tag:theconversation.com,2011:/fr/topics/racial-equality-47036/articles
Racial equality – The Conversation
2022-09-30T12:26:37Z
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/189942
2022-09-30T12:26:37Z
2022-09-30T12:26:37Z
The term ‘achievement gap’ fosters a negative view of Black students
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/486758/original/file-20220927-16-vg6rhl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C6%2C4269%2C2854&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Is it time to find new language to describe racial disparities in education?</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/photo/teacher-going-over-exam-instructions-royalty-free-image/523444522?adppopup=true">Will & Deni McIntyre via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>The <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/topics/research-brief-83231">Research Brief</a> is a short take about interesting academic work.</em> </p>
<h2>The big idea</h2>
<p>Despite long-standing efforts to <a href="https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X035007003">close the racial “achievement gap” in education</a>, the term does more to trigger racist stereotypes and causes a lower sense of urgency than when the issue is presented as the need to “end inequality in educational outcomes.”</p>
<p>Those are the key findings of a 2022 study in which we <a href="https://edworkingpapers.org/sites/default/files/ai22-628.pdf">examined the effect</a> that the two different terms had on teachers and others.</p>
<p>To reach this conclusion, we conducted two different survey experiments – one with <a href="https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X19863765">teachers</a> and one with <a href="https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X221118054">nonteachers</a>.</p>
<p>In the experiments, we randomly asked respondents to answer one of two versions of a question on a survey. Some were asked how important it was to “close the achievement gap” between Black and white students. Others were asked how important it was to “end inequality in educational outcomes between Black and white students.”</p>
<p>As we’d guessed, respondents gave lower priority to racial equity when the issue was presented as a matter of closing an “achievement gap.” This was true for both teachers and nonteachers. Specifically, when asked about ending inequality in educational outcomes, 57% of nonteachers and 78% of teachers said it was a “high priority” or “essential.” But when asked about “closing racial achievement gaps,” only 44% of nonteachers and 70% of teachers rated it as a “high priority” or “essential.”</p>
<p>Furthermore, the term “achievement gap” had a larger negative effect among teachers who hold stronger anti-Black or pro-white implicit stereotypes, as measured by an <a href="https://www.projectimplicit.net/resources/about-the-iat/">implicit association test</a>. The term also led respondents to express stronger anti-Black and pro-white stereotypes. Twenty-four percent of respondents who saw the inequality version rated white Americans as more intelligent than Black Americans, while 36% did so after viewing the achievement gap version of the item. This suggests the term “achievement gap” tends to intensify racial stereotypes among who people already hold them. </p>
<h2>Why it matters</h2>
<p>In working to advance racial equity, we think it is important to use language that doesn’t stigmatize students. Instead, we think it would be more beneficial to use language that puts the focus on structural inequalities in education. Despite its long-standing use, the term “achievement gap” falls short in this regard. </p>
<p>For instance, in prior research, one of us found that when people watched a TV news report about “test score gaps” between Black and white students, it led viewers to <a href="https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X20932469">express more exaggerated stereotypes</a> of Black Americans as lacking education. Our latest study found the term “achievement gap” has a similar effect.</p>
<p>Consequently, when politicians, journalists, researchers and educators use the term – even if they mean well – it could end up doing more harm than good.</p>
<h2>What still isn’t known</h2>
<p>While our study shines light on how the term “achievement gap” affects people when it’s used to discuss racial disparities in educational outcomes, we see a need to learn more about how it affects the viewpoints of people in other groups and on other issues in education. For example, does it lead people to stereotype other students who are described as having achievement gaps, such as English language learners or students with learning differences? How does it affect people’s views on which educational goals are the most important to pursue?</p>
<p>Also, might it have a more positive effect to apply “gap” language to structural issues in education, as opposed to students? For example, the phrase “<a href="https://www.edweek.org/leadership/opinion-lets-focus-on-gaps-in-opportunity-not-achievement/2011/05">opportunity gap</a>” puts the focus on differences in opportunities that students have for learning, versus differences in students.</p>
<p>For those reasons, we think it would be beneficial to see whether educational outcomes improve if the term “achievement gap” is retired. Similarly, we’d like to see what happens when the term is replaced with language that stresses the differences between the educational structures in which those students are served.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/189942/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Funding for this project was provided by a USC Zumberge Individual Research Award and a USC Rossier internal research award.</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Tara-Marie Desruisseaux does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Two education researchers say one of the most widely used terms in school reform debates should be retired because of its potential to do more harm than good.
Tara-Marie Desruisseaux, Research Associate in Education, University of Southern California
David M. Quinn, Associate Professor of Education, University of Southern California
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/184913
2022-07-01T13:01:45Z
2022-07-01T13:01:45Z
Decades after Brown v. Board, US schools still struggle with segregation – 4 essential reads
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/469081/original/file-20220615-10596-ka8yii.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C10%2C3402%2C1925&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Millicent Brown, left, was one of the first two Black students to integrate a South Carolina public school, in September 1963.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://newsroom.ap.org/detail/USAMillicentBrown/deb2f7f4e4f1406aa001d2be2b246af6/photo">AP Photo</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>The Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision, handed down in 1954, was supposed to end racial segregation in the nation’s public schools. But that work remains undone, as evidenced by a U.S. Department of Justice collection showing <a href="https://www.justice.gov/crt/educational-opportunities-cases#race">dozens of active school-desegregation cases</a> even in 2022.</p>
<p>To take a more in-depth look at the prevalence and nature of contemporary school segregation in the U.S., The Conversation sought scholars who could discuss the topic from various standpoints – from its legal history to its current status and modern-day efforts to make schools inclusive beyond racial identity. Here are four selections from our past coverage.</p>
<h2>1. The Brown case wasn’t the beginning</h2>
<p>The fight for full equity in schools first went to the courts in 1947, when a group of Black parents in South Carolina wanted their kids to be allowed to ride the bus to school, as the white students could. When the case finally went to federal court in 1951, writes equity scholar <a href="https://news.clemson.edu/our-experts/roy-jones/">Roy Jones</a> at Clemson University, a federal judge suggested more – a suit against school segregation itself.</p>
<p>“A month later, [civil rights lawyer Thurgood] Marshall brought a new case, Briggs v. Elliott, … arguing that school segregation in South Carolina was unconstitutional. This was the first lawsuit in the country to challenge school segregation as a violation of the U.S. Constitution,” Jones writes. “<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-fight-against-school-segregation-began-in-south-carolina-long-before-it-ended-with-brown-v-board-177418">The Brown v. Board case</a> eventually grew out of that South Carolina case.”</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-fight-against-school-segregation-began-in-south-carolina-long-before-it-ended-with-brown-v-board-177418">The fight against school segregation began in South Carolina, long before it ended with Brown v. Board</a>
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<h2>2. Still segregated</h2>
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<img alt="A group of young adults with varying skin tones socialize outside" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/461338/original/file-20220504-16-rl3u6o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=68%2C43%2C4091%2C3224&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/461338/original/file-20220504-16-rl3u6o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=472&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/461338/original/file-20220504-16-rl3u6o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=472&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/461338/original/file-20220504-16-rl3u6o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=472&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/461338/original/file-20220504-16-rl3u6o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=593&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/461338/original/file-20220504-16-rl3u6o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=593&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/461338/original/file-20220504-16-rl3u6o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=593&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Court-ordered desegregation has happened in the U.S. as recently as 2015, when a federal judge issued a desegregation order to the Cleveland, Miss., school district.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://newsroom.ap.org/detail/DesegregationAfterBusing/8b893af637dc4f649c093e983c0d005f/photo">AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis</a></span>
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<p>The Brown decision declared that public schools could not be segregated by race anymore, but the process took years and is still incomplete, writes <a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=8z4YFq0AAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao">Pedro Noguera</a>, an educational sociologist at the University of Southern California.</p>
<p>“American society continues to grow more racially and ethnically diverse. But <a href="https://theconversation.com/us-schools-are-not-racially-integrated-despite-decades-of-effort-177849">many of the nation’s public K-12 schools</a> are not well integrated and are instead predominantly attended by students of one race or another,” he writes. </p>
<p>In fact, Noguera explains, “in 2018-2019, the most recent school year for which data is available, 42% of Black students attended majority-Black schools, and 56% of Hispanic students attended majority-Hispanic schools. Even more striking, 79% of white students in America went to majority-white schools during the same period.”</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/us-schools-are-not-racially-integrated-despite-decades-of-effort-177849">US schools are not racially integrated, despite decades of effort</a>
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<h2>3. Economic segregation</h2>
<p>Racial differences aren’t the only way U.S. schools are segregated. Education policy scholar <a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=NOT4bMEAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao">Kari Dalane</a> at the American University School of Public Affairs and a collaborator looked at how students are split up into classrooms within schools.</p>
<p>“<a href="https://theconversation.com/students-are-often-segregated-within-the-same-schools-not-just-by-being-sent-to-different-ones-179266">We found that … economically disadvantaged students</a> were increasingly likely to be concentrated in a subset of classrooms rather than spread out relatively evenly throughout the school,” Dalane writes.</p>
<p>That’s a problem because, as she explains, “more experienced teachers raise student test scores more than novice teachers, on average. However, novice teachers are frequently assigned to classrooms with more low-income students. Therefore, the more students are separated along lines of household income, the more likely poorer students are to fall behind academically.”</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/students-are-often-segregated-within-the-same-schools-not-just-by-being-sent-to-different-ones-179266">Students are often segregated within the same schools, not just by being sent to different ones</a>
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<h2>4. Children with disabilities</h2>
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<img alt="A teacher speaks with students who are raising their hands." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/468082/original/file-20220609-18-6twc2p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=31%2C0%2C5207%2C3257&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/468082/original/file-20220609-18-6twc2p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=372&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/468082/original/file-20220609-18-6twc2p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=372&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/468082/original/file-20220609-18-6twc2p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=372&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/468082/original/file-20220609-18-6twc2p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=468&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/468082/original/file-20220609-18-6twc2p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=468&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/468082/original/file-20220609-18-6twc2p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=468&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Learning support teachers such as Sabrina Werley in Pennsylvania are common, but schools’ services can vary widely.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/sabrina-werley-works-with-her-4th-grade-students-in-a-math-news-photo/1312861050">Ben Hasty/MediaNews Group/Reading Eagle via Getty Images</a></span>
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<p>In the wake of the Brown decision came another effort – to include children with disabilities in the nation’s classrooms, rather than sending them to specialized schools focused on addressing their weaknesses.</p>
<p>A 1979 lawsuit ultimately asked the Supreme Court to interpret a 1975 law that said “children have the right to a ‘free appropriate public education’ in the ‘least restrictive environment’ possible in which their needs can be met,” explains education law scholar <a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=T3b-g5YAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao">Charles Russo</a> at the University of Dayton.</p>
<p>The lawsuit didn’t go well. In 1982, the Supreme Court ruled that a deaf student didn’t qualify for a sign-language interpreter because the student was doing well enough, even though an interpreter could have helped the student learn more and do better.</p>
<p>It took 35 years – until 2017 – for the Supreme Court to rule that schools owed students with disabilities an actually equal chance to make the most of their talents and promise. “<a href="https://theconversation.com/decades-after-special-education-law-and-key-ruling-updates-still-languish-181560">Progress – and potential – were the new standards, not merely getting by</a>,” Russo writes.</p>
<p>But it’s not clear how long it will take before every child has those opportunities.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/decades-after-special-education-law-and-key-ruling-updates-still-languish-181560">Decades after special education law and key ruling, updates still languish</a>
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<img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/184913/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
The effort to give every student equal access to an education has lasted decades and may need even more time before the goal is reached.
Jeff Inglis, Politics + Society Editor, The Conversation US
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/171457
2022-01-10T13:39:02Z
2022-01-10T13:39:02Z
Watch for these conflicts over education in 2022
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/439216/original/file-20220103-37443-15i668j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=10%2C21%2C3631%2C2402&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Louisiana residents object to mask mandates at a state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education meeting in August 2021.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://newsroom.ap.org/detail/VirusOutbreakLouisiana/63969424eeb445a0bd0a8c217e038a34/photo">AP Photo/Melinda Deslatte</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>At school board meetings across the country in 2021, parents engaged in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/14/us/loudoun-county-school-board-va.html">physical altercations</a>, <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/back-to-school-live-updates/2021/08/30/1032417970/school-board-members-hostile-meetings-mask-mandates-politicized">shouted at</a> school board members and <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/16/podcasts/the-daily/school-boards-mask-mandates-crt-bucks-county.html">threatened them as well</a>.</p>
<p>These disagreements entered state politics, too, such as the 2021 <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/12/us/politics/virginia-governor-republicans-schools.html?referringSource=articleShare">Virginia governor’s race</a>, which was largely shaped by conflicts over the <a href="https://www.baconsrebellion.com/wp/yes-virginia-there-is-critical-race-theory-in-our-schools/">how issues of race and racism are taught in the K-12 curriculum</a>, and <a href="https://www.virginiamercury.com/2021/10/29/in-2020-the-legislature-passed-a-transgender-students-rights-law-it-largely-hasnt-been-enforced/">transgender student rights</a>. </p>
<p>Our September 2021 article in <a href="https://doi.org/10.1177/08959048211042567">Educational Policy</a> explains that the short-term conflicts that generate media attention – such as about <a href="https://www.edweek.org/leadership/schools-face-fears-of-critical-race-theory-as-they-scale-up-social-emotional-learning/2021/12">critical race theory</a> across the nation – are part of long-standing ideological debates about education. These conflicts are about issues such as who deserves academic opportunity, what the parameters of public education are and whether schools and universities ought to promote a positive image of the U.S. or explore its shortcomings. </p>
<p>As <a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=nezgztgAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao">researchers</a> who <a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=OomuRokAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao">study conflicts in education</a>, we see clashes like these continuing into 2022.</p>
<h2>1. Virtual education</h2>
<p>In 2022, expect conflicts over virtual school offerings to intensify, especially as the omicron variant surges and as some states push toward <a href="https://edsource.org/2021/california-school-vaccine-mandate-coming-soon-but-questions-remain/662985">vaccine mandates</a> for all students. At stake is whether parents should have control over how public funds are spent on educating their children, and the potential effects of diverting those funds away from traditional public schools. </p>
<p>In fall 2021, U.S. school leaders largely <a href="https://www.edweek.org/leadership/most-schools-are-teaching-in-person-this-school-year-latest-fed-data-say/2021/12">shifted their services back to in-person instruction</a> <a href="https://theconversation.com/school-year-off-to-a-rocky-start-4-ways-parents-can-help-kids-get-back-on-track-167609">after shutdowns and remote instruction</a> dominated the initial response to the coronavirus pandemic. </p>
<p>However, demand for home-schooling and virtual schooling <a href="https://www.edworkingpapers.com/sites/default/files/ai21-463.pdf">has risen</a>, as some parents discover that these forms of education offer greater flexibility in scheduling, control over curriculum and safety from the coronavirus. In Washington state, for example, enrollments in publicly funded virtual schools operated by for-profit companies have increased dramatically, such as Washington Virtual Academies, which <a href="https://www.seattletimes.com/education-lab/washingtons-for-profit-online-schools-attract-nearly-6000-more-students-this-school-year/">expanded enrollments by an estimated 85%</a> between the 2019-2020 and 2020-2021 school years. Similar <a href="https://www.edweek.org/leadership/covid-19-fuels-big-enrollment-increases-in-virtual-schools/2020/09">trends happened</a> in school districts across the country.</p>
<p>Enrollment data for the 2021-2022 school year are still emerging, but some school choice <a href="https://www.hks.harvard.edu/centers/taubman/programs-research/pepg/events/school-choice">experts</a> have argued that parental demand for virtual education is here to stay. However, in another research project, one of us found that students who switch to online schools <a href="https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X20909814">experience substantial learning losses</a> in reading and math during each of the three years after switching. That evidence has forced policymakers to consider <a href="https://www.wfyi.org/news/articles/state-committee-recommends-big-shift-for-virtual-charter-school-rules">greater regulation</a> of online schools, even as more parents consider taking their children out of traditional public schools and putting them in virtual ones.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/439217/original/file-20220103-117041-1ln4m7a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Students sit at computers, separated by clear plastic barriers" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/439217/original/file-20220103-117041-1ln4m7a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/439217/original/file-20220103-117041-1ln4m7a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/439217/original/file-20220103-117041-1ln4m7a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/439217/original/file-20220103-117041-1ln4m7a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/439217/original/file-20220103-117041-1ln4m7a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/439217/original/file-20220103-117041-1ln4m7a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/439217/original/file-20220103-117041-1ln4m7a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Schools’ decisions to provide in-person or virtual education sparked concern and conflict in 2021.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://newsroom.ap.org/detail/VirusOutbreak-SchoolDropouts/4fa2bc85087940e9b78914cac886b780/photo">AP Photo/Charlie Riedel</a></span>
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<h2>2. Affirmative action</h2>
<p>Affirmative action and similar policies in college admissions have always generated controversy, and 2022 will likely be no different. This year, a case that began in 2014 will reach the U.S. Supreme Court. That case, <a href="https://docs.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/massachusetts/madce/1:2014cv14176/165519/386">Students for Fair Admissions vs. Harvard University</a>, alleges that Harvard’s race-conscious admissions policies discriminate against Asian applicants. </p>
<p>The case has worked its way through the court system with a <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/19/us/affirmative-action-lawsuits.html">national roster of affluent plaintiffs</a>. This group has filed multiple unsuccessful lawsuits across the U.S., including an October 2021 loss in a similar case over admissions at the <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/us/university-north-carolina-defeats-challenge-race-based-admissions-policies-2021-10-19/">University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill</a>.</p>
<p>Similar lawsuits have also sprung up in <a href="https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/Lowell-High-lottery-admission-likely-to-remain-16705599.php">San Francisco</a> and <a href="https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/09/26/metro/secrecy-around-exam-school-admission-data-prompts-lawsuit/">Boston</a> over school districts’ efforts to make access to academically selective public schools more representative of student populations. These suits reflect broader ideological tensions over who deserves a well-funded, elite education and the government’s responsibility to protect that access.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/439219/original/file-20220103-25-k4qe4b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A student works at a desk while a teacher sits in the background" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/439219/original/file-20220103-25-k4qe4b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/439219/original/file-20220103-25-k4qe4b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/439219/original/file-20220103-25-k4qe4b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/439219/original/file-20220103-25-k4qe4b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/439219/original/file-20220103-25-k4qe4b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/439219/original/file-20220103-25-k4qe4b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/439219/original/file-20220103-25-k4qe4b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Teachers unions wielded significant power over how schools responded to the coronavirus pandemic.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/first-grade-student-alexis-tenorio-works-on-an-english-news-photo/1232327829">Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>3. Teachers unions</h2>
<p>In 2022, look to teachers unions to continue to assert themselves in the face of ongoing efforts by <a href="https://californiaglobe.com/articles/ca-parents-seek-to-abolish-the-california-teachers-association/">parent</a> and <a href="https://teacherfreedom.org">advocacy groups</a> to limit their power.</p>
<p>Over the past year teachers unions effectively negotiated the implementation of health safeguards against the spread of COVID-19
in <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/teachers-union-approves-deal-chicago-schools-return-class-n1257247">Chicago</a>, <a href="https://www.nationalreview.com/news/de-blasio-agrees-to-delay-school-reopening-to-avoid-teacher-strike/">New York City</a> and <a href="https://www.dailynews.com/2021/09/22/lausd-strikes-deal-with-teachers-union-to-provide-quarantine-instruction/">Los Angeles</a>. These unions secured protective measures such as virtual instruction, priority vaccine access for teachers, medical and personal leave related to COVID-19, explicit metrics to determine when schools would close, district-provided personal protective equipment for teachers and classroom air filtration systems. </p>
<p>While the pandemic dominates union activity at present, and <a href="https://www.edworkingpapers.com/ai20-304">many unions have not negotiated significant concessions</a>, these wins signal unions’ strategic and legal capacity to negotiate around issues such as compensation and working conditions. Given <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-59687947">current shortages of qualified teachers</a>, unions’ negotiation power may intensify. </p>
<h2>4. Gifted programs</h2>
<p>In 2022, gifted education may become a national debate. So far it has been prominent in New York City, but that may spread.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/15/nyregion/eric-adams-gifted-talented-nyc-schools.html">Mayor Eric Adams</a> said he intends to keep gifted programs in place. Gifted programs offer accelerated learning opportunities for students who score at the top of their class on standardized tests. Critics, such as the <a href="https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/1c478c_f14e1d13df45444c883bbf6590129bd7.pdf">School Diversity Advisory Group commissioned by former Mayor Bill de Blasio</a>, argue that gifted programs segregate students by race, since research has shown that <a href="https://doi.org/10.1177/2332858415622175">students of color are underrepresented</a> in these programs. </p>
<p>In California, policymakers have <a href="https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-05-20/california-controversial-math-overhaul-focuses-on-equity">unveiled a plan</a> to address this issue by grouping students of different mathematical ability in the same classrooms until their junior year. Only then will students be able to select advanced math courses, such as calculus or statistics. </p>
<p>This move may revive the 1980s’ so-called “<a href="https://www.brookings.edu/book/the-tracking-wars/">tracking wars</a>,” an intense debate over whether students should be offered different levels of curriculum based on their test scores. As other states and districts <a href="https://apnews.com/article/science-new-york-education-new-york-city-race-and-ethnicity-0f3d92179ff20b45c4747d3c84a026a2">consider overhauling their own gifted programs</a>, these short-term conflicts will likely add energy to the existing national fight concerning what role the education system should play in addressing inequality in the United States. </p>
<p>In all of these conflicts, be prepared in 2022 for policy advocates to use both conventional and unconventional strategies to advance their efforts. Further, expect those advocates to include politically and economically powerful actors as well as those who rarely have a voice in policy conversations. </p>
<p>In our research, which spanned the years 2010 to 2020, we saw conventional conflict actions such as <a href="https://www.npr.org/2019/02/19/695856032/w-va-teachers-go-on-strike-over-state-education-bill">teacher strikes</a>, <a href="https://denver.cbslocal.com/2015/02/19/months-after-protests-jeffco-board-scraps-ap-us-history-curriculum-review/">community protests</a> and <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/louisiana-gov-bobby-jindal-sues-obama-over-common-core-state-standards/2014/08/27/34d98102-2dfb-11e4-bb9b-997ae96fad33_story.html">lawsuits</a>. However, we also saw the successful use of less common efforts to challenge local, state and federal education policy, such as <a href="https://greensboro.com/news/local_news/deutsche-bank-cancels-job-expansion-in-cary-due-to-hb2/article_fea19dc6-e2c6-575d-adb9-d4a435d2863f.html">canceled business investments</a>, <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/11/the-surprising-revolt-at-reed/544682/">classroom sit-ins</a>, <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/jonathan-butler-how-grad-students-hunger-strike-toppled-university-president-n460161">a student hunger strike</a>, <a href="https://co.chalkbeat.org/2015/11/3/21093016/jeffco-school-board-members-who-pushed-controversial-changes-ousted-in-recall">school board recall votes</a>, <a href="https://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/nation-world/national/article163339228.html">teacher panhandling</a>, <a href="https://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20180628/OPINION/180629917/stuyvesant-s-valedictorian-find-a-way-to-diversify-my-school">pointed valedictorian speeches</a> and even <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/11/08/455216375/missouri-football-players-strike-to-demand-ouster-of-university-president">college football players’ threat to walk out on scheduled revenue-generating games</a>.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/171457/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Joseph J. Ferrare has received funding from the National Science Foundation, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Spencer Foundation, and U.S. Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences. </span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Kate Phillippo has received funding from the Spencer Foundation and the U.S. Department of Education.</span></em></p>
Short-term disputes are really symptoms of deeper divisions in the US over who deserves academic opportunity, and how to present the nation’s history.
