# data[].attributes.body
This weeks topics and readings made me think of this picture of Angela Peoples (taken by Kevin Banatte) at the Women's March in D.C. in 2017. Her sign reads "Don't Forget: White women voted for Trump" while she stands in front of three white woman taking pictures of themselves attending the protest. This march was criticized for its white feminism from the outset- it was called the Million Women March, copying the name of the 1997 black womens march.

The popularity and attendance of the Women's March was presented as a inspiration of female unity, however this notion quickly falls apart under the consideration that 53% of white women voted for Trump. The neglect of white woman when considering their own implicit and complicit actions in the institutions of white supremacy and patriarchy is an ongoing theme throughout history [such as people voting for Trump as a joke]. This complicity is intersected with a weird optics of protests- where protests become "trendy". The attending of protests and social media posts seems like an act instead of understanding their role in these institutions, there is a performative role. This can be seen not only in this march but the recent BLM protests as well.

It would be interesting to see if there is a direct correlation between social media posting and the rise in popularity of protests. On the one hand it seems a continuation of the benefits of being white- they know their right to protest will be protected and they are not in any life threatening situation. In this way white women can present themselves as "radical" without having to actually subscribe to this and follow through with their actions. This brings up the question that are all people protesting actually resisting? Or are they perpetuating systems that benefit themselves? Here I think it is important to explore why people are resisting, or if they are even resisting at all?

# data[].attributes.body
This article focuses on the allegations against the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) at Irwin county detention center in Georgia. It follows the accounts of woman, one being Pauline Binam, given unwanted and unconsented hysterectomies, which removes their ability to conceive. These practices of forced sterilization are not new to the United States, including those deemed "unfit" such as felons, minorities, Native Americans, and those considered mentally deficient.

The practice of eugenics in the United States has a racially-motivated history of controlling the population. In this way, they have targeted vulnerable groups- those that are not considered fully citizens and therefore are not accorded the rights of human beings. In this way, such as Ticktin's illustration of which bodies are deserving of compassion and common humanity, and how this informs who is given citizenship. This discourse is also present in Ardent's argument that institutions of citizenship are used to exclude people from dignity and common respect. And even argues that camps (including deportation camps) are the archetypal site where this denial happens. This shows why these certain groups are abused without citizenship, they are vulnerable and exploited without the ability to claim any rights or respect.

Similar to Khosravi's argument, this article says that the border is not "simply the edges of a state", but an essential reference of national identity- which is informed by racial biases (Khosravi, 322). In the example of forced sterilization, the border is inscribed onto the bodies of these migrants to halt their ability to have children, and therefore manage the population. This is especially pertinent in the US, as any child born on US soil is an American Citizen, so eugenic practices are used to control "undesirable" populations.

This shows the racial discrimination and gendered aspects of immigration and citizenship. The designation of citizenship offers access to rights, while any other classification results in "justified" violation of humanity and, even lack of bodily autonomy. And, as Khosravi argues immigration laws are all "about the unequal distribution of the right to move and feel at home."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
auline Binam asked to see a doctor because she was having abnormalities with her period. After nearly two years in immigration detention, she was worried that it was having an adverse effect on her health.

The doctor told her that she had a cyst on her ovary and she agreed to a dilation and curettage (D&C) procedure, her lawyer said. But when she awoke from surgery, the doctor told her that one of her fallopian tubes had been removed - a procedure she is adamant she did not give consent for - and that as a result she may no longer be able to conceive naturally. At the time she was just 29.

Her immigration attorney Vân Huynh, told the Guardian: "When she first learned about it, the way that she described it to me is that she was sitting in this wheelchair post operation and the doctor's telling her that she may not be able to conceive children in the future and it was very upsetting for her. She was sobbing in this wheelchair, not understanding why this was happening."

Her account is in one of multiple harrowing allegations of women held by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) at Irwin county detention center in Georgia who have been forced to undergo unwanted hysterectomies and other unnecessary gynaecological procedures. Their stories have come to light in recent days following the release of an explosive whistleblower report.

Binam, a 30-year-old national of Cameroon who has lived in the US since she was two, was narrowly saved from deportation on Wednesday and is now in custody in Texas.

Since her operation in 2019, she has since developed amenorrhea, which means her period has stopped, and is dealing with mental health issues as a result, says Huynh. "There's a lot of questions that she has that's gone unanswered and I don't know that she's going to be able to have a clear answer to some of the questions as to like 'Why was this done to me?' But she's clear about the fact that this was something that was done to her without her consent."

The whistleblower report, filed on behalf of nurse Dawn Wooten, a former employee of the center, claims an alarmingly high rate of hysterectomies performed on Spanish-speaking women who she and other nurses feared did not understand what they were undergoing. Wooten claims the doctor, who has since been identified as gynaecologist Dr Mahendra Amin, was so notorious for performing such procedures that she referred to him in the report as the "uterus collector".

"Everybody he sees has a hysterectomy - just about everybody," Wooten said in the complaint. "I've had several inmates tell me that they've been to see the doctor, and they've had hysterectomies, and they don't know why they went or why they're going." Other alleged failures by the center included dangerous and unsanitary conditions and poor safety precautions around coronavirus.

House speaker Nancy Pelosi said on Tuesday that if true, the whistleblower claims represented "a staggering abuse of human rights".

Amin told The Intercept that he had only performed "one or two hysterectomies in the past two [or] three years" and did not specify whether they were performed on Irwin detainees. His attorney, Scott Grubman, said in a statement: "We look forward to all of the facts coming out, and are confident that once they do, Dr Amin will be cleared of any wrongdoing." Ice said its records show just two referrals for hysterectomies at the jail. "Detainees are afforded informed consent, and a medical procedure like a hysterectomy would never be performed against a detainee's will," said Dr Ada Rivera, medical director of the Ice Health Service Corps.

On Friday, senior Ice official Tony H Phamsaid the recent allegations "raise some very serious concerns that deserve to be investigated quickly and thoroughly". He said he "welcomes" an official review, adding: "If there is any truth to these allegations, it is my commitment to make the corrections necessary to ensure we continue to prioritise the health, welfare and safety of Ice detainees."

LaSalle Corrections, which operates Irwin, has said it "strongly refutes these allegations and any implications of misconduct."

But since the complaint became public, Seattle Democrat congresswoman Pramila Jayapal says she has found at least 17 examples of unnecessary medical procedures, including hysterectomies, being performed on women at the center. "It has become painfully clear to me that the initial reports ... are likely part of a pattern of conduct," she said on Wednesday.

Many politicians, immigration lawyers and advocates fear that these practices are not isolated to one center or one doctor.

A letter, led by Jayapal and signed by more than 170 Democrats, to the inspector general of the Department of Homeland Security calling for an immediate congressional investigation into the center, warned that the allegations had echos of "a dark time in US history" when eugenics laws meant that forced sterilisation was legal in 32 states.

Project South, one of the groups that filed the complaint on Wooten's behalf, has been monitoring conditions at the Georgia center for several years. In 2017 the group released a report in which they recommended that Irwin, along with Stewart Detention Center, also in Georgia, should be shut down.

Legal and advocacy director Azadeh Shahshahani says they "routinely" hear from women who are deeply depressed by the procedures they have undergone.

"These are women, in some cases, I would say most cases, who have fled horrible circumstances of persecution, of torture, of rape, threats of murder, and are seeking refuge in this country and then they're placed in a facility like Irwin and subjected to these abuses. And then when they raise their voices about it they are placed in solitary confinement.

"So the whole picture is very disturbing and there is need for fundamental change. The call for accountability goes beyond this one individual doctor, it's about the system."

She said some of the alleged violations and abuses "may never come to light" because some of the women may have already been deported.

Elizabeth Matherne, an immigration attorney who has had multiple clients at Irwin says she was "not surprised at all" by the revelations. She has heard from several women at the center that "multiple people" there went to the doctor only to be told they needed to have an ovary removed. The wrong ovary was subsequently removed so they ended up having both taken out.

"That is a piece by piece sterilization, but it's a sterilization," she said.

While Matherne said it is impossible to know the doctor's intention, the system, and a lack of oversight, "creates space for someone to have bad intentions. It also creates space for other people who may have bad intentions to enable or to be willfully blind to the actions of one person.

"We think we're going to find even more women who have had basically their fertility limited or taken away altogether because of the actions of this doctor and the facility to continue to take immigration detainees to him and for Ice to continue to foot the bill and approve their requests."

Matherne also believes the problem could be wider than Irwin because she says the system "is built to allow things like this to happen and women especially are vulnerable for this kind of victimization."

The allegations about the center have drawn comparisons to America's history of eugenics. Between 1907 and 1937 two-thirds of US states passed laws that allowed for involuntary sterilization - leading to the sterilization of more than 60,000 people.

Alexandra Minna Stern, professor of history at the University of Michigan and director of the Sterilization and Social Justice Lab there, said: "Sterilization practices really started as an assault on people with perceived disabilities and mental health issues."

She added: "In the US in the 20th century, given that this was then Jim Crow America, intense anti-immigration sentiment at the time, xenophobia at the time that was going on in the teens and 20s as eugenics emerged, meant that these disability frameworks became the lenses through which racism and sexism played out."

In the 1960s and 70s an increase in federal funding for reproductive health procedures combined with racist and anti-immigration sentiment led to "tens of thousands" of women of colour being sterilized, including Native Americans, she said. And by the 1970s, a third of all women in Puerto Rico had undergone sterilization procedures, the majority of which were involuntary, as part of US attempts at "population control".

Despite having been since made illegal, it has continued in very recent history. In California prisons, between 1997 and 2013 about 1,400 people were sterilized. Today Stern says it is "not a coincidence" that it may be happening under the Trump administration which has "breathed new destructive breath" to these systems.

Detention centers, she said, create "the perfect storm of conditions for sterilization abuse".

"Anyone who's studied the history of sterilization abuse would look at this detention center and say this is the kind of place where sterilization abuse is likely to occur because all of the conditions that enable such medical malfeasance and reproductive oppression, they're all in place."

* This article was amended on 21 September 2020. About 1,400 people were sterilized in California between 1997 and 2013, not between 2006 and 2010 as we originally said.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Allegations of unwanted Ice hysterectomies recall grim time in US history

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
auline Binam asked to see a doctor because she was having abnormalities with her period. After nearly two years in immigration detention, she was worried that it was having an adverse effect on her health. The doctor told her that she had a cyst on her ovary and she agreed to a dilation and curettage (D&C) procedure, her lawyer said.

# data[].attributes.body
This opinion article from the NYT talks not only about the recent political debate over Deferred Action for Childhood Action (DACA) but the premise and language surrounding this type of immigration. Started by Obama, DACA allowed illegal immigrants who came to the USA as children to defer deportation and obtain a work permit, however this act does not lead to citizenship, and still classifies these recipients as illegal. In this way, similar to our essential readings resources and our tutorial discussion, the DACA act works to determine who "deserves" citizenship in the USA.

Protests erupted in 2017 after Trump revoked the DACA program, as reporters and immigrant advocates argued that immigrants were "hard workers" and "vital to our economy". While it is true that the USA profits off of the work of immigrants (legal and illegal) acts such as DACA and DREAM view migrants as two-dimensional, only valued for their contribution to the economy. This language of a "hardworking" immigrant is rampant within dialogues of those supporting migrants by "proving" their usefulness.

Similar to Ticktin's account of sick and disabled bodies, certain migrants are considered more "deserving" than others which creates a hierarchy of immigrants. For example, prospective DACA recipients cannot have any criminal records, in an attempt to differentiate between the productive migrants and the "bad"/criminal migrants. This designation as criminal is appointed to minors, to avoid this identification, migrants must be 'of good moral character'. This type of requirement is purposefully open ended, so immigration authorities (and their biases) are given the discretion to decide who will be deported. However this legislation does not grant citizenship or residency, meaning the threat of deportation is always possible, and (similar to last week) can become a condition of life in anticipation of deportation.

This article points out the ways in which immigration laws perpetuate inequalities and discrimination through the inclusion of certain migrants and the exclusion of others. Within the context of the American Dream- the belief that anyone can become successful through hard work- this framing of 'good' migrants is shown in a new light. Showing productive migrants only as an economic asset to the US perpetuates racist assumptions of migrants as less-than human, and do not deserve the respect and rights accorded to human beings. In this way, migrants have to "prove" their value to stay in their country.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The terms of the debate over President Trump's decision to revoke the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program are familiar, as are the terms of the larger conversation about immigration in this country: On one side are hardworking immigrants; on the other are politicians who wrongly claim that these immigrants harm the economic interests of native-born Americans.

As protests broke out across the United States in response to Mr. Trump's move, reporters and immigrant advocates stressed that the administration's actions will hurt achievers - people who have graduated from college, people who have bought houses, people who work for high-tech companies.

There is nothing wrong with this story. It's one that most, if not all, immigrants like to tell about themselves - even if their actual story doesn't neatly fit the narrative. In fact, as Hannah Arendt pointed out in her essay "We Refugees," written in 1943 at the height of the 20th century's refugee crisis, people whose stories fit the narrative least well - the most desperate and the worst-wounded of the immigrants - are especially invested in thinking of themselves as destined for success and, of course, as future loyal citizens.

But something goes awry when this becomes the dominant story told about immigrants in America. This has been happening for a number of years: The good people of America talk about immigrants as hard workers who conscientiously contribute to the economy. (I myself have made it onto a few lists of exemplary immigrant success stories.) In fact, DACA was designed to reward achievement: to qualify for the program, an applicant had to be in school or hold a high school diploma or equivalent, or have been honorably discharged from the armed forces. Those who hadn't been able or lucky to meet those requirements were apparently deemed unworthy of staying in the country where they had lived since they were children.

When Mr. Trump issued an executive order banning entry by citizens of predominantly Muslim countries, American technology companies responded with a lawsuit in which they stressed that immigrants have founded and run many large tech companies. The revocation of DACA has brought forth similar - and much-quoted - responses from Silicon Valley. When the president threw his support behind a reform plan that would drastically reduce immigration to this country, editorial writers argued against it by pointing out that immigrants benefit the economy.

These arguments usually begin by stating that America is a "land of immigrants." This not only is an insult to Native Americans and the descendants of those who were brought to this country against their will but also constitutes a sort of sleight of hand. It turns the stories of individual immigrants into the "story of America." It's one thing for individuals to base their sense of self-worth on their contribution to the American economy. It's quite another to claim that America values immigrants because of this contribution: This paves the way to thinking that America should make decisions about immigrants based on whether they benefit the economy. It can even reframe giving safe haven to the persecuted as giving jobs to the well qualified.

