How to build a better Canada after COVID-19: The power of everyday actions can bring about change 


The Black Lives Matter demonstrations that took place across Canada during the pandemic showed that individual actions can make a difference. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Nathan Denette

July 1, 2020

This story is part of a series that proposes solutions to the many issues exposed during the coronavirus pandemic and what government and citizens can do to make Canada a better place.

I teach in gender studies, where I spend time with university students discussing critical issues that shape our society — power, violence, racism and colonialism. My students learn that histories are complicated and alive in the present.

Yet at a recent Black Lives Matter march in Winnipeg, I was struck by two simple messages: one protestor wore a T-shirt that read “Be kind” and another walked by with a sign saying: “Get your knee off our necks.”

The message to “be kind” seemed to gesture to another world, a world in which one white knee could not possibly have the power to end one Black life. The second message drove home the fact that we live nowhere close to such a world.

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Instead, we live in a world where “normal” means systemic injustice that has become only more intense and apparent during COVID–19.

We live in a world where white women like me don’t have to teach our white kids to keep our hands on the wheel if stopped by police. We don’t have to tell them never to talk back, always to agree, always to do exactly as they are told. We can say to them that they need to treat others with kindness and respect — and that they deserve and can expect the same in return.
Make use of power


Canada could be better in a post-COVID-19 world if all of us recognize and make use of the power of our everyday actions toward social justice. We cannot be comfortable in a world where some of us are afforded kindness and respect, taught to expect it, and others are not.

Canadians have taken to the streets during the pandemic to challenge systemic racism that exists in our society. CANADIAN PRESS/Nathan Denette




During the pandemic, we have seen our ability to act in alignment with public health measures. As a result, we have all contributed to the success of reducing the spread and severity of this virus. But unlike COVID-19, injustice does not spread by accident. Injustice is about power: who has access to it and who does not.


The norm of present-day inequities stems from a history of colonialism in which white men with access to power built systems that benefited them at the expense of others.


Whether we look historically at the Canadian government starvation policy that helped to clear the Prairies of Indigenous people to make room for white settlers, the 200 years of slavery in Canada or the legal enforcement of women’s subordinate status, we find a common theme: only propertied white men counted as fully human, and therefore they were the only ones who received rights, recognition and respect.
Altering the status quo


Although such an idea is counter to the equality touted in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, we witness its continued effects in multiple forms — for example, in the climate of anti-Black racism and ongoing violence against Indigenous women, girls and two-spirit people. Yet we also see a groundswell of support for Black Lives Matter in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. In large enough numbers, people with access to less power can alter the status quo.


It is crucial to name a problem — in this case, systemic injustice — in order to make it visible. The naming is important because it allows us to understand that the violence follows a pattern. But naming alone does not make change happen. Action does.


Calls for “systemic change” seem big and complicated, like the histories that brought us to this moment. But the systems that need changing do not exist in some separate realm. They are made up of people who make decisions every day, decisions about how to act and about who matters.


Similarly, people’s experiences of unjust structures are not structural. They are personal, the result of the actions of others — actions rooted in the belief that some people matter more than others. Actions could equally be rooted in another belief: the belief that everyone is equally human. No one is an object and so no one should be objectified.
Everyone is equally human


We do need systemic change. We cannot accept a status quo of racialized and gendered violence. We are not equally implicated in the structures that operate unjustly, but we all do interact daily with other people (even if those interactions take place at a physical distance these days). Those interactions give us the opportunity to act in line with the belief that everyone is equally human, and equally entitled to the rights, recognition and respect historically granted only to the few.

People in Winnipeg gather in solidarity with the George Floyd

 protests held across the United States in Winnipeg. 

THE CANADIAN PRESS/John Woods

It has taken centuries to build up unjust structures. They will not disappear quickly. Yet it is also true that unjust structures require unjust beliefs to hold them up. Taking apart the structures goes hand in hand with challenging the beliefs.


Millions of protesters have stood up against the institutionalized belief that Black lives do not matter. Black Lives Matter. It is incumbent upon all of us, particularly those with access to power, to act in alignment with a status quo of justice and respect.


“Be kind.” It’s true that it is a simple imperative. It might be a good place to start.


Be kind. Learn our collective history. Act in kind and respectful ways, every day. End the violence.


