UK

Darren Grimes mocked over false claims M&S staff are ‘forced’ to wear pronoun badges

Gabrielle Pickard-Whitehead

Yesterday
Left Foot Forward

“I'm a regular shopper at M&S and have seen no evidence of this. Perhaps you could supply some, rather than a lame third hand anecdote.”

Darren Grimes, a Reform UK councillor in Durham and former presenter on GB News, came under fire this week for claiming Marks & Spencer staff are forced to display their pronouns on name badges.

Taking to X and Facebook, Grimes wrote:

“I met someone that I worked with at Marks and Spencer many moons ago tonight – I’m so grateful for the people I met and the experience I got in that job. But I was informed that they’re all forced to wear their pronouns on their badges now. What on earth? Do they even know their own customers? Sign of the times.”

The post drew attention, as Grimes no doubt intended, but much of the reaction focused on its inaccuracy.

Several social media users challenged the assertion with firsthand accounts. One wrote:

“I was sipping coffee in M&S in Southend earlier and curiosity got the better of me. I had a look around to try and spot one of these badges with mandatory pronouns. Man behind café counter – name badge, no pronouns. Woman clearing café – name badge, no pronouns. Woman in food department – name badge, no pronouns. Woman assisting customers at self-checkout – name badge, no pronouns.”

Another responded: “Yet another bare face lie from Reform Durham Darren.”

Indeed, M&S introduced optional pronoun name badges in 2021. The initiative originated not from corporate command but from an employee suggestion submitted through the retailer’s internal ‘Suggest to Steve’ programme, which allowed staff to propose ideas directly to then CEO, Steve Rowe.

At the time, employees praised the move, with M&S explaining that the badges were intended to help staff feel comfortable at work and to support LGBTQ+ colleagues. The company stressed participation was voluntary.

The charity Stonewall also welcomed the initiative, describing it as a simple but meaningful step towards workplace inclusion.

“Creating an inclusive workplace starts with everyday actions, and having pronouns on badges is a simple yet impactful way to make sure LGBTQ+ identities are respected – for employees and customers alike,” said Sasha Misra, associate director communications at Stonewall.

Given that the voluntary nature of the badges has been public knowledge for several years, critics argued that Grimes’ claim was either careless or deliberately misleading. As one user asked: “Where did you meet this person and how much had they had to drink? I ask because I’m a regular shopper at M&S and have seen no evidence of this. Perhaps you could supply some, rather than a lame third hand anecdote.”

Nevertheless, the post did succeed in provoking some of the culture-war outrage it appeared designed to generate. Among the responses was the unrelated complaint:

“I noticed that they didn’t wear poppies for remembrance either.”

Once again, voluntary inclusion being falsely portrayed as coercive ‘wokeness,’ allowing misinformation to spread.

Trump’s assault on LGBTQ+ programmes ‘undoubtedly’ hitting UK charities, warns Stonewall

Gabrielle Pickard-Whitehead 

Today
Left Foot Forward

Stonewall's corporate donations more than halved over the past year.

Donald Trump’s ongoing attacks on LGBTQ+ programmes in the US are having a ripple effect across the Atlantic, forcing UK LGBTQ+ charities to operate in what experts describe as an increasingly “hostile environment.”

As the US rolls back diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives and freezes funding for international LGBTQ+ causes, UK organisations are already feeling the financial fallout.

Stonewall, the UK’s largest LGBTQ+ charity, says corporate donations more than halved over the past year, falling from £348,636 in 2024 to £143,149 in 2025. Its cash reserves have also dropped sharply, with less than £92,000 remaining, compared with £998,000 the previous year.

Stonewall attributes the decline to a combination of factors, including the cost-of-living crisis, wider economic pressures affecting charitable giving, and a global pushback against DEI initiatives.

Heather Paterson, head of partnerships and development at LGBT+ Consortium, an umbrella organisation supporting LGBTQ+ groups, said Trump’s decision to freeze foreign aid for LGBTQ+ programmes has “undoubtedly affected fundraising efforts in the UK.”

“This is against a backdrop of increasing running costs, a huge growth in support needs and increasing threats of legal challenges,” she said.

Paterson added that in a political climate where support for trans rights and wider LGBTQ+ equality is increasingly framed as controversial, some businesses have become more cautious about where they direct funding. She said funders are also reporting growing levels of negative feedback when they donate to LGBTQ+ causes.

Since returning to office, Trump has enacted a series of measures targeting LGBTQ+ communities, including banning transgender people from serving in the military, shutting down LGBTQ+ youth services and refusing to recognise Pride Month. Campaigners warn these policies are undermining international LGBTQ+ rights programmes and emboldening opposition elsewhere.

In its Annual Report 2024/25, Stonewall noted how the UK was once seen as a global leader on LGBTQ+ rights. “Sadly, that is no longer the case,” the report states.

“Globally, the LGBTQ+ movement, along with a whole range of other social justice and human rights issues, is experiencing a period of significant turbulence, with rights and freedoms being contested – particularly for the trans and non-binary communities. There have been significant reductions, in the UK and around the world, in funding for the movement,” it continued.

Queer and Trans People Were Under Attack in 2025. Here’s How We Fought Back.


From ICE jails to public libraries to Instagram, queer and trans people battled fascism on every front this year.

By Toshio Meronek & Eric A. Stanley , 

Truthout

December 27, 2025

Members of Rainbow Families Action march from Bay Street in Emeryville, California, on December 8, 2025 to the Sutter corporate offices on Powell Street to protest the end of gender-affirming care to patients under age 19.Jessica Christian / San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images

This year — 2025 — was bleak. There’s trans joy around, but to keep it from drying up we’re going to need to stay with the horror of our current moment. Not so long that it destroys us, but long enough to strategize against its creeping totality.