This is neither new nor specific to Republicans. Hillary Clinton's campaign promised comprehensive immigration reform that would "bring millions of hardworking people into the formal economy." Bernie Sanders's platform promised to build an immigration system that would "match our labor market needs." Responding to DACA's repeal, the Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer mentioned "hardworking" people whose "contributions are vital to our economy."

But what's wrong with the decision to discontinue DACA is that people - not workers - will be deported. Lives - not careers - will be shattered. The problem is that it's inhumane. As long as politicians consider it necessary to qualify the victims as "hardworking" or "talented," they fail to stand up to the administration's fundamentally hateful immigration agenda.

The reform package backed by Mr. Trump last month also claims to pursue economic aims. Neither Democrats nor Republicans - nor critics in the news media - have taken issue with this underlying premise: They have largely argued that the package proposes the wrong means for reaching economic ends. The plan would limit immigration to the young, highly educated and highly qualified. It would effectively stop immigrants from being able to bring family members to the United States. If an immigrant is but a cog in the economic machine, then what do parents, grown children and siblings matter? The logic is dehumanizing but hardly new or unique to the Republican Party. Mr. Sanders's campaign plank argued for preserving family-based visas in the following terms: "Family is integral to a worker's pursuit of happiness and economic productivity."

Mr. Sanders's platform made the barest mention of refugees. Mrs. Clinton's published program made none. Mr. Trump, of course, wanted to drastically reduce the already small number of refugees that the United States accepts.

Refugees don't fall into the economic logic of immigration. The argument for accepting refugees is not that they are good - for the economy, or for the country's ability to meet its international obligations, or even because they are good people - but that America is good. This is where the sleight of hand of turning stories of immigrant success into the story of America becomes dangerous. It's not immigrants' economic contribution that makes America proud; it's its adherence to the words inscribed inside the base of the Statue of Liberty: "Give me your tired, your poor/your huddled masses yearning to breathe free" - from the Emma Lazarus poem that the White House adviser Stephen Miller waved away last month during a news conference on immigration reform.

The controversy following Mr. Miller's comments focused on the poem. But the argument for refugees is less poetic than it is pragmatic. As Arendt wrote in that essay, "the outlawing of the Jewish people in Europe has been followed closely by the outlawing of most European nations." This was just a first step, Arendt wrote: "The comity of European peoples went to pieces when, and because, it allowed its weakest member to be excluded and persecuted."

If immigration is debated only in terms of whether it benefits the economy, politicians begin to divide people into two categories: "valuable" and "illegal." When countries make people illegal, the world comes apart. When we agree to talk about people as cogs, we lose our humanity.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Opinion | Immigrants Shouldn't Have to Be 'Talented' to Be Welcome (Published 2017)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The terms of the debate over President Trump's decision to revoke the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program are familiar, as are the terms of the larger conversation about immigration in this country: On one side are hardworking immigrants; on the other are politicians who wrongly claim that these immigrants harm the economic interests of native-born Americans.

# data[].attributes.body
Both of these readings (Fassin and Han) recognize the racial inequalities and social standings within the crime and punishment they focus on crime as a way to distinguish populations and target those (minorities and low-income) already deemed punishable by society. While both show the ways in which order maintenance policing justifies constant, intensified surveillance of low-income, disadvantaged neighborhoods, and how this unequal distribution of punishment reproduces existing social inequalities.   Han shows this through the way in which constant policing has become a "condition of life" in a low-income neighborhood in Santiago, while Fassin illustrates this through a variety of statistics- in which young black males are more like to go to prison than university.

While these readings do offer importance insight into the racial and socio-economic disparities and the way these result in an unequal distribution of punishment- neither fully address that this is not simply a failure of the justice system but actually embedded within the very structure of power, authority and history of society. For example, Fassin only mentions in the conclusion that these social disparities are "often the legacy of particular historical circumstances such as slavery, colonization or immigration". I think that within readings it is not enough to show the racism prevalent within justice systems, etc. but to fully explore how these inequalities came about and their continued legacy years later. As was mentioned at one point in the podcast, just because judges receive and acknowledge race and inequality training, often it does not affect their rulings.

This article by the NYT focuses on the prison system in America, and shows the ways in which slavery has led to a view of black people as criminal, which justified new strategies of racial control. It also shows why this legacy of inequalities continues despite "obvious reform solutions" (DB)- because of the systematic nature of racism, many people (even those against racism) reproduce these inequalities through "unintentional" racism. That is why I think- while Fassin's article has great contributions- the way he speaks about inequality, low income, and minorities without questioning these terms and ignoring the legacy of slavery within the United States, creates a simplified representation of inequalities within the justice system as existing in a vacuum- simply the fault of police and judges. But I think it is more complicated and we should ask why police and politicians use black people as a scapegoat and why is it not questioned by society- because ignorance cannot be used as an excuse anymore.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Several years ago, my law office was fighting for the release of a black man who had been condemned, at the age of 16, to die in prison. Matthew was one of 62 Louisiana children sentenced to life imprisonment without parole for nonhomicide offenses. But a case I'd argued at the Supreme Court was part of a 2010 ruling that banned such sentences for juveniles, making our clients eligible for release.

Some had been in prison for nearly 50 years. Almost all had been sent to Angola, a penitentiary considered one of America's most violent and abusive. Angola is immense, larger than Manhattan, covering land once occupied by slave plantations. Our clients there worked in fields under the supervision of horse-riding, shotgun-toting guards who forced them to pick crops, including cotton. Their disciplinary records show that if they refused to pick cotton - or failed to pick it fast enough - they could be punished with time in "the hole," where food was restricted and inmates were sometimes tear-gassed. Still, some black prisoners, including Matthew, considered the despair of the hole preferable to the unbearable degradation of being forced to pick cotton on a plantation at the end of the 20th century. I was fearful that such clients would be denied parole based on their disciplinary records. Some were.

The United States has the highest rate of incarceration of any nation on Earth: We represent 4 percent of the planet's population but 22 percent of its imprisoned. In the early 1970s, our prisons held fewer than 300,000 people; since then, that number has grown to more than 2.2 million, with 4.5 million more on probation or parole. Because of mandatory sentencing and "three strikes" laws, I've found myself representing clients sentenced to life without parole for stealing a bicycle or for simple possession of marijuana. And central to understanding this practice of mass incarceration and excessive punishment is the legacy of slavery.

It took only a few decades after the arrival of enslaved Africans in Virginia before white settlers demanded a new world defined by racial caste. The 1664 General Assembly of Maryland decreed that all Negroes within the province "shall serve durante vita, " hard labor for life. This enslavement would be sustained by the threat of brutal punishment. By 1729, Maryland law authorized punishments of enslaved people including "to have the right hand cut off ... the head severed from the body, the body divided into four quarters, and head and quarters set up in the most public places of the county."

Soon American slavery matured into a perverse regime that denied the humanity of black people while still criminalizing their actions. As the Supreme Court of Alabama explained in 1861, enslaved black people were "capable of committing crimes," and in that capacity were "regarded as persons" - but in most every other sense they were "incapable of performing civil acts" and considered "things, not persons."
[To get updates on The 1619 Project, and for more on race from The New York Times, our weekly Race/Related newsletter.]
The 13th Amendment is credited with ending slavery, but it stopped short of that: It made an exception for those convicted of crimes. After emancipation, black people, once seen as less than fully human "slaves," were seen as less than fully human "criminals." The provisional governor of South Carolina declared in 1865 that they had to be "restrained from theft, idleness, vagrancy and crime." Laws governing slavery were replaced with Black Codes governing free black people - making the criminal-justice system central to new strategies of racial control.

These strategies intensified whenever black people asserted their independence or achieved any measure of success. During Reconstruction, the emergence of black elected officials and entrepreneurs was countered by convict leasing, a scheme in which white policymakers invented offenses used to target black people: vagrancy, loitering, being a group of black people out after dark, seeking employment without a note from a former enslaver. The imprisoned were then "leased" to businesses and farms, where they labored under brutal conditions. An 1887 report in Mississippi found that six months after 204 prisoners were leased to a white man named McDonald, dozens were dead or dying, the prison hospital filled with men whose bodies bore "marks of the most inhuman and brutal treatment ... so poor and emaciated that their bones almost come through the skin."

Anything that challenged the racial hierarchy could be seen as a crime, punished either by the law or by the lynchings that stretched from Mississippi to Minnesota. In 1916, Anthony Crawford was lynched in South Carolina for being successful enough to refuse a low price for his cotton. In 1933, Elizabeth Lawrence was lynched near Birmingham for daring to chastise white children who were throwing rocks at her.

It's not just that this history fostered a view of black people as presumptively criminal. It also cultivated a tolerance for employing any level of brutality in response. In 1904, in Mississippi, a black man was accused of shooting a white landowner who had attacked him. A white mob captured him and the woman with him, cut off their ears and fingers, drilled corkscrews into their flesh and then burned them alive - while hundreds of white spectators enjoyed deviled eggs and lemonade. The landowner's brother, Woods Eastland, presided over the violence; he was later elected district attorney of Scott County, Miss., a position that allowed his son James Eastland, an avowed white supremacist, to serve six terms as a United States senator, becoming president pro tempore from 1972 to 1978.

This appetite for harsh punishment has echoed across the decades. Late in the 20th century, amid protests over civil rights and inequality, a new politics of fear and anger would emerge. Nixon's war on drugs, mandatory minimum sentences, three-strikes laws, children tried as adults, "broken windows" policing - these policies were not as expressly racialized as the Black Codes, but their implementation has been essentially the same. It is black and brown people who are disproportionately targeted, stopped, suspected, incarcerated and shot by the police.

Hundreds of years after the arrival of enslaved Africans, a presumption of danger and criminality still follows black people everywhere. New language has emerged for the noncrimes that have replaced the Black Codes: driving while black, sleeping while black, sitting in a coffee shop while black. All reflect incidents in which African-Americans were mistreated, assaulted or arrested for conduct that would be ignored if they were white. In schools, black kids are suspended and expelled at rates that vastly exceed the punishment of white children for the same behavior.

Inside courtrooms, the problem gets worse. Racial disparities in sentencing are found in almost every crime category. Children as young as 13, almost all black, are sentenced to life imprisonment for nonhomicide offenses. Black defendants are 22 times more likely to receive the death penalty for crimes whose victims are white, rather than black - a type of bias the Supreme Court has declared "inevitable."

The smog created by our history of racial injustice is suffocating and toxic. We are too practiced in ignoring the victimization of any black people tagged as criminal; like Woods Eastland's crowd, too many Americans are willing spectators to horrifying acts, as long as we're assured they're in the interest of maintaining order.

This cannot be the end of the story. In 2018, the Equal Justice Initiative, a nonprofit I direct, opened a museum in Montgomery, Ala., dedicated to the legacy of slavery and a memorial honoring thousands of black lynching victims. We must acknowledge the 400 years of injustice that haunt us. I'm encouraged: Half a million people have visited. But I'm also worried, because we are at one of those critical moments in American history when we will either double down on romanticizing our past or accept that there is something better waiting for us.

I recently went to New Orleans to celebrate the release of several of our Angola clients, including Matthew - men who survived the fields and the hole. I realized how important it is to stay hopeful: Hopelessness is the enemy of justice. There were moments of joy that night. But there was also heaviness; we all seemed keenly aware that we were not truly free from the burden of living in a nation that continues to deny and doubt this legacy, and how much work remains to be done.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Why American Prisons Owe Their Cruelty to Slavery (Published 2019)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Several years ago, my law office was fighting for the release of a black man who had been condemned, at the age of 16, to die in prison. Matthew was one of 62 Louisiana children sentenced to life imprisonment without parole for nonhomicide offenses.

# data[].attributes.body
This podcast episode by NPR's Hidden Brain and attached Washington Post Article talk about the Broken Windows Approach analyzed by Harcourt, which both Han and Fassin bring up in their work. I was very surprised to find out that the original broken window study (which is not supported by empirical evidence) was conducted by Zombarrado, who was also in charge of the controversial Stanford Prison Experiment.

This broken window approach, which was picked up Rudy Giuliani and NYCPD, argued that people committing small offenses have a natural inclination to commit violent crime and should be punished. The podcast also talks about how this led to the start of the stop-and-frisk, because it was a type of preemptive punishment.

Finally, the stories in the episode also illustrate Harcourts theory of punitive illusion- in that there is a gap between the reality of unequal distribution of punishment and the ideal of fair, effective punishment. Politicians and the news reported the success of the Broken Window approach because there was a huge drop in crime rates- however, they failed to include that crime rates were dropping everywhere, even in city's not implementing this order maintenance type of policing. Additionally, complaints of police misconduct rose drastically, as they are given a wider discretion to enforce the law- this was also brought up in the Serial s3e3.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
subscribe to Short Wave podcast

In 1969, Philip Zimbardo, a psychologist from Stanford University, ran an interesting field study. He abandoned two cars in two very different places: one in a mostly poor, crime-ridden section of New York City, and the other in a fairly affluent neighborhood of Palo Alto, Calif. Both cars were left without license plates and parked with their hoods up.

After just 10 minutes, passersby in New York City began vandalizing the car. First they stripped it for parts. Then the random destruction began. Windows were smashed. The car was destroyed. But in Palo Alto, the other car remained untouched for more than a week.

Finally, Zimbardo did something unusual: He took a sledgehammer and gave the California car a smash. After that, passersby quickly ripped it apart, just as they'd done in New York.

This field study was a simple demonstration of how something that is clearly neglected can quickly become a target for vandals. But it eventually morphed into something far more than that. It became the basis for one of the most influential theories of crime and policing in America: "broken windows."

Thirteen years after the Zimbardo study, criminologists George L. Kelling and James Q. Wilson wrote an article for The Atlantic. They were fascinated by what had happened to Zimbardo's abandoned cars and thought the findings could be applied on a larger scale, to entire communities.

"The idea [is] that once disorder begins, it doesn't matter what the neighborhood is, things can begin to get out of control," Kelling tells Hidden Brain.

In the article, Kelling and Wilson suggested that a broken window or other visible signs of disorder or decay - think loitering, graffiti, prostitution or drug use - can send the signal that a neighborhood is uncared for. So, they thought, if police departments addressed those problems, maybe the bigger crimes wouldn't happen.