Author

Jocelyn Thorpe
Associate Professsor, Women's and Gender Studies, History, University of Manitoba
Disclosure statement
Jocelyn Thorpe has received funding from SSHRC.

Black deaths matter: The centuries-old struggle to memorialize slaves and victims of racism

July 10, 2020 

The Say Their Names Cemetery commemorating the lives of black victims of police violence. Brandon Bell/Getty Images

In an open lot just a block or so from where George Floyd was killed while being detained by officers, 100 plastic headstones were carefully placed.

Created by artists Anna Barber and Connor Wright, the “Say Their Names Cemetery” sprung up in south Minneapolis in early June, as protests over police brutality prompted a more wide-ranging conversation over the legacy of slavery and racism in the United States.

Each headstone documents a victim of police violence – their name, age, date and location of death. Accompanying the biographical information reads a simple epitaph: “Rest in Power” – a reworking of “rest in peace” that has gained popularity among Black Lives Matter activists and supporters to commemorate the dead.
#SayTheirNames

The cemetery forms part of a wider #SayTheirNames campaign aimed at resisting the public erasure of dead victims of brutality.

A temporary tombstone commemorating Breonna Taylor, shot dead by an officer in Louisville. Brandon Bell/Getty Images

I study death rituals in the U.S. Scholars in my field have long argued that Black and African American commemorative practices are important in asserting the personhood of the deceased and maintaining and celebrating community. They have been used to proclaim Black autonomy at times when society has infringed upon the rights of Black people.

The fight to remember those killed by violence has roots in the history of slave cemeteries and burial practices. The enslaved were often limited in their choice of burial grounds, especially on rural Southern plantations. White owners relegated their cemeteries to marginal land that could not be cultivated. Many burials were marked only with a wooden post.

Yet, enslaved communities were often allowed to bury and commemorate their dead, and these funerals were, in the words of historian David Roediger, “value-laden and unifying social” events that allowed for communal expression. Slavery made Black bodies into financial assets. In contrast, Black commemoration of the dead acknowledged their social relationships and the value of their lives.

Marking the graves of the dead with natural or man-made objects could carry tremendous spiritual meaning for the enslaved, sometimes evoking African precedents. In the Central African Bakongo tradition, the burial place was considered a portal between the living and the dead; objects left on the grave could serve as charms to communicate with and assist the spirit in its transition to the afterlife.

Such traditions appeared on American plantation burials as well, as mourners would leave items that had physical connection with the deceased, such as plates and cups.

There were other practices as well, such as putting items with an association with water, including shells and pitchers, close to graves. These reflected a belief in the association between water and the soul’s immortality and metaphysical crossing.

Such practices in America also helped to construct an African diaspora culture that celebrated Black humanity under a labor system that tried to systematically dehumanize the enslaved.
Hidden in plain sight

The absence of recognizable markers on enslaved burials today does not necessarily mean the dead were unacknowledged.

In some instances, grave markers are hidden in plain sight: Scholars have noted the common presence of periwinkle, cedar trees, yucca and other plantings, suggesting that some Black communities employed a botanical language of grave marking. Some of these plants may have been used for their symbolism, or for their visibility, standing out against an area’s native plant life.

In other cases, enslaved communities marked burials with common fieldstones. Although not inscribed, these stones nonetheless provided some form of physical acknowledgment of the dead.

For example, the cemetery at Avoca plantation, near Lynchburg, Virginia, contains several irregular stones that appear to have been placed on the site. The cemetery also contains two pieces of pink quartz, which may indicate the burial of children, scholars believe.

Plantations owners and their families, however, often were laid to rest in family cemeteries. At Avoca, the family burial ground is defined by a low stone wall, and many of the people interred there received a formal stone marker of some kind. This feature conveys a sense of permanence that is often lacking in enslaved people’s cemeteries.
‘God’s Little Acre’

There are some instances of stone markers in Black cemeteries from the antebellum period. One of the most well-known Black burial grounds lies in Newport, Rhode Island. Newport had a sizable community of free and enslaved Africans and African Americans in the colonial period.

Known as “God’s Little Acre,” the site’s headstones serve as “a remarkable testament of African identity, perseverance and memory,” according to the cemetery’s website. Both enslaved and free members of the Newport community received markers.

