiite militias, as Jared Szuba explains at Al-Monitor. These ongoing attacks will not stop.

Erdogan is making noises about another invasion of Syria, to establish a 20-mile deep security zone between the YPG Kurds and Turkey’s border, inside northern Syria. The Biden administration has warned Erdogan not to do it, but it is hard to see how Washington could stop it. Since the US is facilitating the transfer to the Syrian Kurds of the oil of the al-Omar field, Ankara sees them as an enemy, even though the US and Turkey are supposedly NATO allies. Erdogan is using his position in NATO to block the accession of Sweden and Finland until they agree to declare the YPG a terrorist organization. The US, which has long been allied with the YPG, has declined to so designate them, of course. The US does view the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), based in southeastern Turkey and in Qandil in Iraq, as a terrorist organization, but sees the YPG as a separate group rather than as a branch of the PKK.

There is more bad news. Alarmed at Erdogan’s invasion plans, Russia, for which Syria is a major military theater of operations and client state, sent s surveillance helicopters and fighter jets to Qamishli airport in eastern Syria to observe the Turkish border. US troops are deployed near Qamishli, according to the pan-Arab daily al-Sharq al-Awsat (The Middle East).

It is nervous-making to have 900 US troops in the midst of the ongoing Syrian maelstrom, with continual possibilities for war to break out if they get caught in the crossfire in some dispute among the various players in Syria, with the behemoth being Vladimir Putin’s Russian army and air force.

© 2021 Juan Cole


JUAN COLE teaches Middle Eastern and South Asian history at the University of Michigan. His newest book, "Muhammad: Prophet of Peace Amid the Clash of Empires" was published in 2020. He is also the author of "The New Arabs: How the Millennial Generation Is Changing the Middle East" (2015) and "Napoleon's Egypt: Invading the Middle East" (2008). He has appeared widely on television, radio, and on op-ed pages as a commentator on Middle East affairs, and has a regular column at Salon.com. He has written, edited, or translated 14 books and has authored 60 journal articles.

BUFFALO SHOOTING UNDERSCORES THE HUMAN COST OF HATRED

BLACK ENTERPRISE

 Editors

May 30, 2022

(Image: Courtesy of Mike Groll/Office of Gov. Kathy Hochul)

The fatal mass shooting inside a Buffalo, N.Y., grocery store on May 14 has shaken the faith of national political leaders by echoing a tragic and familiar refrain across the country—another mass shooting that appears motivated by race and hate.

Payton Gendron, 18, traveled 200 miles from his home in Conklin, N.Y., to Buffalo, where he strapped on body armor, walked into the Tops Friendly Market and shot 13 people in the store. He streamed the attack online before the police subdued him. Eleven people shot were Black, while two were white—10 of the victims died.

Federal authorities found a racist 180-page document written by Gendron, who said the assault was intended to terrorize all non-white, non-Christian people to persuade them to leave the United States.

A Washington Post analysis of more than 600 messages found that Gendron had planned to target the Tops grocery store since February, because its customer base is mainly Black.

“The American experiment in democracy is in danger like it hasn’t been in my lifetime,” said President Joe Biden in a Buffalo speech May 17.

“It’s in danger this hour. Hate and fear are being given too much oxygen by those who pretend to love America but who don’t understand America.”

Biden went on to say, “In America, evil will not win, I promise you. Hate will not prevail. White supremacy will not have the last word.”
Part of the crowd that gathered May 17 at the Delavan Grider Community Center in Buffalo to grieve with New York Gov. Kathy Hochul and President Joe Biden over the grocery-store shooting in that city. (Mike Groll/Office of Gov. Kathy Hochul)

Law-enforcement officials said that New York State police troopers were called to Gendron’s high school last June for a report that the then 17-year-old had made threatening statements.

From President Biden to New York Governor Kathy Hochul, political officials have offered many words in the wake of a shooting that has stoked fear and worry across the country, while law enforcement searches for answers.

The Sunday morning after the incident, Hochul spoke at True Bethel Baptist Church in Buffalo, where she said: “Our hearts are broken, and I’m going to say one thing: Lord, forgive the anger in my heart right now.”

“Forgive me, Lord. I know it doesn’t belong there, Lord,” Hochul said.

“I was raised to love and respect and care. Well, to hear these stories and the pain that’s out there in a community that I love so well—I’m angry.”

The governor went on to quote Psalm 34: “The Lord is near the broken-hearted and saves the crushed of spirit. Well, Lord, I know you’re here because we are so broken-hearted, and we are crushed in spirit at this moment. But this is temporary because with your love, Lord, we will rise up, and our crushed spirits will rise again.”

Governor Hochul also took practical steps. On May 20, she issued two executive orders.

The first executive order is designed to fight the surge in domestic terrorism and violent extremism frequently inspired by social media platforms and internet forums. The executive order calls on the Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Services to establish a new unit, dedicated solely to the prevention of domestic terrorism, within the Division’s Office of Counterterrorism.

The second calls on New York State Police to establish a dedicated unit within the New York State Intelligence Center (NYSIC) to track domestic violent extremism through social media. The second executive order will require state police to file for an Extreme Risk Protection Order (ERPO) under New York State’s Red Flag Law whenever they have probable cause to believe an individual is a threat to themselves or others.

In addition, Hochul is proposing legislation to close “other gun” loopholes by revising and widening the definition of a firearm to get dangerous guns off the street.