"It's to the point now where I wonder if we should back away from the metaphor of broken windows. We didn't know how powerful it was going to be. It simplified, it was easy to communicate, a lot of people got it as a result of the metaphor. It was attractive for a long time. But as you know, metaphors can wear out and become stale."

"Once you begin to deal with the small problems in neighborhoods, you begin to empower those neighborhoods," says Kelling. "People claim their public spaces, and the store owners extend their concerns to what happened on the streets. Communities get strengthened once order is restored or maintained, and it is that dynamic that helps to prevent crime."

Kelling and Wilson proposed that police departments change their focus. Instead of channeling most resources into solving major crimes, they should instead try to clean up the streets and maintain order - such as keeping people from smoking pot in public and cracking down on subway fare beaters.

The argument came at an opportune time, says Columbia University law professor Bernard Harcourt.

"This was a period of high crime, and high incarceration, and it seemed there was no way out of that dynamic. It seemed as if there was no way out of just filling prisons to address the crime problem."

An Idea Moves From The Ivory Tower To The Streets

As policymakers were scrambling for answers, a new mayor in New York City came to power offering a solution.

Rudy Giuliani won election in 1993, promising to reduce crime and clean up the streets. Very quickly, he adopted broken windows as his mantra.

It was one of those rare ideas that appealed to both sides of the aisle.

Conservatives liked the policy because it meant restoring order. Liberals liked it, Harcourt says, because it seemed like an enlightened way to prevent crime: "It seemed like a magical solution. It allowed everybody to find a way in their own mind to get rid of the panhandler, the guy sleeping on the street, the prostitute, the drugs, the litter, and it allowed liberals to do that while still feeling self-righteous and good about themselves."

Giuliani and his new police commissioner, William Bratton, focused first on cleaning up the subway system, where 250,000 people a day weren't paying their fare. They sent hundreds of police officers into the subways to crack downon turnstile jumpers and vandals.

Very quickly, they found confirmation for their theory. Going after petty crime led the police to violent criminals, says Kelling: "Not all fare beaters were criminals, but a lot of criminals were fare beaters. It turns out serious criminals are pretty busy. They commit minor offenses as well as major offenses."

The policy was quickly scaled up from the subway to the entire city of New York.

Police ramped up misdemeanor arrests for things like smoking marijuana in public, spraying graffiti and selling loose cigarettes. And almost instantly, they were able to trumpet their success. Crime was falling. The murder rate plummeted. It seemed like a miracle.

The media loved the story, and Giuliani cruised to re-election in 1997.

George Kelling and a colleague did follow-up research on broken windows policing and found what they believed was clear evidence of its success. In neighborhoods where there was a sharp increase in misdemeanor arrests - suggesting broken windows policing was in force - there was also a sharp decline in crime.

By 2001, broken windows had become one of Giuliani's greatest accomplishments. In his farewell address, he emphasized the beautiful and simple idea behind the success.

"The broken windows theory replaced the idea that we were too busy to pay attention to street-level prostitution, too busy to pay attention to panhandling, too busy to pay attention to graffiti," he said. "Well, you can't be too busy to pay attention to those things, because those are the things that underlie the problems of crime that you have in your society."

Questions Begin To Emerge About Broken Windows

Right from the start, there were signs something was wrong with the beautiful narrative.

"Crime was starting to go down in New York prior to the Giuliani election and prior to the implementation of broken windows policing," says Harcourt, the Columbia law professor. "And of course what we witnessed from that period, basically from about 1991, was that the crime in the country starts going down, and it's a remarkable drop in violent crime in this country. Now, what's so remarkable about it is how widespread it was."

Harcourt points out that crime dropped not only in New York, but in many other cities where nothing like broken windows policing was in place. In fact, crime even fell in parts of the country where police departments were mired in corruption scandals and largely viewed as dysfunctional, such as Los Angeles.

"Los Angeles is really interesting because Los Angeles was wracked with terrible policing problems during the whole time, and crime drops as much in Los Angeles as it does in New York," says Harcourt.

There were lots of theories to explain the nationwide decline in crime. Some said it was the growing economy or the end of the crack cocaine epidemic. Some criminologists credited harsher sentencing guidelines.

In 2006, Harcourt found the evidence supporting the broken windows theory might be flawed. He reviewed the study Kelling had conducted in 2001, and found the areas that saw the largest number of misdemeanor arrests also had the biggest drops in violent crime.

Harcourt says the earlier study failed to consider what's called a "reversion to the mean."

"It's something that a lot of investment bankers and investors know about because it's well-known and in the stock market," says Harcourt. "Basically, the idea is if something goes up a lot, it tends to go down a lot."

A graph in Kelling's 2001 paper is revealing. It shows the crime rate falling dramatically in the early 1990s. But this small view gives us a selective picture. Right before this decline came a spike in crime. And if you go further back, you see a series of spikes and declines. And each time, the bigger a spike, the bigger the decline that follows, as crime reverts to the mean.

Kelling acknowledges that broken windows may not have had a dramatic effect on crime. But he thinks it still has value.

"Even if broken windows did not have a substantial impact on crime, order is an end in itself in a cosmopolitan, diverse world," he says. "Strangers have to feel comfortable moving through communities for those communities to thrive. Order is an end in itself, and it doesn't need the justification of serious crime."

Order might be an end in itself, but it's worth noting that this was not the premise on which the broken windows theory was sold. It was advertised as an innovative way to control violent crime, not just a way to get panhandlers and prostitutes off the streets.

'Broken Windows' Morphs Into 'Stop And Frisk'

Harcourt says there was another big problem with broken windows.

"We immediately saw a sharp increase in complaints of police misconduct. Starting in 1993, what you're going to see is a tremendous amount of disorder that erupts as a result of broken windows policing, with complaints skyrocketing, with settlements of police misconduct cases skyrocketing, and of course with incidents, brutal incidents, all of a sudden happening at a faster and faster clip."

The problem intensified with a new practice that grew out of broken windows. It was called "stop and frisk," and was embraced in New York City after Mayor Michael Bloomberg won election in 2001.

If broken windows meant arresting people for misdemeanors in hopes of preventing more serious crimes, "stop and frisk" said, why even wait for the misdemeanor? Why not go ahead and stop, question and search anyone who looked suspicious?

There were high-profile cases where misdemeanor arrests or stopping and questioning did lead to information that helped solve much more serious crimes, even homicides. But there were many more cases where police stops turned up nothing. In 2008, police made nearly 250,000 stops in New York for what they called furtive movements. Only one-fifteenth of 1 percent of those turned up a gun.

Even more problematic, in order to be able to go after disorder, you have to be able to define it. Is it a trash bag covering a broken window? Teenagers on a street corner playing music too loudly?

In Chicago, the researchers Robert Sampson and Stephen Raudenbush analyzed what makes people perceive social disorder. They found that if two neighborhoods had exactly the same amount of graffiti and litter and loitering, people saw more disorder, more broken windows, in neighborhoods with more African-Americans.

George Kelling is not an advocate of stop and frisk. In fact, all the way back in 1982, he foresaw the possibility that giving police wide discretion could lead to abuse. In his article, he and James Q. Wilson write: "How do we ensure ... that the police do not become the agents of neighborhood bigotry? We can offer no wholly satisfactory answer to this important question."

In August of 2013, a federal district court found that New York City's stop and frisk policy was unconstitutional because of the way it singled out young black and Hispanic men. Later that year, New York elected its first liberal mayor in 20 years. Bill DeBlasio celebrated the end of stop and frisk. But he did not do away with broken windows. In fact, he re-appointed Rudy Giuliani's police commissioner, Bill Bratton.

And just seven months after taking over again as the head of the New York Police Department, Bratton's broken windows policy came under fresh scrutiny. The reason: the death of Eric Garner.

In July 2014, a bystander caught on cellphone video the deadly clash between New York City police officers and Garner, an African-American. After a verbal confrontation, officers tackled Garner, while restraining him with a chokehold, a practice that is banned in New York City.

Garner died not long after he was brought down to the ground. His death sparked massive protests, and his name is now synonymous with the distrust between police and African-American communities.

For George Kelling, this was not the end that he had hoped for. As a researcher, he's one of the few whose ideas have left the academy and spread like wildfire.

But once politicians and the media fell in love with his idea, they took it to places that he never intended and could not control.

"When, during the 1990s, I would occasionally read in a newspaper something like a new chief comes in and says, 'I'm going to implement broken windows tomorrow,' I would listen to that with dismay because [it's] a highly discretionary activity by police that needs extensive training, formal guidelines, constant monitoring and oversight. So do I worry about the implementation about broken windows? A whole lot ... because it can be done very badly."

In fact, Kelling says, it might be time to move away from the idea.

"It's to the point now where I wonder if we should back away from the metaphor of broken windows. We didn't know how powerful it was going to be. It simplified, it was easy to communicate, a lot of people got it as a result of the metaphor. It was attractive for a long time. But as you know, metaphors can wear out and become stale."

These days, the consensus among social scientists is that broken windows likely did have modest effects on crime. But few believe it caused the 60 or 70 percent decline in violent crime for which it was once credited.

And yet despite all the evidence, the idea continues to be popular.

Bernard Harcourt says there is a reason for that:

"It's a simple story that people can latch onto and that is a lot more pleasant to live with than the complexities of life. The fact is that crime dropped in America dramatically from the 1990s, and that there aren't really good, clean nationwide explanations for it."

The story of broken windows is a story of our fascination with easy fixes and seductive theories. Once an idea like that takes hold, it's nearly impossible to get the genie back in the bottle.
The Hidden Brain Podcast is hosted by Shankar Vedantam and produced by Maggie Penman, Jennifer Schmidt and Renee Klahr. Our supervising producer is Tara Boyle. You can also follow us on Twitter @hiddenbrain, and listen for Hidden Brain stories each week on your local public radio station.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How A Theory Of Crime And Policing Was Born, And Went Terribly Wrong

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
subscribe to Short Wave podcast In 1969, Philip Zimbardo, a psychologist from Stanford University, ran an interesting field study. He abandoned two cars in two very different places: one in a mostly poor, crime-ridden section of New York City, and the other in a fairly affluent neighborhood of Palo Alto, Calif.

# data[].attributes.body
The work on everyday resistance, especially that of Abu-Lughod is very important. With big protests becoming more mainstream and 'trendy' it becomes hard to distinguish between real resistance and the perpetuation of systems of power. This is not meant to create a hierarchy of types of resistance but to recognize that people join large-scale revolts for different reasons.

This book review focuses on the life of Marie- Madeline Fourcade, a leader of one of France's anti-Nazi resistance organizations. While this is by no means a small act of resistance, what interested me the most was the dialogue around her gender. As the review states " her asset as a spy was her gender." Instead of focusing on her bravery or shrewdness her most important contribution was being unsuspecting. The review also brings up her children to "which she was shockingly cold" and "took jaw-dropping risks" when pregnant.  These morally charged statements show that even when a person is resisting one form of power (the Nazi's) she is still expected to subscribe to other social norms. Instead of being applauded as a mother trying to make the world a better place for her children and lead by example she is critiqued for not being maternal enough.

I thought this review on the life of Fourcade was an interesting combination of big scale revolt of those in power and everyday resistance to the patriarchy. This illustrated the danger of romanticizing resistance as a unified front, there are internal divisions within resistance groups. I think it is also interesting to note that she has been erased from history despite running a successful resistance groups- it makes me wonder what other groups are not included in narratives of resistance and protest? What of more marginalised groups of women of color or poor people?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Nonfiction

Marie-Madeleine Fourcade's false identity card under the name Marie Suzanne Imbert. Credit... Tallandier - Rue des Archives/Granger, NYC

When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.

MADAME FOURCADE'S SECRET WAR
The Daring Young Woman Who Led France's Largest Spy Network Against Hitler
By Lynne Olson
Illustrated. 428 pp. Random House. $30.

Why have most of us never heard of Marie-Madeleine Fourcade? Why is her name missing from the honor roll of war heroes carved into thousands of monuments in hundreds of French village squares? Might the fact that this hero - the leader of one of France's most successful anti-Nazi resistance organizations - was not a hero, but a heroine, have something to do with her absence from history? There is reason to believe so. At the end of World War II, the triumphant Gen. Charles de Gaulle designated 1,038 people as resistance heroes. Only six of those heroes were women, and Fourcade, who ran the longest-running spy network, was not among them. In "Madame Fourcade's Secret War," her fast-paced and impressively researched account, Lynne Olson corrects that historical injustice. Marie-Madeleine Fourcade emerges as a vivid and pivotal player in the French Resistance.

She was a daughter of the privileged bourgeoisie and the product of convent schools, with a naturally adventuresome spirit nurtured during a Shanghai childhood (her father was with the French Maritime service). In ordinary times, Fourcade might have slipped into her natural role as a chic Parisian. But, to paraphrase Eleanor Roosevelt, the 1930s were no ordinary time for France - or the world. From the days of gathering darkness in 1936 until the end of World War II, Marie-Madeleine Fourcade was the very definition of une femme engagée.

When German troops marched into Paris in the early morning hours of June 14, 1940, the French government - caught shockingly unprepared - fled the capital. As Hitler triumphantly toured Paris the following week, 84-year-old Marshal Philippe Pétain, hero of Verdun, hastily formed a collaborationist government in the spa town of Vichy. Many of his fellow citizens, still reeling from World War I's aftershocks, including the loss of 660,000 of their sons, were as unenthusiastic about confronting Hitler as the old marshal himself. Pétain soon changed the humiliated country's motto from liberté, égalité, fraternité to the fascist-friendly travail, famille, patrie.

Image

Credit... Associated Press

Fourcade embodied everything Pétain and his ilk despised. She was a woman who refused to play by the rules of the racist, sexist and ultimately murderous Vichy patriarchy.
[ This was one of our most anticipated titles of March. See the full list here. ]
Olson describes how, as early as 1936, over tea at her sister's elegant Paris apartment, the outspoken 27-year-old caught the eye of a former French military intelligence officer, Maj. Georges Loustaunau-Lacau (code name Navarre). He shared her revulsion at France's passivity in the face of fascism and was organizing those of like mind. "It was a moral obligation to do what you are capable of doing," one of Fourcade's operatives said. "It was a must. How could you not do it?"