The right-wing descent that took place during this long year was predicted by Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, the Stonewall riot veteran and mentor to us both who passed this year. Queer and trans people like Major who were alive during the 1980s remember the early days of the AIDS epidemic and the reign of Reagan as a similarly bleak time, in jarring contrast to the revolutionary 1960s and ’70s.

Major kept pushing during that period, behind the wheel of San Francisco’s first needle exchange van, and with a group of trans people dubbed Angels of Care who treated people dying from the virus (at the time, many established doctors and nurses refused). Groups like Angels of Care and the direct action-focused AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) provided where the state and traditional institutions would not.

Following this lineage, queer and trans people in 2025 organized against the fascist takeover of the federal government. Indeed, despite the ascendant right wing, in 2025 queer and trans people in the U.S. organized on battlegrounds such as ICE jails, public libraries facing book bans, and on Instagram. Below are some of the grounds where we fought.

A Struggle Over the Stonewall National Monument

Miss Major was one of the people who fought the cops at the famous 1969 anti-police uprising outside the Stonewall Inn in New York City. The space was commemorated as the country’s first LGBT national monument under the Obama administration, but this year Donald Trump’s White House removed the words “queer” and “transgender” and later, references to bisexuals, from the monument’s signage and website, with the National Park Service instituting a new policy that only allows traditional rainbow flags. Rather than demanding that we simply return to the domestication that the initial monument offered, what if we demanded a commemoration as insurgent at the uprising itself? As Major noted, a commemorative plaque was nice, but free housing and free healthcare for trans people would be much more meaningful. Acting autonomously, people have replaced the flags on and off, regardless of the official policy.

Related Story

NC County Board Dissolves Library Panel Over Refusal to Ban Trans Book
The action by county commissioners “shows a blatant disregard for the expertise of librarians,” one critic said. By Chris Walker , Truthout December 19, 2025

Resistance in Public Libraries and Schools

In 2025, thought police calling themselves “parents’ rights advocates” continued to target people such as the librarian in Georgia who was fired for displaying a book with a trans character, and the Florida teacher who lost their job because they called a student by their chosen name.

These sorts of attacks aren’t new: Look back to the firings of gay teachers in the 1970s and 1980s around the Briggs Initiative in 1978, which was a failed attempt to ban gays and lesbians from working in California schools. Painting queer people as “dangerous” is a tactic that Christian conservatives have deployed as long as queer movements have existed. The Trump Administration along with the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 have reanimated the tactic.

As we write this, a trans University of Oklahoma teaching assistant has been removed from teaching for giving low marks to a paper that called social acceptance of trans identities “demonic,” turned in by a conservative undergraduate student named Samantha Fulnecky. A second instructor was put on leave for offering to excuse students to attend a protest in support of the other suspended teacher. One bright spot at the end of the year: the students organizing in support of the trans teacher at the University of Oklahoma, against the outsized influence of Turning Point USA.

On a broader scale, resistance is happening every time librarians and professors refuse to self-censor, and continue to stock library shelves and syllabi with queer and trans media, teach classes at radical info shops outside of academia, and help people access banned books through projects like the Queer Liberation Library.

At the Hospital and in Doctors’ Offices

Recent wins around gender-affirming health care were tested and in some cases rolled back. As one policy brief has it, “the United States has become the world’s most restrictive developed democracy for transgender healthcare access” — restrictions that will almost certainly result in suicides among people unable to access care.

In December, feds threatened Medicare funding for trans-supporting hospitals, while many health insurance companies have already cut trans services from their policies. This has resulted in protests since the year’s start.

Despite the ascendant right wing, in 2025 queer and trans people in the U.S. organized on battlegrounds such as ICE jails, public libraries facing book bans, and on Instagram.

Northern California’s largest healthcare provider recommitted to providing trans health care for young people, in part thanks to protests against the provider, Sutter Health.

The Trans Youth Emergency Project connects trans youth and families in conservative states with small grants and volunteer guides across state lines, and DIY hormone replacement therapy is also filling in necessary gaps.

Clashes Over Social Media

As tech oligarchs sucked up to Trump and snatched the best seats in the house at this year’s inauguration, Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta (the near-monopoly that owns Facebook, Instagram, and Threads) attempted an anti-queer makeover in the style of Elon Musk’s X, allowing more dehumanizing language under the guise of “free speech,” while users report shadowbanning and censorship of LGBTQ+ content.

Some have left anti-LGBTQIA platforms for others, like Bluesky. Some are spending more time in real life, at reading groups with a political education bent. Examples of these include the Noname Book Club, which describes itself as a “Black owned business connecting community members both inside and outside carceral facilities with radical books,” and Bay Area groups such as Shattered Glass (it has no website, just send an email to join) and Queering the Canon. Zines and festivals centered around physical media are another way people are communicating offline.

Censorship of queer and trans media isn’t new to our movements, which means we’ve long carved out space at leftist and anarchist book fairs; we donate books and labor to organizations like LGBT Books to Prisoners to get books to places where they’re harder to find.

With free or cheap “third spaces” on the decline, libraries and bookstores are even more important as meeting and organizing spaces — places like A Room of One’s Own in Madison, Wisconsin; Midnight Books in Los Angeles; Red Emma’s in Baltimore; and Sour Cherry Comics in San Francisco.

Contestations at Pride

Was anyone shocked when corporations pulled Pride sponsorships this year? Capitalist-friendly Pride parties flailed as companies cut their diversity, equity, and inclusion budgets, and in too many cases failed to support queer and trans people calling for LGBTQIA+ organizations to condemn Israel’s genocide of Palestinians. Our local Dyke March here in San Francisco split into competing marches, as some organizers bowed to a few Zionists who argued that officially adopting an anti-Zionist stance was anti-inclusive of some lesbians.

