tag:theconversation.com,2011:/institutions/amherst-college-2155/articlesAmherst College2023-07-27T17:25:24Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2105262023-07-27T17:25:24Z2023-07-27T17:25:24ZTo get rid of hazing, clarify what people really think is acceptable behavior and redefine what it means to be loyal<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/539622/original/file-20230726-21-ihkl30.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=222%2C90%2C4769%2C3492&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Students often have the wrong idea about what their peers think is acceptable.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/photo/waist-up-of-six-friends-having-fun-and-drinking-royalty-free-image/1290569983?phrase=+party+red+cups&adppopup=true">Anastasiia Korotkova/iStock via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>My husband and I spent a late August day several years ago settling in our oldest child, Andrew, for the start of his first year at college. We went to Walmart to buy a mini fridge and rug. We hung posters above his bed. We attended the obligatory goodbye family lunch before heading to our car to return to a slightly quieter house.</p>
<p>Two weeks later, Andrew called me, his voice breaking. A student in his dorm had just died as a result of head trauma after a fall the young man took while extremely drunk. Media coverage in the months following indicated that instead of seeking help immediately after the fall, the young man’s friends waited nearly 20 hours to call 911. At that point, it was too late for potentially lifesaving medical treatment.</p>
<p>I’m a mom of three and a professor <a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=-dCo5lYAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao">who studies social norms</a> – the <a href="https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691619866455">unwritten rules that shape people’s behavior</a>. In my book “<a href="https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674271111">Why We Act: Turning Bystanders into Moral Rebels</a>” I explore the factors that keep people from speaking up in the face of problematic behavior of all types.</p>
<p>I’ve thought about the story of my son’s classmate often as reports recently surfaced of the widespread hazing among players on the Northwestern University football team, <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/chicago/news/fourth-lawsuit-northwestern-football-hazing-scandal/">four of whom are suing the institution</a>. Hazing is remarkably common; for instance, one NCAA report states <a href="https://www.ncaa.org/sports/2016/9/26/addressing-student-athlete-hazing.aspx">74% of student-athletes experience it</a>. Thankfully <a href="https://www.hanknuwer.com/hazing-destroying-young-lives/">hazing-related deaths are more rare</a>.</p>
<p>I suspect the root cause of these kinds of tragic situations on college campuses is the same: misperceiving what other students are thinking and feeling.</p>
<h2>Misperceiving that you’re the only one</h2>
<p>Problematic behavior in group settings – from students ignoring signs of a medical emergency to athletes hazing freshman recruits – often continues because people privately feel uncomfortable with what they see happening <a href="https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674271111">yet believe their peers don’t share their concerns</a>.</p>
<p>This perception, regardless of its accuracy, leads people to stay silent because they fear the consequences of speaking up: Will doing so lead to rejection from the group? The most common reason male college students give for failing to speak up in situations involving sexual misconduct is <a href="https://doi.org/10.3149/jms.1601.3">fear of being laughed at or ridiculed</a>. This fear is a normal part of human nature. But it weighs especially heavily when you’re an 18-year-old in a new environment and want desperately to fit in.</p>
<p>Psychologists call this condition <a href="https://doi.org/10.1177/1089268021995168">pluralistic ignorance</a>: A majority of people privately believe one thing but incorrectly assume that most others feel differently. Pluralistic ignorance explains why most college students feel there’s too much alcohol use on their campus but <a href="https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.64.2.243">believe other students are perfectly comfortable</a> with the amount of drinking. It explains why most college men privately find sexually aggressive behavior offensive but <a href="https://doi.org/10.1007/s11199-008-9446-y">wrongly believe that others endorse it</a>, and why many athletes may privately disagree with hazing but <a href="https://scholarship.law.marquette.edu/sportslaw/vol29/iss2/6">believe that their peers support it</a>.</p>
<p>Why do people fail to recognize that others might in fact share their own beliefs – about hazing or alcohol use or sexual misconduct? It’s because people tend to believe that the behavior of others <a href="https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674271111">reflects their true thoughts and feelings</a>. Thus, if other people aren’t speaking up to share their concerns about hazing, you might assume they must be perfectly comfortable with such behavior – even though you’re aware that your own behavior does not always match your beliefs.</p>
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<img alt="A bunch of beer bottles on the floor next to a person's arm hanging off couch." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/539623/original/file-20230726-29-h2u7r6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/539623/original/file-20230726-29-h2u7r6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=354&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/539623/original/file-20230726-29-h2u7r6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=354&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/539623/original/file-20230726-29-h2u7r6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=354&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/539623/original/file-20230726-29-h2u7r6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=445&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/539623/original/file-20230726-29-h2u7r6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=445&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/539623/original/file-20230726-29-h2u7r6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=445&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">Research finds some athletes don’t speak out against hazing out fear of being rejected by teammates.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/photo/drunk-man-and-beer-bottles-royalty-free-image/523191212?phrase=drunk&adppopup=true">Bill Varie/The Image Bank via Getty Images</a></span>
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<h2>Shift what it means to be loyal</h2>
<p>So what can parents, coaches and college administrators do to prevent hazing?</p>
<p>Empirical evidence demonstrates that educating students about the psychological factors that lead people to <a href="https://doi.org/10.15288/jsa.2006.67.880">misperceive what others are actually thinking and feeling</a> can make a real difference.</p>
<p>My own research has shown that women have lower rates of disordered eating <a href="https://doi.org/10.1037/0278-6133.21.5.519">if they learned as freshmen how campus social norms</a> contribute to unhealthy body image ideals. I’ve found that college students who <a href="https://doi.org/10.1111/jasp.12489">learn that many of their peers struggle</a> with mental health challenges have a more positive view of mental health services.</p>
<p>So the first step in preventing hazing is to talk to college students about pluralistic ignorance – what it is and how it happens. Understanding the psychological processes that lead them to misperceive what those around them are actually thinking is the first step in helping students <a href="https://theconversation.com/heres-why-some-people-are-willing-to-challenge-bullying-corruption-and-bad-behavior-even-at-personal-risk-140829">speak up in the face of bad behavior</a>.</p>
<p>The next – and crucial – step is to shift norms about what group loyalty means. In tight-knit groups – such as athletic teams – people feel <a href="https://doi.org/10.1177/089124389003004004">considerable pressure to show loyalty</a> to other group members. This sometimes translates into staying silent in the face of bad behavior by their peers — sticking together, regardless of right or wrong.</p>
<p>But the same underlying dynamics of peer influence and group cohesion can help create more positive beliefs and behavior. How? By shifting norms about what it means to protect group members.</p>
<p>Instead of staying silent about bad behavior, the expectation becomes stepping in to keep them safe.</p>
<p>This approach to changing their behavior teaches students that a single bad act hurts the reputation of the entire group, that all members of the group have a responsibility to protect their friends. Being a good friend, fraternity brother, or teammate means speaking up, not staying silent.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/210526/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Catherine A. Sanderson 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>People often privately feel uncomfortable about bad behavior they see around them but mistakenly believe their peers don’t share their concerns.Catherine A. Sanderson, Poler Family Professor and Chair of Psychology, Amherst CollegeLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2060462023-05-30T12:23:40Z2023-05-30T12:23:40ZWhat it takes to become a spelling bee champ<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/528633/original/file-20230526-19-805x46.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=15%2C23%2C5119%2C3369&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Study groups and quizzes can help, but one studying technique stands out above the rest.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/photo/mixed-race-girl-wearing-number-on-stage-royalty-free-image/82149516?phrase=+spelling+bee&adppopup=true">Hill Street Studios / Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Whenever the <a href="https://spellingbee.com/">Scripps National Spelling Bee</a> takes place, parents and children may wonder: What does it take to become a champion? Is it worth the effort?</p>
<p>As just about any former Scripps champion could tell you, the contest – which is set to take place May 31 to June 1 this year – involves <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/10/us/spelling-their-way-to-success.html">a fair amount of luck</a>, so preparation does not guarantee a victory. There’s simply no way a contestant can know which word awaits them from the Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary. But if young people <a href="https://syamantakpayra.com/assets/uploads/papers/payra_2016.pdf">find enjoyment</a> in learning how to spell words, as well as understanding the origins and meanings of these words, then they will feel proud of what they accomplished.</p>
<p>Still, as I state in my book “<a href="https://nyupress.org/9781479831142/hyper-education/">Hyper Education: Why Good Schools, Good Grades, and Good Behavior Are Not Enough</a>,” there are certain practices that can greatly boost a child’s chances of becoming an excellent speller. I observed these practices among families who assist their children in competitive academics.</p>
<h2>1. Invest in study materials</h2>
<p>Rather than just open the dictionary, contestants study word lists, including the 4,000 words in the <a href="https://spellingbee.com/sites/default/files/inline-files/2022%20Words%20of%20the%20Champions.pdf">free official study guide provided</a> by Scripps. Some parents create their own word lists based on observing past bees. </p>
<p>But to the extent possible, competitive spellers, including several <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/05/the-scripps-national-spelling-bee-how-8-kids-won/590782/">previous Scripps National Spelling Bee winners</a>, have purchased special <a href="https://spellpundit.com/#wordlists">word lists</a> to gain a competitive edge. These word lists, which may come in the form of computer software programs or printed booklets, are not easy for everyone to afford. The 2021 champion, Zaila Avant-garde, said her family <a href="https://time.com/6080654/zaila-avant-garde-spelling-bee-equality/">“had a little bit of trouble</a>” coming up with the money to purchase a popular online resource, which at the time cost $600.</p>
<p>Beyond purchasing supplemental materials, hiring a coach has become <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/the-national-spelling-bees-new-normal-200-an-hour-teen-spelling-coaches/2017/05/30/cc8eb8de-4228-11e7-adba-394ee67a7582_story.html">the new normal</a>. These coaches, who are often former spelling bee contestants or teachers, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/the-national-spelling-bees-new-normal-200-an-hour-teen-spelling-coaches/2017/05/30/cc8eb8de-4228-11e7-adba-394ee67a7582_story.html">charge between $50 to over $200 an hour</a>. Some coaches work with students one on one <a href="https://www.npr.org/2019/06/16/733158499/a-spelling-bee-coach-on-how-to-spell-success">on a weekly basis all year</a>.</p>
<h2>2. Practice independently</h2>
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<img alt="A girl reads a dictionary as she lies on the floor." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/528644/original/file-20230526-27-5d0ns6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/528644/original/file-20230526-27-5d0ns6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=799&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/528644/original/file-20230526-27-5d0ns6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=799&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/528644/original/file-20230526-27-5d0ns6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=799&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/528644/original/file-20230526-27-5d0ns6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/528644/original/file-20230526-27-5d0ns6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/528644/original/file-20230526-27-5d0ns6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&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">Deliberate practice is one of the most effective ways to improve spelling bee performance.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/photo/young-girl-reading-the-dictionary-royalty-free-image/97437921?phrase=kids+dictionary&adppopup=true">Alexandra Grablewski via Getty Images</a></span>
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<p>Students must commit to learning the word lists primarily through studying by themselves. Research shows that <a href="https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550610385872">deliberate practice</a> – that is, studying and memorizing words while alone – is a better predictor of performance in the national spelling bee than being quizzed by others or reading for pleasure. All of the students I met recounted studying in their rooms or at libraries or school. The daily ritual of studying also helps youths build up the stamina of spelling needed on the competitive stage. </p>
<h2>3. Make studying a family affair</h2>
<p>While studying alone is essential for adequate preparation, families should be prepared to accompany their contestant on this journey. I observed one mother and daughter who studied word lists at the kitchen table for three hours a day – every day – as they prepared for the competition.</p>
<p>Other families would make a game out of studying, with homemade placards and grown-ups playing the role of announcer. Another family would frequently watch “<a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0437800/">Akeelah and the Bee</a>” – a movie about a young girl from Los Angeles who tries to make it to the national spelling bee – as a way to keep their daughter motivated.</p>
<p>A former champion shared that when her family went to an Italian restaurant, her father would use it as an occasion to practice words of Italian origin, such as chardonnay, rigatoni and spaghetti. The daughter would write the words on the paper menu, which she then brought home as a study guide and kept for years as memorabilia. All of these activities help the child know that they are not in this alone.</p>
<h2>4. Form study groups</h2>
<p>Another way young spellers make connections in this process is through online study groups. This can be done whether they are classmates in the same school or contestants living across the country. Youths can quiz one another, share strategies or make up study games. Having a sense of connection can deepen their <a href="https://doi.org/10.1177/0162353213480432">passion for learning</a> and further their motivation to stick with it.</p>
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<img alt="A middle school-aged boy with headphones looks at a laptop screen. He is smiling and writing in a notebook." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/528661/original/file-20230526-17-spcgfy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/528661/original/file-20230526-17-spcgfy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/528661/original/file-20230526-17-spcgfy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/528661/original/file-20230526-17-spcgfy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/528661/original/file-20230526-17-spcgfy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/528661/original/file-20230526-17-spcgfy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/528661/original/file-20230526-17-spcgfy.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">
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<span class="caption">Forming online study groups can help keep kids engaged.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/photo/asaian-child-boy-kid-taking-an-e-learning-learning-royalty-free-image/1393146298?phrase=online+study+middle+school&adppopup=true">travelism via Getty Images</a></span>
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<p>The same camaraderie that children form in these study groups can be seen on stage during the Scripps National Spelling Bee itself. It’s not uncommon for contestants to give each other high-fives after spelling a word correctly. There is less of an “us versus them” mentality that characterizes other competitive sports because students compete not against one another but against the dictionary. </p>
<h2>5. Read a lot</h2>
<p>When I investigated why students got interested in spelling, just about all of them mentioned their love of reading. They also listed reading as their favorite hobby. Reading cannot substitute for deliberate practice, but it forms the foundation for why students fell in love with words in the first place.</p>
<p>Students benefit when they learn to become active readers. This involves looking up words they do not understand, paying attention to the use of words in sentences and, of course, focusing on their spelling. </p>
<p>With all this being said, it’s important for families – and the contestants themselves – to pay attention to how they are feeling about the preparation. What parts do they enjoy the most? Is spelling practice taking up all their time to socialize or enjoy other interests and hobbies?</p>
<p>Burning out on a single competition isn’t worth it if it undermines a student’s passion for learning. Families should pay attention to when it’s time to tone down the studying and relax or let other interests rise to the surface. Parents of champions – and even champions themselves – routinely told me that their biggest benefit from the spelling bee was a heightened sense of responsibility and confidence. No trophy can match that.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/206046/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Pawan Dhingra 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 road to becoming a champion speller is made easier with support from family and friends, but ultimately it depends on an individual student’s commitment to learning, a scholar writes.Pawan Dhingra, Associate Provost and Professor of American Studies, Amherst CollegeLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2047082023-05-02T12:12:11Z2023-05-02T12:12:11ZRejected Oklahoma plea for death penalty commutation highlights clemency’s changing role in US death penalty system<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/523625/original/file-20230501-22-61xeda.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C35%2C3000%2C1953&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Protesters demonstrate against the conviction and death sentence of Richard Glossip.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/anti-death-penalty-activists-including-members-of-moveon-news-photo/490575204">Larry French/Getty Images for MoveOn.org</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>When the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board <a href="https://theintercept.com/2023/04/27/richard-glossip-execution-parole-board/">decided not to recommend clemency</a> for death row inmate Richard Glossip, the case highlighted the role clemency plays in the death penalty system.</p>
<p>Glossip had asked the board to commute the sentence he had been given for his role in an alleged murder-for-hire plot. He was convicted of paying his co-defendant, Justin Sneed, to kill Barry Van Treese in 1997. Van Treese owned the motel where Glossip was the manager. </p>
<p>The board, which met April 26, 2023, was split 2-2 over recommending that Glossip’s sentence be changed to life in prison. The fifth member of the board recused himself because his <a href="https://kfor.com/news/local/why-was-glossips-clemency-denied-if-the-pardon-and-parole-board-voted-2-2/">spouse was involved</a> in Glossip’s prosecution. A majority vote of three is required for a favorable clemency recommendation.</p>
<p>Because Oklahoma law <a href="https://www.ok.gov/ppb/Pardons_and_Commutations/index.html">does not permit clemency</a> without a positive recommendation from the board, its decision sets the stage for Glossip’s <a href="https://tulsaworld.com/news/local/oklahoma-court-wont-overturn-richard-glossips-conviction-execution-date-set/article_526d14a0-df80-11ed-b3a2-2f2253d04e6c.html">execution on May 18</a>.</p>
<p>From the start, Glossip, who had never before been arrested for any crime, <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/richard-glossip-death-row-oklahoma-1213122/">maintained his innocence</a>. His case has attracted wide attention, <a href="https://www.kgou.org/criminal-justice/2023-03-01/deeply-tainted-oklahoma-conservatives-call-for-moratorium-abolition-of-the-death-penalty">including from some of Oklahoma’s most conservative Republican legislators</a>, who contend that if the state puts him to death it will be <a href="https://saverichardglossip.com">executing an innocent man</a>.</p>
<p>Oklahoma’s case against Glossip <a href="https://saverichardglossip.com/facts/">rested on the testimony</a> of Sneed, who was induced to be a witness with a promise of a reduced sentence. In addition, the <a href="https://okcfox.com/archive/fox-25-investigation-state-destroyed-evidence-in-glossip-case-before-any-appeal-was-decided">prosecution destroyed evidence</a> that would have supported Glossip’s claim of innocence, and new witnesses have come forward who further undermine confidence in the verdict. </p>
<p>An independent investigation by a law firm engaged by state legislators concluded that “<a href="https://www.reedsmith.com/en/news/2022/06/reed-smith-investigation-into-glossip-death-row-case-raises-grave-concerns">no reasonable juror</a> hearing the complete record would have convicted Richard Glossip of first-degree murder” and that his trial <a href="https://www.propublica.org/article/richard-glossip-oklahoma-execution">could not</a> “provide a basis for the government to take … [his] life.”</p>
<p>Even the state’s Republican attorney general, Gentner Drummond, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/26/us/oklahoma-clemency-richard-glossip.html">has said</a> Glossip is probably innocent and that “it would be a grave injustice to allow the execution of a man whose trial was plagued by many errors.” </p>
<p>Drummond asked the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals to <a href="https://apnews.com/article/oklahoma-execution-richard-glossip-82b2c417dcd9dd63bfb46aafff458729">vacate Glossip’s conviction</a> and grant him a new trial. The court refused on April 20, 2023, which led to the parole board hearing the following week.</p>
<p>As someone who <a href="https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691133997/mercy-on-trial">has studied the history of clemency in capital cases</a>, I see three elements that make this case noteworthy: Attorney General Drummond’s actions, the attempt to use clemency to prevent a miscarriage of justice, and the fact that grants of clemency in death cases are today quite rare.</p>
<h2>The role of the attorney general</h2>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/523626/original/file-20230501-26-6t8wjw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A man in a suit and tie." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/523626/original/file-20230501-26-6t8wjw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/523626/original/file-20230501-26-6t8wjw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/523626/original/file-20230501-26-6t8wjw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/523626/original/file-20230501-26-6t8wjw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/523626/original/file-20230501-26-6t8wjw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/523626/original/file-20230501-26-6t8wjw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/523626/original/file-20230501-26-6t8wjw.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">Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://newsroom.ap.org/detail/OklahomaExecutionGlossip/f40b6cc876da4fa0aef9a0d80f1b9feb/photo">AP Photo/Sue Ogrocki</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Clemency hearings like Glossip’s <a href="https://www.ok.gov/ppb/documents/Chapter%2010%20Clemency%20Administrative%20Rules.pdf">are proceedings</a> in which opposing sides – representing the condemned and the government prosecutors – <a href="https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-5893.2008.00338.x">present evidence and arguments</a>. In Oklahoma, family members of the victim are also given time to make their views known.</p>
<p>In 1998, the U.S. Supreme Court gave its approval to that kind of procedure when it held that <a href="https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/523/272/">clemency hearings must afford due process</a> to the participants. The court said the condemned person must be given an opportunity to convince a clemency board that the government should not put them to death – just as the government gets to defend its decision to do so.</p>
<p>And, as my research indicates, <a href="https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691133997/mercy-on-trial">that is what the government has almost always done</a> when its representatives participate in such a process.</p>
<p>But not in the Glossip case. Drummond, his state’s top prosecutor, took the unprecedented step of siding with the petitioner – even against other state officials.</p>
<p>“I want to acknowledge how unusual it is for the state to support a clemency application of a death row inmate,” <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/26/us/richard-glossip-oklahoma-execution-parole-board/index.html">Drummond told</a> the Pardon and Parole Board. “I’m not aware of any time in our history that an attorney general has appeared before this board and argued for clemency. I’m also not aware of any time in the history of Oklahoma when justice would require it.”</p>
<h2>Clemency as grace – or justice</h2>
<p>I believe Drummond’s reference to justice would have surprised many of this country’s founders. </p>
<p>For them, doing justice was a <a href="https://constitutioncenter.org/the-constitution/historic-document-library/detail/alexander-hamilton-federalist-no-78-1788">matter for the courts</a>. Clemency was about something else.</p>
<p>In United States v. Wilson, a decision from 1833 and the first case about clemency to be decided by the United States Supreme Court, Chief Justice John Marshall <a href="https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/32/150/">made that distinction clear</a>. Instead of equating clemency and justice, he called clemency an “act of grace, proceeding from the power entrusted with the execution of the laws.”</p>
<p>Clemency, Marshall continued, “<a href="https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/32/150/">exempts the individual</a> on whom it is bestowed from the punishment the law inflicts for a crime he has committed. It is … delivered to the individual for whose benefit it is intended, and not communicated officially to the court.”</p>
<p>A little more than 20 years after Marshall wrote that, another Supreme Court justice, James Wayne, reinforced this separation of clemency and justice. He <a href="https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/59/307/">noted</a> that clemency was about “forgiveness, release and remission.” Wayne said it was a “work of mercy … [that] forgiveth any crime, offense, punishment, execution, right, title, debt or duty, temporal or ecclesiastical.”</p>
<p>But over the course of American history, both public and judicial understandings of the purpose of clemency have changed, with grace, forgiveness and mercy <a href="https://scholarship.kentlaw.iit.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3175&context=cklawreview">being replaced</a> by justice.</p>
<p>Clemency, especially in capital cases, has come to be associated almost exclusively with correcting errors made in trials and other legal proceedings. Clemency hearings are now generally just another arena to which inmates like Richard Glossip can appeal for justice.</p>
<p>This view reached its height in the 1989 Supreme Court decision Herrera v. Collins, in which the court said that “A proper remedy for the claim of actual innocence … <a href="https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/506/390/">would be executive clemency</a>” – a commutation or a pardon granted by a governor or the president.</p>
<p>Clemency, the court continued – using language that neither Marshall nor Wayne would have recognized – “is the historic remedy for preventing miscarriages of justice where judicial process has been exhausted.” </p>
<p>One example of this use of clemency occurred in 1998, when Gov. George W. Bush <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/bush-commutes-death-sentence/">commuted the death sentence of Henry Lee Lewis</a> after what Bush said were “serious concerns … about his guilt in this case.”</p>