Joseph J. Ferrare, Assistant Professor of Education Policy and Data Visualization, University of Washington, Bothell
Kate Phillippo, Professor of Social Work and Education, Loyola University Chicago
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/164016
2021-10-14T12:11:53Z
2021-10-14T12:11:53Z
The first battle in the culture wars: The quality of diversity
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/423609/original/file-20210928-28-1ek4ilr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=170%2C64%2C6666%2C4551&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Voting rights activists protest voter restriction laws being passed in states across the country, in Washington, D.C., July 15, 2021. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/voting-rights-activists-led-by-u-s-rep-joyce-beatty-and-news-photo/1328936506?adppopup=true">Alex Wong/Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>American diversity is in the spotlight as racial discrimination in the United States reemerges as <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/23/politics/residential-segregation-race-deconstructed-newsletter/index.html">a major topic</a> of public discussion, touching everything from <a href="https://www.wwno.org/education/2019-10-11/in-diverse-east-baton-rouge-an-affluent-white-area-seeks-its-own-city-school-district">education</a> to housing to policing.</p>
<p>The context of the quality of American diversity is inescapable as <a href="https://www.msnbc.com/the-reidout/watch/critical-race-theory-critic-conservative-activist-christopher-rufo-debates-joy-reid-115361349904">multiple</a> <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2019/04/09/how-americans-see-the-state-of-race-relations/">debates</a> around <a href="https://news.gallup.com/poll/1687/race-relations.aspx">race relations</a> <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/30/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-ta-nehisi-coates-nikole-hannah-jones.html">continue</a> to <a href="https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/sean-wilentz-fires-back-on-the-1619-project-and-the-climate-of-anti-history/">rage</a>. </p>
<p>We tend to think of diversity in demographic terms, but that’s an incomplete take. It has a qualitative element to it – it exists as a reality with which we all interact.</p>
<p>The <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/why-black-americans-still-face-obstacles-to-voting-at-every-step-2020-6">debate around voting rights</a>, for example, applies to an American electorate that overwhelmingly lives in racially segregated communities. </p>
<p>Even the bans on <a href="https://theconversation.com/bans-on-critical-race-theory-could-have-a-chilling-effect-on-how-educators-teach-about-racism-163236#comment_2562595">critical race theory</a> – the academic movement that examines how racism has shaped public policy – will be implemented in currently <a href="https://www.epi.org/publication/schools-are-still-segregated-and-black-children-are-paying-a-price/">racially segregated schools</a>.</p>
<p>But the quality of diversity is rarely discussed in popular culture. </p>
<p>The meaning of words like “equity” and “inclusion” – used often in discussions of diversity – is difficult to grasp until Americans address what they think “diversity” looks like. That’s because the quality of diversity comprises both a political and moral stance from which equity and inclusion derive meaning. </p>
<p>The quality of diversity is how Americans exist among each other. It can be described in two ways: segregated coexistence and living in community.</p>
<p>These two terms reflect a fundamental battle in American culture between segregation and integration. As a <a href="https://ct.ku.edu/people/nicholas-mitchell">curriculum theorist</a> who studies how race impacts education and society, I believe it is necessary to acknowledge this distinction. </p>
<h2>Segregated coexistence</h2>
<p>Segregated coexistence is a standard of diversity that relies on a surface-level demography that you could call “diverse” because different races all live in one geographic region, such as cities like Detroit or my native Baton Rouge, Louisiana.</p>
<p>Beneath this demography, the reality is a ubiquitous state of de facto racial segregation where enclaves are so numerous in American cities that people easily associate races and ethnicities with certain neighborhoods, schools and ZIP codes. </p>
<p>An August 2021 <a href="https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2021/us/census-race-ethnicity-map/">map compiled by CNN</a> based on 2020 census data vividly lays bare the endemic residential segregation in the U.S.</p>
<p>In June 2021, the Othering and Belonging Institute at the University of California, Berkeley, a research group, <a href="https://belonging.berkeley.edu/roots-structural-racism">released a report</a> on residential segregation. “Out of every metropolitan region in the United States with more than 200,000 residents, 81% (169 out of 209) were more segregated as of 2019 than they were in 1990,” the report noted.</p>
<p>It also asserted that “83% of neighborhoods that were given poor ratings (or ‘redlined’) in the 1930s by a federal mortgage policy that denied Blacks mortgages were as of 2010 highly segregated communities of color.”</p>
<p>Segregated coexistence is the racist seed from which many contemporary conflicts about race have their roots. </p>
<p>That’s because segregating where people live is physical confirmation of their forced inferiority. Denying them equitable treatment in other areas becomes easy once they have been denied the freedom of movement.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/423610/original/file-20210928-26-1svu957.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A white supremacist and a Black man argue." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/423610/original/file-20210928-26-1svu957.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/423610/original/file-20210928-26-1svu957.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/423610/original/file-20210928-26-1svu957.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/423610/original/file-20210928-26-1svu957.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/423610/original/file-20210928-26-1svu957.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/423610/original/file-20210928-26-1svu957.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/423610/original/file-20210928-26-1svu957.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A white supremacist and a Black man argue during a protest to demand justice for Daniel Prude, a Black man from Chicago who died after being restrained by police, on Sept. 3, 2020, in New York City.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/separated-by-police-officers-a-white-supremacist-and-a-news-photo/1228332495?adppopup=true">Kena Betancur/AFP via Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Living in community</h2>
<p>Living in community is a different reality. It’s not easily achieved because integration is hard for many reasons.</p>
<p>Before different races can live in community there must first be interracial justice that leads to racial reconciliation. <a href="https://nyupress.org/9780814796962/interracial-justice/">Noted scholar Eric Yamamoto</a> describes this process as the recognition of the historical and contemporary harm different racial groups have caused one another, affirmative efforts to address justice grievances and the restructuring of present-day race relations in such a way that broken relationships are healed.</p>
<p>The success or failure of integration depends on whether Americans want to racially reconcile or if they are so accustomed to the conflict that they cannot come together. </p>
<p>This means remaking how <a href="https://blog.dol.gov/2021/05/03/the-departments-role-in-advancing-racial-equity-and-supporting-underserved-communities">governments allocate resources </a>, including providing <a href="https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/education-k-12/reports/2018/11/13/460397/quality-approach-school-funding/">equitable funding for schools</a> and, in the private sector, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/07/business/dealbook/board-diversity-private-companies.html">diversifying executive leadership</a>. </p>
<p>Doing that work means answering the political and moral question that has been with us since this country’s founding: How should we treat those whom we see as different from us?</p>
<p>This question permeates everything from civil rights cases before the Supreme Court to whom we welcome as neighbors or ostracize as outsiders and trespassers. </p>
<p>All these debates have momentous implications for America’s domestic stability. But they are often discussed as a matter of theory and political talking points, with no grounding in the real world. </p>
<p>If we are going to debate diversity in any situation, perhaps we should ask ourselves if we want to live in segregated enclaves or in community, with the full knowledge of what that means and what our answer says about us as individuals and as a nation.</p>
<p>[<em>Understand what’s going on in Washington.</em> <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/newsletters/politics-weekly-74/?utm_source=TCUS&utm_medium=inline-link&utm_campaign=newsletter-text&utm_content=politics-most">Sign up for The Conversation’s Politics Weekly</a>.]</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/164016/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Nicholas Ensley Mitchell does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Americans tend to think of diversity in demographic terms, but it has a qualitative element to it that reflects a fundamental battle between segregation and integration.
Nicholas Ensley Mitchell, Assistant Professor of Curriculum Studies, University of Kansas
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/163413
2021-06-30T12:11:37Z
2021-06-30T12:11:37Z
When a Black boxing champion beat the ‘Great White Hope,’ all hell broke loose
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/408713/original/file-20210628-15-12h7z86.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=40%2C0%2C4514%2C2642&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Black heavyweight champion Jack Johnson, right, beat James Jeffries in 1910, sparking racial violence.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn85066387/1910-07-06/ed-1/seq-9/">George Haley, San Francisco Call, via University of California, Riverside, via Library of Congress</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>An audacious Black heavyweight champion was slated to defend his title against a white boxer in Reno, Nevada, on July 4, 1910. It was billed as “the fight of the century.”</p>
<p>The fight was seen as a referendum on racial superiority – and all hell was about to break loose in the racially divided United States.</p>
<p>Jack Johnson, the Black man, decisively beat James Jeffries, nicknamed “the Great White Hope.” Johnson’s triumph ignited <a href="https://timeline.com/when-a-black-fighter-won-the-fight-of-the-century-race-riots-erupted-across-america-3730b8bf9c98">bloody confrontations and violence</a> between Blacks and whites throughout the country, leaving perhaps two dozen dead, almost all of them Black, and hundreds injured and arrested. </p>
<p>“No event yielded such widespread racial violence until the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., fifty-eight years later,” Geoffrey C. Ward wrote in his biography of Johnson, “<a href="https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2004/11/18/the-man-with-the-golden-smile/">Unforgiveable Blackness</a>.”</p>
<p>Johnson’s victory, in the manliest of sports, contradicted claims of racial supremacy by whites and demonstrated that Blacks were no longer willing to acquiesce to white dominance. Whites were not willing to give up their power. The story has a familiar ring today, as America remains a <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/11/05/what-do-do-about-race-big-divider-american-politics/">country deeply divided by race</a>.</p>
<p>I began my book, “<a href="https://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/nebraska/9780803276802/">From Jack Johnson to LeBron James: Sports, Media, and the Color Line</a>,” with Johnson because the consequences of the fight’s aftermath would affect race relations in sports, and America, for decades.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/408928/original/file-20210629-15-i3ve54.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Illustrations showing troops preparing to leave and marching out of a town center" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/408928/original/file-20210629-15-i3ve54.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/408928/original/file-20210629-15-i3ve54.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=365&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/408928/original/file-20210629-15-i3ve54.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=365&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/408928/original/file-20210629-15-i3ve54.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=365&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/408928/original/file-20210629-15-i3ve54.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=459&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/408928/original/file-20210629-15-i3ve54.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=459&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/408928/original/file-20210629-15-i3ve54.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=459&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Federal troops leave New Orleans in April 1877, as Reconstruction ends.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.loc.gov/item/93505869/">A.J. Bennett in Frank Leslie's illustrated newspaper, via Library of Congress</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>A backdrop of racial hostility</h2>
<p>Born in 1878 in Galveston, Texas, Johnson grew up as the Jim Crow era in American history was getting started. The previous year, Rutherford B. Hayes became president <a href="https://www.history.com/topics/us-presidents/compromise-of-1877">after promising three former Confederate states</a> – South Carolina, Florida and Louisiana – that he would withdraw federal troops, who had protected the measure of racial equality Blacks were beginning to achieve.</p>
<p>As federal forces left, whites disenfranchised Black voters and passed segregation laws, which were enforced by legal and illegal means, including <a href="https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/insurgency-refocuses-need-for-history-of-white-mob-violence-to-be-taught-in-classroom/2021/01">police brutality and lynching</a>. <a href="https://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/nebraska/9780803210769/">Journalists</a>, too, sought to maintain social order by preserving myths about white supremacy.</p>
<p>Johnson’s boxing career challenged those myths. He dispatched one white fighter after another and taunted both the fighter and the crowd. He was brash and arrogant and made no attempt to show any deference to whites. He sped through towns in flashy cars, wore expensive clothes, spent his time with gamblers and prostitutes, and dated white women, which Black sociologist and commentator W.E.B. Du Bois considered “<a href="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/fight-jack-johnson-1878-1946/">unnecessarily alienating acts</a>.”</p>
<h2>Setting up a racial battle</h2>
<p>Johnson won the heavyweight title by easily defeating the defending champion Tommy Burns in 1908. Novelist Jack London, writing in the New York Herald, wrote about Johnson’s “hopeless slaughter” of Burns and, like other journalists, called on former champion James Jeffries to come out of retirement and “<a href="https://timeline.com/when-a-black-fighter-won-the-fight-of-the-century-race-riots-erupted-across-america-3730b8bf9c98">wipe that smile from Johnson’s face</a>.”</p>
<p>Jeffries announced to the world that he would “<a href="https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=128245468">reclaim the heavyweight championship for the white race</a>.” He became the “<a href="https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=128245468">Great White Hope</a>.”</p>
<p>The Chicago Defender, a Black newspaper, said Jeffries and Johnson would “settle the mooted question of supremacy.” The Daily News in Omaha, Nebraska, reported that a Jeffries victory would restore <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=L07wCgAAQBAJ&pg=PT10&lpg=PT10&dq=Johnson+would+settle+the+mooted+question+of+supremacy&source=bl&ots=Irf6RpfNOu&sig=ACfU3U0YUdyayxVqHeqRW_6mouIHYoLeSg&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiFu4ej4LXxAhXPKs0KHeMMAFYQ6AEwA3oECAkQAw#v=onepage&q=Johnson%20would%20settle%20the%20mooted%20question%20of%20supremacy&f=false">superiority to the white race</a>. </p>
<p>Before the fight, there were signs whites feared a Jeffries loss – and that this loss would not be restricted to the boxing ring but would have ramifications for all of society. </p>
<p>The New York Times warned, “<a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=L07wCgAAQBAJ&pg=PT10&lpg=PT10&dq=%22If+the+black+man+wins,+the+New+York+Times+editorialized,+%22thousands+and+thousands%22&source=bl&ots=Irf6RwhTIv&sig=ACfU3U03XhwVDEzCZVB9yIX_6RR0mjJUnw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjk_sfB7rfxAhVBpZ4KHcN7CBEQ6AEwAHoECAQQAw#v=onepage&q=%22If%20the%20black%20man%20wins%2C%20the%20New%20York%20Times%20editorialized%2C%20%22thousands%20and%20thousands%22&f=false">If the black man wins</a>, thousands and thousands of his ignorant brothers will misinterpret his victory.” The message was clear: If Jeffries won, white superiority would be proved – but if he lost, whites would still be superior. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/BnMJL36_oCs?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Footage of the Johnson-Jeffries fight.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Seeking to retain power</h2>
<p>After Johnson easily defeated Jeffries, the Los Angeles Times reinforced white supremacy, telling Blacks: “<a href="https://www.usprisonculture.com/blog/2012/10/07/a-word-to-the-black-man-a-reminder/">Do not point your nose too high</a>. Do not swell your chest too much. Do not boast too loudly. Do not get puffed up. … Your place in the world is just what is was. You are on no higher place, deserve no new consideration, and will get none.” Nearly a century later, <a href="https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2005-jan-14-ed-johnson14-story.html">the newspaper</a> apologized for that 1910 editorial.</p>
<p>In response to the violence, <a href="https://timeline.com/when-a-black-fighter-won-the-fight-of-the-century-race-riots-erupted-across-america-3730b8bf9c98">many cities forbade a film</a> of the fight to be shown in theaters. In 1912, Congress, citing the same motion picture, passed the Sims Act, <a href="https://reason.com/2018/05/25/jack-johnson-fight-films/">banning the transport of fight</a> films over state lines.</p>
<p>In doing so, it kept Blacks and whites from seeing Johnson beat a white man. Historian Jeffrey Sammons says, “in many ways, Johnson represented the ‘bad n—–’ that whites were so willing to parade as an example of why <a href="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/fight-jack-johnson-1878-1946/">blacks must be kept in ‘their place.</a>’”</p>
<h2>An outpouring of violence</h2>
<p>No white boxer could defeat Johnson in the ring, so white America worked to defeat him outside the ring. Johnson was <a href="https://www.history.com/news/white-slave-mann-act-jack-johnson-pardon">arrested in 1912</a> and charged <a href="https://www.pbs.org/kenburns/unforgivable-blackness/mann-act/">with violating the Mann Act</a>, which made it illegal to transport women across state lines “for the purpose of prostitution or debauchery, or for any other immoral purpose.” He served <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/24/sports/jack-johnson-pardon-trump.html">10 months in federal prison</a>. </p>
<p>But he was much more than one man. “No longer the respectful darky asking, hat in hand, for massa’s permission, Johnson was seen as the prototype of the independent black who acted as he pleased and accepted no bar to his conduct,” Randy Roberts wrote in “<a href="https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Papa-Jack/Randy-Roberts/9780029269008">Papa Jack</a>,” his biography of Johnson. “As such, Johnson was transformed into a racial symbol that threatened America’s social order.”</p>
<p>Whites responded to Johnson’s triumph by using violence to keep Blacks in their place by any and all means. When Black construction workers celebrated Johnson’s victory near the town of Uvalda, Georgia, whites began shooting. As the Blacks tried to escape into the woods, the whites hunted them down, killing three and injuring five, <a href="https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Papa-Jack/Randy-Roberts/9780029269008">Roberts wrote</a>. </p>
<p>Such scenes were <a href="https://www.upi.com/Archives/1910/07/05/Race-riots-in-dozen-cities-follow-Johnson-fight-victory/8746818371120/">repeated throughout the country</a>, according to local media reports. </p>
<p>When a Black man in Houston expressed his joy over the fight’s outcome, a white man “slashed his throat from ear to ear.” Another Black man in Wheeling, West Virginia, who was driving an expensive car, just like Johnson was known for, was dragged from his car by a mob and lynched. A white mob in New York City set fire to a Black tenement and then blocked the doorway to <a href="https://timeline.com/when-a-black-fighter-won-the-fight-of-the-century-race-riots-erupted-across-america-3730b8bf9c98">keep the occupants from escaping</a>. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/408933/original/file-20210629-28-18jepxh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A newspaper front page showing news of the fight result and ensuing violence" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/408933/original/file-20210629-28-18jepxh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/408933/original/file-20210629-28-18jepxh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=313&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/408933/original/file-20210629-28-18jepxh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=313&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/408933/original/file-20210629-28-18jepxh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=313&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/408933/original/file-20210629-28-18jepxh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=393&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/408933/original/file-20210629-28-18jepxh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=393&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/408933/original/file-20210629-28-18jepxh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=393&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Leavenworth Times in Kansas on July 5, 1910, published news of Johnson’s win and racial violence across the nation.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://hchm.org/floats-of-every-description-the-fight-of-the-century-july-4-1910/">Leavenworth Times via Harvey County Historical Museum</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>The sports world responds</h2>
<p>Johnson’s punishment served as a cautionary tale for Blacks during the Jim Crow era. Black athletes, however talented, whether it was sprinter Jesse Owens or boxer <a href="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/fight-black-boxers-and-idea-great-white-hope/">Joe Louis</a>, were warned they had to be the “right type” of Black person, one who knew his place and did not challenge the racial status quo. </p>
<p>In those sports where Blacks were not banned and instead begrudgingly allowed to compete with and against whites, there were violent attacks on Black athletes. <a href="https://theundefeated.com/features/jack-trice-life-and-football-career-were-tragically-cut-short/">Jack Trice</a>, an Iowa State football player, died of injuries from the attack he suffered in a game against the University of Minnesota in 1923. </p>
<p>The end of professional baseball’s color line in 1946 line was possible only because Jackie Robinson promised he would <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/2021/02/17/jackie-robinson-spring-training-story-75-years-ago/4488581001/">not respond to racist epithets</a> and physical abuse so that he would be acceptable to white America.</p>
<p>In the 1960s, white America taught Muhammad Ali, whom many considered the “wrong type” of Black athlete, the lesson it had once taught Jack Johnson. Ali, a brash Muslim who refused to defer to the demands of white supremacy, <a href="https://www.si.com/boxing/2020/04/28/this-day-sports-history-muhammad-ali-refuses-induction-army-stripped-title">was convicted of draft evasion</a> for refusing to be inducted into the armed services. He was stripped of his heavyweight title and sentenced to prison. </p>
<p>Other Black athletes, like sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos, baseball player <a href="https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/09/07/curt-flood-fought-for-free-agency-and-against-racism-but-who-remembers/">Curt Flood</a> and football player <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/2021/02/09/black-history-tommie-smith-colin-kaepernick-athlete-activism/6484313002/">Colin Kaepernick</a>, all found themselves punished and ostracized for challenging white supremacy.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/163413/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Chris Lamb does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Johnson’s victory, in the manliest of sports, contradicted claims of racial supremacy by whites and demonstrated that Blacks were no longer willing to acquiesce to white dominance.
