The mashup holiday 'Diwaloween' celebrates light as the year turns dark

(RNS) — This Thursday (Oct. 31), two seemingly opposing holidays, Diwali and Halloween, will be celebrated as one by many South Asians for the first time since 2016.

“Spooky Chai” artwork created by Manasi Arya, featuring a skeleton hand and a green hand with henna toasting with glasses of chai tea. (Image courtesy of Manasi Arya)
Richa Karmarkar
October 29, 2024

(RNS) — What happens when the religious festival celebrating the victory of good over evil coincides with the spookiest night of the year? Diwaloween. Or maybe Hallowali.

Mashups of Diwali and Halloween occur every few years as Diwali, a day on the lunar calendar that shifts from year to year on the Western calendar, falls on or around Halloween. This year the two coincide for the first time since 2016.

The made-up holiday takes the form of trick-or-treating at the temple, Bollywood-themed costume parties, sparklers lighting the night for both the evil-destroying goddess Lakshmi and little goblins. Diwaloween, say many South Asian Americans, is one of the best examples of the diaspora’s unique dual-belonging and could only happen in America.

“I think this is a sign of one of the many ways that Hindu and other South Asians who celebrate Diwali and festivals this time of year are making America their own in some way and participating in these rituals,” said Shana Sippy, associate professor of religion and chair of Asian studies at Centre College.

RELATED: For New York’s Indo-Caribbean Hindus, Diwali is a fusion of East and West

Diwali, one of the largest and most recognizable celebrations for South Asian of dharmic faiths, is celebrated by Hindus, Jains, Buddhists and Sikhs around the world. Those who observe the day traditionally wear their best new clothes, exchange sweets with neighbors, light oil lamps called diyas, draw colorful rangoli patterns with sand and send off fireworks.


Devotees light earthen lamps on the banks of the River Sarayu as part of Diwali celebrations in Ayodhya, India, on Nov. 6, 2018. (AP Photo/Rajesh Kumar Singh)

Increasingly a secular holiday even in the India subcontinent, the holiday can trace its roots to several strands of Hindu mythological stories of Lord Ram, Lord Krishna and the goddess Kali. Diwali is considered an especially auspicious time to start something new.

Halloween, with its ghosts, ghouls and skeletons, often seemed in conflict with the season of light, renewal and hope to many immigrants who came to the United States. Manasi Arya, a 27-year-old social media content creator and fashion designer in New York, said her parents initially “couldn’t understand the point” of Halloween and often asked, “Why don’t you just dress up as an Indian princess?”

“All my friends at school, my neighbors, they were always wearing these really cool costumes that were just like a different character, but I was literally wearing a lengha,” said Arya, referring to a typical Indian dress.

Arya’s family eventually warmed up to the American ritual, even helping her paint Desi-style pumpkins for competitions, with henna art or a heavily made-up woman’s face.

The inspiration led Arya to launch a Diwali-meets-Halloween line of clothing and accessories that included Desi vampires, patterned ghosts and witches with saris and bindis. On Diwaloween, said Arya, “It just so happens that two of our favorite holidays are happening in one day.”


“Desi Witches” artwork created by Manasi Arya. (Image courtesy of Manasi Arya)

The combined holiday also addresses the reality that the resources for traditional Diwali celebrations aren’t always available in the U.S. “We don’t get to do the very typical, traditional things for Diwali, the way that you can do it in India, right? So I think it’s cool to bring that American element into how we’ve been able to celebrate our Diwali here.”

Diwaloween even has its requisite holiday movie, thanks to Shilpa Mankikar, whose multigenerational comedy “Diwal’oween,” is about a diaspora family’s hijinks leading up to the holiday. The film, currently being screened at cultural organizations across the U.S., is patterned after Mankikar’s own upbringing as a first-generation Indian in New Jersey, the state with the most South Asians in the country.

The film’s laughs come from the contradiction of a festival of lights clashing with a festival of darkness, Mankikar told RNS. “They are in opposition, and that’s like the comedy clash of it all.”

Mankikar, 47, grew up in a time when representation of Indian Americans in the media was restricted to misinterpretations and offensive stereotypes. But today non-South Asian Americans’ awareness and even celebration of Diwali has shot to an all-time high. The holiday has been recognized as a work holiday by several states and school districts, including New York City public schools, which will recognize it with a day off for the first time this year


“Holidays are a good opportunity to learn about each other and also, with celebrating Indian culture, there’s so much color and dancing and food that people now are familiar with,” said Mankikar. “It’s such a rich culture, so it’s great too that it’s now in the mainstream. We’re kind of coming to it on our own terms as an American generation.”


Youth enjoy a craft table during a Diwaloween screening in Shelby Township, Mich. (Photo courtesy of Shilpa Mankikar)

Sippy pointed out that, as a result of its popularity, Diwali has taken on an air of all-American consumerism, pointing to a Diwali Barbie released earlier this year, or the packs of Diwali mithai (sweets), sparklers and other branded Diwali goods for gift-giving. Diwali’s adoption by the retail world is analogous to the corporatization of Hannukah, or “Chrismakkah.”

The professor said the urge to combine the two holidays points to a human need for connection and community in an age of atomization in American society. “When (else) do we let our kids knock on strangers’ doors? We don’t often know even our neighbors’ names,” Sippy said. “Here you dress up and you buy things to give away to complete strangers,” she said.

Though opposites in spirit, Sippy said the two celebrations create warmth amid darkness — “Halloween being the dressing up, this opening of doors, the sharing of food, and the lighting of light as we start to get darker earlier.”