In July 1941, Navarre was arrested for anti-Pétain activity, and picked Fourcade to lead the movement he had started. (She chose the code name Hedgehog because, as a colleague put it, "it's a tough little animal that even a lion would hesitate to bite.") Olson's narrative moves briskly through the Cote d'Azur, the Dordogne, Brittany and Burgundy as Fourcade recruited spies, radio operators, pilots and couriers (happily, many recruits came equipped with their own ancient family chateaus), all the while stealthily communicating with British intelligence in London. Skeptics regarding the actual strength of the French Resistance may be surprised by this account, according to which thousands - from all walks of life - signed up.

Among Fourcade's assets as a spy was her gender. "Good God, a woman!" Gabriel Rivière, the head of the underground's Marseille operation, exclaimed, upon meeting Fourcade for the first time. She proved more fearless and often more cunning than some of the men she recruited, and frequently more so than the Vichy authorities. In this account, partly based on Fourcade's own memoirs, Pétain's agents often come off as Inspector Clouseau-ishly inept. When Fourcade's assistant, Monique Bontinck, requested a bath before her arrest, the cops consented, and went for a smoke. "She went into the bathroom, turned on the taps of the tub full blast. ... Taking off her shoes, she tiptoed down the hallway quietly" and opened the front door. "She could hear shouts from the policemen in the stairwell" as she fled to a safe house in Lyon.

Olson writes with verve and a historian's authority. Fourcade, she tells us, was beautiful and liked men, but she was obsessed with defeating the despised Boches. A master of disguises, she frequently changed her hair color, and sometimes used distorting dentures and other theatrical tricks.

Her personal life was - even by French standards - complicated. Fourcade was married, with two young children she didn't see for years at a time. Her estranged husband is barely mentioned. Before long, however, she fell in love with a French Air Force pilot, Leon Faye, who joined her network as her deputy. Even after she became pregnant with Faye's child, she continued to take jaw-dropping risks. (Fourcade's treatment of her children struck me as shockingly cold.)

Olson's narrative might have been tighter had it focused on fewer and more fleshed-out characters. In a long list of dramatis personae worthy of a Russian novel, one of the more memorable is Fourcade's agent Jeannie Rousseau. A 20-year-old recent graduate of the prestigious École Libre des Sciences Politiques, Rousseau, like her boss, benefited from men underestimating her. When the Germans set up their Brittany headquarters, Rousseau, who spoke fluent German, applied for a job as a translator. Remarkably careless around this pretty young woman, the Wehrmacht officers peppered their conversations with two strange words: "Peenemünde" and "raketten." In answer to Jeannie's seemingly innocent query, an officer showed her a drawing of a rocket and a testing station, on an island off the Baltic coast, Peenemünde. Rousseau's report on this exchange was an astonishing piece of intelligence. It revealed to the Allies the existence of a new superweapon, the V2 rocket.

In late 1942, 200,000 Wehrmacht troops marched unopposed into the former Vichy-governed "free zone." Now, with the Gestapo in full charge, Fourcade was often mortally afraid. Reluctantly, she accepted evacuation to London, where she found a different but still vicious war between two titanic exiled French leaders: Charles de Gaulle and Henri Giraud. Fourcade refused to be drawn into this internecine battle and made herself suspect in the eyes of many French exiles by working too closely with the British.

Collaborating with British intelligence confronted Fourcade with a familiar challenge: sexism. When the head of MI6, Cmdr. Claude Dansey, first met Fourcade, he behaved with exaggerated gallantry, presenting her with a bouquet and remarking, "So this is the terrible woman who has had us all scared!" Though anxious to return to her agents in France, Fourcade was told, essentially, not to worry her pretty little head. "You've gone on long past the safety limits," the Englishman admonished her. "According to the law of averages, an underground leader can't last more than six months. You've lasted over two and a half years. It's sheer witchcraft." As Olson relates, behind her back he referred to her as "Cohen's bitch" - a reference to Fourcade's close friend Cmdr. Kenneth Cohen, the MI6 official in charge of French intelligence during the war. Fourcade eventually returned to France and to her agents in the field.

Awaiting capture by the Gestapo, expecting torture and execution, Fourcade requested permission from a priest to take the cyanide pills she carried - suicide being a mortal sin in her Catholic faith. She shouldn't have any scruples about this, the priest assured her. It would not be suicide, but instead a means of resisting the enemy. But, as always, she survived, living to the age of 79, dying in 1989.

Will the brutal Nazi occupation of Europe ever stop churning up new material? Probably not. Nor should we ever cease our attempt to fathom two unfathomable questions regarding the 20th century: Just how did Hitler nearly fulfill his murderous vision, and why did so few resist his monstrous plans? Marie-Madeleine Fourcade certainly did, and with this gripping tale Lynne Olson pays her what history has so far denied her. France, slow to confront the stain of Vichy, would do well to finally honor a fighter most of us would want in our foxhole.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Remembering a Woman Who Was a Leader of the French Resistance (Published 2019)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Nonfiction When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission. MADAME FOURCADE'S SECRET WAR The Daring Young Woman Who Led France's Largest Spy Network Against Hitler By Lynne Olson Illustrated. 428 pp. Random House. $30. Why have most of us never heard of Marie-Madeleine Fourcade?

# data[].attributes.body
This week's essential resources, especially Bringa's film made me think about the way violence is made visible. The 24 hour news cycle has led to a lot of exposure of violence. The profoundness of the film without showing any extreme acts of violence. It made me wonder about the desensitization to violence that occurs through constant exposure of violent news and how it affects people's reactions to such violence. This is especially pertinent within this week, were the 24/7 news coverage of the American election has led to increased anxiety and fear of the aftermaths. In my home state there have been people boarding up shops in preparation for riots no matter who wins the election.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Image

National Guard soldiers were on duty on Friday at the Port Authority Bus Terminal in New York, where security was heightened after the attack in Nice, France. Credit Credit Santiago Mejia/The New York Times

It has been a rough year.

By now, our violence is down to a pattern, and there is a choreography to our reactions.

A killer seeks out a nightclub, a church, an airport, a courthouse, a protest. Someone is shot on video, sometimes by the police, and marchers fill the streets. An attack is carried out in France, America, Turkey, Bangladesh, Lebanon, Tunisia, Nigeria, and then claimed and celebrated by a radical terror group.

Our phones vibrate with news alerts. The talking heads fill air over cable news captions that shout "breaking news" in red. Rumors and misinformation abound. The comments erupt on Twitter, Facebook and news sites.

Journalists create multimedia stories that focus on videos, photos and graphic accounts from victims and witnesses. The experts give interviews, and the latest tools of immediacy are put to use. After thedeadly terror attack in Nice, France, The Times invited grief counselors to be interviewed on Facebook Live. Within days, attention had turned to a shooting in Baton Rouge that left three law enforcement officers dead.

So, what is this doing to us?
It depends on the individual, but living in a digitally linked world where broadcasts of violence are instantaneous and almost commonplace means that many of us are becoming desensitized, Anita Gadhia-Smith, a psychologist in Washington, said Friday.

"With the frequency of shootings and terror attacks there is a sense of anxiety that's building in people," she said, "a sense of vulnerability and powerlessness."

Dr. Smith added: "There is a heightened alarm, but there can also be some desensitization that's happening."

The constant stream of news on social media can also be traumatic. A team of researchers at the University of Bradford in England told a British psychology conference last year that exposure to violent imagery on social media can cause symptoms that are similar to post-traumatic stress disorder, defined as a persistent emotional reaction to a traumatic event that severely impairs one's life.

In an analysis conducted by the Bradford researchers, 189 participants were shown images and provided with stories of violent events, including the Sept. 11 attacks, school shootings and suicide bombings.

The researchers' analysis showed that 22 percent of those who participated were significantly affected by what they saw.

The study also found that people who view violent events more often were more affected than people who saw them less frequently, and that people who described themselves as extroverts with outgoing personalities were at a higher risk to be disturbed by the images.
What can we do about it?
The self-care advice hasn't changed. It is natural to want to follow along with incremental updates on social media and in the news. But it's important to know that this can heighten your anxiety.

Anne Marie Albano, a clinical psychologist and the director of the Columbia University Clinic for Anxiety and Related Disorders, said in an interview after the 2015 Paris attacks that it might be a good idea to limit your exposure to social media.

Designating times to plug into the news - checking Twitter in the morning over coffee, but not listening to the radio while driving your kids to school, for instance - can help you manage anxiety if you are feeling stressed.

"This will help you balance a realistic and credible threat with information that is sensationalized," Dr. Albano said, "or a rush to report something or talk about something that doesn't have the impact that you would think it has."
If you're feeling anxiety about a possible attack, compare your fear with the facts.
When you fear the worst, it's hard to remember that, say, a flight or a train ride has extraordinarily high odds of being safe. But you have to try.

Humans are bad at assessing risk, Martin Seif, a psychologist who specializes in treating anxiety disorders and the fear of flying, said in an interview late last year.

"Every single anxiety-management technique is based on the premise that your reaction is out of proportion" to the likelihood of danger, Dr. Seif said.
Also, remember to take a breath.
A guide to dealing with terrorism released by the Federal Bureau of Investigation encourages closing your eyes and taking deep breaths to feel calmer.

Taking a walk or talking to a close friend can also help.

The guide also recommends avoiding alcohol and drugs, exercising regularly and eating healthy foods - basic self-care guidelines that help reduce stress.

Make sure you have a plan to contact your family if something happens, especially if cellular networks are overloaded or transportation is disrupted, but remember that you most likely will not need it, experts say.

If you have children, the American Psychological Association recommends asking them how they are feeling about the news. Keep in mind that it is possible for children to be influenced by news reports and the adult conversations around them.
Lastly, keep your daily routine.
Dr. Albano said that a primary worry in the field of psychology is people "going out of their way to be so safe that it shrinks their world."

"Terrorists thrive on this kind of thing," she added. "They want to see the population change their practices."

Going out of your way to avoid interacting with strangers - by refusing to take mass transit, for example - can stoke fear and anxiety in children, she said.

The best way to help children cope with acts of violence is to start by listening to them, Sean Rogers, a psychotherapist who works with children and teenagers, told The Times on his Facebook Live appearance.

"Listening is curative," he said. "It is the basis of all therapies."

Madison Mills contributed reporting.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
What Is a Constant Cycle of Violent News Doing to Us?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
It has been a rough year. By now, our violence is down to a pattern, and there is a choreography to our reactions. A killer seeks out a nightclub, a church, an airport, a courthouse, a protest. Someone is shot on video, sometimes by the police, and marchers fill the streets.

# data[].attributes.body
Adding on to my last post, this article is about the 'Proud Boys' a group that claims to be a fraternity but is listed as a hate group. Here, we see what happens when violence has no consequences, in that, these white men whose investigations "remain open" and are free to attend more protests such as these. In one of the cases mentioned, a black victim of hate crime by the Proud Boys, Mykel Mosley was actually detained despite video evidence that showed he did not start the altercation. There is also undertones of masculinity in that the Proud Boys venerate traditional gender roles, and say, "You’re not a man until you’ve had the crap beaten out of you [and] beaten the crap out of someone else". There are also racialized and anti-immigrant agenda which draw upon racialized ideas of people of color as subhuman, in that "You try to speak to them as humans, they disregard that and use it as weakness. But they do listen to your fist smashing into their face."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
On 30 June in Portland, Oregon, a rally staged by the rightwing Patriot Prayer group degenerated into a riotous fight with leftwing counter-protesters. The violence was extensive but rightwing media and activists have lavished attention on a single punch.
Riot in Portland as far-right marchers clash with anti-fascists
Ethan Nordean, a muscular 28-year-old from Washington state, was captured on video fending off two baton blows from a masked counter-protester. He then flattened his assailant.

The video has been used to buttress the preferred rightwing explanation for the Portland riot: leftwing aggression. It has also been seized on as a recruiting tool by a group, the Proud Boys, which has risen to prominence on the far right since the 2016 election and which the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) lists as a hate group.

Nordean was wearing a black and gold Fred Perry polo shirt - the uniform of the Proud Boys. Under his alias Rufio Panman, he was named Proud Boy of the week by the organization's magazine. The article concluded with a group slogan: "They fucked around. They found out." In the first of many tweets referring to the incident, the same slogan was used by the founder of the Proud Boys, Gavin McInnes.

Social media accounts associated with the Proud Boys have spread the video. The group's verified Twitter account has used a still of the punch as its header image; it also incorporated footage into a so-called "sizzle reel" of the violence in Portland.

Since early 2017, a core group of Proud Boys from the Pacific north-west have been active participants in a number of rightwing rallies. Nordean has attended events in Portland and Seattle. Before the 30 June rally, Patriot Prayer founder and Republican Senate candidate Joey Gibson issued a national call for participation. At least 60 Proud Boys answered. Some came from other states, including California and Texas. Many wore body armour, helmets and gas masks.

Keegan Hankes, an SPLC researcher, said the group had "been open and very consistent about using violence as a tool". Its use of the footage from Portland, he said, showed how "a good bit of this is about attention-seeking as well. They live on the internet to promote their brands, and that includes Gavin McInnes."

McInnes claims his group does not promote violence at all. In a post in which he denied that his group is part of the "alt-right", he said it was simply "a men's club that meets about once a month to drink beer".

'Justified violence is amazing'

McInness, who was born in Britain and moved to Canada at a young age, was a co-founder of Vice Media, which he left in 2008. After a stint with the Rebel Media, a far-right Canadian company, and a decade as a columnist for the "paleoconservative" Taki's Magazine,he is now a host on CRTV, a conservative network. He founded the Proud Boys, which he calls a "fraternal organization", in 2016.

As well as items from a growing range of official merchandise, members often wear red Donald Trump caps. Their Fred Perry shirts have a history in subcultures including football hooliganism; black and gold are the colors of anarcho-capitalism, a libertarian ideology which seeks to abolish government in the interest of free markets.

The group's magazine has published a list of its political commitments, which echo talk-radio style constitutional conservatism and add libertarian touches such as opposition to the war on drugs and an antifeministveneration of traditional gender roles.

The group thus falls in line with McInnes's views, which are broadly Trumpist. In Canada, the Globe and Mail summarized his beliefs as: "Libertarian politics, father-knows-best gender roles, closed borders, Islamophobia and something he calls 'western chauvinism'."