<h2>Clemency is rare in capital cases</h2>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/523627/original/file-20230501-14-xizo1o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A man in a T-shirt" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/523627/original/file-20230501-14-xizo1o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/523627/original/file-20230501-14-xizo1o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/523627/original/file-20230501-14-xizo1o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/523627/original/file-20230501-14-xizo1o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/523627/original/file-20230501-14-xizo1o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/523627/original/file-20230501-14-xizo1o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/523627/original/file-20230501-14-xizo1o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Richard Glossip.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://newsroom.ap.org/detail/OklahomaExecutionGlossip/8880cc0cb1f149c7bdc578072be450de/photo">Oklahoma Department of Corrections via AP</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Glossip, joined by Attorney General Drummond, sought clemency in the hope of preventing a miscarriage of justice like the one Bush cited as a reason to save Lewis’ life. Given the facts of Glossip’s case, what the Pardon and Parole Board did <a href="https://theintercept.com/2023/04/27/richard-glossip-execution-parole-board/">shocked many observers</a>. But, from the perspective of clemency’s recent record in capital cases, the result should not have been surprising.</p>
<p>As my research <a href="https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691133997/mercy-on-trial">has shown</a>, a century ago clemency was granted in about 25% of capital cases. But in more recent years, <a href="https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/facts-and-research/clemency">according to the nonprofit Death Penalty Information Center</a>, clemencies in capital cases have been “rare.” The center notes, “Aside from the occasional blanket grants of clemency by governors concerned about the overall fairness of the death penalty, less than two have been granted on average per year since 1976. In the same period, more than 1,500 cases have proceeded to execution.” </p>
<p>While the center does not indicate how often clemency was sought in those cases, requesting clemency <a href="https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-5893.2008.00338.x">is often a standard part of the efforts death penalty defense lawyers make</a> to try to save their clients. </p>
<p>It is hard to get clemency in capital cases because, as the center explains, “Governors are subject to political influence, and even granting a single clemency can result in harsh attacks.” As a result, “clemencies in death penalty cases have been unpredictable and immune from review.”</p>
<p>And what is true nationwide is also true in Oklahoma where during the past half-century there <a href="https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/facts-and-research/clemency">have been only five grants of clemency in capital cases</a>.</p>
<p>Following the denial of clemency, Glossip’s lawyers <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/26/us/oklahoma-clemency-richard-glossip.html">have promised</a> to keeping fighting and are asking both state and federal courts to stay his execution. Meanwhile Gov. Kevin Stitt <a href="https://tulsaworld.com/video/news/gov-kevin-stitt-indicates-he-wont-intervene-ahead-of-richard-glossips-execution/video_233a949b-f13f-55b0-8b44-84f101dec7a0.html">has said</a> he will do nothing to delay Glossip’s date with death.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/204708/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Austin Sarat 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>Despite support for clemency from Oklahoma’s top prosecutor, a death row inmate appears set to die on May 18.Austin Sarat, William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science, Amherst CollegeLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2031342023-04-05T12:36:09Z2023-04-05T12:36:09ZTrump’s indictment is unprecedented, but it would not have surprised the Founding Fathers<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/519432/original/file-20230404-28-pony0a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=11%2C34%2C7634%2C5307&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Former U.S. President Donald Trump sits with his attorneys for his arraignment at the Manhattan criminal court on April 4, 2023, in New York City.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/former-u-s-president-donald-trump-sits-with-his-attorneys-news-photo/1479825853?adppopup=true"> Pool/ Getty Images News via Getty Images North America</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Much has been made of the unprecedented nature of <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/04/04/trump-arraignment-ny-indictment-live-updates/">the April 4, 2023 arraignment</a> on criminal charges of former President Donald Trump following an indictment brought by <a href="https://www.manhattanda.org/meet-alvin-bragg/">Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg</a>. But a closer look at American history shows that the indictment of a former president was not unforeseen.</p>
<h2>What the Constitution says about prosecuting a president</h2>
<p>The Constitution’s authors <a href="https://texaslawreview.org/prosecuting-and-punishing-our-presidents/">contemplated the arrest of a current or former president</a>. At several points since the nation’s founding, our leaders have been called before the bar of justice. </p>
<p><a href="https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/article-1/section-3/">Article 1, Section 3,</a> of the Constitution says that when a federal government official is impeached and removed from office, they “shall nevertheless be liable and subject to Indictment, Trial, Judgment and Punishment, according to Law.” </p>
<p>In his defense of this constitutional provision, <a href="https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed69.asp">Founding Father Alexander Hamilton noted</a> that, unlike the British king, for whom “there is no constitutional tribunal to which he is amenable; no punishment to which he can be subjected,” a president once removed from office would “be liable to prosecution and punishment in the ordinary course of law.” Trump has been impeached twice, but not removed from office. </p>
<p>As a scholar with <a href="https://www.press.umich.edu/16032/history_memory_and_the_law">expertise in legal history</a> and <a href="https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=20093">criminal law</a>, I believe the punishment our Founding Fathers envisioned for high officeholders removed from office would also apply to those who left office in other ways. </p>
<p>Tench Coxe, a delegate from Pennsylvania to the Continental Congress from 1788–89, <a href="https://archive.csac.history.wisc.edu/pa_1.pdf">echoed Hamilton</a>. He explained that while the <a href="https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artI-S6-C1-3-1/ALDE_00013300/#:%7E:text=They%20shall%20in%20all%20Cases,questioned%20in%20any%20other%20Place.">Constitution’s speech and debate clause</a> permanently immunized members of Congress from liability for anything they might do or say as part of their official duties, the president “is not so much protected as that of a member of the House of Representatives; for he may be proceeded against like any other man in the ordinary course of law.”</p>
<p>In Coxe’s view, even a sitting president could be arrested, tried and punished for violating the law. And, though Coxe didn’t say it explicitly, I’d argue that it follows that if a president can be charged with a crime while in office, once out of office, he could be held responsible like anyone else. </p>
<h2>The indictment of Aaron Burr</h2>
<p>Hamilton’s and Coxe’s positions were put to an early test soon after the Constitution was ratified. The test came <a href="https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Hamilton/01-26-02-0001-0281">when jurors in New Jersey indicted</a> Vice President Aaron Burr for killing Hamilton in a duel in that state.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/519384/original/file-20230404-24-lfq6bf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Black-and-white illustration showing Aaron Burr, in black top hat and coat, shooting Alexander Hamilton in a wooded area. Two eyewitnesses stand in the background." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/519384/original/file-20230404-24-lfq6bf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/519384/original/file-20230404-24-lfq6bf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=449&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/519384/original/file-20230404-24-lfq6bf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=449&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/519384/original/file-20230404-24-lfq6bf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=449&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/519384/original/file-20230404-24-lfq6bf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=564&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/519384/original/file-20230404-24-lfq6bf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=564&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/519384/original/file-20230404-24-lfq6bf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=564&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 artist’s depiction of the Burr–Hamilton duel on July 11, 1804. Hamilton was mortally wounded, and Burr was indicted for his death.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/illustration/duel-between-burr-and-hamilton-royalty-free-illustration/489170896?adppopup=true">Ivan-96/DigitalVision Vectors via Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The indictment charged that “Aaron Burr late of the Township of Bergen in the County of Bergen esquire not having the fear of God before his eyes but being moved and seduced by the instigation of the Devil … feloniously willfully and of his malice aforethought did make an assault upon Alexander Hamilton … [who] of the said Mortal wounds died.” </p>
<p>While Burr’s powerful friends subsequently <a href="https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/57580/what-did-aaron-burr-do-after-shooting-alexander-hamilton">interceded and persuaded state officials to drop the charges</a>, their success had nothing to do with any immunity that Burr enjoyed as an executive officer of the United States.</p>
<p>Indeed, Burr’s legal troubles were not over. In February 1807, after his term as vice president ended, <a href="https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/aaron-burr-arrested-for-treason">he was arrested</a> and charged with treason for plotting to create a new and independent nation separate from the U.S. This time, he stood trial and was acquitted. </p>
<h2>The Strange case of Ulysses S. Grant</h2>
<p>Fast forward to 1872, when the incumbent president, Ulysses S. Grant, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/mar/22/ulysses-s-grant-arrest-speeding-horse-drawn-carriage">was arrested in Washington, D.C.,</a> for speeding in his horse-drawn carriage.</p>
<p>The arresting officer <a href="https://www.newspapers.com/image/330876502/?clipping_id=121285615&fcfToken=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJmcmVlLXZpZXctaWQiOjMzMDg3NjUwMiwiaWF0IjoxNjgwMzc2MzkzLCJleHAiOjE2ODA0NjI3OTN9.v6vBKQxZHqtZ9LJ6QFO290LwcrzOnYYMgg7bSCMZSKM">told Grant</a>, “I am very sorry, Mr. President, to have to do it, for you are the chief of the nation, and I am nothing but a policeman, but duty is duty, sir, and I will have to place you under arrest.” </p>
<p>As The New York Post recently <a href="https://nypost.com/2023/03/31/trump-will-be-first-president-arrested-since-ulysses-s-grant-who-was-busted-for-speeding-in-1872/">recounted the story</a>, Grant “was ordered to put up 20 bucks as collateral.” But he never stood trial.</p>
<h2>20th and 21st century precedents</h2>
<p>A little over a century later, Republican Vice President Spiro Agnew <a href="https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/big/1010.html">had a more serious brush with the law</a> when he was accused by the Department of Justice of a pattern of political corruption starting when he was a county executive in Maryland and continuing through his tenure as vice president.</p>
<p>On Oct. 10, 1973, Agnew agreed to a plea bargain. He <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1973/10/11/archives/judge-orders-fine-3-years-probation-tells-court-income-was-taxable.html">resigned his office</a> and <a href="https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/vice-president-agnew-resigns">pleaded no contest</a> to a charge of federal income tax evasion in exchange for the federal government dropping charges of political corruption. He was fined US$10,000 and sentenced to three years’ probation. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/519392/original/file-20230404-903-w07obb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Surrounded by Secret Service agents, Spiro Agnew speaks to reporters outside a federal courthouse." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/519392/original/file-20230404-903-w07obb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/519392/original/file-20230404-903-w07obb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=402&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/519392/original/file-20230404-903-w07obb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=402&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/519392/original/file-20230404-903-w07obb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=402&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/519392/original/file-20230404-903-w07obb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=505&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/519392/original/file-20230404-903-w07obb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=505&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/519392/original/file-20230404-903-w07obb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=505&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Spiro Agnew leaves a Baltimore federal courthouse on Oct. 10, 1973, after pleading no contest to tax evasion charges and resigning as vice president.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/spiro-agnew-flanked-by-secret-service-agents-leaves-federal-news-photo/515575060?adppopup=true">Bettmann via Getty Images</a></span>
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<p>Richard Nixon, the president with whom Agnew served, <a href="https://theconversation.com/watergate-at-50-the-burglary-that-launched-a-thousand-scandals-185030">narrowly escaped being indicted</a> for his role in the Watergate burglary and its cover-up. In 2018, the <a href="https://www.archives.gov/research/investigations/watergate/roadmap">National Archives released</a> documents, labeled the Watergate Road Map, that showed just how close Nixon had come to being charged.</p>
<p>The documents <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/31/politics/richard-nixon-watergate-national-archives-mueller/index.html">reveal</a> that “a grand jury <a href="https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/bribery">planned to charge Nixon with bribery</a>, <a href="https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/371">conspiracy</a>, <a href="https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/obstruction_of_justice">obstruction of justice</a> and <a href="https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1510">obstruction of a criminal investigation</a>.” But an indictment was never handed down because, by that time, Hamilton’s and Coxe’s views had been displaced by a belief that a sitting president should not be indicted.</p>
<p>Nixon was later saved from criminal charges after he left office when his successor, President Gerald Ford, <a href="https://www.fordlibrarymuseum.gov/library/speeches/740061.asp">granted him a full and complete pardon</a>.</p>
<p>Another occasion on which a president came close to being charged with a crime
occurred in January 2001, when, as an article in The Atlantic notes, <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/03/trump-indicment-president-prosecution-nixon-clinton/673503/">independent prosecutor Robert Ray considered</a> indicting former President Bill Clinton for lying under oath about his affair with <a href="http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/multimedia/timeline/9809/starr.report/narrative/n2.htm">former White House intern</a> Monica Lewinsky.</p>
<p>Ultimately, Ray decided that if Clinton publicly admitted to “having been misleading and evasive under oath … he didn’t need to see him indicted.” </p>
<p>And in February 2021, after President Trump had left office, Republican Senate Minority Leader <a href="https://www.marketwatch.com/story/mcconnell-trump-is-still-liable-for-everything-he-did-read-full-speech-11613254884">Mitch McConnell acknowledged</a> that the former president, who had escaped being removed from office twice after being impeached, would still be legally “liable for everything he did while he was in office … We have a criminal justice system in this country. We have civil litigation. And former presidents are not immune from being held accountable by either one.”</p>
<h2>What history teaches about Trump’s indictment</h2>
<p>This brings us to the present moment.</p>
<p>For any prosecutor, including Alvin Bragg, the indictment and arrest of a former president is a genuinely momentous act. As Henry Ruth, one of the prosecutors who was involved in the Nixon case, <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/03/trump-indicment-president-prosecution-nixon-clinton/673503/">explained in 1974</a>, “Signing one’s name to the indictment of an ex-president is an act that one wishes devolved upon another but one’s self. This is true even where such an act, in institutional and justice terms, appears absolutely necessary.” </p>
<p>For the rest of us, this nation’s history is a reminder that ours is not the first generation of Americans who have been called to deal with alleged wrongdoing by our leaders and former leaders.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/203134/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Austin Sarat 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 arrest of a former American president is unprecedented, but the nation’s founders anticipated the day would come.Austin Sarat, William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science, Amherst CollegeLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2000432023-03-28T13:33:30Z2023-03-28T13:33:30ZPilgrimage and revolution: How Cesar Chavez married faith and ideology in landmark farmworkers’ march<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/516472/original/file-20230320-2929-r24sy7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=13%2C462%2C2775%2C1468&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Cesar Chavez salutes the crowd on the steps of the California State Capitol.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://newsroom.ap.org/detail/CesarChavezFarmworkers/97021c0e28524a20b9bfbd53d785e05c/photo?Query=cesar%20chavez%20pilgrimage&mediaType=photo&sortBy=arrivaldatetime:desc&dateRange=Anytime&totalCount=2&currentItemNo=0">AP Photo</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>On March 31, 1966, labor rights pioneer <a href="https://chavezfoundation.org/about-cesar-chavez/">Cesar Chavez</a> wasn’t celebrating his birthday in any usual manner. Rather, he was 14 days into a <a href="https://www.nps.gov/articles/series.htm?id=30500CCE-DEF1-6880-2FA7F592DB11EA8F">25-day pilgrimage in California</a> from Delano to Sacramento.</p>
<p>Leading a group of striking farm laborers and supporters, Chavez’s plan was to build momentum and support for the workers’ cause in a march that would conclude on the steps of the California State Capitol on Easter Sunday morning.</p>
<p>The date here is crucial. A foundational, but mostly forgotten, feature of the nearly 300-mile pilgrimage during Lent was that it was a deeply religious endeavor.</p>
<p>As a <a href="https://www.amherst.edu/people/facstaff/lbarba">scholar of religion and the farmworkers movement</a>, I believe Chavez’s endeavor was not simply a “march” or “protest” – although workers’ rights were, of course, central to the event. Rather, it was a “pilgrimage,” and to overlook the religious dimensions is to fundamentally misunderstand what Chavez was trying to achieve.</p>
<h2>Revolution with penance</h2>
<p>Chavez, whose birthday is <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-actions/2022/03/30/a-proclamation-on-cesar-chavez-day-2022/">celebrated as a commemorative holiday</a> in the U.S. every March 31, remains the preeminent icon of civil and labor rights in the U.S.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="A man speaks into a microphone." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/516527/original/file-20230321-20-lcafsn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/516527/original/file-20230321-20-lcafsn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=907&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/516527/original/file-20230321-20-lcafsn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=907&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/516527/original/file-20230321-20-lcafsn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=907&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/516527/original/file-20230321-20-lcafsn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1140&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/516527/original/file-20230321-20-lcafsn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1140&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/516527/original/file-20230321-20-lcafsn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1140&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">Cesar Chavez speaks at a union rally.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/cesar-chavez-the-organizer-and-leader-of-the-national-farm-news-photo/576842724?phrase=Cesar%20Chavez%201966&adppopup=true">Ted Streshinsky/Corbis via Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>But contrasting with the view of labor rights as a purely secular endeavor, Chavez fused his understanding of Catholic social doctrine with principles of community organizing.</p>
<p>Accordingly, when it came to raising attention to the plight of <a href="https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/workers-united-the-delano-grape-strike-and-boycott.htm">striking grape harvesters</a> – denied the right to unionize in their fight for higher wages and better conditions – Chavez leaned on his religious beliefs.</p>
<p>From the outset, Chavez made clear the pious nature of the march, calling it a peregrinación – Spanish for “pilgrimage” – in the registration form he penned. Leaving no room for ambiguity, Chavez detailed: “This is a religious march” and added the headline banner of “Pilgrimage, Penance, Revolution” – framing designed to appeal to both the majority-Catholic farmworker faithful and more revolutionary members of the labor movement alike.</p>
<p>At first blush, penance seems a bit out of place in a world of protest. Even more ironically, Chavez <a href="https://chavez.cde.ca.gov/modelcurriculum/teachers/lessons/resources/Documents/plan_of_delano.pdf">held that penance</a> during the 1966 Lenten season march was required “for all the failings of Farm Workers” rather than for the exploitative growers that kept farmworkers uprooted and impoverished. But to Chavez, revolution could not happen without penance – that is, an undertaking to offer oneself blameless. As a collective public ritual, however, it also hoped to call the entire nation to penance.</p>
<p>The pilgrimage was an extension of a <a href="https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-pawel-chavez-delano-grape-strike-20150916-story.html">strike launched on Mexican Independence Day</a> in 1965 at Our Lady of Guadalupe Church in Delano. There, the Chavez-led National Farm Workers Association joined forces with the Filipino Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee.</p>
<p>Catholicism offered a ready-made bridge between Mexican and Filipino farmworkers. Seemingly “secular” labor issues could easily be framed through religious and moral language. Chavez’s commitment to <a href="https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520283695/the-political-spirituality-of-cesar-chavez">foregrounding religion</a> in his commitment to nonviolence took a page from Martin Luther King Jr.’s playbook.</p>
<h2>A lady of labor</h2>
<p>The pilgrimage to Sacramento began on March 17, 1966, <a href="https://cal170.library.ca.gov/march-17-1966-the-perigrinacion-begins/">under a banner</a> of Our Lady of Guadalupe. Guadalupe – a <a href="https://theconversation.com/lady-of-guadalupe-avoids-tough-truths-about-the-catholic-church-and-indigenous-genocide-160079">representation of the Virgin Mary</a>, which, according to Catholic tradition, originated in 1531 – has long stood as Mexico’s <a href="https://www.theologyandreligiononline.com/article?docid=b-9781350898806&tocid=b-9781350898806-007">most ubiquitous symbol</a> of national and religious protest.</p>
<p>Along with the banner Our Lady of Guadalupe, a star of David and a cross were featured as prominent religious symbols in the pilgrimage. The larger meaning of the cross, when carried near the <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/cesar-chavezs-march-changed-topic-new-graphic-novel-rcna11752">worn and wearied</a> Chavez <a href="https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/images/Chavez-Leading_Yale.jpg?maxwidth=650&autorotate=false&quality=78&format=webp">hobbling along</a> with the help of a cane, was not at all lost on farmworkers. Later ballads captured this striking allusion to the Passion of Jesus by describing Chavez as a <a href="https://online.ucpress.edu/ch/article-abstract/94/1/26/33337/More-Spirit-in-That-Little-Madera-ChurchCesar?redirectedFrom=fulltext">suffering prophet and messianic figure</a> who would sacrifice everything to bring about justice for farmworkers.</p>
<p>Despite the prominence of Catholic iconography, the pilgrimage remained an interfaith endeavor. Rabbis, Catholic priests and Protestant clergy stood as some of the farmworkers’ staunchest supporters.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="A man in seen walking while leaning on a cane, surrounded by a group of supporters including a man in vicar garb." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/516525/original/file-20230320-14-rwof1l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/516525/original/file-20230320-14-rwof1l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/516525/original/file-20230320-14-rwof1l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/516525/original/file-20230320-14-rwof1l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/516525/original/file-20230320-14-rwof1l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/516525/original/file-20230320-14-rwof1l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/516525/original/file-20230320-14-rwof1l.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">The Rev. Eugene J. Boyle joined protesters, including Cesar Chavez, seen here leaning on a cane.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://newsroom.ap.org/detail/CesarChavez1966/3b359db3ada24db6b4b9385af154649d/photo?Query=cesar%20chavez%201966&mediaType=photo&sortBy=arrivaldatetime:desc&dateRange=Anytime&totalCount=7&currentItemNo=1">AP Photo</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Music to lift souls and ease soles</h2>
<p>Support to lift the spirit of the marchers came in a multitude of ways. For example, after a day of marching, El Teatro Campesino, a theater group established by playwright Luis Valdez, and enthusiastic supporters put on rallies filled with food and music. One <a href="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.tamupress.com/book/9781603441933/farm-workers-and-the-churches/&sa=D&source=docs&ust=1678409084787386&usg=AOvVaw3TAkx7ws0IEU-5BWtlgpqT">historian recorded</a> that these raucous celebrations resembled religious revivals, much like the ones Chavez had noted in Pentecostal church services.</p>
<p>In <a href="https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/cesar-chavez">his 1975 autobiography</a>, Chavez described attending one such service in Madera, in the heart of California’s Central Valley, in 1954. The young labor organizer recalled:</p>
<p>“In that little Madera church, I observed everything going on about me that could be useful in organizing. Although there were no more than twelve men and women, there was more spirit there than when I went to mass where there were two hundred.”</p>
<p>Pentecostal music, unlike typical church music of the time, <a href="https://uncpress.org/book/9781469624068/migrating-faith/">redeemed the fiesta of secular Mexican music</a> by sanctifying musical genres then thought to not be fit for religious services. Chavez would have immediately noticed a striking contrast between demonstrative Pentecostal worship and the staid music of Catholicism in the pre-Vatican II years. </p>
<h2>‘The base must be faith’</h2>
<p>Almost a decade after the pilgrimage, <a href="https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/cesar-chavez">Chavez mused</a>:</p>
<p>“Today I don’t think I could base my will to struggle on cold economics or on some political doctrine. I don’t think there would be enough to sustain me. For me, the base must be faith.”</p>
<p>Faith sustained Chavez on his pilgrimage 57 years ago. On Easter Sunday 1966, Chavez ascended the steps of the California State Capitol upon the completion of the pilgrimage. By then, the aim of securing the farmworkers with their first-ever union contract with a grower had been completed.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/200043/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Lloyd Daniel Barba 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 scholar of religion looks at how faith helped guide the labor rights icon in his organizing endeavors.Lloyd Daniel Barba, Assistant Professor of Religion, Amherst CollegeLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1934292023-03-02T13:24:59Z2023-03-02T13:24:59ZAt a small liberal arts college, Black students learned to become ‘bicultural’ to succeed and get jobs – but stress followed<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/512362/original/file-20230227-4087-z3vk0z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=39%2C78%2C6538%2C4240&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Black students reported stress as a result of trying to downplay their cultural identities. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/photo/happy-young-university-student-with-book-standing-royalty-free-image/1340017268?phrase=black%20college%20students&adppopup=true">Halfpoint Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>In her forthcoming book, “<a href="https://tupress.temple.edu/books/the-impact-of-college-diversity">The Impact of College Diversity: Struggles and Successes at Age 30</a>,” Amherst College <a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=k9DLURIAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao">psychology professor Elizabeth Aries</a> discovered a disturbing dual reality for Black students going to the small, private liberal arts college where she teaches. On the one hand, interacting with students from different backgrounds better prepared them for the world of higher education and work. But Black students also felt pressured to sacrifice their cultural identities in favor of “whiteness” in order to succeed. In the following Q&A, Aries elaborates on her findings and what they mean as the Supreme Court <a href="https://www.insidehighered.com/admissions/article/2023/02/06/colleges-start-prepare-losing-supreme-court-case">decides whether to restrict or outlaw</a> the use of race in college admissions.</em></p>
