Shana L. Redmond writes about Paul Robeson’s afterlife in a U.S. Prison
“I have begun to undertake the task of trying to establish a Paul Robeson month here at Marion Federal Penitentiary,” wrote Bil Brown-El. An incarcerated person in the medium security prison in rural Illinois, USA, Brown-El addressed his June 1977 letter to Tony Gittens, director of the Electric Playhouse in Washington D.C. Brown-El was aware of the film festivals held by Gittens in his hometown and hoped that, with the proper setting of his conditions, his humble request would be met favorably. He continued,
From the very outset I would like to say that this have never been accomplished before here at the institution. There are very limited programs dealing with our people here at Marion, as well as very few films dealing with our people, black people, very few—education[al] or other. It would be [a] joy to see this project; a Paul Robeson month get off to a good start.
Beyond the need for more cultural opportunities at the prison for Black people, Brown-El argues that the answer to the question of why pursue this course is “very simple”: “Paul Robeson is one of America’s greatest men.” His use of the present verb tense, alongside his earlier frustration with those who “are ignorant to just who Paul Robeson is/was,” highlights that Paul had not left the world nor these precarious men, even a year and a half after his death.
Marion penitentiary, Illinois
Prison may seem a surprising location in which to find the great singer, actor, and radical Paul Robeson (1898-1976) but he knew something of those people and conditions. Though never incarcerated himself, Robeson was the son of a formerly enslaved man who secured his freedom through escape from a North Carolina plantation. He also lived through eight years (1950-58) of detention in the United States when his passport was revoked due to his political labors and global solidarities. He spoke in support of the incarcerated Scottsboro Boys in 1935 and the Trenton Six in 1949, as well as his comrade Ben Davis, whose membership and activism in the Communist Party, USA was used to convict and imprison him under the Smith Act in that same year.
Economic dispossession and political repression
Robeson was passionately and vocally opposed to the conditions of economic dispossession and political repression that produce imprisonment within Black communities, all the while forwarding alternatives to that violence. And though it would be inaccurate to label Robeson an anti-prison activist, his commitments are aligned with the urgent calls from contemporary Black U.S. communities and organizers for prison abolition, which abolitionist geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore describes as change that is “deliberately everything-ist” in its design and impact. It is then not a surprise that imprisoned people would seek Robeson out as Brown-El did, especially in the 1970s when incarceration in the U.S. was rapidly becoming the way to contain and disappear poverty and Black insurgency.
Though the proposed program at Marion Penitentiary was less spectacular and significantly less resourced than that which occurred in universities and museums all over the world, it was no less researched. Brown-El began his time with Robeson well before his communication with Gittens. While in solitary confinement at the United States Penitentiary in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, he read “Paul Robeson: Farewell to a Fighter,” by Carlyle Douglas, a writer for Ebony magazine who covered Robeson’s 1976 memorial at Mother A.M.E. Church where his older brother Ben had pastored for more than twenty years. In it, Douglas describes the “knots of sombre people” who braved a rainy Harlem day to honour Robeson. Amongst the strangers and members of multiple former vanguards (“the old Harlem Writers Guild, the Old Left…”) were
ideologues whose visions he had shared and supported, there were people whose personal resolve had been strengthened by the example of his steel-hard integrity, and people who loved him because he sang of them and to them with a voice unmatched in its combination of technical mastery and natural beauty.
The Negro spirituals and world folk songs that define Robeson’s career were inspiration to hundreds of thousands of people or more, and include his famed “Didn’t My Lord Deliver Daniel,” which declares in verse two that “freedom shall be mine.” His unwavering belief in ultimate justice undoubtedly encouraged many to brave the weather and crowds in order to pay their last respects. Descriptions of the memorial were bookends to Robeson’s life, which Douglas covered in broad, yet thoughtful, strokes.
Like any good story, the highs and lows are dramatic and the lessons profound. Brown-El wrote to Douglas that since its reading he had “become conscious of self.” He went on to read Robeson’s Here I Stand (1958), which he later described as a book that fundamentally changed him: “after reading it, re-reading, and still reading it I realized that I have become addicted to Robeson-ism.” From this conversion developed a month-long program in honor of Robeson and an opportunity for Brown-El and his fellow men to continue responding to the world beyond their walls.
The “five[-]part affair” that Brown-El describes to Gittens, which was sponsored by The Black Culture Society (BCS) at Marion, included panels as well as guest speakers from Southern Illinois University, and culminated in a screening of Robeson’s 1933 breakout film, TheEmperor Jones. Originally a play by Eugene O’Neill in which Robeson also starred, the film adapts the story of Brutus Jones, a Pullman porter convicted of murder who escapes imprisonment and ultimately finds himself on a fictitious Caribbean island where, through coercion and quick-wittedness, he becomes the leader of the local people.
Like the other examples of Depression-era Black performance studied by Stephanie Batiste, The Emperor Jones “shows that black culture also contained an aggressive current of desire for power.” The real-life evidence of this desire for power is precisely what drew scholar Michele Stephens’s attention to Pan-African icon Marcus Garvey, who she juxtaposes with the original O’Neill play.
Proclaiming himself the provisional President of Africa in 1920, Garvey, like Jones, used decorative opulence and pomp and circumstance to stabilize the legitimacy of his reign as leader of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and, by extension, the wider Black world. Both men would, however, fall victim to the “true tragedy” of the Negro emperor, which included a failure to use his power to sustain meaningful collectivity beyond the nation and, according to Stephens,
[e]ven more dangerously, his transnationalism spoke most powerfully to a specific segment of the black American population, the group least likely to find social acceptance and the rights of full citizenship in American and, therefore, the group least interested in their cultural Americanization, the black working poor.
The choice of The Emperor Jones as a capstone event for the BCS Paul Robeson Month comes into sharper focus within this context. Seeing a Black man successfully flee, capture and seize his freedom, must have been compelling for those at Marion, yet it is precisely the group that Stephens mentions here who Brown-El envisioned as he planned the screening. They were not simply caged men; they were the Black and working poor, the most shunned and despised of society, the least likely to access their full citizenship rights, and, therefore, those critically attuned to the contradictory national logics exposed by Black performance, which, Batiste argues, “shows African Americans coming to terms with a nation that had both betrayed them and from its foundational creed continually held out the glimmer of a promise of inclusion.” Brutus Jones modeled this condition, perhaps most especially in the fit of madness into which he descends at the film’s end that is catalyzed both by his lifetime of dispossession and his struggle to achieve what he was told could be his.
Disappearing Black citizens into prisons
Though ending with a cautionary note for Black men to not aspire too far above their given social station, the narrative of The Emperor Jones was, like so much of Robeson’s early film portrayals, offset by the life lived by its star. By the time of the film’s viewing at Marion the story of Paul’s life had been told with a clarity that undoubtedly brought nuance to this portrayal and invited further consideration of his unique role in a nation that was, at this very moment, escalating the disappearance of its Black citizens into carceral dungeons. Over the last few months of 1977, Brown-El used his personal interest in and research of Robeson to launch efforts to advance the musician’s name as well as other struggles for social justice.
As a part of Paul Robeson Month, the BCS developed a “Black Awareness Quiz.” Composed of eight questions in multiple-choice style, it asked the reader to answer, for example, “Which noted American became a target of McCarthyism?” and “Which man was honored with the Spingarn Medal, awarded annually for the highest achievement of an American Negro?” The answer to each question was, of course, Paul Robeson, making for a game that was, by question three or four, very predictable but successful nonetheless in its effort to increase knowledge of the month’s namesake. This quick snapshot of both his persecution and his victories began to develop a shared investment in Robeson’s preservation and protection amongst the BCS and their audiences.
Brown-El took advantage of the critical mass that he created through his programming and curatorial work by using it to join in the outrage over the Philip Dean Hayes play Paul Robeson, which premiered in September 1977. Organizing against the play was widespread yet its reach into a federal prison opens up an underdeveloped and undisclosed avenue for solidarity. In the December “petition in support of the actions of the Washington, D.C. Committee to End the Crimes Against Paul Robeson (from Marion),” more than twenty signatories announced their alliance with the celebrities and intellectuals, including Paul Robeson Jr. and writer James Baldwin, who organized the national boycott of the play. The Marion signatories wrote,
This petition is addressed to all people who are concerned with the deplorable assault, “the pernicious perversion of the essence of Paul Robeson” by the farcical play entitled “Paul Robeson” which pretends to depict the life of this heroic giant as it really was. In essence, this unwholesome manure of a play, actually reduces Mount Kilmanjaro [sic] (Paul Robeson) to an insignificant molehill. We, the petitioners, protest.
This is a fantastic document that is not simply additive to the international campaign against the play but revelatory in its own right. Beyond this opening, it goes on to paraphrase Lenin and expose the play as “bourgeois propaganda”, used in service of the long historical practice of making Black revolutionaries small. From these insights and reading practices, we know that these men are dynamically and proactively engaged with events beyond the penitentiary—not simply large-scale national or international events but those that intimately impact the communities in which they continue to love and labour. We know that even though they’ve not seen the play, they’ve read and heard enough about it to have an opinion on its failures and to know that they are joining a collective with the power to adjust current conditions. We know that these men, “the petitioners,” are self-possessed enough to protest and they do it from the prison in the name of Paul Robeson.
In his letter of appreciation to Paul Robeson, Jr., Brown-El outlines his labours for the elder Robeson, including the petition, the film screening, and an additional event on December 1, which he planned to repeat in February 1978. Paul was quickly becoming a recurring presence at Marion—a member of their community and one that they would vigorously defend. Brown-El commits to Paul, Jr. that, “I shall propagate the Great Paul Robeson whenever, however, and wherever I can as there was none greater, there is none greater and there shall be none greater than he…”
The persistence of Robeson’s attendance and influence was made possible not only by the gravity and significance of his labours during his lifetime but also due to the impressions that they would make, even if temporary, at places like Marion Penitentiary. He remained with those vulnerable men and remains with us still, singing and charting new forms of possibility and escape.
Shana L. Redmond is the author of Everything Man: The Form and Function of Paul Robeson (Duke UP, January 2020) and Anthem: Social Movements and the Sound of Solidarity in the African Diaspora (NYU Press, 2014).