At the same time, trans-specific celebrations grew. Trans Pride march in San Francisco, for one, reportedly swelled to become the largest ever, with organizers highlighting the connections between anti-colonial struggle, prison abolition, and trans liberation.
Struggles Against Prisons and Immigration Jails

This year LGBTQ+ asylum seekers like Andry Hernández Romero and Hilary Rivers faced deadly conditions inside ICE’s growing deportation machine, leaving many refugees separated from their families, prone to sexual assault by guards, and contemplating or succeeding in taking their own lives.

In response, queer and trans people with autonomous collectives like Gay Shame protested and worked to provide cover to immigrants against the most expensive domestic policing force in U.S. history. Compton’s Coalition worked to oust GEO Group, the largest private prison contractor in the U.S., from the San Francisco site of the Compton’s Cafeteria riot, where three years before Stonewall, queer and trans people raged against the police.

Behind the walls of domestic prisons, the Department of Justice indicated it plans to roll back policies meant to protect imprisoned children and adults from rape in December; it’s too early to know the fallout.

In LGBTQ Spaces Targeted by the Right

Even as cities massively increase their police budgets, violence against trans/queer people continues. The right and its media attempted to scapegoat trans people for mass shootings, while the Department of Justice erased a study showing right-wingers and white supremacists are largely responsible for terrorist attacks in the U.S. Last month in San Diego, trans women were shot by pellet guns outside a bar in the Hillcrest gayborhood, while a wannabe “martyr” for Charlie Kirk admitted to planning a mass shooting targeting trans people in Arizona.

On the Front Lines of the Class War

A number of gay men in positions of authority have worked to make our lives more miserable this year, including Trump’s top finance guy Scott Bessent, who has been working to justify the president’s tariffs while blaming the media for the affordability crisis; surveillance juggernaut Palantir’s Peter Thiel, who keeps making money off of spying on us all; and OpenAI’s Sam Altman, who despite stating that AI could end the world, keeps pushing for more data centers while angling for a government bailout for his unprofitable chatbot company.

But even as these “gay faces in high places” betrayed the rest of us, queer grassroots resistance persists against gay capitalists who put solidarity with fellow rich people first. Trans and queer people are essential to movements to curb FLOCK surveillance cameras, thwart data centers, and shame companies into cutting contracts with Israel.


This article is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and you are free to share and republish under the terms of the license.

Toshio Meronek
Toshio Meronek is coauthor of the book Miss Major Speaks and host of the podcast Sad Francisco; they have reported on housing and queer politics for Truthout since 2013.


Eric A. Stanley
Eric A. Stanley is the author of Atmospheres of Violence: Structuring Antagonism and the Trans/Queer Ungovernable. They organize and teach in the Bay Area.

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Magnus Hirschfeld, LGBT pioneer

Modern political agitation for gay, lesbian, and transgender rights started in the late 19th century with German socialists.


Workers' Liberty

Author: Peter Tatchell

 5 November, 2025

Picture: Magnus Hirschfeld

By Peter Tatchell

Over 100 years ago, the gay German sexologist Dr Magnus Hirschfeld pioneered the understanding of human sexuality and the advocacy of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) human rights at a time when it was deeply unpopular to do so. That took immense courage — and determination. He was battling against the ignorance and prejudice of centuries.

While Oscar Wilde was being tormented in Reading Gaol, Hirschfeld launched the world’s first gay rights organisation in Berlin. Whereas Wilde merely lamented the persecution of LGBTI people, Hirschfeld organised to fight it.

His Scientific Humanitarian Committee, founded in Germany in 1897, trail-blazed the struggle for homosexual emancipation. A similar movement did not emerge in Britain until the 1960s, over half a century later. He truly was a man ahead of his time.

Hirschfeld was born into a conservative Jewish family in what was then Prussia in 1868. During his childhood he developed a curiosity and fascination with sex. Against the conventions of his era and the moralism of his elders, even as a young boy he viewed sexuality as something entirely natural and wholesome.

At medical school, he was traumatised by a lecture on “sexual degeneracy”, where a gay man — who had been incarcerated in an asylum for 30 years because of his homosexuality — was paraded naked before the students like a laboratory animal. Hirschfeld was the only student revolted by such mistreatment. All the others, even his best friend, viewed it as normal and justified.

Further trauma ensued when, soon after setting up himself as a doctor in Berlin in 1893, he was waylaid outside his apartment at night by a soldier who was deeply disturbed by his homosexuality. Hirschfeld resisted the soldier’s pleading for a consultation there and then, telling him to come to his surgery the next day. Overnight, however, the soldier committed suicide.

Hirschfeld’s terrible guilt and remorse motivated him to begin studying homosexuality and, eventually, to write a pamphlet calling for the decriminalisation of gay sex, which was then outlawed under Paragraph 175 of the German penal code [not fully repealed until 1994].

When his family advised him to study something more worthy and respectable like cholera, arguing that research into homosexuality will not bring him any acclaim or joy, Hirschfeld riposted: “What are you saying: that cholera brings you more joy than sexuality?”

As his pro-gay reputation spread, more and more men who were unhappy with their homosexuality came to him as patients. Hirschfeld’s prescription? Lots of gay parties and plenty of boyfriends!

One of Hirschfeld’s biggest problems was hostility from other gays and lesbians. They mostly accepted their second-class legal status. Many did not like him rocking the boat. He was seen as a trouble-maker. They refused to co-operate with his sex surveys and law reform campaigns.