While she offered political remedies, spiritual leaders also made pleas to end violence.

Bishop Vashti McKenzie, the interim president and general secretary of the National Council of Churches, said in a statement: “Our communities have not healed from the onslaught of violence from past white supremacist attacks and now the scabs have been ripped off to bleed again.”

McKenzie stood with President Obama and other bishops of the African Methodist Episcopal Church after the young white supremacist Dylann Roof walked into Mother Emanuel AME in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015 and opened fire, killing nine people during a midweek Bible study.

“This racial violence has to stop,” McKenzie said.

“We must all increase our efforts to bring racism to an end. That will not happen by only making ceremonial or performative gestures that don’t get to the root causes of the problems. We have to do the deeper work. This is especially true for Christians.”

The Revered Eric Manning, pastor of Mother Emanuel AME, said in a statement that he and members of his congregation could empathize with the suffering from the May 14 shooting in Buffalo.

“We can relate to your hurt, pain and anger,” Pastor Manning said.

“The congregation of Mother Emanuel was in the same place almost seven years ago.”

A memorial to the victims of another grocery store mass shooting, this one in Boulder, Colorado, in March 2021. (gotojbb/Flickr)

On May 17, New York City Mayor Eric Adams joined faith leaders who came to a Harlem vigil for the 10 victims of the racially fueled mass shooting.

During the vigil at Bethel Gospel Assembly Church, Adams placed one of the 10 pink roses on a table. But he also referred to a shooting closer to home—race and hate are not the only reasons why people of color are being killed.

“You are no less demonic,” said Adams to the drive-by shooter who killed an 11-year-old girl in the Bronx. Adams had just visited her parents, and he drew parallels between the Buffalo shooting and New York City gun violence.

Many communities around the country are hosting vigils for racial healing after the Buffalo shooting. In Rockville, Maryland, people from Jewish, Asian, Hispanic and other groups targeted by white supremacists were to gather for a vigil at the Rockville Seventh-day Adventist Church.

“As a family of faith, we pray for healing for all who have been affected,” the Seventh-day Adventist Church in North America said in a statement on May 19.

“But as much as our prayers go up and our hearts go out to those who have been devastated by this horrific event, we cannot stop there.”

“We denounce this mindless and premeditated act of hatred and violence. We call on all people of goodwill to use their voices and platforms to denounce hatred and racism in all of its forms. May we use this evil intention as a catalyst to propel us to action and demonstrate that love is stronger than hatred.”
About the author

Senior contributor Hamil Harris is an adjunct professor at the University of Maryland, College Park, and has been a lecturer at Morgan State University. Harris is minister at the Glenarden Church of Christ and a police chaplain. He was a longtime reporter for The Washington Post.

To End Mass Shootings, We Need to Change the Deeper Structure of Life in the US

Area residents and community members gather at the town square in Uvalde, Texas, for a vigil in the wake of a mass shooting at Robb Elementary School on May 24, 2022.

JORDAN VONDERHAAR / GETTY IMAGES

Truthout

May 27, 2022

BY Henry A. Giroux, 

PART OF THE SERIES
The Public Intellectual

Violence is the oxygen of authoritarianism. It is the symbolic and visceral breeding ground of fear, ignorance, greed and cruelty. It flourishes in societies marked by despair, ignorance, lies, hate and cynicism.

Violence — and especially the killing of children such as the mass killing that occurred this week at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, leaving at least 19 students dead — can’t be understood in the immediacy of shock and despair, however deplorable and understandable. The ideological and structural conditions that nourish and legitimate it have to be revealed both in their connections to power and in the systemic unmasking of those who benefit from such death-dealing conditions.

Among Democrats, the general response to mass violence in the U.S. is to call for more gun regulations and criticize the NRA, gun lobbies and the weapons industry. This is understandable given that the arms industry floods the United States with all manner of lethal weapons, pays out millions to mostly Republican politicians, and in the case of the NRA has sponsored an amendment banning “any federal dollars from being used to research gun injuries or deaths in the US.”

We should indeed criticize the gun lobby and arms industry, but this critique does not go far enough. The tragic murders of the 19 schoolchildren and two teachers in rural Texas at the hands of a young man who resorted to a horrific act of violence — and the killing of Black shoppers in a Tops grocery store in Buffalo by a hate-filled racist and self-proclaimed fascist — represent the end points of a culture awash in guns and violence, a society that nourishes and rewards the gun industries, and values the accumulation of profits over human needs. All of the latter is amplified by a modern Republican Party that accelerates a gun culture, revels in violence as a form of political opportunism, strips young people of crucial social provisions, and enables a culture of lies that make it difficult to discern the truth from falsehoods, good from evil. New York Times columnist Charles Blow rightly claims that “The Republican Party has turned America into a killing field.”

In the current historical moment, the market-driven values of “freedom,” choice and rugged individualism have merged with the concentration of power in the hands of the super-rich and corporations, an unbridled individualism, and a culture of terror and fear. One consequence is that the corruption of politics as big money is used to pay off politicians while using a corporate-controlled media to flood the culture with the notion that individual liberty is synonymous with unfettered gun rights. How else to explain that “Gun rights groups set new records for lobbying in 2021, spending over $15 million, with GOP Sen. Ted Cruz the biggest recipient,” as Ruth Ben-Ghiat wrote this week. It is not surprising that Cruz responded to the mass shooting in a Texas elementary school by declaring that one way to solve the problem of school violence was to arm teachers. It is worth noting that, according to Al Jazeera, “Sales of weapons and military services by the world’s 100 biggest arms companies reached a record $531bn in 2020.”