[Leyla Guven was a member of the Turkish parliament for the HDP (Peoples Democratic Party). She has been jailed, been on hunger strike, and been stripped of her parliamentary status]
Johanna Fernández, The Young Lords: A Radical History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020, $30, 480 pp.)
In December 1969, the Young Lords captured widespread public attention when they occupied the First Spanish United Methodist Church in East Harlem in order to run their numerous “serve the people” programs. Inside the rechristened People’s Church, the Lords provided breakfast to school children, taught a series of political edu- cation classes, and ran a medical clinic. The People’s Church also hosted nightly cultural events meant to instill a sense of pride and com- radery among the area’s Puerto Rican, Latinx, and black American residents. It was during one of these open mic jam sessions that Pedro Pietri performed his epic poem “Puerto Rican Obituary” publicly for the first time. Pietri’s poem captures the conditions of state violence, exploitation, discrimination, and despair ravaging Puerto Rican communities in the US. Although Puerto Rican migrants and their children were stuck in a colonial time loop where they “All died yesterday today/ And will die tomorrow,” Pietri’s poem also points to the emergence of a radical politics grounded in a praxis of self-determination – a “que pasa Power” rooted in decolonial, anti-racist, and anti-capitalist love for the people. Although Pietri was more a fellow traveler rather than member of the Young Lords, his work captured the efforts under- taken by young Puerto Ricans and their comrades to use whatever weapons were at their disposal, including the arts, in the struggle for human liberation.
In The Young Lords: A Radical History, historian Johanna Fernández provides a meticulously researched and beautifully narrated account of the rise and fall of the Young Lords from the group’s beginnings as a street gang in Chicago, to its meteoric rise and bold victories in New York City, to the Lords’ eventual decline when they expanded their operations to Puerto Rico. Fernández’s book complements other books written about and by former Young Lords, such as Darrel Wanzer-Serrano’s book on the New York Young Lords, Iris Morales’ book on the women of the organization, and Mickey Melendez’s memoir of his time as a Lord; however, her book is unique in its scope and the breadth of archival research and interviews that underpin its narrative. Fernández reconstructs the history of the Young Lords using the literature they left behind, including internal documents, their newspaper Palante, personal papers, and audio and visual recordings. Over the course of her research Fernández conducted close to 100 oral history interviews with Young Lords and those who worked alongside them as well as people who traveled in their social orbit or were influenced by their activism. She also relied upon extant studies of the Young Lords, press accounts, municipal government documents, and COINTELPRO surveillance documents related to the group and its activities.
Most impressively, Fernández consulted never-before-seen records of the NYPD’s surveillance of the Young Lords and other radical groups operating in New York City, known as “the Handschu Files.” In 2014, Fernández sued the NYPD after years of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests were unanswered or denied. The files, which hold over one-million surveillance documents compiled by the NYPD from 1952 to 1972, were finally made available in 2016. The Handschu Files, as well as pertinent COINTELPRO records, when coupled with the Young Lords’ own recollections, allowed Fernández to craft an incredibly detailed account of the extent of law enforcement subversion of the Young Lords and other radical groups of the period. This freedom of information activism on Fernandez’s part allows us to get a better grasp on organizational decline during this historical moment, which challenges the notion that personality clashes and ideological rifts alone explain the implosion of some of the era’s most important radical groups and the nation’s subsequent shift rightward.
While there can perhaps never be a fully comprehensive account of the Young Lords due to law-enforcement subversion, as well as linger- ing ideological rifts and interpersonal tensions among former members, Fernández provides the most extensive study to date of the Young Lords as an organization. Importantly, throughout the book she deeply embeds the Lords within the various historical currents of the era such as the rise of the New Left, deindustrialization and urban dis- investment across the US, the black power movement, the struggle for Third World liberation, student activism, increased labor militancy, and the shift in the colonial relationship between Puerto Rico and the US marked by Operation Bootstrap and its aftermath. Most of the chapters are organized around specific “offensives” undertaken by the Lords such as the Garbage Offensive, which fought for increased sanitation in East Harlem, or the Lincoln Offensive, which fought for better and more accessible healthcare for the city’s poor. In her examination of each offensive by the Young Lords, Fernández carefully lays out what was happening at a variety of levels from neighborhood, to city, to state, to nation, to globally. For instance, in her discussion of the Lincoln Offensive, Fernández shows us that the Young Lords were not only responding to the abysmal healthcare accessible to New York City’s Puerto Ricans and other poor people, but that health became a key target of intervention for the Lords because they were influenced by the successes of Cuba’s health programs. She also takes the reader through the various ways in which healthcare was being restructured as a result of local and federal policy at the time and which resulted in medical care that was poorer quality, less accessible, and unaffordable for poor people and people of color. The various offensives waged by the Young Lords function as microcosms for examining the political and structural transformations of the era and the quotidian wars of position that erupted in an attempt to transform society. In many ways, this book is not just a story about the Young Lords. Rather, through Fernández’s skillful retelling, the Young Lords become a lens through which to understand the historical conjunctures that marked the late 1960s and early 1970s, ruptures that we continue to grapple with today.
Perhaps the most important intervention that Fernández makes in the book is her argument that we must understand that “the Young Lords are first and foremost heir to the black power movement” (7). The Young Lords are often discussed as influenced or inspired by the black power movement, which, while true, does not fully reflect the ways that the Young Lords were an explicitly black power organization largely comprised of Afro-Puerto Rican and black American activists. Indeed, the leadership of the organization was visibly black, as was a large number of the rank and file. In addition to the visible Afro- Puerto Rican and Afro-Latinx presence in the organization, Fernández notes between 25 and 30 percent of the group’s membership were black Americans. Black Americans were drawn to the organization due to the Lords’ black leadership (both Afro-Puerto Rican and black American) and the substantial number of Afro-Puerto Ricans among the rank and file. Additionally, the rise of the Lords coincided with a period of decline for the New York Black Panthers due to government subversion and political conflict within the group. The Young Lords’ commitment to black power as an integral aspect of the struggle for Puerto Rican self-determination sometimes put the group into conflict with older generations of activists in Puerto Rico and its diaspora who privileged a white Hispanic identity and adhered to white supre- macist notions of respectability. Thus, while the group was multiracial and multiethnic, “the Young Lords were a far cry from the older, island- born, disproportionately white or light-skinned political leadership that most Puerto Ricans were accustomed to seeing” (239). Throughout the book, but particularly in chapter 8, which deals with the politics of race and gender within the organization, Fernández shows that the Young Lords made common cause with black Americans not only because they lived and labored in close proximity but also because they understood themselves as indebted to and part of the long history of black freedom struggles. This critical reframing of the Young Lords’ history highlights the crucial role of Afro-Puerto Ricans in shaping the priorities of the organization. Fernández shows us that the Young Lords were not only in solidarity with the fight for black liberation but were also active participants in those struggles as black Americans and Afro-Puerto Ricans themselves.
As Fernández demonstrates, although the Young Lords’ existence was short-lived, they were highly successful in enacting their vision for a just and liberated society, which continues to have great resonance and significance 50 years later. The organization’s politics were ground-breaking in many respects, shedding light on the often taboo topics of racism, sexism, and homophobia in Puerto Rican communities, while “the women of the organization theorized ‘intersectionality’ before it became a thing” (381). The Lords also were among the first to use the term “Latino” in order to create common cause with others who were similarly displaced “as a result of U.S. economic and imperial policies” in Latin America. What Fernández brilliantly demonstrates throughout the book is how the Young Lords sought to craft a liberatory project that understood self-determination at a variety of levels, from individual empowerment, to community control, to revolutionary nationalism, in a way that allowed the organization to be grounded in the specificities of the local while building solidarity with other oppressed communities across the US and around the globe.
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We all know the Chernobyl script. A badly designed reactor suffered a meltdown. The decrepit Soviet regime tried to hide the disaster. Millions of citizens were put at risk. And the truth came out. The regime paid the price. Its legitimacy was in tatters. Collapse followed.
For liberals it is a pleasing morality tale. Dictatorship fails when faced with the challenges of modernity. Sunlight is the best disinfectant.
When COVID-19 struck, we wondered whether it might be Chinese President Xi Jinping’s Chernobyl. But after initial prevarication driven by Wuhan’s local politics, China’s national leadership reasserted its grip. The worst moment was Feb. 7, when hundreds of millions of Chinese took to the Internet to protest the treatment of whistleblowing doctor Li Wenliang, who had died of the disease. Since then Beijing has taken control, both of the disease and the media narrative. Far from being a perestroika moment, the noose of party discipline and censorship has tightened.
Adam Toozeis a history professor and director of the European Institute at Columbia University. His latest book is Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World, and he is currently working on a history of the climate crisis.
By the spring it was White House staffers who were likely watching the HBO miniseries Chernobyl and wondering about their own boss. Lately, the historian Harold James has asked whether the United States is living through its late-Soviet moment, with COVID-19 as President Donald Trump’s terminal crisis. But if that turns out to be the case, it will not be because of a botched cover-up; Americans are living neither in late-Soviet Ukraine nor in the era of Watergate, when a sordid exposé could sink a president. Of course, Trump was culpably irresponsible in making light of the disease. But he did so in the full glare of TV cameras. The president reveled in flouting the recommendations of eggheaded public health experts, correctly calculating that a large swath of his base was not concerned with conventional norms of truth or reason.
But the fact that neither Xi’s China nor Trump’s United States are a good match for the late Soviet Union doesn’t mean that Chernobyl is not relevant to our COVID-19 predicament.
But the fact that neither Xi’s China nor Trump’s United States are a good match for the late Soviet Union doesn’t mean that Chernobyl is not relevant to our COVID-19 predicament.
What should interest us is not so much the downfall of the Soviet Union as the more mundane preoccupations of the Western Europeans who in 1986 found themselves in the path of the Chernobyl radiation cloud. As the news leaked out of the disaster, they faced many of the same questions that have haunted us in 2020. Which tests were to be trusted? Was it safe to go outside? Should children play in sand pits? What types of food were safe? How long would it last? What were the trade-offs? What exactly was a becquerel? How many were safe? Which of the vast array of reports, data, and recommendations should one read? Which should one trust?
