Heat death held a morbid fascination for Victorian-era physicists. It was an early example of how everyday physics connects to the grandest themes in cosmology. Drop ice cubes into a glass of water, and you create a situation that is out of equilibrium. The ice melts, the liquid chills, and the system reaches a common temperature. Although motion does not cease — water molecules continue to…
By Katie Gibson
“A romantic fervor drives…children to crime; they project themselves into the most magnificent, daring, and ultimately dangerous lives. I am acting as their translator because they have the right to any language that will allow them to venture…where? you might ask. I don’t know. Neither do they, however precise their fantasies, but it’s nowhere you’d call home…The only way the great and the honest can hope to preserve any moral beauty is by refusing any pity to the children who reject pity…I’ve made my decision: I’m on the side of crime. And I’ll help these children, not to return to your houses, your factories, your schools, your laws, and your sacraments, but to steal them all.” – Jean Genet, The Criminal Child
In the last several years, calls to abolish the American child welfare system have gained national attention, in part due to the publication of sociologist and legal scholar Dorothy Roberts’ book Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families—and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World. The book popularized the term “family policing,” referring to the state’s routine practice of surveilling and regulating poor families through mandated reporting, child welfare investigations, and child removal. For family policing abolitionists, the term “child welfare” is a misnomer for a system that criminalizes poverty instead of remedying it, routinely destroying families and disproportionately affecting Black Americans.
The aim of abolishing family policing has recently gained widespread attention, largely due to the grassroots work of system-affected parents, foster care “alumni,” and allied lawyers, social workers, and journalists. Among these groups are the Texas-based upEND Movement, the New York-based JMACforFamilies, and the Movement for Family Power. As the names and maxims of these organizations indicate, family policing abolitionists tend to hold up the family as an ideal, appealing to the commonsense that families are the natural and rightful source of love and care. This sentiment is clearly articulated by Roberts herself, who stated in Torn Apart: “The family is a critical social institution that serves as a caring shield around its members to protect them from the totalitarian dictates of government officials.[i] Families pass on the cultural norms, moral values, and political commitments of groups within a society. Families prepare children for participating in the economic, political, and social life of the various communities they will be part of as adults.”[ii]
Roberts frames the destruction of familial bonds, particularly between Black mothers and their children, as a central function of the American child welfare system. As she illustrates, child welfare systems, work-first welfare policies, welfare retrenchment, and carceral expansion have worked in tandem to systematically surveil, criminalize, displace, and traumatize generations of Black mothers and their children. Roberts argues that the origins of child welfare can be traced back to violent family separations at auction blocks during chattel slavery, and she has painstakingly charted this violent historical throughline from her first book, Killing the Black Body,[iii] to her most recent book, Torn Apart. What Roberts has achieved throughout her career is a kind of haunting—again and again, she presents us with the figures of Black women who, throughout American history, have been exploited for the various forms of labor their bodies could do: not only manual labor but also, often simultaneously, reproductive and maternal labor.
The figure of the Black mother is thus rightfully at the center of debates about the American child welfare system, due in no small part to the discursive groundwork Roberts has laid. But while her earlier work very clearly illustrated the links between racial capitalism and the regulation of Black (reproductive) labor, these links are no longer visible in much of the discourse surrounding the abolition of family policing. Instead, there is a tendency to naturalize motherhood and the mother-child bond rather than question how and amongst whom the labor of mothering can and should be distributed.[iv] In turn, there seems to be little room among family policing abolitionists for such unruly subjects as youth who see their families not as the balm for their pain but as the cause of it, or queer and trans youth who run away from home and don’t look back, or youth experiencing mental illness or addiction who need help that families can’t provide.
For instance, in the handful of pages in Torn Apart that are devoted to “runaways” (youth in state guardianship who run away from foster homes, group homes, and residential centers), Roberts asserts that these youth are virtually all running away from the state in search of their biological family members. Roberts and other activists are largely silent regarding cases in which children run not to but away from their mothers, or in which women themselves run from motherhood, in part because these runaways complicate an abolitionist narrative that so fervently insists the family is an indispensable (and seemingly unimpeachable) social institution. Runaways require us to think about the limits of family and about other forms of collective care that are necessary for human flourishing. Instead of assuming we know where the runaway can and should end up, we should put this willful, straying figure at the center of family policing abolitionism, alongside Black mothers: the child who doesn’t run to their parent, but runs instead to a sibling, a friend, or to no one at all; the mother who refuses motherhood; the young person who never stops running. Can we be more capacious in how we imagine the set of possible landing points for runaways (be they errant moms or willful children) beyond the “return home” promised by child welfare and, more recently, by the movement to abolish family policing? Keeping runaways at the heart of the movement reminds us of this abolitionist imperative—to envision freedom not as one path leading interminably to one particular end but as countless diversions from the worlds we’re born into.
The Family is a State Institution
What would family policing abolitionism look like if it were to recognize the family as an invention of the capitalist state rather than its precursor or alternative? Family abolitionists question the family’s assumed role as an essential (and pre-societal) social unit. One of the earliest articulations of family abolitionist thought, made by Engels in The Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State, was a critique of marriage as a legal arrangement in which women (and the children they produce and raise) are their husband’s property, and in which inheritance passes along the patriarchal line. As generations of feminists fought for equal rights for women and challenged the heteronormativity of the familial form, some deepened their commitment to family life while others committed to its abolition. But though family abolitionism gained some traction amongst feminists in the ‘60s and ‘70s, the assumption that the bourgeois, nuclear family had lost its former eminence led to the virtual abandonment of family abolitionism, even among the most radical feminists.
However, as argued by Michèle Barrett and Mary McIntosh, hold-outs for family abolition who wrote The Anti-Social Family amidst the intensifying neoliberalism of the 1980s, the family continues to play a significant role in reproducing social stratification and structuring opportunity throughout the life-course. As these scholars and activists point out, while the state may regulate and police families, it also holds up the family as an essential and ideal form through which to enact not only care but also social control. The family form is imposed through laws that determine social obligations based not on social rights and public goods but instead on legally documented and enforced marital, biological, and genetic bonds of inheritance and custody. The state perpetuates the primacy of the family as a social institution to excuse its disinvestment in public services, and widespread acceptance and naturalization of family ideology has produced a society that has almost completely privatized care. As Barrett and McIntosh put it:
“The world around the family is not a pre-existing harsh climate against which the family offers protection and warmth. It is as if the family had drawn comfort and security into itself and left the outside world bereft. As a bastion against a bleak society it has made that society bleak. It is indeed a major agency for caring, but in monopolizing care it has made it harder to undertake other forms of care… Caring, sharing and loving would be more widespread if the family did not claim them for its own.”[v]
From this perspective, it’s not just the state that regulates families; families also regulate themselves, through daily acts of exclusion and inclusion that circumscribe the nature and extent of care, sometimes in ways that are just as brutal as the state’s enforcements of its boundaries. Despite the role of the family in creating the conditions of abandonment experienced by youth in foster care, youth experiencing mental illness or addiction, and queer youth, families are often cast as antidotes and alternatives to the state. It is becoming increasingly common among liberal and leftist activists to critique the state for the ways it polices poor, Black, and Indigenous families. Family policing abolitionists are making the long overdue case that the child welfare system is perniciously entangled with other carceral state systems like immigration enforcement and the criminal punishment system.[vi] But what is often left out of these narratives is that the family itself is a state institution, and it functions as a part of, not an externality to, carceral systems.