While the power of the NRA, arms dealers such as Lockheed Martin — the largest war industry in the world — and the military-industrial complex to shape politics and a permanent war economy is indisputable, this is only one register of a form of gangster capitalism that believes that market values, which privatize, commodify, and commercialize all social relations, are more important than addressing vital human needs, crucial social problems and the public good. This is a logic that suppresses human rights, views the struggle for social justice as a scourge, and cancels out the future for young people. William Greider in his book Who Will Tell the People, published in 1992, stated that if the U.S. lost its civic faith in the promise of democracy, it “has the potential to deteriorate into a rather brutish place, ruled by naked power and random social aggression.” Greider’s words were not only prescient, they capture the loss of vision and cult of authoritarianism at work in the United States.

Under neoliberalism, democratic life has no vision and no meaningful ideological civic anchors. Neoliberalism strips society of both its collective conscience and democratic communal relations. Violence proliferates in a society when justice is corrupted and power works to produce mass forms of historical and social amnesia largely aimed at degrading society’s critical and moral capacities.

There are more guns in circulation in the U.S. than people in a country of 325 million. The U.S. constitutes 5 percent of the world’s population and owns 25 percent of all guns on the globe. Judd Legum in Popular Information reports that in 2020, “39,695,315 guns were sold to civilians.” He notes further that this is an alarming figure given that “firearm ownership rates appear to be a statistically significant predictor of the distribution of public mass shooters worldwide.” Equally significant but not surprising is the fact that “More Americans have died from gunshots in the last 50 years than in all of the wars in American history,” according to NBC News. The Pew Research Center reported, “More Americans died of gun-related injuries in 2020 than in any other year on record.” What emerges from these figures and the relentless mass shootings in which young people have become an increasing target is the question of what kind of society has the United States become, and what are the broader economic, political and social forces that produce massive violence and its increasing collapse into authoritarianism?

As horrific as these figures are, the backdrop to the politics and plague of violence in the United States is rarely a subject of debate in the mainstream media. Even as specific policies are debated, what is ignored is a neoliberal economic system that feeds on self-interest, inequality, cruelty, punishment, precarity and loneliness. Neoliberal society fuels a criminogenic system that celebrates violence both as a source of pleasure and as an organizing principle of governance.

Neoliberal capitalism has given rise to a carceral state that criminalizes the behavior of young people, while filling the prisons with poor people of color, destroying their families and their futures. This is a system so cold-hearted that it refuses to renew the Child Tax Credit, pushing 3 million children below the poverty line.Young people are being killed in spaces that are supposed to protect them. In an age of fascist politics, mass violence has become normalized and is nourished by a culture of conspiracy theories.

The U.S. is the only country in the world where children as young as 13 are sentenced to prison without any chance of parole. Such policies are just one register of the slow and silent state violence waged against young people that works in tandem with the mass violence that is produced by a society in which injustice, poverty, fear and racial cleansing are central modes of governance. The irony here is that the current white supremacist Republican Party now claims it is the party dedicated to protecting children. This claim is ludicrous when tested against a party that bans books, models schools after prisons, demonizes transgender youth, assaults reproductive rights, and consistently puts policies in place that undermine efforts to lift children and their families above the poverty line.

Domestic terrorists now parade as politicians, and white supremacists dominate the Republican Party and revel in a civically depleted culture that has abandoned justice, ethics and hope for the corrupt currencies of wealth, power and self-aggrandizement. Increasingly young people are the targets of a form of gangster capitalism that has written them out of the script of democracy, placed them at the mercy of politicians who are self-proclaimed white Christian nationalists, and abandoned them through institutions that have broken from the social contract. Increasingly, they are stripped of their dignity, hopes, and in too many cases, their lives. This is the death machine of social abandonment and terminal exclusion that creates the conditions for blood to flow in the streets, schools, malls, supermarkets, churches, mosques and synagogues.

Young people are being killed in spaces that are supposed to protect them. In an age of fascist politics, mass violence has become normalized and is nourished by a culture of conspiracy theories, moral indifference, corrupt politicians, a social media that trades in hate, the normalization of mass shootings, and a grotesque public silence in the face of massive inequalities in wealth and power.

In such a context, it is not surprising that an increasing number of Republicans support violence as a tool for resolving political issues. It gets worse. The Washington Post has reported that, “1 in 3 Americans say they believe violence against government can at times be justified.” Violence has become so widespread that it both neutralizes the public’s sense of moral outrage and shatters their bonds of solidarity. As society is increasingly militarized under neoliberalism, violence becomes the solution for everything. This is especially dangerous for those individuals who feel isolated and lonely in a society that atomizes everything. Some of these individuals turn to the internet and social media in search of community, often to be radicalized by white supremacist conspiracy theories, as was the case with the Buffalo shooter.

The culture of violence has intensified since the 1980s and has found a privileged place in the cult of authoritarianism in the United States. It is embraced, legitimated and endorsed by a Republican Party that uses gun violence and mass school shootings as part of a poisonous script designed, as Ruth Ben-Ghiat argues to transform “public schools into death traps as part of a deliberate strategy to create an atmosphere of fear and suspicion conducive to survivalist mentalities and support for illiberal politics.”

