Discourse that allows us to express a wide range of ideas, opinions, and analysis that can be used as an opportunity to critically examine and observe what our experience means to us beyond the given social/cultural contexts and norms that are provided us.
Professor Cornel West delivers the 2024 Gifford Lecture Series at the University of Edinburgh, titled ‘A Jazz-soaked Philosophy for our Catastrophic Times: From Socrates to Coltrane’. This is the first of six lectures, titled ‘Philosophic Prelude’.
In this first lecture, Prof. West asks: How do we emerge from the bleakness of our catastrophic times?
He summarises: ‘In seeking a way forward, I will proceed on three philosophic levels – the genealogical, existential and pedagogical. The genealogical, or historical, level of my analysis will set the stage, and my period will be broadly the Age of Europe (1492-1945) and Age of America (1945-2024). The existential level of my analysis will embrace the lived experiences of struggling, suffering creatures. The pedagogical level will be classical in character and musical in content. My overall theme will resonate with the three pillars of jazz – blues (tragicomic catastrophe lyrically expressed), swing (myopic time opened to new possibilities) and improvisation (practical wisdom and timely interventions unleashed).’
Prof. West is the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Professor of Philosophy & Christian Practice, Union Theological Seminary, New York. His teaching and publications focus on roles of race, gender, and class struggle in American society, synthesizing influences from Christianity, the Black Church, democratic socialism, left-wing populism, neopragmatism and transcendentalism. A musician and spoken word artist, Prof. West has collaborated with acts across the rap, hip-hop and funk genres, as well as appearing in the Matrix series and many documentary films.
The prestigious Gifford Lectureships, held at the Universities of Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen, and St Andrews, have been delivered annually since 1888 by a succession of distinguished international scholars. The Lectureships were established by Adam Lord Gifford (1820-1887) to ‘promote and diffuse the study of Natural Theology in the widest sense of the term – in other words, the knowledge of God’, and have enabled a most notable field of scholars to contribute to the advancement of theological thought.
Aid agencies are running out of food in southern Gaza amid Israel’s ongoing offensive in Rafah and the shutdown of the two main border crossings in the south. Some 1.1 million Palestinians are on the brink of starvation, according to the United Nations, while a “full-blown famine” is taking place in the north. Meanwhile, some Israelis have been blocking aid from reaching the Gaza border, including a violent attack on trucks carrying humanitarian relief through the occupied West Bank earlier this week, when settlers threw food packages on the ground and set fire to the vehicles at the Tarqumiyah checkpoint near Hebron. “They did whatever they want,” says Israeli lawyer and peace activist Sapir Sluzker Amran, who documented the attack on the aid convoy. She says Israeli soldiers appeared to be working with the settlers, refusing to intervene. “They were just standing aside like there is nothing that they can do, like it’s normal, what’s happening.”
Democracy Now! is an independent global news hour that airs on over 1,500 TV and radio stations Monday through Friday. Watch our livestream at democracynow.org Mondays to Fridays 8-9 a.m. ET.
Palestinians across the globe are marking the 76th anniversary of the Nakba — which means "catastrophe" in Arabic — when those establishing the state of Israel violently expelled over 700,000 Palestinians. Palestinian historian Abdel Razzaq Takriti says closer to 900,000 Palestinians were forced out or massacred during Israel's founding, which is being celebrated inside Israel with calls to ethnically cleanse and settle the Gaza Strip and the occupied West Bank. "The Nakba is continuing. This is a colonial continuum," says Takriti. "It's not enough to commemorate. It's not enough to talk about it. We have to stop it right now. … The first step to doing that is to stop the genocide in Gaza."
Takriti lays out four principles for Nakba education: refuting Nakba denialism, recognizing the Nakba is part of an ongoing process of settler colonialism, stopping that process, and then reversing it by restoring Palestinian national rights.
Democracy Now! is an independent global news hour that airs on over 1,500 TV and radio stations Monday through Friday. Watch our livestream at democracynow.org Mondays to Fridays 8-9 a.m. ET.
Israel said on
Thursday that it would send more troops to Rafah, the southernmost city
in Gaza, which has become the focal point in the war between Israel and
Hamas.
The announcement signaled that
Israel intends to press deeper into Rafah despite international concerns
about the threat to civilians from a full-scale invasion of the city,
where more than a million displaced people had been sheltering.
“Hundreds
of targets have already been attacked,” Yoav Gallant, Israel’s defense
minister, said after meeting with commanders in the Rafah area. “This
operation will continue.”
For the past week Israel has described its offensive as a limited military operation, but satellite imagery and Mr. Gallant’s comments on Thursday suggested that a more significant incursion was already underway.