Realising that his lone efforts were not enough, in 1897 Hirschfeld founded the Scientific Humanitarian Committee (SHC). Its strategy was to promote research and education on all sexual matters; in particular to debunk homophobic prejudice and to present a rational case for the decriminalisation of homosexuality.

Demanding

The 1890s equivalent of the UK gay lobby group Stonewall, the SHC’s motto was: “Justice through science”. Some of it’s more radical supporters adapted the battle cry of the French Revolution, demanding: “Liberté, Fraternité, Egalité, Homosexualité!”

As well as having to contend with the complacency and disparagement of other gay people, Hirschfeld was also attacked from left by militant OutRage!-style campaigners led by Adolf Brand. Advocating direct action and the outing of homophobes, Brand denounced Hirschfeld’s “queeny committee” as a talking shop of respectable, middle-class homosexualists.

Much as I admire Brand’s defiant, assertive gay activism, his criticism of the SHC was a bit unfair. In those ignorant, bigoted days, to have a group like Stonewall was truly radical — almost revolutionary. This is confirmed by the way the SHC and Hirschfeld were put under police surveillance as subversives and subjected to repeated harassment.

Thanks to Hirschfeld’s tireless campaigns, in 1898 the German parliament debated the repeal of Paragraph 175. Leading the call for its abolition was August Bebel, head of the left-wing Social Democrats (Hirschfeld was also a prominent member of the SPD). Although defeated, the debate put homosexual equality onto the mainstream political agenda for the first time.

Undeterred by this setback, Hirschfeld decided to tackle the police, in a bid to stop them enforcing the unjust anti-gay laws. He took the police commissioner of Berlin on a tour of gay bars and clubs. Instead of the dens of debauchery that he was expecting, the commissioner found that LGBTI people were witty, stylish, polite and well behaved — and he enjoyed their company. “I wanted to see Sodom and Gomorrah,” he complained somewhat disappointedly.

To strengthen the rational, scientific case for law reform, Hirschfeld proceeded with his medical research into the causes and nature of homosexuality, in the hope that understanding the facts would discourage prejudice and promote acceptance.

Far in advance of others, he concluded that everyone is a mixture of male and female. But this perceptive true analysis led him to erroneously advance the idea that lesbian and gay people were an “intermediate sex” that was biologically predetermined at birth. In his view, male homosexuals possessed a “woman’s soul trapped in a man’s body.”

This well-intentioned misjudgement aside, Hirschfeld was right on most other things. He can and should be forgiven.

As well as his concern for the welfare of homosexuals, he was also a strong advocate of the rights of transgender people — again, decades ahead of his time. Good fortune shone on Hirschfeld when he was paid a fabulous sum to perform one of the world’s first gender reassignment operations. The payment enabled him to establish the Institute for Sexual Science (ISS) in 1919, which predated Dr Alfred Kinsey’s US sex research institute by nearly three decades.

As well as its research role, the Institute promoted sex education, contraception, marriage guidance counselling, advice for gay and transgender people, the treatment and prevention of sexually-transmitted diseases, gay law reform and women’s rights. It saw over 20,000 people a year.

These were novel ideas at the time, and Hirschfeld’s fame and notoriety spread worldwide. When told that the American newspapers were hailing him as “the Einstein of sex”, he wittily replied that he would feel much happier if they called Einstein “the Hirschfeld of physics.”

But his work brought him into conflict with the Nazis. They ranted against his “perversions” — attacking his public meetings and beating up him and his lover and assistant Karl Giese.

While he was away in the US lecturing in 1933, Nazi stormtroopers attacked and ransacked the Institute for Sexual Science, destroying its priceless research archives. The vast library was burned in the great bonfire of “enemy books.” The newsreel footage of these burning books features in almost every documentary about the Nazis and in all the main history books. But it is rarely acknowledged that it was Hirschfeld’s sexological institute and the headquarters of his German gay rights movement that were the main targets and victims of the stormtroopers’ wrath.

The Nazis also seized the Institute’s huge list of client’s names and addresses. These were used by the Gestapo to compile their notorious “pink lists”, which identified homosexuals and led to their arrest and deportation to the concentration camps.

With the Nazis publicly denouncing Hirschfeld as one of the country’s leading “Jewish criminals,” which was effectively a death sentence, friends advised him not to return to Germany. He went to the south of France instead, where he died suddenly of a stroke in 1935. His partner and fellow researcher and campaigner, Karl Giese, committed suicide in 1938, while on the run from the Nazis. Both died sad, lonely deaths; unbefitting their enormous humanitarian contributions.

It took many decades for Hirschfeld’s life and work to be properly documented and for him to receive the social acclaim he so richly deserved.

His extraordinary endeavours are thankfully now well documented... his political campaigns, sexual research and the myriad ups and down of his own less than joyful personal life. As with so many other human rights campaigners, Hirschfeld often sacrificed his own happiness and comfort for the love and welfare of others. A true pioneer and hero of the struggle for sexual human rights and queer emancipation!

• Taken with thanks from here

Past is Prologue: Black Erasure and the Myth of the White Ethnostate

John G. Russell

December 17, 2025


White tenants seeking to prevent blacks from moving into the housing project erected this sign, Detroit, 1942. Photograph Source: Arthur S. Siegel – Public Domain

“Under slave laws, the necessity for color rankings was obvious, but in America today, post-civil-rights legislation, white people’s conviction of their natural superiority is being lost. Rapidly lost. There are “people of color” everywhere, threatening to erase this long-understood definition of America. And what then? Another black President? A predominantly black Senate? Three black Supreme Court Justices? The threat is frightening.”

—Toni Morrison, “Making America White Again,” 2016

“We had a meeting, and I say, “Why is it we only take people from shithole countries,’ right? Why can’t we have some people from Norway, Sweden. Just a few, let’s have a few. From Denmark. Mind sending us your people? Send us some nice people, you mind? But we always take people from Somalia. Places that are a disaster. Filthy, dirty, disgusting, ridden with crime. The only thing they’re good at is going after ships” (emphasis added).