<h2>1. What prompted you to do this research?</h2>
<p>In 2003, Amherst College began to <a href="https://www.amherst.edu/news/magazine/issues/2011summer/nationalinterest">more actively recruit and enroll students of color and individuals from low-income backgrounds</a>. The idea was to promote equity and social mobility. But the effort was also driven by the belief that students benefit educationally when they interact daily with classmates whose experiences and views are different from their own.</p>
<p>I wanted to understand how living in a diverse community would affect students. To do that, I interviewed Black and white students, both affluent and lower-income, three times over a period of 12 years. The interviews were conducted during their <a href="https://tupress.temple.edu/books/race-and-class-matters-at-an-elite-college">first year of college</a>, at the end of their <a href="https://tupress.temple.edu/books/speaking-of-race-and-class">senior year</a> and at <a href="https://tupress.temple.edu/books/the-impact-of-college-diversity">age 30</a>.</p>
<p>I chronicled the nature and extent of what students learned about race and class from engagement with racially and socioeconomically diverse classmates. I also examined the challenges students faced on campus because of their race and class. I believe my findings have great relevance at a time when the U.S. Supreme Court is about to again <a href="https://www.insidehighered.com/admissions/article/2023/02/06/colleges-start-prepare-losing-supreme-court-case">consider the legality of the use of race</a> in admission decisions.</p>
<h2>2. What is the main takeaway from your book?</h2>
<p>At age 30, the vast majority of Black and white Amherst graduates I interviewed – 81% – <a href="https://tupress.temple.edu/books/the-impact-of-college-diversity">told me they gained insight from interacting regularly with classmates of different races</a>. For instance, over their four years of college, the white graduates gained a deeper understanding of the harm of racial stereotypes, prejudice and discrimination, and of their own racial privilege. Black graduates acquired coping strategies to deal with racial prejudice. They also <a href="https://tupress.temple.edu/books/the-impact-of-college-diversity">learned to be “bicultural</a>,” enabling success in predominantly white settings. </p>
<p>Through cross-class interactions, lower-income students gained higher aspirations to seek graduate and professional degrees. They also accessed social networks that connected them to desired internships, graduate programs and jobs. They reported greater social mobility as a result of the skills they learned from living and learning in such a diverse environment.</p>
<p>Almost all strongly agreed that a diverse student body is essential to teaching skills to succeed and lead in the work environment.</p>
<h2>3. Why do Black students benefit from learning to be ‘bicultural’?</h2>
<p>Black graduates enter the professional work world where positions of power are largely held by white people, and racial biases are present. At age 30, 77% of the Black graduates I interviewed <a href="https://tupress.temple.edu/books/the-impact-of-college-diversity">reported facing racial bias at work</a>, and <a href="https://tupress.temple.edu/books/the-impact-of-college-diversity">47% felt they faced a career ceiling</a> because of their race. They reported learning during college how to be <a href="https://tupress.temple.edu/books/the-impact-of-college-diversity">bicultural – to adjust their presentation and behavior</a> and be Black in “the right way” to facilitate their success. This required being attentive to self-presentation in speech, dress, hair and demeanor so that it came closer to whiteness, making it more acceptable to the middle-class white people around them.</p>
<p>While Black graduates benefited from learning to be bicultural, they reported this performance came at a cost. Fitting in to standards of whiteness entailed the stress of hiding parts of themselves and thus made it difficult to feel fully true to themselves.</p>
<p>That said, engagement with diverse peers during college can help lead to the creation of more equitable workplaces. Research has found interaction among people from different racial backgrounds <a href="https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.90.5.751">leads to a decrease in racial prejudice</a> and <a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/00221546.2006.11778933">increases knowledge and acceptance</a> of different races or cultures and openness to diversity. Further, when students participate in interracial dialogues, after college they are <a href="https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1530-2415.2009.01193.x">more likely to commit and take action</a> to redress inequality. </p>
<p>A third of the white graduates in my study said they were <a href="https://tupress.temple.edu/books/the-impact-of-college-diversity">actively addressing systemic inequalities in their work lives</a>. Further, 52% aspired to <a href="https://tupress.temple.edu/books/the-impact-of-college-diversity">teach their future children</a> to be aware of the internalization of racial stereotypes and of the prejudice and discrimination faced by people of color.</p>
<h2>4. Did Amherst need affirmative action to achieve diversity?</h2>
<p>The use of race-conscious admissions undoubtedly enabled Amherst to build a richly diverse community. Today <a href="https://www.amherst.edu/about/facts">49% of U.S. Amherst College students</a> self-identify as students of color. </p>
<p>Amherst has for many years reviewed applicants holistically and by using a wide range of factors. This includes, of course, the standard measures on applications, such as the student’s academic program and record, intellectual talent and creativity, nonacademic achievement and leadership. Also factored into Amherst’s admissions process, though, are such aspects as diversity of socioeconomics, family education, background, life experiences and geography. And, yes, <a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/20/20-1199/232512/20220801174102841_20-1199%20and%2021-707_Brief%20of%20Amici%20Curiae%20Amherst%20et%20al%20Colleges%20and%20Bucknell%20et%20al%20Universities.pdf#page=19">race is also one factor</a> of many in such a holistic consideration.</p>
<h2>5. What happens if affirmative action is banned?</h2>
<p>A decision by the Supreme Court to end race-conscious admissions would severely impede colleges’ ability to attain the kind of diversity needed to achieve their educational goals.</p>
<p>Where states have banned the consideration of race in admission, the proportion of students from underrepresented groups fell precipitously. California, which <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/26/us/affirmative-action-admissions-supreme-court.html">banned consideration of race in admissions in 1996</a>, saw <a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/20/20-1199/232355/20220801134931730_20-1199%20bsac%20University%20of%20California.pdf#page=22">50% declines for African American and Latino students</a> at the most selective campuses between 1995 and 1998.</p>
<p>Many students from underrepresented backgrounds - who previously would have been accepted at flagship schools – went to less selective public and private universities. At these less selective schools, <a href="https://cshe.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/publications/rops.cshe.10.2020.bleemer.prop209.8.20.2020_2.pdf">degree attainment declined, leading to lower wages</a>, thereby increasing socioeconomic inequities.</p>
<p>The use of race-neutral admissions policies after Michigan <a href="https://diversity.umich.edu/about/history/legal-matters/2006-proposal-2/">passed a ballot initiative in 2006</a> to ban the use of race in college admissions was as catastrophic: It resulted in a <a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/20/20-1199/232447/20220801155455154_Nos.%2020-1199%2021-707%20U-M%20amicus%20ISO%20resps..pdf#page=9">44% drop in the enrollment of Black students</a> from 2006 to 2021. Meanwhile, the enrollment of Native American students <a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/20/20-1199/232447/20220801155455154_Nos.%2020-1199%2021-707%20U-M%20amicus%20ISO%20resps..pdf#page=9">dropped nearly 90%</a> despite considerable efforts using race-neutral alternatives.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/193429/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Elizabeth Aries 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 students told a researcher they felt conflicted about hiding parts of themselves in order to get ahead.Elizabeth Aries, Professor of Psychology, Amherst CollegeLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1997212023-02-15T13:23:10Z2023-02-15T13:23:10ZPrisoners donating organs to get time off raises thorny ethical questions<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/509871/original/file-20230213-14-12rt3m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C34%2C4556%2C2998&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Prisoners at a yard at the Nebraska State Penitentiary in Lincoln, Neb.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://newsroom.ap.org/detail/PrisonCrowdingNebraska/27819d626cb24aa586c3f2983975ec4b/photo?Query=prison%20u.s.%20inmates&mediaType=photo&sortBy=&dateRange=Anytime&totalCount=4733&currentItemNo=42">AP Photo/Nati Harnik</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>In January 2023 two Democratic representatives, Judith Garcia and Carlos Gonzalez, <a href="https://malegislature.gov/Bills/193/HD3822">proposed a bill</a> that would offer prisoners in Massachusetts a new way to win reduction in their sentences: by donating their bone marrow or vital organs.</p>
<p>The bill stated that the commissioner of the Department of Corrections should establish both a bone marrow and organ donation program within the department and a committee focused on bone marrow and organ donation that would set eligibility standards for inmates interested in the program. While forbidding commissions or monetary payments for donors, it stated that prisoners could “gain not less than 60 and not more than 365 day reduction in the length of their committed sentence” if they donated bone marrow or an organ. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/boston/news/massachusetts-bill-prisoners-donate-organs-reduced-sentences/">The legislators claimed</a> that their proposal would respect the bodily autonomy of incarcerated people by letting them decide what to do with their vital organs. It also would <a href="https://doi.org/10.1097/MOT.0b013e3283447b1c">address racial disparities</a> by helping to expand the pool of donors.</p>
<p>Recently, however, Garcia and Gonzalez <a href="https://abcnews.go.com/US/massachusetts-bill-allowing-prisoners-donate-organs-reduced-time/story?id=96989325">have walked back their proposal</a> and are planning to introduce a version without the promise of a sentence reduction. </p>
<p>Still, the idea of giving sentence reductions in return for organ donation <a href="https://apnews.com/article/organ-donation-massachusetts-state-government-health-a11a7f93dd13ad018bbb1899dbb4623a">raises serious ethical issues</a>. As someone who <a href="https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=20093">has studied punishment and imprisonment</a>, including the conditions of confinement in American prisons, I’m aware that some states have allowed prisoners to donate organs without any external incentives. But the question is whether prison inmates can ever consent freely to organ donation.</p>
<h2>The history of organ donation</h2>
<p>The idea of transplanting organs as a medical cure <a href="https://doi.org/10.1101/cshperspect.a014977">is quite old</a>. In 600 B.C., skin flaps were used for replacing missing noses, and 16th -century surgeons considered taking grafts of a patient’s tissue for another patient. But the practice of organ donation and transplantation began in earnest only in 1954, when Joseph Murray <a href="https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.1956.02960390027008">carried out the first successful kidney transplant</a>. Other donated organs, including livers and hearts, were transplanted a decade later. However, it <a href="https://doi.org/10.1101/cshperspect.a015685">has always been an ethically fraught area</a>, as the need for donated organs far outstrips the supply.</p>
<p>In 2022, 6,466 people <a href="https://unos.org/news/2022-organ-transplants-again-set-annual-records/">became living organ donors</a> in the United States, and another 14,903 people became posthumous organ donors. Yet, as of early 2023, more than 100,000 men, women and children <a href="https://www.donors1.org/learn-about-organ-donation/who-can-donate/get-the-facts/">are waiting for an organ donation so they can have a transplant</a>. The MIT Technology Review <a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/02/03/1067768/massachusetts-bill-prisoners-swap-organs-freedom/">notes</a> that it is even harder for racial and ethnic minorities to get the organs they need. And thousands of people will die before the organ they need becomes available.</p>
<p>Altruism and the generosity of donors have <a href="https://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/article/organ-donation-altruism-vs-incentive/2002-08">neither closed the gap between the supply of donated organs</a> and the demand nor addressed the issue that <a href="https://nap.nationalacademies.org/catalog/26364/realizing-the-promise-of-equity-in-the-organ-transplantation-system">people of color struggle to find a match</a>.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/509882/original/file-20230213-3866-ejcubu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Two health care professionals working on a procedure with a patient lying on a bed." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/509882/original/file-20230213-3866-ejcubu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/509882/original/file-20230213-3866-ejcubu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/509882/original/file-20230213-3866-ejcubu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/509882/original/file-20230213-3866-ejcubu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/509882/original/file-20230213-3866-ejcubu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/509882/original/file-20230213-3866-ejcubu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/509882/original/file-20230213-3866-ejcubu.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">Two organ procurement coordinators work on the body of a potential organ donor at Mid-America Transplant Services in St. Louis.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://newsroom.ap.org/detail/OrganTransplants/c44be320e3434762b75923c5f8207890/photo?Query=subjects.code:97b84b58814a1004819ddf092526b43e&mediaType=photo&sortBy=&dateRange=Anytime&totalCount=260&currentItemNo=39">AP Photo/Whitney Curtis</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Recognizing these facts, various organizations and advocacy groups <a href="https://optn.transplant.hrsa.gov/professionals/by-topic/ethical-considerations/ethical-principles-in-the-allocation-of-human-organs/">have developed codes of ethics for donating organs</a>. For example,
according to the American Medical Association, organ donation is acceptable only if <a href="https://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/article/ama-code-medical-ethics-opinions-organ-transplantation/2012-03">donors give their informed consent</a>. Additionally, donors <a href="https://doi.org/10.1007/s10561-012-9303-7">must be provided with</a> information regarding the purpose and risks associated with tissue donation. They must also be made familiar with any alternatives to donation and the right to withdraw consent. </p>
<p>Congress <a href="https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/STATUTE-98/pdf/STATUTE-98-Pg2339.pdf">passed the National Organ Transplant Act</a> in 1984 and established the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network to maintain a national system to match organs and individuals. The organ transplant law intended to make sure that organs are not treated as commodities to be bought and sold. </p>
<h2>Inmates as organ donors</h2>
<p>Garcia and Gonzalez are not the first state officials to propose turning to prisoners to help with the organ supply problem in recent years.</p>
<p>Some of those cases are quite unusual. For example, in 2010, Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour suspended <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2010/CRIME/12/30/mississippi.sisters.prison.release/index.html">the life sentences of two sisters</a>, Gladys and Jamie Scott, on the condition that Gladys donate one of her kidneys to Jamie. Her dialysis treatment was costing the state almost US$200,000 per year, and Barbour wanted to save money by <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/01/opinion/01herbert.html">facilitating the organ donation</a>. </p>
<p>In 2013, another governor, Ohio’s John Kasich, <a href="https://apnews.com/article/ef3c4e4fbd3540e29cac52cfadd5a8e0">took executive action</a> to explore the feasibility of allowing death row inmate Ronald Phillips to donate a kidney and other organs to sick relatives before he was put to death. But ultimately the state refused his request because of logistical and security issues involved in having the needed medical procedure done at an outside medical facility.</p>
<p>That same year, Utah became the first state <a href="https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/news/2015/jan/13/utah-first-explicitly-allow-organ-donation-prisoners/#">to enact legislation authorizing prisoners to donate organs</a>. It permits voluntary, posthumous organ donations by prisoners who die while they are behind bars. But, unlike the Massachusetts proposal, the Utah law <a href="https://www.ksl.com/article/23914638/inmates-donating-organs-bill-would-formalize-the-process">does not offer incentives or rewards to inmates</a> who sign up for the program.</p>
<p>Since 2016 Texas <a href="https://www.tdcj.texas.gov/divisions/cmhc/docs/cmhc_policy_manual/E-31.02.pdf">has had a policy similar to Utah’s</a>. That policy allows inmates who die in custody to arrange to donate organs after their death. The Texas policy states: “The inmate will receive no award or compensation of any kind for his donation, including but not limited to preferred treatment by the [Texas Department of Criminal Justice] or improved opportunity for parole.”</p>
<p>In 2018, South Carolina joined Utah and Texas <a href="https://law.justia.com/codes/south-carolina/2018/title-24/chapter-1/section-24-1-285/">in writing permission for inmate organ donation into state law</a>.</p>
<p>But they are exceptions. Today <a href="https://www.law.com/ctlawtribune/2022/12/14/the-ethics-and-politics-of-death-row-organ-donations/?slreturn=20230109213801">most states do not allow prisoners to donate organs at all</a>. And federal prison inmates cannot make posthumous organ donations – but they can make living donations to immediate family members so long as they freely consent to do so.</p>
<h2>Consent in a coercive environment</h2>
<p>Some scholars do not think that prison inmates can <a href="https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/experimentation-prisoners-inadequacy-voluntary-consent">freely consent to organ donation</a> while being in the coercive environment of a prison. They regard inmate organ donation as <a href="https://optn.transplant.hrsa.gov/professionals/by-topic/ethical-considerations/the-ethics-of-organ-donation-from-condemned-prisoners/">exploiting a vulnerable population</a>.</p>
<p>And even some who believe that inmates should be allowed to donate organs were troubled by the initial proposal from Garcia and Gonzales. As the journalist Matthew Cunningham-Cook <a href="https://jacobin.com/2023/02/massachusetts-democrats-prisoner-organ-bone-marrow-donation">noted</a>, their original bill asked prisoners to “choose between their organs and their freedom” and was probably “not even … legal.” </p>
<p>While Rep. Gonzales <a href="https://abcnews.go.com/US/massachusetts-bill-allowing-prisoners-donate-organs-reduced-time/story?id=96989325">recently told</a> ABC News that “he was amending the language to remove the incentives,” he also noted that he would continue to push for legislation to allow inmate organ donation. Such legislation would, in his view, ensure that when it comes to the choice of whether to donate organs, inmates would “have the same basic rights as every citizen has in Massachusetts.”</p>
<p>In my view, this is a worthwhile goal, which, as Garcia and Gonzales now recognize, is best achieved without linking organ donation and sentence reductions.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/199721/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Austin Sarat 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 scholar who has studied imprisonment explains why the promise of sentence reductions in return for organ donation raises ethical issues about whether inmates can ever consent freely.Austin Sarat, William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science, Amherst CollegeLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1853722023-01-06T13:29:55Z2023-01-06T13:29:55ZWhat is Pentecostal Christianity?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/495758/original/file-20221116-12-fkig8y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=4%2C0%2C1017%2C680&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Pentecostal televangelist Paula White, center, prays before giving a sermon in Maryland in 2017.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/visiting-pastor-paula-white-a-pentecostal-christian-news-photo/873934268?phrase=pentecostal%20church&adppopup=true">Mary F. Calvert For The Washington Post via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>In the wake of every election, political analysts pore over polls for clues about how conservative Christians voted, especially evangelicals – and the 2022 midterms are no exception. But these discussions often overlook a group with an increasingly important role in national politics: Pentecostals, evangelicals’ theological cousins. </p>
<p>In summer 2022, Pentecostal Congresswoman Mayra Flores <a href="https://religionnews.com/2022/07/11/the-particularly-pentecostal-flavor-of-mayra-flores-christian-nationalism/">flipped her 84% Hispanic south Texas district</a> to the Republican Party for the first time in over 150 years. On the midterm campaign trail, a number of Pentecostal-leaning preachers <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2022/11/05/lance-wallnau-mastriano-christian-prophets/">stumped for GOP candidates</a>.</p>
<p>Though Pentecostals are diverse, all share an emphasis on the Holy Spirit, or God’s presence in their lives. Yet this also leads to disagreement within the movement about what they believe the Holy Spirit empowers them to do in the real world, especially in activism and politics.</p>
<h2>From an LA church to the world</h2>
<p>For well over 100 years, one thing that has defined Pentecostalism for insiders and outsiders alike has been “charismata,” or “spiritual gifts.” These are special abilities such as <a href="https://www.patheos.com/answers/what-does-it-mean-to-speak-in-tongues">speaking in tongues</a> or performing healings and exorcisms that Pentecostals believe are the Holy Spirit working through them.</p>
<p>Pentecostalism in the U.S. emerged from various streams of thought, but it largely stems from two traditions: the late-19th century “Holiness movement,” which was based in evangelical Methodist teachings, and African American religious practices. </p>
<p>Two preachers in particular played important roles in disseminating the Pentecostal message in the early 20th century: <a href="https://www.bu.edu/missiology/missionary-biography/n-o-p-q/parham-charles-fox-1873-1929/">Charles Parham</a> and William Seymour. Seymour founded the Azusa Street Revival, a series of religious gatherings in Los Angeles that launched the movement’s <a href="https://www.dukeupress.edu/william-j-seymour-and-the-origins-of-global-pentecostalism">rapid global growth</a>. Worldwide Pentecostal denominations are headquartered in places as far apart as Beijing; Lagos, Nigeria; Guadalajara, Mexico; and Sydney. </p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="A skyscraper stands in the distance behind a street sign reading 'Azusa St,' with an informational sign about the Asuza Street Mission." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/495769/original/file-20221116-12-xx3grw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/495769/original/file-20221116-12-xx3grw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/495769/original/file-20221116-12-xx3grw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/495769/original/file-20221116-12-xx3grw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/495769/original/file-20221116-12-xx3grw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1130&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/495769/original/file-20221116-12-xx3grw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1130&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/495769/original/file-20221116-12-xx3grw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1130&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">City Hall can be seen in the background of a memorial to the Azusa Street Mission in Los Angeles.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/city-hall-can-be-seen-in-the-backround-at-the-proposed-site-news-photo/564045807?phrase=azusa%20street&adppopup=true">Richard Hartog/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images</a></span>
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<p>Pentecostalism is a movement, not a particular denomination, and adherents do not ascribe to one shared set of beliefs. Thus, accurate numbers can be hard to come by. But according to <a href="https://assets.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/11/2015/05/Religious-Composition-of-U.S.-Adults.pdf">national studies</a> from 2007 and 2014, about 4.5% of U.S. adults are members of Pentecostal denominations. In addition, Pentecostals can be found in a variety of other churches, from nondenominational congregations to <a href="https://theconversation.com/what-is-charismatic-catholicism-146741">Charismatic Catholic groups</a> that embrace the idea of spiritual gifts.</p>
<h2>Stories of the Holy Spirit</h2>
<p>Pentecostal preaching <a href="http://cup.columbia.edu/book/pentecostals-in-america/9780231141833">is often based on storytelling</a>, using worshippers’ testimonies of miracles and how they believe the Holy Spirit has supported their lives.</p>
<p>Pentecostal churches also put particular emphasis on the Acts of the Apostles: the fifth book of the New Testament, also called <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Acts%201&version=NIV">the Book of Acts</a>. Unlike the four gospels, which describe Jesus’ mission, Acts tells the story of his early followers, who are a strong inspiration for Pentecostals today.</p>
<p>In fact, Pentecostalism even derives its name from events in the Book of Acts. <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Acts+2&version=NIV">According to the biblical narrative</a>, Jesus’ followers had gathered together during the feast of Pentecost when suddenly they were filled with the Holy Spirit, wrought miracles, and could speak in tongues.</p>
<h2>Channeling God’s power for the good of others</h2>
<p>Many early Pentecostals <a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/sowing-the-sacred-9780197516560?cc=us&lang=en&">took inspiration</a> from the Book of Acts’ descriptions of the first-century church and sought to recreate it in their own communities. For example, since early Christians had shared resources and provided aid for widows, some Pentecostals believed that the Holy Spirit could empower them to seek modern social justice.</p>
<p>Collective action led African American Pentecostals to <a href="https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781498553100/Saints-in-the-Struggle-Church-of-God-in-Christ-Activists-in-the-Memphis-Civil-Rights-Movement-1954%E2%80%931968%20%22%22">support the Baptist Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.</a> during the sanitation workers’ strike in Memphis, Tennessee, and to propel the civil rights movement forward. King delivered <a href="https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkivebeentothemountaintop.htm">his famous “Mountain Top” speech</a> – the last before his assassination – at the headquarters of <a href="https://www.uapress.com/product/the-rise-to-respectability/">the Church of God in Christ</a>, the largest Pentecostal denomination in the U.S. </p>
<p>Other Pentecostals are more concerned with how the spirit empowers them personally to overcome individual struggles against sin, rather than institutional or societal problems like exploitative labor or food insecurity.</p>
<h2>Common cause with evangelicals</h2>
<p>In its early years, Pentecostalism mainly drew worshippers from the lower and working classes. During the economic boom after World War II, however, many congregations grew wealthier, and Pentecostals began to deemphasize practices such as exorcisms, <a href="https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315260648">speaking in tongues</a> and strict modesty standards. Many scholars have regarded this shift as a bid for respectability and <a href="https://ifphc.wordpress.com/2022/05/13/80-years-ago-the-assemblies-of-god-was-a-founding-member-of-the-national-association-of-evangelicals/">acceptance into the broader world of American evangelicals</a>, who, like mainline Protestants, often looked down on Pentecostals as uneducated.</p>
<p>To some extent, it worked. By the final quarter of the 20th century, Pentecostals were beginning to experience power in national politics. To be sure, African American and Latino Pentecostals have a long history of grassroots political mobilization on issues like <a href="https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674970915">labor and immigration</a>. But electoral politics offered ready access to the mainstream.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="A man in a suit stands on a platform, talking to a large crowd in a room with flags lined up on one wall." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/495783/original/file-20221117-21-cedo87.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/495783/original/file-20221117-21-cedo87.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/495783/original/file-20221117-21-cedo87.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/495783/original/file-20221117-21-cedo87.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/495783/original/file-20221117-21-cedo87.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/495783/original/file-20221117-21-cedo87.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/495783/original/file-20221117-21-cedo87.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=501&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">The Rev. Luciano Padilla welcomes visitors at the Bay Ridge Christian Center in New York City in 2005.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/reverend-luciano-padilla-offers-a-personal-welcome-to-first-news-photo/52983860?phrase=latino%20pentecostal&adppopup=true">Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images</a></span>