This becomes particularly clear when we shift our focus from the experiences of parents affected by the child welfare system to the experiences of children who become wards of the state. When people imagine the state, they often imagine bureaucrats and the national and institutional borders they police and enforce, and it is at these junctures that the state’s power over children and their biological caregivers is most stark. But, as the history of child welfare shows, families also enact consequential, life-defining, and often traumatic forms of exclusion, which wards of the state know all too well. Youth in foster care are not only separated from families but are also routinely expelled and excluded from them, a fact that is reflected in the long pattern of displacement, imprisonment, and exploitation experienced by the orphans-turned-“delinquents” of American history.[vii] In the U.S., failure or refusal to be incorporated into a family most often means being labeled dangerous or mentally ill and puts one in grave danger of incarceration and homelessness. For many people who have lived through foster care or adoption, it’s clear that the family is both a form of captivity and a catalyst for fugitivity. To understand why this is the case, we have to understand the fundamental premise of family policy in the U.S.: that children are property rather than rights-bearing citizens.
The Parental State and the Liberal Child
Because slavery and child welfare systems have both policed Black life through the regulation of Black reproduction and kinship, Dorothy Roberts asserts that chattel slavery is where the child welfare system’s true “origins” can be found. In her account, state laws that granted slaveowners, rather than Black parents, “legal claim to their children” are akin to contemporary laws that allow states to take a child from their parents. Yet this leaves unexamined how the family itself functioned as a property relation through which the American state justified slavery. The perpetuation of slavery required not just the separation of families but also (as Roberts has illustrated) their reproduction, which allowed slaveowners to claim the offspring of their slaves as their property. And when slavery ended, the extension of marriage and custody rights to former slaves were not purely emancipatory; in fact, they were more often used to justify the continued exploitation of former slaves and their children. For instance, the extension of marriage rights to African-Americans, while creating some legal and economic protections, also facilitated the policing of former slaves and their children “through the vigorous enforcement of laws regulating bigamy, adultery and child support requirements, deny[ing] widow’s pensions to women, and forc[ing] children into ‘apprenticeship’ labor.”[viii] Far from being a protector against the “totalitarian dictates of government officials,” the family is a key institution through which the U.S. has historically exploited and policed its citizens[ix].
Indeed, the family is essential to the core legal logic that links the array of child removal practices America has engaged in throughout its history: the logic of in loco parentis. According to the legal doctrine of in loco parentis, the state is “the central regulatory authority in the affairs of the child and the family [and is] authorized to intervene as an incubator, whenever either one fail[s], to promote the successful growth and delivery of embryonic citizens to the body politic,”[x] an arrangement which sociologist Geoff Ward refers to as the “parental state.” In the parental state, parents are legal “custodians” of their children, a term whose etymological roots bespeak the thin line between protecting and policing children.[xi] In loco parentis positions families as nested institutions within the broader state; like any other state institution, the government has the power to regulate families, not only through coercive and punitive methods when they are deemed as “failing” at their prescribed duties, but through the kinds of rewards and incentives afforded to families through tax codes and social programs.
The logic of in loco parentis has profound implications for all children born or living in the U.S., not just children in the foster care system. Children in the U.S. have minimal rights as citizens; legally, it is their custodian—be it a state guardian or a private citizen—who bears the rights (and obligations) to determine where, how, and with whom a child lives. For example, children have no right to shelter unless they live in a setting in which they are overseen by a custodian who is legally legitimate in the eyes of the parental state. For children in foster care, this means living in a foster home, kinship care, group home, residential care, or a detention center. In other words, being a “ward” of the state does not just mean removal from the biological family, as many family policing abolitionists emphasize. It means reincorporation into institutions sanctioned by the parental state, of which the family or “family-like settings” (those that most closely approximate the private nuclear household) are the most favored. Under the pretense of state benevolence, in loco parentis has justified numerous forms of state-sanctioned child displacement, not only of Black children, but also the forced removal of Indigenous children to boarding schools designed to socialize them into whiteness, the farming out of poor white children on orphan trains, and the current practice of family separation among migrants at the U.S. border.
As Madeline Lane-McKinley writes: “…The liberal idea of children seeks to make natural (but also to moralize) a property relation between child and parent…This logic of the parent-child property relation is why Jeff Sessions can speak of children like a bag of cocaine: ‘If you are smuggling a child, then we will prosecute you, and that child will be separated from you as required by law. If you don’t like that, then don’t smuggle children over our border’.”[xii] The long American tradition of the state using child removal to police and terrorize the adults who love them has led some to call for families to “tak[e] children back.”[xiii] This is reflected in many of the family policing abolition movement’s core policy proposals, which largely focus on protecting the rights of parents by repealing policies designed to criminalize and surveil them. Among the most popular of these changes are calls for the abolition of mandated reporting laws, the creation of Miranda rights for parents who come into contact with family policing authorities, and the repeal of timelines for the termination of parental rights after a child is removed from their custody.
Protecting parents from criminalization is a valuable abolitionist aim. However, a political movement in which children are passively “tak[en] back” by adults who lay claim to them based on biological or legal ties reproduces rather than challenges the core logic of parent-child property relations that is upheld in a parental state. Any true movement to abolish the carceral state has to not only seek the end of family policing but must also ultimately take on the legal structures that treat children as property, enforcing family affiliation and producing the forms of exploitation, abandonment, and criminalization experienced by orphans and runaways throughout U.S. history.
Replacing Custody with Children’s Rights
Custody laws not only punish parents for their (perceived or real) inability to care for children; they also criminalize children when they refuse the custodial arrangements that are made for them by the state. This is why children in foster care are routinely placed in prison-like settings after running away from foster homes, kinship care, or group homes, often having experienced abuse in these settings. Instead of granting children the right to safe and consistent shelter and a basic income, the state insists first and foremost that children must be overseen by a state-sanctioned guardian, even if that means forced confinement or placement with an abusive parent or institution.
Family policing abolitionists should work to un-do custody laws, which gravely limit children’s rights based on the premise that the adults in their lives can and will make decisions in their “best interests.” Custody laws devolve responsibility for upholding children’s best interests to individual families and custodial surrogates, denying the state’s obligation to promote the flourishing of all children while simultaneously punishing caregivers and children when custody arrangements fail. A society where children can be psychiatrically hospitalized and medicated against their own wills but have no right to adequate mental health services is not a society designed in the “best interests” of children. It’s a society designed around the fantasy and tyranny of family.
Family abolition, far from being about tearing any existing bonds apart, is based in the kind of love Sophie Lewis describes at the beginning of her treatise on family abolitionism: “to love a person is to struggle for their autonomy as well as for their immersion in care.”[xiv] Abolition will be achieved through the everyday practices of people invested in developing new forms of collective care and expanding existing communal projects. We will do so by advocating for laws that recognize children’s rights and human rights beyond the family, working to de-privatize care so that more and more people have ready access to care in all its forms, and enacting care in ways that show no special allegiance to biological relatedness or legal bonds. If what we ultimately want is a world without borders, a world without imprisonment, a world without policing, we have to bring abolition home.
[i] Roberts has more recently expressed subdued support of some aspects of family abolition, particularly the abolition of the nuclear family.