Rafah
is the most important logistics hub in the Gaza Strip, the crucial
gateway for most of the food, medicine and other aid that has entered
the enclave of 2.2 million people. The fighting has led to the closure
of a border crossing between Rafah and Egypt and, for a time, greatly
reduced traffic at one between Rafah and Israel at Kerem Shalom.
“The threat of famine in Gaza never loomed larger,” the United Nations’ World Food Program warned this week.
As
Israel pushes more deeply into Rafah, and renewed Israeli airstrikes
and fighting in hard-pressed northern Gaza send tens of thousands of
other civilians fleeing, the questions of where displaced Gazans will go
and how food, medicine and other essentials will enter and be
distributed across Gaza are growing more critical.
An Israeli tank near the border with the Gaza Strip on Thursday. Credit: Leo Correa/Associated Press
Ra’fat
Abu Tueima, 62, and his family have been forced to move six times since
the start of the war in Gaza. On Thursday he found himself in his
latest makeshift shelter, crammed inside a tent in the battle-ravaged
city of Khan Younis wondering how he will feed his nine children.
A taxi driver before the war, Mr. Abu Tueima is among what the United
Nations estimates is an exodus of 600,000 people from the southern city
of Rafah and its surroundings, where Israeli airstrikes are pounding the
land and tanks are rumbling ever deeper into the urban sprawl.
Mr. Abu Tueima, his tent erected in a
school courtyard, said he felt abandoned. “No one here helped us with
anything,” he said, the stress of seven months of war bringing him to
tears.
In Rafah, which he
fled last week, he was able to find some aid, Mr. Abu Tueima said. But
in Khan Younis he feels bereft of hope. “Not one single person asked
about us,” he said. “No one even cares about all of those children and
women here.”
Outside the school
courtyard on Thursday, a few trucks carrying humanitarian aid drove down
the street. Children tried to grab whatever they could, a few making
off with bags of sugar.
As
criticism of Israel’s military operations mounted on Thursday, South
Africa urged the judges of the International Court of Justice to order
an end to the ground assault on Rafah, saying it put Palestinian life in
the enclave at imminent risk of destruction.
The hearing came after South Africa requested last week that the court issue further constraints
on Israel’s military campaign in Gaza. In filings disclosed by the
court, South Africa cited the “irreparable harm” posed by Israel’s
incursion into Rafah.
“No
one even cares about all of those children and women here,” Ra’fat Abu
Tueima said of Khan Younis, where he and his family fled. Credit: Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
“It
has become increasingly clear that Israel’s actions in Rafah are part
of the end game in which Gaza is utterly destroyed as an area capable of
human habitation,” Vaughan Lowe, a British lawyer, told the court.
“This is the last step in the destruction of Gaza and its Palestinian
people.”
Israel, which denies the
claim of genocide, says its latest assault on eastern Rafah is a
“precise operation” targeting members of Hamas. It is expected to make
its defense before the court on Friday.
In
one hopeful development, the American military anchored a temporary
pier on Gaza’s coast on Thursday, creating an additional point of entry
for humanitarian aid, though the system is still being tested.
Aid will be loaded onto trucks that will begin moving ashore “in the coming days,” the U.S. Central Command said in a statement
Thursday morning. Officials said last week that the floating pier and
causeway had been completed, but that weather conditions had delayed
their installation.
An American ship loaded with humanitarian aid, the Sagamore, set off last week from Cyprus for Gaza,
where the materials were loaded onto a smaller vessel for transport to
the pier. The United Nations will receive the shipment and oversee its
distribution in Gaza, according to Central Command, which said no
American troops would set foot in the territory.
An injured man on a horse-pulled cart in the Zaitoun neighborhood of Gaza City on Wednesday. Credit: Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Over
the next two days, the U.S. military and humanitarian groups will aim
to load three to five trucks from the pier and send them into Gaza as a
trial run, said Gen. Charles Q. Brown, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs
of Staff.
“It’ll probably take another
24 hours to make sure everything is set up,” General Brown told
reporters on Thursday aboard a flight to Brussels, where he was
attending a NATO meeting. “We have our force protection that’s been put
in place, we have contract truck drivers on the other side, and there’s
fuel for those truck drivers as well.”
The
Pentagon hopes the pier operation will bring in enough aid for around
90 trucks a day initially, reaching 150 a day when it reaches full
capacity, officials say.
Aid agencies and U.N. officials have said the Gaza Strip requires around 500 to 600 trucks a day at minimum to meet its needs.
In
a briefing on Thursday, an Israeli military spokesman, Lt. Col. Nadav
Shoshani, said supporting the temporary pier project was a “top
priority.” He said the Israeli Navy and the 99th Division were
supporting the effort by sea and by land.