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<p>Today, Pentecostals and <a href="https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Evangelicals/Frances-FitzGerald/9781439131343">evangelicals</a> hardly appear any different from one another in national politics, and the terms are often used interchangeably. In fact, today there is <a href="https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781538116098/American-Blindspot-Race-Class-Religion-and-the-Trump-Presidency">greater agreement</a> between white Pentecostals and white evangelicals on politics than on theology; together, they <a href="https://wwnorton.com/books/9781631495731">resemble more of a culture than a fixed set of beliefs</a>.</p>
<p>Since the 1980s, white Pentecostals and evangelicals have played a key role in carrying the religious right’s agenda forward. Pentecostals’ <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/religious-landscape-study/religious-family/pentecostal-family-evangelical-trad/party-affiliation/">voting patterns</a> lean solidly toward the Republican Party. </p>
<p>They also poll the <a href="https://twitter.com/ryanburge/status/1545554824179159040">highest</a> on matters pertaining to Christian nationalism, and many <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/made-by-history/wp/2018/03/21/the-christian-sect-that-has-always-cheered-on-donald-trump/">enthusiastically supported</a> Donald Trump.</p>
<h2>Diverse ‘values voters’</h2>
<p>Latino and African American Pentecostals, however, are not nearly as unified on matters of religious politics. Yet recent voting trends suggest that Latino voters may begin to lean more <a href="https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-03-04/latino-america-evangelical-political-force">right wing</a>, especially as growing numbers of them identify as Protestants.</p>
<p>African American Pentecostals also maintain a greater range of <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/religious-landscape-study/compare/political-ideology/by/party-affiliation/among/religious-family/pentecostal-family-historically-black-protestant-trad/">political ideologies</a> than white Pentecostals. They assert that they are “<a href="https://azdailysun.com/black-pentecostals-vote-values-but-not-part-of-religious-right/article_24c9718c-9512-58c1-aa80-6f470ff90904.html">values voters</a>,” as social conservatives often call themselves, but not part of the religious right.</p>
<p>The power of the Holy Spirit, not political power, still matters more in the daily lives of most rank-and-file Pentecostals. But what they believe the Holy Spirit empowers them to do in the real world may be the faith’s most significant transformation over the past 100 years.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/185372/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Lloyd Daniel Barba 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>Pentecostals agree on the importance of the Holy Spirit – but not necessarily on what it empowers them to do.Lloyd Daniel Barba, Assistant Professor of Religion, Amherst CollegeLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1941382022-12-15T13:04:21Z2022-12-15T13:04:21ZSpain’s new memory law dredges up a painful chapter of Spain’s often forgotten ties to Nazis<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/500828/original/file-20221213-22031-8iqefp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Plaques commemorating artists who were killed by the Nazis are marked with flowers in Austria in 2020. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://media.gettyimages.com/id/1228082555/photo/austria-germany-wwii-salzburg-festival-jews.jpg?s=612x612&w=gi&k=20&c=g-1Nlh7mzS7sqGVFsvNVnvzQneKWKGI7oQ-n6_zUHqg=">Barbara Gindl/APA/AFP via Getty Images </a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Walking down a tree-lined street in the Poble Sec neighborhood of Barcelona, one might easily miss a small bronze square set into the sidewalk. Stamped into the metal in the regional language of Catalan are the words: “Here lived Francesc Boix Campo, born 1920, exiled 1939, deported 1941, Mauthausen, liberated.” </p>
<p>Holocaust memorials like this one – which honors a Spanish Nazi concentration camp survivor – are part of a project that started in Germany but has expanded over the past few years across Europe and the United States. </p>
<p>These unassuming memorials hide a mighty purpose – making the victims of a traumatic past a visible and permanent part of the modern landscape. </p>
<p>In October 2022, Spain’s current progressive government approved a new law – called the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/oct/05/spain-passes-law-to-bring-dignity-to-franco-era-victims">Democratic Memory Law</a> – that recognizes Spaniards who suffered and died at the hands of the Nazis. </p>
<p>Among other measures, the law will create a census and a national DNA bank to help people identify the thousands of Spaniards who were killed during World War II. </p>
<p>I am <a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=5ptshgYAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao">a scholar</a> of Spain’s role in World War II and the Holocaust. The way the country has faced this disturbing past has evolved considerably in recent decades. Spain has publicly avoided the history of Spaniards killed in Nazi camps, who were victims of Adolf Hitler, but also of Francisco Franco, Spain’s dictator from 1939 to 1975. </p>
<p>This new law marks a shift, recognizing that the Spanish government has a role to play in reviving the memory of all of the victims of Spain’s dark years.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/500830/original/file-20221213-18915-zrnofx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Three school aged blond girls sit and stand over cobblestones on a sidewalk and appear to place flowers there." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/500830/original/file-20221213-18915-zrnofx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/500830/original/file-20221213-18915-zrnofx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/500830/original/file-20221213-18915-zrnofx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/500830/original/file-20221213-18915-zrnofx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/500830/original/file-20221213-18915-zrnofx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/500830/original/file-20221213-18915-zrnofx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/500830/original/file-20221213-18915-zrnofx.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">Children place flowers at a Berlin memorial commemorating a Jewish family killed in World War II.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://media.gettyimages.com/id/1324757639/photo/locals-research-and-commemorate-a-jewish-family-murdered-in-the-holocaust.jpg?s=612x612&w=gi&k=20&c=IbqLnLSWV-bwuA_yy5ZGDZk1xitY9gii1eaHo7z3kbI=">Sean Gallup/Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>From the Spanish Civil War to World War II</h2>
<p>Spain underwent a civil war from 1936 to 1939, setting the stage for World War II. A band of military leaders headed by <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Francisco-Franco">Gen. Franco</a> rose up against the democratically elected Spanish government in 1936. Three violent years later, these fascist-leaning insurgents had won the war, and Franco was installed as dictator. </p>
<p>Spain’s allegiance with the Nazis began with the Spanish Civil War. Hitler sent <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Condor-Legion">Condor Legion</a> planes to bomb the northern city of Guernica – memorialized in a <a href="https://www.museoreinasofia.es/en/collection/artwork/guernica">famous painting by Pablo Picasso</a> – in 1937. Hitler also helped arm the military uprising against the democratic government throughout the civil war. Just a few years later, during World War II, Franco would return the favor by sending <a href="https://doi.org/10.1177/026569149502500103">raw materials</a> used to produce weapons of war to Hitler.</p>
<p>In the spring of 1939, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/feb/09/franco-spain-refugees-haunted-by-the-past-retirada">half a million refugees</a> streamed over the border from Spain to France to escape the violence, including hundreds of thousands of veterans who had fought for Spain’s elected government in the civil war. </p>
<p>Forced into refugee camps with little access to food and clean water along the beaches in southern France, they were given a <a href="https://www.france24.com/en/20190209-france-spanish-civil-war-republican-refugees-la-retirada-80th-anniversary">choice</a>: Return to Spain, where they would be met with Franco’s violent revenge, or fight the Nazis. </p>
<p>Thousands enlisted as soldiers or manual laborers for the French army. Others joined the <a href="https://english.elpais.com/elpais/2016/10/11/inenglish/1476196791_317656.html">French Resistance</a>. </p>
<p>When France fell to the Nazis in 1940, Franco disowned the Spanish refugees he considered traitors. Germany deported 10,000 to 15,000 Spaniards to Nazi concentration camps. The Nazis killed about <a href="http://pares.mcu.es/Deportados/servlets/ServletController">60% of these Spanish refugees</a>.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/500833/original/file-20221213-25978-oz0t5e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Three people stand near white candles on a table, in front of a banner that says 'dia de la memoria del Holocausto' behind them." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/500833/original/file-20221213-25978-oz0t5e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/500833/original/file-20221213-25978-oz0t5e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=414&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/500833/original/file-20221213-25978-oz0t5e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=414&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/500833/original/file-20221213-25978-oz0t5e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=414&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/500833/original/file-20221213-25978-oz0t5e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=520&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/500833/original/file-20221213-25978-oz0t5e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=520&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/500833/original/file-20221213-25978-oz0t5e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=520&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 Israeli ambassador to Spain, Rodica Radian-Gordo, center, lights candles at a Holocaust commemoration day in January 2022 in Madrid.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://media.gettyimages.com/id/1367333987/photo/the-assembly-of-madrid-organizes-an-event-for-holocaust-remembrance-day.jpg?s=612x612&w=gi&k=20&c=-uLHW19VbXzQ6PU8qVOJBpwGXWqaJhIggm_DgfCKlkw=">Eduardo Parra/Europa Press via Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Bringing WWII victims out of the shadows</h2>
<p>As many as 15,000 Spaniards were <a href="https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/spanish-civil-war">deported to Nazi concentration camps</a> during World War II. </p>
<p>But while politicians debate whether it is appropriate to remember Spain’s painful past or if the government is opening old wounds, groups of citizens have stepped in. </p>
<p>The <a href="https://www.stolpersteine.eu/en/home/">Stolpersteine Project</a>, a public art initiative started by German artist Gunter Demnig in 1992, memorializes Jews and other victims of the Nazis, like people persecuted for their political views, with a “stumbling stone” placed in the sidewalk outside the individual’s last known residence. </p>
<p>By recognizing non-Jewish political prisoners during World War II, Stolpersteine cements Spain’s partnership with the Nazis into the ground people walk on, demonstrating how a dark history can be brought into the light of day. The first memorials in Spain were placed in the small town of Navàs, about an hour north of Barcelona, in 2015. </p>
<p>The project has grown in the past seven years to commemorate more than 600 Spanish men and women in 96 cities and towns scattered across the country.</p>
<p>Sidestepping the political firestorm over Spain’s World War II history, Stolpersteine in Spain aims to bring victims out of the memory shadows. </p>
<p>The Stolpersteine project in Spain puts the names of people who suffered during each country’s violent past on public display. These plaques challenge people to consider who these victims were and what their own connection to this past might be. The Spaniards memorialized by Stolpersteine are not household names: They are men and women who fled Spain in 1939 and never returned.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/500835/original/file-20221213-23347-cximvx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A black and white photo shows two men in military clothing, with one doing a heil salute, next to a row of soldiers, some of whom hold a Nazi flag" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/500835/original/file-20221213-23347-cximvx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/500835/original/file-20221213-23347-cximvx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=803&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/500835/original/file-20221213-23347-cximvx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=803&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/500835/original/file-20221213-23347-cximvx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=803&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/500835/original/file-20221213-23347-cximvx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1009&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/500835/original/file-20221213-23347-cximvx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1009&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/500835/original/file-20221213-23347-cximvx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1009&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 meeting between Nazi leader Adolf Hitler and Spanish Gen. Francisco Franco in Basque Country, France, in 1940.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://media.gettyimages.com/id/1083751790/photo/spain.jpg?s=612x612&w=gi&k=20&c=np-CIi9o33ttHtZmIQj1WSzOkdQqIRlNI7JZsGtP3YE=">adoc-photos/Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Preserving the memory of a painful past</h2>
<p>Spain is now experiencing the rise of <a href="https://rosalux.nyc/vox-a-new-far-right-in-spain/">Vox</a>, a far-right political party. If Vox wins in the 2023 national elections, it will likely <a href="https://usercontent.one/wp/www.radicalrightanalysis.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Xidias-2021.1-CARR-RI-Final.pdf?media=1628264068">roll back the Democratic Memory Law</a> – and the government’s initiative to reform historical education and map mass graves. </p>
<p>The Stolpersteine Project avoids the argument over who is responsible for remembering Spain’s past. Sticking to objective facts, every plaque contains the essential details of each individual political prisoner’s escape from Spain, journey through war-torn Europe and survival or death in a Nazi camp. The stone’s placement outside the prisoner’s last known home makes a connection with the street, city and region where they lived. </p>
<p>As Spaniards and tourists snap photos of the <a href="https://datos.madrid.es/portal/site/egob/menuitem.c05c1f754a33a9fbe4b2e4b284f1a5a0/?vgnextoid=d0802ea16a892710VgnVCM1000001d4a900aRCRD&vgnextchannel=374512b9ace9f310VgnVCM100000171f5a0aRCRD&vgnextfmt=default">bronze squares they encounter</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/IStolpersteine">share them on social media</a>, they begin a conversation about who these individuals were, what motivated them to leave Spain, and how they ended up in a Nazi camp. </p>
<p>Francesc Boix, for example, one of the people recognized with a <a href="https://www.elnacional.cat/es/barcelona/francesc-boix-fotografo-mauthausen-stolpersteine-barcelona_762966_102.html">memorial stone</a>, was a a Spanish Civil War veteran and Nazi camp survivor. After fighting fascism in two wars, Boix was imprisoned in the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria for four years. While in the camp, Boix worked as an assistant in the photography lab, where he stole negatives from the Nazis and later used them in his <a href="https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/film/trial-testimony-against-albert-speer">testimony at the Nuremberg trials</a>. </p>
<p>Boix, who died in 1951, is one of the most <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6704776/">well-known</a> concentration camp survivors in Spain. His story illustrates the struggle against fascism, which he and his fellow Spanish Nazi camp prisoners fought on a daily basis.</p>
<p>Stolpersteine memorials in Spain are not only increasing the visibility of these largely unknown victims of Nazi violence. They are also connecting them to the residents and visitors who, decades later, walk along the same sidewalks.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/194138/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sara J. Brenneis receives funding from UNH Center for the Humanities to support a public humanities study of the Stolpersteine in Spain. </span></em></p>Spain has long avoided addressing the fact that tens of thousands of Spaniards were victims of Nazis, who collaborated with Spain’s former dictator, Francisco Franco.Sara J. Brenneis, Professor of Spanish, Amherst CollegeLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1952512022-11-29T13:35:15Z2022-11-29T13:35:15ZAlabama’s execution problems are part of a long history of botched lethal injections<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/497724/original/file-20221128-5230-q7icct.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=5%2C5%2C3457%2C2175&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">In some cases, death row inmates have been strapped to the gurney for hours.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://newsroom.ap.org/detail/DeathPenaltyProblemsExplainer/86ba64530aa64b6ba241c943b619f14a/photo?Query=alabama%20execution&mediaType=photo&sortBy=arrivaldatetime:desc&dateRange=Anytime&totalCount=68&currentItemNo=2">AP Photo/Sue Ogrock</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey has <a href="https://www.npr.org/2022/11/21/1138357929/alabama-executions-pause-lethal-injection">announced</a> a pause in her state’s use of capital punishment. It follows a run of botched lethal injection executions in the state, including two where the procedure <a href="https://eji.org/news/kenny-smith-alabama-execution/">had to be abandoned before the inmates succumbed to the cocktail of death drugs</a>.</p>
<p>The last straw appears to have been the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/17/us/alabama-execution-kenneth-smith.html">failed attempt to put Kenneth Smith to death</a> on Nov. 17, 2022. The state had to call off the procedure after difficulty in securing an IV line.</p>
<p>But that was just the latest execution not to go as planned. In September, Alabama had to stop <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/10/alabama-inmate-execution-alan-miller/671620/">the execution of Alan Eugene Miller</a> after prison officials poked him with needles for more than an hour because they could not find a usable vein in which to secure an IV.</p>
<p>Even when the execution was carried out resulting in death, the manner has been problematic. When the state executed <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/joe-nathan-james-jr-alabama-apparently-botched-recent-execution-anti-death-penalty-group-asserts/">Joe Nathan James</a> on July 28, 2022, the process – which is normally supposed to be over in a matter of minutes – <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/08/joe-nathan-james-execution-alabama/671127/">took more than three hours</a>. During that time, officials tried repeatedly to insert the IV lines necessary to carry the deadly drugs and jabbed James with needles. </p>
<p>In a statement on Nov. 21, Ivey <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/21/politics/alabama-executions-pause-review-ivey">ordered</a> the state Department of Corrections to do a thorough review of the procedures used in executions and asked the state’s attorney general, Steve Marshall, to stop the process for two upcoming executions.</p>
<p>Alabama officials <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/21/us/alabama-executions-lethal-injection.html">have blamed</a> their problems on what they have described as frivolous, last-minute legal maneuvers by death penalty defense lawyers. In the cases of Miller and Smith, state officials claimed that they ran out of time before the death warrant was due to expire.</p>
<p>But whatever the cause, Alabama’s execution difficulties are not unique to that state. </p>
<p>My <a href="https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=23979">research shows</a> that since 1900, in states across the country, lethal injections have been more frequently botched than any of the other type of execution methods used throughout that period. This includes hanging, electrocution, the gas chamber and the firing squad – even though these approaches are not without their problems.</p>
<h2>The early history of lethal injection</h2>
<p>Lethal injection <a href="https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/a25689/gerry-commission-report-methods-of-execution/">was first considered by the state of New York</a> in the late 1880s when it convened a blue ribbon commission to study alternatives to hanging. During its deliberations, Dr. Julius Mount Bleyer <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=E7S3C4_IYmYC&pg=PA73&lpg=PA73&dq=that+%E2%80%9Cthe+condemned+could+be+executed+on+his+bed+in+his+cell+with+a+6-gram+injection+of+sulfate+of+morphine.%E2%80%9D&source=bl&ots=DX7rmZpYKi&sig=ACfU3U2t-1PK08QmFL3jwZ63iRWRO6URAw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiOpYe52Zv4AhWBZjABHbQKD00Q6AF6BAgCEAM#v=onepage&q=that%20%E2%80%9Cthe%20condemned%20could%20be%20executed%20on%20his%20bed%20in%20his%20cell%20with%20a%206-gram%20injection%20of%20sulfate%20of%20morphine.%E2%80%9D&f=false">invited the commission to envision</a> a future in which a person condemned to death “could be executed on his bed in his cell with a 6-gram injection of sulfate of morphine.”</p>
<p>Bleyer and his allies <a href="https://heinonline.org/HOL/Page?handle=hein.journals/medlejo5&div=43&g_sent=1&casa_token=">argued</a> that the procedure would be painless. They said that unlike hanging, the method could not be messed up. It also would be cheap, they claimed – all that was needed was a needle and a small amount of morphine.</p>
<p>Lethal injection’s critics told the commission that the method would actually be easily botched, especially if doctors did not conduct the procedure. And even when done right, those in favor of the death penalty as the ultimate sentence further argued that it would be too humane. It would take the dread out of death and dampen capital punishment’s deterrent effect.</p>
<p>Ultimately, lethal injection’s opponents prevailed, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Executioners-Current-Westinghouse-Invention-Electric/dp/037572446X">aided by the medical community’s unwavering stance against it</a>. Doctors “did not want the syringe, which was associated with the alleviation of human suffering, to become an instrument of death.”</p>
<p>For nearly 100 years after New York’s decision, no jurisdiction in the United States authorized execution by lethal injection. But the early debate over lethal injection foreshadowed arguments that were heard in 1977 during Oklahoma’s consideration of this execution method.</p>
<p>Proponents echoed Bleyer and <a href="https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2005/09/guilty-man/">declared</a> that executions using this method could be accomplished with “no struggle, no stench, no pain.”</p>
<p>This time they won.</p>
<p>The specific drugs to be used in lethal injection – the anesthetic <a href="https://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/molecule-of-the-week/archive/s/sodium-thiopental.html">sodium thiopental</a> and <a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/339801/">pancuronium bromide</a>, a muscle relaxant – would not be chosen until four years later. Although the original law only called for those two drugs, a third drug was soon added: <a href="https://www.hrw.org/reports/2006/us0406/4.htm#:%7E:text=Potassium%20chloride%20is%20the%20drug,within%20a%20minute%20of%20injection.">potassium chloride</a>, which causes cardiac arrest. </p>
<p>Together, these three drugs would <a href="https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-alper-3-drug-cocktail-20170420-story.html">make up what became the “standard” three-drug, lethal injection protocol</a>. And what started in Oklahoma spread quickly. Lethal injection soon became the execution method of choice across the United States in every state that had the death penalty. </p>
<h2>Lethal injection’s troubles</h2>
<p>But right from the start, administering lethal injections proved to be a complex procedure that was difficult to get right. In fact, the <a href="https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/charlie-brooks-last-words/">first use of lethal injection by Texas in 1982</a> gave a foretaste of some of the problems that would later come to characterize the method of execution.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="A black and white photo shows a white gurney with straps in a bricked room." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/497726/original/file-20221128-13-taimz1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/497726/original/file-20221128-13-taimz1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=390&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/497726/original/file-20221128-13-taimz1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=390&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/497726/original/file-20221128-13-taimz1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=390&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/497726/original/file-20221128-13-taimz1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=490&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/497726/original/file-20221128-13-taimz1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=490&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/497726/original/file-20221128-13-taimz1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=490&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Lethal injection chambers have remained relatively unchanged since being introduced in Texas in 1982.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://newsroom.ap.org/detail/TexasDeptofCorrectionsExecutionRoom1982/00ea6690975145cca2dfd711504ce77e/photo?Query=lethal%20injection%201982&mediaType=photo&sortBy=arrivaldatetime:desc&dateRange=Anytime&totalCount=14&currentItemNo=13">AP Photo/Ed Kolenovsky</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The Texas team charged with executing a prisoner named <a href="https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/first-execution-by-lethal-injection#:%7E:text=The%20first%20execution%20by%20lethal,when%20administered%20in%20lesser%20doses.">Charles Brooks</a> repeatedly <a href="https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1982/12/16/painful-questions-pbtbhe-execution-of-charles/">failed in their efforts to insert an IV</a> into a vein in his arm, splattering blood onto the sheet covering his body. And after the IV was secured and the drugs began to flow, Brooks seemed to experience considerable pain.</p>
<p>The difficulties in Brooks’ execution and in subsequent lethal injections result from the fact that medical ethics <a href="https://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4294&context=flr">do not allow</a> doctors to take part in choosing the drugs or administering them. In the place of doctors, prison officials are responsible for the lethal injection procedure. In addition, dosages of the drugs used are <a href="https://people.howstuffworks.com/lethal-injection5.htm">standardized</a> rather than tailored to the needs of particular inmates as they would be in a medical procedure. As a result, sometimes the lethal injection drugs don’t work correctly. </p>
<p>Despite the effort to medicalize executions, the history of lethal injection has been anything but smooth, sterile and predictable. In fact, my research reveals that of the 1,054 executions carried out from 1982 to 2010 using the standard three-drug lethal injection protocol, more than 7% were botched.</p>
<p>Since then, owing in part to <a href="https://www.themarshallproject.org/2016/04/12/how-the-drug-shortage-has-slowed-the-death-penalty-treadmill">difficulties death penalty states have had in acquiring drugs</a> for the standard three-drug protocol, <a href="https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=35871">things appear to have gotten worse</a>. States have turned to questionable drug suppliers, including compounding pharmacies that are <a href="https://www.fda.gov/drugs/human-drug-compounding/compounding-and-fda-questions-and-answers#:%7E:text=Are%20compounded%20drugs%20approved%20by,safety%2C%20effectiveness%2C%20and%20quality.">not subject to extensive regulation by the Food and Drug Administration</a>.</p>
<p>In the last decade, states have used no less than 10 different drug combinations in lethal injections. Some of them were used multiple times, while others were used just once.</p>
<p>As states have experimented in the hope of finding a reliable drug protocol, <a href="https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=35871">my research shows</a> that botched executions have occurred as much as 20% of the time, depending on which of the newer drug protocols is employed. </p>
<p>During some of those executions, inmates have cried out in pain and repeatedly gasped for breath long after they were supposed to have been rendered unconscious.</p>
<p>In September 2020, <a href="https://www.npr.org/2020/09/21/793177589/gasping-for-air-autopsies-reveal-troubling-effects-of-lethal-injection#:%7E:text=Most%20states%20use%20three%20drugs,as%20cruel%3F%22%20says%20Zivot.">an NPR investigation</a> helped explain the high rate of bungled executions. It found signs of pulmonary edema fluid filling the lungs in many of the post-lethal injection autopsies it reviewed. Those autopsies reveal that inmates’ lungs failed while they continued to try to breathe, causing them to feel as if they were drowning and suffocating.</p>
<h2>Responding to lethal injection’s problems</h2>
<p>Alabama now joins <a href="https://sanquentinnews.com/gov-mike-dewine-halts-executions-in-ohio/">Ohio</a> and <a href="https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/politics/2022/05/02/tennessee-governor-pauses-2022-executions-lethal-injection-review/9612950002/">Tennessee</a> as states that have paused executions and launched investigations after lethal injection failures. Other states <a href="https://account.thestate.com/paywall/subscriber-only?resume=251151894&intcid=ab_archive">have resurrected</a> previously discredited methods of execution – like electrocution or the firing squad – and added them to their menu of execution options on the books. </p>
<p>Lethal injection’s problems also have contributed to <a href="https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/state-and-federal-info/state-by-state">the decision of 11 states to abolish the death penalty since 2007</a>.</p>