[ii] Roberts, Dorothy. Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families–and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World. Basic Books, 2022, p. 86.
[iii] Roberts, Dorothy. Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty. Vintage, 1997.
[iv] Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines, edited by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, China Martins, and Mai’a Williams. PM Press, 2016.
[v] McIntosh, Mary, and Michèle Barrett. The Anti-social Family. Verso Books, 1982, p. 81-82.
[vi] Meiners, Erica R. For the Children?: Protecting Innocence in a Carceral State. University of Minnesota Press, 2016.
[vii] Holt, Marilyn Irvin. The Orphan Trains: Placing Out in America. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992.
Platt, Anthony M. The child savers: The invention of delinquency. University of Chicago Press, 1977.
[viii] Weeks, Kathi. “Abolition of the family: the most infamous feminist proposal.” Feminist Theory, 2021, p. 4.
[ix] King, Tiffany Lethabo. “Black ‘feminisms’ and pessimism: Abolishing Moynihan’s Negro family.” Theory & Event 21.1 (2018): 68-87.
[x] Ward, Geoff K. The black child-savers: Racial democracy and juvenile justice. University of Chicago Press, 2019, p. 25.
[xi] custody (n.) mid-15c., “a keeping, a guarding, safe-keeping, protection, defense,” from Latin custodia “guarding, watching, keeping,” also “prison,” from custos (genitive custodis) “guardian, keeper, protector,” from PIE root *(s)keu- “to cover, conceal.” Meaning “restraint of liberty, confinement” is from 1580s.
[xii] Lane-McKinley. “The Idea of Children.” Blind Field: A Journal of Cultural Inquiry, 2018.
[xiii] Briggs, Laura. Taking Children: A History of American Terror. University of California Press, 2021.
[xiv] Lewis, Sophie. Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation. Verso Books, 2022.
Author bio: Katie Gibson is a Teaching Fellow at the University of Chicago. As an ethnographer of youth-serving institutions, she has studied psychotropic drug use in Illinois’s foster care system, case managers’ interpretations of the federal mandate to ensure child “well-being,” and advocacy practices amongst a youth-led policy coalition in California. She is also a former ward of the state of New York.
The following article is adapted from a panel discussion hosted by Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) at the University of Chicago in February 2023, entitled “Counter-Terrorism and Empire: State Violence and the Right to Resist.” This panel was the culminating event of SJP UChicago’s #IsraeliMilitaryOffOurCampus campaign, a quarter-long student movement in the winter of 2023 aimed at exposing the University of Chicago’s ties to the propagandistic “Israel Institute” and opposing its decision to host “counter-terrorism” courses taught by Israeli military personnel, notably Brigadier General Meir Elran.
The discourse of “counter-terrorism” has risen to prominence in recent decades, providing political justification for such acts as the US invasion of Iraq and the ongoing Israeli colonization of Palestine. By exploring counter-terrorism’s origins, imperial applications, and entanglement with other systems of gendered and racialized violence, this discussion raises important questions about anticolonial struggle, discourses of state violence, and the role of academic institutions in normalizing and perpetuating them. Special focus is placed on how these global forces come to manifest at University of Chicago and with the university’s police department. The panel can be viewed here.
The story I want to tell has to do with the Philippines in the early twentieth century. But it will also have to do with policing across the United States and here on campus, and ultimately with the University of Chicago.
In 1898, the United States declared sovereignty over the Philippine Islands, places which President McKinley and most Americans had no idea even existed. But as a result of the Spanish-American war in 1898 the US did come to learn about the Philippines. It sent its troops there to fight the Spanish, and upon defeating Spain, it seized the Philippines and its millions of inhabitants as its new colonial territory.
The problem for the Americans was that the Filipinos, who had been subjected to Spanish rule for 300 years, were not happy about the Americans coming and subjecting them to more colonial rule. They had in fact already declared their independence from Spain, and so they established an independent Philippines: The Philippine Republic. They took up arms against the United States, leading to the so-called Philippine-American war which lasted officially from 1899 to 1902 but continued in various forms afterwards.
This was a formative war for the United States: it was the first overseas guerilla war the US fought, one that prefigured what would happen later in Vietnam. But unlike in Vietnam, the Americans essentially won, crushing most of the rebel resistance. The war ultimately cost some 400,000 Filipino lives.
The war involved brutal acts of violence on the part of American soldiers, including the use of barbaric torture to extract information from Filipino rebels, and a horrific massacre on the island of Sumar in 1902. Led by US General Jacob H. Smith, US forces attacked villages in Sumar, killing civilians and even children. General Smith had ordered his troops: “I want no prisoners. I wish you to kill and burn. The more you kill and burn, the better it will please me. I want all persons killed who are capable of bearing arms in actual hostilities against the United States.” This campaign lasted four and a half months, and an estimated 15,000 Filipinos were killed.
Importantly, this violence was justified to the US military and to the American public on the grounds that Filipinos were criminals and terrorists. And here we get to the discursive logic behind counterterrorist discourse. In American discourse, the two terms “criminal” and “terrorist” were more or less the same. Supposedly, Filipinos were criminals because the very act of taking arms against the United States to call for independence—according to the Americans’ new laws, about which Filipinos had no say— was a crime. Filipino resistance fighters were called terrorists because they were presumably forcing average Filipinos upon pain of violence to join their cause. They were called terrorists simply because they took up arms and were fighting against colonialism and for freedom. General Jacob Smith in fact justified the massacre at Sumar on the grounds that earlier that year Filipino troops had killed fifty US soldiers. Rather than classifying this as an act of wartime defense, or as an act of legitimate rebellion against an occupying oppressor, the Americans called the attack a massacre by Filipino terrorists. It was a crime and an act of terror.
State violence in the Philippines—from massacres to torture—returned to the US through individuals like August Vollmer.
The logic of counterterrorism was this: the Filipino insurgents were not freedom fighters, but irrational violent terrorists who respond only to force. And if they respond only to force, state violence against them is justified.
What does this have to do with policing?
The state violence in the Philippines, and state violence everywhere, from massacres to torture, to all of the US army’s counterinsurgency operations, did not stay put. As with so many cases of imperialism, some of them came back to the United States through a number of individuals, one of whom was a man named August Vollmer. Vollmer was the chief of police at Berkeley starting in 1905, and today, Vollmer is memorialized by historians and police officers alike for being the “father of modern policing.” Ask any police officer—ask any University of Chicago Police Department (UCPD) officer: “do you know August Vollmer?” They’ll say, “yes, he’s the father of modern policing!”
Vollmer is responsible for innovating all kinds of new tactics and policing strategies in the early twentieth century, all of which spread around the country to make modern policing what it is today. For example, prior to this period, police forces were not mobile or mounted. You just had a few cops walking around on their beats on foot. But Vollmer came up with the idea of putting police forces into mobile squads that would patrol on bike, motorcycles, and ultimately squad cars: moving all over the city, concentrating force and raiding houses like early SWAT teams. In a sense, he invented the early SWAT teams and inspired other police departments in the US to create their own mounted forces.
Vollmer also invented a police tactic known as pin-mapping. This involves taking a map and putting a pin wherever you found a crime to show hot-spots of criminal activity. It allows police to then mobilize their forces and concentrate them there.
Now, today this is called spot mapping or “predictive policing.” Every department uses this in some form. They use more complicated algorithms, but essentially these are all Vollmer’s tactics of finding out where crime is and where it happened, and then mobilizing police forces there and saturating those communities with police forces.