In
Rafah, the Israeli military has until this point described its
operations as a limited incursion. Both the United States and the
European Union have warned against a major invasion there, saying that
the humanitarian toll would be too high.
Satellite
imagery captured on Wednesday showed Israeli forces pushing closer to
the center of Rafah. Collapsed buildings and debris can be seen
throughout the eastern parts of the city, a contrast to images from last
week, when only limited damage was visible.
Many areas of Rafah that were full of tents and vehicles just a week ago appeared empty on Wednesday.
Reporting was contributed by Victoria Kim, Natan Odenheimer, Lauren Leatherby, Rawan Sheikh Ahmad, Helene Cooper, Gaya Gupta, Matthew Mpoke Bigg, Marlise Simons and Johnatan Reiss.
In his monologue, Mehdi calls out the Israeli PR machine for warping the UN’s reporting on identified bodies into a false narrative about a “fake” death toll in Gaza.
“On May 8th, [the UN] provided a number for reported fatalities – again, over 34,000 – but also included a new subset of 24,686 ‘identified’ fatalities,” Mehdi said. “What they’re pretending is some smoking gun evidence of a Hamas cover-up, is literally just the difference between fully identified bodies and unidentified or partially-identified bodies. That’s it.”
Of course, this is not the first time Israel has tried to undermine the Gaza Health Ministry. But as Mehdi points out, Israel’s accusations are nothing but propaganda, especially when you consider that Israel’s own military relies on the Gaza health ministry’s numbers.
—
Founded by Mehdi Hasan, Zeteo has a strong bias for the truth and an unwavering belief in the media’s responsibility to the public. Unfiltered news, bold opinions.
For more content from Zeteo, subscribe now www.zeteo.com.
EDWARD SAID (1935-2003). Palestinian-born intellectual and world-famous literary critic. Author of 'Orientalism' and 'The Question of Palestine'. Professor of English Literature at Columbia University, NYC until his death. From the BBC series 'Exiles’.
Tariq Ali introduces an interview with literary critic and public intellectual Edward Said filmed in 1994 in which they discuss Said’s childhood, his political activism for Palestine, and his works.
AMERICA wants another Pep talk It’s never satisfied Banality rules its days & nights
Another mass rally
Never satisfied Mass media not enuff Mass boredom not enuff Mass murder not enuff now nothing can quench its rampaging thirst for lies
AMERICA wants a panacea wants a placebo wants a panderer wants a papier-mache god it can pray to wants a Victim it can identify with scream at cry over stomp on BE!
AMERICA WANTS ANOTHER ENEMY (besides itself) You see: it’s never satiated Infantilism rules Its afternoons & evenings
Another mass tally
Never satiated Stupidity not enuff Cynicism not enuff Suicide not enuff now nothing can impede its spiralling flight toward emptiness
AMERICA wants another alibi wants another excuse wants still another thrill wants another ‘reason’ to eat up the world wants a Fear it can live with fawn over suck on talk about BE!!
[Poem from the book INTERVALS by Kofi Natambu. Post Aesthetic Press, 1983]
At Justice Alito’s House, a ‘Stop the Steal’ Symbol on Display
An
upside-down flag, adopted by Trump supporters contesting the Biden
victory, flew over the justice’s front lawn as the Supreme Court was
considering an election case.
A photo obtained by The Times shows an inverted flag at the Alito residence on Jan. 17, 2021, three days before the Biden inauguration.
After
the 2020 presidential election, as some Trump supporters falsely
claimed that President Biden had stolen the office, many of them
displayed a startling symbol outside their homes, on their cars and in
online posts: an upside-down American flag.
One
of the homes flying an inverted flag during that time was the residence
of Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., in Alexandria, Va.,
according to photographs and interviews with neighbors.
The
upside-down flag was aloft on Jan. 17, 2021, the images showed.
President Donald J. Trump’s supporters, including some brandishing the
same symbol, had rioted at the Capitol a little over a week before. Mr.
Biden’s inauguration was three days away. Alarmed neighbors snapped
photographs, some of which were recently obtained by The New York Times.
Word of the flag filtered back to the court, people who worked there
said in interviews.
While the flag was up, the court was still contending with whether to hear a 2020 election case, with Justice Alito on the losing end
of that decision. In coming weeks, the justices will rule on two
climactic cases involving the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6,
including whether Mr. Trump has immunity for his actions. Their
decisions will shape how accountable he can be held for trying to
overturn the last presidential election and his chances for re-election in the upcoming one.
“I had no
involvement whatsoever in the flying of the flag,” Justice Alito said in
an emailed statement to The Times. “It was briefly placed by Mrs. Alito
in response to a neighbor’s use of objectionable and personally
insulting language on yard signs.”