Prasanna Jog, national coordinator for the charity SewaDiwali, said Diwali food and parties have gotten better over the two decades since he arrived in the U.S. But what has gotten left behind is a tradition of thinking of the less fortunate on Diwali, he said. Jog co-founded SewaDiwali in 2018 as a reflection of the Hindu tenet of “seeing that everyone is happy,” and that inner growth happens when one “brings light to others.”

Opinion
Pennsylvania's recognition of Diwali as a state holiday is a big deal and long overdue
(RNS) — Beyond the symbolism of these bills and proclamations, there is the long overdue feeling of being seen.

(Photo by Udayaditya Barua/Unsplash/Creative Commons)
Murali Balaji
October 30, 2024

(RNS) — A native Pennsylvanian, I remember what it was like for my family to celebrate Diwali (or Deepavali, as it is also known for people of South Indian descent) at a time when Hinduism and other dharmic faiths were considered foreign and exotic religions.

In the 1980s, my family would perform a small puja at home on Diwali. We never mentioned that we were celebrating a religious holiday, despite Diwali’s significance to not just a billion Hindus, but to Jains, Sikhs and some Buddhists as well. We celebrated in the shadows, afraid of not being considered “American” because of Diwali’s foreignness, which only added to the stigma of growing up Hindu back then.

That’s why, when Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro signed Senate Bill 402, recognizing Diwali as a state holiday, last week, it was a long overdue acknowledgment of not only the presence of Hindus and followers of other dharmic faiths in Pennsylvania, but the contributions they have made, to the state and America as a whole. State Sen. Nikil Saval and state Rep. Arvind Venkat, who sponsored the bill in their respective chambers at the Statehouse, were there to see Shapiro sign it into law, along with Montgomery County Commissioner Neil Makhjia.

Pennsylvania’s recognition of Diwali follows in the footsteps of other states, such as New Jersey, New York, California and Texas, which have made similar efforts to recognize followers of dharmic faiths.

RELATED: How Kamala Harris and JD Vance appeal to Hindu voters

While Pennsylvania’s government won’t close on Diwali’s first and most important day, which this year falls on Thursday, its inclusion as a state holiday means that Hindu parents no longer have to defend taking their kids out of school in areas where the holiday isn’t already observed. A growing number of school districts in Pennsylvania (including my own alma mater, North Penn) already close for Diwali, signaling the important shift in recognizing Hindus as fellow Americans.

Diwali is commonly known as the festival of lights, though the holiday has multiple meanings and celebrations. The most widely commemorated by Hindus and non-Hindus is the return of Lord Rama from exile in the Hindu epic the Ramayana. The Sikhs’ celebration, known as Bandi Chhor Divas, marks the 17th-century release of Sikh Guru Hargobind and 52 Hindu kings who had been imprisoned by Mughal Emperor Jahangir for refusing to convert to Islam.

Beyond the symbolism of these bills and proclamations, there is the long overdue feeling of being seen. For years, I was bullied for being a Hindu, and a number of my peers (fellow Gen Xers) shied away from the religion so as to not be seen as foreign. My wife and I have vowed to raise our son Hindu in a manner in which he can proudly and comfortably feel connected to both our faith and our Americanness.
RELATED: The mashup holiday ‘Diwaloween’ celebrates light as the year turns dark

Our son’s teachers have asked my wife to make a presentation this week on Diwali, which was a welcome surprise. On Thursday, we’ll do a small puja, light the diyas (candles) celebrating Lord Ram’s return and then go trick-or-treating. Blending those celebrations together speaks to how far we’ve come from the days I had to hide who I was.
(Murali Balaji is a journalist and a lecturer at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of RNS.)

“As we gain economic prosperity, it’s even more imperative that we think of others,” said Jog, whose group of more than 450 contributing organizations has raised more than 2.2 million pounds of nonperishables for food pantries. “Even though we may not be born here like our children were, we consider the United States our ‘karma-bhoomi’ (land of action). Wherever you are, you need to contribute for the welfare or the betterment of the society, and it is through the power of selfless seva (service).”

And this year, volunteers send a special request for the little ones.

“We are just using that as an opportunity for the kids to have that courage to go door-to-door,” he said. “And in addition to asking for candy, they can also ask for some cans of food!”

RELATED: `Where the goodies are great’: Sweets lovers welcome Diwali

 

America Is So Ready for Kamala Harris

Kali Holloway

Tue, October 8, 2024 

Imagine, for just a moment, if Kamala Harris’s supporters were prone to the sort of political idolatry that characterizes Donald Trump’s devotees. It’s a thought experiment suited to an election for which the word historic feels inadequate to capture either Harris’s political ascent or the sheer number of unprecedented events that led to it. There is the aberration of Trump, the twice-impeached, feloniously convicted, rape-adjudicated former president—a bitter old racist returned for a third time to usher in the white supremacist autocracy that his attempted coup failed to. In any election, President Joe Biden’s age and enfeeblement since taking office would have been an issue of concern, but under the threat of Trumpism, Biden’s disastrous debate performance jettisoned the false narrative that he alone was a bulwark for democracy. Harris—elected in 2020 as the first woman, first Black, and first South Asian vice president because her résumé of legislative and prosecutorial public service made her uniquely suited for the job—should have been recognized as a better candidate than both of those men from the start. And yet, as Biden’s post-debate numbers waned and Trump’s bandaged ear crystallized his MAGA martyrdom, but her unpopularity became a tired echo of 2016’s but her emails. The commentariat, which began sowing doubts about Harris’s viability nearly as soon as she assumed the vice presidency, even floated other names for consideration as Biden’s exit became increasingly probable. Minyon Moore, chair of the Democratic National Convention, said she watched with “fascination” as the media spun a tale she always knew was divorced from reality.