When someone dares defend themselves, and someone else says 'Yay', you say: 'Well you're promoting violence'

Gavin McInnes, to the Guardian

McInnes denies that his group is racist, and he and other Proud Boys point to the presence of non-white members. But in Portland on 30 June, a man in Proud Boys colors taunted counter-protesters through a bullhorn. "Illegals," he said, should have their heads "smashed into the concrete". Another man marched alongside the group and yelled racist slurs. Other Patriot Prayer rallies at which Proud Boys have been present have drawn members of far-right groups including Cascade Legion and Identity Evropa.

Nordean was briefly apprehended. A Portland police spokesman later said an investigation "remains open and under review". Nordean found a place in the limelight. He appeared on McInnes's CRTV show and the Infowars conspiracy theorist Alex Jones played the video of his punch repeatedly. Last Friday, Jones interviewed him.

Regarding counter-protesters, Jones said: "You try to speak to them as humans, they disregard that and use it as weakness. But they do listen to your fist smashing into their face."

Nordean agreed. Jones asked: "How good did it feel, at least later, when you saw his head hit the pavement?"

Nordean said: "Like Gavin McInnes says, violence isn't great, but justified violence is amazing."

McInnes has claimed repeatedly that "fighting solves everything". In a podcast last May, he said: "You're not a man until you've had the crap beaten out of you [and] beaten the crap out of someone."

Last year, after a confrontation with anti-fascist protesters, or "antifa", at New York University, in which McInnes claimed to have been pepper-sprayed, he said: "We're the only ones fighting these guys, and I want you to fight them too. It's fun."

In early 2017, McInnes stated that to become a "fourth degree" Proud Boy, recruits had to "get beat up, kick the crap out of an antifa". In July last year, in the Proud Boys magazine, he issued a " clarification ", saying Proud Boys should only "[defend] themselves after getting fucked with".

'Fucking weak human being'

The Guardian reached McInnes by phone. Asked about the violence in Portland, he said: "You would have to be completely blind, which I think you are, to not see that fight for what it is, which is antifa, fully armed, attacking Joey Gibson and Joey Gibson's friends."

Asked if sharing video of Nordean's punch amounted to the promotion of violence, McInnes called the Guardian a "fucking weak human being", a "vile little pussy" and a "tepid cunt". He then ranted about "the media class", who he said "sit there picking fights, call everyone a Nazi, and then when someone dares defend themselves, and someone else says 'Yay', you say: 'Well you're promoting violence.'"

Before he could be asked about alleged violent incidents in the Pacific north-west involving Proud Boys members, McInnes ended the conversation.

Portland man says he was attacked by man linked to far-right Senate candidate

In one such alleged incident, Proud Boy Tusitala Toese is alleged to have punched a Portland man, Tim Ledwith, in broad daylight in a busy shopping district. Toese and another group member, Donovon Flippo, were arrested on 30 June. The men appeared in court on 2 Julybut were released with no restrictions. A spokesman for the Multnomah county district attorney said the case "remains open and under investigation".

In another alleged incident, on 11 May in Vancouver, Washington, Toese, Flippo and another man, Russell Schultz, were allegedly involved in an altercation with Mykel Mosley, a young African American man.

Mosley, who was 17 at the time, said he was walking with a number of friends after a meal when he saw a truck sporting a Confederate battle flag with Trump's head in the middle of it and expressed his disapproval. According to the Western States Center (WSC), a progressive group representing Mosley: "The three adults in the truck escalated the situation by exiting the vehicle and chasing Mosley, who ran from them."

Toese allegedly struck Mosley but it was Mosley who was detained, first by mall guards and then by police. Video seen by the Guardian appeared to back up Mosley's version of events, however, and charges were dropped after the WSC wrote to the prosecuting attorney. A spokesman for the prosecutor would not comment on whether the office was considering charges against the Proud Boys members.

In Facebook screenshots passed to the Guardian by the WSC, Toese appeared to explain his actions with another Proud Boys slogan: "You wanna play stupid games you will win a stupid prize."
Topics

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Who are the Proud Boys, 'western chauvinists' involved in political violence?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
On 30 June in Portland, Oregon, a rally staged by the rightwing Patriot Prayer group degenerated into a riotous fight with leftwing counter-protesters. The violence was extensive but rightwing media and activists have lavished attention on a single punch.

# data[].attributes.body
This article helped me understand populism a little bit better, it goes over Laclau's definition of politics in more laymen terms. This article argues that while populism gets a bad reputation - in that politicians describe it as an "alien infection" that has come to turn the constituency against its politicians - it is really just a form of democracy. This reminded me of Starakakis who said, "By demonizing any reference to the people, such irresponsible anti-populism risks undermining democracy itself together with disagreement, equality, antagonism and pluralism" (Stavrakakis, 2014, 513). Populism is often portrayed as bad, especially when it is associated with right-wing movements such as Trump, and thus conflated with anti-immigration policies and authoritarianism. But I think that it is interesting that these working class whites and industrial poor in America are written off as racist, sexist, and homophobic, when in a degree like anthropology, "the people" are often the most studied and attempted to be understood.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
When populism appears in the media, which it does more and more often now, it is typically presented without explanation, as if everyone can already define it. And everyone can, sort of - at least as long as they're allowed to simply cite the very developments that populism is supposed to explain: Brexit, Trump, Viktor Orbán's takeover of Hungary, the rise of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil. The word evokes the long-simmering resentments of the everyman, brought to a boil by charismatic politicians hawking impossible promises. Often as not, populism sounds like something from a horror film: an alien bacteria that has somehow slipped through democracy's defences - aided, perhaps, by Steve Bannon or some other wily agent of mass manipulation - and is now poisoning political life, creating new ranks of populist voters among "us". (Tellingly, most writing about populism presumes an audience unsympathetic to populism.)

There is no shortage of prominent voices warning how dangerous populism is, and that we must take immediate steps to fight it. Tony Blair spends his days running the Institute for Global Change (IGC), an organisation founded, per its website, "to push back against the destructive approach of populism". In its 2018 world report, Human Rights Watch warned democracies of the world against "capitulation" to the "populist challenge". The rise of "populist movements", Barack Obama said in a speech last summer, had helped spark a global boom for the "politics of fear and resentment and retrenchment" that pave a path to authoritarianism. "I am not being alarmist. I am just stating facts," Obama said.

When populism is framed this way, the implication is clear. All responsible citizens have a responsibility to do their part in the battle - to know populism when they see it, understand its appeal (but not fall for it), and support politics that stop populism in its tracks, thereby saving democracy as we know it. "By fighting off the current infection," writes Yascha Mounk, until recently executive director of Blair's IGC and a prominent anti-populist writer, "we might just build up the necessary antibodies to remain immune against new bouts of the populist disease for decades to come."

But as breathless op-eds and thinktank reports about the populist menace keep piling up, they have provoked a sceptical backlash from critics who wonder aloud if populism even exists. It is now relatively common to encounter the idea that, just as there were no real witches in Salem, there are no real populists in politics - just people, attitudes and movements that the political centre misunderstands and fears, and wants you, reader, to fear too, although without the burden of having to explain exactly why. Populism, in this framing, is a bogeyman: a nonentity invoked for the purpose of stirring up fear. This argument has even made its way to the centrist mainstream. "Let's do away with the word 'populist,'" wrote the New York Times columnist Roger Cohen in July. "It's become sloppy to the point of meaninglessness, an overused epithet for multiple manifestations of political anger. Worse, it's freighted with contempt, applied to all voters who have decided that mainstream political parties have done nothing for their static incomes or disappearing jobs or sense of national decline these past two decades."

It is hard to deny that much talk of populism obscures more than it illuminates, and tells us more about anti-populist crusaders than any real live populist parties or voters. But long before populism became an object of transatlantic media fascination - before it became a zeitgeisty one-word explanation for everything - a small group of academics was studying it, trying to figure out exactly what it is and what lessons it holds for democratic politics. The debate they have produced is, like many academic debates, knotty and self-referential - and will always live in the shadow of the muddled media and political discourse. But it helps us see that the idea of populism is something more than just a centrist fairytale.

Thanks in large part to the persistent failure of governments across the west to enact anything resembling a credible vision of shared prosperity and security in the post-manufacturing era, we are now living through a time when familiar webs connecting citizens, ideologies and political parties are, if not falling apart, at least beginning to loosen and shift. As a result, the question of populism is not going away. The coming years are likely to include all of the following: more movements being labelled as populist, more movements calling themselves populist, more movements defensively insisting that they are not populist, and more conversations about the extent to which populism represents the problem or the solution.

The academic debate on populism shows us that making sense of this landscape requires more than just a usable definition of the P-word. In short, it shows us that we can't really talk about populism without talking about our conflicting conceptions of democracy - and the question of what it truly means for citizens to be sovereign.

It may be telling that very little of the public discussion of the alleged populist threat to democracy has been devoted to the workings of democracy itself. Perhaps we assume, without much thought, that democracy is such a self-explanatory idea that we already know all there is to know about the subject. Or perhaps we have come to regard democracy in its existing western form - basically liberal democracy - as the only possible endpoint for the evolution of politics. Populism, though it comes in many forms, always reminds us that nothing could be further from the truth.

In 2004 a young Dutch political scientist named Cas Mudde published The Populist Zeitgeist, a paper that proposed a new and concise definition of populism - one that would become the backbone of academic populism studies, a field that hardly existed at the time. Mudde was convinced that populism was a useful concept, which meant something more specific than "democracy, but practised in a way that I find distasteful". He was especially keen to challenge two common intuitions about populism: that it is uniquely defined by "highly emotional and simplistic" rhetoric, and that it primarily consists of "opportunistic policies" that aim to "buy" the support of voters.

Populism, Mudde argued, is more than just demagogy or opportunism. But it is not a fully formed political ideology like socialism or liberalism - it is instead a "thin" ideology, made up of just a few core beliefs. First: the most important division in society is an antagonistic one between "the people", understood to be fundamentally good, and "the elite", understood to be fundamentally corrupt and out of touch with everyday life. Second: all populists believe that politics should be an expression of the "general will" - a set of desires presumed to be shared as common sense by all "ordinary people". (Implicit in this belief is another: that such a thing as this "general will" exists.)

A populist movement, then, is one that consistently promises to channel the unified will of the people, and by doing so undercut the self-serving schemes of the elite establishment. As the National Front founder Jean-Marie Le Pen put it in 2007: "I will give voice to the people. Because in democracy only the people can be right, and none can be right against them." (Note how, in this formulation, there is no disagreement among "the people".) Or, in the more recent words of Donald Trump, speaking at his inauguration: "We are transferring power from Washington DC and giving it back to you, the people ... The establishment protected itself, but not the citizens of our country." (Note how members of "the establishment" are implicitly excluded from "the citizens".)

For decades, attempts at clear-headed conversations about populism had been stymied by the question of how it could be attributed to parties and politicians that were so obviously different: how can Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, for example, both be called populist? In what way are Occupy Wall Street and Brexit both possible examples of populist phenomena? Mudde's simple definition caught on because it has no trouble answering this type of question. If populism is truly ideologically "thin", then it has to attach itself to a more substantial host ideology in order to survive. But this ideology can lie anywhere along the left-right spectrum. Because, in Mudde's definition, populism is always piggybacking on other ideologies, the wide variety of populisms isn't a problem. It's exactly what you would expect.

"The people" and "the elite", Mudde wrote, are groupings with no static definition from one populist movement to another. These categories are, first and foremost, moral: people good, elites bad. The question of exactly who belongs in which group, though, depends on the character of the populist movement, and which "thick" ideology the populism ends up attached to. A populist "people" can define itself by an ethnic identity it feels is under threat, but just as easily by a shared sense of being victims of economic exploitation. What matters is that it blames a perceived class of corrupt elites; in the case of rightwing populisms, it may also heap scorn on some underclass, whether immigrants or racial minorities, whom the elites are accused of favouring with special treatment as part of their plot to keep power away from "real people".

When The Populist Zeitgeist was published, populism wasn't a hot topic: in all of 2005, Mudde's paper was cited only nine times. But as the field of populism studies has ballooned alongside mainstream interest in the subject, the paper has become widely recognised as a classic. By a wide margin, Mudde is now the populism scholar most likely to be cited or interviewed by journalists - as often as not, for articles in which his definition intermingles with the same old sloppy generalisations he set out to overturn.

Today, no academic disputes the dominance of Mudde's definition, especially among the growing number of scholars hoping to be part of the conversation about populism as a global phenomenon. One major factor in its success, in fact, is the way that it anticipated events in world politics. The market crashes of 2008 led to the emergence of anti-austerity movements - such as Podemos in Spain, Syriza in Greece, and Occupy worldwide - motivated by rage at financial institutions and the small class of people who benefited from their profits. These movements were obviously animated by a sense of opposition between "the people" and "the elite" - but old theories of populism that defined it specifically as rightwing, racist or anti-immigrant were insufficiently capacious to describe these new developments in populist politics.

The thin-ideology definition is also extremely congenial to the landscape of contemporary academic political science, which places a considerable premium on broad frameworks that enable young scholars to do empirical, quantitative work. Many new scholars of populism no longer feel the need to argue over definitions. Instead, they perform textual analyses designed to detect how often populism's core ideas, as laid out in Mudde's 2004 article, pop up in party platforms, political speeches, manifestos and tweets. Or they administer surveys designed to track the prevalence of the core tenets of populism in different populations, searching for profiles of archetypal populist voters.

Every time another paper relying on the ideological framework is published, it becomes a little more entrenched - a matter of some frustration to the minority of academics who still think it misses the point.

The rise of the thin-ideology definition, and its increasing influence in the still-ballooning public conversation about populism, has consistently provoked the objections of a small but persistent camp of dissenters within populism studies. These academics think defining populism in terms of core beliefs is a deep methodological error: many of them also think defining populism as an ideology runs the risk of making effective and worthwhile political strategies seem irresponsible, even dangerous.

These academics are likely to stress the extent to which mainstream political parties in the US and Europe have converged in recent decades, narrowing the range of opinions that find real purchase in national decision-making. They take as a given that this has swelled the ranks of people who feel that what gets called democracy responds to their concerns much less than it caters to the whims of a small, wealthy, self-dealing class of elites - elites who vigorously deny their own complicity in this state of affairs, often by insisting that there is no alternative.