There is no HBO series about life under the fallout cloud that summer. (In terms of curies per square kilometer, the radiation was worst in two belts: one stretching northwest across Scandinavia, the other to the south across Slovenia, Austria, and Bavaria.) What we do have is a book, Risk Society, published by the German sociologist Ulrich Beck with exquisite timing in the spring of 1986.
Beck argued that the omnipresence of large-scale threats of global scope, anonymous and invisible, were the common denominator of our new epoch: “A fate of endangerment has arisen in modernity, a sort of counter-modernity, which transcends all our concepts of space, time, and social differentiation. What yesterday was still far away will be found today and in the future ‘at the front door.’” The question, so vividly exposed by the crises such as Chernobyl and the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, is how to navigate this world. The relevance of Beck’s answers are even more apparent in our day than they were in his own.
Left: A television at Chernobyl’s catastrophe museum in Kiev plays a documentary in 2006 that shows footage of the roughly 600,000 soldiers, firemen, and civilians who were deployed over four years to clean up after the nuclear meltdown. SERGEI SUPINSKY/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES Right: A medical staff member gestures inside an isolation ward at the Red Cross Hospital in Wuhan in China’s central Hubei province on March 10. STR/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
Beck was in many ways an emblematic figure of postwar Germany. Born in 1944 near the Baltic coast in the Pomeranian town of Stolp, now Slupsk in Poland, Beck’s family fled the Red Army to settle in the booming industrial city of Hanover. He studied sociology not in the famously radical Frankfurt, or at the Free University of Berlin, but in Freiburg and Munich. By the early 1980s he was comfortably ensconced as a professor of sociology upriver from Frankfurt, in picturesque Bamberg. Following the success of Risk Society, Ulrich Beck would emerge as perhaps Germany’s most widely recognized social scientist after Jürgen Habermas.
Not for nothing Beck has been dubbed a “zeitgeist sociologist.” The intellectual world he was responding to in the early 1980s in West Germany was one of considerable uncertainty. The reform momentum of the 1960s and 1970s had ebbed. West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s government had little of the energy of U.S. President Ronald Reagan or British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Habermas characterized the period in intellectual and political terms as die neue Unübersichtlichkeit—the New Obscurity. The most common move was to refer to the period as an age of “post-”—post-industrial, postmodern, postcolonial. But as Beck put it, the use of the term “post-” was a marker of our helplessness, the intellectual equivalent of a blind man’s stick probing in the dark. Facing up to the challenge of providing a positive definition, Beck chose “risk society.”
In the early 1980s, the theme of risk was in the air. The escalation of Cold War tension created a pervasive sense of threat. The campaign against DDT, given huge prominence by Rachel Carson’s bestselling Silent Spring, had heightened awareness of invisible chemical pollution. The Three Mile Island incident of 1979 brought home the danger of nuclear accidents. In the United States in 1982, Mary Douglas and Aaron Wildavsky had outlined their cultural theory of risk, elaborating on Douglas’s earlier anthropological work. Charles Perrow warned that in living with massive complex systems such as air traffic control systems, dams, and nuclear reactors, accidents must be accepted as normal.
Beck’s contribution in Risk Society was to offer a compelling sociological interpretation of this pervasive sense of undefined but omnipresent threat, both as a matter of personal and collective experience and as a historical epoch. But more than that, Risk Society is a manifesto of sorts, proposing a novel attitude toward and politics for contemporary reality.
The West’s first wave of modernization had been carried forward by an enthusiastic overcoming of tradition and a confident subordination of nature by science and technology. The disorienting realization of the late 20th century was that those very same energies, those same tools were now the source not only of our emancipation but also of our self-endangerment. To retreat would be to put the gains of modernization at risk. We could not deny the benefits of modern medicine. But nor could we deny its risks and side effects, intended and unintended. What was required was, for want of a better description, a “scientific approach to science.” In this age, which Beck dubbed second or reflexive modernity, the challenge was to find ways to employ the tools of modernity—of science, technology and democratic debate—without succumbing to the ever-present temptations of glancing backward to a more familiar age or engaging in denial.
This is not easy to do. There is no familiar liberal formula for coping with the contemporary risks created by modern technological development.
There is no familiar liberal formula for coping with the contemporary risks created by modern technological development.
It was not a matter of denouncing dictatorship or know-nothing populism. Indeed, there is every reason to think that the problems of risk society will be most acute precisely for those who fancy ourselves as particularly reasonable and modern, because they cannot evade the dilemmas and paradoxes that it generates.
Beck shared with the environmental movement of the 1970s and 1980s the dawning awareness of the gigantic risks produced by modern economic development. It was the nuclear question that catapulted risk society into public consciousness. But the 1980s also saw the emergence of widespread awareness both of climate change and the “emerging diseases paradigm.” If climate change was the result of carbon emissions, the emergence of viruses such as HIV, and the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 could be traced to the intrusion of humans into delicate forest ecosystems and the vast animal incubators of the agro-industrial complex. As citizens of successful modernizing societies, we face all-pervasive risks that fundamentally blur the distinction between the social and the natural. Beck could rightly claim to be one of the first thinkers of what we know today as the Anthropocene.
Left: An undated picture sent by Soviet television shows a man injured in the blast at the Chernobyl nuclear plant. AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES Right: A nurse attends to a COVID-19 patient while he is moved out of the Intensive Care Unit of the Pope John XXIII Hospital in Bergamo, Italy, on April 7. MARCO DI LAURO/GETTY IMAGES
But Beck goes a step further. If it is true that we are now faced with pervasive risks generated and brought upon us by the forces of modernity and yet not accessible to our immediate senses, how do we cope? Until you start suffering from radiation poisoning, until your fetus suffers a horrific mutation, until you find your lungs flooding with pneumonia, the threat of the radiation or a mystery bug is unreal, inaccessible to the naked eye or immediate perception.
In risk society, we become radically dependent on specialized scientific knowledge to define what is and what is not dangerous
In risk society, we become radically dependent on specialized scientific knowledge to define what is and what is not dangerous
in advance of encountering the dangers themselves. We become, as Beck puts it, “incompetent in matters” of our “own affliction.” Alienated from our faculties of assessment, we lose an essential part of our “cognitive sovereignty.” The harmful, the threatening, the inimical lies in wait everywhere, but whether it is inimical or friendly is “beyond one’s own power of judgment.” We thus face a double shock: a threat to our health and survival and a threat to our autonomy in gauging those threats. As we react and struggle to reassert control, we have no option but to “become small, private alternative experts in risks of modernization.” We take a crash course in epidemiology and educate ourselves about “R zero.” But that effort only sucks us deeper into the labyrinth.
The normal experiential logic of everyday thought is reversed. Rather than starting from immediate experience and abstracting from there to general claims about the world, the news of the day starts by reference to mathematical formula, chemical tests, and medical judgements. The more we rely on science, the more we find ourselves distanced from immediate reality. Every encounter with our fellow citizens as we go about our normal business is shadowed by a calculation of virtual risks and the probability of contamination. The result is paradoxical. The path of science leads us into a realm in which hidden forces, like the gods and demons of old, threaten our earthly lives. A strange mixture of fear and calculation pursues us into our “very dreams.” Whereas animistic religion once endowed nature with spirits, we now view the world through the lens of omnipresent, latent causalities. “Dangerous, hostile substances lie concealed behind the harmless façades. Everything must be viewed with a double gaze, and can only be correctly understood and judged through this doubling. The world of the visible must be investigated, relativized and evaluated with respect to a second reality, only existent in thought and yet concealed in the world.”
As we have learned during the COVID-19 pandemic, one of the main functions of a face mask is to remind oneself of invisible dangers and to signal to others that one is taking those risks seriously. In the United States they have become something like an article of faith, a way of indicating publicly that one belongs to those who take “the science” seriously.
“Like the gaze of the exorcist, the gaze of the pollution-plagued contemporary is directed at something invisible.” “Omnipresent pollutants and toxins” take the role of spirits. In our effort to cope we develop our “own evasion rituals, incantations, intuition, suspicions and certainties.” Of course, we insist, this isn’t exorcism. This is about science, medicine, engineering, technology. But references to those authorities don’t actually solve our problem. Because on most matters we care about, it turns out that science speaks with many voices. Science is, at best, a rowdy, self-willed choir with many people with different ideas of the tune they should be singing. As we have discovered to our horror in 2020, anyone who professes to believe that medicine, science, and public health expertise will by themselves tell us how to act is either naive or in bad faith. Though overwhelmed and underinformed, we cannot escape the responsibility of both personal and collective political judgment.
Furthermore, the more we know, the more we realize that we are not the only ones judging. Every interested party is picking and choosing its sources. It is an enlightening but also shocking exposure to how the sausage of modern knowledge is truly made. And as Beck reminds us, it “would not be so dramatic and could be easily ignored if only one were not dealing with very real and personal hazards.”
This is clearly a deeply modern world, saturated with technology and expertise. But it is not a cookie-cutter image of modernity in which scientific reason marches to victory over superstition and censorship. Would that it were so clear-cut. Instead we find ourselves in a world in which rationalism and skepticism are turning on themselves. Knowledge comes not neatly packaged in the form of clearly recognizable truth but in “admixtures” and “amalgams.”
Knowledge comes not neatly packaged in the form of clearly recognizable truth but in “admixtures” and “amalgams.”
It is transported by “agents of knowledge in their combination and opposition, their foundations, their claims, their mistakes, their irrationalities,” all of which all too obviously go into defining the possibility of their knowing the things they claim to know.
As Beck remarks, “this is a development of great ambivalence. It contains the opportunity to emancipate social practice from science through science.” We gain a far more realistic understanding of how scientific results are generated and vaccines are produced. But the resulting disillusionment and skepticism also has the potential to immunize “prevailing ideologies and interested standpoints against enlightened scientific claims, and throws the door open to a feudalization of scientific knowledge practice through economic and political interests and ‘new dogmas.’”
So, not only is technological progress churning up nature and generating massive and dangerous blowback, but at the moment when we need it most to orient ourselves, science and the government’s decisions based on it forfeit their basis of legitimacy. And as the full extent of this shock sinks in, it unleashes a third process of destabilization: We begin to wonder about the broader narratives of progress and history within which we understand our present.