“The rules dictated a lot. What they did not understand was the rules,’’ Moore told me. “First of all, she campaigned for two years with Joe Biden. She raised money for Joe Biden. She took no shortcuts. What they were trying to do was put in place a process that did not exist…. Those 4,000 delegates literally voted for Joe Biden—but they also voted for his ticket. And she was a part of that ticket.”

When Biden, a record-breaking 107 days before the election, finally left the race and endorsed Harris, the act unexpectedly unleashed an outpouring of enthusiasm and joy, emotions rarely associated with politics in recent years. The mood shift not only proved Harris’s naysayers wrong but also revealed how Biden’s frailty and Trump’s darkness had drained the party to sepia tones. Harris’s run, quite unexpectedly, infused it with color and light again. If the left had the same sanctification tendencies as the Trumpian right, the improbable events leading to Harris’s nomination might have been cast as divine intervention—Jesus taking the wheel, only to hand the keys to Harris, so she might steer America away from Trumpism and back onto a righteous road.

But the Democratic Party is not a cult of personality, a fact proved by Biden’s withdrawal. Harris’s run produced a jubilance incomparable to anything seen since at least Barack Obama’s first run, and it may even have eclipsed that. Within hours of becoming the presumptive nominee, Harris was buoyed by organizers who had begun laying the groundwork for her run years before. A Zoom organized by Win With Black Women drew 44,000 participants, an unprecedented number that required the site’s engineers to increase capacity. The call ultimately raised $1.5 million in just three hours. At least a dozen other calls followed—South Asian Women for Harris, Win With Black Men, White Women: Answer the Call—each enlisting volunteers and strategizing for a Harris win. In mid-September, Voto Latino reported a 200 percent surge in its voter registrations since the day Harris replaced Biden. A senior analyst at TargetSmart, a data research firm, reported that registrations are up more than 85 percent among Black voters overall and a staggering 98 percent among Black women. Potential youth voters increased most impressively. In 13 states, registrations have gone up nearly 176 percent and 150 percent among 18- to 29-year-old Black and Hispanic women, respectively. Taylor Swift’s much-anticipated endorsement of Harris, which came moments after Harris thrashed Trump in the debate, drove “a 400 or 500 percent increase” in people going to vote.gov to register, according to a TargetSmart analyst. What’s more, young Democrats are 14 percent more enthusiastic about voting than their Republican counterparts. While party killjoys such as David Axelrod suggested Democrats were feeling “irrational exuberance,” and James Carville chastised their “giddy elation,” organizers were getting down to work and galvanizing people to get Harris elected. Those on the ground, doing the real heavy lifting, helped consolidate support for Harris, building a campaign powered not from the top down, but from the grassroots up.

How Harris Seized Her Moment

Of course, none of this would have happened if Harris hadn’t proved herself so ready to meet the moment. First and foremost, she and her team did a masterful job of staying out of the way while Biden deliberated. Even as rumors swirled around her, Harris kept her head down and remained “completely loyal to this administration,” to quote Moore. There were no leaks that suggested she was secretly angling for the boss’s job, no little hints that she wanted to push the old guy down the stairs. And then, on Sunday, July 21, after Biden’s announcement, Harris hunkered down with her team, working her way through a who’s who list of Democratic bigwigs. Within the first 10 hours, she had made roughly 100 calls, per The New York Times, nailing down endorsements and support from former presidents, members of Congress, and labor union and civil rights players from the Democratic coalition. Some of those relationships had likely been forged over the last year, during which Harris led administration outreach efforts on LGBTQ rights, gun reform, and Black civil and voting rights, and as she engaged with young voters on college campuses. Even before Roe v. Wade was struck down by the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority, Harris had become recognized as a forceful defender of reproductive freedom, attending abortion rights rallies and even becoming the first sitting vice president to visit an abortion clinic.

On Sunday, July 21, after Biden’s announcement, Harris hunkered down with her team, working her way through a who’s who list of Democratic bigwigs. Within the first 10 hours, she had made roughly 100 phone calls, nailing down endorsements and support from former presidents, members of Congress, and labor union and civil rights players from the Democratic coalition.

Aimee Allison, founder of She the People, an organization dedicated to helping elect women of color, emphasized Harris’s role as a liaison to those marginalized communities. “Her presence in the White House has been critical for constituencies who, frankly, didn’t have much access during Trump’s years. She made sure to play a very important convening role, welcoming groups who now are coming forward as part of the Kamala Harris coalition, organizing themselves,” Allison told me. “The respect that she’s shown to many, many groups—and she’s now seeing the results of this kind of politicking.”

It would be absurd to ignore the all-hands-on-deck efforts of a massive, dedicated Democratic machine working at full capacity to ensure a flawless transition. But Harris, during what one veteran strategist labeled “a perfect 48 hours,” deserves credit for stewarding the ship and keeping the operation steady. “The seamlessness of Ms. Harris’s ascent,” the Times reported, “impressed a range of party leaders after years of private sniping and second-guessing of her political skills.” Not for the first time, an underestimated Harris demonstrated a level of agility, skill, and savvy in keeping the campaign running with nary a misstep. Choosing Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate was yet another canny move.