Gun violence cannot be abstracted from a broader culture of violence and authoritarianism that calls for more gun ownership, more police and more national security. Moreover, both the gun industry and right-wing politicians who benefit from its profits are well aware fear and extremism sell more guns and generate lucrative markets for the merchants of death. The right-wing response to school shootings is as disingenuous as it is morally corrupt. In order to feed the coffers of the surveillance industry and other merchants of death, it calls for turning schools into armed camps, awash with high-tech security systems, more police, and more firearms for teachers while increasingly defining the purpose and meaning of schools through the language of a military culture. Such actions both cultivate a mass consciousness that worships violence even as it bemoans the terrible price it enacts on human life, especially when children become collateral damage in such a culture. The cult of violence in the U.S. is inseparable from cult of authoritarianism and the rise of neoliberal fascism.

In moments like these, we all must remember that justice is partly dependent upon the merging of civic courage, historical understanding, a critical education and robust mass action. There is a long history of resistance in the U.S. that is under siege and is being erased from schools, books and libraries by right-wing Republican politicians and their followers. This is not only an assault on historical consciousness; it’s also an assault on thinking itself, and the very ability to recognize injustice and the tools needed to oppose it. One consequence is that neoliberal authoritarianism now thrives in an ecosystem of historical amnesia and has become an accelerating agent of violence.

Authoritarianism as a death machine thrives by hiding in the language of common sense and the discourses of fear, terror and moral panic. As it becomes more widespread, it is normalized, becoming all the more destructive. Normalization is a form of mystification, and it can be seen in the way in which the larger forces behind mass shootings such as those at Tops supermarket and in the Texas school are often reduced to personal stories of individual grief and narratives limited to the assailants’ lives. As structural conditions are obscured, connecting the dots to a broader culture of violence becomes more difficult.

Hiding behind a rhetoric in which the political collapses into the personal and private troubles are removed from broader systemic considerations, power now functions in the service of a cabal of religious fundamentalists, charlatans of mass ignorance, the financial elite, and the corporate-controlled cultural apparatuses that trade in dishonesty, the spectacle of violence, and the demonization and dehumanization of anyone who is not a white Christian. Even worse, the modern Republican Party not only endorses calls for violence by members of its own party, including those made by Paul Gosar, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and others, but it has also become a party that openly views violence as a legitimate way to secure its desired political outcomes — to seize power and destroy democracy. Rather than being alarmed by violence, the Republican Party has created the conditions that suggest it wishes for even more. As Charles Blow observes, trading in fear and paranoia, the Republican Party terrorizes the public by claiming that “criminals are coming to menace you, immigrants are coming to menace you, a race war (or racial replacement) is coming to menace you and the government itself may one day come to menace you. The only defense you have against the menace is to be armed.” The only solution is to not only accept the American way of violence and death but to affirm it, be complicit with it, and in doing so legitimate it.

The killing of children turns this invisible scourge of power and its poisonous instruments on its head, if only for a moment, because of the shock of the unimaginable, gesturing at its roots the workings of current political and economic formations that function as a lethal force that turns everything into ashes. Such horrors cry out for connecting the endless threads of violence that mark the brutality waged against women, transgender youth, Black people, Indigenous people, undocumented immigrants, youth of color, disabled people, the environment, and all those considered disposable in this neo-fascist social order.As society is increasingly militarized under neoliberalism, violence becomes the solution for everything.

Against this authoritarian death machine, we all need to mobilize to turn despair into militant hope, critical analysis into action, and individual anger into collective struggles that refuse the seductions of gangster capitalism and its rebranded fascism.

On multiple fronts, youth are already at the forefront of this organizing. After the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, in 2018, youth rose up against gun violence in unprecedented ways, creating the March for Our Lives and connecting the issue of school shootings with police violence, racial justice, and other urgent issues.

Youth are also speaking out and rising up in monumental ways regarding the climate crisis, racial justice, immigration justice, war, prisons, and more. Adults would do well to recognize, bolster and amplify these forms of youth activism to help them grow and gain momentum.

History is open, and the signposts of the current moment are waiting for a radical change in consciousness, institutions and action. How much more blood will flow in schools and other places where young people and adults live their lives before a sufficiently powerful mass movement arises to put an end to this capitalist architecture of ideological and institutional violence?

Resistance is the only option, and it has to be educational, structural, bold and disruptive — far removed from the weak call for a revitalized electoral politics or moderate gun reforms. Resistance has to breathe anger, outrage, and mediate a sense of moral righteousness through a mass movement for economic, environmental and social justice.

Frederick Douglass was right when he stated: “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to, and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.”

How many more deaths can this country endure, how many more innocent children will be killed before a mass movement arises that can bring this brutal social order to an end?

Henry A. Giroux currently holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural Studies Department and is the Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy. His most recent books include: American Nightmare: Facing the Challenge of Fascism (City Lights, 2018); The Terror of the Unforeseen (Los Angeles Review of books, 2019), On Critical Pedagogy, 2nd edition (Bloomsbury, 2020); Race, Politics, and Pandemic Pedagogy: Education in a Time of Crisis (Bloomsbury 2021); and Pedagogy of Resistance: Against Manufactured Ignorance (Bloomsbury 2022). Giroux is also a member of Truthout’s Board of Directors.