Pin-mapping and “predictive policing” are racist tools of state power.
This tactic is essentially how racist policing is justified; police are sent only to those areas of high crime, but those areas that they think are high crime or that show up on a map are only areas of racial minorities. Not because racialized minorities commit more crimes, but because of historical biases in data collection and racist assumptions about criminality. Pin-mapping is a racist tool of state power.
Vollmer popularized this too, along with many other police tactics. Now, the question you might ask is, where did Vollmer’s innovations come from? And a large part of the answer comes from the fact that Vollmer, before he became police chief, had been part of America’s colonial empire and in fact had served in the Philippine-American war.
Vollmer had been part of America’s colonial counter-insurgency regime, squashing so-called terrorists. In fact, he had been hand-picked to join a new elite colonial counterinsurgency unit charged with penetrating the interior to conquer and capture rebel leaders, not unlike the sort of units that killed so many civilians in Sumar. Only after this did Vollmer return to Berkeley and become chief of police. And he brought with him some of those very colonial counterinsurgency techniques—those so-called counterterrorist techniques—that he had been exposed to and used in the Philippines.
His idea of mounting police forces, for instance, came partly from the American army’s new counterinsurgency units that penetrated the Philippine archipelago. In other words, the early police mobile units that Vollmer created and popularized—these early SWAT forces—were modeled upon America’s “counterterrorist” regime in the Philippines. The same goes for his pin-mapping techniques: the US army had innovated pin-mapping techniques specifically as a new tool to track the movements of Filipino insurgents in order to locate their camps in the vast terrain of central Luzon and embark upon their search-and-destroy missions. It was through pin-mapping that the US army was able to send troops to Sumar and conduct a brutal and murderous campaign against civilians that was justified as counterterrorism. Vollmer saw this as a tactic that could also be applied to policing—he called it the art of making war on the map.
Using techniques of so-called “counterterrorist” state violence in the colonies and applying them to “criminals” in the US followed only naturally.
After all, Vollmer himself stated repeatedly that he thought of criminals as racially inferior, as he and other US imperialists classified Filipinos and justified their colonial rule on racial grounds. They said the same thing about criminals, who were after all, seen as terrorists, just as terrorists were thought of as criminals.
Thus, using techniques of so-called “counterterrorist” state violence in the colonies and applying them to “criminals” in the US followed only naturally. It’s fitting that Asha Bandele and Patrisse Cullors, leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement, titled their memoirs When They Call You a Terrorist.
These examples of pin-mapping and mounted units are just two examples of how so-called counterterrorist tactics in America’s colonies returned home. For example, in the 1910s and 1920s, some police around the country were soon discovered to be using modes of torture to extract confessions, largely from Black Americans. They used a technique called the “water cure.” This was an early variant of “waterboarding” that we know was used in Iraq. Police tried to extract confessions from suspects by holding them down and pouring water down their throats. But this too was an effect of empire.
The American military first learned about it during their colonial counterinsurgency campaigns in the Philippines. This was the chosen mode of torture used by the US army during the Philippine-American war. It was also reportedly being used by US forces in the 1910s during the US occupation of Haiti.
Racist policing in the US in the early twentieth century through today has its origins in America’s colonial occupation of the Philippines. Policing is a colonial invention. It is an invention of so-called “counter-terrorist” state violence. The state violence of military engagements overseas, of counterinsurgency operations, and “counter-terrorist” tactics, do not stay put, they do not only live in the site of their origins, they move around. And in this case, they came back to the imperial metropole to fundamentally shape state violence at home with disastrous effects.
Policing is a colonial invention.
Presumed criminals here in the US become treated like presumed terrorists, ostensibly warranting violence by the same set of counterinsurgency tools, tactics and techniques used in the colonies.
The circulation of state terror has continued ever since. It has taken many different forms, has been used by US empire, the British empire, along with other colonial states, a list which today includes Israel.
Consider a training program that has been going on between US police and Israeli military and police ever since 2001. Since then, officials and officers from US police forces around the United States have been sent to Israel to learn and observe counterinsurgency and so-called counter-terrorist techniques from the Israeli military and the Israeli national police. A delegation of officers from towns in Massachusetts in 2017, for example, toured the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the border with Syria, and Israel’s municipal police academy, to learn about intelligence gathering and surveillance, and other tactics like roadblocks and weapons for crowd control, which they have been trying to bring back for policing in the United States.
US police also learned various other Israeli police tactics, with one US county sheriff who attended going on record to say, in reference to how Israeli forces used force during arrests, “We’d be in jail if we did something like that here.”
US police officials from all around the country, in fact, have participated in this program, with numbers of police officials going on these training missions exceeding the thousands. Attendees include police officers from the Chicago Police Department, as well as a man named Chief Timothy Fitch. In 2011, Fitch was sent to Israel for training. He returned home by 2014 to serve as St. Louis County police chief, thus overseeing the police murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson, which is part of St. Louis County.
We see this pattern repeats with earlier in the century, when folks like August Vollmer went overseas, learned tactics and techniques of state violence there, and brought them home for police to use on domestic populations. Again, state terror overseas, created in the name of countering terror, created to mete out violence against presumed terrorists and so-called criminals, this state terror does not stay put. It is not something that just happens far away, it circulates everywhere, and comes home.
Finally, what does this have to do with the University of Chicago?
Let me return to August Vollmer, for Vollmer did not stay put either. After his stint at Berkeley, and then after serving as chief of police in Los Angeles, he traveled around the country and was hired by various police departments to advise them in adopting the new techniques that he had brought back from the Philippines. He even advised the Chicago Police Department. While in Chicago, he held a conference at what is today Windermere House in Hyde Park. This conference brought together police officials from around the US so they could share policing practices, and all the new policing tactics that Vollmer had brought back from the imperial frontiers. Vollmer’s efforts were so popular in town that in 1929 he received a telegram from a man offering him a new job based upon his work.
At the University of Chicago, August Vollmer became the very first professor of police administration in any American university.
That man was named Robert Maynard Hutchins. Hutchins had just been appointed president of the University of Chicago, and he hired August Vollmer to create a police training program here at the University of Chicago. Hutchins appointed Vollmer to be professor of police administration at the University of Chicago, making August Vollmer the very first professor of police administration in any American university, and making the University of Chicago the first university to have a professor of police administration. His office was located in room 317 of the social science research building, two doors down from my current office.
Now Vollmer ended up teaching a number of courses here for a few years, but he did not stay—he moved back to California in the 1930s. And while the University of Chicago today does not have an official police administration program anymore, it does have its own police force, which is one of the largest private police forces in the country. And of course it uses many of the tactics and forms that Vollmer himself innovated. The University of Chicago also has the Crime Lab, which works with the Chicago Police Department, and which hired as its director a former Los Angeles police officer named Sean Malinowski. Malinowsky is widely known for leading the LAPD in adopting so-called predictive policing. This is a form of policing rooted in Vollmer’s pin-mapping techniques, and which has, by all accounts, been a primary method of racist policing, a tool by which police justify their over-policing and harassment of Black and Latinx communities.