Just as the inside game was expertly played, the outside game, the part visible to the electorate, may have been even stronger. Much has been made of Harris’s rallies—the lines forming hours before start time and snaking for blocks, the exuberant multiracial crowds dancing to music from the last decade (for which Harris-Walz campaign will not be sued), the supporters who appear rapt instead of driven to “exhaustion and boredom.” Yes, size matters, but not in the way Trump thinks. It’s a sign that momentum is on Harris’s side. But it’s also a testament to how her candidacy has brought together a diverse swath of voters who share an eagerness to get beyond the toxic divisions that have plagued the country since the rise of MAGA. For nearly a decade, Trump’s rallies have been hate contagions, their poisonous us-versus-them serum infecting the entire body politic. It’s been such a relief to witness the palpable joy of Harris’s audiences, a reflection of the campaign’s tone—a kind of uplifting feedback loop between the candidate and her supporters. A Harris presidency offers the opportunity to step out of the darkness of Trumpism into a sunny, expansive future that welcomes all. It’s the difference between staring mournfully backward and looking hopefully ahead, a task anathema to an embittered Trump, and one that a well-meaning but aged Biden could not quite muster the energy to pull off.

The very idea of patriotism is transformed when advanced by a Black, biracial daughter of immigrants. There is a sense that what is actually being invoked is the progressive idea that this country belongs to all of us. The right-wingers don’t own patriotism. The flag, the chant, and the ideals they represent were never theirs alone to define.

In articulating their vision for the country, Harris and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz have moved rally and conventiongoers to wave U.S. flags and chant “U-S-A, U-S-A,” normally a rarity at Democratic events. Republicans have long taken a proprietary approach to the ideas of freedom, liberty, and patriotism, treating them as property rather than principles, wielding them like empty slogans with brand value (when you use the word “freedom” so promiscuously that you rename french fries “freedom fries” in congressional cafeterias, as GOP lawmakers did briefly after 9/11, you’ve cheapened a valuable word). Those chants and flags carry a completely different resonance at Harris’s rallies than when they are invoked, and weaponized, by MAGA throngs. The very idea of patriotism is transformed when advanced by a Black, biracial daughter of immigrants. There is the sense that what is actually being invoked is the progressive idea that this country belongs to all of us. The right-wingers don’t own patriotism; in fact, they have presented a corrupt and exclusionary version of it. The flag, the chant, and the ideals they represent were never theirs alone to define. There’s something deeply powerful in reclaiming these symbols—in showing they can represent a diverse, forward-looking vision of the country rather than just a nostalgic one. This is a genuine show of patriotism—neither jingoistic nor nationalistic, but rooted in a deep love for the country and the belief that there is still work to be done.

“I’m of the notion that you can love something, critique it, and help to make it better, all at the same time. I think that has often been Black America’s relationship with America. We love our country just as much as anybody else, but we’ve often had to ask the question, does our country love us the same?” Jotaka Eaddy, founder of Win With Black Women, told me. “In this moment, we feel that, at least as it relates to breaking and shattering the barriers related to our representation, I think we’re continuing to see those barriers broken.”

She cited Langston Hughes’s famous poem I, Too, published in 1926—during the Harlem Renaissance, but long before Black Americans, even in New York City, enjoyed anything close to equality:

I, too, sing America.
I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.
Tomorrow,
I’ll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody’ll dare
Say to me,
“Eat in the kitchen,”
Then.
Besides,
They’ll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed—
I, too, am America.

“I think we, too, sing America,” Eaddy told me.

Generational Change and the Politics of Boomerism

Perhaps a factor in the excitement accompanying Harris’s rise is the sense that her candidacy may usher in a long-awaited generational shift in Democratic politics. Loosening the viselike grip of gerontocratic boomerism has also proved that there is an updated way campaigns can be run. If the 2016 election was all about how the “left can’t meme”—the mantra of alt-right shit-posters and 4chan edgelords who helped elect Trump—the 2024 election so far has been about Harris dominating the internet. From the outset, the campaign has made smart decisions, embracing the coconut memes and lime-green Brat color schemes. Its Taylor Swift–inspired friendship bracelets, made available shortly after the singer’s endorsement, quickly sold out. It’s funny to think that, should Harris win the election, Republicans will deserve just the teeniest nano-bit of credit for helping her get elected. It was the Republican National Convention, after all, that repackaged old clips of Harris in an effort to embarrass her. Instead, those images of Harris laughing and quoting her mother humanized her, before Trump’s racist and sexist attacks could begin to corrupt her image.

It goes beyond coconut memes. Consider how videos of Harris and Walz chatting about beloved albums and taco recipes did more to provide a portrait of the candidates on their own terms than so many Republican talking points disguised as gotcha interview questions. In the early days of the shortest U.S. presidential campaign in modern history, the pair’s ability to present themselves directly to voters was an incredible asset. That’s not to say Harris can ride social media alone to a win, but it’s certainly better than passively leaving the task to the media. Perhaps it took a campaign headed by a woman who was born after the invention of color television and Hula-Hoops, and who first won elective office in 2003, as the internet age was bursting into full flower, to understand the true direct-to-voter value of social media. Obama, also born after rock and roll was invented, is often called “the first social media president,” a label that fits to a certain degree. But during his inaugural and incumbent runs in 2008 and 2012, no social media sites had the audience or influence enjoyed by platforms today. Roughly 170 million Americans are currently on TikTok, which is used by almost two-thirds of Americans younger than 30, Pew Research reports, and nearly 40 percent of Americans under age 50. Both there and on the platform formerly known as Twitter—which since Elon Musk’s takeover has become a cesspool of right-wing misinformation, bots, and talking points too vile to dignify here—the KamalaHQ account trolls Trump, slices up humiliating Trump and JD Vance clips to repurpose as campaign ads on the fly, fact-checks Trump’s debate lies, boosts its favorable news content, and does a far better job than the mainstream media does of highlighting the madness of Trump and his MAGA acolytes in real time.