<p>Reviewing the history of the different execution methods used in this country, Supreme Court Justice Sonya Sotomayor <a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/16pdf/16-602_n758.pdf">wrote in 2017</a>: “States develop a method of execution, which is generally accepted for a time. Science then reveals that … the states’ chosen method of execution causes unconstitutional levels of suffering.”</p>
<p>And, referring specifically to lethal injection and its problems, she observed, “What cruel irony that the method [of execution] that appears most humane may turn out to be our most cruel experiment yet.”</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/195251/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Austin Sarat 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>Alabama has paused the carrying out of death sentences after a series of cases in which the state struggled with the procedure.Austin Sarat, William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science, Amherst CollegeLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1898502022-10-26T12:29:48Z2022-10-26T12:29:48ZRap artists have penned plenty of lyrics about US presidents – this course examines what they say about Reagan and the 1980s<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/489515/original/file-20221013-14-avelq0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=10%2C30%2C3421%2C2253&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Numerous rap songs criticize the Reagan administration for its complicity in the illicit drug trade.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/president-ronald-reagan-campaigning-for-a-second-term-of-news-photo/594771010?phrase=Ronald%20Reagan&adppopup=true">Wally McNamee/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="Text saying: Uncommon Courses, from The Conversation" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/499014/original/file-20221205-17-kcwec8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/499014/original/file-20221205-17-kcwec8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=375&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499014/original/file-20221205-17-kcwec8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=375&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499014/original/file-20221205-17-kcwec8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=375&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499014/original/file-20221205-17-kcwec8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=471&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499014/original/file-20221205-17-kcwec8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=471&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499014/original/file-20221205-17-kcwec8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=471&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"></span>
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</figure>
<p><em><a href="https://theconversation.com/topics/uncommon-courses-130908">Uncommon Courses</a> is an occasional series from The Conversation U.S. highlighting unconventional approaches to teaching.</em> </p>
<h2>Title of course:</h2>
<p>“Rap, Reagan and the 1980s”</p>
<h2>What prompted the idea for the course?</h2>
<p>Actually, it was Donald Trump’s <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/how-donald-trump-came-up-with-make-america-great-again/2017/01/17/fb6acf5e-dbf7-11e6-ad42-f3375f271c9c_story.html">Make America Great Again</a> movement. People seemed shocked by his campaign slogan. But it wasn’t the first time in the U.S. that an entertainer had acted as a populist politician to win the allegiance of working-class white voters who feared losing their socioeconomic status. That distinction more rightly belongs to Ronald Reagan, who used the phrase first in his 1980 campaign.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/489513/original/file-20221013-24-kjid11.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A campaign button emblazoned with the faces of two men is topped with the words 'Reagan-Bush in '80'" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/489513/original/file-20221013-24-kjid11.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/489513/original/file-20221013-24-kjid11.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=554&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/489513/original/file-20221013-24-kjid11.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=554&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/489513/original/file-20221013-24-kjid11.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=554&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/489513/original/file-20221013-24-kjid11.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=697&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/489513/original/file-20221013-24-kjid11.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=697&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/489513/original/file-20221013-24-kjid11.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=697&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 1980 Ronald Reagan campaign button employed the use of the phrase ‘Let’s Make America Great Again.’</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/search/object/nmah_522618">Smithsonian Institution</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/">CC BY-NC-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Many of my students, who came of age during the Obama administration, enjoyed the 2016 song by YG and Nipsey Hussle titled “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BlIREcAu0PI">FDT</a>,” which is an acronym for “F— Donald Trump.” The song’s <a href="https://genius.com/Yg-fdt-lyrics">lyrics</a> criticize Trump for campaigning for the White House by trying to <a href="https://time.com/3923128/donald-trump-announcement-speech/">breed resentment against immigrants from Mexico</a>. I realized then that, just as today’s rappers are weighing in on politics, I could teach a course about how rap artists in the 1980s – and even afterward – dealt with the politicians from that era, chief among them President Reagan.</p>
<h2>What does the course explore?</h2>
<p>It uses hip-hop as a tool to understand the sociopolitical, economic and cultural factors that affected the lives of Black youths during the 1980s – the era of “<a href="https://www.history.com/topics/us-presidents/heres-why-reaganomics-is-so-controversial-video">Reaganomics</a>.” That’s the <a href="https://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/reaganomics.asp">name given to Reagan’s economic policies</a>, which called for deregulation of the markets, widespread tax cuts, less spending on social programs and more spending on the military.</p>
<p>For instance, we use Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s classic 1982 hit “The Message” to examine the disappearance of middle-class factory jobs from American cities during a period of <a href="https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2002/03/bought.htm">globalization</a> and <a href="https://www.edweek.org/education/education-spending-declined-during-80s-report-says/1991/06">cuts to public school funding</a>.</p>
<p>The group rapped:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“<em>My son said, Daddy, I don’t wanna go to school<br>
‘Cause the teacher’s a jerk, he must think, I’m a fool<br>
And all the kids smoke reefer, I think it’d be cheaper<br>
If I just got a job, learned to be a street sweeper</em>”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Students also examine the crack cocaine epidemic of the 1980s through the lyrics of Too $hort’s “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJ9ioPrZ6_c">Girl That’s Your Life</a>” from 1983, N.W.A’s “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Ei_zhL_YTY">Dopeman</a>” from 1987, and Killer Mike’s 2012 song “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lIqNjC1RKU">Reagan</a>,” which holds the Reagan administration <a href="https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB2/index.html">complicit in creating the crack cocaine epidemic</a>.</p>
<p>Raps Killer Mike: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>“<em>Just like Oliver North introduced us to cocaine / In the 80s when them bricks came on military planes</em>.”</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Why is this course relevant now?</h2>
<p>It allows students to see the effects of the loosely regulated market economy of Reagan’s America, which led to <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/45131666">profound wealth gaps</a>. </p>
<p>To get a sense of the implications of the Reagan 1980s, I also have students listen to Kendrick Lamar’s “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YARwQQntqp8">Ronald Reagan Era</a>,” which came out in 2011 and deals with the flow of drugs, crack cocaine in particular, into Lamar’s native Compton, California, and Los Angeles during the late 1980s. The song also illuminates how drugs negatively affected his neighborhood and childhood. Lamar was born in 1987.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/490105/original/file-20221017-19-6eidfe.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Two men speak while holding microphones" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/490105/original/file-20221017-19-6eidfe.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/490105/original/file-20221017-19-6eidfe.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=480&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/490105/original/file-20221017-19-6eidfe.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=480&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/490105/original/file-20221017-19-6eidfe.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=480&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/490105/original/file-20221017-19-6eidfe.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=603&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/490105/original/file-20221017-19-6eidfe.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=603&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/490105/original/file-20221017-19-6eidfe.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=603&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Kendrick Lamar, right, and Killer Mike are among the rap artists who’ve made songs that mention Ronald Reagan in the title.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Andrew Chin and Matthew Baker Getty Images</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>What’s a critical lesson from the course?</h2>
<p>As various rap artists have pointed out, the violence that takes place in urban communities is directly connected to the world of politics.</p>
<p>As a group called Above the Law, part of a coalition of artists called the <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9892864/">West Coast Rap All-Stars</a>, stated in the 1990 song “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pmg6c0PASYk">We’re All in the Same Gang</a>”:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“<em>violence don’t only revolve from drugs and thugs and gangs that bang; most times it’s a political thang.</em>” </p>
</blockquote>
<p>A key lesson is that much of the praise for Reagan, a <a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/10511431.2019.1708602">revered figure</a> in the conservative movement, did not always match the effects of his policies. For instance, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/06/01/trump-is-giving-arthur-laffer-presidential-medal-freedom-economists-arent-laughing/">modern economists have questioned</a> the purported benefits of the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/06/01/trump-is-giving-arthur-laffer-presidential-medal-freedom-economists-arent-laughing/">Laffer curve</a>, which is an <a href="https://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/laffercurve.asp">economic analysis</a> that shows the relationship between tax rates and tax revenue, and which was used to support the <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/taxnotes/2021/09/03/reagans-tax-cut">Reagan tax cuts</a>. Reagan also embraced <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/how-bad-is-inequality-trickle-down-economics-thomas-piketty-economists-2021-12">“trickle-down” economics</a>, a theory that tax breaks and other benefits for business will ultimately help everyone, but economists say these benefits rarely, if ever, reached the most marginalized. </p>
<h2>What materials does the course feature?</h2>
<p>• “<a href="https://link.springer.com/book/10.1057/9780230616196">Ronald Reagan and the 1980s: Perceptions, Policies, Legacies</a>,” edited by Cheryl Hudson and Gareth Davies</p>
<p>• “<a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/625232/reconsidering-reagan-by-daniel-s-lucks/">Reconsidering Reagan: Racism, Republicans, and the Road to Trump</a>,” by Daniel Lucks</p>
<p>• “<a href="https://kansaspress.ku.edu/9780700616510/hip-hop-revolution/">Hip-Hop Revolution: The Culture and Politics of Rap</a>,” by Jeffrey O.G. Ogbar</p>
<p>• The 1985 movie “<a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089444/">Krush Groove</a>,” starring Sheila E. as well as Joseph Simmons and Daryl McDaniels of the pioneering rap group <a href="https://www.rundmc.com/">Run-DMC</a>.</p>
<h2>What will the course prepare students to do?</h2>
<p>The class prepares students to communicate their points of view to the public in creative and concise ways, much as rappers do in their songs. Specifically, they must write 16 bars. They also critically evaluate readings, songs and albums by doing a “5-Mic Review” <a href="https://www.hiphopnostalgia.com/2014/01/the-source-mic-system-for-album-reviews.html">in the way of the groundbreaking rap magazine The Source</a>. Finally, they do a group project that involves constructing a soundtrack for a movie or a hip-hop playlist.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/189850/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Stefan M. Bradley 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>Ronald Reagan may have been known as ‘The Great Communicator,’ but rap artists don’t view his legacy through such rose-colored glasses. A professor of Black studies and history takes a closer look.Stefan M. Bradley, Professor of Black Studies and History, Amherst CollegeLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1922172022-10-12T12:18:57Z2022-10-12T12:18:57ZChallenges to voters are growing before the midterms – and have a long history as a way of keeping down the Black vote<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/489128/original/file-20221011-20-o72r8v.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=8%2C17%2C5973%2C3934&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A GOP plan means that voters may be challenged on their right to vote.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/michigan-residents-their-ballots-in-the-michigan-primary-news-photo/1242271776?phrase=voting%20ballots&adppopup=true">Matthew Hatcher/Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Voters who want to cast their ballot on Election Day this November may be in for an unpleasant surprise – the very real possibility that they will be unable to vote.</p>
<p>That’s because any registered voter can challenge the right of another voter, or group of voters, to cast a ballot by alleging that they are not qualified to do so.</p>
<hr>
<iframe id="noa-web-audio-player" style="border: none" src="https://embed-player.newsoveraudio.com/v4?key=x84olp&id=https://theconversation.com/challenges-to-voters-are-growing-before-the-midterms-and-have-a-long-history-as-a-way-of-keeping-down-the-black-vote-192217&bgColor=F5F5F5&color=D8352A&playColor=D8352A" width="100%" height="110px"></iframe>
<p><em>You can listen to more articles from The Conversation, narrated by Noa, <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/topics/audio-narrated-99682">here</a>.</em></p>
<hr>
<p><a href="https://www.sos.wa.gov/_assets/elections/voter-registration-challenge-form.pdf">Potential challenges range from</a> the wrong address on a voter’s registration to not being old enough to vote to having been barred from voting as a felon. Once a challenge is made, election officials have to determine whether it is valid and whether a voter should be removed from the list of eligible voters.</p>
<p>State and local election officials have already had an unusually busy year dealing with voting challenges. In many places, they have been <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/28/us/politics/election-activists-voter-challenges.html">flooded</a> with them.</p>
<p>The Associated Press <a href="https://apnews.com/article/2022-midterm-elections-voting-georgia-presidential-florida-dfbe7f00418a35c70c9d53fa3a260111">reported</a> on Sept. 17, 2022, that in one Iowa county, election officials who had received “three voter challenges over the previous 15 years” got 119 challenges over a two-day period. </p>
<p>This year, <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/us/georgia-county-validates-thousands-voters-challenged-by-trump-allies-2022-09-22/">Georgia has been</a> <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/28/us/politics/election-activists-voter-challenges.html">ground zero for such efforts</a>. Eight counties have received complaints seeking to remove 65,000 people from their lists of registered voters. In 2021, True the Vote, a self-described election integrity group, <a href="https://www.news4jax.com/news/georgia/2020/12/19/group-says-its-challenging-residency-of-364k-georgia-voters/">led an effort that challenged 364,000 voters</a> across all of Georgia’s 159 counties. </p>
<p>Such challenges don’t happen only before Election Day; <a href="https://www.nass.org/sites/default/files/surveys/2020-01/state-laws-poll-watchers-challengers-Jan2020.pdf">39 states allow</a> similar challenges to occur on Election Day itself. <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2022/06/01/gop-contest-elections-tapes-00035758">A video obtained by Politico</a> shows a GOP staffer in Michigan explaining how Republicans will, the reporter writes, “install party-trained volunteers prepared to challenge voters at Democratic-majority polling places.” </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/489137/original/file-20221011-10401-7r5061.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A screenshot of a chart describing how to get involved in voter challenges." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/489137/original/file-20221011-10401-7r5061.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/489137/original/file-20221011-10401-7r5061.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=542&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/489137/original/file-20221011-10401-7r5061.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=542&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/489137/original/file-20221011-10401-7r5061.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=542&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/489137/original/file-20221011-10401-7r5061.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=681&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/489137/original/file-20221011-10401-7r5061.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=681&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/489137/original/file-20221011-10401-7r5061.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=681&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 website of conservative group True the Vote features this description of an effort to use citizens to review ‘potentially ineligible records for local review through a process often referred to as a voter challenge.’</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.iv3.us/">Screenshot from True the Vote</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>The Trump effect</h2>
<p>In 2020, then-President Donald Trump urged <a href="https://www.npr.org/2020/09/30/918766323/trumps-calls-for-poll-watchers-raises-fears-about-voter-intimidation">his supporters to file such challenges</a> in places where he claimed that there might be fraudulent voting. </p>
<p>During that year’s first presidential debate, Trump singled out Philadelphia, a longtime Democratic stronghold with a large Black population. He <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2020-election/trump-asked-supporters-watch-polls-how-states-are-countering-fears-n1244569">called on</a> supporters to “go into the polls and watch very carefully … because bad things happen in Philadelphia. Bad things.”</p>
<p>The practice of citizens’ challenging others’ right to vote <a href="https://www.democracydocket.com/analysis/challenging-someone-elses-voter-eligibility-shouldnt-be-so-easy-but-it-is/">started long before Trump came onto the political scene</a>. It is, in fact, older than the American republic. Throughout U.S. history, citizen voting challenges have been a tool used by people seeking to disenfranchise others and secure partisan advantage for themselves.</p>
<h2>200 years of citizen challenges</h2>
<p>The first laws authorizing such challenges to others’ voting rights <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/23154475?seq=4#metadata_info_tab_contents">can be traced back to the American Colonies</a>. In some of those places, the right to challenge was even written into royal charters, allowing challenges in any Colonial election. </p>
<p>For example, in 1742, when Rhode Island and Providence Plantations revised its charter, the changes <a href="https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/evans/N04574.0001.001/1:122?rgn=div1;view=fulltext">included</a> this provision allowing eligible voters to question the voting rights of any other person: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>“… if any Person in this Colony shall attempt to vote in any Election within the same, who is suspected not to be qualified as above said, it shall and may be lawful for any Person to inform the Moderator, or other Person who presides at such Election, that he hath Cause to doubt, that such suspected Person hath not a good Right to vote.” </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Soon after the American Revolution, newly formed states enacted laws giving their voters the right to challenge people who they believed <a href="https://www.ushistory.org/us/11b.asp">had supported the British</a> during the war. New York law <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=0N8TAAAAYAAJ&ots=g53Z4436EH&dq=Weed+Parsons+New+Yo&hl=en">allowed</a> citizens to object to anyone voting who had “not taken an active and decisive part in favor of the United States in the present war. …”</p>
<p>The <a href="https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/voter-challengers">full flourishing of this practice did not occur until after the Civil War</a>. Suddenly confronted with the prospect that freed slaves would vote and change the outcome of elections, <a href="https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/black-codes-and-jim-crow-laws">states in the Reconstruction South enacted</a> voter challenge statutes.</p>
<p>These laws fostered a kind of <a href="https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/5445-vigilantism-or-the-birth-of-the-racial-state">vigilante justice</a>, in which citizens could police the electoral behavior of others in the name of preventing fraudulent voting. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/voter-fraud-used-to-be-rampant-now-an-anomaly">Such vigilantism was</a> one tool among many to intimidate freed slaves and keep them from casting ballots on Election Day.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/489132/original/file-20221011-11-ypazsx.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A newspaper clipping with the headline 'Voters challenged in North Carolina' describes challenges to 150 'colored voters' for 'improper registration.'" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/489132/original/file-20221011-11-ypazsx.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/489132/original/file-20221011-11-ypazsx.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=381&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/489132/original/file-20221011-11-ypazsx.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=381&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/489132/original/file-20221011-11-ypazsx.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=381&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/489132/original/file-20221011-11-ypazsx.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=479&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/489132/original/file-20221011-11-ypazsx.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=479&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/489132/original/file-20221011-11-ypazsx.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=479&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 brief item describing voter challenges to 150 ‘colored voters’ in The Daily State Journal of Alexandria, Va., on July 29, 1872.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn84024670/1872-07-29/ed-1/seq-1/">Library of Congress</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Political parties and voting challenges</h2>
<p>Despite their tainted history, laws allowing citizens to make both preelection and Election Day challenges persisted through the 20th and into the 21st century. <a href="https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/voter-challengers">The Brennan Center, a progressive think tank, notes</a> that in the early 20th century, several states reaffirmed, reenacted or refined their voter challenge laws, including Election Day challenges.</p>
<p>One example: In 1904, <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=qARAAAAAYAAJ&dq=editions%3ALCCN80644883&l">Virginia reenacted</a> its Election Day challenge law and at the same time passed new poll tax and literacy tests for voting. Today, <a href="http://www.bazelon.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/2016_Voter-Challenge-Statutes-by-State.pdf">Virginia law says</a> that “any qualified voter and election officers” may object to anyone’s casting a vote on the grounds that they are not legally eligible to do so.</p>
<p>During the 20th century, <a href="https://www.aclu.org/news/civil-liberties/block-the-vote-voter-suppression-in-2020">political parties</a> promoted voting challenges.</p>
<p>One of the most <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/radio/day6/voter-suppression-halloween-heroes-rubik-s-cube-s-creator-watchdogs-legion-dolly-parton-s-songs-and-more-1.5782336/with-a-landmark-court-order-expired-a-1981-campaign-of-voter-suppression-might-point-to-trouble-in-2020-1.5782358">prominent of those efforts happened</a> during the 1981 campaign for New Jersey governor. The <a href="https://theconversation.com/trumps-encouragement-of-gop-poll-watchers-echoes-an-old-tactic-of-voter-intimidation-147234">Republican National Committee mailed sample ballots</a> to the homes of people in precincts with a high percentage of racial or ethnic minority voters. Voters whose sample ballots were returned as undeliverable, or because the voter had moved, were then subject to challenge.</p>
<p>The Democratic National Committee sued, alleging the Republicans’ effort violated the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The suit <a href="https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/624899/democratic-nat-committee-v-republican-nat/">resulted</a> in a court-approved agreement in which the Republican National Committee agreed to end this vote-challenging practice. </p>
<p>Before the 2004 election, the Republican Party announced another voter challenge plan. <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A7422-2004Oct28.html">It would station 3,500 people in polling places</a> in Democratic areas of Ohio to raise objections when Democratic voters showed up to vote. The party ultimately backed down, even though it <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/02/politics/campaign/gop-in-ohio-can-challenge-voters-at-polls.html">won a court fight over its plan</a>.</p>
<h2>What happens in an Election Day challenge?</h2>
<p>On Election Day any registered voter seeking to disqualify another person from voting must notify an election official of the desire to file a challenge. They may do so on the same grounds that are used in preelection challenges.</p>
<p>Such challenges raise real difficulties at the polls. In many states, challengers <a href="http://www.bazelon.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/2016_Voter-Challenge-Statutes-by-State.pdf">do not have to submit evidence to substantiate their allegations</a>.</p>
<p>While voters get no advance notice that a challenge will be made, they may be required to provide documentation or swear on the spot that they are entitled to vote. </p>
<p>As Federal District Judge Donald Molloy <a href="https://cite.case.law/f-supp-2d/581/1077/">said</a> in a 2008 Montana election challenge case, “Voters might be intimidated, confused or even discouraged from voting upon receiving notice that their right to vote … has been challenged.”</p>
<p>And Election Day challenges put officials at polling places in a very difficult position. As the Brennan Center puts it, they are “under immense time pressure to decide challenges quickly. … As a result, they can be denied a full opportunity to thoroughly review every challenge and to verify the challenger’s allegations.” In some states <a href="https://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/provisional-ballots.aspx">challenged voters may be allowed to cast provisional ballots</a> while the challenge is pending.</p>
<p>On Nov. 8, this nation may experience a surge of voters intimidated by Election Day challenges. Election officials may have to make hurried decisions. That’s a situation that threatens the very right to vote, a right that former President Ronald Reagan once <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1981/11/07/us/text-of-president-s-statement.html">called</a> “the most sacred right of free men and women … (and) the crown jewel of American liberties.”</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/192217/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Austin Sarat 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>On Nov. 8, the US may experience a surge of voters intimidated by Election Day challenges to their right to cast a ballot.Austin Sarat, William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science, Amherst CollegeLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1893652022-09-01T12:25:12Z2022-09-01T12:25:12Z50 years after landmark death penalty case, Supreme Court’s ruling continues to guide execution debate<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/482104/original/file-20220831-4904-nyopg3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C3462%2C2184&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The execution chamber inside Oklahoma State Penitentiary</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://newsroom.ap.org/detail/DeathPenaltyOklahoma/cbf64b4cb0af4222a53b90da28d68f08/photo?Query=death%20penalty%20Oklahoma&mediaType=photo&sortBy=arrivaldatetime:desc&dateRange=Anytime&totalCount=220&currentItemNo=29">AP Photo/Sue Ogrocki</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>The state of Oklahoma <a href="https://apnews.com/article/executions-oklahoma-mcalester-albert-hale-207f11efd600ce46c00315c9c077c321?taid=630797576450cd0001573de5&utm_campaign=TrueAnthem&utm_medium=AP&utm_source=Twitter">put James Coddington to death</a> on Aug. 25, 2022, for the 1997 murder of a 73-year-old friend who refused to give him money to buy drugs.</p>