Some of the stones acknowledge the deceased’s African heritage; others were paid for by the deceased’s owners. Several of the Newport markers were made by enslaved African stonecutters – a mason known as Pompe Stevens signed at least two of his works, one of which was for his brother’s grave.

As political and social inequality continued into the 19th century, communal burial grounds remained important places for expressing the value of Black lives.

In 1807, men and women affiliated with the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Baltimore founded the African Burying Ground – which exists today as the renamed Mount Auburn Cemetery. As historian Kami Fletcher argues, the cemetery “was founded as the simultaneous call for freedom and humanity as well as a call for actualized burial rights for Black people and people of color.”

The cemetery let the local Black community bury its dead in ways that were significantly different from burials on nearby plantations: The dead could be named, placed near family and interred in land owned by their own community.
Remembering the dead

In recent years there have been efforts to locate and restore enslaved cemeteries that have been lost or threatened by development. This work exists in many forms, from the African Burial Ground National Monument in New York City to smaller cemeteries documented by archaeologists and local organizations. Universities and former plantations have made the effort to search for, and commemorate, slave cemeteries.

New discoveries of remains continue to raise questions about how to appropriately honor burial sites and the painful histories they represent. Even at sites where the names of the dead are lost, historical interpretation, digital projects and public education can act as long overdue “markings” of the dead.

As Minneapolis’ temporary “Say Their Names” Cemetery hints at, commemoration is not an apolitical act. Remembering those lost to violence – whether that of slavery or of unchecked police power – is important. It can serve as a reminder for the need for political and legislative change, led by communities who have spent centuries asserting the value of both Black lives and Black deaths.

Author

Vicki Daniel
Teaching Fellow and Instructor of History, Case Western Reserve University

There are many leaders of today’s protest movement – just like the civil rights movement

Demonstrators march in the Black Mamas March to protest police brutality, June 27, 2020 in Washington, D.C. Michael A. McCoy/Getty Images

July 7, 2020 

The recent wave of protests against police brutality and systemic racism has inspired numerous comparisons with the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.

Commentators frequently depict the charismatic leadership of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X in sharp contrast with the decentralized and seemingly leaderless nature of the current movement.

Despite the efforts of activists and historians to correct this “leaderless” image, the notion persists. Such comparisons reflect the cultural memory – not the actual history – of the struggle for Black equality.
Heroic struggle led by charismatic men

Through collective remembering and forgetting, societies build narratives of the past to create a shared identity – what scholars refer to as cultural memory.

The civil rights movement is remembered as a heroic struggle against injustice led by charismatic men. That is not the whole story.

King’s soaring rhetoric and Malcolm’s unflinching social critiques have supplanted recollection of the significant work performed by legions of local leaders, whose grassroots organizational style more closely resembled the efforts of Black Lives Matter activists and other contemporary social justice groups to build movements full of leaders.

The iconic images of 1950s and 1960s Black protesters marching, kneeling and being arrested while dressed in their “Sunday best” illustrated the respectability politics of the day.American Civil Rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., flanked by Rev. Ralph Abernathy (center left) and Nobel Prize-winning political scientist and diplomat Ralph Bunche (center right) during the third Selma to Montgomery, Alabama march for voting rights, March 21, 1965. PhotoQuest/Getty Images

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These efforts, designed to cultivate white sympathy for civil rights activists, relied on conformity with patriarchal gender roles that elevated men to positions of visible leadership, confined women to the background and banished LGBTQ individuals to the closet.

Yet the movement could not have happened without the extraordinary leadership of Black women like veteran organizer Ella Baker. Baker’s model of grassroots activism and empowerment for young and marginalized people became the driving force of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, known as SNCC, and other nonviolent protest organizations, past and present. 

Flyer announcing a Youth Leadership Meeting, that was to be held at Shaw University, Raleigh, North Carolina, on April 15-17, 1960, and bearing the names of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Ella J. Baker, the president and executive director, respectively, of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, April 1960. New York Public Library/From the New York Public Library/Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images).

The decentralized structure of the current movement builds on this history of grassroots activism while working to avoid replicating the entrenched sexism and homophobia of an earlier era.
Amplifying voices

SNCC transformed lives by recognizing talent and empowering marginalized people. As Joe Martin, one of the organizers of a student walkout in McComb, Mississippi, recalled, “If you had a good idea it was accepted regardless of what your social status was.”Ella Baker, NAACP Hatfield representative, Sept. 18, 1941. Afro American Newspapers/Gado/Getty Images

Endesha Ida Mae Holland, a teenage prostitute, found purpose as a SNCC field secretary, organizing and leading marches in Greenwood, Mississippi. Facing down Police Chief Curtis Lary “made me feel so proud,” she recalled, and “people start looking up into my face, into my eyes” with respect. Holland went on to become an award-winning playwright and distinguished university professor.