Left: A photo from October 1986 shows the damaged portion of the Chernobyl nuclear plant in Ukraine about five months after a major explosion on April 26, 1986. ZUFAROV/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES Right: New graves dot the Nossa Senhora Aparecida cemetery in Manaus, Brazil, in May 2020 amid the rising death toll from the coronavirus pandemic. MICHAEL DANTAS/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
It is Beck’s openness to the ambiguity and complexity of global development, his insistence on the multiplicity and surprising quality of potential reactions to risk society, that helps to keep his book relevant as a map for reading our current situation. If we go back to 1986, Beck anticipated three ways in which societies might deal with the risks he identified.
What Beck himself hoped for was what he called a cosmopolitan micropolitics. This was a logical extension of his model of reflexive modernity, in which not just science has been dethroned, but also the previously demarcated sphere of national politics, dominated by parliaments, sovereign governments, and territorial states. What Europe witnessed starting in the 1980s was a double movement which, on the one hand, dramatically reduced the intensity of political conflict between parties in the parliamentary sphere and, at the same time, politicized previously unpolitical realms such as gender relations, family life, and the environment, spheres which he dubbed “sub-politics” or “micropolitics.” For Beck this was no cause for lament. The challenge was to invigorate subpolitics at whatever scale they operated. This could be intensely local, as in struggles over road projects or airport runways. But it could also be global in scope.
When SARS was revealed in China in 2003, it was for Beck a demonstration of a global micropolitics in action.
When SARS was revealed in China in 2003, it was for Beck a demonstration of a global micropolitics in action.
New networks of “risk actors” led by doctors, researchers, and independent public health experts overcame the initial efforts at secrecy by the Chinese state. If the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has had a Chernobyl moment, this was it. Bottom-up environmental politics and social-justice activism was for Beck the model of a new mode of politics. But one might also think of the remarkable effort involved in stabilizing an institution such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as a global authority in mapping the climate emergency. It involves a tireless and massive effort of scientific politics. Again and again climate scientists from all over the world, using different models, starting from different assumptions, paid for by governments with oppposing interests have struggled to reconcile their differences and define reasonable bands of agreement. The reality of this kind of science is more like the workings of a complex system of legal arbitration than the pristine image of the lab bench.
But, as Beck acknowledged, there were also at least two other possibilities. One was a retro politics of going back to the future. This would be a politics that aimed to restore the certainty of social development and the rule of organized politics and scientific reason that had guided the first modernity. The United States’ “war on terror” was one such attempt. It turned a 21st century security risk into a conventional war against Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq. It was a disaster. The most successful effort to control risk society within the framework of a classic industrial modernity is China. Its response to the COVID-19 crisis has put that on full display. COVID-19 was contained and CCP rule ensured by a full-bore mobilization of societal discipline, targeted deployment of medical spending, and state power, all of it clad in the guise of what the regime calls 21st-century Marxism, a self-confident narrative of modernization and progress. There is no room for questioning the modern epic of the China dream. The lack of a positive attitude is enough to trigger suspicion.
Another response with which we have become all too familiar in the contemporary United States is a retreat from the vertiginous whirl of self-reflexive rationality
Another response with which we have become all too familiar in the contemporary United States is a retreat from the vertiginous whirl of self-reflexive rationality
toward new taboos, superstition, rigidification, and denial. This for Beck was not to be understood as a hangover from traditional folkways, but as a new superstition raised in response to new threats. Given the spiraling uncertainty of risk society, it was hardly surprising that some might react this way. During the response to COVID-19, it was all too easy to find oneself torn between two camps described by Beck in his article on Chernobyl: “Some refuse to perceive the dangers at all, while others energetically insist on blanket condemnations in the name of ‘self-protection’ or the preservation of ‘life on this earth.’” How was one to decide between these positions? The polarization of views in the eddying arguments of risk society could easily extend to science itself. If, by an honest fallibilistic account, “science is only a disguised mistake in abeyance … then where does anyone derive the right to believe only in certain risks?” A realistic skepticism about scientific authority all too easily shaded into a general obfuscation of risks. It was, Beck admitted in Risk Society, a “knife’s edge,” in which debates about invisible risks mutated into “sort of modern seance” with the dial on the Ouija board being moved by rival scientific and counterscientific analyses.
“Once the invisible has been let in,” Beck wrote, “it will soon not be just the spirits of pollutants that determine the thought and the life of people. This can all be disputed, it can polarize, or it can fuse together. New communities and alternative communities arise, whose world views, norms and certainties are grouped around the center of invisible threats.” How can one not think of our ongoing struggle over face masks?
And then there is denial. Outside a totalitarian setting, a social problem such as a labor dispute cannot easily be settled by denial. But perceived risks “can always be interpreted away (as long they have not already occurred).” Barring the actual disaster, mounting anxiety may be relieved simply by pushing the danger out of mind. Risk is a matter of perception; therefore, it originates “in knowledge and norms, and they can thus be enlarged or reduced in knowledge and norms, or simply displaced from the screen of consciousness.” The awareness of modern risks was not a one-way street. It was reversible. “Troubled times and generations can be succeeded by others for which fear, tamed by interpretations, is a basic element of thought and experience. Here the threats are held captive in the cognitive cage of their always unstable ‘non-existence.’” Later generations would look back and mock the fears that had once “so upset the ‘old folks.’” A recurring refrain in the response to COVID-19, notably from the populists of the Americas, whether in the United States, Mexico, or Brazil, has been essentially this: We will just have to get used to it. After all, we live with flu. It will blow over.
As Beck warned more than 30 years ago, we may be “at the beginning of a historical process of habituation. It may be that the next generation, or the one after that, will no longer be upset at pictures of birth defects, like those of tumor-covered fish and birds that now circulate around the world, just as we are no longer upset today by violated values, the new poverty and a constant high level of mass unemployment.” The word out of the White House in the summer of 2020 is that Trump’s strategists are looking forward to the day when news of tens of thousands of new cases per day no longer ruffles the headlines.
Beck was at heart a sociologist more than a critical theorist or normative political theoretician. He did not denounce the development of denial or unreason so much as chart and explain it. In dealing with risk society, one had to reckon with its basic motive force: the powerful emotion of fear. This was the basic question it posed:
“How can we cope with the fear, if we cannot overcome the causes of the fear? How can we live on the volcano of civilization without deliberately forgetting about it, but also without suffocating on the fears—and not just on the vapors that the volcano exudes?”
In 2020, that question is even more pressing than it was in 1986.
NY Times, August 4, 2020 One-Third of New York’s Small Businesses May Be Gone Forever
Small-business owners said they have exhausted federal and local assistance and see no end in sight after months of sharp revenue drops. Now, many are closing their shops and restaurants for good.
William Garfield, the owner of Glady’s, a Caribbean restaurant in Brooklyn, said he decided to close after his landlord told him he would need to start paying his full monthly rent.Credit...Amr Alfiky/The New York Times
In early March, Glady’s, a Caribbean restaurant in Brooklyn, was bringing in about $35,000 a week in revenue. The Bank Street Bookstore, a 50-year-old children’s shop in Manhattan, was preparing for busy spring and summer shopping seasons. And Busy Bodies, a play space for children in Brooklyn, had just wrapped up months of packed classes with long waiting lists.
Five months later, those once prosperous businesses have evaporated. Glady’s and Busy Bodies are closed for good and Bank Street, one of the city’s last children’s bookstores, will shut down permanently in August.
The three are victims of the economic destruction that threatens to derail New York City’s recovery from the financial collapse triggered by the coronavirus pandemic.
An expanding universe of distinctive small businesses — from coffee shops to dry cleaners to hardware stores — that give New York’s neighborhoods their unique personalities and are key to the city’s economy are starting to topple.
More than 2,800 businesses in New York City have permanently closed since March 1, according to data from Yelp, the business listing and review site, a higher number than in any other large American city.
About half the closings have been in Manhattan, where office buildings have been hollowed out, its wealthier residents have left for second homes and tourists have stayed away.
When the pandemic eventually subsides, roughly one-third of the city’s 240,000 small businesses may never reopen, according to a report by the Partnership for New York City, an influential business group. So far, those businesses have shed 520,000 jobs.
While New York is home to more Fortune 500 headquarters than any city in the country, small businesses are the city’s backbone. They represent roughly 98 percent of the employers in the city and provide jobs to more than 3 million people, which is about half of its work force, according to the city.
When New York’s economic lockdown started in March the hope was that the closing of businesses would be temporary and many could weather the financial blow.
But the devastation to small businesses has become both widespread and permanent as the economy reopens at a slow pace. Emergency federal aid has failed to provide enough of a cushion, people remain leery of resuming normal lives and the threat of a second wave of the virus looms.
The first to fall were businesses, especially retail shops, that depended on New York City’s massive flow of commuters. And months into the crisis, established businesses that once seemed invincible, including some that had ambitious expansion plans, are cratering under a sustained collapse in consumer spending.
One business that will not reopen is Bank Street Bookstore, a nonprofit on the Upper West Side run by the Bank Street College of Education. More than 90 percent of its revenue was in-store sales, mostly to neighborhood parents, the college’s students and elementary schoolteachers.
“We had to keep reinventing the business every week to two weeks, based on new guidelines,” Caitlyn Morrissey, the store’s manager, said about the past months. “Our cornerstone was in-person sales, not web sales.”
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“Our cornerstone was in-person sales, not web sales,” said Caitlyn Morrissey, the manager of Bank Street Bookstore, a children’s book shop that is closing for good. Credit...Amr Alfiky/The New York Times
Unlike larger firms, small businesses — bookstores, bodegas, bars, dental practices, gyms and day care centers — typically do not have the financial resources to overcome a few rough days or weeks, let alone months.
There is no clearinghouse for reliable data on the number of small businesses that have closed in New York or nationwide. The actual number of permanent closings in New York is probably higher than Yelp’s tally since it largely focuses on consumer-facing businesses. A small business is broadly defined by economists as those with under 500 employees.
From March 1 to the end of April, during the height of the pandemic in New York City, businesses in the city that use the payment company Square saw their revenues drop by half, according to an analysis the company provided to The New York Times. The most significant revenue declines were in the Bronx and Manhattan, the company said.