Chris Lamb, Professor of Journalism, Indiana University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/162515
2021-06-22T20:02:59Z
2021-06-22T20:02:59Z
Here’s an approach to mentoring that can help close the leadership gender gap
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/407360/original/file-20210621-35447-36u9yj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C5176%2C3453&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/two-women-working-computer-contemporary-office-284518922">Shutterstock</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Mentoring is known to be a critical component of <a href="https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0207634">job satisfaction and career development</a>. It is also widely recognised that career advancement in medicine, research and health more broadly remains <a href="https://humanrights.gov.au/our-work/education/face-facts-gender-equality-2018">in favour of men</a>. </p>
<p>Traditional academic mentoring programs rely on a unidirectional mentor-mentee relationship: a senior academic mentors a junior (female) academic. This model has been shown to increase mentees’ <a href="https://bmcmededuc.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12909-018-1290-3">personal achievement</a>, <a href="https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0207634">career progress and satisfaction with work environment</a>. </p>
<p>While these are important achievements, <a href="https://www.publicanthropology.org/interrogating-model-mentoring-by-simone-dennis-and-alison-behie/">Simone Dennis and Alison Behie</a> <a href="https://theconversation.com/why-mentoring-for-women-risks-propping-up-patriarchal-structures-instead-of-changing-them-157965">argue</a> that “by replicating action of the mentors, junior women are merely trained how to navigate a system that favours men”. Traditional mentoring programs teach women how to work within, rather than change, a system biased against them. This perpetuates patriarchal structures.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/why-mentoring-for-women-risks-propping-up-patriarchal-structures-instead-of-changing-them-157965">Why mentoring for women risks propping up patriarchal structures instead of changing them</a>
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<p>We have established a mentoring program for women scientists that focuses on diversifying and changing the education sector. This program helps equip them to challenge systemic values and culture. </p>
<h2>What’s different about this model?</h2>
<p>The <a href="https://www.hotnorth.org.au/opportunities/catalyse-mentorship-program-women-scientists/">Catalyse Mentorship Program</a> in regional and rural Australia follows a dual-mentorship model. This means each female mentee is matched with an academic mentor and a corporate-sector mentor. </p>
<p>Our <a href="https://bmcmededuc.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12909-020-02219-w">research</a> found the Catalyse academic mentors provided technical university/ research pathways advice. They advised on explicit and implicit academic growth, such as formal university progression, the types of journals to publish in and how to distinguish one’s specific work. </p>
<p>The corporate mentors, on the other hand, provided advice on strategy, leadership and interpersonal skills. Advice included “how to generate consensus within a team and with external stakeholders”, “how to have difficult conversations”, and “how to build and express your personal brand”. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Chart showing topics discussed with Catalyse program's academic and corporate mentors" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/407373/original/file-20210621-22-1mups4y.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/407373/original/file-20210621-22-1mups4y.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/407373/original/file-20210621-22-1mups4y.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/407373/original/file-20210621-22-1mups4y.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/407373/original/file-20210621-22-1mups4y.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/407373/original/file-20210621-22-1mups4y.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/407373/original/file-20210621-22-1mups4y.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://bmcmededuc.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12909-020-02219-w">Chart: The Conversation. Data: Championing women working in health across regional and rural Australia – a new dual-mentorship model</a>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
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<p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/how-mentoring-improves-the-leadership-skills-of-those-doing-the-mentoring-143668">How mentoring improves the leadership skills of those doing the mentoring</a>
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<p>The Catalyse mentees reported positive “discomfort” at being pushed out of their “comfort zones”. This allowed them to reflect on leadership and impact outside their academic institution. The mentees set the agenda and explored first-time activities such as developing business cases, establishing peer-to-peer networking groups and applying for awards and accolades. </p>
<h2>Group approach has additional benefits</h2>
<p>Group mentoring is a way to go beyond supporting women and enhancing their capacity to manage a patriarchal culture. Bringing women together with a senior (retired) researcher has delivered several additional benefits compared to traditional unidirectional mentoring. </p>
<p>As the group members share their stories and worries, the sense of injustice and the care for each other increase. The women also bring a range of solutions and support to each other. This process strengthens ties within the cohort. </p>
<p>Such solutions are far more likely to be effective than those a single older mentor might suggest. That’s because they come from a contemporary context and a broader set of experiences. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="chart showing outcomes of Catalyse mentorship program" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/407371/original/file-20210621-62599-u32u50.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/407371/original/file-20210621-62599-u32u50.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/407371/original/file-20210621-62599-u32u50.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/407371/original/file-20210621-62599-u32u50.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/407371/original/file-20210621-62599-u32u50.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/407371/original/file-20210621-62599-u32u50.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/407371/original/file-20210621-62599-u32u50.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://bmcmededuc.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12909-020-02219-w">Chart: The Conversation. Data: Championing women working in health across regional and rural Australia – a new dual-mentorship model</a>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/how-to-support-junior-staff-in-a-time-of-turmoil-for-universities-148917">How to support junior staff in a time of turmoil for universities</a>
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<p>In addition, all the groups we have mentored have debated carefully developed strategies aimed at changing the status quo. This would not have happened in one-on-one mentoring. Examples of these strategies are:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>request data on fund-raising within the organisation – and relate that data to gender as well as research area</p></li>
<li><p>demand administrative support for women who are asked to take on additional leadership or other roles – which made organisations look as if they were supporting more women but didn’t give them the capacity to manage those roles without significant impacts on their research time</p></li>
<li><p>present collective suggestions for the organisation to consider </p></li>
<li><p>push for the women to be the leading chief investigator on grant applications and first or senior author on papers, to be considered for national committees and to give keynote presentations at major conferences. </p></li>
</ul>
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<p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/forget-the-ideal-worker-myth-unis-need-to-become-more-inclusive-for-all-women-men-will-benefit-too-156107">Forget the ideal worker myth. Unis need to become more inclusive for all women (men will benefit too)</a>
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<p>One of us (Fiona Stanley) has experience in group mentoring of First Nations health research scholars. The benefits of sharing experiences within these cohorts is that the scholars are able to provide much more solid collective solutions than if in a one-on-one session with a non-Indigenous older researcher. </p>
<p>It was clear from these sessions that racism pervades the health academic sector. However, empowering the group of mentees has resulted in major activities to address racism in their organisations. These include: mentees offering to give major presentations to the executive teams, often bringing in external speakers who have more power; suggesting and running NAIDOC activities; and reviewing reconciliation action plans to make them real rather than a token or box-ticking exercise.</p>
<h2>3 key elements to bring about change</h2>
<p>A <em>strong</em> mentoring model should consider three key elements to close the leadership gap:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>mentees set the agenda and are empowered to initiate change within the organisation</p></li>
<li><p>diversify mentors, include mentors from corporate/business sectors, and do group mentoring to enhance networks </p></li>
<li><p>hold mentor networking events throughout the program, leading to cross-fertilisation between networks and (funding) opportunities.</p></li>
</ul>
<p>Mentoring programs like these provide a more rounded approach to closing the leadership gap. These programs offer participants both discipline-based technical advice and external guidance on personal attributes and the strategic thinking needed to lead. </p>
<p>As <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Mary-Wollstonecraft">Mary Wollstonecraft</a> <a href="http://www.womeninworldhistory.com/lesson16.html">wrote</a> in laying out the first steps toward bringing down the patriarchy for the betterment of all humanity, “I do not wish them [women] to have power over men; but over themselves.”</p>
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<p>
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<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/its-not-lack-of-confidence-thats-holding-back-women-in-stem-155216">It's not lack of confidence that's holding back women in STEM</a>
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<img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/162515/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Fiona Stanley received funding from NHMRC and ARC over many years of her research career; she no longer receives funds but is associated with several grants for which she is an unpaid advisor and mentor.</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Teresa Wozniak does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
One criticism of traditional mentoring is that it teaches people how to succeed by playing by existing rules, thus reinforcing the status quo. But mentoring can also be a force for change.
Teresa Wozniak, Senior Research Fellow and co-founder Catalyse Mentorship Program, Menzies School of Health Research
Fiona Stanley, Perinatal and pediatric epidemiologist; distinguished professorial fellow, Telethon Kids Institute
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/144708
2020-09-10T11:47:07Z
2020-09-10T11:47:07Z
Community land trusts could help heal segregated cities
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/355598/original/file-20200831-22-1t2intn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=11%2C0%2C3882%2C2627&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Efforts to build wealth for Black Americans could focus on property ownership.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/resident-tiffany-jessup-poses-for-a-portrait-at-savannah-news-photo/1173047316">Matt McClain/The Washington Post via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>American cities represent part of the nation’s long and <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/06/24/magazine/reparations-slavery.html">grim history of discrimination and oppression</a> against Black people. They can also be part of the recovery from all that harm.</p>
<p>Some cities’ work can be symbolically important, such as removing public monuments that honor oppression. But as professors of <a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=HSr3W8AAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao">urban sustainability</a> and <a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=aSSRcJkAAAAJ">community development</a> at Arizona State University, we see that <a href="https://www.worldcat.org/title/toward-sustainable-communities-solutions-for-citizens-and-their-governments/oclc/782101048">cities can do much more</a> to address inequality, starting with an area that was key to past discrimination: how land is used.</p>
<p>Zoning rules, including requirements that prohibit duplexes or anything other than <a href="https://www.shareable.net/zoned-apart-how-the-us-failed-to-share-land-but-should-start-today/">single-family homes on residential lots</a>, have helped maintain class and racial segregation. <a href="https://doi.org/10.1177/0096144203029004002">Lending practices</a> like <a href="https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0096144203029004002">redlining</a> that discriminate mostly against people of color in specific urban neighborhoods have <a href="https://upittpress.org/books/9780822959397/">entrenched poverty and inequality</a> in U.S. cities. </p>
<p>One result is that the average Black family with children in the U.S. has just <a href="https://doi.org/10.1177%2F2378023120916616">one cent of wealth for every dollar</a> held by the average white family with children.</p>
<p>Some calls to resolve these inequalities have <a href="https://centerforneweconomics.org/publications/proposal-for-a-black-commons/">raised an idea</a> with century-old roots: community land trusts to assemble land for the <a href="https://theconversation.com/land-loss-has-plagued-black-america-since-emancipation-is-it-time-to-look-again-at-black-commons-and-collective-ownership-140514">benefit of Black Americans</a>.</p>
<h2>Cities consider compensation</h2>
<p>Some cities are already looking at ways to promote racial equality. In July, the Asheville, North Carolina, city council <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/live-updates-protests-for-racial-justice/2020/07/15/891700076/asheville-n-c-approves-steps-toward-reparations-for-black-residents">unanimously passed</a> a resolution directing the city manager “to <a href="https://www.scribd.com/document/468725433/Reparations-for-Black-Asheville">boost economic mobility and opportunity</a> in the Black community.”</p>
<p>Also in July, the <a href="https://www.providenceri.gov/mayor-jorge-elorza-announces-truth-telling-reconciliation-municipal-reparations-process/">mayor of Providence, Rhode Island</a> issued an executive order “<a href="https://www.providenceri.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Mayors-Executive-Order-2020-13-1.pdf">committing the City to a process of truth, reconciliation and municipal reparations</a> for Black, Indigenous (Indian) People, and People of Color in Providence.”</p>
<p>To carry out these lofty goals, they could take a page from history.</p>
<h2>A new kind of land ownership</h2>
<p>In the 1960s, civil rights organizers recognized that denying property rights was a key method of reinforcing white supremacy in the U.S., blocking people from putting down roots in a community, limiting their political power as well as wealth.</p>
<p>They devised a system called a “<a href="http://cltroots.org">community land trust</a>” as a way for <a href="https://community-wealth.org/strategies/panel/clts/index.html">African American farmers to work rural land</a> for their own benefit. This was in stark contrast to the sharecropping system prevalent after the Civil War, where black families would rent small plots of land, or shares, to work themselves and in return give a <a href="https://www.history.com/topics/black-history/sharecropping">portion of their crop to the landowner</a> at the end of the year. </p>
<p>The first community land trust in rural Georgia in 1970 was established on land purchased by a small group of individuals with some federal grant assistance and became <a href="https://www.newcommunitiesinc.com/about.html">the largest single piece of land in the country owned by African Americans</a>, who got to keep all the proceeds from their labor. Although the trust, <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-04-29/alternative-homeownership-land-trusts-and-co-ops">New Communities Inc.</a>, was beset by drought and discrimination from the start and was forced to close by the late 1980s, it helped inspire people to create similar organizations across the country.</p>
<p>Community land trusts today are more often focused on housing. They are <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-04-29/alternative-homeownership-land-trusts-and-co-ops">community-run, nonprofit landholding organizations</a> that aim to help low-income buyers obtain homes. Trust land can be purchased or donated. The model allows community ownership of the land with individual ownership of houses. </p>
<p>With this model, a buyer can get into a home for less money than elsewhere in the local market, because they aren’t paying for the land – just the building. This makes homes more affordable, especially for low-income families who often can get down-payment assistance and low-interest mortgages from the trust as well. </p>
<p>The residents, who become members of the trust, elect board members to govern the organization and guide its development and investments to meet community needs and priorities.</p>
<p>Community land trusts are a form of <a href="http://www.smallhousingbc.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/PAH-report_final.pdf">permanently affordable housing</a> based on <a href="https://groundedsolutions.org/shared-equity-housing-numbers">shared equity</a>. The trust retains ownership of the land and maintains it for the benefit of homeowners present and future and the community as a whole. The homeowner leases the land but owns the building and pays for improvements. </p>
<p>The land lease sets out terms for any future sale of the property, letting the homeowner build equity through appreciation in value, while <a href="https://www.houstonclt.org/">ensuring the home remains affordable for future limited-income buyers</a>. This sort of shared-equity model may not appeal to people who can afford open-market housing. But for those otherwise priced out of the housing market, it is an opportunity to build equity and wealth, and establish credit and financial stability.</p>
<p>These <a href="https://housingmatters.urban.org/articles/three-ways-community-land-trusts-support-renters">trusts also serve renters</a> by providing long-term leases with limits on rent prices, as well as by investing in housing in communities where others won’t. They also can give a more formal voice to tenants, who otherwise are often ignored by local officials.</p>
<p>There are now between 225 and 280 community land trusts in the U.S., which together have <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-04-29/alternative-homeownership-land-trusts-and-co-ops">around 15,000 home ownership units and 20,000 rental units</a>. </p>
<p>To encourage more of this type of development, <a href="https://citylimits.org/2017/12/20/council-to-vote-on-key-housing-bills-at-busy-last-meeting/">New York City passed a bill</a> in 2017 exempting community land trusts from certain taxes. <a href="https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/City-plan-to-expand-affordable-housing-will-rely-13656027.php">Houston</a> in 2019 announced a plan to use a <a href="https://www.houstonclt.org/">community land trust</a> to develop 1,000 affordable units.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/355603/original/file-20200831-16-1bec9e9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Seattle's Fire Station 6" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/355603/original/file-20200831-16-1bec9e9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/355603/original/file-20200831-16-1bec9e9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/355603/original/file-20200831-16-1bec9e9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/355603/original/file-20200831-16-1bec9e9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/355603/original/file-20200831-16-1bec9e9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/355603/original/file-20200831-16-1bec9e9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/355603/original/file-20200831-16-1bec9e9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">This decommissioned fire station in central Seattle is slated to be turned over to a community land trust to benefit people of African descent in the area.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://frontporch.seattle.gov/2020/06/12/city-of-seattle-will-transfer-fire-station-6-to-community/">Joe Mabel/City of Seattle</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>A history of working together</h2>
<p>Local governments have formed several kinds of partnerships with community land trusts. In June, the city of Seattle announced it would transfer a decommissioned fire station to the Africatown Community Land Trust, saying “<a href="https://frontporch.seattle.gov/2020/06/12/city-of-seattle-will-transfer-fire-station-6-to-community/">we understand the urgency behind making bold investments in the Black community</a> and increasing community ownership of land.” Community members hope the site will play a key role in a <a href="http://www.seattle.gov/Documents/Departments/OPCD/OngoingInitiatives/SeattlesComprehensivePlan/EDIImpPlan042916final.pdf">city development plan that highlights Black entrepreneurs</a>. It’s one of several proposals in the region for <a href="https://www.kingcountyequitynow.com">Black-led community organizations to acquire underutilized public property</a>.</p>
<p>Cities have also used municipal zoning powers to require larger developers to donate a portion of new development to community land trusts or related entities such as <a href="https://www.localhousingsolutions.org/act/housing-policy-library/housing-trust-funds-overview/housing-trust-funds/">housing trust funds</a> for permanently affordable housing.</p>
<p>Partnerships between cities and community land trusts are a promising way to provide affordable housing and help low-income and minority families. As cities reflect on their roles in perpetuating institutional racism and what they can do to relieve it, they can use their zoning laws and negotiating power to support community land trusts, as one way to keep housing affordable and benefit minority communities.</p>
<p>[<em>The Conversation’s science, health and technology editors pick their favorite stories.</em> <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/newsletters/science-editors-picks-71/?utm_source=TCUS&utm_medium=inline-link&utm_campaign=newsletter-text&utm_content=science-favorite">Weekly on Wednesdays</a>.]</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/144708/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Mark Roseland has received funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), Canada. He is affiliated with the American Planning Association, the Canadian Institute of Planners, and RAIL Community Development Corporation in Mesa, Arizona. </span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Christopher Boone receives funding from the US National Science Foundation and the Wells Fargo Foundation. He is affiliated with the Global Consortium for Science and the Environment and the Alliance of Sustainability and Environmental Academic Leaders. </span></em></p>
Some calls to resolve racial inequities in the US have raised an idea with roots more than a century old: community land trusts to assemble property for the benefit of Black Americans.