Black Lives Matter co-founders Alicia Garza and Patrisse Cullors also encourage strategies that place marginalized voices at the center.

Elevating “Black trans people, Black queer people, Black immigrants, Black incarcerated people and formerly incarcerated people, Black millennials, Black women, low income Black people, and Black people with disabilities” to leadership roles, they wrote, “allows for leadership to emerge from our intersecting identities, rather than to be organized around one notion of Blackness.”

Black women and teens have played a critical role in organizing, leading and maintaining the momentum of recent protests.

Kimberly Jones captured the nation’s attention with an impassioned takedown of institutional racism and debates over appropriate forms of protest. After repeatedly breaking the social contract to keep wealth and opportunity out of reach for black communities, Jones concludes, white Americans “are lucky that what black people are looking for is equality and not revenge.”

Women have organized family-friendly demonstrations, including the “Black Mamas March” in Charlotte, North Carolina, and a “Black Kids Matter” protest in Hartford, Connecticut.

Six young women, aged 14 to 16, organized a peaceful protest attracting more than 10,000 people in Nashville, Tennessee, while 17-year-old Tiana Day led a march on the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco.  

Seventeen-year-old Tiana Day leads a march on the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, June 6, 2020, to protest the death of George Floyd. AP Photo/Jeff Chiu

Full of leaders

The adaptive “low ego/high impact” leadership model, in which leaders serve as coaches helping groups build their own solutions, has become popular among current social justice organizations, but it is not new.

Baker encouraged civil rights organizations to “develop individuals” and provide “an opportunity for them to grow.” She praised SNCC for “working with indigenous people, not working for them.”

“You don’t have to worry about where your leaders are,” former SNCC organizer Robert Moses reflected. “If you go out and work with your people, then the leadership will emerge.”

Campaigns are exhausting and external recognition as a “leader” can take a heavy toll. Spreading leadership around helps to protect any one person from becoming a target for retaliation while advancing a stream of talent to rise as individual energy wanes.

Returning from a citizenship training program in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1963, Fannie Lou Hamer was arrested and severely beaten, leaving her with permanent injuries. Holland’s mother died when their house in Greenwood, Mississippi, was bombed in 1965 in retaliation for her activism.

Civil rights worker Anne Moody recounted how the physical and psychological toll of constant harassment by white supremacists in 1963 forced her to leave a voter registration drive in Canton, Mississippi, saying “I was on the verge of a breakdown” and “would have died from lack of sleep and nervousness” had she stayed “another week.”

In a 2017 interview, Erica Garner, who became a tireless campaigner against police brutality after her father, Eric Garner, died from a New York police officer’s chokehold in 2014, echoed Moody’s comments.

“I’m struggling right now with the stress and everything. … The system beats you down to where you can’t win,” she said. Just three weeks after that interview, Erica Garner died of a heart attack at the age of 27.

Comparisons to the romanticized cultural memory of charismatic leadership in the Civil Rights Movement devalues the hard work of today’s activists – as well as those who worked hard outside of the limelight in the earlier movement. Social change – then and now – derives from a critical mass of local work throughout the nation. Those who cannot find leaders in this movement are not looking hard enough.

Author
 

Sarah Silkey
Professor of History and Social and Economic Justice, Lycoming College
Disclosure statement

Smaller farmer’s fields can reduce biodiversity loss and increase wild plants, birds, beetles and bats

July 9, 2020 

Around the world, biodiversity is dropping precipitously. In North America, about three billion birds have been lost over recent decades and amphibian populations are declining at a rate of about four per cent per year. Globally, insects are vanishing at a rate of about nine per cent per decade.

This is distressing for nature lovers. It is also worrying on a practical level: in agricultural landscapes, wild species perform many important activities such as pollination and control of insect pests.