<p>It marks the beginning of a busy period at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary’s execution chamber. Last month, the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/01/us/oklahoma-executions-scheduled.html">state announced plans</a> to carry out the death sentence of 25 people over the next couple of years. </p>
<p>As a scholar who has long <a href="https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691102610/when-the-state-kills">followed the capital punishment debate</a> in the U.S., I know that Oklahoma’s plan runs against the grain of the death penalty’s recent history. Over the past several years both the number of death sentences imposed and executions carried out across the U.S. <a href="https://www.vox.com/2020/12/30/22187578/death-penalty-united-states-executions-decline-gregg-georgia-bucklew-precythe">has declined sharply</a>. </p>
<p>Since 2007 more states have <a href="https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/state-and-federal-info/state-by-state">abolished the death penalty</a> than in any comparable 15-year period in American history. And in November 2020 America elected its <a href="https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/01/biden-death-penalty-agenda.html">first president ever to openly oppose capital punishment</a>.</p>
<p>Today, fewer jurisdictions are using the death penalty, but some – like Oklahoma – seem to be doubling down. America’s death penalty is now defined, as the nonprofit Death Penalty Information Center <a href="https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/facts-and-research/dpic-reports/dpic-year-end-reports/the-death-penalty-in-2021-year-end-report">noted</a> in a 2021 report, “by two competing forces: the continuing long-term erosion of capital punishment across most of the country, and extreme conduct by a dwindling number of outlier jurisdictions to continue to pursue death sentences and executions.”</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="A video screen shows death row inmate James Coddington dressed in prison clothes." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/482118/original/file-20220831-8166-wmmp7y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/482118/original/file-20220831-8166-wmmp7y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/482118/original/file-20220831-8166-wmmp7y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/482118/original/file-20220831-8166-wmmp7y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/482118/original/file-20220831-8166-wmmp7y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/482118/original/file-20220831-8166-wmmp7y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/482118/original/file-20220831-8166-wmmp7y.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">The execution of James Coddington was the first of 25 planned executions to be carried out over a 28-month period in Oklahoma.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://newsroom.ap.org/detail/OklahomaExecutionCoddingtonClemency/064e4bdeae794b5db0f0a067f719164b/photo?Query=death%20penalty%20Oklahoma&mediaType=photo&sortBy=arrivaldatetime:desc&dateRange=Anytime&totalCount=220&currentItemNo=13">AP Photo/Sue Ogrocki</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>That “extreme conduct” includes imposing death sentences arbitrarily and sometimes <a href="https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/sentenced-to-death-but-innocent-these-are-stories-of-justice-gone-wrong">sentencing innocent people to death</a>. Moreover, it includes <a href="https://harvardcrcl.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2020/07/07.30.2020-Phillips-Marceau-For-Website.pdf">carrying out executions</a> in a racially discriminatory way. </p>
<p>Looked at as a whole, capital punishment in the United States, as Amnesty International <a href="https://www.amnesty.org/en/what-we-do/death-penalty/the-death-penalty-your-questions-answered/">puts it</a>, is used “against the most vulnerable in society, including the poor, ethnic and religious minorities, and people with mental disabilities.”</p>
<p>Indeed, <a href="https://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=7616&context=jclc">framing the argument against the death penalty</a> in ways that appeal to American’s sense of procedural fairness and equal treatment has been a tactic of death penalty abolitionists for decades – and may help explain the <a href="https://news.gallup.com/poll/1606/death-penalty.aspx">gradual decline in popular support for executions</a> since the early 1990s.</p>
<p>Yet the U.S. appears to be at something of a <a href="https://scholarship.law.wm.edu/wmlr/vol62/iss1/2/">stalemate</a> when it comes to the death penalty – the country is seemingly unable to either achieve fairness in capital sentencing or to abolish the death penalty once and for all.</p>
<p>My research on capital punishment <a href="https://nyupress.org/9780814762189/the-road-to-abolition/">suggests</a> that both <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/1192427">the arguments of today’s abolitionists</a> and the current stalemate can be traced back half a century to the Supreme Court’s 1972 decision in a landmark death penalty case: <a href="https://www.oyez.org/cases/1971/69-5030">Furman v. Georgia</a>. For a time, that decision <a href="https://kansaspress.ku.edu/978-0-7006-1711-1.html">stopped the death penalty in its tracks</a> and offered a stinging critique of its unfairness. Yet it left the door open for states to implement or reform their own laws – and some chose to preserve capital punishment.</p>
<h2>The Furman framework</h2>
<p>The Furman litigation was the culmination of a campaign <a href="https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/cruel-and-unusual-supreme-court-and-capital-punishment">conducted</a> by a group of lawyers under the auspices of the <a href="https://www.naacpldf.org/">NAACP Legal Defense Fund</a>. They hoped the Supreme Court would strike down the death penalty because of its demonstrated racial discrimination and other inequities.</p>
<p>What they got instead was something less.</p>
<p>The court <a href="https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/408/238/">issued a cryptic and unusual “per curiam” decision</a> – one which is a <a href="https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/per_curiam">given in the name of the court rather than any specific judges</a>.</p>
<p>It read: “The Court holds that the imposition and carrying out of the death penalty in these cases constitute cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments.” The ruling was narrow in scope. It set out that if a death sentence was handed out in a capricious or discriminatory nature, then it would be unconstitutional.</p>
<p>But the NAACP lawyers <a href="https://wwnorton.com/books/A-Wild-Justice/">were unable</a> to get a majority of the court to agree on a set of reasons for this judgment. In fact, five justices each wrote separate opinions concurring in the judgment of the court. The other four justices each wrote separate dissenting opinions.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.oyez.org/justices/william_o_douglas">Justice William Douglas</a>, who <a href="https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/justice-douglas-and-death-penalty-demanding-view-due-process">did not think the death penalty was always unconstitutional</a>, used his opinion to condemn the arbitrary and discriminatory way in which death sentences were imposed under laws that gave complete discretion to the sentencing judge or jury.</p>
<p>Because judges or juries rarely handed down death sentences, <a href="https://www.oyez.org/justices/potter_stewart">Justice Potter Stewart</a> wrote that any particular capital defendant would have to be very unlucky to get one. It was, Stewart said, like “being struck by lightning.” <a href="https://www.oyez.org/justices/byron_r_white">Justice Byron White</a> agreed and concluded that, because they were rarely imposed, they could serve no legitimate punitive purpose.</p>
<p>Justices <a href="https://www.oyez.org/justices/william_j_brennan_jr">William Brennan</a> and <a href="https://www.oyez.org/justices/thurgood_marshall">Thurgood Marshall</a> both <a href="https://scholarship.law.nd.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1432&context=ndjlepp">announced that the death penalty was, in their view, always unconstitutional</a>.</p>
<p>The dissenters were similarly split in their views, though they generally agreed that the question of whether the death penalty should be ended was a legislative and not a judicial question.</p>
<p>The Furman decision <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0098261X.2008.10767891">was both</a> a remarkable achievement for the NAACP lawyers and a disappointment for those seeking to abolish capital punishment in this country. </p>
<p>It was remarkable because, for the first time in American history, the court <a href="https://wwnorton.com/books/A-Wild-Justice/">insisted</a> that if the U.S. were going to use death as a punishment, the government had to take extraordinary steps to ensure that it was administered fairly. It was a disappointment because the court did not say, once and for all, that capital punishment could not be squared with the Constitution.</p>
<h2>The return of capital punishment</h2>
<p>Reaction to the Furman decision <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/01/books/review/a-wild-justice-by-evan-j-mandery.html">was swift</a>. Death penalty states <a href="https://repository.uchastings.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1003&context=hastings_journal_crime_punishment">worked hard to discern</a> its meaning and to ascertain what they could do to restore capital punishment. </p>
<p>Some states, such as Louisiana and North Carolina, enacted mandatory death penalty statutes, eliminating discretion entirely from the death penalty system. Others – Georgia, Florida and Texas – chose a different path, retaining the punishment but guiding discretion by narrowing and specifying the class of death-eligible crimes. </p>
<p>Four years after Furman, the death penalty was back before the Supreme Court. The question was whether either of those approaches adequately addressed the concerns expressed by the justices who concurred with the Furman decision.</p>
<p>This time the court’s verdict was less equivocal, though no less divided. In a 5-4 decision, it <a href="https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/428/280/#tab-opinion-1951897">struck down</a> mandatory death sentencing statutes. In addition, a seven-justice majority <a href="https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/428/153/#tab-opinion-1951891">found</a> guided discretion statutes to be constitutional.</p>
<p>Despite compelling evidence that narrowing and specifying the class of death-eligible defendants did not cure the problems of unfairness identified in Furman, the Supreme Court <a href="https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/481/279/#tab-opinion-1957081">again upheld the death penalty</a> in 1987. In <a href="https://www.oyez.org/cases/1986/84-6811">McCleskey v. Kemp</a>, it ruled that statistical evidence could not be used to prove that racial discrimination persisted even after the implementation of the Furman-inspired reforms.</p>
<h2>Furman’s legacy</h2>
<p>Fifty years after Furman, arbitrariness and discrimination remain <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/03/us/racial-gap-death-penalty.html">persistent features of America’s death penalty system</a>. Today Americans <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2021/06/02/most-americans-favor-the-death-penalty-despite-concerns-about-its-administration/#:%7E:text=Yet%20%22%22">are still arguing about fairness in that system</a>. And the case against the death penalty continues to be made on the terms that Furman’s concurring opinions articulated.</p>
<p>But Furman also initiated a process that <a href="https://www.ncsc.org/__data/assets/pdf_file/0023/17474/give-him-a-fair-trial-then-hang-him.pdf">lent a veneer of legal respectability</a> to the death penalty system. It has allowed states such as Oklahoma to keep the machinery of death running by making procedural changes rather than addressing the injustices that continue to plague capital punishment in the United States. </p>
<p>Sociologist and law professor <a href="https://its.law.nyu.edu/facultyprofiles/index.cfm?fuseaction=profile.overview&personid=19938">David Garland</a> <a href="https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674066106">rightly observed</a> that Furman and the court decisions that took up its mantle have served “to enhance the perceived lawfulness and legitimacy of capital punishment” and acted “as a force for its conservation.”</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/189365/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Austin Sarat 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>In 1972, justices handed down a decision that attacked discriminatory and capricious death sentences. But it left the door ajar for states to continue the practice.Austin Sarat, William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science, Amherst CollegeLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1840302022-07-29T12:21:41Z2022-07-29T12:21:41ZCharles Henry Turner: The little-known Black high school science teacher who revolutionized the study of insect behavior in the early 20th century<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/475880/original/file-20220725-12-r36mpc.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=1%2C1%2C1010%2C573&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Turner was the first scientist to prove certain insects could remember, learn and feel.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Courtesy of Charles I. Abramson</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/">CC BY-ND</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>On a crisp autumn morning in 1908, an elegantly dressed African American man strode back and forth among the pin oaks, magnolias and silver maples of <a href="https://www.stlouis-mo.gov/parks/parks/browse-parks/view-park.cfm?parkID=68&parkName=O%27Fallon%20Park">O’Fallon Park in St. Louis, Missouri</a>. After placing a dozen dishes filled with strawberry jam atop several picnic tables, biologist Charles Henry Turner retreated to a nearby bench, notebook and pencil at the ready. </p>
<p>Following a midmorning break for tea and toast (topped with strawberry jam, of course), Turner returned to his outdoor experiment. At noon and again at dusk, he placed jam-filled dishes on the park tables. As he discovered, <a href="https://entnemdept.ufl.edu/creatures/misc/BEES/euro_honey_bee.htm">honeybees (<em>Apis mellifera</em>)</a> were reliable breakfast, lunch and dinner visitors to the sugary buffet. After a few days, Turner stopped offering jam at midday and sunset, and presented the treats only at dawn. Initially, the bees continued appearing at all three times. Soon, however, <a href="https://mellenpress.com/author/charles-i-abramson/4825/">they changed their arrival patterns</a>, visiting the picnic tables only in the mornings.</p>
<p>This <a href="https://psychology.okstate.edu/museum/turner/turnerbio.html">simple but elegantly devised experiment</a> led Turner to conclude that bees can perceive time and will rapidly develop new feeding habits in response to changing conditions. These results were among the first in a cascade of groundbreaking discoveries that Turner made about insect behavior.</p>
<p>Across his distinguished 33-year career, <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2020.08.075">Turner authored 71 papers</a> and was the first African American to have his research <a href="https://doi.org/10.1126/science.ns-19.466.16">published in the prestigious journal Science</a>. Although his name is barely known today, <a href="https://psychology.okstate.edu/museum/turner/turnermain.html">Charles Henry Turner was a pioneer in studying bees</a> and should be considered among the great entomologists of the 19th and 20th centuries. While researching <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/557206/the-butterfly-effect-by-edward-d-melillo/">my book on human interactions with insects in world history</a>, I became aware of Turner’s pioneering work on insect cognition, which constituted much of his groundbreaking research on animal behavior.</p>
<h2>Humble beginnings</h2>
<p>Turner was born in Cincinnati in 1867, a mere two years after the Civil War ended. The son of a church custodian and a nurse who was formerly enslaved, he grew up under the specter of Jim Crow – a set of formal laws and informal practices that relegated <a href="https://www.history.com/topics/early-20th-century-us/jim-crow-laws">African Americans to second-class status</a>.</p>
<p>The social environment of Turner’s childhood included school and housing segregation, frequent lynchings and the denial of basic democratic rights to the city’s nonwhite population. Despite immense obstacles to his educational goals and professional aspirations, Turner’s tenacious spirit carried him through.</p>
<p>As a young boy, he developed an abiding fascination with small creatures, capturing and cataloging thousands of ants, beetles and butterflies. An aptitude for science was just one of Turner’s many talents. At Gaines High School, he led his all-Black class, securing his place as valedictorian.</p>
<p>Turner went on to earn a Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Cincinnati, and he became the first African American to receive a <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Charles-Henry-Turner">doctorate in zoology from the University of Chicago</a>. Turner’s cutting-edge doctoral dissertation, “<a href="https://doi.org/10.1002/cne.920170502">The Homing of Ants: An Experimental Study of Ant Behavior</a>,” was later excerpted in the September 1907 issue of the Journal of Comparative Neurology and Psychology.</p>
<p>Despite his brilliance, Turner was unable to secure long-term employment in higher education. The <a href="https://doi.org/10.1007/s13592-021-00855-9">University of Chicago refused to offer him a job</a>, and Booker T. Washington was too cash-strapped to hire him at the <a href="https://www.tuskegee.edu/about-us/history-and-mission">all-Black Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute in Alabama</a>. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/474367/original/file-20220715-16-uu04fh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Black and white photo of a large brick high school building." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/474367/original/file-20220715-16-uu04fh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/474367/original/file-20220715-16-uu04fh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=299&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/474367/original/file-20220715-16-uu04fh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=299&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/474367/original/file-20220715-16-uu04fh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=299&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/474367/original/file-20220715-16-uu04fh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=376&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/474367/original/file-20220715-16-uu04fh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=376&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/474367/original/file-20220715-16-uu04fh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=376&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Sumner High School in St. Louis, Mo., circa 1908.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://mohistory.org/collections/item/N46489">Missouri Historical Society</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Following a brief stint at the University of Cincinnati and a temporary position at Clark College (now Clark Atlanta University), Turner spent the remainder of his career teaching at <a href="https://www.slps.org/domain/8207">Sumner High School in St. Louis</a>. As of 1908, his salary was a meager US$1,080 a year – <a href="https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/1908">around $34,300 in today’s dollars</a>. At Sumner – without access to a fully equipped laboratory, a research library or graduate students – Turner made trailblazing discoveries about insect behavior. </p>
<h2>Probing the minds of insects</h2>
<p>Among Turner’s most significant findings was that wasps, bees, sawflies and ants – members of the <em>Hymenoptera</em> order – are <a href="https://psychology.okstate.edu/museum/turner/turnerbio.html">not simply primitive automatons</a>, as so many of his contemporaries thought. Instead, they are organisms with the capacities to remember, learn and feel. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/474365/original/file-20220715-22-fzxqs6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Black and white engraving of a variety of bees from 1894." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/474365/original/file-20220715-22-fzxqs6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/474365/original/file-20220715-22-fzxqs6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=394&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/474365/original/file-20220715-22-fzxqs6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=394&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/474365/original/file-20220715-22-fzxqs6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=394&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/474365/original/file-20220715-22-fzxqs6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=495&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/474365/original/file-20220715-22-fzxqs6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=495&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/474365/original/file-20220715-22-fzxqs6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=495&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Bees were not well understood at the turn of the 20th century. Illustration published by Popular Encyclopedia, 1894.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/photo/old-engraved-illustration-of-bees-antique-royalty-free-image/1211227581">mikroman6/Moment via Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>During the early 1900s, biologists were aware that <a href="https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250070975/astinginthetale">flowers attracted bee pollinators by producing certain scents</a>. However, these researchers knew next to nothing about the visual aspects of such attractions, when bees were too far from the flowers to smell them. </p>
<p>To investigate, Turner pounded rows of wooden dowels into the O’Fallon Park lawn. Atop each rod, he affixed a red disk dipped in honey. Soon, bees began traveling from far away to his makeshift “flowers.”</p>
<p>Turner then added a series of “control” rods topped with blue disks that bore no honey. The bees paid little heed to the new “flowers,” <a href="https://doi.org/10.2307/1536088">demonstrating that visual signals provided guidance</a>, when the bees were too distant to smell their targets. Although a <a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/07929978.1997.10676682">honeybee’s ability to detect red remains controversial</a>, scientists have determined that Turner’s bees were likely responding to something called <a href="https://www.encyclo.co.uk/meaning-of-achromatic_stimulus">achromatic stimuli</a>, which <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2020.08.075">allowed them to discern among various shades and tints</a>.</p>
<h2>Lasting legacies of an underappreciated pioneer</h2>
<p>Turner’s astounding range of findings from three decades of experiments established his reputation as an authority on the <a href="https://psychology.okstate.edu/museum/turner/turnerbio.html">behavioral patterns of bees, cockroaches, spiders and ants</a>.</p>
<p>As a scientific researcher without a university position, he occupied an odd niche. In large part, his situation was the product of systemic racism. It was also a result of his commitment to training young Black students in science. </p>
<p>Alongside his scientific publications, Turner wrote extensively on African American education. In his 1902 essay “<a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=39R1AAAAMAAJ&q=Charles+Henry+Turner#v=snippet&q=Charles%20Henry%20Turner&f=false">Will the Education of the Negro Solve the Race Problem?</a>” Turner contended that trade schools were not the pathway to Black empowerment. Instead, he called for widespread public education of African Americans in all subjects: “if we cast aside our prejudices and try the highest education upon both white and Black, in a few decades there will be no Negro problem.”</p>
<p>Turner was only <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Charles-Henry-Turner">56 when he died of acute myocarditis</a>, an infectious heart inflammation. He was survived by two children and his second wife, Lillian Porter.</p>
<p>Turner’s scientific contributions endure. <a href="https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315802558">His articles continue to be widely cited</a>, and entomologists have subsequently <a href="https://doi.org/10.1038/542031d">verified most of his conclusions</a>.</p>
<p>Despite the colossal challenges he faced throughout his career, Charles Henry Turner was among the first scientists to shed light on the secret lives of bees, the <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/557206/the-butterfly-effect-by-edward-d-melillo/">winged pollinators that ensure</a> the welfare of human food systems and the survival of Earth’s biosphere.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/184030/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Edward D. Melillo 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 son of a formerly enslaved mother, Charles Henry Turner was the first to discover that bees and other insects have the ability to modify their behavior based on experience.Edward D. Melillo, William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of History and Environmental Studies, Amherst CollegeLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1843762022-06-03T16:15:27Z2022-06-03T16:15:27ZHow Indian American spelling bee dominance may fuel educational inequities<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/466966/original/file-20220603-24-neix0q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=105%2C37%2C4902%2C2920&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Harini Logan is embraced by her parents after winning the Scripps National Spelling Bee.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/year-old-harini-logan-from-san-antonio-texas-is-embraced-by-news-photo/1241066857">Drew Angerer/Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p><a href="https://apnews.com/article/texas-san-antonio-education-cf165d27b93b784ab7fb7c0f9e7ecbf0">Harini Logan</a>, a cheerful 14-year-old from San Antonio, Texas, made history on June 2, 2022. She became the first Scripps National Spelling Bee champion to win after being eliminated and later reinstated. She was also the first to prevail in a <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2022/jun/03/national-spelling-bee-harini-logan-tiebreaker">lightning-round tiebreaker</a> with the runner-up.</p>
<p>But the fact that she is Indian American – a group that makes up about <a href="https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/fact-sheet/asian-americans-indians-in-the-u-s/">1.3% of the U.S. population</a> – is hardly unusual. Over the past 20 years, <a href="https://theconversation.com/what-does-the-spelling-success-of-indian-american-kids-tell-us-42459">Indian Americans have come to dominate</a> the Scripps National Spelling Bee – with 21 of the past 23 champions being of South Asian descent.</p>
<p>One of the two exceptions was <a href="https://theconversation.com/zaila-avant-garde-2021-scripps-national-spelling-bee-champ-stands-where-black-children-were-once-kept-out-164271">Zaila Avant-garde</a>, also 14. When she won the bee in 2021, she became the Scripps contest’s first Black champion from the U.S.</p>
<p>The bee was canceled in 2020, but there were <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/01/opinion/contributors/the-scripps-spelling-bee-is-broken-please-dont-fix-it.html">eight co-champions</a> in 2019, seven of whom were Indian American. </p>
<p>There’s even a documentary on this endearing story, “<a href="https://www.netflix.com/title/81069312">Spelling the Dream</a>.” But I contend that the commitment of Indian Americans to these competitions stems partly from perceived hurdles they face in higher education. And I believe that their achievements inadvertently further educational inequalities.</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"1532556637051002896"}"></div></p>
<h2>The academic track</h2>
<p>I spent years with Indian American, white and other families engaged in spelling bees, math competitions and other after-school academics while doing research for my book “<a href="https://nyupress.org/9781479831142/hyper-education/">Hyper Education: Why Good Schools, Good Grades, and Good Behavior Are Not Enough</a>.”</p>
<p>In one chapter, I explained why Indian Americans have come to dominate bees. I believe that their success has to do with a firm commitment by families to spend the time and money necessary to help their kids fully prepare. These children excel not just in spelling bees but also in geography, math and other academic competitions.</p>
<p>Most of my book addresses a more revealing question: why families care about such competitions and advanced academics in the first place and the implications around that.</p>
<p>Most U.S. <a href="https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2015/12/17/5-childrens-extracurricular-activities/">kids participate in activities outside school</a>, usually involving sports, the arts, religious or civic activities. Indian immigrant children do these things too, but many of their parents also make them at least try extracurricular academic activities, especially competitive ones.</p>
<p>The more than 100 Indian American parents I interviewed between 2011 and 2018 believed that to have a good shot at getting into a prominent university, their children would need an undeniably strong academic record to compensate for what they saw as weak networks and a lack of <a href="https://www.ivywise.com/ivywise-knowledgebase/resources/article/legacy-status-in-college-admissions-does-it-improve-your-chances">college legacy status</a>.</p>
<p>Parents also worried that college admission officers might hold their children, as Asian Americans, to <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt7rqbv">a higher standard</a> in expected test scores. </p>
<p>“We have to have 130 points above other groups,” one father of a spelling contestant said about the SAT college entrance exam. He assured me that tutoring centers and spelling bees would help his daughter get a higher score, an attitude echoed by other parents and children alike. </p>
