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  • Hitting Bottom: Incarcerated Women in the Prison Hierarchy

    By David Chura

     

    This post originally appeared on The Huffington Post blog.

    A prison can't function without its pecking order. Call it what you will, chain of command, hierarchy, rank, it all comes down to power. Who's got it, who doesn't. Who's on top, who's on bottom. It's an all-inclusive, endemic culture: wardens, top assistant wardens, captains, sergeants, and rank and file officers. Frontline correctional officers top inmates, and inmates top whomever they can.

    Support staff is notched in there somewhere, just one step above inmates. These "civilians"—medical workers, teachers, social workers, chaplains—are viewed by corrections with almost as much suspicion and contempt as inmates. I know firsthand all about that suspicion and contempt from my years teaching high school offenders locked up in an adult county prison. You get the message pretty quickly when time after time you're kept standing behind some prison gate or security door, waiting in plain view for an officer to buzz you through while he or she finishes joking with their buddy or finally looks up from their crossword puzzle.

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  • Black History Month and the Cuban Solidarity Movement of the 1870s

    By Paul Ortiz

    Seven years after the end of the Civil War, hundreds of African Americans in Baltimore gathered at historic Madison Street (Colored) Presbyterian Church for the purpose, “[O]f adopting measures to petition the Congress of the United States to tender the powerful mediation of this great government towards ameliorating the sad condition of a half million of our brethren now held in slavery in the island of Cuba by Spain.”[1] S.R. Scottron, noted black inventor and a co-founder of the Cuban Anti-Slavery Committee, was the evening’s keynote speaker. He urged his enthusiastic audience to remember, “They had passed through the Egyptian bondage and through the sea of blood, and having become clothed in the habiliments of freedom, knew how to sympathize with the 500,000 of their own race bowed down in Cuba. The Cuban patriots were opposing wrongs as galling as those which adduced the American patriots to rise up against the oppression of Great Britain.” Scottron’s advice was that African Americans should “petition the government of the United States to extend a liberal policy to the colored race in Cuba. The 800,000 votes of the colored people here would have their weight in that direction.” After Scottron concluded his speech, church deacons circulated the petition for signatures.

    Garnet_henry

    Rev. Henry Highland Garnet

    Less than a week later Scottron joined a delegation that included Rev. Henry Highland Garnet, George T. Downing, and J.M. Langston to present petitions to President Ulysses S. Grant signed by tens of thousands of African Americans and allies across the country in support of the resistance movement in Cuba.[2]  African Americans demanded that the US government grant belligerency status to the Cuban freedom fighters and also support the abolition of slavery on the island.  The Cuban solidarity movement was a national phenomenon with organizing activities in cities including Sacramento; San Francisco; Virginia City, NV; New Orleans; Boston; Philadelphia; New York; Washington, DC; and many other places.[3]  Estimates of the number of signatures gathered in support of the struggle ranged from tens of thousands to as much as half a million.[4]

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  • US poised to bring trade sanctions against China for rhino, tiger trade

    By J.A. Mills

    Eric-Ash-Tiger-Double-Trouble

    This post originally appeared on J.A. Mills' blog.

    The United States is one step from bringing trade sanctions against China for its domestic trade in tiger bone and rhino horn.

    The fact is the US has been one step away since 1993, thanks to a legal petition filed by World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and the National Wildlife Federation (NWF) with the Clinton administration. They did so under the Pelly Amendment of the Fisherman’s Protection Act, which gives the US mandate to punish countries whose nationals undermine international protections for endangered species. Not long after China’s State Council banned domestic trade in tiger bone and rhino horn in 1993, President Clinton put the sanctions on hold, where they remain today.

    In July 2014, the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) asked the Obama administration to revisit them, providing lengthy documentation to show that China continues to ignore international agreements aimed at stopping tiger trade and allows legal trade in tiger products from tiger farms. The US Department of Interior confirmed it is reviewing EIA’s request.