Illustration of Kamala Harris

It’s inspiring to see a Democratic Party that’s finally stopped volunteering its lunch money to bad-faith actors and insecure clowns. Likewise, the Harris team’s trolling of Trump online, and her face-to-face IRL baiting of his insecurities—demonstrated with such aplomb at the debate—have been delightful to watch. Calling Trump “dangerous,” “a bully,” or “a strongman” only emboldens him. He’s been curating an image as a tough guy since the 1980s, and he thrives, above all else, on being feared. But Trump isn’t powerful or strong. He’s a trust fund kid from Queens who weaponized his daddy issues into everyone else’s problem. Elevating him to strongman status only played into MAGA’s Trump-aggrandizing game. Perhaps a generation of Democrats from another era remain obsessed with civility, but sometimes you have to meet your opponents where they are—on the low road, where they’ve built a detour to electoral wins. Get on that road, knock them off it, and make sure you snap a pic of them falling so you can caption it and share it on your socials.

Harris seems to get this; hence the green light she’s given to a crack team of Gen Z staffers, who have approached attention-grabbing so differently than Biden did. Her campaign knows, for better or worse, that this election is about playing the attention game—a game Trump essentially created in his own image. Beating him at it is critical. Harris can’t meme her way to victory, but we’ve reached a point where capturing the American public’s attention is, in itself, a key part of winning. Part of that is knowing how to navigate online culture—and, more importantly, knowing how to push back hard when necessary, and using the digital town square to your advantage. For the first time, this year’s DNC credentialed more than 200 digital content creators. Among these was Brandy Star Merriweather, founder of BStarPR and a social media influencer who has used her platform to help engage fellow Gen Zers with Harris’s campaign.

“I love that the memes have been able to reach a demographic who may not be involved in politics or care to read it, but then they can look at a meme and kind of understand.... It’s beneficial to people who may not be in that world all the time hearing about policy,” Merriweather told me. “They are breaking down solutions in a way that anyone can consume. And I think doing it on social media, we’re quick—we love things quick, we love things that are pretty funny and witty. I’ve not seen a candidate do that before.”

Finally, the campaign’s approach on all these fronts is different from its predecessors because the electorate—the important question of who now constitutes “the people”—is different. In some ways, quite literally. An estimated 20 million baby boomers have died over the last eight years. In the same period, around 32 million young people have come of voting age, with nearly half of Gen Z voters identifying as people of color. This is a country that has grown Blacker, browner, and gayer than it was in 2016, the last time a woman appeared at the top of the ticket. The white backlash that has defined the era since Trump arrived has been challenged by progressive activism including #MeToo, Black Lives Matter, and the kind of women-led political organizing that helped elevate Harris’s candidacy.

All this is to say that while the country may not be as far along as many of us would hope, it is in a different place than it was eight years ago. If Harris has not touted her “firstness” as much as Hillary Clinton did, it is perhaps because she does not have to. The convention-breaking nature of her candidacy is apparent both in who she is as an embodied person and in what she stands for in terms of politics, morals, and outlook. Harris is able to personalize messaging about abortion, civil rights, gender equality, and more far better than Biden ever could. She represents so much more accurately who this country is today. We don’t need to yearn for a fictional yesteryear—to make America great again—because this is a better America we live in NOW.

Black Women Make History

America may very well be “the greatest democracy in the history of the world,” as Harris declared at the convention, but our democracy has also been terribly flawed by a legacy of exclusion and, often, plain old cruelty and sadism. The Founding Fathers’ so-called democratic vision was myopically limited by both white supremacy and patriarchy. And while we have made slow, painful steps toward inclusive democracy, each advance has been met by violent opposition and retrenchment. In nearly 250 years of American history, only one white woman has clinched a major party’s nomination, and the procession of white males into the Oval Office was disrupted by a Black man only once. Trump, in fact, was elected president by those seeking reassurance that Obama’s presidency neither heralded a turn to multiracial democracy nor diminished the enduring privileges of white mediocrity. In the split screen that was so often on display during the September 10 debate, Harris’s assured competence, in contrast to the sputtering incompetence of Trump—a man who after nine years could only hold up the “concepts of a plan” like so much sand running through his fingers—was a perfect encapsulation of a Black woman being twice as good as a white guy to get the same job.

Harris is no stranger to these presumptions. Amid the veepstakes of 2020, she was criticized as “too ambitious” for the role, which is another way of saying she “didn’t seem to know her place.” A mere six months into her vice presidency, outlets including Business Insider, The Washington Post, and Politico began publishing articles depicting the vice president as “a bully” who wasn’t diligent enough “to do the prep and the work”—but also—an “over-prepared” perfectionist who “berated” staff who didn’t meet her lofty standards. (One Biden staffer called it “a whisper campaign designed to sabotage her.”) An op-ed from The Hill written way back in November 2021 claimed she’d be “a 2024 problem for Biden and the Democrats,” calling her “an unpopular sharp-tongued incumbent female vice president.” And just recently, The Washington Post ran a piece suggesting that a potential shortcoming for Harris was her “demanding management style,” including her prosecutorial habit of “asking pointed questions” of staff. This included a former staffer’s lament that it was “stressful to brief her, because she’s read all the materials, has annotated it, and is prepared to talk through it.” You cannot imagine these criticisms lodged against a man because that is not a thing that happens. Make America Competent Again, I say.