All of this to say that not only is it the case that state violence circulates globally and lands at home, but also that there are parts of the University of Chicago that have long played a part in cultivating, promoting, spreading, and normalizing the intellectual tools of such state violence. This state violence goes under the moral cover of the label “counterterrorism” or “counter- crime,” but is ultimately just another form of violence against humanity.
All of this is why I would insist that the struggle against police violence here in the United States cannot be separate from the struggle against colonialism overseas. This is also why the struggle against police violence here at the University of Chicago should not be separate from the struggle against colonialism, and vice-versa. And neither should it be separated from Indigenous struggles in the US, Canada, and Australia, or elsewhere. Empire and its violence is global, connects us all, and so resistors to empire and its violence must also be global and connected.
The post The Colonial Origins of the UChicago Police appeared first on Rampant Magazine.
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While a near-term rupture in the greenback’s dominance is unlikely, divergence away from dollar usage is beginning to show, JPMorgan analysts wrote in a Monday note.
“Some signs of de-dollarization are emerging; this trend is likely to persist but USD should maintain its large footprint for the foreseeable future,” they said.
For now, the currency remains “top-of-class” in global transactions, and accounts for 88% foreign exchange volumes, while its share of trade invoicing has remained steady for two decades, between 40% and 50%.
However, this has been set against a decline in the US share of global trade, as the country’s exports fell to a record low of 9%.
And the dollar’s share of foreign exchange reserves has also dropped. That trend was accelerated after the West froze Russia’s $330 billion in reserves last year for its Ukraine invasion — prompting other nations to decrease their reliance on the US currency.
“De-dollarization is evident in FX reserves where USD share has declined to a record as share in exports declined, but is still emerging in commodities,” JPMorgan said.
Meanwhile, the dollar has started to lose to gold, as foreign central banks have bought the commodity in record volumes over the past few quarters. The yellow metal now compromises 15% of total assets, versus the dollar’s 44%.
JPMorgan pushed against the prospect of a yuan-dominated currency regime, as the Chinese currency’s international presence remains small: compared to the dollar’s 43% share of SWIFT payments, the yuan compromises 2.3%.
Still, analysts acknowledged China’s efforts to push the yuan abroad, noting progress in cross-border transactions and liabilities, but expect it to be limited on account of the tight control regulators hold over the yuan.
Other institutional outlooks on the dollar’s future include that of Goldman Sachs, which found that there are no viable alternatives to threaten the greenback, even if the currency faces new risks.
All around us things are falling apart. Collectively, Americans are experiencing national and imperial decline. Can America save itself? Is this country, as presently constituted, even worth saving?
For me, that last question is radical indeed. From my early years, I believed deeply in the idea of America. I knew this country wasn’t perfect, of course, not even close. Long before the 1619 Project, I was aware of the “original sin” of slavery and how central it was to our history. I also knew about the genocide of Native Americans. (As a teenager, my favorite movie — and so it remains — was Little Big Man, which pulled no punches when it came to the white man and his insatiably murderous greed.)
Nevertheless, America still promised much, or so I believed in the 1970s and 1980s. Life here was simply better, hands down, than in places like the Soviet Union and Mao Zedong’s China. That’s why we had to “contain” communism — to keep them over there, so they could never invade our country and extinguish our lamp of liberty. And that’s why I joined America’s Cold War military, serving in the Air Force from the presidency of Ronald Reagan to that of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. And believe me, it proved quite a ride. It taught this retired lieutenant colonel that the sky’s anything but the limit.
In the end, 20 years in the Air Force led me to turn away from empire, militarism, and nationalism. I found myself seeking instead some antidote to the mainstream media’s celebrations of American exceptionalism and the exaggerated version of victory culture that went with it (long after victory itself was in short supply). I started writing against the empire and its disastrous wars and found likeminded people at TomDispatch — former imperial operatives turned incisive critics like Chalmers Johnson and Andrew Bacevich, along with sharp-eyed journalist Nick Turse and, of course, the irreplaceable Tom Engelhardt, the founder of those “tomgrams” meant to alert America and the world to the dangerous folly of repeated U.S. global military interventions.
But this isn’t a plug for TomDispatch. It’s a plug for freeing your mind as much as possible from the thoroughly militarized matrix that pervades America. That matrix drives imperialism, waste, war, and global instability to the point where, in the context of the conflict in Ukraine, the risk of nuclear Armageddon could imaginably approach that of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. As wars — proxy or otherwise — continue, America’s global network of 750-odd military bases never seems to decline. Despite upcoming cuts to domestic spending, just about no one in Washington imagines Pentagon budgets doing anything but growing, even soaring toward the trillion-dollar level, with militarized programs accounting for 62% of federal discretionary spending in 2023.
Indeed, an engorged Pentagon — its budget for 2024 is expected to rise to $886 billion in the bipartisan debt-ceiling deal reached by President Joe Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy — guarantees one thing: a speedier fall for the American empire. Chalmers Johnson predicted it; Andrew Bacevich analyzed it. The biggest reason is simple enough: incessant, repetitive, disastrous wars and costly preparations for more of the same have been sapping America’s physical and mental reserves, as past wars did the reserves of previous empires throughout history. (Think of the short-lived Napoleonic empire, for example.)
Known as “the arsenal of democracy” during World War II, America has now simply become an arsenal, with a military-industrial-congressional complex intent on forging and feeding wars rather than seeking to starve and stop them. The result: a precipitous decline in the country’s standing globally, while at home Americans pay a steep price of accelerating violence (2023 will easily set a record for mass shootings) and “carnage” (Donald Trump’s word) in a once proud but now much-bloodied “homeland.”
Lessons from History on Imperial Decline
I’m a historian, so please allow me to share a few basic lessons I’ve learned. When I taught World War I to cadets at the Air Force Academy, I would explain how the horrific costs of that war contributed to the collapse of four empires: Czarist Russia, the German Second Reich, the Ottoman empire, and the Austro-Hungarian empire of the Habsburgs. Yet even the “winners,” like the French and British empires, were also weakened by the enormity of what was, above all, a brutal European civil war, even if it spilled over into Africa, Asia, and indeed the Americas.
And yet after that war ended in 1918, peace proved elusive indeed, despite the Treaty of Versailles, among other abortive agreements. There was too much unfinished business, too much belief in the power of militarism, especially in an emergent Third Reich in Germany and in Japan, which had embraced ruthless European military methods to create its own Asiatic sphere of dominance. Scores needed to be settled, so the Germans and Japanese believed, and military offensives were the way to do it.
As a result, civil war in Europe continued with World War II, even as Japan showed that Asiatic powers could similarly embrace and deploy the unwisdom of unchecked militarism and war. The result: 75 million dead and more empires shattered, including Mussolini’s “New Rome,” a “thousand-year” German Reich that barely lasted 12 of them before being utterly destroyed, and an Imperial Japan that was starved, burnt out, and finally nuked. China, devastated by war with Japan, also found itself ripped apart by internal struggles between nationalists and communists.
As with its prequel, even most of the “winners” of World War II emerged in a weakened state. In defeating Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union had lost 25 to 30 million people. Its response was to erect, in Winston Churchill’s phrase, an “Iron Curtain” behind which it could exploit the peoples of Eastern Europe in a militarized empire that ultimately collapsed due to its wars and its own internal divisions. Yet the USSR lasted longer than the post-war French and British empires. France, humiliated by its rapid capitulation to the Germans in 1940, fought to reclaim wealth and glory in “French” Indochina, only to be severely humbled at Dien Bien Phu. Great Britain, exhausted from its victory, quickly lost India, that “jewel” in its imperial crown, and then Egypt in the Suez debacle.