<p>Pursuing after-school education to help their children eventually become more competitive college applicants makes sense to these immigrant parents, given their own upbringing with similar tutoring. I think it’s only natural for parents to promote what they are most familiar with, and many of these parents <a href="https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/chart/educational-attainment-of-indian-population-in-the-u-s/">have advanced degrees</a> and grew up with intense academic expectations. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/xSEeiSTjOhQ?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">In ‘Spelling the Dream,’ a documentary, viewers see how hard Indian American families work to prepare their children to win bees.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>A cost of achievement</h2>
<p>As Indian American children boost their test scores and other academics through studying words, mastering quadratic equations and other intellectual endeavors, they inadvertently contribute to what I see as a troubling trend: the <a href="https://hechingerreport.org/growing-income-achievement-gap-overshadows-race/">widening educational gaps</a> between higher-income and lower-income families.</p>
<p>Achieving in these competitions often requires spending hundreds or even thousands of dollars. Hexco, a publisher specializing in contest preparation, sells word guides and packages of eight coaching sessions that cost US$1,725. </p>
<p>According to its website, 94% of spellers who “advanced to the Scripps finals … <a href="https://www.hexco.com/pages/Personal-Spelling-Coach.html">were Hexco customers”</a> in 2019.</p>
<p>Indian Americans have a <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/fact-sheet/asian-americans-indians-in-the-u-s/">median household income of $119,000</a>, well above the national median of $85,800. Many of them use this economic edge to advance their children’s grades and scores.</p>
<p>So, while Indian Americans gravitate toward academic competitions because they worry that otherwise their children will lack equal opportunities, they reinforce educational inequality in the process.</p>
<p>This is related to the growing <a href="https://theconversation.com/tutoring-kids-who-dont-need-it-is-a-booming-business-in-affluent-areas-where-parents-want-to-stack-the-deck-131517">trend of supplemental education</a> by higher-income families generally, which I also studied. </p>
<p>The pursuit of after-school education, whether through competitions or tutoring centers, is increasingly common for middle-class families. I’m certain that it’s prone to grow even more. Online tutoring alone is expected to grow to an <a href="https://finance.yahoo.com/news/online-tutoring-global-market-report-122000044.html">almost $3 billion industry</a> worldwide by 2025.</p>
<p>And while the reasons parents pay for and encourage this practice can have something to do with their ethnic backgrounds, one outcome is the same: growing educational inequality.</p>
<p><em>This is an updated version of an article first published on <a href="https://theconversation.com/why-indian-american-spelling-bee-success-is-more-than-just-an-endearing-story-141265">July 20, 2020</a>.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/184376/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Pawan Dhingra 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>Ensuring that children hone skills and build up credentials at a young age is part of a long-term plan common among the South Asian parents who immigrate to the United States.Pawan Dhingra, Professor of Sociology and American Studies; Faculty Equity and Inclusion Officer, Amherst CollegeLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1624652021-06-11T12:40:48Z2021-06-11T12:40:48ZWhy the legacy of Billy Graham continues to endure: 3 essential reads<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/405496/original/file-20210609-28624-43rtdf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=156%2C32%2C3381%2C2358&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Evangelist Billy Graham came to have an enormous influence on American politics and culture.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/evangelist-billy-graham-addressing-a-meeting-news-photo/3317456?adppopup=true">Keystone/ Collections Hulton Archive/Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>A new two-hour <a href="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/billy-graham/">documentary on PBS</a> examines the life and rise of Billy Graham, the famed preacher, who died on Feb. 21, 2018, at 99. Graham’s enduring legacy is that he helped shape the modern-day American right.</p>
<p>Graham’s rallies, known popularly as “crusades,” attracted millions of people all over the globe. His influence extended deep into American politics, and he provided spiritual counsel to several American presidents, from Harry S. Truman to Donald Trump.</p>
<p>Here are three articles from The Conversation U.S. that offer insights into his life. </p>
<h2>Representative of new evangelicalism</h2>
<p>In the early part of the 20th century, evangelicalism came to be seen as being “<a href="https://theconversation.com/could-there-be-another-billy-graham-92250">synonymous with intolerance and anti-intellectualism</a>,” writes <a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/andrew-dole-446668">Andrew Dole</a>, professor of religion at Amherst College. </p>
<p>In 1925 fundamentalists succeeded in bringing in legislation banning the teaching of evolution in public schools in Tennessee. That same year, as Dole writes, the young teacher John Scopes was prosecuted for teaching evolution. Known famously as the “Scopes monkey trial,” it made headlines all over the country.</p>
<p>Quoting the congregationalist minister Harold Ockenga, Dole points out that a new generation wanted to create “a progressive fundamentalism with an ethical message.”</p>
<p>Billy Graham, he writes, “would lead evangelicalism to revival.” As he says, “Graham, already a rising star, was soon adopted as the right man to represent the new ‘evangelicalism.’” Over time, Graham would “became the closest thing to an official spokesman for this movement,” which was then seen to be rescuing evangelicalism from fundamentalism.</p>
<h2>Influence on Eisenhower</h2>
<p>Over the next few decades, Graham had an unparalleled influence on American politics. Scholar <a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/david-mislin-357694">David Mislin</a> points to the religious language that found its way into government and politics, “due in no small part to Billy Graham.”</p>
<p>Mislin writes that in 1953 President Dwight Eisenhower held the first National Prayer Breakfast, “<a href="https://theconversation.com/how-billy-grahams-legacy-lives-on-in-american-life-92229">at the strong encouragement of Graham</a>.” The event is now an annual tradition that brings together high-profile political, military and corporate leaders in Washington, D.C., usually on the first Thursday of February. Eisenhower would later sign a bill placing the phrase “In God We Trust” on all American currency.</p>
<p>Mislin argues that in the early years of the Cold War, these actions emphasized the religious commitment of Americans. And Graham, as he writes, stressed the use of religious language, not just as a way to set the U.S. apart from “the godlessness of Soviet communism,” but to address other domestic concerns that included social welfare policies that conservatives business leaders and others were opposed to.</p>
<p>“To be sure, Billy Graham was not singularly responsible for all of these developments. But as his biographers have noted, he loomed large in the religious politics of the 1950s,” adds Mislin.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/405523/original/file-20210610-39374-1bnjezq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Rev. Billy Graham in a conversation with President Dwight Eisenhower." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/405523/original/file-20210610-39374-1bnjezq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/405523/original/file-20210610-39374-1bnjezq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=492&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/405523/original/file-20210610-39374-1bnjezq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=492&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/405523/original/file-20210610-39374-1bnjezq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=492&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/405523/original/file-20210610-39374-1bnjezq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=618&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/405523/original/file-20210610-39374-1bnjezq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=618&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/405523/original/file-20210610-39374-1bnjezq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=618&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">President Dwight Eisenhower held the first National Prayer Breakfast at the encouragement of Billy Graham.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://newsroom.ap.org/detail/RevDrBillyGrahamandDwightDEisenhowerTalking/ba17d9c2cfa04c158ff084edfb4464a2/photo?Query=billy%20Graham%20eisenhower&mediaType=photo&sortBy=&dateRange=Anytime&totalCount=17&currentItemNo=5">AP Photo/Zieglero</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>God’s wrath and Christian nation beliefs</h2>
<p>In addition to political influence, evangelical leaders such as Billy Graham deeply influenced the moral values and America as a Christian nation. Scholar <a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/samuel-perry-239674">Samuel Perry</a> says for many evangelical leaders such as Billy Graham and Jerry Falwell Sr., social and cultural changes of the 1970s and 1980s such as racial integration of schools “<a href="https://theconversation.com/evangelical-leaders-like-billy-graham-and-jerry-falwell-sr-have-long-talked-of-conspiracies-against-gods-chosen-those-ideas-are-finding-resonance-today-132241">were signs of a fallen country</a>.”</p>
<p>Part of this rhetoric was that God punishes America when Americans are unfaithful to his commandments, writes Perry. In the lead-up to Obama’s reelection, Graham wrote an article with a premise that Obama’s leadership would lead to God’s wrath. It was, for Graham and other evangelical leaders, “an intentional move away from Christian values toward immorality,” says Perry.</p>
<p>“Trump offered himself as an antidote to that fallen America and as a savior from the destruction,” he writes.</p>
<h2>What is the future of evangelicalism?</h2>
<p>Evangelicalism is once again going through a change. As scholar Andrew Dole points out, “evangelicalism of the future will be smaller, grayer, more closely identified with the Republican Party, and <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/05/04/though-still-conservative-young-evangelicals-are-more-liberal-than-their-elders-on-some-issues/">more out of step</a> with the views of younger Americans than it is at present.” </p>
<p>To many it might appear that Billy Graham was the last of evangelicals who enjoyed nonpartisan support. However, adds Dole, “as one who teaches the history of evangelicalism, I can imagine different possibilities.”</p>
<p><em>Editor’s note: This story is a roundup of articles from The Conversation’s archives.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/162465/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
A PBS documentary has reinitiated conversations about the influence of Billy Graham. Here are three articles that describe the impact and the enduring legacy of the famed preacher.Kalpana Jain, Senior Religion + Ethics Editor/ Director of the Global Religion Journalism InitiativeLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1602372021-05-07T16:33:47Z2021-05-07T16:33:47ZMary Ball Washington, George’s single mother, often gets overlooked – but she’s well worth saluting<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/399504/original/file-20210507-17-1wz3h9a.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=41%2C0%2C4671%2C3167&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Mary Washington helped her son develop into the leader he became. While her son was the subject of several portrait artists, there is no record that Mary ever was.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/at-the-end-of-the-american-revolutionary-war-american-news-photo/57080316?adppopup=true">Stock Montage/Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>It is important and poignant to recall the hard life of Mary Ball Washington, who struggled – mostly alone – to raise our Founding Father. Historians have left us with inaccurate and mostly unpleasant accounts of her long and laborious years. </p>
<p>After George Washington’s death, historians canonized him and his mother, too. </p>
<p>But unlike George’s enduring sainthood, praise for Mary was short-lived. In the late 19th century, George’s biographers began interpreting the few shreds of evidence about Mary – almost all of it from George – to mean that she was overprotective, possessive and greedy. </p>
<p>By the 1950s she had become, in the word of a <a href="https://www.littlebrown.com/titles/james-thomas-flexner/george-washington-the-forge-of-experience-1732-1775-volume-i/9780316285971/">Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer</a>, a termagant, an ill-tempered shrew. The author, James Flexner, created a portrait of Mary as a woman insatiably hungry for money that she didn’t need, and intent on keeping George by her side. Other nasty myths still circulate alongside these: that she was illiterate, pipe-smoking, uncouth and slovenly.</p>
<p>These poisonous portraits bear little resemblance to the industrious, worried, frugal, devoted and self-reliant woman who emerges from my research as a professor of history and women’s studies. I recently wrote a <a href="https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780809097012">book about Mary Washington</a>. In my research, I found that Mary’s challenging life was very different from the myths that grew up around her. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Bank of the Rappahannock River" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/399084/original/file-20210505-15-1jr2rxh.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/399084/original/file-20210505-15-1jr2rxh.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=411&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/399084/original/file-20210505-15-1jr2rxh.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=411&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/399084/original/file-20210505-15-1jr2rxh.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=411&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/399084/original/file-20210505-15-1jr2rxh.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=517&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/399084/original/file-20210505-15-1jr2rxh.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=517&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/399084/original/file-20210505-15-1jr2rxh.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=517&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A view of the Rappahannock River as Mary Washington would have seen it from her front windows.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Enrico Ferorelli</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
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</figure>
<h2>George Washington’s mother, daughter of a servant</h2>
<p>Mary was born in either 1708 or 1709; there are no records. Her father was an elderly, slave-owning planter and her mother was probably an indentured servant. By 12, she had lost her father, stepfather, mother and half-brother to death in the disease-ridden <a href="https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/chesapeake-region">Chesapeake region</a>.</p>
<p>From these terrible losses Mary acquired two parcels of land, a good horse and saddle, and three enslaved boys. She stayed in what had been her mother’s house, living with her older half-sister. There the shocked girl worked diligently to help manage the household and make herself indispensable. </p>
<p>She also grew into her role of slave-owner, and learned to extort work out of people who were enslaved. She began assuming the habits of Anglican piety in this mournful time, trying to subdue her feelings and resign herself to God’s mysterious will.</p>
<p>When she was about 22, she married Augustine Washington, a wealthy widower with two sons in Great Britain and a daughter in Virginia. Mary traded her duties on a small farm and the companionship of her affectionate half-sister for more expansive tasks as the mistress of a large plantation and marital obligations to an acquisitive, restless planter. </p>
<p>The couple had five surviving children: George, born in 1732; Elizabeth, Samuel, John Augustine, and Charles. The growing family and many of their enslaved people moved three times, eventually settling across the <a href="https://dwr.virginia.gov/waterbody/rappahannock-river-upper/">Rappahannock River</a> from the growing town of Fredericksburg.</p>
<p>Augustine died suddenly in 1743 when he was about 49 years old. George, the eldest, was 11, and the youngest was 4. Augustine left his best properties to his eldest sons by his first marriage, Lawrence and Augustine. Mary was allowed to stay in the Fredericksburg house but was to turn it over to George when he came of age at 21. </p>
<p>She received the same number of enslaved people she had brought to the marriage. If she wanted more, they were to come from those allotted to her other children – setting their desires at odds with hers. If she remarried, the executors could demand security to be sure her children would receive their full inheritances at 21. Failing that <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/14139639">she would lose custody of them</a>. She remained a widow all her years.</p>
<h2>Single motherhood was hard for George Washington’s mom</h2>
<p>With her income and resources seriously diminished because of the dispersal of Augustine’s properties, Mary set about making sure that her daughter and four sons had such education and polish as she could provide. Elizabeth learned the arts of serving tea, managing a household and decorative handwork.</p>
<p>Mary kept the young men in proper clothes and wigs. These could be expensive, costing as much as 3 pounds. That could have been about US$2,400 in today’s dollars, assuming the American pound was valued the same as the British pound at the time. The wigs had to be de-liced by enslaved people who would otherwise be doing field work. </p>
<p>Mary dissuaded George from going into the British Navy at 14 but failed to convince him not to join <a href="https://www.nps.gov/articles/braddock-campaign.htm">General Edward Braddock’s disastrous </a> 1755 campaign. She nursed George back to health after the illness he suffered succeeding this battle and several other serious sicknesses, including smallpox. </p>
<p>She tried to imbue in her children her extensive practical and religious wisdom. She had some success, especially with George and Elizabeth, but none of her children became frugal. Despite the family’s straitened circumstances, Mary saw all of her offspring marry up. George married Martha Dandridge Custis, the richest woman in Virginia.</p>
<h2>Mary Ball Washington after the Revolution</h2>
<p>In the years before the Revolution, Mary, like almost all small farmers at the time, was poorer than ever and sometimes asked her extremely wealthy eldest son for small amounts of money. As he slid deeply into debt himself from his extravagances and expanding ambitions, he begrudged her the insignificant bits of cash she needed and insisted she could not be in want – a claim he repeated throughout her life. </p>
<p>George <a href="https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/99-01-02-05144">wrote in 1782</a>, having not seen or been in touch with his mother for seven years, “confident I am that she has not a child that would not divide the last sixpence to relieve her from <em>real</em> [emphasis in the original] distress. This she has been repeatedly assured of by me … in fact she has ample income of her own.” </p>
<p>Mary lived through the long years of the revolution alone. In her last years, she struggled like all small farmers against debt and bad harvests. She, too, suffered from high taxes, severe shortages of corn and salt and the threat of smallpox. Her overseer, exploiting the vulnerability of an elderly woman, cheated Mary throughout the war.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Outside of Mary Washington's house" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/399294/original/file-20210506-13-rxp78j.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/399294/original/file-20210506-13-rxp78j.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=402&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/399294/original/file-20210506-13-rxp78j.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=402&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/399294/original/file-20210506-13-rxp78j.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=402&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/399294/original/file-20210506-13-rxp78j.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=505&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/399294/original/file-20210506-13-rxp78j.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=505&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/399294/original/file-20210506-13-rxp78j.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=505&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">George Washington bought his mother her final house in Fredericksburg when he took over the Ferry Farm.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Enrico Ferorelli</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Mary lived to see the revolution won and her son elected the nation’s first president. As George said, <a href="https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/04-01-02-0088">praising her in Fredericksburg</a> at the end of the revolution, <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/40696810">she led him to manhood in the absence of a father</a>. Always sparing in her praise of worldly achievements, she gave him the compliment he probably most valued: that he had always been a good son. She died of breast cancer in August 1789 months after George became the nations’ first president.</p>
<p>[<em>Like what you’ve read? Want more?</em> <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/newsletters/the-daily-3?utm_source=TCUS&utm_medium=inline-link&utm_campaign=newsletter-text&utm_content=likethis">Sign up for The Conversation’s daily newsletter</a>.]</p>
<h2>Mary Washington and George Washington shared many traits</h2>
<p>After some years of reflected hagiography, Mary‘s reputation began a precipitous decline in the late 19th century. Ideas about biography and psychology began changing. Nurture began competing with an earlier idea of people being born with an essential character that needed to unfold. Mothers, who in the antebellum period were described as self-sacrificing vessels of virtue holding the new nation together, began to be held responsible for facilitating – or not – their sons’ ambitions.</p>
<p>Male writers then saw evidence of Mary’s love for George – such as keeping him out of the British Navy – as possessiveness and interference with his glorious military destiny. They saw her requests for money as her <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/968173941">irrational greediness, not his stinginess</a>. </p>
<p>Male historians, even now, have never doubted that his exasperation with his mother was justified, nor have they tried to find out more about her circumstances. Instead, they agree that he desperately needed to free himself from her efforts to limit him before he could father our nation. </p>
<p>But mother and son were much alike in physical strength, in superb horsemanship, in irascibility, in penny-pinching, in the capacity for extraordinary persistence and in their strenuous, lifelong efforts to maintain a measure of equilibrium. I believe that without Mary’s brave, enduring and self-denying mothering, we would not have had the brave, enduring and self-denying man who led both the revolution and the optimistic experiment in governing that resulted.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/160237/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Martha Saxton 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>Mary Washington raised George and his four siblings mainly alone, imbuing in George many of his best traits. Historians have focused instead on George’s complaints about her.Martha Saxton, Professor emerita of History and Sexuality, Women's and Gender Studies, Amherst CollegeLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1586072021-04-28T12:14:10Z2021-04-28T12:14:10ZWind farms bring windfalls for rural schools, but school finance laws limit how money is spent<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/397398/original/file-20210427-17-o4pal0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=40%2C13%2C4467%2C3360&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Texas has collected and spent more money on wind energy than any other state. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/daxis/34747221193/">Daxis/flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/">CC BY-ND</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>On the website for the local school district in Blackwell – a town of just over 300 people in rural Texas – school Superintendent Abe Gott says: “<a href="https://www.blackwellhornets.org/about/superintendents_message.jsp">We believe that no matter your dreams, you can achieve them from Blackwell, Texas.</a>”</p>
<p>To back that up, the Blackwell Consolidated Independent School District provides a <a href="https://www.blackwellhornets.org/apps/pages/index.jsp?uREC_ID=82661&type=d&pREC_ID=288568">postsecondary scholarship of up to US$36,000</a> for graduates from the district’s single high school. So far 140 students have benefited from scholarships, according to Gott. </p>
<p>The money that makes this possible came from a $35 million deal the school district brokered with a wind farm company in 2005, part of the <a href="https://www.citizen.org/wp-content/uploads/nolan_county_case_study_070908_0.pdf">massive growth of that sector</a> in Nolan County and Texas.</p>
<p>The spread of wind energy in rural America has been a financial boon to school districts such as the one in Blackwell. However, because of the complexity of how schools are financed, <a href="https://emp.lbl.gov/publications/school-district-revenue-shocks">the impact on student achievement is limited</a>, according to a new study that we conducted as researchers in <a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=1S2bLkcAAAAJ&hl=en">public finance</a>, <a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=71IQR0IAAAAJ">education economics</a> and <a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=IMWAynMAAAAJ">energy policy</a>.</p>
<h2>Windfall of wind taxes</h2>
<p>Nolan County – one of three counties served by the school district – is home to <a href="https://eerscmap.usgs.gov/uswtdb/viewer/#10.17/32.2543/-100.3605">1,371 wind turbines</a> that generate a maximum of 2,097 megawatts, or enough to power half a million Texas homes per year. That includes the 585-megawatt <a href="https://www.duke-energy.com/our-company/about-us/businesses/renewable-energy/wind-energy/sweetwater-windpower">Sweetwater Wind Farm</a> and the 735-megawatt <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horse_Hollow_Wind_Energy_Center">Horse Hollow project</a>, which was the largest in the world when it came online in 2006.</p>
<p>Over the past 25 years wind energy has blossomed in the United States, rising from less than 2 gigawatts of capacity in 1995 to <a href="https://emp.lbl.gov/wind-technologies-market-report/">over 110 GW last year</a>, enough to meet more than 7% of the entire nation’s electricity supply. It provides more than 10% of supply in 14 states, and more than 40% in two of those states — Iowa and Kansas.</p>
<p>By 2020, there were over 1,600 commercial wind installations made up of almost <a href="https://www.sciencebase.gov/catalog/item/57bdfd8fe4b03fd6b7df5ff9">68,000 individual turbines</a>. The industry is continuing to grow rapidly, with <a href="https://emp.lbl.gov/news/halfway-zero-progress-towards-carbon-free">another 200 gigawatts</a> of projects applying for grid connections as of the end of 2020.</p>
<p>With all this rural development come property tax revenues. Wind projects paid an estimated <a href="https://cleanpower.org/news/wind-powers-america-annual-report/">$1.6 billion in property tax revenues</a> to states and local jurisdictions in 2019.</p>
<p>That is no doubt welcome revenue for school districts in rural areas, which sometimes <a href="https://ednote.ecs.org/how-states-allocate-funding-for-rural-schools/">struggle to generate local tax revenue</a>. But as researchers we wanted to know: How are school districts using wind farm revenues? And is this money helping boost student achievement?</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="High school students and their teacher both wear masks in a classroom." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/397163/original/file-20210426-19-1g8ktu0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/397163/original/file-20210426-19-1g8ktu0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=345&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/397163/original/file-20210426-19-1g8ktu0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=345&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/397163/original/file-20210426-19-1g8ktu0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=345&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/397163/original/file-20210426-19-1g8ktu0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=433&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/397163/original/file-20210426-19-1g8ktu0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=433&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/397163/original/file-20210426-19-1g8ktu0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=433&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Revenue from wind turbines can allow for schools to hire more teachers.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/photo/high-school-teacher-and-students-in-classroom-royalty-free-image/1264961021?adppopup=true">RichLegg/E+ via Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>To find out, we collected data on new U.S. wind installations from 1995 through 2017 and tax revenue trends in school districts. We then checked to see if new wind farms led to significant changes in school budgets and how school districts spent their money, such as on things like new buildings, hiring more teachers to reduce class sizes, or boosting teacher salaries.</p>
<p>We found that <a href="https://emp.lbl.gov/publications/school-district-revenue-shocks">wind energy installations led to large increases in local revenues to school districts</a>. Schools dramatically increased spending on capital outlays, such as buildings and equipment, but made only modest increases to their operating budgets, like hiring more teachers to reduce class size. </p>
<h2>When priorities and policies collide</h2>
<p>Numerous studies have shown that smaller class sizes result in <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-much-of-a-difference-does-the-number-of-kids-in-a-classroom-make-125703">better student achievement</a>. So why are districts putting new tax revenues into capital spending rather than class size reduction?</p>