Harris’s candidacy and her effort are in keeping with the persistent resolve of Black Americans—particularly Black women—to push America toward fulfilling its democratic ideals. It was Win With Black Women, a collective of prominent Black women formed in 2020 to elevate the image of Black women and support their pursuit of political office, that got the fundraising ball rolling, encouraging the parade of affinity groups that followed. Some moments have even seemed imbued with historical resonance. The night of August 22, when Harris appeared at the Democratic National Convention to accept the presidential nomination, marked 60 years to the day that civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer delivered a blistering and rule-changing speech at the 1964 convention in Atlantic City.

Hamer, co-founder of the interracial Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, led the delegation to that convention to contest the seating of her home state’s all-white, segregationist delegation. In her searing testimony before the DNC’s Credentials Committee, Hamer detailed the horrific violence and abuses inflicted upon her by state-backed white aggressors for daring to vote. Hamer had been fired from her job and evicted from her home, and the Ku Klux Klan fired 16 bullets into the home where she sought refuge from the violence. (“The only thing they could do to me was to kill me,” she would tell a later interviewer, “and it seemed like they’d been trying to do that a little bit at a time ever since I could remember.”) After attending a workshop to learn how to register other Black Mississippians, she was arrested and thrown in the county jail, where she was beaten with billy clubs and sexually assaulted. She suffered permanent bodily damage, including the worsening of a limp resulting from a childhood bout with polio, a blood clot behind her eye that eventually left her nearly blind, and severe kidney damage. “All of this is on account we want to register,” Hamer noted in her speech, “to become first-class citizens.

”President Lyndon B. Johnson had already tried to muzzle Hamer through various advisers. In the middle of her testimony, he called an impromptu press conference to divert television cameras. But network news shows broadcast Hamer’s speech in full during prime time, effectively giving her a far bigger audience than if it had aired live. “I question America,” Hamer concluded. “Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, where we have to sleep with our telephones off the hooks because our lives are threatened daily because we want to live as decent human beings in America?”

An illustration showing the mountain of influences that led to Kamala Harris's run for the presidency. Includes images of Coretta Scott King, Barbara Jordan, Eleanor Holmes Norton, Shirley Chisholm, Kamala Harris, Fannie Lou Hamer, Rosa Parks, Zora Neale Hurston, and Ida B. Wells

Hamer would be elected as a delegate to the 1972 convention in Miami, the same year that Shirley Chisholm became the first Black woman to seek a major party’s nomination. Chisholm, who like Harris was both of West Indian descent and was the child of immigrants, had been the first Black woman elected to Congress in 1968. Four years later, without waiting for backing from a Democratic Party machine she knew would never come, Chisholm launched a campaign that was both truly independent and disruptive. “I am not the candidate of any political bosses or fat cats or special interests,” she stated in her announcement speech, delivered at one of the oldest Black churches in her hometown of Brooklyn, New York. Though she had expected to run up against the commingled toxicity of anti-Black racism and misogyny, or misogynoir, Chisholm was nonetheless disappointed by the lack of support she received from the overwhelmingly white, mainstream feminist movement, or Black civil rights figures. Neither the National Women’s Political Caucus nor the Congressional Black Caucus, both groups that Chisholm had co-founded, endorsed her, essentially citing pragmatism over principles, and a desperate need to beat Richard Nixon. Notably, Hamer boasted of voting for Chisholm on the first ballot, stating, “Men couldn’t have talked about the real issues in this country the way she did. They bow to political pressure, but Chisholm didn’t bow to anyone. She’s a great person, a Black person, and a great woman, and she’s working for the kinds of change that the National Women’s Political Caucus is working for. With the woman’s vote and the youth vote—far more than 50 percent—we can have a candidate like Chisholm in the White House one day.”

Chisholm would later write in her memoir, The Good Fight: “I ran for the presidency, despite hopeless odds, to demonstrate the sheer will and refusal to accept the status quo…. The next time a woman runs, or a Black, or a Jew or anyone from a group that the country is ‘not ready’ to elect to its highest office, I believe that he or she will be taken seriously from the start…. I ran because someone had to do it first. In this country everybody is supposed to be able to run for president, but that’s never really been true.”

Harris has nodded to that lineage. In her 2020 vice presidential victory speech, she paid tribute to the “women who fought and sacrificed so much for equality, and liberty, and justice for all,” paying specific homage to Black women, “who are too often overlooked, but so often prove that they are the backbone of our democracy.” She has embraced this debt throughout her life, and it is imbued in her biography. Alpha Kappa Alphas like Coretta Scott King and Toni Morrison. Divine Nine icon Barbara Jordan. Howard alums from Zora Neale Hurston to Toni Morrison to Thurgood Marshall. Her citation of these figures, all liberatory leaders who have made this union slightly less imperfect, is recognition of the shoulders on which she, and so many of us, stand.