Mark Roseland, Professor of Community Resources and Development, Arizona State University
Christopher Boone, Dean and Professor of Sustainability, Arizona State University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/137587
2020-05-06T12:20:52Z
2020-05-06T12:20:52Z
Black Americans are bearing the brunt of coronavirus recession – this should come as no surprise
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/332441/original/file-20200504-83764-k20coc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=7%2C28%2C4680%2C3085&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">When the shuttered economy reopens, how many black Americans will be left out in the cold?</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Virus-Outbreak-Unemployment-Funds/390acd85a7b94a2a8cfddfdd414dacfa/1/0">http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Virus-Outbreak-Unemployment-Funds/390acd85a7b94a2a8cfddfdd414dacfa/1/0Mark Lennihan</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>As the COVID-19 pandemic worsened in April, many Americans were shocked by the extent that black Americans were being disproportionately impacted: <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/14/opinion/sunday/coronavirus-racism-african-americans.html">higher infection rates, more deaths</a> and <a href="https://www.npr.org/2020/04/22/840276956/minorities-often-work-these-jobs-they-were-among-first-to-go-in-coronavirus-layo">greater job loss</a>.</p>
<p>But many black Americans were not surprised. </p>
<p>This is not new. The same dynamic has been going on at times of crisis for decades and generations.</p>
<p>As <a href="https://bloustein.rutgers.edu/rodgers/">a labor economist</a> and former chief economist at the U.S. Department of Labor under the Clinton administration, I know that history has shown that black Americans consistently <a href="https://theconversation.com/african-americans-economic-setbacks-from-the-great-recession-are-ongoing-and-could-be-repeated-109612">bear the brunt of recessions</a> and <a href="https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/katrina-washed-away-new-orleanss-black-middle-class/">natural disasters</a>.</p>
<h2>Economic history repeating itself</h2>
<p>Prior to this pandemic, the worst economic downturns in post-World War II America were the <a href="https://www.federalreservehistory.org/essays/recession_of_1981_82">1981-82 recession</a> and the Great Recession that followed <a href="https://www.federalreservehistory.org/essays/great_recession_of_200709">the 2007-2008 financial crisis</a>. During those downturns, the jobless rate of black Americans peaked at 20.2% and 14.8% respectively, according to my calculations. From each downturn’s onset, it took 16 and 18 months to hit those levels.</p>
<p>This pandemic has eclipsed those figures in just one month. My estimate – based on the historic link between the unemployment rate and initial claims, and April’s data – has the <a href="https://tcf.org/content/commentary/new-data-show-true-march-jobless-rate-near-20-percent/?session=1">black American unemployment rate</a> already exceeding 20%, compared to a white unemployment rate of 13%.</p>
<p>Black Americans have higher likelihoods of losing their jobs because those jobs are <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/04/economy/minority-job-losses-coronavirus/index.html">concentrated in the hardest-hit sectors of the economy</a>, such as hotels, restaurants, bars and other food services, and department stores.</p>
<p>Many who have kept their jobs face <a href="https://www.visualcapitalist.com/the-front-line-visualizing-the-occupations-with-the-highest-covid-19-risk/?mod=article_inline">higher risks of infection</a> because <a href="https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/04/occupations-highest-covid19-risk/">they work in “high touch” jobs</a> such as transit workers and grocery clerks.</p>
<p>Further, because they tend to <a href="https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2020/04/10/who-lives-in-the-places-where-coronavirus-is-hitting-the-hardest/">live in more densely populated communities</a>,
they also <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6915e4.htm">have a harder time practicing physical distancing</a>. </p>
<p>This, along with the <a href="https://robinkelly.house.gov/sites/robinkelly.house.gov/files/2015%20Kelly%20Report.pdf">long-standing chronic health challenges</a> of many black Americans, puts them at greater risks of infection, illness and death.</p>
<h2>Fewer resources</h2>
<p>Only when <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2020/04/16/bailout-money-hospitals-slow-get-out-missing-some-places-that-need-it-most-lawmakers-industry-groups-say/">the public protested</a> did they finally pass legislation that <a href="https://khn.org/news/in-coronavirus-relief-bill-hospitals-poised-to-get-massive-infusion-of-cash/">targeted additional resources</a> to the neediest hospitals. It took until the <a href="https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-paycheck-protection-program-has-run-out-of-money-but-its-not-the-only-option-to-keep-some-small-businesses-afloat-2020-04-20">second installment of the Paycheck Protection Program</a> for many minority and women-owned businesses to <a href="https://www.vanhollen.senate.gov/news/press-releases/van-hollen-calls-on-administration-to-ensure-minority-owned-small-businesses-are-not-shut-out-of-paycheck-protection-program-funding">get access to funds</a>.</p>
<p>Black Americans also tend to have <a href="https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2020/02/27/examining-the-black-white-wealth-gap/">access to fewer resources</a>, making it harder for them to be more resilient when faced with a challenge like a pandemic, recession or natural disaster.</p>
<p>This has been their experience during past economic recessions, but even during “normal” times, it is harder for black Americans to compete on a level playing field.</p>
<p>Lower wealth and smaller savings form part of a patchwork of <a href="https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/public-sector/our-insights/covid-19-investing-in-black-lives-and-livelihoods">long-standing structural barriers</a> that mean that in times of economic hardship, black Americans tend to get hit hardest.</p>
<p>Fewer <a href="https://www.brookings.edu/articles/unequal-opportunity-race-and-education/">education opportunities</a>, lower rates of work experience, <a href="https://hbr.org/2017/10/hiring-discrimination-against-black-americans-hasnt-declined-in-25-years">discrimination in hiring and pay</a> and <a href="https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Srvy_JobsProximity.pdf">having to live further away</a> from where jobs are located all contribute to higher unemployment rates, lower earnings, greater part-time employment and more underemployment.</p>
<p>So too does the high rates of incarceration. Economists have found that when the incarcerated population is factored in, black Americans are in <a href="https://www.rsfjournal.org/content/5/5/198">no better an economic position</a> than they were back in 1950.</p>
<p>As a result of these barriers to well-paying, sustainable jobs, the budgets of black American families tend to be more vulnerable to economic shocks.</p>
<h2>A false economy?</h2>
<p>The figures also undercut pre-coronavirus claims by the Trump administration that in terms of jobs, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/01/17/trump-takes-credit-low-black-unemployment-rates-most-black-voters-largely-disagree/">black Americans have never had it so good</a>.</p>
<p>Although the headline unemployment rate suggests black Americans over the last three years have experienced their best economy ever, when carefully examined this is not true. My analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data shows that the share of black high school graduates that were employed just before the coronavirus crisis took hold is still well below its pre-Great Recession level. This is also true for black college graduates.</p>
<p>And it has taken over 10 years for the incomes of black Americans <a href="https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/income-poverty/historical-income-people.html">to return to its pre-Great Recession level</a>. This all factors in to why the economic hit of the pandemic has been so hard for black Americans.</p>
<p>Trump likes to <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/19/white-house-report-compares-trumps-economic-record-to-obamas.html">compare the economy during his tenure to President Obama’s economy</a>, but such analysis doesn’t make sense. Trump inherited a strong economy, while President Obama inherited an economy that was reeling from the Great Recession. Trump should compare the economy under his administration to the first three years of President Bill Clinton’s second term, another peak in the economy’s expansion.</p>
<p>Under this comparison, the Trump economy looks less favorable for black Americans. Although the unemployment rate is lower, a comparison of the employment-population ratios – a measure that includes people not looking for work and is generally favored as a snapshot of labor market conditions – reveals that black Americans did better during the Clinton administration.</p>
<p>But when compared to past recessions, so too were many other Americans unprepared – even before the current crisis around 40% of American households <a href="https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/files/2017-report-economic-well-being-us-households-201805.pdf">could not pay an unexpected bill of US$400</a>.</p>
<p>Globalization and technological change have <a href="https://psmag.com/economics/what-caused-the-decline-of-unions-in-america">weakened institutions</a> such as unions. The Trump administration has undermined <a href="https://www.epi.org/publication/deregulation-year-in-review/">policies put in place to help create safe and fair workplaces</a>.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, tax cuts that <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/30/business/trump-tax-cuts-beat-gilti.html">favor corporations and wealthy individuals</a> and actions such as stock buybacks have further muted the impact of economic growth on Main Street.</p>
<p>The bottom line I see is that the U.S.’s failure to maintain its investments in human priorities such as education, unemployment insurance, housing and community services, and health and recreation services, is threatening the ability of all Americans to bounce back from economic adversity.</p>
<h2>Restoring resilience</h2>
<p>So what next? As a member of the New Jersey commission advising the governor on how and when to reopen, I’m looking at immediate economic concerns. But a long-term federal plan will reach more people.</p>
<p>Instead of another rehash of what typically happens, I think many black Americans – along with many Americans of all backgrounds – want a new and different response to addressing racial inequality. Polling from before the current crisis found that a <a href="https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2019/04/09/views-of-racial-inequality/#majorities-see-advantages-for-whites-disadvantages-for-blacks">majority of people acknowledge</a> that being black hurts a person’s chance of getting ahead.</p>
<p>Black Americans have historically borne the brunt of economic downturns, so they <a href="https://www.rsfjournal.org/content/5/5/198">will need a disproportionate share of resources</a> to create and sustain their resiliency, including policies that improve opportunity, lessen overall inequality and fight discrimination.</p>
<p>I suspect that many will say the country can’t afford that kind of investment. Past surveys have indicated <a href="https://www.people-press.org/2019/04/11/little-public-support-for-reductions-in-federal-spending/">a lack of general support for increased federal spending</a> on needy Americans and it is not known if COVID-19 will have changed minds.</p>
<p>But I believe we <a href="https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/public-sector/our-insights/covid-19-investing-in-black-lives-and-livelihoods">can’t afford not to invest</a> in better, sustainable communities. Failing to do so will condemn those left vulnerable – both black, and nonblack Americans alike – to suffer from future economic shocks.</p>
<p>[<em>You’re too busy to read everything. We get it. That’s why we’ve got a weekly newsletter.</em> <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/newsletters/weekly-highlights-61?utm_source=TCUS&utm_medium=inline-link&utm_campaign=newsletter-text&utm_content=weeklybusy">Sign up for good Sunday reading.</a> ]</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/137587/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>William M. Rodgers III does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Black Americans were left especially vulnerable to the economic impact of COVID-19 and history shows it will take them longer to rebound.
William M. Rodgers III, Professor of Public Policy and Chief Economist, Rutgers University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/126315
2019-11-15T13:28:36Z
2019-11-15T13:28:36Z
Haiti protests summon spirit of the Haitian Revolution to condemn a president tainted by scandal
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/301791/original/file-20191114-26202-1yymhsj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C13%2C4510%2C2984&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Jean Marcellis Destine, dressed as Haitian independence hero Jean-Jacques Dessalines, heads to a protest against President Jovenel Moïse in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Oct. 4, 2019. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Haiti-Protests/11d660c323c64a7fa26d140e9d3d9acb/4/0">AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>A radical, unlikely figure has emerged as the icon of Haiti’s months-long protests against President Jovenel Moïse, who stands <a href="https://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/americas/haiti/article231122978.html">accused of embezzling millions in public funds</a>.</p>
<p>That figure is <a href="https://theconversation.com/meet-haitis-founding-father-whose-black-revolution-was-too-radical-for-thomas-jefferson-101963">Jean-Jacques Dessalines</a>, the black Haitian revolutionary who defeated the French to free Haiti from colonial rule in 1804. By summoning Dessalines, Haitian protesters implicitly contrast the achievements of that revolution – <a href="https://theconversation.com/meet-haitis-founding-father-whose-black-revolution-was-too-radical-for-thomas-jefferson-101963">freedom, universal citizenship and racial equality</a> – with the disappointments of the Moïse government.</p>
<p>Dessalines wrote a radical <a href="https://haitidoi.com/constitutions/1805-2/">constitution</a> that eliminated racial hierarchy, established equality before the law and instituted freedom of religion in Haiti.</p>
<p>One of Haiti’s opposition political parties is called “<a href="https://ageofrevolutions.com/2016/02/15/the-2015-16-haitian-elections-politicizing-dessalines-and-the-memory-of-the-haitian-revolution/">Pitit Dessalines</a>” – Children of Dessalines. </p>
<p>When demonstrations began last year, simple stenciled images of Dessalines wearing a military hat and holding a protest sign appeared on walls across the capital. This year, at several marches, men in revolutionary-era garb have ridden the streets of Port-au-Prince on horseback. They were waving Dessalines’ red-and-black version of the Haitian flag inscribed with the words “Viv Lib ou Mouri” – “Live Free or Die.”</p>
<h2>A commitment to equality</h2>
<p>I am writing a biography of Dessalines, who has long been overshadowed outside of Haiti by the formerly enslaved revolutionary leader <a href="https://www.blackpast.org/global-african-history/loverture-toussaint-1743-1803/">Toussaint Louverture</a>, who is often heralded as Haiti’s founding father despite dying before independence.</p>
<p>My research on the <a href="https://uncpress.org/book/9781469625621/haitian-connections-in-the-atlantic-world/">diplomacy and state-building practices</a> of Dessalines, conducted using archives from the Caribbean, North America and Europe, shows the Americas’ first black head of state to be a <a href="https://theconversation.com/meet-haitis-founding-father-whose-black-revolution-was-too-radical-for-thomas-jefferson-101963">groundbreaking enlightenment thinker and revolutionary leader</a>.</p>
<p>At the time of his birth, around 1758, Haiti – then a French Caribbean slavery-based colony called <a href="https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674018266&content=reviews">Saint-Domingue</a> – was the most lucrative colony in the world. By the time of Dessalines’ 1806 assassination, it was the Americas’ first sovereign abolitionist state. </p>
<p>Though European and American powers refused to recognize the young nation, Dessalines steadfastly rebuffed any concession to world powers that might undermine Haiti’s hard-won independence. </p>
<p>In early 1804, Dessalines even <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5309/willmaryquar.69.3.0583?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents">declined</a> to sign a treaty with the British governor of Jamaica that would have given Haiti diplomatic recognition. The reason: It would have limited Haitian sea travel and allowed the British to occupy a strategic fort. </p>
<p>A few months before, when Dessalines discovered that white Frenchmen were plotting to overthrow his government, he <a href="http://faculty.webster.edu/corbetre/haiti/history/earlyhaiti/1805-const.htm">ordered the execution</a> of all remaining French people in Haiti. Some women and children were targeted in these public executions. </p>
<p>White world leaders took note of Dessalines’ gruesome retaliation against the French, which may have contributed to Haiti’s <a href="https://uncpress.org/book/9781469625621/haitian-connections-in-the-atlantic-world/">diplomatic isolation</a> in the early 19th century. Haiti’s independence would go unrecognized until 1825, when France <a href="http://islandluminous.fiu.edu/part04-slide06.html">finally conceded</a> that it had lost the war. </p>
<p>To maintain Haitian autonomy, Dessalines’ constitution also declared that only <a href="https://www.upress.virginia.edu/title/4876">Haitian citizens</a> and the Haitian government could own land and property in Haiti. </p>
<p>But he also <a href="https://uncpress.org/book/9781469625621/haitian-connections-in-the-atlantic-world/">established a policy of offering refuge</a> in Haiti for the downtrodden and oppressed of the Americas. In the decades to come, Haiti would welcome <a href="https://theconversation.com/donald-trump-doesnt-understand-haiti-immigration-or-american-history-87982">13,000 African Americans who fled racial discrimination in the southern U.S.</a> and many <a href="https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article-abstract/117/1/40/46487">others fleeing slavery in the Caribbean islands</a>.</p>
<p>Dessalines is the only Haitian revolutionary to have been incorporated into the <a href="https://theconversation.com/what-is-haitian-voodoo-119621">Haitian religion</a> as a spirit, named <a href="https://romantic-circles.org/praxis/circulations/HTML/praxis.2011.twa.html">Ogou Desalin</a>. Among Haitian spirits, the Ogou are known as warriors. Ogou Desalin is the warrior who defends liberty.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/301794/original/file-20191114-26243-1anftgg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/301794/original/file-20191114-26243-1anftgg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/301794/original/file-20191114-26243-1anftgg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/301794/original/file-20191114-26243-1anftgg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/301794/original/file-20191114-26243-1anftgg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/301794/original/file-20191114-26243-1anftgg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/301794/original/file-20191114-26243-1anftgg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/301794/original/file-20191114-26243-1anftgg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">An anti-government protest called by the artist community in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Oct. 20, 2019.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Haiti-Political-Crisis/56d84ed9c34042f49656e83fb2f9e14b/64/0">AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Wanted: government accountability</h2>
<p>This legacy underpins Haitians’ desire for a new kind of independence – an existence free of predatory leaders and <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/oct/11/haiti-and-the-failed-promise-of-us-aid">reliance</a> on <a href="https://theconversation.com/in-haiti-climate-aid-comes-with-strings-attached-108652">international aid that comes with strings attached</a>. </p>
<p>After the 2010 earthquake, many Haitians hoped that the devastation would <a href="https://lenouvelliste.com/article/78780/agriculture-energie-sante-priorites-des-usa-pour-reconstruire-haiti">inspire positive change</a>. Instead, the influx of foreign aid and global investment in Haiti opened the door for the <a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/can-haitis-corrupt-president-hold-on-to-power/">corruption</a> that has tainted Haiti’s last two leaders.</p>
<p>Moïse’s predecessor, Michel Martelly, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/08/world/americas/michel-martelly-haitis-president-departs-without-a-successor.html">departed office amid scandal</a> in February 2016 without a successor in place, leaving the country with a provisional government. Moïse, a businessman who was Martelly’s chosen successor, <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-38140316">became president in February 2017</a> with 56% of the vote. </p>
<p>To deter the fraud that had marred recent presidential elections in Haiti, <a href="https://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/americas/haiti/article93333377.html">monitors from the Organization of American States</a> supervised the vote. But many Haitians still doubted that Moise’s victory was <a href="https://www.caribbeanlifenews.com/stories/2016/12/2016-12-30-nk-haiti-electoral-process-cl.html">legitimate</a>. </p>
<p>By late 2017, Haitians had learned that <a href="https://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/americas/haiti/article231122978.html">Moïse was implicated</a> in an embezzlement scheme involving <a href="https://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/americas/haiti/article184740783.html">US$2 billion</a> meant to finance infrastructure development in the country. The pillaged funds came from an international organization called <a href="https://caricom.org/projects/detail/petrocaribe">PetroCaribe</a>, which sells Venezuelan gas and oil to Caribbean countries at reduced cost to free up money for development. Under Martelly and Moïse, Haiti’s extra money seems to have disappeared.</p>
<p>To make matters worse, <a href="https://theconversation.com/latin-america-shuts-out-desperate-venezuelans-but-colombias-border-remains-open-for-now-123307">Venezuela’s own political and economic crisis</a> has rendered the PetroCaribe program unable to meet Haiti’s oil and gas needs, creating an acute gas shortage. In mid-2018, Haiti’s government <a href="https://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/americas/haiti/article214722915.html">raised the cost of gas</a> by 38%.</p>
<p>Saying they are suffering the direct consequences of government corruption, angry Haitians <a href="https://www.npr.org/2019/06/11/731640235/protesters-demand-resignation-of-haitian-president-over-corruption-allegations">have demanded Moïse’s resignation</a>. The president, who has largely retreated from the public eye, <a href="https://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/americas/haiti/article235443547.html">refuses</a>. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/299916/original/file-20191101-88428-dwxy91.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C39%2C2044%2C1168&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/299916/original/file-20191101-88428-dwxy91.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C39%2C2044%2C1168&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/299916/original/file-20191101-88428-dwxy91.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/299916/original/file-20191101-88428-dwxy91.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/299916/original/file-20191101-88428-dwxy91.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/299916/original/file-20191101-88428-dwxy91.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/299916/original/file-20191101-88428-dwxy91.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/299916/original/file-20191101-88428-dwxy91.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Graffiti in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, shows the revolutionary hero Jean-Jaques Dessalines holding a sign reading, ‘Where is the PetroCaribe Money?’ November 2018.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Nathan Dize</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Legacies of imperialism</h2>
<p>Dessalines’ track record as a leader <a href="https://ageofrevolutions.com/2016/02/15/the-2015-16-haitian-elections-politicizing-dessalines-and-the-memory-of-the-haitian-revolution/">was not perfect</a>, either. </p>
<p>Shortly after he overthrew French rule, Dessalines declared himself emperor of Haiti and <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03585522.1984.10408024">revived the plantation system</a> that revolutionaries had just burned to the ground. Field workers were called “cultivateurs,” and they received some pay or a share of their crop. However, they were bound to a specific plantation. </p>
<p>This form of coerced labor resembled the U.S. sharecropping system and others <a href="https://jhupbooks.press.jhu.edu/title/problem-freedom">that arose across the Americas</a> after slavery ended. </p>
<p>Two centuries after his assassination in 1806, some still consider Dessalines a barbarous <a href="https://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/C/bo16724367.html">despot</a>. To others, he is an uncompromising <a href="https://www.worldcat.org/title/fondateur-devant-lhistoire/oclc/1892049">freedom fighter</a>. </p>
<p>Both of these conflicting portrayals reduce Dessalines to a one-dimensional character. The protesters inspired by his legacy aren’t necessarily ignoring Dessalines’ shortcomings. Instead, they are championing his unwavering determination to rid the country of foreign rule so that Haitians could live “<a href="https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/C12756259">by ourselves and for ourselves</a>.”</p>
<p>[ <em>Get the best of The Conversation, every weekend.</em> <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/newsletters/weekly-highlights-61?utm_source=TCUS&utm_medium=inline-link&utm_campaign=newsletter-text&utm_content=weeklybest">Sign up for our weekly newsletter</a>. ]</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/126315/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Julia Gaffield has received funding from the American Council of Learned Societies. </span></em></p>
Jean-Jacques Dessalines, who freed Haiti from French colonial rule in 1804, is revered as a spirit in the Haitian religion. Now he’s become an icon of the uprising against President Jovanel Moïse.