As you might expect, these scholars tend to be most interested in challenges to the status quo that come from the left - from "the 99%" of Occupy Wall Street and the Sanders campaign, to the "many not the few" of Jeremy Corbyn's Labour party - and foreground an insistence that politics is not yet serving the correct constituency. They are also instinctively alert to the possibility that the self-preserving centre will try to defang outsider challenges by making anyone who endorses them appear unreasonable, frightening and constitutionally unequipped for the sober task of governance.

This makes them suspicious of any suggestion that there is an identifiable ideology called populism that has fundamental similarities no matter where on the political spectrum it appears. For this crowd, talk of an essence of populism - however thin - shades too easily into a charge of guilt by association, which inevitably has the effect of saddling leftwing populist movements (or even populist- looking movements) with the baggage of their xenophobic and racist rightwing counterparts. More specifically, they are likely to worry that the emphasis on exaggerated moralism as a defining feature of populism makes it too easy to depict legitimate opposition to elite power as irrational mobs.

Most objections to the thin-ideology definition owe a substantial debt to a duo of leftist political theorists: Chantal Mouffe, a Belgian who teaches at the University of Westminster, and her late husband, the Argentine Ernesto Laclau. Both thinkers have directly informed the new European left populist movements, including Syriza, Podemos and Jean-Luc Mélenchon's La France Insoumise.

Mouffe and Laclau's writings on Marxism and populism - some of which they produced together, and some separately - are famously dense and sometimes resistant to summary. But at their core is the idea that conflict is an inescapable and defining feature of political life. In other words, the realm of politics is one where antagonism is natural and unavoidable, in which consensus cannot ever be permanent, and there is always a "we" and a "they".

"Political questions are not mere technical issues to be solved by experts," Mouffe insists. "Properly political questions always involve decisions which require us to make a choice between conflicting alternatives." This emphasis on conflict produces a vision of democratic life that looks more radical than typical mainstream accounts of liberal democracy - but, Laclau and Mouffe would argue, one that more accurately describes the actual logic of politics.

In this view, any existing socio-political order (or "hegemony" in Mouffe and Laclau's preferred formation, borrowed from the Italian Marxist philosopher and politician Antonio Gramsci) is subject to challenge. Every status quo - however sturdy - is only temporary, and can always be challenged by a movement that seeks to replace it with something new. Political change, in other words, is the result of demands against the existing order, which must be fused together in a movement to change it - a movement that may look a lot like populism.

When my demands and your demands and our neighbours' demands are brought together in such a movement, they can become the basis for a new political "we": a "people" insisting that the current arrangement of power be altered in their name. To the extent that such a movement succeeds, it creates a new hegemony - a new baseline - which itself becomes open to challenge over time.

From this perspective, populism is just another word for real politics: for people ("us") creating together, live on the ground, a sense of how our dissatisfactions relate, who is to blame ("them"), and how to force a change.

But those who benefit from the status quo don't want it to change; to this end, they might champion toothless approaches to collective decision-making: bipartisan consensus as an end in itself; the elevation of "rational" experts over hot-headed partisans; "Third Way" centrism that shuns ideological conflict in favour of "what works" or mediation by liberal institutions. These approaches (Mouffe calls them "non-politics") may for a time become dominant, as they did in the Anglo-American 1990s and early 2000s. But nothing lasts for ever, especially when the number of people who feel politicians are making their lives more precarious is rising. And then politics - real politics, which is to say populist politics - make a return.

According to Mouffe and Laclau, the only inherent connection between rightwing and leftwing populist movements is that both embrace the same fundamental truth about democracy: that it is an ever-shifting contest over how the default "we" of politics is defined and redefined, in which no one definition can be guaranteed to last. The goal, they argue, should not be placid consensus but "agonistic pluralism": a state in which opposition and disagreement are accepted as the norm, and in which people maintain the capacity to disagree intensely without demonising each other, or descending into war.

Mouffe, in particular, has in recent years argued that the political question of the immediate future is not how to fight populism, but rather which type of populist you want to be. It's about who you're with (who belongs in your "chain of equivalence"), who you're against (who is causing the problem, and how), and where to take your stand. Populism isn't the problem: instead, leftwing populism is the solution.

Not all the academics who take inspiration from Mouffe and Laclau go quite this far, especially in the sober pages of peer-reviewed political science journals. But their work is palpably motivated by a sense that the real threat of "populism" is that our panic over the word will foreclose the possibility of new kinds of politics and new challenges to the status quo - and that fear of populism on the left could enable the victory of populism of the right.

These scholars' preference is for definitions in which it has no ideological essence - not even the "thin" one posited by Cas Mudde. For them, even though the thin definition readily recognises populism's ideological portability, it is still irrevocably tainted by pejorative overtones that push participants in debates about populism to take a position "for" or "against" all populisms. With no internal essence, populism is harder to categorise as inherently good or bad. Paris Aslanidis, a Yale political scientist, calls populism a "discourse" - a mode of talking about politics, rather than a set of beliefs - one that frames politics in terms of the "supremacy of popular sovereignty".

Benjamin Moffitt, a senior lecturer in politics at the Australian Catholic University, refers to populism as a "political style", the presence of which "tells us very little about the substantive democratic content of any political project". Under definitions of this type, the central question is not whether a given political actor or group is or isn't populist. It is instead whether, from moment to moment, they are "doing populism", and how, and with what impact.

Of course, these disputes aren't really about the difference between a "thin ideology" and a "discourse." They are about whether "populist" is always an insult, and if the project of defining populism can ever be disentangled from the concept's pejorative baggage. Ultimately, they are disputes about which types of politics make us suspicious, and why.

The current discussion of populism in the west is strongly coloured by the populist far-right parties that emerged in Europe in the late 1980s and early 90s, such as the Austrian Freedom party, the Danish People's party and the French National Front. What most people knew about these parties, at first, was that they were openly nativist and racist. They talked about "real" citizens of their countries, and fixated on the issue of national and ethnic "purity," demonising immigrants and minorities. Many of their party leaders flirted winkingly with antisemitism, and their electoral victories coincided with a resurgence of extreme right-wing violence in Europe, such as the 1991 attack on immigrant workers and asylum seekers in the east German town of Hoyerswerda.

When journalists and politicians started calling these parties and their supporters populist, the term was an expression of alarm at a problem and, simultaneously, a euphemism that made it possible to gloss over that problem's exact qualities. This was especially useful for journalists who feared being viewed as anything less than politically neutral. Populist was obviously not a compliment, but it sounded less alarming than "extreme right" or "radical right". What the term seemed to communicate more than anything else was backwardness: a juvenile incapacity to bring your preferences to the political arena and engage in the complex give-and-take of rational compromise. The populist combination of immaturity, emotional resentment and intolerance was widely held to constitute a threat to postwar European democracy.

In one respect, the thin-ideology definition popularised by Cas Mudde dismantled this view of things, freeing populism from its exclusively far-right connotations, and cautioning against the conflation of populism with the other -isms it was often paired to.

Mudde and many other scholars who use the ideological definition have in fact repeatedly argued that neither Trump nor Brexit should be regarded primarily as populist phenomena. Of course both Trump and Brexiters used ample populist rhetoric; but in both cases, they argue, the majority of support was motivated not by passion for populism's core ideas, but by other ideological factors. After the Cambridge Dictionary declared populism 2017's "word of the year", Mudde wrote a Guardian column criticising the decision. ("It has become the buzzword of the year," he noted acidly, "mostly because it is very often poorly defined and wrongly used.") For the radical-right parties whose electoral campaigns in the Netherlands, France, Germany and Austria raised alarms across Europe, "populism comes secondary to nativism, and within contemporary European and US politics, populism functions at best as a fuzzy blanket to camouflage the nastier nativism", Mudde concluded.

And yet, despite these caveats, the thin definition nonetheless positions populism as always posing at least something of a majoritarian threat to liberal democracy. It is this judgment, more than any other, that keeps the fight going between scholars who adopt the ideological definition, on one hand, and their Mouffe- and Laclau-inspired critics, on the other.

Liberal democracy, in this context, has almost nothing to do with contemporary distinctions between left and right. It refers, instead, to the idea that government should facilitate pluralistic coexistence by balancing the never fully attainable ideal of popular sovereignty with institutions that enshrine the rule of law and civil rights, which cannot easily be overturned by a political majority. (In this regard, as Mudde writes in his original paper, liberal democracy is "therefore only partly democratic".) Today, liberal democracy is what most people mean when they talk about democracy - and therefore, to be deemed a threat to liberal democracy is, in the context of most political discussions, a devastatingly negative judgment.

Because populism, as described by the ideological definition, involves a moralised conception of an absolutely sovereign "people" - whose verdicts are regarded as practically unanimous - it is inevitable that populist movements will come into conflict with the liberal aspects of liberal democracy.

If all "real" people think the same way about the things that matter most in politics, then the idea of institutional protections for a dissenting minority are are at best superfluous and at worst nefarious. For the populists, they are just another wall that the corrupt elite has built to keep real power away from the people. The same is true for the independence of judges or regulators, or checks and balances between branches of government - especially when they appear to stymie the plans of a populist leader. In this account, the most basic elements of liberal democracy become both kindling and fuel for the populist fire.

No one who studies populism seriously - and not even the most opportunistic participants in the cottage industry of anti-populist alarmism - denies that populist movements can raise valid critiques of the status quo, and of the very real anti-democratic power of elites. Many take a viewpoint similar to that of the Mexican political theorist Benjamin Arditi, who described populism as a drunken guest at democracy's dinner party, one who disrespects the rules of sociability and, along the way, brings up the failure and hypocrisies that everyone else in the room has agreed to ignore. In Populism: A Very Short Introduction, Mudde and his frequent co-author, the Chilean political scientist Cristóbal Kaltwasser, describe contemporary populism as an "illiberal democratic response to an undemocratic liberalism" - one that "asks the right questions but provides the wrong answers".

Reading critics from the left, however, one often gets the sense that for them this adds up to so much lipstick on a pig: a sprinkling of nuance and restraint that still leaves populism, no matter its ideological stripe, with an undeserved taint of inherent danger. The unhappiness of these critics is magnified by the fact that populism rarely appears in mainstream discussion as anything but an insult - often in the mouth of pundits and politicians who regard the left and the right as an equal threat.

The fear in these circles is that saying anything negative about "populism"- however qualified and analytical -simply hands more ammunition to the very people who helped make politics such a hollow, undemocratic mess in the first place. Positioning any populism as fundamentally antithetical to liberal democracy, in this view, simply reinforces the association between populism and mob psychology, and stokes fears that individual rights will always be trampled by group identities.

Some scholars in this camp now argue that we should be talking less about populism and more about the centrist "anti-populism" that fears and demonises it. "Just as the adulterous spouse is always the one most suspicious of their own partner," wrote the Italian sociologist Marco d'Eramo in New Left Review in 2013, "so those who eviscerate democracy are the most inclined to see threats to it everywhere. Hence all the to-do about populism betrays a sense of uneasiness, smacks of overkill."

For each side in this debate, the obvious temptation is to simply dismiss the other - or to insist that what the other side calls "populism" isn't really populism at all, but just something populist-ish. But to conclude that the two camps are simply talking past each other would be to miss the extent to which they are in agreement -and what, taken together, they tell us about the current political moment.

In 1967, when political theorists from around the world gathered at the London School of Economics for the first ever academic conference on populism, they had a hard time figuring out exactly what they were supposed to be talking about. The word came from the "prairie populists", an 1890s movement of US farmers who supported more robust regulation of capitalism. But in the intervening decades it had been used for a wide and varied grab bag of phenomena from around the world, from McCarthyite anti-communist witch-hunts in the US to charismatic Latin American leaders.

In the end, the conference proceedings failed to clarify the matter at hand. "There can at present be no doubt about the importance of populism," read a summary report. "But no one is clear what it is."

Over half a century later, there has been some progress. Populism, specialists now agree, is an ideologically portable way of looking at politics as a forum for opposition between "people" and "elites". This definition creates more questions: is the conceptual "people" of populism inherently defined in a way that spells danger to pluralistic coexistence? Or, less menacingly, is the idea of "the people" a necessary but always malleable concept - simply part of what it means to do politics?

But populism, whatever it is, is not a chemical: no scientist will ever come along and reveal its exact, objective composition. Populism is a lens for looking at our politics, including - down a long hall of mirrors - the politics of what gets called populist, and with what implications.

The questions of populism would have little urgency were it not for the widespread agreement about the shortcomings of the political status quo: about the abyss between the shining ideals of equality and responsive government implied by our talk about democracy and the tarnished reality of life on the ground. The notion that "the people" are being poorly served by politics has vast resonance across the political spectrum, and for good reason.

But what is the remedy? Among the proponents of the ideological definition, some decline to provide an answer, claiming that they are looking only to define and measure populism, not take a stance on it. Others admit that, in the case of populism, the options for producing a description without forming a judgment are basically nonexistent. The order of the day, in their view, is to convince citizens to recommit to liberal democracy and its institutions.

There is, however, widespread recognition in this camp - more than they are credited with by their critics on the left - that it will no longer suffice to insist that there is no acceptable alternative to existing liberal democracy. Writing in the Guardian in 2017, Mudde argued that responding to populism required more than "purely anti-populist campaigns"; it would take, he claimed, "a return to ideological politics". Even liberals who want some issues to be "depoliticised" - to be removed from the realm of democracy and handed over to experts - will have to, at a minimum, remake the case for those decisions. Nothing can stay depoliticised for ever; that's politics.

If you squint just a little, this looks more than a bit like what you would expect from Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, with their insistence that there is no space "beyond left and right" and no way to put political decisions - decisions about our collective fate - outside the reach of politics. Arguably, you might say that the defenders of liberal democracy are being suddenly reacquainted with the need to construct a democratic "we" - a people - around their demand to protect liberal institutions and procedures, in opposition to radical rightwing parties who are happy to see them discarded.

The corresponding challenge for anyone further on the left is to figure out the relationship between their long-term goals and the ideals of liberal democracy. There have always been critics for whom liberal democracy is sham democracy: a nice-sounding set of universal principles that, in practice, end up functioning as smokescreens that normalise the exploitations and inequities of capitalism.

Other theorists, Mouffe included, view something like the European social democracy of the 60s and 70s as the precondition for whatever comes next - for "radical democracy" that forces liberal democracy to make good on its promises of equality. But even Mouffe is no longer optimistic about our ability to revive our democratic prospects. Two years ago she wrote: "In 1985 we said 'we need to radicalise democracy'; now we first need to restore democracy, so we can then radicalise it; the task is far more difficult." What that task will look like on the ground is an open question.