A highly effective way to reduce biodiversity losses in agricultural regions is to increase the amount of natural and semi-natural habitats such as forests, hedgerows, prairie strips and other non-crop areas. This has led to various government incentives for farmers to leave some areas out of production. But there are limits to how much land farmers can leave for biodiversity, while foregoing opportunities for crop production.
The benefit of small crop fields

Small fields can help. Farmers can maintain or increase biodiversity in agricultural landscapes by planting their crops in smaller fields.

For example, instead of planting two large fields, they could plant eight small fields, keeping the same total amount of land in production. Note that this is not about the size of a farm, but about the average size of crop fields.

A very large farm could, in theory, be composed of a very large number of small fields, where a “field” is an area in a particular crop type, such as a corn field or a hay field. Adjacent areas in the same crop type are separate fields if they are divided by even a narrow bit of non-field such as a hedgerow, a fence line, a track or a ditch.

My colleagues and I have found remarkably consistent increases in biodiversity with decreasing average field size, across eight very different agricultural regions in five countries — and for a wide array of wildlife types.

The number of species of plants, pollinators including bees, butterflies and syrphid flies, and pest-eating wildlife such as spiders, carabid beetles, birds, frogs and bats, all increase with decreasing average field size. For example, biodiversity is about 50 per cent higher when the average field size drops to two hectares from eight hectares.
Pest-eating wildlife, such as this carabid beetle, can benefit crops. (Shutterstock)

In fact, the benefit to biodiversity of reducing crop field sizes appears to be greater than two other commonly suggested methods for increasing biodiversity in agricultural landscapes — reducing pesticide use and increasing crop diversity, the number of different crop types grown in a landscape.
The best of both worlds

One question is whether the increased biodiversity is due to the additional non-cropped strips of semi-natural land, such as hedgerows, between fields. In other words, is there actually less cropland — and more semi-natural land — in an agricultural landscape with eight small fields than in a landscape with two large ones?

Our research shows that in fact biodiversity is higher in a landscape with smaller crop fields, even for the same total amount of natural and semi-natural habitat, including all the little pieces such as hedgerows.  

Small strips of natural and semi-natural habitat, like this hedgerow, can provide wildlife with an area for food, breeding or an escape from farming operations. (Shutterstock)

We don’t know yet why biodiversity is higher in landscapes with smaller crop fields. One possibility is that when crop fields are smaller, the natural habitats are closer together.

This would increase the ability of wildlife to easily access natural habitats from crop fields. Crop fields may provide temporary food sources for wildlife, such as when a crop is in flower or when there is a pest outbreak. Natural areas are also needed for breeding and overwintering sites and for escape from farming operations such as plowing.

When wildlife can easily move back and forth between crops and natural spaces, perhaps they have access to the best of both worlds.
The farmer’s dilemma

Altogether, our research suggests a “many small” approach to support biodiversity in agricultural landscapes.

But can farmers readily reduce the sizes of fields? In many parts of the world, just the opposite has been happening over the past 50 years.

Fields are being consolidated by removing the tracks, fences, stone walls and hedgerows that once separated them. Farmers do this to increase the efficiency of their operations. But in doing so, they reduce the populations of wildlife that help support agriculture.

The net cost or benefit to farmers of reducing field sizes while maintaining the same area in production has not yet been studied. But the benefits to biodiversity are now clear.

Author

Lenore Fahrig
Chancellor's Professor of Biology, Carleton University
Disclosure statement
Lenore Fahrig receives funding from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC).

ONCE AGAIN KROPOTKIN DISCUSSES THIS IDEA OF SMALL SCALE URBAN RURAL SUSTAINABLE FARMING OF THE FUTURE

Factories, Fields and Workshops - Black Cat Press

www.blackcatpress.ca › ffw

Fields, Factories and Workshops is a landmark anarchist text and arguably one ... Kropotkin's inspiration has reached into the 21st century as a lasting vision of a ...

TOWARD A CRITICAL ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE STUDIES: Black Lives Matter as an Environmental Justice Challenge

• David N. Pellow ^(a1) 

In this paper I expand upon the recent use of the term “Critical Environmental Justice Studies.” This concept is meant to capture new developments in Environmental Justice (EJ) Studies that question assumptions and gaps in earlier work in the field. Because this direction in scholarship is still in its formative stages, I take this opportunity to offer some guidance on what Critical Environmental Justice (CEJ) Studies might look like and what it could mean for theorizing the relationship between race (along with multiple additional social categories) and the environment. I do so by (1) adopting a multi-disciplinary approach that draws on several bodies of literature, including critical race theory, political ecology, ecofeminist theory, and anarchist theory, and (2) focusing on the case of Black Lives Matter and the problem of state violence.