Julia Gaffield, Associate Professor of History, Georgia State University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/115548
2019-05-06T10:37:30Z
2019-05-06T10:37:30Z
Brazil’s long, strange love affair with the Confederacy ignites racial tension
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/272324/original/file-20190502-103063-1kkkuh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C271%2C3706%2C2426&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Visitors and performers at Brazil's 'Confederate Party,' held each April in São Paulo state.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Jordan Brasher</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The aroma of fried chicken and biscuits roused my appetite as the country sounds of Alison Krauss, Alan Jackson and Johnny Cash played over the loudspeakers.</p>
<p>This might have been a county fair back home in Tennessee, but it wasn’t. I was in a cemetery in rural Brazil, at the “<a href="http://festaconfederada.com.br/">Festa Confederada</a>” – the “Confederate Party” – an annual celebration of southern U.S. heritage held each April in Santa Bárbara d'Oeste, in São Paulo state. </p>
<p>A sign explaining “What the Confederate Flag Really Means” in both English and Portuguese greeted the roughly 2,500 visitors – most of them white – at the entryway of the American Cemetery. Inside, women wearing Antebellum-style hoop skirts square danced with men clad in gray Confederate uniforms. Couples in T-shirts were doing the two-step.</p>
<p>Just outside cemetery grounds stood black activists protesting the April 28 party with signs and banners saying, “Down with the Confederate flag.”</p>
<p>How did an American debate about racism make its way to Brazil? That’s a tangled question I’m unraveling in my dissertation research on <a href="https://scholar.google.com.br/citations?user=aahQqKkAAAAJ&hl=en">the history and meaning of Confederate symbols in Brazil</a>.</p>
<h2>The Confederacy comes to Brazil</h2>
<p>Brazil has a long, strange relationship with the United States Confederacy. </p>
<p>After the Civil War ended in 1865, ending slavery in the United States, some <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/blar.12202">8,000 to 10,000</a> Southern soldiers and their families left the vanquished Confederacy and went to Brazil. </p>
<p>There, slavery was still legal. Roughly <a href="https://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/Transatlantic_Slave_Trade_The#start_entry">40%</a> of the nearly 11 million Africans <a href="https://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/Slave_Ships_and_the_Middle_Passage">forcibly brought across the Atlantic</a> between 1517 and 1867 went to work on sugarcane plantations in Brazil. It was the last country in the Western Hemisphere to formally abolish slavery, <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/slavery-sociology">in 1888</a> – 23 years <a href="https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/slavery-abolished-in-america">after the United States</a>.</p>
<p>Legal slavery may have been a draw for the Confederate soldiers who migrated to Brazil after abolition. </p>
<p>Brazilian <a href="http://repositorio.unicamp.br/bitstream/REPOSIP/285977/1/Silva_CelioAntonioAlcantara_D.pdf">political economist Célio Antonio Alcântara Silva</a> analyzed letters sent to Brazilian consulates and vice-consulates in the United States at the end of the Civil War and found that <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/blar.12202">74% of Southerners inquiring about emigration were slaveowners</a>. </p>
<p>At the time, <a href="https://eh.net/encyclopedia/slavery-in-the-united-states/">25% of white Southern households owned slaves</a>. That means the people interested in moving to Brazil in the 1860s disproportionately represented a relatively small, slaveholding slice of the free Southern population. </p>
<p>Because the exact number of Confederate families that migrated to Brazil is unknown, it is impossible to state with certainty how many rejoined the slave trade upon arrival. Silva’s research finds records of 54 Confederate families that purchased, in total, <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/blar.12202">536 enslaved Africans</a> in Brazil.</p>
<p>The Brazilian historian <a href="https://ufrb.academia.edu/LucianaBrito">Luciana da Cruz Brito</a> has also found evidence in the 150-year-old Confederado journals she dug up that <a href="https://revistas.ufrj.br/index.php/RevistaHistoriaComparada/article/view/2354">slavery attracted white Southerners to Brazil</a>. </p>
<p>In one, an American named Charles Gunter wrote about his desire to purchase enslaved people in Brazil at a lower price than he could in the U.S. Another Confederado, James Gaston, expressed disappointment that he couldn’t bring recently freed African Americans to Brazil.</p>
<p><iframe id="tc-infographic-394" class="tc-infographic" height="400px" src="https://cdn.theconversation.com/infographics/394/0c6d9f49f4eb0045ae7f3692650eabbbf0a38cc8/site/index.html" width="100%" style="border: none" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<h2>Rural expertise</h2>
<p>Despite these historical records, many descendants of the Confederados dispute that slavery brought their forefathers to Brazil. </p>
<p>As early as the 1860s, Brazil was actively recruiting Southern American plantation owners, part of an <a href="https://www.history.com/news/confederacy-in-brazil-civil-war">immigration policy aimed at attracting</a> Europeans, European-American and other “white” migrants. According to historians <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/book/36697">Cyrus and James Dawsey</a>, who were <a href="https://www.alabamaheritage.com/issue-42-fall-1996.html">born and raised near Confederado communities in São Paulo</a>, Brazilian Emperor Dom Pedro II also promised cheap land to any American farmer who would come with a plow – a technology Brazil lacked.</p>
<p>Either way, thousands of white southerners <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/blar.12202">made Brazil their new home</a> after the Civil War. In São Paulo state, they established a somewhat closed and culturally homogeneous community that maintained its southern traditions for generations. </p>
<p>Brazil’s Confederados continued to speak English and to practice their Baptist, Methodist and Presbyterian faiths, introducing Protestantism to the Catholic country. </p>
<p>To this day, many Confederado descendants still <a href="http://fdasbo.org.br/site/historia/">describe</a> the Civil War as the “War of Secession” – <a href="https://www.journalofthecivilwarera.org/2018/09/what-the-name-civil-war-tells-us-and-why-it-matters/">one of its original southern names</a>. </p>
<p>And, since 1986, at the American Cemetery where their ancestors were laid to rest – as Protestants, they were barred from burial alongside Catholics – the <a href="http://fdasbo.org.br/site/">Fraternity of American Descendants</a> has held a low-profile, annual celebration of their southern heritage.</p>
<h2>Racism and the legacy of Charlottesville in Brazil</h2>
<p>For three decades, Brazil’s Confederate Party was relatively uncontroversial. </p>
<p>That <a href="https://liberal.com.br/cidades/s-barbara/movimentos-sociais-protestam-contra-uso-da-bandeira-confederada-1001118/">changed</a> after the events in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017 when an anti-racist protester Heather Heyer was murdered by a white supremacist <a href="https://theconversation.com/charlottesville-attack-shows-homegrown-terror-on-the-right-is-on-the-rise-78242">at the “Unite the Right”</a> march protesting the Virginia city’s <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/16/us/charlottesville-violence-spurs-new-resistance-to-confederate-symbols.html">planned removal of a statue</a> of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.</p>
<p>Racism is a persistent social problem in <a href="https://press.princeton.edu/titles/7846.html">multicultural Brazil</a>, where about half the population is of African descent. White Brazilians on average earn <a href="https://www.cartacapital.com.br/sociedade/seis-estatisticas-que-mostram-o-abismo-racial-no-brasil/">twice as much as</a> black Brazilians, and <a href="https://www.cartacapital.com.br/sociedade/seis-estatisticas-que-mostram-o-abismo-racial-no-brasil/">two-thirds of all prisoners</a> are black. </p>
<p>Efforts since 2010 to set racial quotas for <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2016/09/29/495665329/for-affirmative-action-brazil-sets-up-controversial-boards-to-determine-race">university admissions and government jobs</a> have been controversial. In a country where people use <a href="https://blackwomenofbrazil.co/racial-classification-and-terminology-in-brazil/">dozens of categories</a> to identify their race, allegations of fraud and <a href="https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/04/05/brazils-new-problem-with-blackness-affirmative-action/">questions about who is and isn’t “black”</a> have plagued the affirmative action system.</p>
<p>One month after the violence in Charlottesville, black activists in São Paulo organized a public <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fybBkbVqxA&list=PLlLA-q8V2jm_sdiJi792pSHz2hJgtY-NF">debate</a> with the Fraternity of American Descendants, which organizes the annual Confederate Party. The activists wanted to discuss its embrace of Confederate symbols. </p>
<p>“You can leave the flag behind,” said professor Claúdia Monteiro of <a href="https://www.facebook.com/UnegroAmericana/">UNEGRO</a>, a member organization of Brazil’s national <a href="https://www.blackpast.org/global-african-history/movimento-negro-unificado-founded-1978/">Unified Black Movement</a>. “Black people can’t. The stigma [it represents] is in the color of our skin.” </p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/272310/original/file-20190502-103078-1a6w92d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/272310/original/file-20190502-103078-1a6w92d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/272310/original/file-20190502-103078-1a6w92d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/272310/original/file-20190502-103078-1a6w92d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/272310/original/file-20190502-103078-1a6w92d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/272310/original/file-20190502-103078-1a6w92d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/272310/original/file-20190502-103078-1a6w92d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Activists from Brazil’s black rights movement protest the Confederate Party in Santa Bárbara d'Oeste, São Paulo state, April 28, 2019.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.facebook.com/UnegroAmericana/photos/a.2199940713651435/2199949216983918/?type=3&theater">Courtesy of UNEGRO</a>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The Fraternity of American Descendants insists their group does not represent racism. In a 2018 <a href="https://issuu.com/fdasbo/docs/boletim_fda_2017_09_web">bulletin</a>, the organization stated that it “does not discriminate based on race, gender, color, age, religion or on any other basis.”</p>
<p>Marcelo Dodson, ex-president of the Fraternity of American Descendants, said in the 2017 debate that the Civil War was a battle not for slavery but for small government, low taxes, free commerce and <a href="https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/01/underground-railroad-states-rights-114536">states’ rights</a> – a stance many American <a href="https://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/lost_cause_the">defenders of the Confederacy’s “lost cause”</a> also maintain. </p>
<h2>Confederate culture lives on</h2>
<p>The 2017 dialogue between black activists and Confederados, which was filmed and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fybBkbVqxA&list=PLlLA-q8V2jm_sdiJi792pSHz2hJgtY-NF">posted on YouTube</a>, did not resolve their <a href="https://liberal.com.br/cidades/regiao/historiador-destaca-heterogeneidade-de-imigrantes-norte-americanos-1004404/">disagreement</a>. </p>
<p>Last year, visitors to the Confederate Party were greeted by protesters who <a href="https://www.novomomento.com.br/Pol%C3%ADtica%20Cr%C3%ADtica/58872/festa-dos-confederados-enfrenta-protesto-da-unegro--">said</a> the Confederate flag was a symbol of oppression. </p>
<p>This year, black activists outside the cemetery in Santa Bárbara d'Oeste carried the same message, <a href="https://liberal.com.br/cidades/s-barbara/movimentos-sociais-protestam-contra-uso-da-bandeira-confederada-1001118/">saying</a> “a lot of blood” was shed under the auspices of the Confederate flag. They also played drums and practiced capoeira, <a href="https://utpress.utexas.edu/books/talhid">an Afro-Brazilian dance and martial art form</a>, in a display of Brazil’s deep African roots. </p>
<p>A week after the Confederate Party, <a href="https://cartacampinas.com.br/2019/04/x-mais-de-100-entidades-protestam-contra-o-uso-de-bandeira-racista-em-festa-de-santa-barbara-doeste/">at least 100 civil society groups</a> from across the country had signed a <a href="https://www.sbnoticias.com.br/noticia/Festa-Confederada-acontece-dia-28-em-SB-e-e-alvo-de-manifesto/167593">manifesto</a> criticizing the event’s use of “symbols that elevate white supremacy” – a sign of <a href="https://liberal.com.br/cidades/s-barbara/movimentos-sociais-protestam-contra-uso-da-bandeira-confederada-1001118/">growing Brazilian awareness</a> about the complicated, controversial history of the American Confederacy. </p>
<p>
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<img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/265344/original/file-20190322-36244-jav5vf.png?w=128&h=128">
<div>
<header></header>
<p><a href="http://www.aag.org">Jordan Brasher is a member of the American Association of Geographers</a></p>
<footer>The association is a funding partner of The Conversation US.</footer>
</div>
</section>
</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/115548/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jordan Brasher receives funding from the National Security Education Program's David L. Boren Fellowship, The University of Tennessee’s Thomas-Penley-Allen Fellowship, the W.K. McClure Scholarship for the Study of World Affairs, and the Stewart K. McCroskey Memorial Fund. Jordan Brasher is a member of the American Association of Geographers. </span></em></p>
The Confederate flag debate has arrived to Brazil, pitting black activists against the Brazilian descendants of soldiers who fled the South after the Civil War.