Judicial
experts said in interviews that the flag was a clear violation of
ethics rules, which seek to avoid even the appearance of bias, and could
sow doubt about Justice Alito’s impartiality in cases related to the
election and the Capitol riot.
The
mere impression of political opinion can be a problem, the ethics
experts said. “It might be his spouse or someone else living in his
home, but he shouldn’t have it in his yard as his message to the world,”
said Amanda Frost, a law professor at the University of Virginia.
This
is “the equivalent of putting a ‘Stop the Steal’ sign in your yard,
which is a problem if you’re deciding election-related cases,” she said.
Interviews
show that the justice’s wife, Martha-Ann Alito, had been in a dispute
with another family on the block over an anti-Trump sign on their lawn,
but given the timing and the starkness of the symbol, neighbors
interpreted the inverted flag as a political statement by the couple.
The longstanding ethics code for the lower courts, as well as the recent one
adopted by the Supreme Court, stress the need for judges to remain
independent and avoid political statements or opinions on matters that
could come before them.
“You
always want to be proactive about the appearance of impartiality,”
Jeremy Fogel, a former federal judge and the director of the Berkeley
Judicial Institute, said in an interview. “The best practice would be to
make sure that nothing like that is in front of your house.”
The
court has also repeatedly warned its own employees against public
displays of partisan views, according to guidelines circulated to the
staff and reviewed by The Times. Displaying signs or bumper stickers is
not permitted, according to the court’s internal rule book and a 2022
memo reiterating the ban on political activity.
Excerpts from guidelines given to the Supreme Court staff.
Asked if these rules also apply to justices, the court declined to respond.
The
exact duration that the flag flew outside the Alito residence is
unclear. In an email from Jan. 18, 2021, reviewed by The Times, a
neighbor wrote to a relative that the flag had been upside down for
several days at that point.
In recent years, the quiet sanctuary of his street, with residents who
are registered Republicans and Democrats, has tensed with conflict,
neighbors said. Around the 2020 election,
a family on the block displayed an anti-Trump sign with an expletive.
It apparently offended Mrs. Alito and led to an escalating clash between
her and the family, according to interviews.
Some residents have also bridled at the
noise and intrusion brought by protesters, who started showing up
outside the Alito residence in 2022 after the Supreme Court overturned
the federal right to abortion. Other neighbors have joined the
demonstrators, whose intent was “to bring the protest to their personal
lives because the decisions affect our personal lives,” said Heather-Ann
Irons, who came to the street to protest.
The
half-dozen neighbors who saw the flag, or knew of it, requested
anonymity because they said they did not want to add to the
contentiousness on the block and feared reprisal. Last Saturday, May 11,
protesters returned to the street, waving flags of their own (“Don’t
Tread on My Uterus”) and using a megaphone to broadcast expletives at
Justice Alito, who was in Ohio giving a commencement address. Mrs. Alito appeared in a window, complaining to the Supreme Court security detail outside.
Turning
the American flag upside down is a symbol of emergency and distress,
first used as a military S.O.S., historians said in interviews. In
recent decades, it has increasingly been used as a political protest
symbol — a controversial one, because the flag code and military
tradition require the paramount symbol of the United States to be
treated with respect.
Over
the years, upside-down flags have been displayed by both the right and
the left as an outcry over a range of issues, including the Vietnam War,
gun violence,
the Supreme Court’s overturning of the constitutional right to abortion
and, in particular, election results. In 2012, Tea Party followers
inverted flags at their homes to signal disgust at the re-election of President Barack Obama. Four years later, some liberals advised doing the same after Mr. Trump was elected.
Trump supporters at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.Credit: Getty Images/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
A demonstrator in California waved an inverted flag during the Biden inauguration. Credit: Watchara Phomicinda/The Press-Enterprise via Getty Images
During
Mr. Trump’s quest to win, and then subvert, the 2020 election, the
gesture took off as never before, becoming “really established as a
symbol of the ‘Stop the Steal’ campaign,” according to Alex Newhouse, a
researcher at the University of Colorado Boulder.
“If Jan. 6 rolls around and Biden is confirmed by the Electoral College our nation is in distress!!” a poster wrote
on Patriots.win, a forum for Trump supporters, garnering over a
thousand “up” votes. “If you cannot go to the DC rally then you must do
your duty and show your support for our president by flying the flag
upside down!!!!”
Local newspapers from Lexington, Ky., to Sun City, Ariz.,
to North Jersey wrote about the flags cropping up nearby. A few days
before the inauguration, a Senate candidate in Minnesota flew an
upside-down flag on his campaign vehicle.