The media framing of populism almost always sounds like a discussion about the margins: about forces from outside "normal" or "rational" politics threatening to throw off the balance of the status quo. But the scholarly discourse makes clear that this is backward: that populism is inherent to democracy, and especially to democracy as we know it in the contemporary west. It finds life in the cracks - or more lately, the chasms - between democracy's promises and the impossibility of their full, permanent realisation.

The question of populism, then, is always the question of what kind of democracy we want, and the fact that we will never stop arguing about this. Anxiety about populism can be a smokescreen for people who don't want the world as they know it to be disturbed. But it also flows from the core insight that we can never know exactly where democracy is going to take us - not this time, nor the next, nor the time after that.

Follow the Long Read on Twitter at @gdnlongread, or sign up to the long read weekly email here.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
'We the people': the battle to define populism

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The long read : The noisy dispute over the meaning of populism is more than just an academic squabble - it's a crucial argument about what we expect from democracy

# data[].attributes.body
The journal article 'News Media and the racialization of protest: an analysis of Black Lives Matter articles' gave an interesting perspective into the intersection of media and populism. As Gottberg argues in the Color of Mobs, the media constructs understandings of acceptable political subjects by representing them as "destructive mob" or as a "legal, peaceful protest" (Gottberg, 2011, 271). Gottberg argues that this has a racialized aspect, as the Chavista movement is commonly portrayed as a "dark-skinned mob that overtakes the streets" (Gottberg, 2011, 272). This made be think of Black Lives Matter, and the way those protests are commonly portrayed as criminal, disruptive, and dangerous, with media outlets focusing on burning cars and destruction to property.

This article by Leopold & Bell explores the portrayal of BLM protests within news articles. They argue that journalists and editors can act as "agents of racialization that define social reality rather than solely reflecting it" (727). This is illustrated in the fact that many of the articles called into question the innocence of adult and child victims (730). These understandings of black lives matter movements are predicated upon conceptions of black people as inherently criminal. This conceptions were similar to the examples in Gottbergs article, such as the comedy sketch in which a creole man tries to court a feminine figure that represents the people, assumed to be dark skinned and poor. To seduce her, this upper-class man must resemble the people, which for him means not to shower, brush his teeth or dress neatly (285).

These similarities between the media portrayals of Chavistas and Black Lives Matter movements got me thinking; why are the BLM protests not considered a movement of "the people", such as the Chavistas? Black people are certainly not considered "the elites" and are a minority group of people fighting for their claim to the nation. Yet the media portrays BLM as a reckless, dangerous mob action- not a fight for independence and freedom. Is this because of a history of colonialism in which black people will never be considered "true" americans?

Leopold, Joy & Bell, Myrtle P, (2017) News media and the racialization of protest: an analysis of Black Lives Matter articles. Equality, diversity and inclusion an international journal, 36(8), pp.720–735.

# data[].attributes.body
The song Us and Them by Pink Floyd shows how the framework between "the people" and the "elite" is a framework not just used by state actors, but individuals in their daily lives. In the song, "us" are called the "ordinary people", while "them" are not only the Vietnamese, but also the general commanding the American troops. Here, the general can be seen as a type of "elite" who is unaffected by the fighting. This is exemplified in the line, "Forward he cried from the rear/ And the front rank died" and "The general sat/ and the lines on the map/ moved from side to side." I think this, in a way, mimics parts of populism as it is an "appeal to the people against the established structure of power and the dominant ideas and values of society" (Canovan, 2016, 3). Similarly, this anti-war song is revolting against the government and structures of power.

# data[].attributes.body
The notion of "us" and "them" within populism made me think about the rights accorded to individuals, which in the US is based on citizenship status. This news article is about the Trump administration's new citizenship test. The new test is more complicated than the last and forces officials to take more time administering each individual test. These new rules limits the amount of applicants exam officers can give. Additionally, they tried to double the citizenship application fee to over $ 1,000 dollars, which must be paid regardless if citizenship is awarded. The process of naturalization is a long, expensive and complicated process used to establish the boundaries of the nation state. I remember when I was in high school we all took the citizenship test to show us how difficult it is to become a citizen of the US.

Citizenship is used to establish who is "us" and who is "them". Within the US, there is a history of complicated legal processes to withhold the rights of citizens. Similar to the citizenship test, the black codes of the Jim Crow era worked to prevent black people from exercising their right to vote. Here, despite black people established as citizens of the US, restrictive laws like the Grandfather clause and tax requirements stopped them from voting. This history established a legacy in which the US is conceived as a white nation, and therefore its citizens must be white. This is still present today, and shown through the new citizenship laws and immigration agenda that specifically works to keep Latinx people disenfranchised. This works to separate "us" (white citizens) as separate and identifiable from "them" (BIPOC). This is especially apparent within the Trump administration, specifically Trump himself, in which he refers to all Latinx people as "the mexicans". This language homogenizes many different groups of people, many of those who do not even identify as Latinx but happen to speak Spanish. This depiction creates an image of a threatening mob (similar to Gottberg in The Color of Mobs) that have come to steal jobs and wreck havoc. The language used in his speeches depicts Latinx bodies as "out of place" in the US. Here, Latinx's are portrayed as criminals, rapists, drug dealers who are a threat to white America. Thus, Latinx are presented as a direct contrast to white America, and helps to establish the boundary between "us" and "them", "citizens" and "illegal immigrants".

# data[].attributes.body
Covid- 19 has disproportionately affected Black, Latinx, and Indigenous peoples. The increased news coverage on Covid-19, and the hopes of a vaccine, fail to acknowledge that "the people who need the vaccine the most won't have access to it". A dark history of unauthorized medical experimentation and unequal access to care reminds me of the journal article written by Farmer. While he focuses on the modern AIDS and tuberculosis epidemic in Haiti, there are many similarities with structural violence in the US, and many intersections between US policy and the Haitian revolution. He defines structural violence as "violence exerted systematically - that is, indirectly - by everyone who belongs to a certain social order" (307). This violence limits the agency of victims, such as the case of Anite, who went to 14 clinics without receiving care for breast cancer. The historic and economic processes affect who is given care and who isn't. The Covid-19 pandemic has forced acknowledgement of the effects of inequality on susceptibility and access to services.

This makes me think of relations of power, specifically Foucault. The notion of sovereignty "the right to take life or let live" figures heavily into the medical field, where it is the power to foster life or to neglect it until death. Drawing on Mbembe and his notion of necropolitics, this is put into systems of violence and domination through "the power and capacity to dictate who may live and who must die" (2019, 66). This distinction is driven by the economy, as Farmer said "governments have been more concerned with pillaging than with protecting rights" (311). Thus, the distribution of AIDS in Haiti, and Covid-19 in America is historically given and economically driven.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Racial disparities create obstacles for Covid-19 vaccine rollout

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
“Without considering racial equity, we deepen the cracks that systemic racism has already created in our health care system,” a health advocate said.

# data[].attributes.body
Hage's (2003) article, 'Comes a time we are all enthusiasm' speaks about the ethics of pursuing an anthropology of suicide bombing. He posits that terrorism is not the worst violence of humanity, but has come to be seen as much more violent than say colonial violence. He argues that Palestinian suicide bombings are borne out of desperation and a culture of martyrdom (Hage, 2003, 29). This article made me think of the ethical considerations of anthropologists and the duty of anthropologists to be engaged in activism within their work.

The Forbes article is about the growing activism on social media and led by many high-school students. This fits within a legacy of student-led activism, which comes from a history of the Civil Rights movement - such as the Greensboro sit-ins. The inspiring work of student activism makes me think of the role of activism within anthropology. Anthropologist that do not recognize the intersections of power and politics, as well as their own implicit biases reproduce inequalities and relations of power.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
WASHINGTON, USA - JUNE 3: Protests over the death of George Floyd, an unarmed black man who died ... [+]
Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

Following George Floyd's brutal murder at the hands of Minneapolis police last Monday, the Black Lives Matter movement has shifted to the forefront of the world's attention. Protesters have taken to the streets in cities around the world, including in Auckland, Paris, London, Copenhagen, and Amsterdam. Though student activists face endless obstacles in having their voices heard, "from distrust and dismissal from adults; to co-optation; to attrition by graduation, infighting, or simply other obligations as students" as Zachary Jason writes in Harvard's Ed. Magazine, they continue to take the lead as social activists fighting for equality and justice. Today, many are at the forefront of the Black Lives Matter movement.

The Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement was founded in 2013 in response to the acquittal of the man who shot and killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin. Since then, BLM has spread worldwide, and many have formed regional coalitions fighting for the racial justice and equality BLM stands for. This week, students planned BLM marches across the country. A protest from Katy ISD high school students in Houston planned for Thursday has " grown into a Black Lives Matter: Houston-sanctioned event with a projected attendance of more than 1,000 people." The growth of the protest has been attributed to social media, where news of the event spread quickly and led organizers to realize they would need to move the event to a larger venue to accommodate a larger crowd. Smaller student-led protests have taken place in Sonora County, CA and at State College in Minneapolis.

Activism has also found a platform on social media, where students propagate resources and information for others to become educated about the pressing need to strive for racial justice. Students share links to petitions, offer advice for safe protesting practices, create templates for emailing authorities, list bail funds and black-owned restaurants and businesses in need of support, and share videos documenting instances of police brutality at protests.

Across the nation, students have rallied behind the BLM movement and have spearheaded and founded branches of the movement. The Youth Vanguard, founded by Thandiwe Abdullah, and the Black Lives Matter Youth Coalition, founded by Nupol Kiazolu in the South Bronx, are examples of the powerful activists in the movement. Kiazolu has been protesting in Minneapolis these last few days.

In a phone interview with Teen Vogue, Kiazolu said, "At the end of the day, whether I sit at home or I'm on the front lines, I could be killed just for the color of my skin. If anything were to happen to me, I would want it to be for a righteous cause."

Kiazolu's activism as a student leader in the Black Lives Matter movement has taken many forms, from protesting Trayvon Martin's murder by wearing a hoodie marked "Do I look suspicious" to class ,and organizing a voter registration drive at her high school. As a college student at Hampton University, she is growing the voter registration initiative through her Vote 2000 campaign.

Students and educators for the BLM movement have also gathered to found Black Lives Matter at School, an organization dedicated to addressing and transforming the racial injustices present in the education system. Black Lives Matter At School advocates for a week of actions in schools, in which educators and members of the school community can engage in conversations to work towards a more socially just education system, especially for students of color.

Student activism has consistently been the most effective when students have made "an off-campus issue also a campus issue," Jason quotes Harvard professor Julie Reuben as saying. In fact, students are not unfamiliar with protesting against the racial injustices present in their campus environments. Take, for instance, the case that unraveled at the University of Missouri at Columbia in 2015. After students brought up multiple instances of being subjected to racial slurs and mistreatment, the student body launched protests and called for the resignation of then-president Tim Wolfe due to his inadequate response to support students of color. This proved to be successful, as the president resigned shortly after.

Student activism characteristic of the Black Lives Matter movement has a rich history in the United States, the same way student activism lay at the heart of the Civil Rights movement. Melissa Anderson wrote in The Atlantic; "From its inception, the 1960s civil-rights movement was fueled by youth leaders and student activists." This was evident in the 1960 Greensboro sit-ins, which were initiated by four black students of North Carolina A&T State University, and continued for six months. In the decade that followed the landmark Brown vs. Board of Education decision, students in Chicago and New York took to the streets to protest in favor of school integration.

In the Chicago Public Schools Boycott, 250,000 students boycotted schools and 20,000 marched in the streets of Chicago in October of 1963. Four months later, 450,000 students protested segregation in the streets of New York. Five years later in East Los Angeles, students walked out of their high schools to protest the poor educational opportunities in their schools, chanting "Education, not eradication!" These protests continued for a week, and in part, fueled the Chicano power movement in southern California. These protests further emphasize the role that student voices have had in shaping the present and the future.

Students have continued their longstanding fight against structural violence and racial injustices in recent years outside of the BLM movement. In 2018, students across the nation staged "walkouts" in honor of the victims of the school shooting in Parkland, Florida. Students subsequently took to the street, demanding gun control and changes to state and national laws. The Voices of Youth in Chicago Education (VOYCE) is a Chicago-based youth alliance united around issues related to education and racial justice. VOYCE's Senate Bill 100, which addressed punitive school discipline practices, was passed by the Illinois Senate in May of 2015. As a result; " districts throughout Illinois will be required to eliminate zero-tolerance punishment, minimize out-of-school suspensions and expulsions, and adopt other discipline-related policies. "

Young activists and students have played a critical role in calling for change and transformation in our society. Today, these activists have turned to the streets and to social media to amplify their voices and to call attention to structural racism and police brutality across the country. Social rights activist Desmond Tutu once stated, "If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor." Students and young activists throughout history and across the country have been anything but neutral or quiet.

... Read More

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How Student Activism Shaped The Black Lives Matter Movement

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Following George Floyd's brutal murder at the hands of Minneapolis police last Monday, the Black Lives Matter movement has shifted to the forefront of the world's attention. Protesters have taken to the streets in cities around the world, including in Auckland, Paris, London, Copenhagen, and Amsterdam.

# data[].attributes.body
This weeks lecture, and readings about suicide bombings and terrorism got me thinking about 9/11.   This event is so widely recognized and mourned in American society. Everyone has a story about where they were on 9/11 or when they found out it happened. (My dad was in the Pentagon parking lot coming out of a meeting when the pentagon plane hit). In middle school we performed a play about 9/11 and had guest speakers who were first responders on the site.

This, and the subsequent War on Terror, led to increased hate crimes on Muslims or those perceived to be Muslim. Even now, in 2020 Muslims are targets of hate crimes and have increased since Trump's election. The Muslim Ban institutionalized this violence against Muslims, as well as situates Muslims as Other. While the widespread effects of 9/11 are still harped on, other forms of violence with higher mortality rates, is not considered such a terrible act. This is not to say that terrorist violence is acceptable, but it is important to understand the conditions in which terrorists perceive this violence as their only option. Additionally, the anthropology of suicide bombing and terrorism often has a moralizing agenda - such as condemning such violence or seen as supporting it for simply having a neutral opinion

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
For the last 19 years, 9/11 has been a somber, difficult day - a day of mourning for Americans. On it, we commemorate the 2,977 lives lost when terrorist flew planes into the World Trade Center in New York City, the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., and a field in Pennsylvania.