–President Donald J. Trump, 2025, who has approved the slaughter of over 80 people on boats at sea

Trump has made clear his intention to make America white again, although, America has never has been exclusively white. What he means, of course, is ensuring that white people retain political and cultural dominance, a project central to the country’s ethos even before the Founding Fathers. Here the “most transparent president in American history” is unequivocally clear.

This project entails diminishing and erasing the history and contributions of black[1] people and other communities of color have made to the country, while dramatically reducing their physical presence through deportation and restrictive immigration policies that privilege white immigrants from “nice” Western countries.

Past is prologue: America is returning to its “golden age” of whiteness, an era when the achievements of black Americans and other people of color were denied, belittled, or ignored; when they appeared only in subservient roles on television and in film, if they appeared at all; when the academic canon dominated almost exclusively by works of dead white men. It is the America of Pleasantville (1998), stripped of its metaphor of colorization.

Old erasure strategies now harness new technologies. AI is increasingly deployed to erase, distort, and denigrate the black presence (and other marginalized presences) in America. Soon after Trump returned to office, government websites began scrubbing information about black people from their archives. Instead of “86-ing” it, they “404ed” it. In compliance with several presidential executive orders (EO14173, EO14151, EO14185), algorithmic racism is now employed to whitewash history, as federal agencies employ AI to systematically remove material that violates Trump’s anti-DEI directives. When public backlash arises, agencies conveniently blame AI, though the decisions are made by their human operators – the real automatons – “just following the orders.”

Erasure is not confined to the digital realm. As part of his assault on DEI, Trump ended free access to national parks on Martin Luther King Day and Juneteenth, while adding insult to injury by declaring his own birthday a fee-free day. He ordered the National Park Service to remove plaques and interpretive displays recognizing the contributions of black Americans. Yet the truth remains: both enslaved and free black Americans built much of the infrastructure that defines the nation. Black labor built the White House, the Capitol, and other government buildings. The Buffalo Soldiers were instrumental in constructing roads, trails, and facilities that make up the National Park system, even as their contributions were ignored or minimized. Now those contributions are being summarily expunged.

These erasures do not stop at digital spaces or American shores. In the Netherlands, the American Cemetery at Margraten, Limburg, commemorative displays honoring African American soldiers who built the cemetery for U.S. soldiers killed in WWII, specifically those that spotlighted the racism they endured, were removed in March to comply with Trump’s anti-DEI directives. The cemetery contains the graves of 8,301 American soldiers, including 174 black soldiers. Dutch families who faithfully maintained these graves for over 80 years were outraged at the removal of displays dedicated to their “black liberators.” For decades, these displays stood as reminders of their sacrifice – of their “double victory” over fascism abroad and racism at home. That victory is now halved, as a fascistic white America assumes the posture of those it once fought to defeat.

The pathology of historical hagiography demands the concealment of inconvenient truths that contradict the national mythos. According to U.S. ambassador to the Netherlands Joe Popolo, panels acknowledging the two-front war fought by black American soldiers “push an agenda criticizing America,” and therefore had to be removed.

Popolo wants to have it both ways. In February, during his first visit to Margraten cemetery, he declared:


“Walking these beautiful grounds and exploring the powerful exhibit at the visitor center, we were struck by the stories told and untold that live here. Honoring the memory of the heroes buried at Margraten, including African American service members like Private Willmore Mack, is something we hold sacred. Their courage, sacrifice, and their humanity deserve to be remember openly honestly, and fully. The United States has always been committed to sharing their stories, no matter a person’s rank, race, gender or creed (emphasis added).”

Yet those commitments vanish when the stories reveal the dark underbelly of American racism. Consequently, despite these rather lofty – and ultimately empty – words, Popolo accepted the removal of the displays, embracing the Trump regime’s revisionist view of history. Rather than honoring those who resisted racism and celebrating their struggle as part of America’s ongoing effort to realize its ideals, Popolo and the American Battle Monuments Commission – which ordered the removal – treat that history as a threat. In place of recognition and restitution, monuments that glorify the betrayal of those ideals are returned to their pedestals.

The presence of black Americans – living reminders of both the nation’s past and present – is reframed as a problem to be silenced and concealed. Slavery, segregation, and other injustices are not condemned; after all, in this sanitized view, they have been overcome and no longer plague the nation. Instead, black citizens who insist white America confront its past honestly are delegitimized, contorted into race-card-playing anti-white racists. For Trump, Popolo, Stephen Miller, Kristi Noem, and their allies, such demands are cast as baseless assaults on white identity that allegedly traumatize white children by “indoctrinating” them to hate their whiteness. In their view, this trauma is more than a cultural grievance, it is a direct obstacle to their larger project of creating a defiantly proud, exclusionary ethno-state.

However, nothing – not even racism – is absolute: not all black contributions are bound for the circular file, certain myths require validation. In 2020, Trump announced his plan for the construction of a National Garden of American Heroes. The following year, in an executive order, he formalized the proposal with a list of 244 names of historical figures to be commemorated. Of these, only 37 were black [2], the majority drawn from sports and entertainment. Just a handful of activists – Harriet Tubman (whose long-awaited appearance on the twenty-dollar bill has been delayed under Trump) [3], Sojourner Truth (slated for the reverse of the ten-dollar bill), Frederick Douglass (whom Trump once remarked is “someone who has done an amazing job”), Muhammad Ali, Martin Luther King Jr., and Rosa Parks – appear on the list. Conservative America has strategically learned to tolerate these figures, to parade them as proof of death of American racism, though they despised them during their lifetimes. Tellingly absent are Nat Turner, Malcolm X, W.E.B. Du Bois, James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, Ed Dwight, Maya Angelou, Shirley Chisholm, or Marsha P. Johnson (whose name was deleted from the National Park Service’s official Stonewall National Monument website), to name but a few.