There was, in fact, only one country, one empire, that truly “won” World War II: the United States, which had been the least touched (Pearl Harbor aside) by war and all its horrors. That seemingly never-ending European civil war from 1914 to 1945, along with Japan’s immolation and China’s implosion, left the U.S. virtually unchallenged globally. America emerged from those wars as a superpower precisely because its government had astutely backed the winning side twice, tipping the scales in the process, while paying a relatively low price in blood and treasure compared to allies like the Soviet Union, France, and Britain.
History’s lesson for America’s leaders should have been all too clear: when you wage war long, especially when you devote significant parts of your resources — financial, material, and especially personal — to it, you wage it wrong. Not for nothing is war depicted in the Bible as one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse. France had lost its empire in World War II; it just took later military catastrophes in Algeria and Indochina to make it obvious. That was similarly true of Britain’s humiliations in India, Egypt, and elsewhere, while the Soviet Union, which had lost much of its imperial vigor in that war, would take decades of slow rot and overstretch in places like Afghanistan to implode.
Meanwhile, the United States hummed along, denying it was an empire at all, even as it adopted so many of the trappings of one. In fact, in the wake of the implosion of the Soviet Union in 1991, Washington’s leaders would declare America the exceptional “superpower,” a new and far more enlightened Rome and “the indispensable nation” on planet Earth. In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, its leaders would confidently launch what they termed a Global War on Terror and begin waging wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere, as in the previous century they had in Vietnam. (No learning curve there, it seems.) In the process, its leaders imagined a country that would remain untouched by war’s ravages, which was we now know — or do we? — the height of imperial hubris and folly.
For whether you call it fascism, as with Nazi Germany, communism, as with Stalin’s Soviet Union, or democracy, as with the United States, empires built on dominance achieved through a powerful, expansionist military necessarily become ever more authoritarian, corrupt, and dysfunctional. Ultimately, they are fated to fail. No surprise there, since whatever else such empires may serve, they don’t serve their own people. Their operatives protect themselves at any cost, while attacking efforts at retrenchment or demilitarization as dangerously misguided, if not seditiously disloyal.
That’s why those like Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, and Daniel Hale, who shined a light on the empire’s militarized crimes and corruption, found themselves imprisoned, forced into exile, or otherwise silenced. Even foreign journalists like Julian Assange can be caught up in the empire’s dragnet and imprisoned if they dare expose its war crimes. The empire knows how to strike back and will readily betray its own justice system (most notably in the case of Assange), including the hallowed principles of free speech and the press, to do so.
Perhaps he will eventually be freed, likely as not when the empire judges he’s approaching death’s door. His jailing and torture have already served their purpose. Journalists know that to expose America’s bloodied tools of empire brings only harsh punishment, not plush rewards. Best to look away or mince one’s words rather than risk prison — or worse.
Yet you can’t fully hide the reality that this country’s failed wars have added trillions of dollars to its national debt, even as military spending continues to explode in the most wasteful ways imaginable, while the social infrastructure crumbles.
Clinging Bitterly to Guns and Religion
Today, America clings ever more bitterly to guns and religion. If that phrase sounds familiar, it might be because Barack Obama used it in the 2008 presidential campaign to describe the reactionary conservatism of mostly rural voters in Pennsylvania. Disillusioned by politics, betrayed by their putative betters, those voters, claimed the then-presidential candidate, clung to their guns and religion for solace. I lived in rural Pennsylvania at the time and recall a response from a fellow resident who basically agreed with Obama, for what else was there left to cling to in an empire that had abandoned its own rural working-class citizens?
Something similar is true of America writ large today. As an imperial power, we cling bitterly to guns and religion. By “guns,” I mean all the weaponry America’s merchants of death sell to the Pentagon and across the world. Indeed, weaponry is perhaps this country’s most influential global export, devastatingly so. From 2018 to 2022, the U.S. alone accounted for 40% of global arms exports, a figure that’s only risen dramatically with military aid to Ukraine. And by “religion,” I mean a persistent belief in American exceptionalism (despite all evidence to the contrary), which increasingly draws sustenance from a militant Christianity that denies the very spirit of Christ and His teachings.
Yet history appears to confirm that empires, in their dying stages, do exactly that: they exalt violence, continue to pursue war, and insist on their own greatness until their fall can neither be denied nor reversed. It’s a tragic reality that the journalist Chris Hedges has written about with considerable urgency.
The problem suggests its own solution (not that any powerful figure in Washington is likely to pursue it). America must stop clinging bitterly to its guns — and here I don’t even mean the nearly 400 million weapons in private hands in this country, including all those AR-15 semi-automatic rifles. By “guns,” I mean all the militarized trappings of empire, including America’s vast structure of overseas military bases and its staggering commitments to weaponry of all sorts, including world-ending nuclear ones. As for clinging bitterly to religion — and by “religion” I mean the belief in America’s own righteousness, regardless of the millions of people it’s killed globally from the Vietnam era to the present moment — that, too, would have to stop.
History’s lessons can be brutal. Empires rarely die well. After it became an empire, Rome never returned to being a republic and eventually fell to barbarian invasions. The collapse of Germany’s Second Reich bred a third one of greater virulence, even if it was of shorter duration. Only its utter defeat in 1945 finally convinced Germans that God didn’t march with their soldiers into battle.
What will it take to convince Americans to turn their backs on empire and war before it’s too late? When will we conclude that Christ wasn’t joking when He blessed the peacemakers rather than the warmongers?
As an iron curtain descends on a failing American imperial state, one thing we won’t be able to say is that we weren’t warned.
Copyright 2023 William J. Astore
Featured image: 20201005 16 God, Guns & Trump, Western Ohio by David Wilson is licensed under CC BY 2.0 / Flickr
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel, Songlands (the final one in his Splinterlands series), Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power, John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II, and Ann Jones’s They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return from America’s Wars: The Untold Story.
The World Bank sees better global economic growth than previously forecast in 2023, due to resilient U.S. consumer spending and China’s recovery from the pandemic earlier this year.
Researchers calculated that high-emitting countries, including the U.S., should pay $192 trillion in compensation to low-emitting nations
Nazis show up in support of the ‘TERF ‘Let Women Speak’ rally in Australia
By Cassandra Devereaux
In 1933, a town councilor in Paris was very concerned by what he called “a moral crisis”. This crisis was the fact that those known as ‘inverts’ at the time existed, and moreover that they have the nerve to do so in public. ‘Invert’ was a common term for what we call members of the LGBTQIA2S+ community today. This counselor is remembered today for saying,
“Far be it for me to want to turn to fascism, but all the same, we have to agree that in some things those regimes have sometimes done good… One day Hitler and Mussolini woke up and said, ‘Honestly, the scandal has gone on long enough’ … And … the inverts … were chased out of Germany and Italy the very next day.”
Of course, they were not ‘chased out’ by fascists. They were murdered, outside or inside concentration camps.