Hanging
an inverted flag outside a home was “an explicit signifier that you are
part of this community that believes America has been taken and needs
to be taken back,” Mr. Newhouse said.
This
spring, the justices are already laboring under suspicion by many
Americans that whatever decisions they make about the Jan. 6 cases will
be partisan. Justice Clarence Thomas has declined to recuse himself
despite the direct involvement of his wife, Virginia Thomas, in efforts to overturn the election.
Now,
with decisions in the Jan. 6 cases expected in just a few weeks, a
similar debate may unfurl about Justice Alito, the ethics experts said.
“It really is a question of appearances and the potential impact on
public confidence in the court,” Mr. Fogel said. “I think it would be
better for the court if he weren’t involved in cases arising from the
2020 election. But I’m pretty certain that he will see that
differently.”
If Justice Alito were on
another court, Mr. Fogel said, the flag could also trigger some sort of
review to determine if there was any misconduct. But because the
Supreme Court serves as the arbiter of its own behavior, “you don’t
really have anywhere to take it,” he said.
Jodi Kantor is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter and co-author of “She Said,”
which recounts how she and Megan Twohey broke the story of sexual abuse
allegations against Harvey Weinstein, helping to ignite the #MeToo
movement. Instagram•More about Jodi Kantor
Sunset light illuminates the U.S. Supreme Court building on December 7, 2021. Bill Clark / CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images
The U.S. Supreme Court, whose current ideological leanings are extremely reactionary, has spearheaded a broad national regression on human rights. Indeed, the United States is a global outlier on multiple fronts (the only wealthy nation without a universal health care system and number one in firearms per capita, to name just a few), and some of the latest Supreme Court rulings (on abortion, guns and affirmative action) are turning the country into “a global pariah.”
How do we make sense of these utterly dangerous developments? First of all, why is the Supreme Court acting like the executive committee of the Republican Party? Are there even clean legal arguments upon which its rulings are based? In this exclusive interview for Truthout, renowned law professor and anthropologist Khiara M. Bridges, who specializes in the intersection of race, class, reproductive justice and law, shares her insights into the issues raised above and offers some legal remedies that she believes will help achieve racial justice and equality in the 21st century.
Bridges is a professor of law at UC Berkeley School of Law. Her scholarship has appeared in scores of prestigious publications, including the Harvard Law Review, the Stanford Law Review, the California Law Review, the NYU Law Review and the Virginia Law Review. She is the author of Reproducing Race: An Ethnography of Pregnancy as a Site of Racialization (2011), The Poverty of Privacy Rights (2017) and Critical Race Theory: A Primer (2019). On July 12, 2022, Bridges testified before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee about the fallout from the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned Roe v. Wade.
How do we make sense of these utterly dangerous developments? First of all, why is the Supreme Court acting like the executive committee of the Republican Party? Are there even clean legal arguments upon which its rulings are based? In this exclusive interview for Truthout, renowned law professor and anthropologist Khiara M. Bridges, who specializes in the intersection of race, class, reproductive justice and law, shares her insights into the issues raised above and offers some legal remedies that she believes will help achieve racial justice and equality in the 21st century.
Bridges is a professor of law at UC Berkeley School of Law. Her scholarship has appeared in scores of prestigious publications, including the Harvard Law Review, the Stanford Law Review, the California Law Review, the NYU Law Review and the Virginia Law Review. She is the author of Reproducing Race: An Ethnography of Pregnancy as a Site of Racialization (2011), The Poverty of Privacy Rights (2017) and Critical Race Theory: A Primer (2019). On July 12, 2022, Bridges testified before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee about the fallout from the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned Roe v. Wade.
C. J. Polychroniou: Race, class and gender have functioned as organizing principles in the development of U.S. society and culture from the very beginning and continue to shape social identities to this day. Your own work, as a professor of law and an anthropologist, focuses on the relationship between race, class and gender in the context of reproductive rights and law. Can you briefly discuss this relationship and explain what intersectionality has to do with efforts to create a more equitable and just world for ourselves and future generations?
Khiara M. Bridges: I will try to answer your question by explaining why I was drawn to the study of the intersection of race, class and gender in the context of reproductive rights and law.
When I was in law school, I was struck by the way pregnancy and motherhood were described in Supreme Court cases. On the whole, the court talked about pregnancy and motherhood in celebratory terms. They were conceptualized as good for the pregnant woman, her family, her community and the nation as a whole. Language idealizing pregnancy and motherhood could be found even in cases in which the court protected the right to terminate a pregnancy. For example, in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, in which the court affirmed its holding in Roe v. Wade that the Constitution protected the right to terminate a pre-viability pregnancy, the court writes:
As with abortion, reasonable people will have differences of opinion about these matters. One view is based on such reverence for the wonder of creation that any pregnancy ought to be welcomed and carried to full term no matter how difficult it will be to provide for the child and ensure its well-being. Another is that the inability to provide for the nurture and care of the infant is a cruelty to the child and an anguish to the parent.