Even more striking is the inclusion of game show host Alex Trebek, a Canadian-born naturalized citizen, while Elijah McCoy – another Canadian-American inventor, whose unrivaled ingenuity produced inventions of such superior quality they defied imitation, giving rise to the expression “the real McCoy” – did not make the cut – and paved the way for modern robotics. Nonetheless, black contributors to science and invention are conspicuously absent. Figures who challenged the myth of white supremacy through intellect and innovation are sidelined, evidence that American racism is authentic, quite literally, the real McCoy. No surprises here. As the poet Haki Madhubuti (Don L. Lee) wrote in 1966:


America calling.

negroes.

can you dance?

play foot/basketball?

nanny?

cook?

needed now, negroes

who can entertain

ONLY.

others not

wanted.

(& are considered extremely dangerous).

Consider the cases of Ed Dwight and Robert Henry Lawrence. In 2024, at the age of 90, Dwight became the oldest person launched into space, aboard Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin New Shepard spacecraft – surpassing the previous record-holder, Star Trek’s William Shatner, by 8 months.

But more than 60 years earlier, Dwight had been personally tapped by President John F. Kennedy to become the first black American astronaut candidate in the Air Force program from which NASA selected its “Right White Stuff.” A celebrated sculptor later in life, Dwight faced entrenched racism and institutional barriers that blocked his path into space for decades, including opposition from Chuck Yeager, the sound-barrier-breaking test pilot and then commander of the Aerospace Research Pilot School, who deemed him unqualified. Although he was not selected for the astronaut corps, by the time he graduated from the program, he had clocked some 9,000 hours of flight time, including 2,000 hours in high-performance jets, as an Air Force pilot. These achievements, however, do nothing to placate the soaring negrophobia of ideologues like Tucker Carlson and the late Charlie Kirk, whose racist rhetoric about black pilots – and black excellence more broadly – thrives on denying the very possibility achievement in fields historically gatekept by whiteness.

Another black astronaut, Robert Henry Lawrence Jr., faced similar hurdles. He did not stand on the moon and take giant steps for mankind, but he was the first African American astronaut [4]. His ascent to the stars was cut short when he was killed in a tragic training accident during a test flight. According to the NASA website (read it while you still can, before the DEI-hunters, like their ICE counterparts, disappear it), in 1967, he was selected for U.S. Air Force’s Manned Orbital Laboratory (MOL) program, a military initiative that both preceded and ran parallel to NASA’s civilian space program. Lawrence was the only MOL astronaut to hold a doctorate, having earned his Ph.D. in physical chemistry in 1965. A prodigy, Lawrence graduated from high school at 16 and earned his Bachelor of Science in chemistry at 20. Who knew? Not many of us.

Certainly not astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson. Asked whether he had ever wanted to be an astronaut as a child, Tyson said no, explaining that “it was clear that they [the space program] was not interested in me by who they were sending into space” and that he felt that “he was not a part of that.” Tyson was born in 1958. He would have been 9 years old when Lawrence was selected for the MOL program. Would it have made a difference if he had known? We will never know.

As someone who is two years Tyson’s senior, I stayed up to watch the first moon landing in 1969, photographing it off the television screen using my father’s old tripod-mounted box camera in a darkened living room, a trick my father had taught me. Those grainy images of the moon landing, captured secondhand from a flickering old black-and-white television, became my personal proof that I had witnessed humanity’s greatest technological leap. At the time, I wondered if there were any black astronauts. I heard only whispers of their possible existence, but their faces were not among those that appeared on the nightly news. I wonder how different it might have felt if I had known then what I know now about Dwight and Lawrence.

Representation matters [5]. For Tyson, for me, and for countless others, seeing someone who looked like us might have reshaped how we imagined our place in the universe – and, more down-to-earth, within a white America that denied and diminished the achievements of our people – and us. We will never know what difference it might have made, but Dwight and Lawrence’s legacy reminds us that history, when left uncensored, is always more inclusive and expansive than its gatekeepers admit, and how easily that history can be denied then – and now.

I raise the issue because history, as I have written previously, is rhyming again. How many lives will be diminished, how many dreams deferred, how many futures foreclosed because access to history has been deliberately blocked to clear the way for a resurgent white supremacy? True, despite these omissions, Tyson became a highly respected astrophysicist. I became a cultural anthropologist. But both of us had to carve out paths in disciplines where representation was scarce, and where the absence of visible predecessors made the journey challenging than it needed to be.

Erasure, however, is only part of the picture. Like nature, racism abhors a vacuum. It rushes to fill the void with denigration. As in the past, technology once again becomes the handmaiden of prejudice, mass-producing stereotypes and weaponizing them at scale. During the government shutdown, when food stamp benefits were suspended, social media influencers using OpenAI’s Sora 2 flooded TikTok and YouTube with racist AI-generated fake videos that recycled hyper-realistic racist tropes of black people: obese black women portrayed as angry welfare cheats, confronting welfare officials and store clerks, complaining about cut benefits, looting shops, and boasting about their gaming the system. Black men depicted as shiftless, “baby daddies.” When not caricatured as sub-humans, they were rendered as raging silverbacks, irate, bewigged chimpanzees, and cautiously furtive monkeys. These videos recycled the familiar faux narrative that black people do not contribute to society but sponge off it – a direct call back to Ronald Reagan’s trope of the “welfare queen.”