In 2019 Posie Parker gave an interview to Jean-François Gariépy. Parker is part of a British establishment of women fashioning themselves as feminists dubbed ‘Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists, or TERFs. The political project of TERFs is to attack not patriarchal systems but the political rights, well being, and dignity of transgender people. Parker is admired by Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling, herself the celebrity figurehead of transphobic hate. Gariépy is a podcast host and a white nationalist who believes in the genetic superiority of white people and frequently hosts infamous fellow white nationalist Richard Spencer. Earlier this year, Parker took her hateful rhetoric to New Zealand. She was met by cadres of the far right, including some wearing skull masks and patches for the neo-nazi Azov Battalion and Boogaloo Boys. They welcomed her with Nazi salutes. In an interview she gave while there, she invoked a classic anti-semitic trope.
“Do you not know that the billionaires who are — the billionaire men, who are pushing this ideology and funding it — Are you not aware of those people?”
Interviewer Kim Hill followed up Parker’s claim by asking “No, tell me more” repeatedly as Parker failed to offer a shred of evidence. In the end, Parker refused to address the topic further.
J.K. Rowling, as well as other TERFs, expressed continued support for Parker, even as her ties to the far right deepen and become more undeniable.
As we can see, it is easy for people who start out not explicitly in support of fascism to be pulled into supporting fascists and fascist ideas. From the starting line of common cause, they can then introduce new scapegoats. People who fashion themselves as progressive, who have exposed themselves to the right, sometimes fall into their broader ideologies of hate with a tiny push.
Of course, TERFs are simply a small pool the right has won support from. The right has a broader population from which to recruit, and they attempt this by invoking child mutilation and the eternal canard of queer pedophilia. To be clear, the right wing movement doesn’t care about pedophilia. They lionize right wing figures like Judge Roy Moore who are linked to it. Trump has been accused of sexual assault by a woman who was 13 at the time, and was a close friend of child sex trafficker Jeffery Epstein. Trump even called him a “terrific guy” who likes women “on the younger side.” Of course, the far right aren’t the only ones who overlook ties to Epstein. There aren’t a lot of Democrats discussing Bill Clinton’s ties to Epstein and his Lolita Express. That said, right wingers, also wholeheartedly support child marriage. Any amount of time monitoring the far right will expose you to their support for abolishing age of consent laws. Even though a child is much more likely to be raped by a straight man, it’s queers that they smear.
Queer sexuality has always been perceived as a threat in our society. The general public has only recently become somewhat comfortable with homosexuality. Yes, today it’s okay to have queers in our sitcoms, giving way to an already tired trope of gay dads falling into the 1950s sitcom style suburban heterosexual dichotomy of breadwinner and happy homemaker raising a precocious child with no room for a romance or sexuality in their lives. It’s a soft form of neutering.
On the other hand, gender affirming care is a topic most people don’t know a whole lot about. It’s easy to invoke the boogeyman of Frankensteinian doctors performing dreadful disfigurements on innocents who are deluded by a shady cabal of villains. To be clear, gender affirming care for minors requires a longstanding and pervasive pattern of the child asserting self-knowledge of their gender. This care takes the form of puberty blockers, which delay puberty and therefore the development of secondary sex characteristics. Should one choose to stop taking puberty blockers, their bodies then proceed along the typical path of development. Secondary sex characteristics are distressing and leave the patient forever with a body that makes them far more uncomfortable than it needed to be. Such care is well documented to lead to positive outcomes, including higher self esteem and reduced suicidal ideation. But to the right, it is a horror, and to the evangelical right, it is an abomination before an angry God.
Fascism trades on the notion that national greatness has been lost. It sells the idea that the country was great, and now is not due to being undermined by a scapegoated group. It says the country needs to be restored to a mythic past by breaking the scapegoat’s influence on society. They must purge the scapegoated element, they believe. Hand in hand with their fetishization of weapons, the final means is force. They may float the idea that the rest of society can avoid this by simply falling in line. But they know, in their endgame, that this will not happen. There will be no other option, and they gleefully anticipate the violence.
The elements they believe must be purged include the voting rights act and Black enfranchisement. Immigration from the south. Secularism. Women’s autonomy. To be restored is the domination of white men and subjugation of women. What is more of a threat to the rule of men over women than the idea that the categories of men and women themselves are not immutable?
Patriarchy developed hand in hand with the institution of private property and inheritance along patrilineal lines. As patriarchy developed, so did the gender binary. While the right likes to present the gender binary as eternal and universal, it is not. Anthropologists identify past and present cultures that recognize multiple genders around the world, most especially in pre-patriarchal, cooperative societies. Once there is patriarchy and private property, society divides into those who have property and those who have not. Because of the role of patrilineal inheritance, this happens along the lines of reproductive function. A binary arises, and notions of gender are then tied to this function. Therefore, to challenge the binary threatens patriarchy, and because we were carried to the present on the back of years of patriarchal societies, it is unthinkable to challenge this with evolving understanding. Despite the scientific community sharing the knowledge that biological sex and gender exist on a spectrum, the right insists that they have science on their side even when presented with the facts. They do so because accepting the falsity of the gender binary is unthinkable to them. As the gender binary begins to be challenged in science and society, they see the world changing. They become afraid and angry. Fear and anger in the face of a changing world wins Republicans votes, and for fascists, it provides a call to militant action.
In contrast, for Democrats, we’re an obstacle. Dems believe that they can reach their desired world by building a broad enough base to vote their enemies out. No matter how bad things get, the belief among the rank and file is that if they can get enough votes next time they’ll somehow turn back the things that scare them. When it comes to winning votes, in a patriarchal and transphobic society, transgender people are a wedge. We’re small in number. Acceptance for us from the general public is tenuous at best and with the slightest push easily reverses into suspicion and hatred. For most Democratic politicians, keeping their mouths shut is a far safer bet than taking a principled stand.
In the 2016 presidential debates, reporter Edward Luce posed the following question to Hillary Clinton:
“Democrats seem to be going out of their way to lose elections by elevating activist causes, notably the transgender debate, which are relevant only to a small minority. What sense does it make to depict J.K. Rowling as a fascist?”
Her response was this:
“We are standing on the precipice of losing our democracy, and everything that everybody else cares about then goes out the window. Look, the most important thing is to win the next election. The alternative is so frightening that whatever does not help you win should not be a priority.”
Of course there is always the next election, and we will always be told it’s the most important election of our lives. When’s the last time a politician told you that you should vote for them, but the stakes are lower than they were last time? They always tell us that their “democracy” itself is on the line, and in this way, they hope to win votes again and again. Also, and not for nothing, which Democratic politician had “the author of the most beloved children’s book series in the world is bad” as a plank on their platform? The question was the softest of lay-ups, allowing Clinton to reassure voters that Democrats weren’t about to champion icky transfolk who don’t even wield enough electoral power to make a difference in an election.
The right wing knows that any time Democrats express any support of transgender people they are in aggregate being performative. The far right are militant and animated by their opposition to transgender people. Democrats, they know, are not likewise animated in support of us and they’re certainly not militant. Liberals can be counted on to sometimes hold a candle and nonviolently observe a moment of silence for queer people, and one of those conditions is usually whiteness and bourgeois respectability. The murder of white university student Matthew Shepard in ‘98 brought liberals and their candles to memorials. The outpouring of support for an oppressed gay man was good and proper. However, the multitude of murders of Black and Latina transwomen around the same time such as Rita Hester won only shrugs from the same liberals, many of whom expressed only that they were surprised that it didn’t happen more.