New Book Explores Why “Inclusion” Can’t Bring an End to Anti-Trans Violence

A demonstrator speaks in support of Black transgender lives at 

a rally in Foley Square on July 30, 2020, in New York City.

SCOTT HEINS / GETTY IMAGES

INTERVIEW

LGBTQ RIGHTS

BY Toshio Meronek, Truthout

PUBLISHED May 30, 2022

In their new book Atmospheres of Violence, organizer and University of California Berkeley gender studies professor Eric A. Stanley describes how the United States political system depends on violence against trans people.

Stanley argues that to stay in power, U.S. institutions and the people behind them — including politicians, their corporate benefactors, and the armed guard forces that police the rest of us — consolidate power and wealth through the constant precarity experienced by marginalized people.

In the past year, 22 state legislatures introduced and in several cases passed laws to ban transgender health care access for youth while banned books lists at libraries were engorged with titles featuring queer characters. South Carolina criminalized trans youth participation in school sports and legalized discrimination against LGBTQ people by medical practitioners. “Don’t Say Gay”/”Don’t Say Trans” laws meant queer public school teachers were fired or almost fired but for mass actions like student walkouts in Florida and Texas.

The attacks continue to creep out of capitol buildings like spilled oil, contributing to jumps in mental health emergencies and death: A Trevor Project study released in May 2022 found 45 percent of TLGBQ youth had seriously considered attempting suicide in the past year.

While conservatives scapegoat trans people to rally their bases, liberals spit out toothless speeches supporting trans people at the same time as they push spending bills to enrich police, the military and various other policing departments too numerous to name. These, the country’s most well-funded institutions, are notorious for reinforcing gender binaries and stereotypes, high rates of assault and rape, and near-immunity from repercussions for harm they cause.

March 31 marked the first time the White House celebrated the annual Transgender Day of Visibility. In the press briefing room, a prerecorded message from President Joe Biden played, and officials announced more funding for the Transportation Security Administration to install gender-neutral surveillance scanner technology at airports. The White House’s other announcement: It will start issuing nonbinary passports in April, a positive change, but one that will mostly affect a narrow slice of trans U.S. citizens who plan to travel internationally soon. (It’s also a late change, given that almost half of U.S. states already offer nonbinary IDs.)

Atmospheres of Violence
Structuring Antagonism and the Trans/Queer Ungovernable

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Atmospheres of Violence details stories of pain and resistance from the past half-century that have mostly been lost to history. Some are shocking in their cruelty and proximity to the U.S. political machinery — as when the government used the chaos of HIV/AIDS to sap energy from radical trans liberation movements of the 1980s and 1990s while it propped up the nonprofit-industrial complex and pharmaceutical companies. As these system-enabled tragedies unfold, the book offers moments of relief as it describes trans people working against and around the system’s rules.

By its end, the book provides a figurative version of the mace “bomb” that the Black trans revolutionary Marsha P. Johnson described carrying before her still-unsolved death in 1992. It’s one of the book’s inscriptions: “If they attack me, I’m going to attack them, with my bomb.”

Johnson was prepared for the everyday war that continues against Black trans people. The book gives readers more reasons to organize against the U.S. empire, and to do away with attempts to incrementally bring progress to a country built on the bodies of trans people. As the fog of the mace subsides and the rubble of the empire settles, Stanley points readers to futures that are independent of concentrated physical and psychic violence. Truthout interviewed the author in May.

Toshio Meronek: During an online launch for Atmospheres of Violence, one of your mentors, Angela Davis, was on the panel. She said she was especially moved by the book’s insistence that we “unlearn ideas” that reproduce or strengthen the forces we are fighting against. Can you speak more on “unlearning” assumptions most of us have internalized from when we were young? What assumptions do we need to unlearn?

Eric A. Stanley: Learning must also be a practice of unlearning, this is something Angela continues to model for us. I think specifically she was referring to one of the major claims of the book, that inclusion is not evidence of freedom. To begin, I should also say that this book is as woven from collective struggle as much as it is from more traditional texts. Much of the organizing that I’ve been involved with has been pushing back against the logic that assimilation for trans/queer people will provide us with the world we want and need. It was also organizing, mostly around housing, HIV/AIDS and various prison abolitionist projects that led me to understand that inclusion does not provide the relief we are taught it does, but even worse, it’s one of the ways harm is reproduced under the name of safety.

Eric A. Stanley

COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR

Perhaps a way to think about this is through the push to include gender and sexuality in federal hate crimes enhancement laws. While many mainstream LGBT organizations have long argued for such expansion, trans/queer prison abolitionists have shown how the law itself is foundationally racist, as it is transphobic/homophobic. So, while hate crimes laws claim to be deterrents to the very real violence people endure, they grow the state’s capacity to terrorize the very same people they purport to protect.

Through this, and other examples, the book demonstrates how racialized anti-trans/queer violence is foundational to the United States. I make this argument through analyzing attacks against trans/queer people and also forms of structuring neglect, like inaction around HIV/AIDS that destroys people and their communities. While these, and many other forms of brutality directed toward Black, Brown and/or Indigenous trans women persist, the law appears as the sole avenue of redress. What we have then is a circular trap. Structural violence, like policing, is offered as the remedy to personal harms.

Right. The government and its biggest cheerleaders — Democrat-leaning organizations like the Center for American Progress — put their energy into studying how to make the justice system “more just.” They offer solutions like shifting tax money to go to “transgender sensitivity” training for police, or funding for lawyers’ fees for people who can’t afford specialized lawyers.