Jordan Brasher, Doctoral Candidate in Geography, University of Tennessee
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/112578
2019-02-27T11:40:48Z
2019-02-27T11:40:48Z
Cuba expands rights but rejects radical change in updated constitution
<p>Cuba has rejected a proposal to <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-cuba-gaymarriage/cuba-panel-closes-door-on-gay-marriage-constitutional-amendment-idUSKBN1OI00V">legalize same-sex marriage</a> in its new and revised constitution, a move that disappointed some gay rights activists. </p>
<p>An article that would have redefined marriage as a “union between two people” – rather than a “<a href="http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/cuba.htm">union between a man and a woman</a>” – was eliminated from a proposed new constitution, which was written last year by the National Assembly, <a href="http://www.cubahora.cu/uploads/documento/2019/01/05/nueva-constitucion-240-kb.pdf">analyzed and debated</a> in thousands of public meetings across the island and, on Feb. 24, approved by the Cuban people at referendum.</p>
<p>But marriage equality is not <a href="https://paquitoeldecuba.com/2018/12/19/que-paso-con-el-matrimonio-en-el-proyecto-de-constitucion/">totally off the table</a> in Cuba. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/cuba-actualiza-su-constitucion-expandiendo-derechos-pero-posponiendo-cambios-radicales-112360">Cuba actualiza su Constitución, expandiendo derechos pero posponiendo cambios radicales</a>
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<p>Marriage is now defined in the constitution as “a social and legal institution” and “one form of family organization.” In other words, same-sex marriage is not explicitly permitted – but it’s no longer strictly prohibited, either.</p>
<p>This is how social change works these days in Cuba, my home country and the subject of my <a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=A6rP7kYAAAAJ&view_op=list_works&citft=1&citft=2&citft=3&email_for_op=chabelalfonso%40gmail.com&authuser=1&gmla=AJsN-F7aJwdpY7gyIsy5ZO0ZZzic4RS5V6l95SwuP0h8Xko1jChPQIjqevXse1xhYMOXDZNyU0f9_QEnaAxnUQkmtkhBZkci8H2zFH8Gwuoqu9Qy7eyXNHc">academic research</a>. Progress is no longer revolutionary. It comes slowly, and cloaked in moderation. </p>
<h2>Slow change</h2>
<p>In this way, Cuba has undergone a <a href="https://theconversation.com/in-cuba-the-post-fidel-era-began-ten-years-ago-71720">gradual and dramatic metamorphosis</a> under the governments of Raúl Castro and his successor, <a href="https://theconversation.com/cubas-new-president-what-to-expect-of-miguel-diaz-canel-95187">President Miguel Díaz-Canel</a>. </p>
<p>Thanks to a <a href="https://theconversation.com/after-a-tense-50-years-obama-and-castro-announce-us-cuba-thaw-35635">thaw</a> in U.S.-Cuba relations under President Barack Obama, American tourists began visiting the communist country for the first time since the Kennedy administration placed a trade embargo on Cuba after Fidel Castro’s 1959 communist revolution.</p>
<p>Starting in 2008, Castro <a href="https://www.brookings.edu/research/cuba-is-changing-slowly-but-surely/">opened the economy to some foreign investment</a> and allowed Cuban workers – once confined to government jobs – to start <a href="https://www.inc.com/associated-press/cuban-entrepreneurs-first-business-group-cuba.html">small businesses</a>.</p>
<p>The new constitution – the fourth such update to Cuba’s founding document – creates official legal standing for Castro’s <a href="https://theconversation.com/castros-conundrum-finding-a-post-communist-model-cuba-can-follow-81242">economic reforms</a>, which had remained in legal limbo under a Cold War-era constitution that did not recognize private property or the business sector. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/261096/original/file-20190226-150688-1wzwsas.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/261096/original/file-20190226-150688-1wzwsas.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/261096/original/file-20190226-150688-1wzwsas.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=384&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/261096/original/file-20190226-150688-1wzwsas.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=384&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/261096/original/file-20190226-150688-1wzwsas.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=384&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/261096/original/file-20190226-150688-1wzwsas.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=482&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/261096/original/file-20190226-150688-1wzwsas.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=482&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/261096/original/file-20190226-150688-1wzwsas.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=482&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel with former President Raúl Castro, brother of Fidel Castro.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Cuba-May-Day/e7ef2e8ef22b4a44a70a1563767274cc/19/0">AP Photo/Desmond Boylan</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Many Cubans hoped the reform process would also expand civil liberties, bringing Cuban law more into line with its changing society. </p>
<p><a href="https://vistarmagazine.com/clandestina-gay-power/">LGBTQ rights groups</a>, in particular, launched public awareness campaigns about sexual diversity. By late 2018, the path seemed to have been paved <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jul/23/cubas-new-constitution-paves-way-for-same-sex-marriage">for gay marriage</a>. </p>
<p>But <a href="https://theconversation.com/as-cuba-backs-gay-marriage-churches-oppose-the-governments-plan-103198">religious groups fiercely opposed the move</a>, and ultimately the government removed new language defining marriage as a “union between two people.”</p>
<h2>Some hits, some misses</h2>
<p>Still, the <a href="http://www.cubahora.cu/uploads/documento/2019/01/05/nueva-constitucion-240-kb.pdf">newly approved constitution</a> does substantially expand social, political and economic rights in Cuba. </p>
<p>It limits Cuban presidents to two five-year terms. Previously, Cuba had no term limits. It also creates a prime minister position and strengthens local government, shifting power out of the executive. The criminal justice system in Cuba now operates on the presumption of innocence, not guilt.</p>
<p>Freedom of assembly, long restricted on the island, has also been expanded. </p>
<p>Previously, Cubans had the “right to meet, demonstrate and associate, for licit and peaceful purposes,” but only as part of a so-called “organización de masa” – the Cuban term for state-run groups. The new constitution removes the words “organizaciones de masa,” depoliticizing the freedom of assembly. </p>
<p>It remains to be seen whether the government will actually respect Cubans’ new right to form <a href="http://icarusfilms.com/if-reth">independent organizations</a> – especially if those groups are political in nature. </p>
<p>“Spontaneous gatherings [in Cuba] are not seen positively and are always perceived to be the product of a foreign power,” wrote José Gabriel Barrenechea of La Trinchera, a blog for and by “young Marxists,” in a <a href="http://www.desdetutrinchera.com/politica-en-cuba/se-discutio-el-proyecto-de-constitucion/?fbclid=IwAR0vGf03JQk4PBmtrLBXp5kDhxSixCq__mOOW2Onw3-W0BI2SPEpgAH1HbU">recent post</a>.</p>
<h2>Greater equality</h2>
<p><a href="http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/cuba.htm">Cuba’s prior constitution</a> prohibited discrimination on the basis of race, skin color, sex, national origin and religious belief. Now <a href="http://www.cubahora.cu/uploads/documento/2019/01/05/nueva-constitucion-240-kb.pdf">gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, ethnic origin, disability and territorial origin</a> have been added to the list. </p>
<p>The National Assembly stopped short of proposing any affirmative action policies, however, which would have been a more radical step toward equality. </p>
<p>The 1959 Cuban Revolution aimed to <a href="https://www.amazon.com/nacion-desigualdad-politica-1900-2000-Spanish/dp/8492355093">abolish all economic and racial differences</a> among the Cubans, at least <a href="http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2015/8/13/amid-sweeping-changes-in-us-relations-cubas-race-problem-persists.html">36 percent of whom are Afro-Cuban</a>. And Cuba’s inequality levels still remain well below other <a href="https://www.cepal.org/en/pressreleases/poverty-latin-america-remained-steady-2017-extreme-poverty-increased-highest-level">countries in the region</a>.</p>
<p>But the recent economic reforms that increased prosperity for some have left certain minority groups – namely <a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/afro-cuban-activists-fight-racism-between-two-fires/">Afro-Cubans</a> and the elderly – behind. Anti-discrimination statutes do nothing to close the widening wage gap.</p>
<p>The verdict is also mixed on how women fare under new laws.</p>
<p>Abortion, which unlike in the <a href="https://theconversation.com/in-latin-america-is-there-a-link-between-abortion-rights-and-democracy-85444">majority of Latin America and Caribbean</a> has long been easily accessible in Cuba, is now officially protected in a provision guaranteeing women’s access to reproductive health services. And all forms of gender-based violence, not just domestic abuse and sexual assault, but also <a href="https://oncubanews.com/opinion/columnas/sin-filtro/el-ano-de-la-disputa-por-la-carta-magna/?fbclid=IwAR1o9d7muBdZUIVZUz0nVebHVRMRSVnAXqQr1Es3ToYG_d_QLM4uuG9MYfQ">street harassment and workplace intimidation</a>, are criminalized.</p>
<p>However, a popular constitutional guarantee that the government will provide free, universal child care and elder care to all working families women was <a href="http://www.sinpermiso.info/textos/cuba-el-ano-de-la-disputa-por-la-carta-magna">eliminated</a>. </p>
<p>This shifts the burden of care away from the government and onto the family. In a patriarchal society like Cuba’s, I believe women will inevitably assume <a href="https://oncubanews.com/opinion/columnas/sin-filtro/el-ano-de-la-disputa-por-la-carta-magna/?fbclid=IwAR1o9d7muBdZUIVZUz0nVebHVRMRSVnAXqQr1Es3ToYG_d_QLM4uuG9MYfQ">these domestic duties</a>.</p>
<p>Cubans evidently feared that other heralded rights would be lost, too. </p>
<p>In last year’s island-wide public meetings, people frequently <a href="https://mundo.sputniknews.com/america-latina/201902181085552213-diaz-canel-defiende-nueva-constitucion/">requested</a> assurances that universal health care and free public education through the post-graduate level would be maintained. </p>
<p>They were.</p>
<h2>Rights deferred</h2>
<p>But some long-hoped-for rights remain elusive.</p>
<p>Independent media <a href="http://www.cubahora.cu/uploads/documento/2019/01/05/nueva-constitucion-240-kb.pdf">is still prohibited</a>, a <a href="https://www.periodismodebarrio.org/2018/12/que-dice-la-nueva-politica-de-comunicacion-cubana">blow</a> to the blogs and alternative news sites that have cropped up to fill the information vacuum of a country where all news sources are government-owned.</p>
<p>Some analysts have observed that, as in the case of gay marriage, language defining the role of the media in Cuba was loosened somewhat. And in December the government announced it would <a href="https://www.elnuevoherald.com/noticias/mundo/america-latina/cuba-es/article216661380.html">allow</a> Cubans to access the internet on their smartphones.</p>
<p>This may leave the door open for greater press freedom in the future. </p>
<p>However, in my analysis, regional politics make that unlikely to occur any time soon. </p>
<p>For six decades, the U.S. government has tried to <a href="https://library.brown.edu/create/modernlatinamerica/chapters/chapter-4-cuba/moments-in-cuban-history/revolution-through-the-airwaves/">destabilize Cuban society</a> by broadcasting anti-Communist messages on radio and TV broadcasts. </p>
<p>Now, the U.S. Office of Cuba Broadcasting has turned its <a href="https://www.bbg.gov/wp-content/media/2018/02/BBGBudget_FY19_CBJ_2-7-18_Final.pdf">attention to social media</a>. The Trump administration in 2018 admitted that it tried to <a href="https://www.miaminewtimes.com/news/us-planned-cuban-facebook-propaganda-on-radio-tv-marti-10625033">create fake Facebook accounts</a> to foment dissent on the island, though it says the project “never got off the ground.” </p>
<p>This revelation will likely only strengthen the Cuban government’s resolve to limit Cubans’ access to information. </p>
<p>The constitutional reform process has confirmed that radical progress in Cuba will have to wait. But Cuba is changing, in zigs and in zags – just perhaps not as fast as some might hope.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/112578/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>María Isabel Alfonso is affiliated with Cuban Americans for Engagement (CAFE), an organization that advocates for the normalization of relations between Cuba and the U.S.</span></em></p>
Cuba will not legalize same-sex marriage, as gay activists hoped. But its new constitution adds greater protections for LGBTQ people and for women, and gives Cubans the right to own private property.
María Isabel Alfonso, Professor of Spanish, St. Joseph's College of New York
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/105616
2018-11-05T14:26:23Z
2018-11-05T14:26:23Z
What the racial equality movement can learn from the global fight for women’s rights
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/243864/original/file-20181105-12015-6n9dfq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/black-lives-matter-sunday-protest-downtown-483296818?src=UPBgzgs5IkMsTrJLgnSEVA-1-9">Diego G Diaz / Shutterstock.com</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Full equality might remain a distant goal, but the gender equality movement has made considerable progress internationally. The same cannot be said of racial equality. Campaigns tend to remain regional or national, rather than international, due to the complexity of ethnicity and the nuanced nature of racial categories. </p>
<p>But there is potential for those fighting against racism to learn from the gender equality movement. Despite the fact that both have historically different struggles for recognition and emancipation, the success of the women’s movement shows there is scope for developing transnational solidarity when it comes to equality. It is this switch to becoming an international movement that is crucial for success.</p>
<p>Progress in gender campaigns involved international treaties and agreements. The most remarkable one is the <a href="https://www.ohchr.org/EN/ProfessionalInterest/Pages/CEDAW.aspx">Convention on the Elimination of all kinds of Discrimination Against Women</a>, which was adopted in 1979 by the United Nations General Assembly and has been signed by 191 countries. Along with other gender equality laws and regulations, it has led to considerable progress <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=-UANAAAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false">toward gender equality across the world</a>.
International agreements are important for the spread of ideas of equality and diversity. They turn into national regulation and this kind of legal pressure has a bigger impact on people and organisations acting more equally <a href="http://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTWDR2012/Resources/7778105-1299699968583/7786210-1322671773271/Chiongson-law-and-justice.pdf">than when it’s voluntary</a>. </p>
<p>But the <a href="https://www.ohchr.org/en/professionalinterest/pages/cerd.aspx">International Convention on the Elimination of All forms of Racial Discrimination</a>, which was adopted in 1969 and undersigned by 183 countries, has been less effective than its gender equivalent. In spite of this common UN mandate, the movement for racial equality has remained too local, with individual campaigns failing to get international consensus. </p>
<p>Only in rare cases does the struggle against racism go global – such as the international embargoes against apartheid in South Africa from the late 1970s and into the 1980s, which was very effective.</p>
<h2>Going global</h2>
<p>As well as international agreements, the drive toward gender equality has benefited from global gatherings like the UN’s periodic <a href="http://www.unwomen.org/en/how-we-work/intergovernmental-support/world-conferences-on-women">World Conferences on Women</a>. These would bring together government officials, NGO representatives, activists and journalists and create a real buzz around the issue of gender equality. </p>
<p>The Beijing conference in 1995 was a <a href="https://www.aauw.org/2014/08/20/1995-beijing/">turning point</a> for the women’s movement. It had 17,000 delegates from around the world and created a concrete action plan to further women’s rights. Similar international gatherings have not happened for the elimination of racism. </p>
<p>Another factor in the gender movement’s success has been its ability to create internationally agreed goals and definitions of gender equality – such as equal pay and tackling the gender gap. This makes it much easier to raise international awareness, and when a march for women’s equality takes place, it’s easy to understand and support around the world.</p>
<p>The same has not happened in the field of racial equality. In fact, the measures for racial equality are locally debated and widely contested. For example, the <a href="https://theconversation.com/why-the-uk-needs-its-own-black-lives-matter-moment-to-wake-up-to-police-racism-100998">Black Lives Matter</a> movement is very much US-centred. Meanwhile, the “Racism, it stops with me” <a href="https://itstopswithme.humanrights.gov.au/">campaign</a> in Australia is disconnected from Black Lives Matter in public consciousness. Yet they are both fighting institutional racism. </p>
<h2>Using data</h2>
<p>Global organisations are important conduits for the transfer of ideas of equality, diversity and inclusion. They have been instrumental in the adoption of gender equality rhetoric internationally. This potential remains untapped in the field of racial diversity and equality. </p>
<p>Recent <a href="https://www.accaglobal.com/content/dam/acca/global/PDF-technical/human-capital/pol-tp-tbcfdm-diversity-management.pdf">research</a> on equality and diversity in global organisations shows that most focus their efforts on gender equality. Because racial categories are discussed in a very local way and data is rarely collected, there is small scope for international debate or comparison. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/243862/original/file-20181105-83635-jl3fxi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/243862/original/file-20181105-83635-jl3fxi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/243862/original/file-20181105-83635-jl3fxi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/243862/original/file-20181105-83635-jl3fxi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/243862/original/file-20181105-83635-jl3fxi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/243862/original/file-20181105-83635-jl3fxi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/243862/original/file-20181105-83635-jl3fxi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Black Lives Matter is largely US-focused.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Rena Schild/Shutterstock</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>When it comes to gender equality there is clear data on things like the number of women on boards and the gender pay gap. Developing new measures of ethnic inclusion (and exclusion) is one way to better judge the efforts of international organisations and foster solidarity beyond national borders. </p>
<h2>Joining forces</h2>
<p>The fight for women’s rights has long struggled with the <a href="https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi">issue of intersectionality</a> – taking into account how some women suffer from other forms of discrimination, as well as their gender. This can include race but also class, sexual orientation, and disability. But, by and large, the white and wealthy feminist movement has been successful in securing intersectional allies around the world and transcending various hostilities <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/mar/08/international-womens-day-marked-by-protests-and-celebrations">to focus on common interests</a>. </p>
<p>The same is not true in the fight for racial equality, which has suffered from intersectional hostility, with different groups feeling like they are placed in a pecking order, often <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/aug/04/womens-march-bob-bland-interview-feminism-race">without a sense of solidarity</a>. In the US, for example, different racial groups are <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/mar/01/how-americas-identity-politics-went-from-inclusion-to-division">increasingly divided</a> instead of fighting together for equality. To build solidarity between different races and across borders, the race equality movement must develop a common purpose that can appeal to a wider public. </p>
<p>It must also make racial equality everyone’s responsibility rather than a problem of the few. The gender equality movement has also been successful in developing the case for gender equality as a <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/shelleyzalis/2018/10/30/lessons-from-the-worlds-most-gender-equal-countries/#f895c0d7dd8a">social, economic and political necessity</a> – the idea that if women suffer, society is poorer as a result. Campaigners for racial equality could develop these arguments too. </p>
<p>All progressive social movements need solidarity that can transcend their single category agendas. Intersectional solidarity is the way forward for both gender and racial equality movements to gain strength. This will require both movements to overcome their internal fighting and fears of diluting their individual message – and find a way forward for equality for all.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/105616/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Mustafa Ozbilgin received funding from ESRC and ACCA. </span></em></p>
The success of the women’s movement shows the importance of international solidarity.
Mustafa Ozbilgin, Professor of Organisational Behaviour, Brunel University London
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/102112
2018-10-16T04:31:27Z
2018-10-16T04:31:27Z
Fifty years later, Peter Norman’s heroic Olympic stand is finally being recognised at home
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/240730/original/file-20181016-165905-813omm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The Australian Olympic Committee posthumously awarded sprinter Peter Norman with an Order of Merit in June. His daughter Janita accepted the award on his behalf.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">David Crosling/AAP</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Fifty years ago today, American sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their black-gloved fists in the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2017/09/24/they-didnt-takeaknee-the-black-power-protest-salute-that-shook-the-world-in-1968/?utm_term=.6ad96acad8c5">Black Power salute</a> on the medal podium at the <a href="https://www.britannica.com/event/Mexico-City-1968-Olympic-Games">1968 Mexico City Olympics</a> to protest against racial inequality. </p>
<p>The protest became one of the most indelible sporting moments of the 20th century. Much less known, for a long time at least, was the silver medallist, Peter Norman, a white runner from Australia, who stood in solidarity with Smith and Carlos. </p>
<p>You may wonder why Smith raised his right hand while Carlos raised his left. Carlos forgot to bring his gloves to the ceremony. It was Norman <a href="https://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/the-civil-rights-movement-in-america-1945-to-1968/peter-norman/">who suggested</a> they share the only pair they had, leaving an even stronger impact on the viewer. </p>
<p>Norman didn’t raise his fist, but he did wear an “<a href="http://www.isreview.org/issues/61/feat-zirin.shtml">Olympic Project for Human Rights</a>” badge on his chest. After the games, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/news/2006/oct/05/guardianobituaries.australia">he said</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I believe that every man is born equal and should be treated that way.</p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/240731/original/file-20181016-165905-3rp91z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/240731/original/file-20181016-165905-3rp91z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=840&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/240731/original/file-20181016-165905-3rp91z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=840&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/240731/original/file-20181016-165905-3rp91z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=840&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/240731/original/file-20181016-165905-3rp91z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1056&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/240731/original/file-20181016-165905-3rp91z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1056&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/240731/original/file-20181016-165905-3rp91z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1056&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Norman (left), Smith and Carlos on the medal podium in Mexico City.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Different ways of remembering someone</h2>
<p>Whether a person is remembered, and how a person is remembered, can vary by time and space. Individual memory may not be consequential for society. However, collective memory by a group of people, especially the people of a nation, can be very influential. But collective memory is also selective, as French sociologist <a href="https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/O/bo3619875.html">Maurice Halbwachs</a> noted, as different groups of people can have different collective memories of the same person or event. </p>
<p>French historian <a href="https://eclass.gunet.gr/modules/document/file.php/ARTGU163/%CE%92%CE%99%CE%92%CE%9B%CE%99%CE%9F%CE%93%CE%A1%CE%91%CE%A6%CE%99%CE%91%20%28%CE%93%CE%95%CE%9D%CE%99%CE%9A%CE%91%29/89NoraLieuxIntroRepresentations.pdf">Pierre Nora</a> distinguished between what he refers to as <em>lieux de mémoire</em> (sites of memory) and <em>milieux de mémoire</em> (real environments of memory). </p>
<p>Examples of <em>lieux de mémoire</em> include monuments, memorials, museums, anniversaries and treaties. These are partially preserved memories of a person and are often fragmented. In contrast, <em>milieux de mémoire</em> attempt to completely preserve a person’s memory through historical depictions of their lives and accomplishments – biographies, documentaries and the like.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/i-will-stand-with-you-finally-an-apology-to-peter-norman-10107">'I will stand with you': finally, an apology to Peter Norman</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>When it comes to Norman, two countries have experienced different collective memories of him. He has been celebrated for his contributions to civil rights in the US, while Australia, a country that <a href="http://www.nma.gov.au/online_features/defining_moments/featured/end_of_the_white_australia_policy">pursued a whites-only immigration policy</a> for decades, chose to selectively forget him until recently.</p>
<p>The US has produced both <em>lieux de mémoire</em> and <em>milieux de mémoire</em> of Norman. Despite the initial outcry over the salute by Smith and Carlos, Norman became gradually integrated into the history of the <a href="https://www.history.com/topics/black-history/civil-rights-movement">civil rights movement</a> in the US. </p>
<p>At the <a href="https://www.britannica.com/event/Sydney-2000-Olympic-Games">2000 Sydney Olympic Games</a>, Norman was invited as a guest, not by the Australian Olympic Committee, but by the <a href="http://www.usatf.org/">USA Track and Field Federation</a>. </p>
<p>And when he died in 2006, the federation declared October 9, the day of his funeral, as Peter Norman Day. Then, in 2012, CNN aired a documentary, <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2012/04/24/sport/olympics-norman-black-power/index.html">The Third Man: The Forgotten Black Power Hero</a>, about Norman’s life story. </p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"1051950991686266880"}"></div></p>
<p>There are also two monuments remembering the 1968 black power salute in the US. One of them is at the new <a href="https://nmaahc.si.edu/">National Museum of African American History and Culture</a> in Washington DC. It includes a statue of Norman, gazing stoically from the medal stand in front of the American sprinters. </p>
<p>The other monument was erected in 2005 on the campus of Smith’s and Carlos’s alma mater, <a href="http://www.sjsu.edu/">San Jose State University</a> in California. For this piece, the second-place podium was left empty. Norman had <a href="https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/olympic-black-power-statue">declined to be depicted</a>, to allow visitors to stand in his place in solidarity with the two Americans instead. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/240727/original/file-20181016-165918-3m24ic.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/240727/original/file-20181016-165918-3m24ic.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/240727/original/file-20181016-165918-3m24ic.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/240727/original/file-20181016-165918-3m24ic.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/240727/original/file-20181016-165918-3m24ic.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=533&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/240727/original/file-20181016-165918-3m24ic.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=533&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/240727/original/file-20181016-165918-3m24ic.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=533&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The San Jose State monument to Smith and Carlos, minus Norman in the silver medal spot.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photo by Tim Liao</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/human-rights-and-the-olympics-games-of-freedom-or-oppression-8287">Human rights and the Olympics: games of freedom or oppression?</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Australia’s slow acceptance of Norman’s place in history</h2>
<p>Australia, by contrast, has only belatedly made efforts to remember Norman and his achievements in athletics and contributions to racial equality. </p>
<p>When Norman returned to Australia following the 1968 Olympics, he faced intense criticism from the public and media. He was also ostracised by the Australian Olympic Committee, who <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7674157.stm">decided not to send him</a> to the 1972 Munich Olympics, even though he had met the qualifying time on numerous occasions. (The AOC <a href="http://olympics.com.au/athlete/peter-norman">maintains</a> he was injured at the national Olympics trials and didn’t qualify.)</p>
<p>Norman <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/the-hero-too-many-of-us-still-dont-know-20120813-244vg.html">retired soon after</a>.</p>
<p>After his death in 2006, some Australians began recasting Norman’s actions in a more positive light. </p>
<p>In 2008, Norman’s nephew, Matt Norman, <a href="http://salutethemovie.com/">produced a documentary</a>, Salute, retelling the sprinter’s story. It was nominated for best documentary in the Film Critics Circle of Australia Awards. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/history-shows-sidney-crosby-could-have-stood-up-to-racial-injustice-85065">History shows Sidney Crosby could have stood up to racial injustice</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>But it was not until 2012 when <a href="http://www.andrewleigh.com/3389">the Australian parliament issued an official state apology</a> to Norman. And this April, the <a href="http://olympics.com.au/">Australian Olympic Committee</a> bestowed <a href="http://olympics.com.au/news/aoc-annual-general-meeting-orders-of-merit-to-australian-sporting-greats">an Order of Merit</a> posthumously to Norman. It was a significant gesture, given the AOC <a href="http://olympics.com.au/news/peter-norman-not-shunned-by-aoc">has consistently denied</a> blacklisting Norman after his return from Mexico. </p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"920800598835978240"}"></div></p>
<p>A statue of Norman will also <a href="https://www.sbs.com.au/news/peter-norman-statue-to-be-erected-in-melbourne">finally be erected</a> outside a stadium in his hometown, Melbourne, which is due to be completed in 2019. And October 9 will also be recognised in Australia as Peter Norman Day, too.</p>
<p>This recognition through both <em>lieux de mémoire</em> and <em>milieux de mémoire</em> is long overdue. Remarkably, Norman’s time in the 200m from the 1968 games still stands as an Australian record today. But his contributions to society should be remembered for far longer than what he achieved on the track.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/102112/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Tim Liao does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Sprinter Peter Norman has been memorialised in many ways in the US for his support of Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the 1968 Olympics. In Australia, it’s taken much longer.