As part of a $2.2 trillion emergency aid package adopted in March, the federal government set aside about $500 billion in small-business loans to keep workers employed and companies afloat. But business owners said they have spent all or most of their loans, paying salaries and bills, including rent.
More help for small businesses is part of negotiations as the Trump administration and Republicans and Democrats in Congress try to iron out another rescue package.
While the worst of the pandemic in the United States struck New York City first, small businesses across the country have been clobbered.
In New York, the restaurant and hospitality industry has been one of the hardest hit. More than 80 percent of the city’s restaurants and bars did not pay full rent in June, according to the NYC Hospitality Alliance.
Among those restaurants was Glady’s in Brooklyn. Its revenue plummeted by two-thirds since March, to about $12,000 per week in June. The majority of its sales were from tropical rum drinks served through a side window of the restaurant.
The owner, William Garfield, said he decided to close in June before officials started allowing outdoor dining after his landlord said he had to start paying the full monthly rent, $8,000, starting in July. Mr. Garfield said the healthy revenue from drink sales was still not enough to make ends meet.
“We were thriving,” said Mr. Garfield, 32, said about Glady’s business before March. “I would disagree with the sentiment that if someone had a thriving business they should be able to survive this.”
Mr. Garfield has another restaurant, Mo’s Original, and a bar next door, both of which he plans to keep open. His staff among his businesses has shrunk from 56 to seven.
He has spent almost all of his small-business stimulus loan, known as Payroll Protection Assistance, about $72,000. His insurance company denied his business interruption claim, citing New York State’s order that restaurants were “essential businesses” and could stay open.
“It’s the most frustrating situation because it’s not about passion anymore or the work you put in or the hours you put in,” he said. “It’s all about the mitigating circumstances that are out of your control.”
In recent weeks, “For Lease” signs have started to appear on storefronts on streets throughout New York, evidence that businesses that tried to ride out the initial months or abruptly shift to new online business models could no longer survive.
Business owners said they are at a tipping point. They have exhausted their federal, state and local aid. And while some landlords have offered breaks on rent, some business owners say others have been less flexible.
Owners say they also have to cope with constant uncertainty — not just the threat of a resurgence of the virus but also having to navigate shifting reopening plans.
Restaurants in New York City were expecting to restart indoor dining in July. Owners bought food and supplies for what they thought would be larger crowds. But days before the restrictions were to be lifted, officials halted the plans, citing rising cases in other states that had allowed indoor dining.
Nearly a third of the 2,800 businesses in New York City that have permanently closed were restaurants, according to Yelp.
The remaining businesses represent a broad swath of the city’s economy, including small law firms, beauty stores, spas and cleaning companies.
“As a small-business owner, I’m surprised that more businesses have not closed yet,” said Andrea Dillon, the owner of Busy Bodies, a day care she opened on Fulton Street in Brooklyn in 2016.
Ms. Dillon said she noticed the ripple effect of the pandemic in late February, a few weeks before the city shut down. Parents and caregivers were canceling upcoming birthday parties and classes.
By early March, she realized that her entire business model — in which up to 70 children and adults cram into a play space with toys and live music — could not coexist with the coronavirus.
She asked her landlord for a break on her $6,000 a month rent, but he refused. Ms. Dillon said she decided in early April to close down.
“The face of New York City storefronts, they will not be forever changed,” she said. “But they will be changed for the foreseeable future.”
While her management company did not offer a break on rent, another landlord, Brian Steinwurtzel, said he was doing just that for some of his roughly 2,000 tenants in New York City, many of them small businesses. Mr. Steinwurtzel, the co-chief executive at GFP Real Estate, said he helped them apply for federal assistance and lowered their rents while business is down.
“It doesn’t make any sense to kick them out or fight with them as long as we are all working together,” Mr. Steinwurtzel said. “We believe we are all in it together, and we all have to help each other out.”
The most vulnerable small businesses in New York City might be those operated by minority or female owners. Recent studies have shown that these were largely shut out of federal aid. There are about 10,500 business that New York City has certified as minority- or female-owned.
A survey of such businesses released by the New York City Comptroller’s Office found that 30 percent of them believed they were likely to fold within the next 30 days.
Among those businesses is ThroughMyKitchen, a catering and snack company owned by Evelyn Echevarria. Before March, she derived most of her income from selling goods at street fairs and catering. Her last event was in March, catering a 120-person wedding in South Carolina.
She is surviving on unemployment benefits, but the largest portion of that, the federal stimulus of $600 per week, expired at the end of July. She also received $2,000 in assistance from the city.
“It’s been very, very hard,” Ms. Echevarria, 58, said. “The small businesses won’t be able to survive this. This, to me and many others, is devastating. It’s devastating.”
Sheelagh McNeill contributed research.
Matthew Haag covers the intersection of real estate and politics in the New York region. He previously was a general assignment and breaking news reporter at The Times and worked as an education reporter at The Dallas Morning News. @matthewhaag
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A critic shouldn’t often deal in superlatives. He or she is here to explicate, to expand context and to make fine distinctions. But sometimes a reviewer will shout as if into a mountaintop megaphone. I recently came upon William Kennedy’s review of “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” which he called “the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race.” Kennedy wasn’t far off. Caste The Origins of Our Discontents By Isabel Wilkerson 474 pages. Random House. $32.
I had these thoughts while reading Isabel Wilkerson’s new book, “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents.” It’s an extraordinary document, one that strikes me as an instant American classic and almost certainly the keynote nonfiction book of the American century thus far. It made the back of my neck prickle from its first pages, and that feeling never went away.
I told more than one person, as I moved through my days this past week, that I was reading one of the most powerful nonfiction books I’d ever encountered.
Wilkerson’s book is about how brutal misperceptions about race have disfigured the American experiment. This is a topic that major historians and novelists have examined from many angles, with care, anger, deep feeling and sometimes simmering wit.
Wilkerson’s book is a work of synthesis. She borrows from all that has come before, and her book stands on many shoulders. “Caste” lands so firmly because the historian, the sociologist and the reporter are not at war with the essayist and the critic inside her. This book has the reverberating and patriotic slap of the best American prose writing.
[ This book is one of our most anticipated titles of August. See the full list. ]
This is a complicated book that does a simple thing. Wilkerson, who won a Pulitzer Prize for national reporting while at The New York Times and whose previous book, “The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration,” won the National Book Critics Circle Award, avoids words like “white” and “race” and “racism” in favor of terms like “dominant caste,” “favored caste,” “upper caste” and “lower caste.”
Some will quibble with her conflation of race and caste. (Social class is a separate matter, which Wilkerson addresses only rarely.) She does not argue that the words are synonyms. She argues that they “can and do coexist in the same culture and serve to reinforce each other. Race, in the United States, is the visible agent of the unseen force of caste. Caste is the bones, race the skin.” The reader does not have to follow her all the way on this point to find her book a fascinating thought experiment. She persuasively pushes the two notions together while addressing the internal wounds that, in America, have failed to clot.
A caste system, she writes, is “an artificial construction, a fixed and embedded ranking of human value that sets the presumed supremacy of one group against the presumed inferiority of other groups on the basis of ancestry and often immutable traits, traits that would be neutral in the abstract but are ascribed life-and-death meaning.”
“As we go about our daily lives, caste is the wordless usher in a darkened theater, flashlight cast down in the aisles, guiding us to our assigned seats for a performance,” Wilkerson writes. She observes that caste “is about respect, authority and assumptions of competence — who is accorded these and who is not.”
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Isabel Wilkerson, whose new book is “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents.”Credit...Joe Henson
Wilkerson’s usages neatly lift the mind out of old ruts. They enable her to make unsettling comparisons between India’s treatment of its untouchables, or Dalits, Nazi Germany’s treatment of Jews and America’s treatment of African-Americans. Each country “relied on stigmatizing those deemed inferior to justify the dehumanization necessary to keep the lowest-ranked people at the bottom and to rationalize the protocols of enforcement.”
Wilkerson does not shy from the brutality that has gone hand in hand with this kind of dehumanization. As if pulling from a deep reservoir, she always has a prime example at hand. It takes resolve and a strong stomach to stare at the particulars, rather than the generalities, of lives under slavery and Jim Crow and recent American experience. To feel the heat of the furnace of individual experience. It’s the kind of resolve Americans will require more of.
“Caste” gets off to an uncertain start. Its first pages summon, in dystopian-novel fashion, the results of the 2016 election alongside anthrax trapped in the permafrost being released into the atmosphere because of global warming. Wilkerson is making a point about old poisons returning to haunt us. But by pulling in global warming (a subject she never returns to in any real fashion) so early in her book, you wonder if “Caste” will be a mere grab bag of nightmare impressions.
It isn’t.
Her consideration of the 2016 election, and American politics in general, is sobering. To anyone who imagined that the election of Barack Obama was a sign that America had begun to enter a post-racial era, she reminds us that the majority of whites did not vote for him.
She poses the question so many intellectuals and pundits on the left have posed, with increasing befuddlement: Why do the white working classes in America vote against their economic interests?
She runs further with the notion of white resentment than many commentators have been willing to, and the juices of her argument follow the course of her knife. What these pundits had not considered, Wilkerson writes, “was that the people voting this way were, in fact, voting their interests. Maintaining the caste system as it had always been was in their interest. And some were willing to accept short-term discomfort, forgo health insurance, risk contamination of the water and air, and even die to protect their long-term interest in the hierarchy as they had known it.”
In her novel “Americanah,” Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie suggested that “maybe it’s time to just scrap the word ‘racist.’ Find something new. Like Racial Disorder Syndrome. And we could have different categories for sufferers of this syndrome: mild, medium and acute.”
Wilkerson has written a closely argued book that largely avoids the word “racism,” yet stares it down with more humanity and rigor than nearly all but a few books in our literature.
“Caste” deepens our tragic sense of American history. It reads like watching the slow passing of a long and demented cortege. In its suggestion that we need something akin to South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, her book points the way toward an alleviation of alienation. It’s a book that seeks to shatter a paralysis of will. It’s a book that changes the weather inside a reader.