Several conversations in Atmospheres of Violence point to the storytelling of the book and the way you write with care around people and topics that are potentially soul-deflating, which asks how society allows and even abets so many tragedies of violence against trans people. For a book published by an academic press, they mention the writing as a way in for non-academic readers. Do you purposefully write to reach non-academic audiences?

I think writing produces audiences as much as it finds them. What this means is that when I write, I don’t know in advance who will be drawn to the work. When writing is accused of being “too theoretical,” which mine sometimes is, it’s more often than not an accusation made on behalf of an imagined other. As a person with an intellectual disability, I’m acutely aware of the ways we are all captured differently by language. For me, writing, not unlike other expressive practices like dance, poetry, or conceptual art, is an invitation for both form and content to forge a path toward new understandings. Of course, not everyone might be into it. Just like we might not all be into noise music or science fiction, and that’s OK. But one thing I’m emphatic about is that we need more ways to explain the unexplainable world we are trying to survive, not less.

Something I’ve noticed with this book so far is that most of the feedback I’ve received has been from high school debaters and Black trans/queer people who have formed reading groups in prisons. I think this is rad, and I feel lucky that people are engaging with the text. In the end, as our friend Tourmaline reminds us, theory is simply another name for people fashioning words to describe their lives. We are all making theory, all the time.

On March 31 of this year, the federal government observed Trans Day of Visibility for the first time. In a previous book you co-edited, Trap Door (2017), you and your co-editors, Johanna Burton and Tourmaline, argued against the allure of mainstream cultural visibility, and against the idea that visibility is a shortcut to easier lives for gender nonconforming people.

In the anthology I had a conversation with Miss Major and CeCe McDonald, who said that more inclusion in mainstream media hasn’t benefited the community at large. That was five years ago. Has your view of representation changed?

As a filmmaker and organizer, I know the transformative possibility of representation. That said, mainstream visual culture’s flirtation with trans/queer characters does not necessarily change the material conditions of our lives. Holding these contradictions forces me to examine how film’s form, following scholars like Jemma DeCristo and David Marriott, is not only anti-Black, but it is also anti-trans. This seems important to explore as we live in the reality where increased representation is not providing the transformation we need, so staying with these questions is vital.

I’m also interested in tracking how radical demands for an entirely different social order get flipped into primarily wanting more trans people in movies. It’s not that I’m against trans people in movies, but I think we must hold open this question if we are to produce liberatory images. What this means for me is that we rethink the entire production, distribution and consumption of visual culture. That’s an overwhelming task, and yet it can also mean the difference between life and death.

Luckily, lots of other people have also been thinking through these questions and dreaming up ways to weaponize their practices toward collective liberation. We are not alone, and we have generations to connect with, but that these histories are hidden is not an accident.

What’s the significance of the photograph on the cover: a picture by Every Ocean Hughes of the remains of New York City’s Chelsea Piers?

Every’s image is a beautiful mix of sorrow and possibility, which reflects the tone of the book. It’s a black and white photograph of what remains of the Christopher Street piers in New York City. The pierces were an otherwise hidden place on the edge of the city where trans/queer people cruised and mostly Black and Brown young people built underground networks of care. Not far from there is also where Marsha P. Johnson’s body was found, further anointing the sacredness of the space.

I’m also drawn to Every’s photograph as it’s in conversation with Alvin Baltrop’s work. Baltrop was a Black gay man who documented the queer sexual cultures of the piers in the 1970s and ‘80s. I am moved by the image’s referential history, how it brings this past into the present. Its view of the horizon also offers a bit of hope, or something like it. Even after much community organizing by groups like FIERCE and others, the piers have mostly been destroyed by the relentless gentrification of Manhattan, and yet, trans/queer life continues. The photograph holds these contested realities.

I became close with Miss Major through working with her on your film with Chris Vargas, Criminal Queers. You met her years before in the Tenderloin, the neighborhood in San Francisco that was a lot more welcoming to trans and queer people than the Castro district, which is the city’s famous gayborhood.

The Tenderloin holds a somewhat mythic place in both my personal biography and the larger stories of trans history in the United States. Of course, it’s where the anti-police Compton’s Cafeteria riots were in August of 1966, and it’s also where I first encountered Miss Major when she was working at TARC. The neighborhood has long been under siege by the tech-fueled gentrification threatening to destroy it from every side.

Even under such duress, it’s still a place of much trans of color life, where people who are mostly low income and/or unhoused continue to scavenge a life out of the ruins of “latest capitalism“ (a term Angela Davis once used when I was her student at the University of California, Santa Cruz, to describe the constant transformation of how we describe “late capitalism“). This is not to be overly romantic, but to name the forms of ungovernability, or what I call living in refusal, that might otherwise fall out of social movement histories. That is one of the commitments of the book, to archive these practices as forms of riotous theory.

The Tenderloin, like the piers, is a spatial reminder of the racialized anti-trans/queer violence that is everywhere. And yet, life remains there. The book ends not with a prescription, but with another set of questions: If we know that the law (and by extension the settler-state) cannot end anti-trans/queer violence, then what forms of solidarity might be intensified so that we find more than survival?

Toshio Meronek  has reported for Truthout since 2013; his work also appears in Al Jazeera, In These Times, The Nation and the anthologies Captive Genders, Trap Door and The Long Term. His collaborative book with the iconic Black, trans activist Miss Major will be out spring 2021.