Predictably, in a land where confirmation bias reigns supreme, many on the right fell for it. FOX News even reportedthat “SNAP beneficiaries threaten to ransack stores over government shutdown,” quoting an AI-generated avatar as saying, “I have seven different baby daddies and none of ’em no good for me.”

What AI taketh away with one hand, it giveth with the other. This is the real great replacement white fragility fails to recognize. Instead, white America attempts to protect its mythologies, never quite realizing those myths have also been shaped, quite literally, by black hands.

In 1972, at 16, I met Dan Haskett, then a young artist four years my senior, at a science fiction convention in New York, where, between panels, he kindly drew one of his distinctive black-themed character sketches for me. Almost a half century later, I learned that Haskett had gone on to work as a Disney animator and art director. Remember Ariel from The Little Mermaid? Remember the uproar when black actress Halle Bailey was cast in the role in the live-action remake? Well, Haskett, a black man, designed Ariel, a white mermaid, among many other iconic characters that shaped the visual imagination of generations.

My point is that erasure takes many forms. Much of what white America regards as exclusively its own simply is not. Too often, this history remains hidden, dismissed as “woke nonsense.” We learn our spotty history not in classrooms but in movie theaters. More than a half century after their contributions to the space program, black women mathematicians like Christine Darden, Annie Easley, Mary Jackson, Katherine Johnson, and Dorothy Vaughan, the “human computers” featured in the 2016 film Hidden Figures are finally being recognized, though only the last three appear on Trump’s National Garden list. Black inventors also exemplify this overlooked legacy: Lewis Latimer, who helped perfect the filament used in the incandescent light bulb [6], and Miriam Elizabeth Benjamin, who patented the “gong button,”precursor to the flight attendant call button and other signaling systems used in public spaces (she was also a composer).Add to this the aforementioned Robert Lawrence. Their stories remind us that the foundations of American achievement are far more diverse than the sanitized, whitewashed version we are often told – if we are told their stories at all. And in the current cultural moment, who can say whether their stories will remain to be told.

In 1965, playwright Douglas Turner Ward staged Day of Absence, a biting satire in which all the black residents of a Southern town suddenly vanish for a single day, leaving chaos in their wake. The play exposed how indispensable the black lives were to the white lives, even as those lives were devalued and demeaned by those who benefited from their labor.

Perhaps America as a whole needs its own “day of absence” – not as fantasy, but as a reminder of how much it owes to those it strives to erase. Imagine a moment when black people not only leave America – which seems to be what the fascists want – but take with them all the things they have gifted it, often without acknowledgement or appreciation.

Of course, black Americans will not disappear, despite the Gestapo-inspired wet dreams of MAGA and its king. Black people built this nation, for free – and it owes us. Just as it owes Haitians who revitalized Springfield, Ohio, and Somalis who revitalized Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Collectively, black people – even, ironically, those Somalis who did not consider themselves black and voted for Trump (then again, adversity invites inclusion, as the excluded discover common ground and solidarity) – have built this country. And we will not let a confederacy of racist Trumpanista and “Millertant” dunces turn it into a “shithole,” however earnestly they might try.

Notes

[1] I have chosen not to capitalize “black” until there is substantive reform of American police enforcement and the criminal justice system that results in the criminal prosecution of those who use excessive force and a systemic, long-term reduction in the number of police killings and brutalization of black people.

[2] Trump’s 2021 executive order listed 244 figures. A subsequent unofficial count raises the total to 250. Significantly, the list was made before Trump’s anti-DEI executive orders.

[3] Although listed among the honorees, Tubman was temporarily removed “without approval” from the National Park Service website in 2025. Other figures on the list, including Jackie Robinson and Medgar Evers were also briefly scrubbed from Department of Defense and Arlington National Cemetery websites, respectively, before public outcry led to their restoration. This raises the possibility that their proposed statues may meet the same fate as the East Wing, perhaps to be hastily replaced for the republic’s 250th anniversary by multiple, NFT-themed, golden statutes of Trump himself to make up for the loss.

[4] While the Air Force’s MOL program was largely secret, its existence was public knowledge and Lawrence’s involvement was announced, though the details of his work remained classified. Despite being selected as an astronaut, Lawrence was not officially recognized as such until 1997, ostensibly because prior to his death, he had not flown above 50 miles – then the threshold for becoming an astronaut. Three years decades after his death, his name was finally inscribed on the Astronaut Memorial at Kennedy Space Center.

[5] See Tyson’s interview with Nobel Laurette Thomas R. Cech, particularly 4:45-10:20, in which he discusses the importance of representation.

[6] Latimer is also AI chatbot named after the inventor. However, while Elon Musk’s Grok chatbot spreads disinformation about an imaginary “white South African genocide,” calls itself MechaHitler, denies the Holocaust, and contemplates one of its own in a grotesque thought experiment in which it hypothetically slaughters the world’s 16 million Jews rather than vaporize its creator’s “Einstein/DaVinci-surpassing” mind, Latimer is designed for inclusivity, not to perpetuate lies about genocide, imagined or real.

Starbucks Ignores Workers Demands at Its Peril

Sonali Kolhatkar

 November 26, 2025

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Starbucks workers protesting in Seattle. Photo: Eric Stoller. CC BY-SA 2.0

Thousands of baristas at nearly 100 Starbucks locations are on strike this holiday season, picketing outside the iconic cafes for a contract. While the corporate coffee chain has claimed little to no disruption to its bottom line so far, the union chose one of the most lucrative sales days of the year to launch its strike—Red Cup Day—and boldly rebranded it as a “Red Cup Rebellion.”

How long the rebellion will last is unclear. But given the union’s strong stand and public appetite to punish misbehaving corporations, Starbucks is risking everything by ignoring its workers’ demands.