While the attacks that day caused direct devastation, myriad aftershocks have had other horrifying consequences - notably, the endless wars the U.S. started in Afghanistan and Iraq. Another, immediate effect of the attacks was a rise in Islamophobia throughout the United States. Though Islamophobia certainly wasn't invented in 2001, political and social reactions to 9/11 fueled ignorance and bigotry and violence towards Muslims.

And this wasn't just limited to the weeks following 9/11, in the years since then, anti-Islamic hate crimes have surged across the U.S. This rise in Islamophobia is well-documented, which made it all the more surprising that New York Times journalist Paul Krugman tweeted earlier today that "there wasn't a mass outbreak of anti-Muslim sentiment and violence."

In the months following 9/11, the number of hate crimes against Muslims jumped: In 2000, there were just 28 recorded hate crimes; in 2001, there were 481. While anti-Muslim hate crimes used to be the second-least reported type of religious-bias incidents, they quickly became the second-highest reported; Muslims spoke out about being shamed and physically assaulted in public.

In the week after September 11 alone, three people were killed because of Islamophobia. On September 15, Balbir Singh Sodhi - who was Sikh but, according to NPR, was mistaken for being Muslim because of his turban- was killed in Arizona. The same day, Waqar Hasan and Vasudev Patel were gunned down in Texas, where the perpetrator said he did it to "avenge" the United States on 9/11.

The hatred hasn't stopped, and anti-Muslim sentiment fueled by 9/11 continues to affect Muslims in America. In a survey from 2017, 75% of Muslim Americans said there's a lot of discrimination against Muslims in the United States, with 48% of those surveyed responding they had experienced at least one incident of discrimination in the last year. Across America, Muslims have continued to speak out about the ways they're treated with suspicion, called names, or singled out by airport security.

"I have to go an extra hour earlier than anybody else, because it's not random checking," Nafees Syed, who wears a hijab, told the New York Times in 2016.

To educate people and change the mindset that Islam is synonymous with terrorism, Muslim activists and organizers like Heraa Hashmi, who created MuslimsCondemn.com, have worked to spread awareness. She and others have attempted to shift the narrative against Muslims that has been pervasive since 2001, and make people understand the faults of stereotyping a whole religion of 1.6 billion people.

"I wanted to show people how weak the argument that Muslims don't care about terrorism is," Hashmi told The Guardian. Teachers, too, have found the need to create special curricula to talk about 9/11 and contextualize and correct anti-Muslim sentiment.

Islamophobia has also been fueled by politicians, including our current president and members of his cabinet. After Trump's 2016 campaign started, Islamophobia peaked, and the number of assaults against Muslims in America rose significantly between 2015 and 2016, surpassing the peak that had been reached in 2001, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of hate crimes statistics.

Before he even got to the White House, Trump falsely alleged that Muslims were cheering in New York after 9/11 and celebrating the attacks. One of his first acts in office was to attempt to implement a "Muslim ban" - an attempt to suspend immigration from predominantly Muslim countries.

Today, many Muslims are still struggling with both the ignorance and hatred fueled by Islamophobia, as well as constant political attacks. "We must always acknowledge and remember that Islamophobia has always existed in this country, specifically against enslaved people and Black American Muslims post-slavery. After 9/11, hatred for Muslims intensified, masked under a guise of national security and justified fear of others. This manifested into the creation of ICE, the TSA, desecration of mosques, and hate crimes," Reina Sultan, a Muslim journalist, tells Refinery29. "That's not normal mourning, that's deadly racism and it's continuing today with a fascist president who enacted a Muslim ban as soon as he entered office."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Yes, 9/11 Did Cause An Increase In Islamophobia

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
For the last 19 years, 9/11 has been a somber, difficult day - a day of mourning for Americans. On it, we commemorate the 2,977 lives lost when terrorist flew planes into the World Trade Center in New York City, the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., and a field in Pennsylvania.

# data[].attributes.body
While media attention on police brutality has grown with the Black Lives Matter movement, the loss of life of disabled people at the hands of police is not given as much publicity. Many of the people who are killed by the police have some kind of disability. The majority of these people are also black which leads to increased stigmatization and physical violence on these black, disabled people. In the case of mental health crisis, police officers are often the first ones called, as there is a lack of services to address these issues. This problem does not stop at arrest though, in courts and prisons there are not enough facilities to help those in need. While a lot of the anthropological readings we do focus on the intersections of race, class, and gender - assumptions still stand that the norm is that of an able body.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Almost half of the people who die at the hands of police have some kind of disability, according to a new report, as officers are often drawn into emergencies where urgent care may be more appropriate than lethal force.

The report, published by the Ruderman Family Foundation, a disability organization, proposes that while police interactions with minorities draw increasing scrutiny, disability and health considerations are still neglected in media coverage and law enforcement policy.

"Police have become the default responders to mental health calls," write the authors, historian David Perry and disability expert Lawrence Carter-Long, who analyzed incidents from 2013 to 2015. They propose that "people with psychiatric disabilities" are presumed to be "dangerous to themselves and others" in police interactions.

The report wades directly into the racial debates over policing, noting that while coverage of police brutality cases has understandably "focused on race," that lens can also obscure how disability also factors into police interactions.

Take one of the most discussed recent police brutality cases - the Chicago Police shooting of LaQuan McDonald, a black teenager killed while acting erratically and holding a knife. Prosecutors took the unusual step of charging an officer with first degree murder, noting McDonald did not pose a lethal threat to the officers who had surrounded him. When video of the shooting was released, it sparked the resignation of Chicago's police chief and a national debate over race and policing.

"Police have become the default responders to mental health calls"

There was far less focus, however, on McDonald's health. According to a later investigation by the Chicago Tribune, McDonald suffered from PTSD and "complex mental health problems."

That reality may be relevant to his conduct the night of his death - and ways the police might have de-escalated the interaction.

According to law enforcement experts, it is crucial that officers precisely evaluate the problems a suspect may be experiencing.

"Officers are action-oriented people," says Jim Cavanaugh, a former federal agent and MSNBC analyst. "The training always has to be a slow evaluation - if possible."

If other mechanisms to help people with disabilities or mental illness have failed, Cavanaugh suggested, often its police who end up facing that breakdown in an emergency scenario.

"Every crisis in this society," he says, "always gets dumped right in front of the officer."

The report also cites the tragic example of Ethan Saylor, a 26-year-old with Down syndrome who was simply trying to spend a day at the movies when he was killed in 2013.

Saylor had purchased a ticket to see "Zero Dark Thirty," but when he tried to stay in the theater for a second showing of the movie, he got into an altercation with the theater's security.

"Every crisis in this society always gets dumped right in front of the officer."

Saylor was unarmed, and three off-duty Frederick County deputies, working as security guards, restrained and dragged him from the theater until he died of asphyxiation.

Saylor could be heard screaming "mommy, mommy," "it hurts," according to a lawsuit filed by his family. Authorities ruled the death a homicide. A Maryland grand jury declined, however, to indict the officers.

The report compares Saylor's case to several other instances where police used force on non-compliant individuals with Down syndrome. The implication is that using force to address compliance - an option in conventional policing - is counterproductive without careful attention to a suspect's health or cognitive abilities.

The authors recommend police adopt specific training to address people with disabilities, and they argue that public discussion of police brutality should consider the intersection of disability, class and race in scrutinizing police use of force.

Some police departments are experimenting with new approaches. In August, Phoenix Police launched an entire squad, the Crisis Intervention Team, devoted to responding to emergencies that involve mental health issues.

The initiative grew out of concerns that in Phoenix, roughly one out of ten officer-involved shootings were of suspects with mental illness. There was also intense local outrage after the 2014 fatal police shooting of Michelle Cusseaux, a woman who had been diagnosed with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.

Police came to Cusseaux's house to transfer her to a mental health facility, under a court's orders, but when she allegedly charged at an officer with a hammer, he shot her dead.

Many criticized the incident as an avoidable escalation, and an example of a scenario where police need better preparation to address a foreseeable disability emergency.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Half of People Killed by Police Have a Disability: Report

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Almost half of the people who die at the hands of police have some kind of disability, according to a new report, as officers are often drawn into emergencies where urgent care may be more appropriate than lethal force.

# data[].attributes.body
In the recent US presidential election, the Virginia ballot voted on bipartisan gerrymandering. Gerrymandering is when politicians divide the state into districts in a way that favors or hurts Democrats or Republicans. This helps political parties stay in power and reduces the power of the voters. While the US espouses itself as a democracy practices such as gerrymandering reveal the manipulation behind the electoral system.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The Virginia state Capitol in Richmond in January. (Steve Helber/AP)

In her Sept. 8 letter, " Trouble with bipartisan redistricting," Barbara E. Taylor said, "I object to Virginia's declaring unilateral disarmament when Republican-dominated state legislatures elsewhere continue gerrymandering." This statement reflects the intensely partisan political environment we're living in, which is the direct result of partisan gerrymandering.

Moving beyond partisan politics, let's remember that gerrymandering actually harms democracy. With guaranteed reelection thanks to automatically safe seats, politicians are less accountable to their constituents. There is little incentive to work across the aisle to make change to benefit their communities. The follow-ons are low voter engagement and a feeling that one's vote doesn't count.

Voters deserve a responsive, accountable representative democracy. Virginians can make lasting change for the better by approving Amendment 1. The amendment would establish a bipartisan redistricting commission with citizens actually leading this important conversation for the first time, full transparency in all meetings and records, and voter protection for racial and ethnic minorities in redistricting regardless of the federal Voting Rights Act. Or Virginians can do nothing and keep feeding a broken system that does nothing to benefit voters' communities.

The writer is a volunteer for FairMapsVA

Today's Headlines

The most important news stories of the day, curated by Post editors and delivered every morning.

By signing up you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Opinion | Allowing partisan gerrymandering helps feed a broken system

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In her Sept. 8 letter, " Trouble with bipartisan redistricting," Barbara E. Taylor said, "I object to Virginia's declaring unilateral disarmament when Republican-dominated state legislatures elsewhere continue gerrymandering." This statement reflects the intensely partisan political environment we're living in, which is the direct result of partisan gerrymandering.

# data[].attributes.body
Within a democracy, elections only work if the losing side admits defeat. Trump's calls of voter fraud and refusal to step down erodes the strength of the election system. The electoral system only stands because of its investment of the people, which is shown through voting. Trump's calls of a false election goes against the foundation of American democracy. This leads to a fracturing of the nation in which Trump and his supporters go against the institution of democracy and create even more polarization between Democrats and Republicans.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
President-elect Joe Biden attacked Republicans for making baseless claims about the legitimacy of the election on Dec. 14 in Wilmington, Del. (The Washington Post)

After the electoral college cemented his victory on Monday, President-elect Joe Biden urged the nation and the GOP to "turn the page" on weeks of false claims by President Trump and his allies that massive fraud had flipped the election.

Trump, though, soon made it clear that he has no intention of moving on.

In a cascade of tweets sent after midnight, the president shared more dubious claims of electoral fraud and falsely insisted, yet again, that he was the true victor.

"Many Trump votes were routed to Biden," Trump baselessly claimed in one tweet early Tuesday. "This Fake Election can no longer stand. Get moving Republicans."

The early-morning posts erased any doubts about Trump's willingness to continue undermining the election results, even as Monday's electoral college vote led more Republican senators to acknowledge Biden's win and left some of Trump's closest media allies urging him to accept his defeat.

Electoral college affirms Biden's victory on a relatively calm day of a chaotic election

Trump has spent six weeks pushing conspiracy theories and evidence-free claims about massive voter fraud. His legal team's efforts to push similar claims in court have been tossed time and again, including in a succinct rejection on Friday from the U.S. Supreme Court, which refused to hear a suit from the attorney general of Texas that was backed by scores of elected Republicans.

Biden took particular aim at that effort on Monday night after he netted 306 electoral college votes, lambasting the GOP for signing onto a lawsuit that sought to disenfranchise millions of voters.

"Thankfully, a unanimous Supreme Court immediately and completely rejected this effort," Biden said. "The court sent a clear signal to President Trump that they would be no part of an unprecedented assault on our democracy."

On Trump's Twitter account, at least, an assault on the election results continued apace early on Tuesday.

Trump retweeted multiple posts highlighting a Michigan judge's decision on Monday to release a report written by Russell Ramsland, a cybersecurity analyst and former Republican congressional candidate, that alleges Dominion Voting Systems machines "flipped" ballots from Trump to Biden in Antrim County, Mich.

There is not and has not been any credible evidence of significant fraud in the 2020 election

"This is BIG NEWS. Dominion Voting Machines are a disaster all over the Country. Changed the results of a landslide election," Trump tweeted with a link to the report.

But Ramsland has previously signed inaccurate affidavits in other Trump legal challenges, including one that grossly misstated voting turnout in Michigan and another that mixed up Michigan and Minnesota voting precincts. Michigan Assistant Attorney General Erik Grill told the Detroit Free-Press that the report is "inaccurate, incomplete and misleading."

As The Washington Post's Philip Bump reported on Monday, the report is based on results in a small county that Trump won by 3,800 votes - in a state that Biden carried by more than 150,000 votes.

Trump also retweeted similarly baseless claims about Dominion machines in Nevada, as well as accounts mocking Biden's transition to the White House.

"Election Status: Trump is in the process of proving he won, and Biden is pretending he did," read one tweet the president shared.

Like many of Trump's posts since the election - including all his claims of fraud early on Tuesday - Twitter flagged that retweet with a warning about its accuracy.

Updated December 15, 2020

Election 2020: Biden defeats Trump
Electoral college affirms Biden's victory on a relatively calm day of a chaotic election 'This is the reality': Newsmax and One America grapple uneasily with Biden's electoral college victory
Electoral college: Tracking the vote
Graphic: Where Republicans in Congress stand on Trump's false claim of winning the election
Election results under attack: Here are the facts
Show More Show Less
Today's Headlines

The most important news stories of the day, curated by Post editors and delivered every morning.

By signing up you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
After electoral college backs Biden, Trump continues falsely insisting he won: 'This Fake Election can no longer stand'

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
After the electoral college cemented his victory on Monday, President-elect Joe Biden urged the nation and the GOP to "turn the page" on weeks of false claims by President Trump and his allies that massive fraud had flipped the election. Trump, though, soon made it clear that he has no intention of moving on.