INTRODUCTION

Black Lives Matter (BLM) is a social movement centered on the problem of state-sanctioned racist violence. The movement began as a response to the acquittal of George Zimmerman, a man who killed Trayvon Martin, a seventeen-year old African American boy in Sanford, Florida, in 2012. From that moment on, social media, mainstream media, and the Black Lives Matter movement would routinely intensify the national focus on racialized state-sanctioned violence when yet another video or testimony surfaced featuring an African American being shot, beaten, choked, and/or killed by police or White vigilantes. The role of social media technology was pivotal. As one writer put it, “Social media could serve as a source of live, raw information. It could summon people to the streets and coordinate their movements in real time. And it could swiftly push back against spurious media narratives . . .” (Bijan 2015).

BLM co-founder Alicia Garza explained what the movement stands for: “Black Lives Matter is an ideological and political intervention in a world where Black lives are systematically and intentionally targeted for demise. It is an affirmation of Black folks’ contributions to this society, our humanity, and our resilience in the face of deadly oppression” (Garza 2014).

In this paper, I draw links between what I view as the most important insights and questions that emerge from the Black Lives Matter movement and the struggle against environmental racism. This is a connection that many scholars might not make at first glance because police brutality and environmental politics would appear to be only tangentially related, but I argue they are in fact closely intertwined and that we must explore their myriad connections in order to excavate the roots of racist violence no matter the form it takes. The questions I explore here include: How can Black Lives Matter’s emphasis on police violence against African American communities inform our understanding of the scourge of ecological burdens facing those same communities? Conversely, what can the violation of Black bodies and spaces by ecologically destructive agents produced by states and corporations tell us about the violation of those same bodies by police and law enforcement agents? I find that a “first-” and “second-generation” Environmental Justice Studies framework can assist in this effort, but can only take us so far. Therefore, I propose that a Critical Environmental Justice Studies framework can more fully address these pressing concerns.

ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE STUDIES

The Environmental Justice (EJ) movement is composed of people from communities of color, indigenous communities, and working-class communities who are focused on combating environmental injustice—the disproportionate burden of environmental harm facing these populations. For the EJ movement, social justice is inseparable from environmental protection.

In the early 1970s, researchers in the United States found strong correlations between social class status and air quality in the United States. As a result of social movement activism, however, the focus began to broaden from social class to race and from air pollution to a range of environmental hazards (Pulido 1996; Walker 2010). For example, in 1982, hundreds of civil rights leaders and community activists protested a toxic waste dump in the majority African American community of Warren County, North Carolina. That action sparked the discourse of environmental racism and the growth of Environmental Justice Studies, and since that time, scholars and other researchers have documented the reach of environmental racism/inequality in the United States and around the globe, as well as the social movement that has emerged to highlight and challenge this phenomenon (Bullard 2000; Cole and Foster, 2000; Pellow and Brulle, 2005).

Thus, hundreds of studies have documented that people of color, people of lower socioeconomic status, indigenous and immigrant populations, and other marginalized communities are disproportionately affected by ecologically harmful infrastructures, such as landfills, mines, incinerators, polluting factories, and destructive transportation systems, as well as by the negative consequences of ecologically harmful practices, such as climate change/disruption and pesticide exposure (Ringquist 2005). Much of this work has documented the troubling depths and breadth of environmental injustice’s impact on the lives of people—including public health and mental health effects—and on how these communities make meaning out of these assaults while organizing for environmental justice. And while EJ Studies may have earlier focused on the United States, scholars are also documenting environmental inequalities and EJ movements’ responses to them around the globe (Agyeman et al., 2010; Pellow 2007; Roberts and Parks, 2006). A small but growing group of researchers—including and especially environmental humanities scholars—have focused on the ways that gender, sexuality, citizenship, indigeneity, and nation shape the terrain of ecological inequalities, but those areas of scholarship remain in need of further development (Adamson 2011; Bell 2013; Buckingham and Kulcur, 2010; Gaard 2004; Smith 2005).