While reading “Caste,” I thought often of a pair of sentences from Colson Whitehead’s novel “The Underground Railroad.” “The Declaration [of Independence] is like a map,” he wrote. “You trust that it’s right, but you only know by going out and testing it for yourself.”
Rupert Murdoch’s NY Post made a splash on July 24 with an article titled “de Blasio quotes Karl Marx in WNYC radio interview”. This red-baiting exercise begins:
First it was Che Guevara — now it’s Karl Marx!
Mayor Bill de Blasio reached back to his salad days as a young radical to quote the father of communism on Friday.
As for the source of the Karl Marx quote, during the course of an interview, NPR’s Brian Lehrer asked de Blasio to comment on a Politico article that made the mayor sound like a fire-breathing radical. Instead of “reaching out now to business leaders in the city” for help with various problems, he shut the door on this possibility by focusing on “inequality and wanting to raise taxes on the wealthiest New Yorkers and things like that.
Unsung Heroes of Los Alamos: Rethinking Manhattan Project Spies and the Cold War
By Dave Lindorff
high southwest view aerial of Los Alamos Los Alamos National Laboratory (left) and Los Alamos townsite (middle and right)
75 years ago before dawn on July 16, 1945, a cataclysmic explosion shook the New Mexico desert as scientists from the top-secret Manhattan Project tested their nightmarish creation: the first atom bomb, called “the Gadget.”
This birth of the Nuclear Age, was quickly followed a few weeks later, first on August 6 by the dropping of a U-235 atom bomb on Hiroshima, a non-military city of 225,000, and then, three days after that on Aug. 9, by the dropping of a somewhat more powerful Plutonium atom bomb on Nagasaki, another non-military city of 195,000. The resulting slaughter of some 200,000 mostly civilian Japanese men, women and children naturally leads to talk of the horrors of those weapons and to discussions about whether they should have been used on Japan instead of being demonstrated on an uninhabited target.
What goes unmentioned, however, as we mark each important anniversary of these horrific events — the initial Trinity test in Alamogordo, the “Little Boy” bombing of Hiroshima and the “Fat Man” plutonium bombing of Nagasaki — is that, incredibly, in a world where nine nations possess a total of nearly 14,000 nuclear weapons, not one has been used in war to kill human beings since the bombing of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945.
And that’s not all. Over those same 75 years, despite seven and a half decades of intense hostility and rivalry, as well as some major proxy wars, between great powers like the US and USSR, and the US and China, no two superpower nations have gone to war against each other.
The reason for this phenomenal and almost incomprehensible absence of catastrophic conflict of the type so common throughout human history is the same in both cases: No country dares to risk the use a nuclear weapon because of the fear it could lead other nuclear nations use theirs, and no major power dares to go to war against another major power because it is obvious that any war between two such nations would very quickly go nuclear.
Things could have gone very differently, however, with the dawn of the nuclear age.
At the end of WWII, the US was the world’s unchallenged superpower. It had emerged from war with its industrial base undamaged while Europe, the Soviet Union, Japan and much of China and were all smoking ruins, their dead numbering in the tens of millions. The US also had a monopoly on a new super weapon — the atom bomb — a weapon capable of vaporizing a city. And the this country had demonstrated that it had no moral compunction about using its terrible new weapon of mass destruction.
Some important scientists involved in the creation of the bomb urged the sharing of its construction secrets with America’s ally in the war against the Axis powers, the Soviet Union. These scientists, many of them Nobel-winning physicists, said negotiations should begin immediately at that point to eliminate nuclear weapons for all time, just as germ and chemical weapons had already been banned (successfully as the history of WWII showed).
But military and civilian leaders in Washington balked at the idea of sharing the bombs’ secrets. In fact, after Bohr’s visit, President Roosevelt reportedly had the FBI monitor Nobelist Nils Bohr, one of the Los Alamos scientists who directly pleaded with him to bring the Russians into the bomb project, and even considered barring him from leaving the US. The Truman administration considered deporting Leo Szilard, and after Robert Oppenheimer proposed to Truman the sharing of the bomb with the Russians, his top-secret security clearance was revoked.
Instead of sharing the bomb with the USSR, which, remember, was America’s ally in World War II, and then working for its being banned, the US began producing dozens and eventually hundreds of Nagasaki-sized atom bombs, moving quickly from hand-made devices to mass produced ones. The US also quickly started pursuing the development of a vastly more powerful bomb — the thermonuclear Hydrogen bomb — a weapon that theoretically has no limits to how great its destructive power could be. (A one-megaton bomb typical of some of the larger warheads in the US arsenal today is 30 times as powerful as the bomb dropped on Nagasaki.)
Why this obsession with creating a stockpile of atomic bombs big enough to destroy not just a country but the whole earth at such a time as the end of WWII? The war was over and American scientists and intelligence analysts were predicting that the war-ravaged Soviet Union would need years and perhaps a decade to produce its own bomb, yet the US was going full tilt building an explosive arsenal that quickly dwarfed all the explosives used in the last two world wars combined.
What was the purpose of building so many bombs? One hint comes from the fact that the US also, right after the war, began mass producing the B-29 Super Fortress — planes like the Enola Gay that delivered the first atomic bomb to Hiroshima — and de-mothballing and refurbishing hundreds that had been built and declared surplussed right at the war’s end. A B-29 could only carry one plutonium or two uranium bombs for any significant distance. But the US was building several thousand of them in peacetime. Why?
The answer, according to a 1987 book, To Win a Nuclear War authored by nuclear physicists Michio Kaku and Daniel Axelrod, is that the US was planning to launch a devastating nuclear first strike blitz on the Soviet Union as soon as it could build and deliver the 300 nuclear bombs that Pentagon strategists believed would be needed to destroy the Soviet Union as an industrial society and its Red Army as well, eliminating any possibility of the USSR responding by sweeping over war-ravaged western Europe. And the B-29 was at the time the only plane it had which could deliver the bombs.
This genocidal nightmare envisioned by Truman and the Pentagon’s nuclear madmen never happened because the initial slow pace of constructing the bombs meant that the 300 weapons and the planes to deliver them would not be ready until early 1950. Meanwhile, Russia’s first bomb, a plutonium device that was a virtual carbon copy of the “Fat Man” bomb dropped on Nagasaki, was successfully exploded on August 29, 1949, in a test that caught the US by complete surprise. At that point the idea of a deadly first strike was dropped (or at least deferred indefinitely) by Truman and Pentagon strategists.
A new era of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) had arrived, and according to Kaku and Axelrod, just in time.
For that bit of good fortune, I suggest, we have to thank the spies who, for whatever their individual motives, successfully obtained and delivered the secrets of the atomic bomb and its construction to the scientists in the Soviet Union who were struggling, with limited success, to quickly come up with their own atomic bomb.
To most Americans, those spies, especially the US citizens among them like Julius Rosenberg and notably Ted Hall, the youngest scientist at the Manhattan Project, hired out of Harvard as a junior physics major at 18, were modern day Benedict Arnolds. The truth is quite different.
Hall, who was never caught, and who was not recruited to be a spy but volunteered plans for the plutonium bomb on his own initiative after searching for and finally locating a Soviet agent, and another spy, the young German Communist physicist, Klaus Fuchs, working independently of each other, both delivering critical plans for the US plutonium bomb to Moscow, clearly prevented the US from launching a nuclear holocaust.
By decisively helping the USSR develop and test its own bomb quickly by mid-1949, half a year before the US could attain a stockpile of 300 bombs, they forced the US to have to consider the unacceptable risk of retaliation. Had the Soviets taken longer to create their own atomic bomb, the US could have gone through with its criminal plans, which would have dwarfed Hitler’s slaughter of the six million Jewish and Roma people. (Pentagon experts estimated that over 30-40 million Russians would be killed by a US nuclear blitz.)
Hall, in public statements made in the mid-1990s after de-encrypted Soviet spy codes became public and his name was identified in them, explained that he had acted to share the plans for the plutonium bomb because he felt that the US, coming out of WWII with a nuclear monopoly, would have been a danger to not just the Soviet Union, but to the entire world. (The Russian bomb exploded in August, 1949 was a virtual carbon copy of the Nagasaki plutonium bomb Hall had worked on in his two years at Los Alamos.)
Looking back to the US decision to use its first nuclear weapon not as a demonstration on an empty island or military base, but on two undefended civilian cities, and to catastrophic US carpet bombings using non-nuclear bombs, of North Korea and later Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, it’s hard disagree with Hall’s thinking. His concern about US nuclear intentions is further borne out by how close the US came to using its nuclear bombs in crisis after crisis during the late ’40s and early ‘50s — against China and North Korea during the Korean War, in support of the French expeditionary force trapped at Dien Bien Phu, by JFK in the 1961 in the Berlin crisis, in the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. and later when US Marines were trapped by Vietnamese troops in Khe Sanh. Each time, it was fear of the Soviets responding with their own bomb that saved the day and largely kept American bombs on the ground (actually in the Khe San case in 1968 atom bombs were actually delivered close to the Indochina front, but President Johnson called a halt to the military’s plans).
The truth is, if the Soviets had not had their own bomb during any of the above listed crises, it is hard to imagine that the US, with a monopoly on the bomb, would not have used it to full advantage. If we’re honest, The MAD reality enabled by Russia’s Los Alamos spies proved to be a lifesaver for tens or perhaps millions of people around the world.
Americans may (and should!) decry the hundreds of billions of dollars (trillions in today’s dollars) that have been poured into a massively wasteful arms race with the Soviet Union and later Russia and China — money that could have done incalculable good if spent on schools, health care, environmental issues etc. — need to consider what the alternative would have been to Cold War and MAD. With MAD (and considerable good luck) we have had no world wars, and no nuclear bombs dropped on human beings. Without it, with the US having a monopoly on the bomb for perhaps as long as a decade following WWII, this country would have nuked cities all over the world, almost certainly destroying the Soviet Union entirely, and the US would today be known today as the ultimate genocidal monster of history, rather than having Germany left holding that eternal badge of shame.
In reconsidering the work of Soviet atomic spies, Americans also need to know the truth about the goal of the Manhattan Project. While the push to develop the bomb began with a letter from Albert Einstein to Roosevelt warning that the Germans might develop such a weapon, by the time the program got underway, it was clear that the real target was America’s Ally in the fight against the Nazis: The USSR.