The sad truth is that while liberals and Dems today sometimes play lip service to us, fascists need us. They rely on the widespread hate and fear that’s so successful in animating their base. The world they want in their imagined endgame is one where we are crushed into non-existence to cleanse their society and to serve as a warning to people to get in line. Today, we are an animating force for them and the right writ large.
So what do we do? We turn to our greatest weapon…. solidarity.
The far right can’t build a base of true solidarity because their ideal world is not solidarity but submission. They aren’t working with the likes of Posie Parker because they see her ilk as equals. They don’t intend to share power with women just because some women share one of their hatreds. Gay alt-right troll Milo Yiannopoulos was useful until he wasn’t, leaving him bankrupt and scrambling to regain relevance with his claims that he’s no longer gay and opening a ‘conversion therapy’ torture center. Fascism is an ever tightening noose. As they make steps toward their end goal, they shed allied groups on a last hired, first fired basis because what they want is a hierarchy of oppressed and oppressors.
They want homogeneity. The book banning, denial of gender affirming care, the anti-drag laws that threaten any trans person existing in public, the defining of parents of trans kids as child abusers allowing their children to be taken from them to keep them from gender affirming care shows they see the threat we pose to homogeneity and they want us gone. Pairing the act of taking children and placing them into another cultural group with Michael Knowles’ CPAC speech saying, “transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely” we start to see genocidal ideas gaining steam. While the right quibble over definitions whenever this is pointed out, all the work they’ve been doing…. all the recruitments they gained from fear mongering and all of the alliances they made with anti-trans feminists and other groups, is conferred into this push: eradicating transgenderism. Make no mistake, this can only mean eliminating transgender people. We are in their sights. They have been working to build the cultural machinery needed to destroy transgender lives. Furthermore, they won’t be satisfied to stop at us.
It wasn’t long ago when nearly everyone balked when ‘fascist’ was said. Over time, we’ve been seeing it used more frequently, even in mainstream media, as people examine the meaning of the word. We need to do the same for the word ‘genocide’. Genocide is one of those heavily charged words that we are loathe to trot out in a cavalier manner. This is understandable, but what’s clear is that the right wants to, eliminate us. Therefore, when we find ourselves asking, “are transgender people really a distinct cultural group that can be genocided?” we need to reflect on the fact that this question keeps presenting itself in the first place and act accordingly.
The left can be challenging to cohere into a united front. However, where the right has to content itself with alliances that will end up being purged, we can achieve solidarity. We want a cooperative society where poor, working class, and oppressed people take the reins of progress. We don’t want a world divided between oppressor and oppressed, we want an end to oppression. As we recognize solidarity as our greatest strength, we need to understand that when this falters, this leaves us open to division. To leave any oppressed group behind leaves us vulnerable to division. It’s imperative that we reject this weakness. Leave the view of us as a wedge to the Democrats. We cannot make their mistakes.
Therefore we defend Drag Queen Story Hour. When they talk about ‘drag’ they mean all trans people, but even if they didn’t, as drag performers are oppressed queer peoples, we stand with them in solidarity. When they attack gender affirming health care, we protect trans people’s ability to survive and thrive in a hostile world. As they criminalize the parents of trans youth and try to transfer trans children into a system that seeks to crush their thriving and drive them into suicide we fight back. When they pull books that accurately describe our existences from libraries or burn them, we defend knowledge of ourselves out in the world, available to all. The knowledge to help people understand and build compassionate relationships among oppressed peoples and the knowledge of trans kids to understand themselves is sacrosanct. We do all of this not just to uplift queer people. We do this because to achieve victory, we cannot be divided, we cannot concede an inch, we cannot compromise by giving up on any poor, working class, or oppressed peoples because when we do, they slide in the knife to split us down the middle.
Stand with us. Fight with us. Arm in arm and hand in hand, march with us into the world to come. We have a world to win, and nothing to lose but our chains.
Countries like the United States and those in Europe could be on the hook for an eye-popping $170 trillion in climate reparations for their excessive carbon emissions, according to new research from the University of Leeds.
The study highlights inequities in the remaining carbon that the world can emit before invoking even more catastrophic climate events. Wealthier countries like the U.S, United Kingdom, and Germany are not only responsible for the largest share of current and historic emissions, but they are also on track to overshoot their existing carbon budgets, or the amount that the world can emit before exceeding the current global target of 1.5 degrees C (about 2.7 degrees F) of warming.
Researchers used estimates from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a group of experts assembled by the United Nations, to measure the total global carbon budget as well as a country’s individual budget. They also looked at the deep cuts in emissions that countries in the Global South will have to make if they are to counteract the countries that use more than their fair share, and the study attempts to quantify the dollar amount that would properly compensate them for it.
“The problem is that the Global North would be overshooting its collective fair share of the 1.5-degree carbon budget by nearly three times,” said Andrew Fanning, the study’s lead author and a visiting research fellow at the University of Leeds. “And, of course, if some countries are overshooting, then other countries need to pick up the slack.”
The study found that the U.S. would be responsible for the largest share, $80 trillion, for its excess emissions, which would be paid out to historically low emitters like India and China as well as regions like sub-Saharan Africa. The oversized carbon footprint of wealthier nations has been an ongoing roadblock in the race to cut emissions and curb the worst impacts of climate change. Researchers sought to quantify how much excess emissions would cost and used the existing framework from the IPCC to price out the difference in emissions.
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Monday marked the beginning of an international climate change conference in Bonn, Switzerland, that serves as a precursor to the United Nation’s annual Conference of the Parties talks, with COP28 scheduled to take place this fall in the United Arab Emirates. The topic of unequal carbon emissions has become a central issue in recent years at U.N. climate conferences, including last year’s in Egypt.
Research like Fanning’s follows other academic studies that attempt to put a price on carbon emissions in order to better understand the economic impact of climate change.
“Carbon pricing is supposed to help shift the cost away from the broader society to those responsible for the emissions, while providing an incentive to reduce emissions,” said Yamide Dagnet, director of climate justice at Open Society Foundations. “[It’s] supposed to be used to deter the use of fossil fuels.”
So-called “loss and damage” refers to the idea that countries that emit less carbon will also be impacted more by climate change and should be compensated for both the carbon they don’t emit and the resulting destruction of higher global temperatures. The idea has become more popular at international climate negotiations as Global South countries continue to struggle with devastating impacts and major polluters, like the U.S., fall short of their climate goals.
“At the core of loss and damage, it’s just acknowledging and recognizing that climate change is a cumulative problem where historical responsibility needs to be taken into account,” said Fanning.
Countries like the island nation of Vanuatu and Pakistan have previously called for climate reparations from wealthier nations, since developing countries have not contributed in the same way to total global emissions yet have borne the brunt of the consequences of climate change.
“Some countries have used far more than their fair share, [while] others essentially lose parts of their fair share,” said Fanning. “And that is unjust.”
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Study: US owes $80 trillion in climate reparations on Jun 6, 2023.
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by Roberto Bissio*
A reform in the international financial architecture is needed and urgent. High level UN officials and civil society agreed on that proposition during the UN Summit on the Least Developed Countries.
“The international financial architecture is absolutely no longer fit for purpose. It is morally bankrupt” said UN deputy secretary general Amina Mohammed in a candid dialogue with civil society organizations at the closure of the Civil Society Forum on the last day of the Summit on the Least Developed Countries held in Doha last March 2023.