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Chris Wallace presses DeVos on threats to withhold funding from schools that don't reopen

BY JUSTINE COLEMAN - 07/12/20

Fox News’s Chris Wallace pressed Education Secretary Betsy DeVos on Sunday on threats she and President Trump have made to withhold federal funding from schools that do not reopen in the fall amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Wallace questioned their “authority” to “unilaterally cut off” funding for schools that was allocated by Congress. He also challenged the secretary, asking whether reducing funds is “exactly the wrong answer” instead of funneling money to “make schools safer” through measures such as health checks.

“American investment is a promise to students and their families,” DeVos responded on "Fox News Sunday." “If schools aren’t going to reopen and fulfill that promise, they shouldn’t get the funds. Then give it to the families to decide to go to a school that is going to meet that promise.”

Wallace disputed DeVos’s comments on withholding funding, saying, “Well, you can’t do that.”

“I know you support vouchers, and that’s a reasonable argument, but you can’t do that unilaterally,” he added. “You have to do that through Congress.”

DeVos answered by saying the administration is “looking at all the options.”

“It’s a promise of the American people to students and their families, and we want to make sure that promise is followed through on,” she said.

DeVos noted earlier in the interview that there will not be a “one-size-fits-all” approach, saying areas where the coronavirus pandemic is “out of control” in the fall have to be “dealt with differently.”

Last week, DeVos said she was “very seriously” considering withholding funding from schools that do not reopen in the fall, saying that another semester of remote learning would put American students behind.

"We are looking at this very seriously. This is a very serious issue across the country," DeVos told Fox News host Tucker Carlson.

The president has also tweeted about cutting funding to schools that do not reopen and condemned the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines for being too tough to allow schools to reopen.

The number of new COVID-19 cases identified each day in the U.S. has been rising in recent weeks, reaching a high of 68,241 new cases on Friday. In total, the nation has confirmed more than 3.2 million COVID-19 cases, leading to at least 134,815 deaths, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.

Barr says Black Lives Matter 'distorting the debate'

WAIT WHAT?! BLM IS THE DEBATE

BY TAL AXELROD - 07/09/20 

© Pool/UPI Photo


Attorney General William Barr said Thursday that the Black Lives Matter movement “distorts” the important debate over systemic racism in the country.

In an interview with ABC News, Barr said the movement uses the phrase "black lives matter" to refer exclusively to African Americans who are killed by police instead of focusing on a range of issues.

“I'd make a distinction between the organization, which I don't agree with, they have a broader agenda,” he said. “But in terms of the proposition that Black lives matter, obviously Black lives matter. I think all lives — all human life is — is sacred. And entitled to respect. And obviously Black lives matter.”
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“But I also think that it's being used now in a sort of distorting the debate, to some extent. Because it's used really to refer exclusively to Black lives that are lost to police misconduct which — are — you know, have been going down statistically. Five years ago there were 40 such incidents. This last year it was 10. So at least it's a positive trajectory there. But then you compare it to 8,000 homicides in the African American community, those are Black lives that matter, too. And those are lives that are protected by the police."

The remarks come amid a mushrooming national conversation over systemic racism and police brutality sparked by the killing of George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis in late May.

Polling has shown a surge of support across party lines for the Black Lives Matter movement amid ongoing protests and civil unrest.

However, President Trump has come out swinging against the movement, dismissing activists and anarchists and looters and condemning a "Black Lives Matter" mural as a "symbol of hate."

Barr maintained that he did not see Trump’s recent remarks about Black Lives Matter and that the movement should broaden its focus beyond police killings.
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Congresswoman accidentally tweets of death of Rep. John Lewis, who's...

“I’d have to see what he said. I don't know what he said. But I also think, you know, it's not just protecting life. It's also Black Lives Matter in the sense of ensuring that African Americans fully participate in the benefits of this society and their lives flourish. And I think it goes beyond just the physical safety. It goes to getting good education. It goes to having economic opportunities,” he said.

“So I think the Black Lives Matter, you know, has focused on a particular problem. And it is a problem. And it's a problem that at least the trajectory has been improving. And they're ignoring, I think, these broader issues.”

Republicans often cite violence in Black communities when discussing systemic racism, a tactic critics say is rarely followed up by action on relevant issues such as gun control and is intended to deflect away from conversations on broader social problems.