Here, even in its defense of the constitutional right to abortion, the court speaks about pregnancy and motherhood in radiant terms. In this framing, the abortion right deserves recognition and protection because when pregnancy occurs during a disadvantageous time in a person’s life — when they do not have the means to provide for the child’s emotional and material needs — it is “cruel” to the infant and causes the parent “anguish.” In my reading, the court still conceptualizes pregnancy as a blessing. The court recognizes a constitutional right to abortion simply because this blessing may occur at a bad time.
The fairly laudatory presentation of pregnancy and motherhood in the court’s jurisprudence sits in diametrical opposition to the way that some people’s pregnancies are spoken about in political discourse. When I was in law school, the nation had just spent the two immediately preceding decades talking about “welfare queens” — implicitly Black women who were imagined to have babies solely to increase the size of their welfare checks. “Welfare queens” were decidedly bad for the nation; they drained public finances while producing children that were the country’s future criminals and “welfare queens” themselves. I was in law school during a period of time in which politicians were arguing that welfare beneficiaries should be required to take long-acting reversible contraception, or to undergo sterilization, in order to receive financial assistance from the state. Essentially, politicians were talking about poor people’s reproduction as if it were a social problem that needed to be solved. This was, again, the complete inverse of the way that the court spoke about pregnancy and motherhood.
I was fascinated by the inversion. And race and class explain the opposition. They explain why some people’s procreation is celebrated, and other people’s procreation is denigrated. And that’s really the lesson of intersectionality. Intersectionality offers a framework for understanding the complexity of social life. It recognizes that power is exerted along many different axes in the U.S. — race, class, sex, gender identity, sexuality, ability, immigration status, religion etc. And intersectionality simply submits that privilege or subjugation will look different at the various intersections of those axes of power. So, for example, sexism when it intersects with race privilege will look different than the way it looks when it intersects with race un-privilege. The form that sexism, patriarchy and misogyny have taken for affluent white women is the command to reproduce at all costs. The form that sexism has taken for Black women, especially when they are poor, is the demand that they avoid reproduction at all costs.
And so, intersectionality cautions that as we engage in efforts to create a more equitable and just world, we have to be careful not to allow one group’s experiences with an axis of power to stand in for everyone’s experience with that axis of power. If we do, our efforts will be liberatory only for some.
Critical race theory was developed in the 1980s but has become a hot-button political issue for today’s conservatives in the U.S. What is it about critical race theory that has become such an obsession for Republicans, and why is it coming up now?
You are absolutely correct to note that critical race theory was developed in the 1980s. It was created by law professors who were trying to figure out how it came to be that dramatic racial inequality endured even though the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s had forced the nation to bestow formal racial equality onto people of color. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 both had been passed. These were monumental pieces of legislation. Nevertheless, when these incipient critical race theorists looked around at the social landscape in the 1980s, they saw that people of color were still at the bottom of most measures of social well-being. Black people, particularly, were incarcerated at higher rates than white people; they were poorer than white people; they were sicker than white people; they died earlier than white people. So, the law professors who created critical race theory wanted to think about how this dramatic racial inequality could coexist with formal racial equality. That is what critical race theory sets out to do. It is an advanced legal theory that attempts to think through the relationship between law and continuing racial injustice in a post-civil rights era.
Of course, this is not what the Republican Party is talking about when they invoke “critical race theory.” Conservative pundits and politicians say that critical race theory is being taught in K-12 schools. They say that it is “Marxist.” They say that it proposes that all white people are racist and all Black people are oppressed. Essentially, their description of critical race theory bears absolutely no relationship to actual critical race theory — the advanced legal theory that law professors began developing in the 1980s. Essentially, the Republican Party has co-opted the term, and they are using the struggle to rid so-called critical race theory from public life to accomplish the goal of silencing any talk that suggests that racial inequality remains a problem and that race still matters in the U.S. today.
Race and class explain … why some people’s procreation is celebrated, and other people’s procreation is denigrated.
I think that it is important to keep in mind precisely when the Republican Party began talking about critical race theory. The GOP’s fixation began in fall 2020 — right after the country had a long, hot summer of racial protests in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. If you recall, optimists that summer were saying that the country was having a “racial reckoning.” Then, in the fall, the Republican Party began claiming that critical race theory was being taught everywhere — to federal employees, kindergartners and everyone in between. The timing is no accident. It seems pretty obvious that the Republican Party created a bogeyman out of critical race theory to stop whatever racial reckoning that was happening at the time and to undo any gains — legislative, political, discursive — that racial justice advocates had managed to achieve that summer.