Tim Liao, Professor of Sociology and Director of the Center for East Asian & Pacific Studies, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/101963
2018-08-30T10:49:16Z
2018-08-30T10:49:16Z
Meet Haiti’s founding father, whose black revolution was too radical for Thomas Jefferson
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/233722/original/file-20180827-75993-1psc3m3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A statue in Port-au-Pirnce honors Jean-Jacques Dessalines' legacy as a Haitian revolutionary. Now, a renamed Brooklyn street does, too.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">AP Photo/Dieu Nalio Chery</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Crowds cheered as local lawmakers on August 18 unveiled a street sign showing that Rogers Avenue in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/18/nyregion/little-haiti-dessalines-boulevard.html">would now be called Jean-Jacques Dessalines Boulevard</a>, after a Haitian slave turned revolutionary general. </p>
<p>When Dessalines declared Haiti’s independence from France in 1804 after a 13-year <a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/Avengers_of_the_New_World.html?id=x0FCX4Y8ufoC">slave uprising and civil war</a>, he became the Americas’ first black head of state. </p>
<p>Supporting the French colonial perspective, leaders across the Americas and Europe <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0144039X.2016.1196996">immediately demonized</a> Dessalines. Even in the United States, itself newly independent from Britain, newspapers <a href="http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/15562.html">recounted horrific stories</a> of the final years of the Haitian Revolution, a war for independence that took the lives of some <a href="http://www.uapress.ua.edu/product/Slaves-Who-Defeated-Napoleon,5154.aspx">50,000 French soldiers</a> and over <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14623528.2013.789181">100,000 black and mixed-race Haitians</a>.</p>
<p>For more than two centuries, Dessalines was <a href="https://www.versobooks.com/books/1440-the-american-crucible">memorialized</a> as a ruthless brute. </p>
<p>Now, say residents of Brooklyn’s “<a href="http://observer.com/2018/05/little-haiti-brooklyn-new-york-city/">Little Haiti</a>” – the blocks around Rogers Avenue, home to some <a href="https://bklyner.com/flatbush-little-haiti-finally/">50,000 Haitian-Americans</a> – it’s time to correct the record. They hope the newly renamed Dessalines Boulevard will burnish the reputation of this Haitian hero.</p>
<h2>Opposition to Dessalines</h2>
<p>Other New Yorkers aren’t so sure. </p>
<p>The New York City Council’s vetting committee labeled Dessalines a “<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/05/nyregion/little-haiti-flatbush-brooklyn-street.html">possibly offensive historical figure</a>,” tacitly referencing the <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00313220500106196">massacre of French citizens</a> that followed Haiti’s revolution. </p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/233937/original/file-20180828-86123-1hk4hmz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/233937/original/file-20180828-86123-1hk4hmz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=548&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/233937/original/file-20180828-86123-1hk4hmz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=548&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/233937/original/file-20180828-86123-1hk4hmz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=548&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/233937/original/file-20180828-86123-1hk4hmz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=689&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/233937/original/file-20180828-86123-1hk4hmz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=689&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/233937/original/file-20180828-86123-1hk4hmz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=689&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Haiti’s founding father.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://aponte.hosting.nyu.edu/visionary-aponte/">Book of Paintings, by Renée Stout</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/">CC BY-NC-ND</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Just after declaring independence, in early 1804, Dessalines discovered that local French colonists <a href="https://haitidoi.com/2015/10/30/dessalines-reader-1-april-1804/">were plotting</a> to overthrow his new government. He ordered all remaining French citizens in Haiti, except for a few <a href="http://faculty.webster.edu/corbetre/haiti/history/earlyhaiti/1805-const.htm">French allies</a>, to be killed. </p>
<p>My research indicates that between 1,000 and 2,000 white landowners and their families, merchants and poor French were executed, always in a very public fashion. Some estimates are as high as <a href="https://blackthen.com/haitian-massacre-organized-cleansing-against-white-population-in-haiti/">5,000</a>. </p>
<p>Dessalines, who protected <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5309/willmaryquar.69.3.0583?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents">all British, American and other non-French white people</a> living in Haiti, justified the killings as a <a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/Avengers_of_the_New_World.html?id=x0FCX4Y8ufoC">response to acts of war by France</a>. Despite Haiti’s declared independence, French imperial forces <a href="https://www.uncpress.org/book/9781469625621/haitian-connections-in-the-atlantic-world/">continued to threaten</a> invasion from their military outpost in Santo Domingo, modern-day Dominican Republic. </p>
<p>To his critics, however, Dessalines’ massacre amounted to “<a href="https://www.city-journal.org/html/dessalines-boulevard-16086.html">white genocide</a>.”</p>
<h2>The limits to Jefferson’s vision of equality</h2>
<p>In researching Dessalines for the biography <a href="https://haitidoi.com/">I am writing</a>, I found that that he was in many ways cut from the same cloth as Thomas Jefferson, George Washington and other American revolutionaries. </p>
<p>Dessalines was an Enlightenment thinker who espoused life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And he was willing to use strategic, bloody violence to free his people from colonial rule. </p>
<p>But in his commitment to black equality he was far more radical than America’s founding fathers, who freed the U.S. from England but let black Americans <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/03/science/civil-war-toll-up-by-20-percent-in-new-estimate.html">stay in chains for another nine decades</a>.</p>
<p>In June 1803, when Dessalines began planning for independence, <a href="https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-40-02-0450">he wrote</a> to President Thomas Jefferson. </p>
<p>Like Americans, he reported, Haitians were “tired of paying with our blood the price of our blind allegiance to a mother country that cuts her children’s throats,” he said. They would fight for their freedom.</p>
<p>Jefferson never responded. </p>
<p>Dessalines’ vision of an autonomous black state – a nation founded by enslaved people who killed their colonial masters – alarmed the patrician Virginia plantation owner, <a href="http://tjrs.monticello.org/letter/1748">Jefferson’s letters show</a>. The U.S. was also being pressured by southern slave states and French and British diplomats to <a href="https://www.abc-clio.com/Praeger/product.aspx?pc=D6315C">shun Haiti</a>. </p>
<p>Rather than reckoning with the ills of racial oppression and colonialism, most prominent thinkers <a href="http://www.iupress.indiana.edu/product_info.php?products_id=84748">across the Americas and Europe</a> interpreted Dessalines’ war as an example of African barbarity. </p>
<p>Haiti was run by a “hord of ferocious banditt” and led by “Barbarous Chieftains,” <a href="https://www.uncpress.org/book/9781469625621/haitian-connections-in-the-atlantic-world/">commented one British observer in 1804</a>. </p>
<h2>Pushing the Enlightenment further</h2>
<p>This <a href="https://www.versobooks.com/books/1440-the-american-crucible">racist view</a> of Dessalines persisted for two centuries. </p>
<p>Today, modern scholarship is redeeming Haiti’s founding father. </p>
<p>Dessalines challenged the <a href="https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/06/taking-the-enlightenment-seriously-requires-talking-about-race.html">universalist rhetoric</a> of the 1789 French Revolution, when idealists toppled their monarchy demanding “<a href="https://www.diplomatie.gouv.fr/en/coming-to-france/france-facts/symbols-of-the-republic/article/liberty-equality-fraternity">Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité</a>” – freedom, equality and fraternity.</p>
<p>Yet the French continued to <a href="http://www.blackpast.org/gah/haitian-revolution-1791-1804">use enslaved labor</a> to produce sugar, coffee and other crops in the Caribbean. Dessalines said France had shrouded their colonies in a “<a href="https://haitidoi.com/2015/12/31/dessalines-reader-29-november-1803/">veil of prejudice</a>.” He insisted that true egalité required black liberty, too. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/233286/original/file-20180823-149472-1wvbkrf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/233286/original/file-20180823-149472-1wvbkrf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/233286/original/file-20180823-149472-1wvbkrf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=711&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/233286/original/file-20180823-149472-1wvbkrf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=711&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/233286/original/file-20180823-149472-1wvbkrf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=711&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/233286/original/file-20180823-149472-1wvbkrf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=894&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/233286/original/file-20180823-149472-1wvbkrf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=894&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/233286/original/file-20180823-149472-1wvbkrf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=894&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The author discovered the only remaining copy of Haiti’s original 1804 Declaration of Independence in 2010.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Julia Gaffield</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This radical vision of black empowerment is evident in Haiti’s 1804 Declaration of Independence, signed by Dessalines. In 2010 <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/01/world/americas/01document.html">I located</a> the only known extant copy of this stunning founding document, <a href="https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/julia-gaffield-discovers-haiti-founding-document-in-british-national-archives-d8zrxv0v5xj">at the National Archives of the United Kingdom</a>. </p>
<p>The 1805 Constitution that followed reaffirmed the abolition of slavery in Haiti, making it the first free black state in the Western Hemisphere. </p>
<p>It also eliminated official racial distinctions. According to Haiti’s Constitution, all Haitians, regardless of skin color, would be <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/25096441">considered black in the eyes of the law</a>. In Dessalines’ philosophy, race was an ideological concept. By securing Haitian citizenship, a person became black. </p>
<p>Under Dessalines’ rule, blackness was to be the source <a href="https://theconversation.com/donald-trump-doesnt-understand-haiti-immigration-or-american-history-87982">of freedom and equality</a> – not bondage. </p>
<h2>Haiti’s rejection on the world stage</h2>
<p>Dessalines’ revolutionary fervor earned him international diplomatic isolation.</p>
<p>France refused to accept Haitian independence until 1825, when Haitian President Jean-Pierre Boyer <a href="https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250002365">agreed to pay</a> 150 million francs – equivalent to US$21 billion today – for the loss of human and territorial “property.” To ensure compliance, French warships with loaded canons threatened the country from the harbor of Port-au-Prince.</p>
<p>Things also went badly for the newly independent Haiti <a href="https://www.uncpress.org/book/9781469625621/haitian-connections-in-the-atlantic-world/">in its own neighborhood</a>. </p>
<p>Jefferson <a href="https://theconversation.com/donald-trump-doesnt-understand-haiti-immigration-or-american-history-87982">imposed an embargo on Haiti</a>, cutting off trade with the country from 1806 to 1808, and the U.S. <a href="https://www.uncpress.org/book/9781469625621/haitian-connections-in-the-atlantic-world/">refused to recognize</a> Haitian independence until 1862.</p>
<p>Dessalines was assassinated in 1806 by opponents within his own government. </p>
<h2>A modern black hero</h2>
<p>The international smear campaign almost succeeded in erasing Dessalines’ revolutionary legacy.</p>
<p>As <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/18/nyregion/little-haiti-dessalines-boulevard.html">one opponent</a> to the Little Haiti street renaming claimed, Dessalines is “obscure to most Americans.”</p>
<p>Even within <a href="https://ageofrevolutions.com/2016/02/15/the-2015-16-haitian-elections-politicizing-dessalines-and-the-memory-of-the-haitian-revolution/">Haiti</a>, Dessalines is overshadowed by the black Haitian military leader <a href="http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/14656.html">Toussaint Louverture</a>, allegedly a more restrained and diplomatic revolutionary. </p>
<p>But as scholars have revised the long-dominant racist narrative about Dessalines, public interest in the abolitionist has grown.</p>
<p>As the Haitian-American <a href="http://myemail.constantcontact.com/Brooklyn-Lawmakers-Celebrate-Street-Co-Naming-of-Jean-Jacques-Dessalines-Boulevard.html?soid=1103413547828&aid=YNH8z5_S990">New York Assemblywoman Rodneyse Bichotte</a> said in Brooklyn, the newly named Dessalines Boulevard is “undoing in a concrete and tangible way centuries of the trivialization of our history.”</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/101963/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Julia Gaffield receives funding from the American Council of Learned Societies. She is affiliated with the Democratic Party. </span></em></p>
A renamed Brooklyn street celebrates Jean-Jacques Dessalines, a Haitian slave turned president. For centuries his legacy was tarnished by allegations that Haiti’s revolution led to ‘white genocide.’
Julia Gaffield, Assistant Professor of History, Georgia State University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/89956
2018-02-07T11:26:10Z
2018-02-07T11:26:10Z
Black Americans mostly left behind by progress since Dr. King’s death
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/204651/original/file-20180202-19961-158fmoj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">How much has really improved for black people in the U.S. since 1968?</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://farm6.staticflickr.com/5603/15616873857_652015cfef_b.jpg">Ted Eytan</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>On Apr. 4, 1968, <a href="https://theconversation.com/what-activists-today-can-learn-from-mlk-the-conservative-militant-90058">Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.</a> was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, while assisting striking sanitation workers. </p>
<p>Back then, over a half century ago, the wholesale racial integration required by the <a href="https://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=false&doc=97">1964 Civil Rights Act</a> was just beginning to chip away at discrimination in education, jobs and public facilities. Black voters had only obtained <a href="http://www.history.com/topics/black-history/voting-rights-act">legal protections</a> two years earlier, and the <a href="https://www.hud.gov/program_offices/fair_housing_equal_opp/FHLaws">1968 Fair Housing Act</a> was about to become law. </p>
<p>African-Americans were only beginning to move into neighborhoods, colleges and careers once reserved for whites only. </p>
<p>I’m too young to remember those days. But hearing my parents talk about the late 1960s, it sounds in some ways like another world. Numerous African-Americans now hold positions of power, from mayor to governor to corporate chief executive – and, yes, once upon a time, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/05/us/politics/05elect.html">president</a>. The U.S. is a very different place than it was in 1968. </p>
<p>Or is it? As a scholar of minority politics, I know that while some things have improved markedly for Black Americans in the past 50-odd years, today we are still fighting many of the same battles as Dr. King did in his day.</p>
<h2>That was then</h2>
<p>The 1960s were tumultuous years indeed. During the <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=io17AwAAQBAJ&pg=PP15&lpg=PP15&dq=where+did+the+term+long+hot+summers+come+from&source=bl&ots=ZBuIqYORrs&sig=qImwiPBpOM_ZFK1DC-LQ2r1zlnQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjBl-_TxYDZAhVs7YMKHe6uAHEQ6AEIVDAH#v=onepage&q=where%20did%20the%20term%20long%20hot%20summers%20come%20from&f=false">long, hot</a> summers from 1965 to 1968, American cities saw approximately <a href="http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/kerner-commission-report-released">150 race riots and other uprisings</a>. The protests were a sign of profound citizen anger about a nation that was, according to the <a href="http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/kerner-commission-report-released">National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders</a>, “moving toward two societies, one black, one white — separate and unequal.” </p>
<p>Economically, that was certainly true. In 1968, just 10% of white people lived below the poverty level, while nearly <a href="https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/1969/demo/p60-68a.pdf">34% of African-Americans did</a>. Likewise, just 2.6% of white job seekers were unemployed, compared to <a href="https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/ERP-2010/pdf/ERP-2010-table43.pdf">6.7% of black job seekers</a>. </p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/204653/original/file-20180202-19915-k1blq8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/204653/original/file-20180202-19915-k1blq8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=916&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/204653/original/file-20180202-19915-k1blq8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=916&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/204653/original/file-20180202-19915-k1blq8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=916&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/204653/original/file-20180202-19915-k1blq8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1151&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/204653/original/file-20180202-19915-k1blq8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1151&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/204653/original/file-20180202-19915-k1blq8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1151&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Dismantling ‘Resurrection City’ in 1968.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">AP Photo/Bob Daugherty</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>A year before his death, Dr. King and others began organizing a <a href="https://poorpeoplescampaign.org/index.php/poor-peoples-campaign-1968/">Poor People’s Campaign</a> to “dramatize the plight of America’s poor of all races and make very clear that they are sick and tired of waiting for a better life.” </p>
<p>On May 28, 1968, one month after King’s assassination, the <a href="https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=91626373">mass anti-poverty march took place</a>. Individuals from across the nation erected a tent city on the National Mall, in Washington, calling it Resurrection City. The aim was to <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/01/remembering-martin-luther-king-jrs-solution-to-poverty/283193/">bring attention to the problems associated with poverty</a>. </p>
<p>Ralph Abernathy, an African-American minister, led the way in his fallen friend’s place. </p>
<p>“We come with an appeal to open the doors of America to the almost 50 million Americans who have not been given a fair share of America’s wealth and opportunity,” Abernathy said, “and we will stay until we get it.”</p>
<h2>This is now</h2>
<p>So, how far have Black people progressed since 1968? Have we gotten our fair share yet? Those questions have been on my mind a lot this month.</p>
<p>In some ways, we’ve barely budged as a people. Poverty is still too common in the U.S. In 1968, 25 million Americans — roughly 13 percent of the population — <a href="https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=91626373">lived below poverty level</a>. In 2016, <a href="https://poverty.ucdavis.edu/faq/what-current-poverty-rate-united-states">43.1 million – or more than 12.7% – did</a>.</p>
<p>Today’s Black poverty rate of <a href="https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2019/demo/p60-266.html">21% is almost three times that of whites</a>. Compared to the 1968 rate of <a href="http://www.russellsage.org/sites/default/files/rates-over-time-large_0.jpg">32%</a>, there’s not been a huge improvement. </p>
<p>Financial security, too, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/09/18/upshot/black-white-wealth-gap-perceptions.html">still differs dramatically by race</a>. In 2018 black households earned $57.30 for every $100 in income earned by white families. And for every $100 in white family wealth, black families held just $5.04.</p>
<p>Another troubling aspect about black social progress – or the lack thereof – is how many black families are headed by single women. In the 1960s, unmarried women were the main breadwinners for <a href="https://www.irp.wisc.edu/publications/focus/pdfs/foc121e.pdf">20% of households</a>. In recent years, the percentage has <a href="http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2013/jul/29/don-lemon/cnns-don-lemon-says-more-72-percent-african-americ/">risen as high as 72%</a>. </p>
<p>This is important, but not because of some outmoded sexist ideal of the family. In the U.S., <a href="https://www.unicef.org/argentina/spanish/ar_insumos_PEMujeresjefashogar.pdf">as across the Americas</a>, there’s a powerful connection between <a href="https://nwlc.org/resources/women-and-poverty-state-state/">poverty and female-headed households</a>.</p>
<p>Black Americans today are also more dependent on government aid than they were in 1968. About 40% of African-Americans are poor enough to qualify for <a href="https://www.statisticbrain.com/welfare-statistics/">welfare, housing assistance and other government programs</a> that offer modest support to families living under the poverty line.</p>
<p>That’s <a href="https://www.statisticbrain.com/welfare-statistics/">higher than any other U.S. racial group</a>. Just <a href="https://www.statisticbrain.com/welfare-statistics/">21% of Latinos, 18% Asian-Americans and 17% of whites</a> are on welfare.</p>
<h2>Finding the bright spots</h2>
<p>There are, of course, positive trends. Today, far more African-Americans graduate from college – 38 percent – <a href="https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/04/26/college-completion-rates-vary-race-and-ethnicity-report-finds">than they did 50 years ago</a>. </p>
<p>Our incomes are also way up. Black adults experienced a more significant income increase from 1980 to 2016 – <a href="http://blackdemographics.com/households/african-american-income/">from $28,667 to $39,490</a> – than any other U.S. demographic group. This, in part, is why <a href="https://www.urban.org/urban-wire/stalled-struggling-black-middle-class">there’s now a significant black middle class</a>. </p>
<p>Legally, African-Americans may live in any community they want – and from Beverly Hills to the Upper East Side, <a href="http://newafricanmagazine.com/how-the-1964-civil-rights-act-cost-black-america/">they can and do</a>.</p>
<p>But why aren’t those gains deeper and more widespread? </p>
<p>Some prominent thinkers – including the award-winning writer Ta-Nehisi Coates and “<a href="http://newjimcrow.com/about">The New Jim Crow</a>” author Michelle Alexander – put the onus on institutional racism. Coates argues, among other things, that racism has so held back African-Americans throughout history that <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations-a-narrative-bibliography/372000/">we deserve reparations</a>, resurfacing a <a href="http://www.crf-usa.org/brown-v-board-50th-anniversary/reparations-for-slavery-reading.html">claim with a long history in Black activism</a>. </p>
<p>Alexander, for her part, has famously said that racial profiling and the mass incarceration of African-Americans are just <a href="https://www.uua.org/multiculturalism/ga/new-jim-crow">modern-day forms of the legal, institutionalized racism</a> that once ruled across the American South. </p>
<p>More conservative thinkers may hold Black people solely accountable for their problems. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development <a href="https://www.vox.com/2015/2/20/8069151/ben-carson-dr">Ben Carson is in this “personal responsibility” camp</a>, along with public intellectuals like <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/article/297176/debunking-racism-myths-thomas-sowell">Thomas Sowell</a> and <a href="https://www.creators.com/read/larry-elder/07/07/blacks-banks-and-institutional-racism">Larry Elder</a>. </p>
<p>Depending on who you ask, then, Black people aren’t much better off than in 1968 because either there’s not enough government help or there’s too much.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/204658/original/file-20180202-19933-1laa440.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/204658/original/file-20180202-19933-1laa440.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=475&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/204658/original/file-20180202-19933-1laa440.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=475&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/204658/original/file-20180202-19933-1laa440.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=475&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/204658/original/file-20180202-19933-1laa440.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=597&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/204658/original/file-20180202-19933-1laa440.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=597&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/204658/original/file-20180202-19933-1laa440.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=597&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">In 1963, 250,000 people marched on Washington to demand equal rights. By 1968, laws had changed. But social progress has since stalled.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">United States Information Agency</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>What would MLK do?</h2>
<p>I don’t have to wonder what Dr. King would recommend. He believed in institutional racism. </p>
<p>In 1968, King and the Southern Christian Leadership Council sought to tackle inequality with the <a href="https://mlkglobal.org/2017/11/23/dr-kings-econ-bill-of-rights-revived/">Economic Bill of Rights</a>. This was not a legislative proposal, per se, but a <a href="http://www.msnbc.com/all/mlks-fight-against-economic-inequality#49742">moral vision of a just America</a> where all citizens had educational opportunities, a home, “<a href="https://mlkglobal.org/2017/11/23/dr-kings-econ-bill-of-rights-revived/">access to land</a>,” “a meaningful job at a living wage” and “a secure and adequate income.” </p>
<p>To achieve that, King wrote, the U.S. government should create an initiative to “abolish unemployment,” by developing incentives to increase the number of jobs for black Americans. He also recommended “another program to supplement the income of those whose earnings are below the poverty level.” </p>
<p>Those ideas were revolutionary in 1968. Today, they seem prescient. King’s notion that all citizens need a living wage portends the <a href="https://theconversation.com/money-for-nothing-has-the-time-come-for-universal-basic-income-71348">universal basic income</a> concept now gaining traction worldwide.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.ajc.com/news/local-govt--politics/bernie-sanders-leaders-don-just-praise-king-make-his-dream-real/ByhA3zOTESB4RLhPxbMtJJ/">King’s rhetoric and ideology</a> are also obvious influences on Sen. Bernie Sanders, who in the 2016 and 2020 presidential primaries has advocated equality for all people, economic incentives for working families, improved schools, greater access to higher education and for anti-poverty initiatives.</p>
<p>Progress has been made. Just not as much as many of us would like. </p>
<p>To <a href="https://www.npr.org/2014/01/20/264226759/a-promise-unfulfilled-1962-mlk-speech-recording-is-discovered">put it in Dr. King’s words</a>, “Lord, we ain’t what we oughta be. We ain’t what we want to be. We ain’t what we gonna be. But, thank God, we ain’t what we was.”</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/89956/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sharon D. Wright Austin does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
A minority politics scholar assesses black progress 52 years after MLK’s death based on poverty, jobs and wealth. ‘In some ways,’ she concludes, ‘we’ve barely budged as a people.’