Of course we must work to ban nuclear weapons and war. Such weapons are incomparably evil and if the world agrees that germ warfare and poison gas weapons should not exist, certainly nuclear weapons a million times worse should not! But we should nonetheless, as we look back at the grim 75th anniversary of those three first nuclear bombs exploded by the US, admit a debt of gratitude to those spies at Los Alamos who kept the US from committing an atrocity that humanity would have never forgiven, and for giving us this amazing three-quarters of a century of no nuclear or world war.
[Dave Lindorff is a founding member of ThisCantBeHappening!, an online newspaper collective, and is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press).]
The other night, I found myself once again scrolling the multiple streaming services I subscribe to, and wondering, as I often do, which show or movie would allow me to relax my brain into a pleasing limpness. Should I pick the reality dating show about Indian singles looking to enter an arranged marriage with the help of an unflappable matchmaker? The documentary series about the face-off between federal agents and New York goodfellas in the seventies and eighties? The travel show in which a tetchy British comedian joins celebrities on jaunts to various international locales? All of these seemed solid options, if fairly mindless. Then I noticed that Martin Ritt’s 1979 drama, “Norma Rae,” which I hadn’t watched since high school, was on Hulu. Relaxing my brain, I decided, could wait for the night.
For those who haven’t seen the movie, or whose memory of it is hazy, a recap: Norma Rae Webster—played by a ferocious Sally Field, who won an Academy Award for Best Actress for the role, in 1980—is a Southern single mom of two who works on the dim, noisy floor of the town textile mill, where her parents, and, likely, her grandparents, have worked before her. It’s a grim, precarious, and repetitive job, which makes for a grim, precarious, and repetitive existence. Early on in the movie, we see her attempt to rouse her mother, who has gone temporarily deaf from the incessant din of the mill’s machines. The plant doctor is unimpressed: “Now, you know it happens, Norma Rae. It happens all the time!,” he says, suggesting that the older woman “can get herself another job” if this one isn’t to her liking. But in their mill town there is no other job, and no real alternative to the low-paying and dangerous work that the plant provides.
Though she is as constrained as anyone by her work and life conditions, Norma Rae is spirited. The movie’s original theatrical poster, an image of which is used as a thumbnail on Hulu, shows Field silhouetted on a white background, smiling widely as she raises her arms high in a cheesy triumphant stance, a slice of bare tummy revealed over the waistband of her jeans. The film itself, however, presents the character’s spunk as an angrier, more complicated, and occasionally self-defeating thing. She rails against her circumstances by talking back—to the worthless men she sleeps with and who degrade her, to her loving but domineering father, to her uncaring bosses. “Norma Rae, you have the biggest mouth in this mill,” one of her managers tells her, before attempting to neutralize her workplace demands—for a Kotex machine in the women’s bathroom, for longer smoke breaks, for more time off—by giving her a supervisor job, which she leaves soon afterward, when she realizes that it makes her a “fink” in the eyes of her fellow-workers. “You’re looking fine, Norma Rae,” the deadbeat father of one of her children tells her, when he runs into her at a local baseball game. “I’m always fine. I’m a horse!” she tells him, defiantly. Like a horse, she is strong, and she keeps going, but she also has blinders on. On her own, she is unable to shift course.
A turn comes about when Reuben Warshowsky (the great Ron Leibman, who died this past December), an organizer for the Textile Workers Union of America, arrives. A New Yorker, Reuben is an oddity in town, and his unionization efforts are met with resistance. As far as most millhands are concerned, he is a communist Jew interloper who will cost them their jobs. Norma Rae, however, is intrigued. “I think you’re too smart for what’s happening to you,” Reuben, with whom she develops a platonic but transformative relationship, tells her. The film’s most iconic and well-known scene—and the one I recalled, from watching it as a teen—is a moment when Norma Rae stands on a table at the mill and holds up a sign that reads “UNION,” until, one by one, the workers around her stop their machines and silence falls on the factory floor.
On this viewing, what struck me even more strongly, however, was the movie’s suggestion that no struggle can take place alone. Norma Rae is heroic, but she comes into her own, as a woman, because she is fighting for class solidarity—a struggle that, in turn, could not happen without a breaking down of long-standing ethnic and racial barriers. Even though he is Jewish, Reuben doesn’t have horns, as Norma Rae was taught to expect (“I’ve never met a Jew before,” she tells him. “As far as I can see, you look just like the rest of us”), and, though she is a woman, habitually derided by men, he treats her as his equal. What’s more, the racist tactics taken by the factory bosses, who try to persuade white employees that their Black co-workers are scheming to take over the union, can only be countered by a white-Black coalition working together against management. Speaking from the pulpit at a Black church, Reuben tells the workers of his grandfather’s textile union and its members: “When they spoke, they spoke in one voice, and they were heard. And they were Black, and they were white, and they were Irish, and they were Polish, they were Catholic, and they were Jews.” To watch the scene, toward the end of the movie, in which the factory workers chant as one, to celebrate their unionization victory, is to be reminded of something that is not only moving but also, still, more relevant than ever.
WASHINGTON—The U.S. Constitution’s Bill of Rights includes these words opening the Fourth Amendment: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated.”
Somebody tell the three-white-man, all-Trump-named right-wing Republicans who are now the entire National Labor Relations Board.
Recently, the three ruled, unanimously, of course, that bosses could search your car in the company parking lot, including the trunk, or your toolbox, or your locker, or anywhere else for unauthorized–i.e. union–materials. The only restriction: Tell workers in the company handbook.
Then there’s the little problem organizers have after they file union recognition election cards with the NLRB. They’re supposed to get a list, from the company, of workers’ names and addresses so they can contact people off the job.
After all, they can’t go in the plant to organize. They’d get arrested, as Rep. Andy Levin, D-Mich., a former AFL-CIO Deputy Organizing Director, pointed out at a hearing last year.
So unions and organizers get the Excelsior list from the company. In 2014, the NLRB majority, named by Democratic President Barack Obama, added home phones, cell phones, and e-mail addresses to the list.
Now the NLRB wants to dump the phones and e-mails altogether—and make that change permanent. It proposed a rule, which would have the force of law, on July 29 and gave everyone two months to comment on it. Even a management-side labor lawyer, Clifford Geiger, admitted in a recent blog that “this one may be headed for court.”
The two recent rulings are part of a continuing pattern by the Trump-named NLRB members, led by chairman John Ring, who made a name for himself as a right-wing GOP congressional aide drafting mean and nasty anti-worker legislation.
The difference between the Trump NLRB and prior boards is that rather than just reverse pro-worker rulings case by case, they frequently go further, promulgate their anti-worker edicts as proposed federal rules, take comments, shrug them off and set them in stone. It’s often tougher to toss a federal rule than it is to repeal a federal law.
But the violation of the Fourth Amendment is more wide-ranging, and it caught the eye of, among others, the Electrical Workers (IBEW). Had it been in effect just months before, a big and successful organizing drive by Local 538at Full-Fill Industries in Danville, Ill., would have been in danger. The case Ring and his colleagues used pitted Verizon Wireless against the Communications Workers, and the CWA lost that May 24 decision.
IBEW Local 538
“Verizon Wireless gives an employer the right to search its employees’ personal workspace, locker, or even an employee’s own vehicle. In the decision, the board reversed a previous administrative law judge’s ruling” and “determined a ‘reasonable employee’ would not refrain from engaging in protected activity–like union organizing–if that activity could be discovered through a search of their personal property.”
“In other words, the NLRB believes there would be no deterrent effect. The board further concluded that companies can do this because they have a business interest in protecting assets and ensuring a safe workplace,” IBEW said.
That’s ridiculous, said IBEW President Lonnie Stephenson.
“This decision will absolutely have a chilling effect on lawful union organizing, not to mention a person’s sense of privacy while at work,” Stephenson said on August 3.
“We don’t check all our rights at the door when we clock in.” And what makes it worse is that the board upheld part of the administrative law judge’s ruling that lets bosses check workers’ computers and e-mail for “legitimate management reasons,” whatever that means.
The board claimed, however, “The ‘reasonable employee’ does not view every employer policy through the prism of the National Labor Relations Act.”
“Consistent with this principle, we reject the (administrative law) judge’s unsupported speculation that employees would refrain from engaging in” organizing and other pro-union protected “activity merely because evidence of such activity might be detected if their personal property or personal vehicle were searched.”
“To the contrary, a reasonable employee would understand the purpose of the (Verizon handbook) rule is, as it states, ‘to protect company assets, provide excellent service, ensure a safe workplace, and to investigate improper use or access.”
Besides, the board opined, its decision “merely reserves the right to” employers to “search employees’ personal property or vehicles. Nothing suggests such searches will take place, let alone they will occur routinely or frequently. We do not believe the remote prospect that a search might someday occur would have any material impact on the exercise of” workers’ rights, Ring and his NLRB colleagues declared.
Local 538’s top organizer at Full-Fill, Joe DiMichele, agreed with Stephenson. Without that threat, the local won the vote at Full-Fill.
“Employers always use fear and intimidation tactics to discourage employees from organizing,” DiMichele said. “This new decision completely takes away an employee’s right to organize and contradicts the purpose of the NLRB, which is to protect employees’ rights.”
“If we would have had the current decision, the employees would not have felt safe and protected in their right to organize. It essentially allows the employer to harass its employees.”
[Mark Gruenberg is head of the Washington, D.C., bureau of People's World. He is also the editor of Press Associates Inc. (PAI), a union news service in Washington, D.C. that he has headed since 1999. Previously, he worked as Washington correspondent for the Ottaway News Service, as Port Jervis bureau chief for the Middletown, NY Times Herald Record, and as a researcher and writer for Congressional Quarterly. Mark obtained his BA in public policy from the University of Chicago and worked as the University of Chicago correspondent for the Chicago Daily News.]