Finally, it is important to understand the intentionality behind the creation of “critical race theory” as a bogeyman. Most scholars thinking through the Republican Party’s co-optation of the term “critical race theory” credit Christopher Rufo, a conservative activist, with putting so-called critical race theory on the Republican Party’s radar. In March 2021, Rufo tweeted:
We have successfully frozen their brand — “critical race theory” — into the public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions. We will eventually turn it toxic, as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category.
The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think “critical race theory.” We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.
Very rarely do the villains explicitly and publicly reveal their nefarious plans. In this case, the villain did just that.
The Supreme Court’s Republican-appointed majority has issued a series of ultra-reactionary rulings on a number of critical issues such as voting rights, affirmative action, gerrymandering, abortion, gun control and campaign finance. Are these rulings based on clear legal arguments, or are they in fact driven by political preferences and ideological biases? For example, there seems to be very little consistency in the Supreme Court decisions on guns and abortion.
I think that it is hard for anyone to say with a straight face that the court’s recent decisions are based on clear, consistent legal principles. I believe that anyone paying attention sees that the court has been issuing decisions that are consistent only in the sense that they consistently align with the Republican Party’s political platform.
First, we have to keep in mind that the court creates its own docket; it decides which cases it wants to hear. So, it is not just some odd coincidence that in the last two terms alone, the court has decided to hear cases that touch on the most hot-button political issues of our time: abortion, gun rights, voting rights, affirmative action, LGBTQ rights, the free exercise of religion etc. The court has chosen to hear these particular cases because with six conservative justices presently sitting on the bench, it has the power to organize American society in the way that the Republican Party wants.
Second, it really is impossible to reconcile the court’s decisions with one another. A search for a legal principle that unites the cases will turn up nothing. For example, in last year’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, in which the court overturned Roe v. Wade and permitted states to criminalize abortion, the court argued that in order to determine what any given provision of the Constitution does and does not protect, we have to look to what people were thinking at the time of that provision’s ratification. This, the court said, is what originalism requires. The court said that when we are trying to figure out whether the Due Process Clause contained in the 14th Amendment protects the abortion right, originalism demands that we divine whether people in 1868, the year that the 14th Amendment was ratified, thought that the Due Process Clause protected abortion rights. The court in Dobbs looks at all the criminal abortion laws on the books in 1868 and answers in the negative: In 1868, people did not think that the 14th Amendment protected abortion rights. The fact that women were unable to vote until 1920 and, therefore, had no say in any of the laws on the books in 1868 is irrelevant to the court’s analysis.
The Republican Party created a bogeyman out of critical race theory … to undo any gains … that racial justice advocates had managed to achieve that summer.
Fast forward to Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard [SFFA], which was decided earlier this summer. There, the court held that the race-based affirmative action programs instituted at Harvard College and University of North Carolina violated the Equal Protection Clause contained in the 14th Amendment. Now, just last year in Dobbs, the court declared that originalism is the proper method for interpreting the Constitution. This would suggest that the court in SFFA would try to figure out whether people in 1868 thought that the 14th Amendment permitted race-conscious efforts to produce racial equality. Note that in 1868, the nation was just three years past the end of the Civil War, which was fought, in part, to end the institution of chattel slavery in this country. The 14th Amendment was added to the Constitution for the express purpose of making formerly enslaved people equal citizens of the nation. A court that believes that originalism is an inexorable command would have interrogated whether in 1868, people believed that this amendment that had just been ratified with the express purpose of making Black people equal citizens permitted race-conscious efforts to produce racial equality. The answer, clearly, is yes. Originalism leads to the conclusion that race-based affirmative action is constitutional. Perhaps that explains why the court says nothing about originalism in SFFA. Indeed, the majority opinion in that case is perfectly originalism-free. No legal principle explains why originalism is relevant when the court is deciding whether a constitutional right to abortion exists and irrelevant when the court is deciding whether race-based affirmative action is permissible. It is results-oriented reasoning all the way down.
I should mention that in SFFA, Justice Thomas authored a concurring opinion that endeavors to provide an originalist defense of the court’s holding that race-based affirmative action is unconstitutional. The opinion is entirely unconvincing. Historians will shudder when reading it. Perhaps that explains why no other justice, including his conservative colleagues who preached the gospel of originalism in Dobbs, signed on to it.
Why is the U.S. obsessed with abortion, and what does the overturning of Roe v. Wade say about U.S. credibility with regard to human rights?