A Powerful Novel Featuring a Métis Teen Girl

BY HARPERCOLLINS 

 

MAY 08, 2022

The Summer of Bitter and Sweet is a complex and emotionally resonant novel about a Métis girl living on the Canadian prairies. In her debut novel, author Jen Ferguson serves up a powerful story about rage, secrets, and all the spectrums that make up a person—and the sweetness that can still live alongside the bitterest truth.

Ferguson says she chose to write The Summer of Bitter and Sweet because, “By my 30s, I’d read exactly two books that made me feel seen: Claire Kann’s Let’s Talk About Love which features a demisexual main character having her love story and Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves, where I saw a Métis main character in a starring role. Yet as a demisexual mixed-race Indigenous woman, I’d never read a novel where a character could be both Métis and queer. So I wrote one.” 

In the novel, main character Lou has enough confusion in front of her this summer. She’ll be working in her family’s ice-cream shack with her newly ex-boyfriend—whose kisses never made her feel desire, only discomfort—and her former best friend, King, who is back in their Canadian prairie town after disappearing three years ago without a word.

But when she gets a letter from her biological father—a man she hoped would stay behind bars for the rest of his life—Lou immediately knows that she cannot meet him, no matter how much he insists.

While King’s friendship makes Lou feel safer and warmer than she would have thought possible, when her family’s business comes under threat, she soon realizes that she can’t ignore her father forever.

Praise for The Summer of Bitter and Sweet: "In a layered first-person portrayal of a young Indigenous woman navigating the edge of adulthood, Ferguson tackles necessary issues—of identity and sexuality alongside colonialism, generational trauma, racism, physical and sexual assault, and substance reliance—through well-wrought, complicated characterizations and prose that sings with poetry."—Publishers Weekly, starred review

The Summer of Bitter and Sweet is available now wherever books are sold, and you can start reading an excerpt here. 

About the Author: Jen Ferguson is Michif/Métis and white, an activist, an intersectional feminist, an auntie, and an accomplice armed with a PhD in English and creative writing. She teaches fiction writing at Loyola Marymount University. Connect with her on Twitter @jennyleeSD or online at jenfergusonwrites.com. 

The Summer of Bitter and Sweet is brought to you by Heartdrum, an imprint of HarperCollins Children’s Books that centers a wide range of intertribal voices, visions, and stories while welcoming all young readers, with an emphasis on the present and future of Indian Country and on the strength of young Native heroes. In partnership with We Need Diverse Books.

‘You go all in’: Diné composer from Chinle wins Pulitzer for music

Courtesy photo | Clare Hoffman Raven Chacon works with Native students at Grand Canyon Village in Arizona. Since 2004, he has served as composer-in-residence for the Native American Composer Apprentice Project.

BY RIMA KRISST - NAVAJO TIMES MAY 29, 2022

WINDOW ROCK - Diné musician, artist and educator Raven Chacon’s long list of achievements and honors now includes the esteemed Pulitzer Prize for music, awarded on May 9 for his ensemble composition titled “Voiceless Mass."

The composition is a rousing, discordant, and sometimes eerie invocation of the unheard – past and present – whose voices have been silenced.

The Pulitzer Prize Board called the piece “a mesmerizing, original work… that evokes the weight of history in a church setting, a concentrated and powerful musical expression with a haunting visceral impact.”

Chacon said he was surprised to learn that he won the award when he was on travel and his phone blew up with messages of congratulations.

“People were saying I won the Pulitzer,” he told Navajo Times. “I was unaware that an announcement was coming.


Adam Conte Raven Chacon somewhere in New Mexico. (Courtesy Photo)

Chacon, 44, is the first Native American to be awarded the Pulitzer for music.

“Not only was I not expecting myself to win – not in my wildest dreams,” he said, “but I would have been equally excited and grateful for there to ever be a Pulitzer music winner who was Native.”

Commissioned by the United Church of Christ and Present Music, Chacon composed “Voiceless Mass” for the pipe organ at the Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist in Milwaukee, where it was performed on Thanksgiving, Nov. 21, 2021.

“As an Indigenous artist, I make a point not to present my work on this holiday but, in this case, I made an exception,” said Chacon. “This work considers the spaces in which we gather, the history of access of these spaces, and the land upon which these buildings sit.”

The piece features wind and string instruments but has no singing voices that might make up a typical church mass choir, adding to its other-worldly aura.

“In exploiting the architecture of the cathedral, ‘Voiceless Mass’ considers the futility of giving voice to the voiceless, when ceding space is never an option for those in power,” said Chacon.

‘The world was quiet’

Like many of Chacon’s previous collaborative works that have earned critical acclaim, including the Manifest Destiny opera “Sweet Land,” a “future creation story” “The Journey of the Horizontal People,” and monumental art installations like the two-mile “Repellent Fence,” Chacon uses artistic expression to disrupt and deconstruct false narratives in history, especially for Indigenous and other peoples who have been marginalized in the path of conquest and colonization.

Chacon said when he worked on “Voiceless Mass” during the COVID-19 lockdown, the world itself had become still and fragmented in the wake of the pandemic.

“I was definitely thinking about this global shared experience that we were undergoing,” said Chacon. “The world was quiet when I was writing this.”

At the same time, attention was brought to injustices through protests like Black Lives Matter and more information was coming out about the suppression of information pertaining to residential boarding schools.