“This is not the first nationwide strike,” explained Diego Franco, a Chicago-based Starbucks worker who is active with Starbucks Workers United (SBWU) and an elected strike captain. “However,” he added, “this will be the largest strike in the company’s history.”

It all began in December 2021 when the New York Times hailed the first-ever successful union vote at an Elmwood Starbucks near Buffalo, New York, as a “big symbolic win for labor.”

In response, the company brought its founding CEO Howard Schultz out of retirement in 2022 to lead it on an interim basis. But Schultz’s return did little to stave off the union’s momentum, and by 2025, in spite of multiple changes in leadership, more than 640 Starbucks cafes were unionized under the banner of SBWU. This is despite a union-busting campaign that was so aggressive that the National Labor Relations Board denounced the company’s actions as a “virulent, widespread and well-orchestrated response to employees’ protected organizing efforts.” Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) also lambasted it as “the most aggressive and illegal union-busting campaign in the modern history of our country.”

The company has long referred to its workers as “partners,” a term that holds the promise of fairness. But, according to Franco, “they claim that we are partners until we have serious issues and serious demands [that] we want to bring to the table… At that point, they choose to stonewall us, they engage in union busting, and they try to drag this out for as long as they can.”

The union is calling on the public to not cross picket lines and to not spend money at any Starbucks location or on products until the company agrees to negotiate a contract. It’s a well-timed strike that comes on the heels of many months of stalled negotiations—Starbucks relies on brisk sales during the holiday season when it rolls out signature hot drinks and coffee-related gift-giving—and it has a catchy name: “No Contract, No Coffee.”

“We are asking people not to shop at Starbucks, whether the location be union, non-union,” said Franco. “Do not buy Starbucks at the grocery stores. Don’t even buy it from the vending machines.” Such a widespread boycott could cripple a company whose sales are already flagging.

Unfortunately for Starbucks, the strike also comes at a time when Americans are in a rebellious mood against corporate elites and extremely distrustful of billionaires. In the public opinion battle between a young, diverse, low-income group of workers and a new CEO—who was gifted an unimaginably large compensation package of $96 million for four months’ work in 2024, plus use of the company jet—workers will likely win.

The company boasts of good pay and benefits for its workers, but the reality is quite different. “Tenured coworkers and tenured employees often find themselves having their hours cut, and so, then they do not make the threshold to qualify for these benefits,” explained Franco.

He added, “I’ve had coworkers get kicked off of [their] healthcare insurance. I’ve seen college students get kicked off of the college tuition plan that Starbucks offers, and then having to pay back the money in student loans that they thought the company was paying off for them, simply because their hours had gotten cut.”

In order to take advantage of the company’s touted benefits, workers need to put in at least 20 hours of work a week. But many find themselves stuck at 19 hours even as customer wait times have increased. In other words, the company appears to be squeezing every penny of profit at the expense of its workers and customers. It’s a far cry from the company’s “long-standing commitment to making Starbucks the best job in retail.”

The majority of Starbucks workers are women, and about half are people of color. Like Franco, they are largely young and well-educated, have high expectations of the nation’s social contract that hard work will pay off, and are very vocal on social media.

“The CEO and the C-suite executives are treated so well at the very top, as opposed to the baristas in the stores or other corporate workers who have had their quality of life diminished over the past year,” said Franco.

This CEO-worker dichotomy is a fitting symbol of everything modern-day capitalism has wrought in the United States, and one that SBWU is making much of. The union has won the support of Senator Sanders, the newly elected mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani, and young social media influencers with huge followings.

Starbucks ought to view what happened to the retail giant Target as a cautionary tale. A well-publicized boycott of Target launched early in 2025, in response to the company’s decision to drop diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, has resulted in significant losses and is holding strong.

Moreover, coffee lovers have more options than ever, not in the form of corporate brands, but at independent cafes that are thriving and offer unique, warm, and inviting alternatives to cookie-cutter chains.

Starbucks ought to heed its workers, but instead seems to be backtracking on previous assurances as well. For example, Starbucks executive vice president Sara Kelly said in November 2025 that the union’s demand to allow baristas to pause online orders via the mobile app during high customer traffic is unreasonable. But in a call to investors in July, Starbucks CEO Brian Niccol announced, “[W]e plan to sunset our mobile order and pickup only concept in fiscal 2026. We found this format to be overly transactional and lacking the warmth and human connection that defines our brand.”

The overpaid Niccol appears to be a major reason why negotiations have come to a stop. SBWU representatives say contract negotiations were making headway under the previous CEO, Laxman Narasimhan, for the better part of a year.

But when Niccol replaced Narasimhan, talks stalled. And now, Niccol’s plan to turn the company around involves burdening baristas with unreasonable demands such as a stricter dress code and more stringent guidelines on customer interaction. “Baristas were instructed to write something ‘genuine’ on each customer cup, with threats of repercussions if they didn’t,” said author Justin Bariso in an Opinion piece for Inc. magazine.

That’s hardly the way to make peace with a disgruntled workforce. Even corporate insiders are perplexed at the company’s refusal to treat its workers well. Kelly O’Keefe, the CEO of the marketing and strategy consultancy Brand Federation, told Business Insider that “They need to double down on their own employees — if they win with their own employees, they will win with the customer, and I don’t think they’re there yet.”

SBWU is inviting the company to do right by its workers, like Franco, who are determined to stand firm. “The strike will go on until the company decides to bring forth a good economic package,” he said. “I would rather stand outside in the cold than work for an employer that’s choosing to disrespect us.”

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Sonali Kolhatkar is the founder, host and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV (Dish Network, DirecTV, Roku) and Pacifica stations KPFK, KPFA, and affiliates.