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  • Breeding for Perfection: What It Takes for a Dog to Be a Champion

    By Michael Brandow

    Brandowheader

    The following is excerpted from A Matter of Breeding: A Biting History of Pedigree Dogs and How the Quest for Status Has Harmed Man's Best Friend.

    Entering the grand old house on West Twelfth for an interview with a potential client, I was ushered in by a determined doggy who was flanked on both sides by two decorative felines. The cats paused cautiously while their pal, a funny French bulldog whose personality far exceeded her size, came rushing toward the door snorting and barking with a rough, whiskey voice. “This is Winnie,” was my introduction to the being I befriended with a simple scratch behind one of her outlandish satellite-dish ears out of proportion to her head, which was itself supersized for the small, compact frame to which it looked bolted. “She’s seven and loves cats,” Winnie’s mom continued, sensing my delight with the peaceable kingdom I’d just discovered in a narrow foyer. The dog approved, her owner was instantly set on giving me the job, and the rest was mere formality.

    My new client gestured me down the hall and my new best friend followed, as though by instinct without being told, in a precise heel position by my side on round, feline feet. The cats scattered to right and left , disappearing into different rooms. “In fact she has two of her own. I like to call them the Three Musketeers. But you have to watch her on the sidewalk because she only loves her cats.” A conversation followed in the front parlor where I sat on a sofa petting a quirky contraption that looked more like a cat than a dog. Attached to Winnie’s dwarfed body was a domed lion’s head with the punched-in face of a Persian. Puss-in-Boots ears were raised alertly, and her back was permanently arched like a frightened kitty’s. Wide leonine eyes, a flat button nose, and a Cheshire grin carved into a globular skull resembling a Halloween pumpkin—a long tail was all that was missing to complete the comparison. Winnie’s was reduced to a stub.

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  • Report from the Blizzard Zone

    By Tom Hallock

    Snow

    Now we get to feel what it’s like to live in extreme weather. The 16’’ of snow we just received, on top of the 80” we already had—most of which arrived in the past three weeks—has changed the way we live and work. We are experiencing the world we’ve created by our collective failure to address climate change and invest in public transportation. Our offices have been closed 5 of the past 15 workdays.

    Meanwhile, we adapt and our work continues. Since our warehouse and printers are located elsewhere, new books ship on time and we are staying in stock with reprints. Our publicity team reaches out to media about new titles, royalties and vendors are paid, new lists of books are launched and promotion continues. We held an editorial meeting via conference call and acquired two books.

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  • Three Young Muslims Were Murdered in Chapel Hill: What Happens Next?

    By Kay Whitlock and Michael Bronski

    ChapelHill

    What is a mob, actually? We say the word, and tend to think of it as a crowd of people. But a mob is not a crowd; it is a state of mind.… Two or three people, even one can become a mob. —Lillian Smith, novelist and civil rights activist

    It was another tragedy in a distrustful, on-edge society steeped in violent confrontation and extra-judicial killing as the solution to whatever ails us.

    What motivates these on-the-spot executions? Fear? Resentment? Rage? Disgust? Misbegotten feelings of some sort of imagined superiority: racial, religious, gendered? Maybe just a hair-trigger impulse to strike back decisively at anyone who symbolizes an enemy? Or maybe, at times, the motivation is some terrible combination of any or all of these emotions that results in a desire, as Lillian Smith wrote, to hurt somebody.

    There have been so many tragedies lately. Too many.

    On February 10, 2015, Deah Shaddy Barakat, 23; his wife Yusor Mohammad Abu-Salha, 21; and her sister, Razan Mohammed Abu-Sahla, 19, were shot to death—bullets to their heads—in a condominium complex in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. They were Muslim, all pursuing or about to pursue studies at UNC and North Carolina State University.

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  • AwkwardMan: One Man’s Journey From Brokenhearted Solitude to a Happy Life in Love

    By Zain Omar

    Zainpost

    This essay appears in Salaam, Love: American Muslim Men on Love, Sex, and Intimacy edited by Ayesha Mattu and Nura Maznavi.