“It also got me thinking back to Standing Rock when there was an urgency that was being called out to the rest of the world about this ecological encroachment,” he said. “And the world not taking notice until there was a critical mass of people to spread that word.”

The dissonance heard in “Voiceless Mass” is a hallmark of Chacon’s style which, regardless of medium, denotes unresolved injustices, incongruencies, misdeeds and their consequences that live on in the silence of the collective conscience.

“As it relates to ‘Voiceless Mass,’ we think about how history gets suppressed or altered or perverted,” he said. “It is not the true story and as it gets more and more diluted or whitewashed, that itself becomes another way that people aren’t able to voice what happened.”

‘It’s who I am’

As a child growing up in Chinle, Chacon says he was exposed to a variety of music.

“In the homes, there was always music being played,” he said. “I remember my parents, aunts and uncles would have the radio on constantly.”

Courtesy photo | Jamie Drummond Raven Chacon performs in a basement in Albuquerque.

He said he was inspired by everything from metal music to the traditional Navajo songs that his grandfather sang.

“I feel strongly that every music you’ve ever listened to will end up in the music that you write,” he said.

Asked how his Diné upbringing has influenced his music,Chacon simply said, “It’s just who I am.”

When he was about seven years old, his family moved to Albuquerque where he started taking piano lessons, his first entrée into formal music education.

Over time, he learned to play guitar, drums and cello, flute, write songs, built his own instruments, delved into electronic music, outdoor “field recordings,” noise music, and classical chamber music.

“I was lucky to grow up in a city that had a lot of Native people, but at the same time had other things – access to live music, music education,” he said.
As he grew older, he engaged with the vibrant and diverse performing arts community in Albuquerque as an organizer and performer.

“When you see other people making music, it’s inspiring,” he said. “There was a time when a group of us were gathering and making experimental music together.”

He led a collective of musicians that would gather and put out each other’s recordings, put on concerts, including “on rooftops, or out in the desert,” he said.

“That’s the music community that has inspired me, maybe more than anything, being a contributor to that group of people there,” he said.

‘Shared experiences’

Chacon is careful to credit all of the other artists and musicians he worked with along the way.

“I’ve been told that I’m prolific, that I do things in a lot of different areas, but I also credit the people I collaborate with,” he said. “I don’t do all these projects alone.”

When he writes something like “Voiceless Mass,” at a certain point it’s in collaboration with the people who commissioned it and all of the musicians that are playing it.

“When it’s all done, I can just sit and listen and watch,” he said.

He said many of his music compositions are actually designed to be shared experiences for the people who are playing them and sometimes his scores are in the form of a problem or puzzle that’s seeking to be solved.

“I like to make sounds and I like to compose situations for people to gather to make something together,” he said. “Then others will gather to experience that thing that was made.”

He said he’s most interested in the dynamics between the players and what kinds of unexpected sounds and timing might come from their interactions, and his compositions deliberately leave space for that.
“They’re very malleable and they might be a completely different composition in the hands of different performers,” he said.

As a member of the Native American arts collective Postcommodity, Chacon has also developed multi-media installations that have been exhibited internationally.

“Whether making an artwork or gathering to make change in some kind of venue or landscape, it can produce results that are unexpected and greater than intended when you have an organized group of people working together on that goal,” he said.

‘Doing the work’

Chacon says he regularly goes back to Navajo to visit his family and work on a youth mentorship project called the Native American Composer Apprentice Project with fellow composer Michael Begay.

Founded in 2001, project is an outreach program of the Grand Canyon Music Festival dedicated to teaching students on the Navajo and Hopi reservations who want to learn how to compose concert music through an immersive experience.

“That’s brought me often back every year to teach these kids in Chinle, Kayenta, Tuba City and the Hopi High School,” said Chacon.

Each year, Chacon and Begay work with students in partnership with their school music programs to produce original scores that are premiered by professional ensembles.

Chacon is also a member of the faculty at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, where he provides mentorship to master’s program graduate students.

If there is a key to his success beyond his fortitude and talent, Chacon says he works around the clock and barely sleeps.

He said that work ethic comes from his parents, Dr. Gayle Diné Chacon, a former surgeon general of the Navajo Nation, and Lorenzo Chacon, an attorney from Mora, New Mexico.

“My parents told me and my sisters, if you want to do this thing, you go all in,” he said.

In addition to learning by doing since he was a child, Chacon earned a bachelor’s in music from the University of New Mexico and a master’s in music composition from the California Institute of the Arts.

Chacon said even in the times when he needed to work a “day job,” every spare minute was put into his music.

“I think ideas can come out of nowhere,” he said. “You need to be ready to jot them down on a notepad. Then you write a piece of music. That hasn’t stopped.”

He advises that youth on the reservation who are interested in becoming an artist or musician should tell a teacher or a family member.

“I realize some of our schools out there are lacking in funds and equipment, but I think a young person should express their interest in making art or music,” said Chacon. “When people work together, they can find a way to get some kind of instrument or get some paint and brushes to a young person.”

From there, he advises, “Work very hard and live with it – practice every day like I still do today.”

Chacon says he never stops learning.

“It’s on to the next project,” he said. “Every extra minute I have goes into doing the work and that’s all that’s needed.”

Chacon is Todích’íí’nii and Kinyaa’áanii.

Information: www.spiderwebsinthesky.com