<p>We think it is due to state school finance formulas and state- and county-level tax laws, and the incentives they provide to school administrators.</p>
<p>As wind grew it expanded from only 16 school districts in 1995 to 900 districts <a href="https://eta-publications.lbl.gov/sites/default/files/brunner_hoen_hyman_2_3_21_working_paper.pdf">spread across 38 states</a> in 2016. Leading the pack are rural areas of the West, the Midwest and Texas.</p>
<p>The amount of tax revenue a school district gets from a wind energy installation depends on state and local laws and how those laws interact with state school finance formulas. </p>
<p>States use a wide variety of approaches to tax wind farms, ranging from normal property tax treatment to full exemptions. Sometimes wind farms make “payments in lieu of taxes,” known as PILOTs.</p>
<p>Kansas, for example, exempts wind projects from property taxes for the first 10 years. Some wind companies make PILOT payments to hosting counties, but individual school districts are often left out of those deals. Wyoming has a centralized system of school finance, so any revenue generated from wind projects is captured entirely by the state and redistributed to schools following a formula.</p>
<p>Texas, the <a href="https://emp.lbl.gov/wind-energy-growth">No. 1 wind energy state</a>, has a complicated system of local taxation of wind farms. Because of the state’s school finance system, much of the additional property tax revenue generated by wind installations can be captured by the state. </p>
<p>Texas uses a formula to take money from school districts with high property tax revenues per pupil and give it to poorer districts.</p>
<p>But that does not apply to local property tax revenue dedicated to paying off debt in Texas. So school districts have a strong incentive to borrow money by selling bonds to pay for capital improvements, then use revenues from the wind farms to pay off the bonds.</p>
<p>As a result, school districts in Texas tend to put wind tax revenues into buildings and facilities, rather than into teachers and operations. For example, the Blackwell school district, in addition to its scholarship fund, has spent $15 million for a new football stadium and academic complex.</p>
<h2>Impact on school finances</h2>
<p>The growth in wind energy development over time and across the country provides an ideal setting to examine how wind energy – or really any outside boost in funding – can impact school district finances and, in turn, student performance.</p>
<p>Our sample included 638 school districts that had a wind energy installation at some point between 1995 and 2017. Not surprisingly, these “wind districts” tend to be smaller and more rural than the average school district. </p>
<p><iframe id="g0wGE" class="tc-infographic-datawrapper" src="https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/g0wGE/9/" height="400px" width="100%" style="border: none" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p>We found that new wind farms result in large increases in the amount of local revenue that is brought in per student, with only small reductions in state aid. We also found large boosts in per-pupil expenditures. Texas, especially, collected and spent more than other states.</p>
<p><iframe id="IDbea" class="tc-infographic-datawrapper" src="https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/IDbea/6/" height="400px" width="100%" style="border: none" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p>But we found that most of those new expenditures were used for building improvements or new facilities rather than operating or “current” expenses. District spending on buildings went up by as much as 73%, while operating expenditures increased only slightly, by about 2%.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/397154/original/file-20210426-21-1jbp8mp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A local school undergoes construction." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/397154/original/file-20210426-21-1jbp8mp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/397154/original/file-20210426-21-1jbp8mp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=387&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/397154/original/file-20210426-21-1jbp8mp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=387&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/397154/original/file-20210426-21-1jbp8mp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=387&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/397154/original/file-20210426-21-1jbp8mp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=487&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/397154/original/file-20210426-21-1jbp8mp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=487&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/397154/original/file-20210426-21-1jbp8mp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=487&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Schools are more likely to use new wind revenues to build up their infrastructure.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/overall-shows-a-2-story-building-under-construction-at-news-photo/1229426574?adppopup=true">Mel Melcon/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Formulas at play</h2>
<p>This allocation of funds seems to be driven in part by the formulas that states use to provide aid to local school districts. States typically reduce the amount of funds they send to a district that sees an increase in local tax revenues, in order to equalize spending.</p>
<p>In some cases, though, that applies only when a district spends more on day-to-day operations, not when it boosts building improvements or new construction. So to avoid losing state aid, districts are more likely to use any new local revenues from wind farms for new buildings or repairs than for operating expenses. </p>
<p>This is exactly what we saw in our study. While school facilities and equipment no doubt improved, new wind farm revenues resulted in little to no change in class sizes or teacher salaries. In line with past research that shows better lower student-to-teacher ratios are <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-much-of-a-difference-does-the-number-of-kids-in-a-classroom-make-125703">clearly connected to student achievement</a>, we found little change in student outcomes.</p>
<p>So while new development from wind energy can significantly boost rural economies and tax revenues, decisions on how the money is used are still made within the constraints of local school finance policy and law.</p>
<p>[<em>Get our best science, health and technology 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-best">Sign up for The Conversation’s science newsletter</a>.]</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/158607/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Eric Brunner received funding from the the Wind Energy Technologies Office of the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231 to support this research project.</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Ben Hoen receives funding from the Wind Energy Technologies Office of the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231.</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Joshua Hyman received funding from the the Wind Energy Technologies Office of the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231 to support this research project.</span></em></p>Despite a growth in revenue from wind farms, many rural school districts are being nudged by policy and law to spend the money on buildings and not instruction.Eric Brunner, Professor of Economics and Policy, University of ConnecticutBen Hoen, Research Scientist, Lawrence Berkeley National LaboratoryJoshua Hyman, Assistant Professor of economics, Amherst CollegeLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1574872021-03-19T11:33:41Z2021-03-19T11:33:41ZRacism is behind anti-Asian American violence, even when it’s not a hate crime<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/390495/original/file-20210318-19-1cjz44.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=20%2C26%2C4391%2C2883&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Children attend a March 17 vigil at Clemente Park in Lowell, Massachusetts, for the victims of the shooting spree in Atlanta. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/children-carry-stop-the-hate-and-asian-lives-matter-as-they-news-photo/1231790569?adppopup=true">Erin Clark/The Boston Globe via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Over the past year, attacks on Asian Americans have <a href="https://www.voanews.com/usa/race-america/hate-crimes-targeting-asian-americans-spiked-150-major-us-cities">increased more than 150%</a> over the previous year, including the March 16 <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/3-dead-shooting-georgia-massage-parlor-suspect-loose-n1261262">murders of eight people, including six Asian American women</a>, in Atlanta. </p>
<p>Some of these attacks may be classified as hate crimes. But whether they meet that legal definition or not, they all fit a long history of viewing Asian Americans in particular ways that make discrimination and violence against them more likely.</p>
<p><a href="https://pawanhdhingra.com/">I</a> have <a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=2Y0_sPsAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao">researched</a> and taught on Asian America for 20 years, including on the pernicious <a href="https://nyupress.org/9781479831142/hyper-education/">effects of stereotypes</a> and attacks <a href="https://politybooks.com/bookdetail/?isbn=9780745647036">on individuals</a>. Race can play a role in violence and prejudice, even if the offender does not clearly express a racist intent.</p>
<p>Much remains unknown about the attacks in Atlanta, but the man charged with the murders has said he <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/live/2021/mar/17/atlanta-spa-shootings-live-updates-asian-women-suspect-arrested-latest?page=with:block-605219848f0832395ae584fe#block-605219848f0832395ae584fe">did not have a racial prejudice</a> against people of Asian descent. Rather, he has <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/03/17/atlanta-spa-shootings-live-updates/">claimed he has a sexual addiction</a>. But that statement indicates that he assumed these women were prostitutes, <a href="https://www.vice.com/en/article/qjpymp/atlanta-georgia-shooting-shows-how-police-are-failing-asian-women">whether that’s true</a> or not.</p>
<p>This assumption, and the resulting violence, is just one of many that Asian Americans have suffered through the years.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/390497/original/file-20210318-17-z3mrbt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A detective in New York's Chinatown neighborhood handing out leaflets." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/390497/original/file-20210318-17-z3mrbt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/390497/original/file-20210318-17-z3mrbt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/390497/original/file-20210318-17-z3mrbt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/390497/original/file-20210318-17-z3mrbt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/390497/original/file-20210318-17-z3mrbt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/390497/original/file-20210318-17-z3mrbt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/390497/original/file-20210318-17-z3mrbt.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">Anti-Asian violence has increased in the U.S. in the past year. After the Atlanta shootings, Detective Suk H. Too, second from right, with the New York Police Department Community Affairs Rapid Response Unit hands out flyers to residents in the Chinatown neighborhood of New York with information on how to report hate crimes.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://newsroom.ap.org/detail/RacialInjusticeGeorgiaShootingsReaction/aa1adbd2499f4afb852b9a528be9ecda/photo?Query=Atlanta%20AND%20asian&mediaType=photo,graphic&sortBy=&dateRange=Anytime&totalCount=180&currentItemNo=24">Mary Altaffer/AP</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>A long history of prejudice</h2>
<p>The presupposed connection between Asian women and sex dates back almost 150 years: In 1875, Congress passed <a href="https://immigrationhistory.org/item/page-act/">the Page Act</a>, which effectively <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/27500484">barred Chinese women from immigrating</a>, because it was impossible to tell if they were traveling “for lewd and immoral purposes,” including “<a href="https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/BILLS-112sres201is/html/BILLS-112sres201is.htm">for purposes of prostitution</a>.” The assumption that all Chinese women were of questionable moral character placed the burden on the women themselves to somehow prove they were not prostitutes before being allowed to immigrate.</p>
<p>The <a href="https://scholarlycommons.law.wlu.edu/crsj/vol14/iss2/5">U.S. military contributed</a> to this conception of Asian women as hypersexualized. During the wars in <a href="https://apjjf.org/2011/9/30/Paul-A.-Kramer/3574/article.html">the Philippines</a> at the start of the 19th century, and during the mid-20th-century wars in Korea and Vietnam, servicemen took advantage of <a href="https://www.worldcat.org/search?q=isbn%3A9780789012036">women who had turned to sex work</a> in response to their lives being wrecked by war.</p>
<p>In the 1960s, the U.S. government brokered a deal with Thailand to be a <a href="https://escholarship.org/content/qt4115c8f8/qt4115c8f8.pdf">“rest and relaxation”</a> center for military personnel fighting in Vietnam. That bolstered what became the foundations of <a href="https://www.news.com.au/travel/travel-updates/incidents/the-dark-side-of-tourism-in-thailand/news-story/6dce761c19b802179f1c1218a1e6e836">Thailand’s modern-day sex tourism industry</a>, which attracts men from the United States and Europe.</p>
<p>This association of Asian women with men’s sexual fantasies <a href="https://www.dukeupress.edu/the-hypersexuality-of-race/">has permeated</a> <a href="https://variety.com/2021/tv/opinion/hollywood-complicit-violence-against-asians-in-america-1234932858/">popular culture</a>, such as a scene in the 1987 Stanley Kubrick movie “Full Metal Jacket” in which a Vietnamese woman entices two servicemen by saying, “Me love you long time,” and regular themes in the animated comedy “<a href="http://doi.org/10.15133/j.os.2014.003">Family Guy</a>.” This makes Asian women more desirable to <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/02/us/massage-parlors-human-trafficking.html">sex traffickers</a>, brought over to serve male desires in spas and massage parlors <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/investigations/2021/03/17/atlanta-spa-shootings-illicit-reviews-massage-parlors/4737755001/">such as the ones</a> attacked in Atlanta. </p>
<p>This history of sexualization of Asian women, shaped by the U.S. military and patriarchy, creates the backdrop to the Atlanta shootings. It helped create the conditions for the Asian spas and massage parlors to be there in the first place. It presents Asian American women as submissive, responsive agents of sexual temptation. </p>
<p>Race and gender inform what happened, and the public response to it, whether the alleged shooter articulates racist motives or not.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/390498/original/file-20210318-15-38j0vw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A woman holding a sign that says " src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/390498/original/file-20210318-15-38j0vw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/390498/original/file-20210318-15-38j0vw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=406&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/390498/original/file-20210318-15-38j0vw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=406&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/390498/original/file-20210318-15-38j0vw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=406&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/390498/original/file-20210318-15-38j0vw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=510&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/390498/original/file-20210318-15-38j0vw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=510&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/390498/original/file-20210318-15-38j0vw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=510&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Tracy Wong, wearing a face mask and holding a sign, takes part in a rally to raise awareness of anti-Asian violence, near Chinatown in Los Angeles on Feb. 20.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/tracy-wong-wearing-a-face-mask-and-holding-a-sign-takes-news-photo/1231291607?adppopup=true">Ringo Chiu/AFP/Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Stereotypes and perceptions matter</h2>
<p>Other crimes against Asian Americans may also lack clear evidence of racial bias, but still echo anti-Asian American stereotypes.</p>
<p>For instance, many <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/08/us/asian-american-attacks-bay-area/index.html">elderly Asian Americans</a> have been shoved to the ground in recent weeks, and Vicha Ratanapakdee, an 84-year-old man, died in one such incident in February in San Francisco. </p>
<p>The public defender representing the accused perpetrator in Ratanapakdee’s death <a href="https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/teen-facing-murder-pleads-not-guilty-in-death-of-elder/">denies that race</a> motivated the crime. But that is different from saying race was not a factor at all. </p>
<p>Practically all Asian Americans, but elderly men in particular, are often <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0030100">viewed as nonaggressive</a>, meek and unable or unwilling to fight back, in contrast to men of other races. They are easy targets.</p>
<h2>It’s not always a crime</h2>
<p>Other anti-Asian American racism isn’t criminal at all, but still fits with the nation’s racist history. As COVID-19 spread across the U.S., Asian-owned restaurants and stores were the <a href="https://www.vox.com/21536943/asian-american-restuarant-racism-coronavirus">first to experience declining revenue</a>, even though most of the earliest cases in the U.S. <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/08/science/new-york-coronavirus-cases-europe-genomes.html">came from Europe</a>.</p>
<p>There is a long history of suspecting Asian Americans of <a href="https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520226296/contagious-divides">carrying disease</a> into the U.S., which made it seem natural for people to avoid Asian American-owned businesses. President Donald Trump’s repeated public declarations that the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/with-kung-flu-trump-sparks-backlash-over-racist-language--and-a-rallying-cry-for-supporters/2020/06/24/485d151e-b620-11ea-aca5-ebb63d27e1ff_story.html">“Kung Flu”</a> virus came from China reinforced those feelings. </p>
<p>This race-based and erroneous assumption has resulted in Asian Americans having among the highest <a href="https://www.npr.org/2020/10/01/918834644/overlooked-asian-american-jobless-rate-surges-but-few-take-notice">unemployment rates</a> in the nation, though they had among the lowest before the pandemic.</p>
<p>It defies logic to claim that race isn’t relevant in attacks on Asian Americans unless the perpetrator actively references it. Research has found that most Americans <a href="http://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.89.5.717">assume a person of Asian descent is foreign-born</a>, unless there is some aspect of their appearance that clearly marks them as American – such as <a href="https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0956797617720912">being overweight</a>. </p>
<p>Asian Americans of all types experience this perception of being “<a href="https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/forever-foreigners-or-honorary-whites/9780813526249/#!">forever foreigners</a>” in a wide range of ways. Regardless of whether some or all – or none – of these latest assaults on Asian Americans are proved to be hate crimes or not, race plays a historic role.</p>
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<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Pawan Dhingra 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>Some racism isn’t criminal at all but still is the result of deep-seated and long-standing racial prejudices.Pawan Dhingra, Professor of Sociology and American Studies, Amherst CollegeLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1563682021-03-19T11:31:20Z2021-03-19T11:31:20Z‘Doing nothing’ is all the rage – is it a form of resistance, or just an indulgence for the lucky few?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/389945/original/file-20210316-17-13njlj6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C3676%2C2772&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">John White Alexander's 'Repose' (1895).</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/repose-1895-artist-john-white-alexander-news-photo/1195089734?adppopup=true">Heritage Images via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>The pandemic has either created too much free time or too little. <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-19-pandemic-likely-improved-your-commute-to-work-11609669801">Kitchen-table commutes</a> and reduced social obligations expand mornings and weekends for some, while caretakers and gig workers are exhausted by the <a href="https://www.wellandgood.com/productivity-free-time-myth-covid/">constant, overlapping demands</a> of home and work. </p>
<p>It’s no surprise, then, that idleness is trending. Concepts like “<a href="https://bookshop.org/books/niksen-embracing-the-dutch-art-of-doing-nothing-9780358396376/9780358395317">niksen</a>,” Dutch for “doing nothing,” and “<a href="https://bookshop.org/books/wintering-the-power-of-rest-and-retreat-in-difficult-times/9780593189481">wintering</a>,” resting in response to adversity, have entered the wellness lexicon. Doing nothing is even being called <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-doing-nothing-can-make-you-more-productive-11615911969">a new productivity hack</a>, aligning the practice with an always-on culture that seeks to optimize every waking minute. </p>
<p>While such prescriptions largely target the privileged who have the resources to curate their schedules, idleness can also be a form of resistance to the capitalist machine. Artist Jenny Odell’s bestselling book “<a href="https://bookshop.org/books/how-to-do-nothing-resisting-the-attention-economy/9781612197494">How to Do Nothing</a>” argues for using leisure time to build cohesive communities by engaging with your local environment instead of your smartphone. </p>
<p>In other words, there’s an ethics to idleness. And the debates on its ethics date back thousands of years, to philosophers and theologians who distinguished between civic-minded leisure, or “<a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/24699758">otium</a>,” and sloth, or “<a href="https://doi.org/10.1179/ros.1998.16.2.57">accidia</a>.”</p>
<p>Though leisure and sloth have variously been praised and scorned, a central tension runs through the history of idleness, from the Roman Empire to today: What obligations do humans have to society? And just because you can do nothing, should you? </p>
<h2>Ancient roots</h2>
<p>Many ancient Romans disparaged <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/24699758">otium</a> as political disengagement that threatened the stability of the republic. (Its opposite, “negotium,” is the source of the word “negotiation.”) </p>
<p>Yet others sought to recuperate leisure and idleness for positive political ends. <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/24699758">Cicero</a> and <a href="https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139542746.007">Seneca</a> both advocated for an otium consisting of personal cultivation that would serve society. They argued that properly studying history, politics and philosophy demanded time away from the business of the city. Citizens who learned from these subjects could help ensure peace and stability in the republic. Both took care to distinguish the otium of study from the idleness of hedonistic indulgences like drinking and sex.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Two men lounge as they observe and are inspired by three statues." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/390452/original/file-20210318-15-1r306ic.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/390452/original/file-20210318-15-1r306ic.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=490&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/390452/original/file-20210318-15-1r306ic.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=490&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/390452/original/file-20210318-15-1r306ic.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=490&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/390452/original/file-20210318-15-1r306ic.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=616&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/390452/original/file-20210318-15-1r306ic.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=616&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/390452/original/file-20210318-15-1r306ic.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=616&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">Francesco Bartolozzi’s ‘Demosthenes, Cicero and William Pitt, Earl of Chatham.’</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/demosthenes-cicero-and-william-pitt-earl-of-chatham-1750-news-photo/1304446677?adppopup=true">Heritage Images via Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Medieval Christian society more sharply divided the two modes of idleness. Monastic communities performed the “Opus Dei,” or work of God, that included activities the Romans would have defined as otium, <a href="https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/R/bo5485359.html">like contemplative reading</a>. </p>
<p>But the medieval system of vices and virtues <a href="https://doi.org/10.1017/S0017816005000908">condemned sloth</a>. Geoffrey Chaucer wrote that it was “<a href="http://www.librarius.com/cantales/parstl06.htm">the bilge-hold of all wicked thoughts and of all trifles, jests, and filth</a>.” Sloth distracted from many kinds of work: productive economic labor, the spiritual work of penance and the “good works” of charity that supported society’s most vulnerable members. </p>
<h2>Idleness and industry</h2>
<p>The division of idleness into beneficial “otium” and reprehensible “accidia” elicited new critiques in the industrial era. The 19th-century economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen acerbically noted that leisure was a status symbol that distinguished the haves from the have-nots. He counted “<a href="https://oll.libertyfund.org/title/veblen-the-theory-of-the-leisure-class-an-economic-study-of-institutions">government, warfare, religious observances and sports</a>” as primary leisure activities enjoyed by capitalist elites. Essentially, Veblen condemned the classical and medieval activities of learning and leisure with the vitriol once reserved for sloth. </p>
<p>At the same time, others construed even the most slothful forms of idleness as a bold resistance to modernity’s greatest ills. Robert Louis Stevenson found in idleness an antidote to capitalist striving that acquainted the idler with what he called “<a href="https://www.wired.com/beyond-the-beyond/2018/01/robert-louis-stevenson-apology-idlers/">the warm and palpating facts of life</a>” – a kind of immediate experience of one’s fellow man and natural environment that was otherwise squelched by participation in the capitalist machine. </p>
<p>If Stevenson’s take on idleness had a tongue-in-cheek dilettantism to it, Bertrand Russell’s was deadly serious. He saw the solution to the high-stakes ideological conflict of the 1930s, between fascism and communism, in leisurely study and debate. <a href="http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html">In Russell’s view</a>, what he proudly called “laziness” promoted a virtuous habit of mind that encouraged deliberative discourse and guarded against extremism. </p>
<p>Yet as the 20th century progressed, productivity again became a status symbol. Long work hours and a packed calendar <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/apr/24/new-status-symbol-hard-work-spending-ceos">conveyed status – even virtue – when judged by capitalist values</a>. </p>
<h2>Should you do nothing?</h2>
<p>Underlying this divided conception of idleness is the paradox at its heart. By definition, it is nonaction, unlikely to influence the world. </p>
<p>Yet escaping the hamster wheel of productivity can spark the ideas that change the world. Real thought and insight require time away from “negotium.” A Reddit forum <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Showerthoughts/">celebrates the shower thoughts</a> that happen when the mind wanders, and Silicon Valley companies <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/f8c3fa4a-0c5b-11ea-bb52-34c8d9dc6d84">grant sabbaticals</a> to encourage innovation. But it’s hard to tell from the outside whether idleness is hedonistic or edifying.</p>
<p>If today’s surge of interest in idleness promotes itself as a panacea for a peculiarly modern condition stemming from lockdown ennui and the omnipresence of technology, it has sometimes failed to grapple with the political implications of its prescriptions.</p>
<p>Extra sleep, time for hobbies and retreat from mundane cares restore the body and mind and <a href="https://hbr.org/2019/02/why-you-should-work-less-and-spend-more-time-on-hobbies">promote creativity</a>. Yet too often, the wellness movement’s treatment of idleness – which rebrands the medieval sin of sloth as a virtue – reinforces its privileges.</p>
<p>At its worst, it curates rarefied products and experiences – from eye pillows to expensive <a href="https://magazine.compareretreats.com/luxury-anti-stress-retreats-to-deal-with-your-burnout/">anti-burnout retreats</a> – for those with the means and the time, further isolating them from society. </p>
<p>Everyone needs rest, and it’s easy to feel the attraction of disengagement. But idleness has too often been a resource unequally allocated to the haves and moralized as sloth among the have-nots. </p>
<p>So, should you do nothing? </p>
<p>Whatever choice you make, you should know that personal idleness has a different function from civic-minded idleness. Personal idleness restores and renews but can also lead to antisocial or exploitative behavior. Civic-minded idleness acknowledges our connection with society even as we withdraw from it, giving us space to explore, play and discover. Ultimately, this should lead to a more equitable society.</p>
<p>Both kinds of idleness can be a social good. But the more opportunities people have to be idle, the better off everyone is.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/156368/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Ingrid Nelson has received funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities. </span></em></p>The ethics of idleness have been debated for thousands of years.Ingrid Nelson, Associate Professor of English, Amherst CollegeLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.