    I often think awkwardness is my superpower. No one else I know has such a deft way of turning an ordinary situation into a hot mess of confusion and apprehension. People have noticed—particularly at work, where I seem to bumble my way through meetings and pleasantries with high-powered executives.

    When I tell people I work in online marketing, I usually get a confused response: they assume that I work from home in a get-rich-quick scheme or that I’m spamming their e-mail address about performance-enhancing drugs. It’s still a fairly new field, and it doesn’t yet have much cachet because there hasn’t been a television series to glamorize it.

    In one of my many attempts to legitimize my life’s work, I started a job in Los Angeles with the hopes of turning the phrase “I work in online marketing” into “I am an executive at a marketing firm.” However, my inner AwkwardMan took over and sabotaged me before I could get a firm grip on the corporate ladder.

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  • Martin Luther King’s Beloved Community and #BlackLivesMatter

    By Sheryll Cashin

    Martin Luther King Jr Beloved Community quote

    The movie Selma deserves the accolades it has received not just for its artistry but also because it lays bare for modern day activists the kind of strategies that are necessary to work a social transformation. Martin Luther King, Jr., was a Christian theologian but he was also a tactician. He recognized the power and absolute moral authority in love and nonviolence. He championed agape love. It was not romantic love or the love between friends, but the hardest kind of love to show—a love indifferent to human merit. You raise a billy club to me and I will kneel and pray for you. I can’t say that I could be as brave or as disciplined as the marchers who lived this history and code. The moral authority that flowed from John Lewis and others crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge, getting beaten and not retaliating did much to render the movement “everybody’s fight”—the words that Viola Liuzzo used to justify leaving her five children in Michigan to join with civil rights activists in Alabama.

    Dr. King saw in his increasingly multiracial band of civil rights soldiers an early example of the beloved community he espoused. The movement itself could be an approximation of the spirit of agape love and community that he envisioned for the whole of America. One expression of this love for community was seeing the mutuality in all types of human suffering. As King famously said, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” In the end he did not turn away from the hardest part of community building. In  “A Christmas Sermon on Peace,” delivered at Ebenezer Baptist Church on Christmas Eve 1967, he proclaimed, “Our loyalties must transcend our race, our tribe, our class, and our nation.”

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  • Power to the People: Why We Need Civilian Police Review Boards

    By Mary Frances Berry

     

    As distasteful as it is to anticipate the next shooting of an unarmed African American by law enforcement officers, it’s also sadly inevitable. When it happens next, government officials and the media will attempt to diffuse the righteous anger on display in the community protests just they have done before in demonstrations against the killings in Ferguson, Missouri, in New York City, in Los Angeles, in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and elsewhere. The mayor and the police commissioner will suggest that “justice” will be served and the murderous officer prosecuted. But justice rarely arrives despite videos and testimony.

    Indictments of law enforcement are almost impossible to obtain for three very simple reasons. First, local District Attorneys are elected officials and voters (whites and even many voters of color) are ambivalent about curbing police power. Second, prosecutors do not want to antagonize the law enforcement agencies they depend on to do their jobs. Law and order protect each other.

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  • The Birth of a Nation: Visualizing Hate and Justice in Early Hollywood

    By Kay Whitlock and Michael Bronski

     

    D. W. Griffith’s infamous silent film The Birth of a Nation turns 100 years old this Sunday. In an excerpt from their new book Considering Hate: Violence, Goodness, and Justice in American Culture and Politics, Kay Whitlock and Michael Bronski investigate the legacy of that film’s “politically fraught public discussion of hate, race, power, and sex.”

    The birth of the American film industry, first in New York and then Hollywood, changed how Americans thought about politics, law, and social justice. Beginning in colonial times, newspapers, pamphlets, and books were enormously influential in shaping public opinion. They helped formulate ideas about justice and helped an ever-growing reading population to engage in public conversations about ethics and morality. Images played a large part in this (think of the illustrations of abused slaves in abolitionist literature), and the advent of photography in the mid-nineteenth century radically transformed the cultural influence of images.

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