Rupert Murdoch’s NY Post made a splash on July 24 with an article titled “de Blasio quotes Karl Marx in WNYC radio interview”. This red-baiting exercise begins: First it was Che Guevara — now it’s Karl Marx! Mayor Bill de Blasio reached back to his salad days as a young radical to quote the father of communism on Friday. As for the source of the Karl Marx quote, during the course of an interview, NPR’s Brian Lehrer asked de Blasio to comment on a Politico article that made the mayor sound like a fire-breathing radical. Instead of “reaching out now to business leaders in the city” for help with various problems, he shut the door on this possibility by focusing on “inequality and wanting to raise taxes on the wealthiest New Yorkers and things like that. full: https://louisproyect.org/2020/08/04/mayor-de-blasios-doublethinking-on-karl-marx/
A comment from Mike Tormey on my de Blasio post. I was on the other side of a bitter faction fight in Boston in the early 70s led by Peter Camejo. I have patched things up with all my old nemeses, including Mike. That's what so great about the net, a permanent reunion of lost souls.
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Mike:
Possibly, one of Karl Marx’s shirttail relatives, one Julius Groucho Marx inadvertently summed up Bill de Blasio best when he opined “Those are my principles if you don’t like them … well I have others”.
Across the country, collective uprisings are building momentum for the conversation surrounding the defunding and abolition of the police. In Chicago, groups like the Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Oppression(CAARPR) and the Black Abolitionist Network (BAN) continue the fight for the Civilian Police Accountability Council (CPAC), pushing for community control of the CPD. Chicago DSA recently adopted #DefundCPD as a priority campaign for the organization, and is working with CAARPR and BAN.
At the July 16 webinar “CPAC from A to D: Abolition, Community Control, and Defunding the Police” Chicago DSA organizers were joined by panelists Frank Chapman of CAARPR and Chicago DSA co-chair Robin Peterson to discuss the intersection of these core components with the socialist movement. Why is the call for the defunding of the police a socialist issue, and what does abolition have to do with CPAC and Chicago DSA?
As socialists, we must consider defunding and abolition as central parts of our movement towards a better future. Alderman Carlos Ramirez-Rosa (35th), who first introduced the CPAC bill in 2016, put it this way at last month’s CPAC 101 panel: “I am a socialist, so I am an abolitionist.” The prison industrial complex is a violent tool of white supremacy and capitalism, and dismantling that system is fundamental to an antiracist socialist movement.
“In my view, socialists need to be fighting to defund the police, gain community control, and ban police and prisons. It’s not just about getting rid of police and prisons but also about creating a world where we don’t need those things,” Peterson said.
CAARPR, which formed in 1973 as part of the movement to free Angela Davis and all political prisoners, has been organizing for CPAC for the last seven years. The movement for community control of police follows in the tradition of the Black Panther Party, which got the issue on the ballot in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1971. The CPAC campaign, supported by a coalition of organizations, now has the support of 19 City Council co-sponsors, and organizers are not letting up on the pressure.
“We believe we can win this because the people are behind this. The way things become victorious is through the might of the people,” Chapman said.
So, how does #CPACNow fit into the larger conversations about police defunding and abolition? It’s important that all of these campaigns arose as demands from the movement against police violence, Chapman said. They are all part of the bigger picture.
“This is an expression of the fact that people, particularly Black and brown people, are sick and tired of the police repression, brutality, and terrorism that go on in their communities unchecked,” he said.
With some of those larger goals in mind, community control of the police takes a strong step in the right direction. It’s important to think of CPAC as the first of many necessary steps. The council would have final review over CPD policies, work on the budget, and investigate misconduct not investigated by the Civilian Office of Police Accountability (COPA). In other words, through CPAC, we can make sure the police have accountability to the people.
“CPAC would let us regulate, defund, and demilitarize, but we need CPAC as a department of the people in order to do that,” Chapman said.
When asked whether we can trust Lightfoot and City Council to defund without CPAC, Peterson pointed to the mayor’s pro-cop track record. As CPD officers beat protesters in the streets, she praised their “restraint,” and she has repeatedly sided with violent officers while they escalate protests to violence. Under our current system, Lightfoot appoints the Chief Administrator of COPA, the Superintendent of Police, the police board, and negotiates contracts with the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP). None of these appointees are accountable to the people, and the Mayor keeps CPD happy.
“Anyone with her funders has an interest in keeping the police. They’re the reason we have the police: to protect their property,” Peterson said. Power comes from mass organizing, she added, and Chicago DSA has an important role to play in helping to apply pressure to elected officials and follow the lead of CAARPR and BAN to lend our support. The struggle must be sustained and continuous, Chapman emphasized. CPAC represents one piece of a much bigger picture, and it’s important to keep up the pressure on officials even after an accountability council is in place.
“When we organize the people to bring about systemic changes, we have to keep that organization going because the enemy—which is the system—is always positioning itself to take back any reform that it is forced to give up. They give a reform with a teaspoon and take it back with a shovel. If we got it through organized struggle of the people, then that’s how we keep it,” Chapman said.
“This rebellion that came in the wake of George Floyd’s and Breonna Taylor’s murder and many others is still going on, and we don’t want it to die out. We know that rebellions don’t die out; they’re smashed or killed by people in power. The only defense against racist suppression is mass struggle,” Chapman said.
His last word of advice? “Don’t get lost in the sauce.”
Chris Nineham reflects on the history of jazz music and the anti-war movement ahead of Stop the War's event with Shabaka Hutchings marking the 75th anniversary of the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Written by Chris Nineham
"I dislike war, period. So therefore, as far as I am concerned, it should stop". John Coltrane
In July 1966, the great jazz saxophonist John Coltrane embarked on a tour of Japan with his wife Alice Coltrane and the rest of his band. When they arrived at Tokyo airport Coltrane was shocked by the hundreds of fans who welcomed them. Apparently, he thought there must have been a top-ranking politician on the plane.
When the group arrived by train on July 16th for the concert Coltrane had insisted on in Nagasaki, his hosts found him playing the flute in the express train. He said he was searching for an appropriate sound and asked if he could go immediately to the site where the atomic bomb had fallen on the city 21 years before. They took him there before he went to his hotel. He stayed for some time in silence and laid a wreath of flowers.
The politics of music
Coltrane and some other US jazz musicians had a massive following in both Japan and Germany at the time. Paradoxically, the popularity of jazz in these countries was a legacy of the tens of thousands of US troops stationed in both after the second world war. In both countries it had become inflected with politics.
During the sixties, partly in response to the growing civil rights and black power movement, John Coltrane had become progressively more political and his music more experimental. His 1964 ballad “Alabama” served as a requiem for four young girls killed by racists in an arson attack in Birmingham. It was based on the cadences of Martin Luther King's speech in response to the murders. In the years that followed, as the movement grew and radicalised he attended meetings of Malcolm X’s Organization of African American Unity and performed a series of political fundraisers.
Coltrane saw his music as a search for human harmony, but he knew harmony had to be struggled for:
"Music is an expression of higher ideals … brotherhood is there; and I believe with brotherhood, there would be no poverty … there would be no war … I know that there are bad forces, forces put here that bring suffering to others and misery to the world, but I want to be the opposite force, the force which is truly for good.”
As Coltrane became more political his style became freer and less conventional and his popularity waned in the US. But in Japan and in Germany it grew. Partly this was because Coltrane's music was taken up by the new left seeking a culture opposed to their national pasts but critical too of the cold war superpowers.
On that night of July 16th at Nagasaski, John Coltrane and his band performed a new song, Peace on Earth, an elegy for the dead in the US nuclear attack on Nagasaki and a condemnation of war in general. One of the many complexities of the moment was that his search for musical universality had led him to attempt to fuse western and eastern elements in his music, something obvious in the song. This had a particular charge in the context of both the cold war and the escalating US war in Vietnam. The performance was received rapturously.
New ground
In taking this clear, musical anti-war stance as in so much else, John Coltrane was groundbreaking. Post-war Jazz music had a shifting and complicated relationship with politics. At all times it was a play on the pain, paradoxes, and resistance of black life in the US, but it reached way beyond that. Trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie suggested the complexities of jazz artist's attitudes in the bebop years during and straight after the war:
"We never wished to be restricted to just an American context for we were creators in an artform which has universal roots and which had proved it had universal appeal. Damn right! We refused to accept racism, poverty or economic exploitation, nor would we live out uncreative, humdrum lives merely for the sake of economic survival."
Defiance and subversion were at the heart of bebop's headlong virtuosity and experimentation. In the forties and fifties the FBI were monitoring the activities of a range of leading jazz musicians, suspecting them of anti-segregationist and pro-communist attitudes which they regarded as pretty much the same thing. At the same time, with breathtaking cynicism, they were inviting some of the same musicians including Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington to act as cultural cold war ambassadors to the USSR and other countries. All in an attempt to counter the US's growing international reputation for racism!
The movement and the moment
John Coltrane's radicalisation during the sixties echoed that of a diverse group of jazz artists including Max Roach, Abbey Lincoln, Charles Mingus, and Sonny Rollins who linked musical experiment with more and more explicit political positions inspired not just by civil rights and black power, but also anti-colonial struggle.
In 1958, Sonny Rollins made the 19-minute Freedom Suite, jazz music’s first explicitly acknowledged instrumental protest piece. It was followed in 1960 with Roach's breakthrough album We Insist: Freedom Now which he made with his wife Abbey Lincoln and included the outstanding Freedom Day.
Coltrane's pioneering anti-war song was amongst the last pieces of music he made. He died tragically young at 40 in July 1967. But the great ghetto uprisings, anti-colonialism, the racism of the draft and the growing movement against the Vietnam War were starting to generate a militancy that linked the struggle against racism and poverty with the struggle against an imperial system. Just three months before Coltrane died, in a famous speech at Riverside Church in New York in April 1967 Martin Luther King spoke out against the Vietnam War. Almost all his advisors begged him not to take this stand, arguing it would cause a storm of controversy and that it would alienate President Johnson who had signed the Civil Rights Act. But King did not waver, as he said in the speech, '"A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”
For many activists, Coltrane's music was the most authentic soundtrack to the great struggles of the 1960s. But in the next few tumultuous years a whole range of jazz musicians responded. Grant Green made a bossa inspired guitar groove called 'Cease the Bombing', at the other end of jazz's spectrum in 1970 Charlie Haden worked with Carla Bley and Ornette Coleman on an album of anti-war and anti-imperialist songs under the heading Liberation Music Orchestra. All helped pave the way for the explosion in radical black music of the 1970s.