Sharon D. Wright Austin, Professor of Political Science, University of Florida
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/89681
2018-01-08T12:13:23Z
2018-01-08T12:13:23Z
The freemasons no longer have significant influence in the British police
<p>The <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/dec/31/freemasons-blocking-reform-police-federation-leader">controversial issue</a> of serving police officers being members of the Freemasons has been a recurring theme in policing in England and Wales for some 50 years. There has been consistent disquiet about the potential for the organisation to exert informal political influence on the police, impinging on operational matters.</p>
<p>However, these days, the organisation has marginal, if any, influence on operational policing. This is in part thanks to constitutional changes within the service. Another factor is the increasingly diverse nature of the workforce, which employs far more women than hitherto.</p>
<p>Historically, the key concern has been that Freemasons have held informal but powerful influence over senior police officers who were also members of lodges. This is a total conflict of interest and contrary to the oath for the <a href="http://www.polfed.org/documents/The_Office_of_Constable_July15.pdf">Office of Constable</a>. </p>
<h2>Exposed</h2>
<p>The relationship between police officers and Freemasons became a major issue in the 1960s, largely as a result of investigative journalism by the The Times and The Sunday Times. Revelations were made about corruption in the Metropolitan Police’s CID unit and surrounding the activities of the <a href="https://theconversation.com/from-gambling-rings-to-sly-downloads-how-police-corruption-has-changed-37002">Obscene Publications Squad</a>. Senior officers were receiving illegal payments on a regular basis in return for allowing London sex shops to trade unrestricted.</p>
<p>The fact that London detectives shared membership of the same Freemason lodges as active high-profile London criminals became public knowledge. Senior officers were seen spending time with convicted London criminals in Mediterranean holiday villas.</p>
<p>Ultimately, this led to major reforms of the Metropolitan Police. Criminal investigations resulted in custodial sentences for a number of senior CID officers and voluntary retirements for many more.</p>
<p>This all unfolded during a period in which there was minimal accountability of the police, either at institutional or individual level. The Metropolitan Police, unlike their provincial colleagues, operated without a police committee or authority. It was answerable only to the home secretary. The first external body which oversaw some complaints against the police, the Police Complaints Board, which had limited powers, only became effective in 1976.</p>
<h2>The 1970s and 1980s</h2>
<p>By 1978, further criminal allegations into the alleged activities of London detectives emerged. “<a href="http://www.policecrimes.co.uk/">Operation Countryman</a>” – an external inquiry into criminal wrongdoing – was launched. </p>
<p>Countryman was eventually scaled down, even though enquiries had revealed far more potential criminality than initially envisaged. Allegations were made that “masonic influences” were instrumental in that inexplicable decision.</p>
<p>All the Countryman files were handed to the Metropolitan Police Criminal Investigation Board. That allowed the Metropolitan Police to investigate itself “in house”, without any external scrutiny. By July 1982, the 200 Countryman files had resulted in just one conviction.</p>
<p>Shortly after this, in 1983, the author Stephen Knight published a book called <a href="http://www.harpercollins.co.nz/9780007370726/the-brotherhood/">The Brotherhood</a>. This again highlighted the relationship between the police service and the Freemasons.</p>
<p>In the wake of the book, the then commissioner, Kenneth Newman, recommended that Metropolitan Police officers “stay away” from their lodges. However, in direct contravention of this decree, <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/public-face-of-the-masons-defends-right-to-privacy-1592413.html">the Manor of St James Lodge</a> was created for officers serving at New Scotland Yard. Membership included officers at chief officer level.</p>
<p>Disquiet was not confined to London. That same year the “Stalker affair” dominated the daily news. It involved allegations that masonic influences were at play in the decision to remove John Stalker, the then deputy chief constable of Great Manchester, from his post.</p>
<p>Stalker had been leading an external inquiry into allegations that members of the Royal Ulster Constabulary were <a href="http://www.irishnews.com/news/northernirelandnews/2016/12/30/news/shoot-to-kill-investigator-john-stalker-concerned-about-six-murders--856199/">shooting to kill</a> as they engaged with the Provisional IRA in Northern Ireland. Again, tangible evidence of masonic malpractice and influence was not forthcoming. Nevertheless, the issue of informal masonic influences was once again a concern.</p>
<h2>Modern times</h2>
<p>By the mid-1990s things began to change. The <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/police-complaints-authority">Police Complaints Authority</a>, the successor to the Police Complaints Board, urged the government to introduce legislation that would compel serving police officers to declare their membership of masonic lodges. This was rejected, but police forces introduced a voluntary scheme where officers could declare their membership and, by inference, any conflict of interest in their role as a police officer. </p>
<p>Currently, membership may conflict with Code No. 1 of the <a href="http://www.college.police.uk/What-we-do/Ethics/Documents/Code_of_Ethics.pdf">police Code of Ethics</a>. This refers to “honesty and integrity” and specifically mentions “acting with integrity at all times” and not acting to “compromise or abuse” the position of police officer.</p>
<p>The voluntary scheme was a forerunner for the enhanced accountability that police forces are subject to these days. Changes made back then have laid the foundations and discouraged membership among officers.</p>
<p>Police and Crime Commissioners have also been introduced to enhance police accountability. These local leaders are elected by citizens who ultimately can dismiss the chief officer. The introduction of the Code of Ethics has arguably broadened and heightened the requirement for propriety, in addition to the cultural shift towards a professional status via the <a href="http://www.college.police.uk/Pages/Home.aspx">College of Policing</a> – the only professional body for a police service in the world. The organisation has taken the lead on professional behaviour and development, encouraging a culture in which unprofessional practices are no longer tolerated.</p>
<p>The police service is also now far more inclusive and diverse. The Freemasons is an organisation almost exclusively for men, which is completely incongruent with the values and reality of the contemporary police service. That’s probably the most significant factor that has reduced this secret organisation to having marginal influence, if at all. </p>
<p>The “boys’ clubs” that pervaded the police service are a thing of the past. In fact, officers these days would be derided by colleagues if their membership became public knowledge, such is the cultural change that has occurred.</p>
<p>The debate regarding the Freemasons and the police service needs to be concluded and confined to that one of police history only. Those days have gone and the emphasis now is on diversity and transparency in decision making. While there will be always be work to be done to embed this further, police forces in England and Wales now reflect this.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/89681/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Peter Williams does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
As the service becomes more professional and diverse, the less it can be influenced by boys’ clubs.
Peter Williams, Practitioner Fellow in Policing, Liverpool John Moores University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/84042
2017-12-01T00:41:25Z
2017-12-01T00:41:25Z
Who are the Baha'is and why are they so persecuted?
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/197179/original/file-20171130-30931-mb6d9m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Entrance to the Shrine of Bahá’u’lláh, burial place of the founder of the Bahá’í faith, near Acre, Israel.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://news.bahai.org/legal">Bahá’í World News Service © Bahá'í International Community</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>The Baha'is are among the most persecuted religious minorities in the world.</p>
<p>In Iran, where the religion was founded, universities <a href="https://www.iranhumanrights.org/2017/09/iranian-bahai-students-offered-university-enrollment-in-exchange-for-renouncing-their-faith">refuse to admit Baha'i students</a>, <a href="https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/05/14/bahai-cemetery-iran-destroyed_n_5323286.html">Baha'i cemeteries have been destroyed</a> and the country’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei <a href="http://www.reuters.com/investigates/iran/#article/part1">has confiscated properties from Baha'i families</a>. Baha'is have also been discriminated against in <a href="https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2017/04/yemen-bahai-community-faces-persecution-at-hands-of-huthi-saleh-authorities/">Yemen</a> and in <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-egypt-bahai/bahais-in-egypt-fight-for-recognition-as-people-idUSL2757830620070221">Egypt</a>.</p>
<p>At the same time, the Baha'i faith has spread around the globe. There are more than 100,000 local <a href="http://www.bahai.org/national-communities">Baha'i communities</a> in places as diverse as <a href="http://www.cnn.com/style/article/bahai-temple-chile/index.html">Chile</a>, <a href="http://www.news.bahai.org/story/1190">Cambodia</a> and the <a href="https://www.bahai.us/">United States</a>.</p>
<p>On the 200th anniversary of the birth of Baha'u'llah, the founder of the Baha'i faith, the question remains: What is the reason for their persecution?</p>
<h2>Baha'u'llah and the Babi movement</h2>
<p><a href="https://oneworld-publications.com/baha-u-llah-pb.html">Baha'u'llah</a>, whose name means “Glory of God” in Arabic, was born in Tehran in 1817. Baha'u'llah’s father was a minister in Iran’s government, which supported Shi'i Islam as the state religion. As a member of Iran’s nobility, Baha'u'llah was offered a government position. Instead, he <a href="http://www.kalimat.com/resurrection.html">joined a new religious movement</a>, started by a young Iranian, known as the Bab.</p>
<p>The Babi movement called for revolutionary social changes and <a href="http://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=25087">championed women’s rights</a>. Quite controversially, the Bab claimed that his teachings were a revelation from God and <a href="http://www.bahaibookstore.com/Selections-from-the-Writings-of-the-Bab-P7293.aspx">predicted</a> that a new prophetic figure, or manifestation of God, would soon appear.</p>
<p>In 1850, the Bab was charged by Shi'i religious officials with heresy and was put to death by firing squad. Subsequent public protests and mob violence <a href="https://www.routledge.com/The-Bahais-of-Iran-Socio-Historical-Studies/Brookshaw-Fazel/p/book/9780415356732">claimed the lives of thousands of his followers.</a> </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/197176/original/file-20171130-30937-1alqghf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/197176/original/file-20171130-30937-1alqghf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=466&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/197176/original/file-20171130-30937-1alqghf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=466&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/197176/original/file-20171130-30937-1alqghf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=466&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/197176/original/file-20171130-30937-1alqghf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=586&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/197176/original/file-20171130-30937-1alqghf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=586&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/197176/original/file-20171130-30937-1alqghf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=586&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">In Acre in northern Israel, a former prison city of the Ottoman Empire, the barracks where Bahá’u’lláh was imprisoned starting in 1868.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://news.bahai.org/legal">Bahá’í World News Service © Bahá'í International Community</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>As part of its crackdown on the followers of the Bab, the Iranian government incarcerated Baha'u'llah. He was kept in an underground prison in Tehran, which Baha'u'llah describes in his writings as filthy, dark and “<a href="http://www.bahaibookstore.com/Epistle-to-the-Son-of-the-Wolf-P8480.aspx">foul beyond comparison</a>.” </p>
<p>The government released Baha'u'llah in 1853, and <a href="http://theisispress.org/book-b220.htm">exiled him to Baghdad</a>, then part of the Ottoman Empire. It was during this exile that he publicly announced the establishment of the Baha'i faith. Indeed Baha'u'llah claimed to be the manifestation of God that the Bab had foretold and gained a large following. </p>
<p>Ottoman officials later moved Baha'u'llah to the prison city of Akka in Palestine. He remained there until his passing in 1892. Today, Baha'u'llah’s shrine, now in Israel, is an important pilgrimage site.</p>
<h2>Baha'u'llah’s teachings</h2>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/197189/original/file-20171130-30931-1l7yxo5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/197189/original/file-20171130-30931-1l7yxo5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/197189/original/file-20171130-30931-1l7yxo5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/197189/original/file-20171130-30931-1l7yxo5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/197189/original/file-20171130-30931-1l7yxo5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/197189/original/file-20171130-30931-1l7yxo5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/197189/original/file-20171130-30931-1l7yxo5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Metal pen nib belonging to Bahá’u’lláh.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://news.bahai.org/legal">Bahá’í World News Service © Bahá'í International Community</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Baha'u'llah’s <a href="http://www.bahai.org/library/authoritative-texts/bahaullah">writings</a> form the foundation of the Baha'i faith. Throughout his life, Bah'u'llah penned over 100 volumes in Arabic and Persian. About a dozen of these have been translated into English and other languages. </p>
<p>His most well-known book is <a href="https://oneworld-publications.com/the-hidden-words-of-baha-u-llah-pb.html">“The Hidden Words,”</a> which is composed of short poetic statements that get to the heart of his spiritual and ethical teachings. </p>
<p>A primary theme of Baha'u'llah’s teachings is achieving world peace through the establishment of unity, justice and equality. Therefore, <a href="https://oneworld-publications.com/the-baha-i-faith-pb-1056.html">Baha'u'llah’s teachings</a> specifically advocate for racial unity, gender equality, universal education, and harmony of science and religion. </p>
<p>Baha'is, for example, embrace interracial marriage and education for girls. In fact, the first school for girls in Iran was established by the Baha'is. </p>
<p>Baha'is were nonetheless subjected to persecution, as some Muslim clerics perceived their faith to be a heresy. For most Muslims, the prophet Muhammad was the last and final prophet.</p>
<h2>Establishment of the Baha'i faith</h2>
<p>Despite the persecution, the Baha'i faith has attracted millions of adherents around the globe for its ability to transcend nationalism, racism and the like.</p>
<p>Baha'u'llah’s followers disseminated his teachings in the Middle East and beyond. His son and successor, Abdu'l-Baha, traveled to Europe and the United States to <a href="http://www.palgrave.com/us/book/9781137032003">spread the faith</a>. </p>
<p>Baha'u'llah <a href="http://www.grbooks.com/george-ronald-publisher-books/academic-books/bahai-ethics-vol-1-1308657144">encouraged Baha'is</a> to cooperate with their governments and engage with the followers of all religions in a spirit of fellowship. Yet Baha'is in Iran, who are the largest non-Muslim religious community, continue to face persecution. The majority of Baha'is, however, <a href="http://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/religion/religion-general-interest/introduction-bahai-faith?format=PB#ZrOxiHuKuyDYLyjE.97">live in the global south</a>.</p>
<p>For many, the Baha'i faith is one of the most <a href="http://connect.customer.mheducation.com/products/connect-for-molloy-experiencing-the-worlds-religions-6e/">universal religions</a>. Summed up in Baha'u'llah’s words:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“<a href="http://www.bahaibookstore.com/Tablets-of-Bahaullah-Revealed-After-the-Kitab-i-Aqdas-P6196.aspx">The Earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens</a>.”</p>
</blockquote><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/84042/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Zackery M. Heern does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
The Baha'i faith originated in Iran and today has 100,000 communities across the globe, including the United States. Here is their history.
Zackery M. Heern, Assistant Professor of History and Middle East Studies, Idaho State University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.