This anarchist thinker helps explain why we feel so driven to help each other through the coronavirus crisis

March 27, 2020 

Volunteers in Washington help prepare food packages for people made suddenly unemployed by the pandemic. EPA/Erik S Lesser

Empty supermarket shelves and panicked government briefings have become the defining images of the coronavirus crisis. But the community response, however, may well be a more enduring feature. The virus and the enforcement of social isolation have sparked uncertainty and anxiety. But a range of local volunteer-run mutual aid networks have also emerged.

Many of the people involved in these groups know that the term “mutual aid” was made famous by the 19th-century anarchist Peter Kropotkin. He used it to attack Social Darwinists who described nature as a competitive fight between self-interested individuals. “Survival of the fittest” became their catch phrase and was used to describe antagonistic relationships between people, races and states. This way of thinking normalised aggression as a natural response to scarcity.

In the present context, the implication is that scrapping for the last bottle of hand sanitiser or roll of toilet paper is a programmed, inevitable response. If only the strongest survive, then others should be seen as rivals or even enemies and we are right to take all necessary measures to preserve ourselves against them.

Although Kropotkin accepted that competition was a factor determining biological fitness, his argument was that cooperation – or mutual aid – was as significant.

As an ethical idea, mutual aid describes the efforts people make to help others without seeking reward. It thrives in local, voluntary organisation. The Lifeboat Association, initiated in the UK by William Hillary to support the foundation of a national institution to save victims of shipwrecks, was an example of the ethical self-organising that Kropotkin had in mind.

Hillary appealed to the king in 1825 to support his project, explaining that his aim was to aid “people and vessels of every nation, whether in peace or in war”. His cause was at once “individual, national, and universal”. He imagined that the establishment of a British association would inspire the foundation of sister organisations across the world.

Kropotkin liked the Lifeboat Association because it relied on “cooperation … enthusiasm … local knowledge”. It rescued anyone in need and because it depended on local action, it could be replicated easily elsewhere. It was a template for global networking to build solidarity.
Working together in a time of crisis

This is the spirit we see in the support networks emerging as people confront the coronavirus pandemic. Neighbours helping neighbours. Those who are able to leave their homes are collecting prescriptions and essential supplies for the vulnerable. Groups networking across towns and cities are pooling resources so that no one is left without.

Community support has always been a core aspect of human social life. Research looking at the way people go about their different everyday tasks shows that far more time than we might imagine is spent on unpaid community support. Mutual aid and cooperation – such as neighbours looking after each other’s children or helping each other fix their cars – run through society. It is a mistake to think that the prospect of profit motivates our behaviour.

A statue of Peter Kropotkin in the Kropotkin House Museum,

 Dmitrov, Russia. Ruth Kenna, Author provided

Mutual aid is often seen in times of crisis or horrible catastrophe – for example, in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy in the US and the Grenfell fire in London. Its emergence now bears out Kropotkin’s observations about the capacity for everyday solidarity. The question he would ask is: how can we expand these practices to rethink our social organisation?

Kropotkin described the Lifeboat Association as “perfectly spontaneous”. This did not mean that he thought it was unplanned. It meant that it was not forced by law. Trust and practice were essential to Kropotkin’s vision of the world remade through cooperation and respect for local self-determination.

With resources stretched to their limits, governments all over the world are relying on mutual aid networks to help those most at risk by shopping for those in isolation or sending virtual messages of support to prevent demoralisation.

Perhaps, then, we can start to think about how to preserve community-based organisation in the post-coronavirus world.

There is a significant difference between the politics of mutual aid and neo-liberal projects intended to privatise government services. Kropotkin did not want to see responsibility for government services devolved to big corporations or cash strapped volunteers. His aim was to attack existing power structures. Mutual aid thrives in conditions of equality and it is a necessary part of an anarchist drive towards decentralised federation.

If business-as-usual austerity returns after the crisis, the fertile ground of mutual aid may well dry up. The maintenance and extension of basic income, in contrast, may help preserve and promote grassroots social change in the longer term.

Authors

Ruth Kinna
Professor of Political Theory, Loughborough University

Disclosure statement

Ruth Kinna has previously received funding from the British Academy for research on Kropotkin.

Thomas Swann
Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, Loughborough University
Disclosure statement
Thomas Swann receives funding from the Leverhulme Trust to support his research. He is a volunteer with a mutual aid network in Leicester.
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Loughborough University provides funding as a member of The Conversation UK.