What Comes Next

Three weeks out from voting day, if there’s anything that this campaign should have taught us, it’s that it’s impossible to predict what the final stretch will look like. Trump is desperate, and thus capable of anything, a prospect that is terrifying but in keeping with who he has always been. Perhaps there will be missteps from Harris, who needs to strengthen her support among noncollege voters. And some major external event could derail things at the last minute.

But we know this already: America, just as Shirley Chisholm hoped, is more than ready for Kamala Harris. From its inception, Harris’s campaign has been powered by the people. The surge in voter registrations, the grassroots organizers hitting the pavement, the supporters who have filled her rallies to capacity—all of these are a testament to the movement behind her campaign, which is driven from the ground up.

This is no ordinary campaign, but it’s exactly the campaign that we needed at this extraordinary moment. In it, there is the potential for an America brought a little closer to giving everyone a place at the table. Most Americans, I truly believe, would love to see an end to MAGA. Harris, along with millions of energized supporters, has the potential to shape a more promising future. Within that, a rejection of revanchist politics, a renewed push toward progress, and full-throated assertion—yet again—that we are not going back.

 

Ozone pollution reduces tropical forest growth

University of Exeter

 

image: 

Dr Alexander Cheesman tending seedlings at the TropOz research facility established by Exeter and James Cook universities

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Credit: Kali Middleby

Ozone gas is reducing the growth of tropical forests – leaving an estimated 290 million tonnes of carbon uncaptured each year, new research shows.

The ozone layer in the stratosphere shields our planet from harmful ultraviolet radiation – and protecting it is one of the major successes of environmental action.

But ozone at ground level – formed by the combination of pollutants from human activities in the presence of sunlight – interferes with plants’ ability to absorb carbon dioxide. Ozone is also harmful to human health.

The new study, published in the journal Nature Geoscience, calculates that ground-level ozone reduces new yearly growth in tropical forests by 5.1% on average.

The effect is stronger in some regions – with Asia’s tropical forests losing 10.9% of new growth.

Tropical forests are vital “carbon sinks” – capturing and storing carbon dioxide that would otherwise stay in the atmosphere and contribute to global warming.

“Tropical forests play a crucial role in mopping up our carbon dioxide emissions,” said co-lead author Dr Alexander Cheesman, of James Cook University and the University of Exeter.

“Our study shows that air pollution can jeopardise this critical ecosystem service.

“We estimate that ozone has prevented the capture of 290 million tonnes of carbon per year since 2000. The resulting cumulative loss equates to a 17% reduction in carbon removal by tropical forests so far this century.”

The researchers ran experiments to measure the ozone susceptibility of various tropical tree species, then incorporated the results into a computer model of global vegetation.

Urbanisation, industrialisation, burning fossil fuels and fires have led to an increase in “precursor” molecules – such as nitrogen oxides – that form ozone.

“Ozone concentrations across the tropics are projected to rise further due to increased precursor emissions and altered atmospheric chemistry in a warming world,” said co-lead author Dr Flossie Brown, a recent graduate of the University of Exeter.

“We found that areas of current and future forest restoration – areas critical for the mitigation of climate change – are disproportionately affected by this elevated ozone.

“It is clear that air quality will continue to play an important but often overlooked part in the way forests absorb and store carbon.”

Professor Stephen Sitch, from the University of Exeter, added: “Embracing a future with greater environmental protection would lead to reduced ground-level ozone, thus improved air quality and the additional benefit of enhanced carbon uptake in tropical forests.”

The paper is entitled: “Reduced productivity and carbon drawdown of tropical forests from ground-level ozone exposure.”

Leaf of tropical tree species Homalanthus novoguineensis after exposure to ozone

The canopy of a tropical rainforest at James Cook University’s Daintree Rainforest Observatory in north Queensland Australia.

Credit

Alexander Cheesman

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Journal

Nature Geoscience

DOI

10.1038/s41561-024-01530-1 

Article Title

Reduced productivity and carbon drawdown of tropical forests from ground-level ozone exposure

Article Publication Date

12-Sep-2024

For the Love of Gaza, Bring Back the Students So They Can Bring the War Home Again

by Nicky Reid

 August 30, 2024
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Image by Steel Brooks.

I was born and raised in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania, a small-town cowering in the shadow of a vast college metropolis known simply as State College and I fucking hate State College. I hate State College because nine months out of the year State College is the home of Penn State University, a massive tax-funded corporation that floods my otherwise bucolic corner of nowhere with an ocean of football rape culture and the faceless swarm of brats standing in line to go into debt just to be a part of it.

Needless to say, as a recovering agoraphobic with complex post-traumatic stress disorder, I generally count the minutes until June when these alcoholic tourists finally fuck off for a few months so I can actually drive to my therapist’s office without having flashbacks in the heat of a goddam traffic jam. But this year, I find myself in a strange new predicament. For the first time in my life, I find myself begging Kali goddess of destruction to bring those brats back.

What the hell could inspire such seemingly contradictory behavior, you ask? Perhaps yet another mental illness? Yes, a global pandemic known as holocaust, but for once I’m not the one inflicted by this demented disorder, the political establishment of the western world is. You see, there is a genocide raging across the Gaza Strip and while the racist apartheid state of Israel may be providing the shock troops on the ground wiping an impoverished population from the face of the planet, it is the United States, the United Kingdom, and the European Union that make this savage final solution possible.