The nation’s current obsession with abortion makes it hard to believe that abortion has not always been a partisan issue. Indeed, as recently as the mid-1980s, abortion was not very politically charged. Only in the last 40 years or so has the Republican Party built its platform around the criminalization of abortion and the Democratic Party offered itself as the party that favors abortion rights and access.
The reversal of Roe v. Wade positions the U.S. as an outlier on the world stage. Most countries are liberalizing their criminal abortion laws. Five years ago, Ireland, a deeply Catholic country, voted to repeal its abortion ban. In 2020, Argentina changed its laws to permit legal abortion up until the 14th week of pregnancy. And in 2021, the Supreme Court in Mexico ruled that the country’s constitution prohibited the criminalization of abortion. So, we are witnessing the expansion of abortion rights in countries across the globe. These countries are changing their laws to allow their citizens access to safe and legal abortion because they recognize that the ability to terminate a pregnancy safely and legally is necessary if people are to control the content and trajectory of their lives. These countries have come to the realization that governments that force their citizens to continue pregnancies and to give birth against their will deny their citizens’ dignity and treat them inhumanely.
The reversal of Roe, then, reveals the U.S. to be deeply regressive on this issue, and devastatingly so.
One final question: What legal remedies would you recommend to achieve racial justice and equality in the 21st century?
A different outcome in Washington v. Davis would have allowed the federal judiciary to address structural racism.
Perhaps it’s because I am a constitutional law scholar that when I think of legal remedies, I think of Supreme Court cases that should be reversed. The court has handed down some truly terrible decisions. These are decisions that, if they had come out the other way, would have helped to make the nation more racially just. There are too many cases to name here. But one decision that I repeatedly come back to is Washington v. Davis, which was decided in 1976. The case concerned a standardized test that the District of Columbia had been using to make hiring decisions for the district’s police force. Black applicants did not perform as well on the test. As a result, very few Black people were getting hired as police officers. A Black applicant challenged the District of Columbia’s use of the test, arguing that because the test disproportionately burdened Black people, and because it did not do a particularly good job of identifying which candidates would be competent, effective police officers, the government’s use of the test violated the Equal Protection Clause. In the course of upholding the constitutionality of the test, the court announced the rule that a law will be struck down as a violation of the Equal Protection Clause only if there is a finding that lawmakers had the intent to discriminate against a racial group when passing the law.
A different outcome in Washington v. Davis would have allowed the court to strike down laws that do not mention race explicitly, but nevertheless have the effect of burdening people of color. Note that this is exactly how critical scholars define institutional or structural racism: We understand institutional/structural racism to be what happens when institutions and structures operate in a race-neutral manner that nevertheless perpetuates historical racial disadvantage and produces new forms of racial disenfranchisement. Essentially, a different outcome in Washington v. Davis would have allowed the federal judiciary to address structural racism. It would have upheld race-neutral laws that are racially burdensome only if the government could show that there is no other way to accomplish the goal that it set out to accomplish with the law. So, for example, in Washington v. Davis, the District of Columbia would have been able to use the test that worked to disproportionately prevent Black people from being hired onto the police force only if it showed that this particular test was the only way to identify people who would be effective police officers. Few laws would survive such a standard. Accordingly, the federal judiciary would have been able to diminish structural racism — perhaps even significantly.
So: What legal remedies would I recommend to achieve racial justice and equality in the 21st century? I would begin by reversing Washington v. Davis.
I will end just by noting that Washington v. Davis was decided close to 50 years ago. I think a lot of people believe that the Supreme Court has only recently become anti-democratic, obviously partisan, uninterested in human rights etc. But nothing could be further from the truth. The court’s recent decisions are part of a longue durée in which the court has demonstrated a patent hostility to racial justice and equality.
ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER:
C.J. Polychroniou is a political scientist/political economist, author, and journalist who has taught and worked in numerous universities and research centers in Europe and the United States. Currently, his main research interests are in U.S. politics and the political economy of the United States, European economic integration, globalization, climate change and environmental economics, and the deconstruction of neoliberalism’s politico-economic project. He is a regular contributor to Truthout as well as a member of Truthout’s Public Intellectual Project. He has published scores of books and over 1,000 articles which have appeared in a variety of journals, magazines, newspapers and popular news websites. Many of his publications have been translated into a multitude of different languages, including Arabic, Chinese, Croatian, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Turkish. His latest books are Optimism Over Despair: Noam Chomsky On Capitalism, Empire, and Social Change (2017); Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal: The Political Economy of Saving the Planet (with Noam Chomsky and Robert Pollin as primary authors, 2020); The Precipice: Neoliberalism, the Pandemic, and the Urgent Need for Radical Change (an anthology of interviews with Noam Chomsky, 2021); and Economics and the Left: Interviews with Progressive Economists (2021).