America alone has delivered nearly 30,000 bombs to Israel since the tragic blowback of October 7 gave them the greenlight to kill. The official body count delivered by that arsenal stands at a staggering 40,000+, over 16,000 of them children. That is 2% of Gaza’s entire population. However, medical experts at The Lancet believe that the miasma of indirect devastation that comes with this level of total war likely puts the death toll somewhere between 149,000 and 598,000, the latter would place around 15% of Gazan’s underground, easily making this bloodbath one of the most devastating genocides of the last century.

So, what do all these grim statistics have to do with Penn State University? The only reason why half the people in this country even knows that this massacre is occurring is because of the holy fucking hell that campus brats across the country have raged over it. Last spring, universities from sea to shining sea became virtual battlegrounds as legions of college students put down their bongs to take to the streets and demand that these institutions cut their ties to genocide. They occupied large swaths of property that their tuitions maintain with encampments on at least 75 campuses across the country and this movement quickly spilled out into the streets with students haunting Democrats and Republicans alike at every possible public appearance and campaign stop with heckling catcalls and profane accusations.

The Democrats responded by working in tandem with universities and local police to suffocate this uprising in its cradle. The Biden Administration has even quietly admitted to coordinating and overseeing the ensuing crackdowns that turned these campuses into open air prisons flooded with heavily armed gestapo in riot gear, flogging and gassing peaceful protestors before dragging them off to jail. Over 2,000 students were arrested across the country in a massive sweep against free speech. It didn’t work. More protestors came. The Republicans responded by calling to bring in the National Guard and soldiers with rifles were spotted at several campus events in the Midwest, just a stone’s throw away from the killing fields of Kent State.

As if the violence wasn’t enough, these kids were also dragged through the mud by every corporate news hole from the New York Times to Fox News who slurred them as terrorists and antisemites. But they just kept coming. These pissed-off kids were joined by legions of equally pissed-off Muslims and together this unlikely coalition boldly threatened to deprive the Democrats of the pivotal swing state of Michigan with over 100,000 of them voting uncommitted during the party’s one-candidate primary.

Soon the same Democrats who were siccing the pigs on these kids just weeks earlier began paying lip service to the notion of a ceasefire even while the weapons continued to flow to Tel Aviv. Something wonderful had happened. The system learned to fear their children’s wrath again. Then the bell rang, and class was dismissed but the genocide just kept on burning.

If anything, it’s only gotten worse. While the pressure from Michigan undoubtedly helped force an increasingly decrepit Genocide Joe from office, Kamala Harris has changed nothing but the brand image. That Bay Area prison warden may be skulking around to kiss Bibi’s ring behind closed doors but she’s still passing that butcher checks with one hand while wagging a virtue signaling finger with the other. Thus, this August brought more gift-wrapped hardware and killing sprees to the Holy Land. The administration that Kamala still actively serves in approved a $20 billion dollar arms deal to Israel that included 50 F-15 fighter jets while Netanyahu used their existing fleet to bomb no fewer than 13 shelters, including 9 schools in 8 days.

Even worse, Israel and its sponsors seem to be signaling their intentions to expand the massacre across the region to every corner of the map where people have dared to stand with the Palestinian people. While increasingly targeting civilian infrastructure in South Lebanon, Israel has also taken to assassinating possible negotiators in Iran and firebombing oil facilities in Yemen. For their part, America is surrounding their mad dog proxy with an armada of battleships that now includes both the USS Abraham and the USS Theodore Roosevelt. The message here is clear. With no cantankerous students upsetting the elites at their universities there is simply no reason for these imperial arsonists not to turn up the heat.

The Democrats are hoping that their kids will cool off by fall while they sell Kamala on TikTok as some kind of breath of fresh air in the gas chamber. It is my sincere hope that these kids come back as pissed-off as I am and resist falling victim to the delusions of electoral democracy in a failed empire. Even if they weren’t rigged, an election has never ended a war in this country, but students have when they’ve tossed over the ballot box and stuck to the streets where real democracy happens.

Richard Nixon won the biggest landslide in electoral history in 1972 against George McGovern, the only real pacifist the Democratic Party has ever nominated. But within a year, the troops were home from Vietnam and Nixon was out of office because the campus protests had spread to military bases and lead to widescale mutinies and acts of sabotage. The Pentagon folded out of fear of losing control over their own soldiers and an already paranoid and pill-popping Nixon collapsed beneath the pressure.

This is what we need now to end the slaughter in Gaza, and I believe that the brilliantly obnoxious student agitators of the BDS Movement and Jewish Voice for Peace have what it takes if they’re willing to take this motherfucker to the next level.

This means increasing the occupations, openly boycotting the elections, doxing corporate warmongers on campus, and generally making America unlivable for the people who profit off of genocide. I also hope that this movement doesn’t stop with Gaza, that these kids make the same demands for America’s other victims in places like Yemen, Syria, West Papua, Haiti, and the Donbas, and that every student with a conscience in this country becomes another monkey-wrench in the gears of the rusty battleship we call empire.

I still fucking hate Penn State and the shadow it casts over my tiny hillbilly sanctuary. But I will bomb through the crowded campus streets of State College with my face buried in a brown paper bag and my fist raised high above my Ford Taurus if it means siccing these kids on the war machine. I will embrace my agoraphobia like a dangerous lifestyle choice if it means spreading the fear to the powerful. Kali help me, but for the love of Gaza, bring back the students so they can bring the war home again where it belongs.

Nicky Reid is an agoraphobic anarcho-genderqueer gonzo blogger from Central Pennsylvania and assistant editor for Attack the System. You can find her online at Exile in Happy Valley.